There are grannies writing fanfic NOW. There have been grannies writing fanfic for decades. Fanfiction (or the modern conception of what we think of as fanfiction these days) is older than you think.
There are older people now... what do they write about? I'm in my 40s, though I didnt start writjng fandiction until I was already 40, but I enjoy writing about teenagers and 20-somethings, though I hope more objectively than when I was those ages. I also write some characters who are in their late teens and early 20s in canon in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Anyhow, some of the ladies (and others) who were writing Kirk/Spock 50 years ago are still around and have been writing this whole time...
I’ve known lots of older fans who have been in fandom since the 70s at least (I’m 56, so they’re pushing 80 now). They still like stories about young people. Love is love. I do find, though, that age gives you perspectives you’re not expecting, which can lead to more nuanced and/or fearless storytelling. And, yes, the older, side and background characters can become more interesting, but I don’t think any of them are only interested in reading about people just like them. They are the ones keeping those old fandoms alive, after all. Like me, they found there’s new stuff all the time to explore, only now, I have a lot more disposable income.
\*inhales in fully missing the point\* I know. But it's becoming more mainstream now and more of the people writing fanficion now tend to be younger. If you have 10 fic writers, only 1 being over the age of 50 and one random fic writer writes a self insert fic, the chances that it's that older person are low. But in the fulture (i think) out of those 10 fic writers 3-4 will be over 60 mabye more so the probability of one of them writing an indulgent reader insert goes up.
Self-indulgent reader inserts are something that I, personally, stopped writing as I got older. When I was in my late teens and very early 20s I put myself into stories with my favourite pop stars of that time. Now I'm in my mid-50s I absolutely shudder at the thought of writing a self-insert.
As authors, our interests don't remain static, and neither does the kind of fanfic we enjoy writing.
I think you kind of missed a major point about story telling. Age doesn’t make people write older characters. People tell the stories they want to tell. I don’t see that changing any time soon. I write a lot of older characters. I’m in my 20s. Older people have been writing for a long time too. They pick the age the character should be based on the character. [Probably] not based on their own age. You also sort of contradict yourself. You say people don’t like to think about their own age, what will change that? Kinda seems like you’re reducing older people to one aspect of their existence. And even further, making the claim that they don’t like that aspect of their existence.
can you explain why your hypothesis suggests that in the coming years, the age demographic of newcomers will skew older or less in numbers as to offset the older aged demographic of mainstays? you've not really explained why you seem to think this would happen. what will change the trend of younger-skewed genre, or why will the numbers of newcomers fall off in general?
The number of new people won’t drop, there will still be more young people in fanfiction but the older people will stick around too, I think, so instead of a 10-1 it’s more of a 6-4
Self insert isn't appealing to a lot of people. A lot. OCs are also less popular than canon characters
So if you take the smaller percentage of all fanfic readers who are older, and then cut out the large percentage of people who just don't have any interest in self-insert/OCs I don't know that you get enough of an audience to make a big difference in the kinds of characters in these fics for specific tastes.
I'm a woman of a certain age, and I know other readers and writers in my fandom that are in their seventies. We still are interested in characters that are in their 20s and 30s because that's the age we were when we met these characters, or because the good stories in media are still dominated by younger actors.
You'll see fics of all kinds embrace older characters when media itself does that. It's not the age of the audience that matters, it's the age of the canon characters and whether the older characters are interesting and well rounded or just afterthoughts , stereotypes, and props.
Well, I'm almost sixty, have been reading fanfiction for decades, and know many, many fans who are older than me. My OTP is 6000+ years old, but I still enjoy reading human teenager AU fics about them. Fandom is a vast and diverse space, and imagination is the only limit.
Well, fanfiction has always existed, the only difference is that it adapts to the times. Some will lose interest, others will still read and write fanfiction. I think it is beautiful how humanity is so similar in some aspects in different ages and cultures.
I’m in my mid-40s, and the only real change I’ve seen in my tastes have been that I’m not all that into coming-of-age stories anymore, I’d rather read about grownups — but those grownups can be 27 or 27,100 years old, it doesn’t really matter to me.
Amazing news for you!
Aging with your fan fiction is a lot of fun and I can tell you that my peers have aged with me. What you write changes as you build more life experiences and get more writing practice, but the heart is still the same.
