The fanfiction world is a scary place year-round. The things I see on AO3 and Wattpad in maybe a month are enough to send a Victorian author’s entire bloodline into a coma.
And for some reason, the worst of fanfiction began to emerge, Black Lagoon style, right around election season.
Explicitly sexual satirical fanfiction is not a new concept. Explicitly sexual satirical fanfiction depicting a gay relationship between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is also not new.
At that, I’ll interrupt with a brief explanation. “fanfiction” is generally stories created by a member of a fandom, typically a fictional one. These stories offer a kind of expansion on the actual franchise, be it a book or movie or anything. These works are always created with some level of “canon divergence,” meaning something is added to or changed from the original plot or world of the canon of the media it is based on. This could be the addition of a romantic relationship between two characters who are not explicitly together in the canon, a “missing scene” that the writer dreams up and adds into their version of the canon, or any other modification. It can be as simple as an added character of the author’s creation (called an OC, or original character), or as drastic as an AU(alternate universe) that contains the same characters but adds elements like time travel, vampirism, magic… really anything you can come up with. These canon divergences are sometimes called “headcanons,” referring to the author’s own ideas that are added to the canon.
As for romantic relationships, authors occasionally create a “ship” (short for relationship) name, which usually combines the names of the two characters involved. For example, if I was in the Twilight fandom (I am NOT), I would say that Bella and Edward becomes Bedward.
The problem is that fanfiction principles can be applied to real people.
If you’re brave enough.
Does that make sense? Cool. Back to Brump.
Why were the youth writing about the famously senile, demented former presidential candidate duo? It’s hard to put it simply.
First of all, without a doubt, it was a coping mechanism. The people who wrote Brump fics are young. They are probably our age-ish, living in the same world we are. And just like us, they were riddled with anxiety and fear over the very serious issue of having two terrible presidential candidates. None of us had any way of knowing which bag of Alzheimer’s-ridden bones would take our country and our lives into his hands (now we have the slightly better option of Kamala Harris. Thank God). And like any teenager or young adult would do, they made jokes about their situation. They made Brump fanfiction.
So why this method? Political cartoons, making fun of higher authorities, all that has always been a thing.
In short, fanfiction can spread very easily and anyone can spread it very privately. Fanfiction website accounts aren’t typically something you share with your mom. Young people can create an account and write whatever horrendous “Biden x Trump” AU they want and publish it immediately. More of them pick their work up. They laugh and comment and share it to their equally mentally-ill friends. It’s hard to get that kind of spread with anything serious— especially when you’re dealing with teenagers. Explicit fanfictions of the Brump kind are funny. The youth enjoy them (God, I sound like an undercover cop practicing his lines).
Anyways. Depraved sexual writing about two psychos might be a really cool thing to study if you want to learn how young people have learned to cope. Probably don’t read it though. It goes a lot deeper once you click on the tags.
Good luck!
Oona
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