poupon:

vohalika:

pagerunner-j:

Fandom: where if you draw the COVER for a tawdry romance novel referenced in someone else’s story, the creators will fall all over it, put it on a notebook – blank, of course – and put it up for sale…

…but if you _write_ a tawdry romance novel, all you’ll get is uncomfortable jokes made about it, and you’re expected to hide in a closet and never admit that you did it.

I’m kind of emotionally done.

Where fanartists get to work on professional gigs and be compensated and praised every week, and fanfiction writers get maybe a joke or two at their expense while writing jobs get handed to people in the extended family who haven’t watched more than 10% of the show and never written a comic before…

Hate to shit on this post but fanart does not magically get one anything, jobs or money included, and it is mocked just as viciously as fanfic is in professional art circles. The number of folks who have create financially viable career out of fanart is comperable to the number of theater kids who become Holywood A-listers. It happens, and the visibility of the folks who “make it” distorts common conception.

As for prestige and mocking, It’s only now becoming even sort of acceptable for professional genre artists to occasionally admit to and condescend to post fanart, just like fiction writers will rarely admit to writing fanfic. Its exactly the same bias and factors in play.

I mean, ive done a lot of tawdry-ass shit thats been well recieved and i still work doing shit-all, creatively speaking, in a walkin clinic. Before that, at the height of my arts’ popularity, when it was being posted on for-profit geek websites without consent, and being used as free marketing through official chanels with consent (dumb), i scrubbed toliets.The only thing that engenders professional success is perseverance, luck, networking, knowing how to monitize ones’ work and create a personal brand, not just falling in to the correct medium.

So, uh, great news if you have those things and write romance! If not, then there’s always walkin clinics and toliets which I definitley recommend as a socially acceptable alternative to despair.

This is about a very specific fandom where fanartist literally get rewards from the content creators every week and where now a second professionally published artbook came out featuring exclusively fanartists from this fandom, where the fanart of an in-universe tawdry romance novel cover is now on official merch, but fanfiction writers don’t even get to compete for the single writing job they’d had, ever.

I don’t doubt that being a fanartist ain’t too glorious in general, but this is one specific example where all of these things literally happened.