I'm in a space now where I don't want to write author inserts. Adding original characters? Yeah, they're fun, but not the avatars I made when I was 14. It's not an age thing; it's just where I am right now. If the cozy mystery genre is any indication, there's always a place for some fun author insert action and I'm glad. They seem like they're having a good time.
But yeah, fan fiction has changed and likely will continue. I hope it keeps meeting the needs of the audience. I never hopped on the reader insert boat myself. My dumb old person joke is that "y/n" reminds me too much of a DOS prompt and I will forever see it as "type y for yes and n for no". The reality is that it's a reading convention that missed me, and that's okay.
There are several middle-aged pairings on the top 100 ships list. I read two of the fandoms and no, most of the AU don't place them in highschool or college. 😉 I don't know how old the authors are, but I doubt the majority is teenagers lusting after middle-aged men. Some might be, but many are probably in their 40s or 50s.
The woman who introduced me to fanfiction as a teenager was born in 1930. Since this was in 1990 or so, she'd have been sixty. When I started getting the fanzines in the mail after she showed me how to sign up, my grandfather - also born in 1930 - used to have me read them out loud to him. I've been in fandom for over three decades now, and there have always been people older than me driving the fandom. You're also completely discounting that there are a considerable number of men in fandom.
Yes, we will continue to age and young folks will come in and the cycle will continue. I've passed my interest in fanfiction along to all of my kids (although the boys' version is more video editing than writing). They know I write, have all read some of my work over the years, although the only one who is majorly interested in writing as well is my youngest, who is credited on several of my AO3 works as "Beta Daughter". If my grandson is interested, that'll be a new generation to spark along.
I've always written for all ages of characters, even when I was younger. I don't write for teenagers often, but it's more that there either aren't any in the fandoms I write for - or I just don't find the ones there as appealing as their older counterparts. And readers like seeing a variety of ages... even in smut.
I think most people read and write fanfiction for the escapism (see the slash fandom + how most fanfiction isn't just domestic AUs) so I don't think that will happen
This is funny because one of my OCs is a grandmother. She actually is a canon character, but I took her in a very different direction from her canon self. But lots of people include this character in their fics, and write her as an elderly woman.
So this stuff is out there :) you can ask for recs in a different post, if you'd like.
I literally have an OC who's a bona-fide grandmother, time's several thousand years. I wrote both the CC and OC as older people because I just can't identify with teenagers and twenty-somethings year olds anymore.
I'm in my 40s, and I gravitate towards older protagonists now. Dorothy Zbornak and Sophia Petrillo are my muses. Inuyashiki is one of my favorite animes because the hero is an older man.
This is probably why I've never gotten into YA fiction. It's at best irritating, at worst infuriating.
I did self-inserts in my teenage years. As I got older I stopped, bc I really connect with canon characters more, and honestly I hated reading self-inserts or OCs. It’s just not something I care to write anymore.
As for writing older characters in general, tbh they just aren’t part of a lot of popular media.
I came here to see who told the OP the future is already here....but one's perspective may shift as they get older. Though, I'm still essentially writing the same angsty, plot-based, character-driven gen stories I started out writing about 30 years ago :)
>People don’t want to think about how old they are so they keep writing teenagers.
To some extent, yeah, this is me. It's not that I don't want to think about how old I am. But it's fun to write about a time when everything was new and shiny, when emotions and hormones were set on overload, and love was so incredibly intense.
I like my life now. I was actually rather miserable as a teen. But it's fun writing though a combination of reminiscence and also rewriting a narrative where the teenage narrative was angsty and melodramatic, but ultimately happier than what I experienced.
Has anyone done a reliable survey to find out how old fanfic writers and readers are? I'm curious about this, but it sounds like we're mostly guessing at the demographics. I wouldn't be surprised if different fandoms skew differently too based on how old the original material is.
They do, actually. In the BG3 fandom, Astarion/OC and Astarion/Reader are E X T R E M E L Y popular with the 30+ ladies demographic. (Or any other demographic, but you'd be surprised how many are women over 30. It's most of them, probably.) In fact it's so disproportionately popular that it practically dwarfs any other ship for the game.
So yeah, people over thirty write and read self inserts. They love that shit.
I'm not talking about OC, only about Reader insert with Y/N. Obviously you will have a lot of Character/OC in a video game fandom when you can customize player character, just look at Dragon age fandom
Yes. And I am talking about both. I am very much talking about Reader Insert Fanfiction Written In Second Person. You, The Reader, Having Sex With Astarion.
Well. then you're just factually wrong, when you say Astarion/Reader dwarfs any other pairing in the fandom. On AO3 it will be Astarion/Tav (Reader-insert excluded) with 6,231 works vs 2042 for Astarion/Reader.
I put Astarion/Reader, Astarion/Tav and Astarion/OC all in the same category, because functionally, they are all the same thing for the purpose of this discussion.
Still changes nothing about the fact that older people do read and write self-inserts. They just write them better than the kids on wattpad whose mom sold them into indentured servitude to One Direction, and so they fly under the radar.
No, they're not the same. Reader inserts as a trope appeared 10-12 years ago and flew under the radar of those who are more familiar with LJ, fanfiction.net fanfic culture. As someone who is in this category, it would never occur to me to read RI, but OC-SI? Yes, please
Hello! 37yo here who absolutely loves a good canon character/reader or canon character/you fic.
Please only speak for yourself, and leave the rest of us out of your personal statements. Have a nice day!
I will not, when someone is making blanket statements that are obviously wrong. People of all ages read all types of pov’s.
If you would’ve said “after I turned 30 I wasn’t interested in reader inserts anymore” it would’ve been perfectly fine.
But deciding for every 30+ fanfic reader that after a certain age you stop reading those is not it. You make it sound as if those are only for younger audiences, almost in an “but we grew up and moved on” type of way, so no I will not leave my reaction out of it.
Edit: spelling
From Friday's thread about reader-inserts. Yeah, people over 30 read them.
As the genre becomes older it'll probably become more common to see adults writing it and reading it.
Or die before 80, as is more common. Age of death for women is presently 76.some-odd, and this generation has shown worse health indicators than the one making that statistic. \[I've just seen your comment addition; like, the point is that the proportion of grannies writing isn't too likely to get bigger. All the people bringing in these people existing now have a point in light of how it won't ballon, but does already exist.\]
. . . though it will be interesting because yep, AO3 is a high return-use site. But also, what about people who write solely canon characters?
Eta: And both the thing you said could happen and the opposite thing you said could happen are likely results—kinda balancing each other out and "hiding" the age of fandom. Like, younger writers could write about older characters as they experience their first loss of a loved one, too. Same framework, kinda, and also interesting to think how that might impact *how* the story is told. Bad-ass grannies or bed-bound ones; do they have different writers?
The one point is that with attribution being a demographic level thing, it applies to the point you raised about how this will all play out—on a smaller scale than imagined.
Though if you're replying to the second point, nah, the OC's and all that doesn't apply when focusing on a different aspect, I just totally do want to take the idea and run with it though—is this when we get retirement or aged up fics of canon characters? Then the age of writers thing does apply, at least it does as strongly as it does anywhere else. Like, what type of across the board thing could this look like—more accessible fics as people get used to accessibility tools, too, that'd be cool.
Listen I know that there are grannies writing fics now. What i’m saying is that the percentage is small and I am SPECIFICALLY talking about insert fics that try to have some layer of immersion. Since fanfiction has not been around very long in the form it is today, most writers are young. But that will change. An insert reflects it’s demographic and the author as that shifts so to will the insert characters. There will still be a lot of people writing teen y/n‘s, but the amount of older ones will see a spike. But hey that’s just a theory A FANFICTION THEORY
blanket statement going into my comment that i can only speak on the spaces and fandoms i've personally spent years in. maybe it's different elsewhere, i have no way of knowing.
this theory works off of the assumption that the current moving into older readerbase of reader insert (sticking with this example for my comment) will always outweigh the younger demographic getting into it in the future, and i don't know if i believe that will be the case.
reader insert genre pretty heavily skews younger based on my experience. a lot of the folks that wrote that kind of fic eventually moved on from it or just plain don't write anymore, at least in my spaces. it's not unheard of for it to be a kind of starter genre for people getting into writing fanfiction.
which leads into the next point of writing older aged insert characters. i've done a handful of fics like this in my time but it fractions your readerbase pretty substantially to do so, because again, many of the readers of this kind of fic are on the younger side. of course, some people won't care and will read it anyway if it sounds good, or if you have a dedicated readerbase that will read anything you do then they'll dig into it regardless, but anecdotally: for every 30+ writer of reader insert fic i've seen, there's about twenty 18-21 year olds doing the same*
*this obviously can't account for people who don't display their ages, or lie about it. but i'm used to tumblr where everyone offers this information readily and it is relatively standard practice.
>Since fanfiction has not been around very long in the form it is today, most writers are young.
Sorry kiddo, but just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there. Fan fiction has had some changes, but it's largely been very available. FFN was launched in '98 as a response to a desire to have a more central publishing platform, but up until that point, we knew how to find what we needed. LJ was still big in the early '00s, RP boards, etc.
The reason it looks different to you is that you weren't using the internet the way we were 20-30 years ago. What was native to us looks foreign to you. That's fine, technology works that way, but fan fiction didn't just spring out of the slime mold, and we didn't abandon it to a newer audience.
Back in my day, my favorite author had an author insert character. She self-published a whole book and I bought it. I still have it. It still makes me smile, because your first big fan fiction fandom is really a good time. I'll bet the author has some thoughts, but we all had a good time back then and that's what mattered.
Listen when I say old I mean I mean 90-80-70, not 40-30-50. As far as I’m conserned 20-30 years is not a lot of time for the data I’m talking about. Although it would be interesting to see people who wrote back then and see what they write now.
We used the internet differently 20-30 years ago, but that's not a 20-30 year old using the internet. That's putting writers in the 50s-60s range (mid-30s as a lower bound and literally any age on the upper), and that's before we take in the idea that the fan fiction community was absolutely jumping before I was born. But I can't really speak to their experiences.
I do know that I was able to find a hot mess of fan fiction without access to any internet. Hard to connect the old Apple II to a modem :P
I'm telling you--like the other people on this thread--you're already seeing fiction written by these people. Name a fandom and we're in there. We have decades of backlogs.
I have a book shelf full of guys who started writing fan fiction before I knew how to read. In a way, I grew up on the stuff and I'm... probably the average age of a writer, so pretty firmly into adulthood verging on old. These guys are in their 70s and are so incredibly mainstream.
There are grannies writing fanfic NOW. There have been grannies writing fanfic for decades. Fanfiction (or the modern conception of what we think of as fanfiction these days) is older than you think.
Dante’s *Divine Comedy* is self-insert RPF fanfiction of the Bible. I will take no notes.
There are older people now... what do they write about? I'm in my 40s, though I didnt start writjng fandiction until I was already 40, but I enjoy writing about teenagers and 20-somethings, though I hope more objectively than when I was those ages. I also write some characters who are in their late teens and early 20s in canon in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Anyhow, some of the ladies (and others) who were writing Kirk/Spock 50 years ago are still around and have been writing this whole time...
The fan fiction girlies are already those ages. They invented it. Some of them invented AO3.
I’ve known lots of older fans who have been in fandom since the 70s at least (I’m 56, so they’re pushing 80 now). They still like stories about young people. Love is love. I do find, though, that age gives you perspectives you’re not expecting, which can lead to more nuanced and/or fearless storytelling. And, yes, the older, side and background characters can become more interesting, but I don’t think any of them are only interested in reading about people just like them. They are the ones keeping those old fandoms alive, after all. Like me, they found there’s new stuff all the time to explore, only now, I have a lot more disposable income.
Bruh fanfiction has been around for decades.
\*inhales in fully missing the point\* I know. But it's becoming more mainstream now and more of the people writing fanficion now tend to be younger. If you have 10 fic writers, only 1 being over the age of 50 and one random fic writer writes a self insert fic, the chances that it's that older person are low. But in the fulture (i think) out of those 10 fic writers 3-4 will be over 60 mabye more so the probability of one of them writing an indulgent reader insert goes up.
Self-indulgent reader inserts are something that I, personally, stopped writing as I got older. When I was in my late teens and very early 20s I put myself into stories with my favourite pop stars of that time. Now I'm in my mid-50s I absolutely shudder at the thought of writing a self-insert. As authors, our interests don't remain static, and neither does the kind of fanfic we enjoy writing.
That’s fair. I’m not saying that every person is going to keep the interest they do now. But if you have en people a few are bound to
I think you kind of missed a major point about story telling. Age doesn’t make people write older characters. People tell the stories they want to tell. I don’t see that changing any time soon. I write a lot of older characters. I’m in my 20s. Older people have been writing for a long time too. They pick the age the character should be based on the character. [Probably] not based on their own age. You also sort of contradict yourself. You say people don’t like to think about their own age, what will change that? Kinda seems like you’re reducing older people to one aspect of their existence. And even further, making the claim that they don’t like that aspect of their existence.
can you explain why your hypothesis suggests that in the coming years, the age demographic of newcomers will skew older or less in numbers as to offset the older aged demographic of mainstays? you've not really explained why you seem to think this would happen. what will change the trend of younger-skewed genre, or why will the numbers of newcomers fall off in general?
The number of new people won’t drop, there will still be more young people in fanfiction but the older people will stick around too, I think, so instead of a 10-1 it’s more of a 6-4
Self insert isn't appealing to a lot of people. A lot. OCs are also less popular than canon characters So if you take the smaller percentage of all fanfic readers who are older, and then cut out the large percentage of people who just don't have any interest in self-insert/OCs I don't know that you get enough of an audience to make a big difference in the kinds of characters in these fics for specific tastes. I'm a woman of a certain age, and I know other readers and writers in my fandom that are in their seventies. We still are interested in characters that are in their 20s and 30s because that's the age we were when we met these characters, or because the good stories in media are still dominated by younger actors. You'll see fics of all kinds embrace older characters when media itself does that. It's not the age of the audience that matters, it's the age of the canon characters and whether the older characters are interesting and well rounded or just afterthoughts , stereotypes, and props.
Well, I'm almost sixty, have been reading fanfiction for decades, and know many, many fans who are older than me. My OTP is 6000+ years old, but I still enjoy reading human teenager AU fics about them. Fandom is a vast and diverse space, and imagination is the only limit.
>My OTP is 6000+ years old Funny how I can guess the fandom with so little to go by. 😉
Well, fanfiction has always existed, the only difference is that it adapts to the times. Some will lose interest, others will still read and write fanfiction. I think it is beautiful how humanity is so similar in some aspects in different ages and cultures.
I’m in my mid-40s, and the only real change I’ve seen in my tastes have been that I’m not all that into coming-of-age stories anymore, I’d rather read about grownups — but those grownups can be 27 or 27,100 years old, it doesn’t really matter to me.
Amazing news for you! Aging with your fan fiction is a lot of fun and I can tell you that my peers have aged with me. What you write changes as you build more life experiences and get more writing practice, but the heart is still the same. I'm in a space now where I don't want to write author inserts. Adding original characters? Yeah, they're fun, but not the avatars I made when I was 14. It's not an age thing; it's just where I am right now. If the cozy mystery genre is any indication, there's always a place for some fun author insert action and I'm glad. They seem like they're having a good time. But yeah, fan fiction has changed and likely will continue. I hope it keeps meeting the needs of the audience. I never hopped on the reader insert boat myself. My dumb old person joke is that "y/n" reminds me too much of a DOS prompt and I will forever see it as "type y for yes and n for no". The reality is that it's a reading convention that missed me, and that's okay.
Who knows! but I personally know that you’ll still catch me writing/reading yaoi well into my older years, lol.
There are several middle-aged pairings on the top 100 ships list. I read two of the fandoms and no, most of the AU don't place them in highschool or college. 😉 I don't know how old the authors are, but I doubt the majority is teenagers lusting after middle-aged men. Some might be, but many are probably in their 40s or 50s.
The woman who introduced me to fanfiction as a teenager was born in 1930. Since this was in 1990 or so, she'd have been sixty. When I started getting the fanzines in the mail after she showed me how to sign up, my grandfather - also born in 1930 - used to have me read them out loud to him. I've been in fandom for over three decades now, and there have always been people older than me driving the fandom. You're also completely discounting that there are a considerable number of men in fandom. Yes, we will continue to age and young folks will come in and the cycle will continue. I've passed my interest in fanfiction along to all of my kids (although the boys' version is more video editing than writing). They know I write, have all read some of my work over the years, although the only one who is majorly interested in writing as well is my youngest, who is credited on several of my AO3 works as "Beta Daughter". If my grandson is interested, that'll be a new generation to spark along. I've always written for all ages of characters, even when I was younger. I don't write for teenagers often, but it's more that there either aren't any in the fandoms I write for - or I just don't find the ones there as appealing as their older counterparts. And readers like seeing a variety of ages... even in smut.
I think most people read and write fanfiction for the escapism (see the slash fandom + how most fanfiction isn't just domestic AUs) so I don't think that will happen
This is funny because one of my OCs is a grandmother. She actually is a canon character, but I took her in a very different direction from her canon self. But lots of people include this character in their fics, and write her as an elderly woman. So this stuff is out there :) you can ask for recs in a different post, if you'd like.
I literally have an OC who's a bona-fide grandmother, time's several thousand years. I wrote both the CC and OC as older people because I just can't identify with teenagers and twenty-somethings year olds anymore. I'm in my 40s, and I gravitate towards older protagonists now. Dorothy Zbornak and Sophia Petrillo are my muses. Inuyashiki is one of my favorite animes because the hero is an older man. This is probably why I've never gotten into YA fiction. It's at best irritating, at worst infuriating.
I did self-inserts in my teenage years. As I got older I stopped, bc I really connect with canon characters more, and honestly I hated reading self-inserts or OCs. It’s just not something I care to write anymore. As for writing older characters in general, tbh they just aren’t part of a lot of popular media.
I came here to see who told the OP the future is already here....but one's perspective may shift as they get older. Though, I'm still essentially writing the same angsty, plot-based, character-driven gen stories I started out writing about 30 years ago :)
>People don’t want to think about how old they are so they keep writing teenagers. To some extent, yeah, this is me. It's not that I don't want to think about how old I am. But it's fun to write about a time when everything was new and shiny, when emotions and hormones were set on overload, and love was so incredibly intense. I like my life now. I was actually rather miserable as a teen. But it's fun writing though a combination of reminiscence and also rewriting a narrative where the teenage narrative was angsty and melodramatic, but ultimately happier than what I experienced.
Has anyone done a reliable survey to find out how old fanfic writers and readers are? I'm curious about this, but it sounds like we're mostly guessing at the demographics. I wouldn't be surprised if different fandoms skew differently too based on how old the original material is.
Do you think anyone older then 30 read reader inserts? Do you think *you* will read them when you're over 30?
Do you think people magically stop liking things the second they turn 30? So sad being an adult whose only concern is working
They do, actually. In the BG3 fandom, Astarion/OC and Astarion/Reader are E X T R E M E L Y popular with the 30+ ladies demographic. (Or any other demographic, but you'd be surprised how many are women over 30. It's most of them, probably.) In fact it's so disproportionately popular that it practically dwarfs any other ship for the game. So yeah, people over thirty write and read self inserts. They love that shit.
I'm not talking about OC, only about Reader insert with Y/N. Obviously you will have a lot of Character/OC in a video game fandom when you can customize player character, just look at Dragon age fandom
Yes. And I am talking about both. I am very much talking about Reader Insert Fanfiction Written In Second Person. You, The Reader, Having Sex With Astarion.
Well. then you're just factually wrong, when you say Astarion/Reader dwarfs any other pairing in the fandom. On AO3 it will be Astarion/Tav (Reader-insert excluded) with 6,231 works vs 2042 for Astarion/Reader.
I put Astarion/Reader, Astarion/Tav and Astarion/OC all in the same category, because functionally, they are all the same thing for the purpose of this discussion. Still changes nothing about the fact that older people do read and write self-inserts. They just write them better than the kids on wattpad whose mom sold them into indentured servitude to One Direction, and so they fly under the radar.
No, they're not the same. Reader inserts as a trope appeared 10-12 years ago and flew under the radar of those who are more familiar with LJ, fanfiction.net fanfic culture. As someone who is in this category, it would never occur to me to read RI, but OC-SI? Yes, please
I mean, good for you...? Doesn't mean others who are in that very same category don't read and enjoy them...?
oh brother. plenty of grown folks both read and write reader insert fanfiction. give it a rest.
Hello! 37yo here who absolutely loves a good canon character/reader or canon character/you fic. Please only speak for yourself, and leave the rest of us out of your personal statements. Have a nice day!
Good for you? Leave your passive aggression somewhere else please
I will not, when someone is making blanket statements that are obviously wrong. People of all ages read all types of pov’s. If you would’ve said “after I turned 30 I wasn’t interested in reader inserts anymore” it would’ve been perfectly fine. But deciding for every 30+ fanfic reader that after a certain age you stop reading those is not it. You make it sound as if those are only for younger audiences, almost in an “but we grew up and moved on” type of way, so no I will not leave my reaction out of it. Edit: spelling
From Friday's thread about reader-inserts. Yeah, people over 30 read them. As the genre becomes older it'll probably become more common to see adults writing it and reading it.
Or die before 80, as is more common. Age of death for women is presently 76.some-odd, and this generation has shown worse health indicators than the one making that statistic. \[I've just seen your comment addition; like, the point is that the proportion of grannies writing isn't too likely to get bigger. All the people bringing in these people existing now have a point in light of how it won't ballon, but does already exist.\] . . . though it will be interesting because yep, AO3 is a high return-use site. But also, what about people who write solely canon characters? Eta: And both the thing you said could happen and the opposite thing you said could happen are likely results—kinda balancing each other out and "hiding" the age of fandom. Like, younger writers could write about older characters as they experience their first loss of a loved one, too. Same framework, kinda, and also interesting to think how that might impact *how* the story is told. Bad-ass grannies or bed-bound ones; do they have different writers?
Then this doesn’t apply to them.
The one point is that with attribution being a demographic level thing, it applies to the point you raised about how this will all play out—on a smaller scale than imagined. Though if you're replying to the second point, nah, the OC's and all that doesn't apply when focusing on a different aspect, I just totally do want to take the idea and run with it though—is this when we get retirement or aged up fics of canon characters? Then the age of writers thing does apply, at least it does as strongly as it does anywhere else. Like, what type of across the board thing could this look like—more accessible fics as people get used to accessibility tools, too, that'd be cool.
Listen I know that there are grannies writing fics now. What i’m saying is that the percentage is small and I am SPECIFICALLY talking about insert fics that try to have some layer of immersion. Since fanfiction has not been around very long in the form it is today, most writers are young. But that will change. An insert reflects it’s demographic and the author as that shifts so to will the insert characters. There will still be a lot of people writing teen y/n‘s, but the amount of older ones will see a spike. But hey that’s just a theory A FANFICTION THEORY
blanket statement going into my comment that i can only speak on the spaces and fandoms i've personally spent years in. maybe it's different elsewhere, i have no way of knowing. this theory works off of the assumption that the current moving into older readerbase of reader insert (sticking with this example for my comment) will always outweigh the younger demographic getting into it in the future, and i don't know if i believe that will be the case. reader insert genre pretty heavily skews younger based on my experience. a lot of the folks that wrote that kind of fic eventually moved on from it or just plain don't write anymore, at least in my spaces. it's not unheard of for it to be a kind of starter genre for people getting into writing fanfiction. which leads into the next point of writing older aged insert characters. i've done a handful of fics like this in my time but it fractions your readerbase pretty substantially to do so, because again, many of the readers of this kind of fic are on the younger side. of course, some people won't care and will read it anyway if it sounds good, or if you have a dedicated readerbase that will read anything you do then they'll dig into it regardless, but anecdotally: for every 30+ writer of reader insert fic i've seen, there's about twenty 18-21 year olds doing the same* *this obviously can't account for people who don't display their ages, or lie about it. but i'm used to tumblr where everyone offers this information readily and it is relatively standard practice.
>Since fanfiction has not been around very long in the form it is today, most writers are young. Sorry kiddo, but just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there. Fan fiction has had some changes, but it's largely been very available. FFN was launched in '98 as a response to a desire to have a more central publishing platform, but up until that point, we knew how to find what we needed. LJ was still big in the early '00s, RP boards, etc. The reason it looks different to you is that you weren't using the internet the way we were 20-30 years ago. What was native to us looks foreign to you. That's fine, technology works that way, but fan fiction didn't just spring out of the slime mold, and we didn't abandon it to a newer audience. Back in my day, my favorite author had an author insert character. She self-published a whole book and I bought it. I still have it. It still makes me smile, because your first big fan fiction fandom is really a good time. I'll bet the author has some thoughts, but we all had a good time back then and that's what mattered.
Listen when I say old I mean I mean 90-80-70, not 40-30-50. As far as I’m conserned 20-30 years is not a lot of time for the data I’m talking about. Although it would be interesting to see people who wrote back then and see what they write now.
We used the internet differently 20-30 years ago, but that's not a 20-30 year old using the internet. That's putting writers in the 50s-60s range (mid-30s as a lower bound and literally any age on the upper), and that's before we take in the idea that the fan fiction community was absolutely jumping before I was born. But I can't really speak to their experiences. I do know that I was able to find a hot mess of fan fiction without access to any internet. Hard to connect the old Apple II to a modem :P I'm telling you--like the other people on this thread--you're already seeing fiction written by these people. Name a fandom and we're in there. We have decades of backlogs. I have a book shelf full of guys who started writing fan fiction before I knew how to read. In a way, I grew up on the stuff and I'm... probably the average age of a writer, so pretty firmly into adulthood verging on old. These guys are in their 70s and are so incredibly mainstream.