Translated from Japanese to English.

“Maybe the kind of fan work I want to make just isn’t possible anymore.” That’s the thought I’m writing through right now.

Lately, I’ve been circling the same set of questions. What does it mean to be a creator? What is art? What even counts as a “work”? What’s the right way to exist on social media?

Out of all of it, the one that gnaws at me most is this: How do I keep making fan work?

What Fan Creation Actually Is

First, a distinction that matters more than people think: being part of organised fandom and making fan work are not the same thing.

People involved in organised fandom – selling zines at conventions, running tables at fan events, putting out doujinshi – are almost always fan creators. But not every fan creator is part of that world. And honestly, I’m not sure my feelings will resonate much with those who are, because that side of things comes with a ready-made infrastructure. There are events to attend. There are anthologies to contribute to. Even if your niche doesn’t have a dedicated convention, the path of “make a zine and sell it” has been carved out by decades of precedent.

So what about the rest of us? The ones without that infrastructure? That’s what I’m trying to talk about here.

And there’s a second premise I want to put on the table: fan creation has always been, at least in part, about connection with other people. The line you hear a lot – “Just make things for yourself, it doesn’t matter if no one sees it” – has a kernel of truth, and it sounds reasonable enough. But I don’t think it tells the whole story.

“Just make it for yourself” is advice that fits original creation better. Sure, a fan creator might go through a phase of working in a kind of private-study mode – learning technique, refining craft. But if isolation drags on long enough, a person with sufficient skill will eventually drift toward making their own original things. That’s a natural trajectory.

Fan work has a different engine. At its core is the sharing of love: the impulse that says, “I need at least one other person to understand what’s so good about this.” It’s a communicative desire that only exists because the source material exists. It’s inherently social.

Or to put it plainly: you want friends who get it. You want comrades.

Fan creation that’s missing that dimension has, in my view, drifted away from what fan work originally was. It’s a similar kind of slippage to what happened when the boundary between amateur and professional started to blur; when the concept of the mega-popular fan circle emerged, and with it the dream that fan work could be a launchpad into a professional career.

The Dead End Created by Social Media – and Why “It’s Just Validation-Seeking” Doesn’t Cover It

Most of us can’t pinpoint the exact moment we became fans of something. At some point you just were: deep in a particular series, with a favourite character, making things without consciously deciding to.

In 2026, if you ask where that expression goes, the obvious answer is: you post it on social media.

There are different platforms, of course. There was an era – and honestly, as far back as I can remember, it was the best era – when blogs were the dominant form. Instead of firing off a post on X, you’d write a proper blog entry: your thoughts on a series, maybe with fan art attached. Long, unself-conscious, full of feeling.

Maybe I’m just getting older and romanticising the past. Maybe. But I don’t think that’s all it is.

What “Triggers” Actually Meant

Today’s social media serves you content you never asked for. And fine, okay; the algorithms are clever. They can identify your fandom accurately enough. That part works.

What doesn’t work is when you try to actively search for something specific, and it’s somehow buried under algorithmically promoted content. You want to see the latest posts under a tag, but updates are delayed, or posts go missing from the feed entirely.

This half-baked state of affairs is what’s most infuriating. And when someone waves the AI dream at me – “It’ll only get better! Recommendations will become so precise!” – sorry, but in 2026, after watching these tools bump up against their ceilings, I’m not buying it.

Besides, for people as particular as we are, unsolicited recommendations are beside the point. We’re not lost. We know exactly what we’re looking for.

The concept of “triggers” – content that’s deeply upsetting to encounter unexpectedly – became widespread in fan communities around the time today’s major platforms took hold. Originally it referred to a specific experience: you’re browsing a tag for a character or series you love, and you stumble across fan work depicting something you find genuinely distressing.

In response, communities developed practices: content warnings, tagging systems, filter options, listing your triggers in your bio. These were good-faith measures. Nobody was trying to ambush anyone; the goal was to let everyone create and consume fan work in peace.

But the way “triggers” functions as a concept now has outgrown that original meaning, and conversations around it carry an uncomfortable charge. Why? Because the platforms themselves have become opaque. You can follow every convention, tag everything carefully, and the algorithm will still push your work to unintended audiences via recommendations. Or the reverse: you tag something correctly and it gets suppressed, invisible to the people who are actually looking for it.

It’s a dead end. And nobody likes being handed a problem with no exit.

Since the platforms show no sign of changing, the discourse defaults to “protect yourself” – individual responsibility as the final answer. The side effect is predictable: everyone becomes more hesitant. People post less. People say less.

There was a time when you could find fans writing blog posts so earnest they’d make you cringe with second-hand embarrassment – and that was wonderful. Now, most fan creators I see online carry a kind of careful distance. There’s a buffer: “I am someone who produces fan ‘works,’ and the polish of those works comes first.” And popular fan creators, to some degree, take pride in maintaining that distance.

On top of all this, there’s the issue every fan creator eventually has to confront: the question of rights and the relationship with the original work. The moment your stuff starts circulating, you become visible. You use coded language, you avoid official hashtags, you try to keep your head down, because becoming known as “the fan creator for that series” carries real risk.

It’s just frightening. And the freedom keeps shrinking. Steadily, relentlessly.

The Platform’s Idea of “Success” and Fan Work’s Idea of “Success” Are Different Things

Speaking from experience as someone who posts their own work:

I’m no expert on how algorithms work, but I can feel the difference between posts the system has decided should gain traction and posts it hasn’t. It goes beyond “oh, this one landed and that one didn’t”; there’s something unmistakably inorganic about the selection process.

I only follow creators whose work I genuinely love, so my following count is small. And yet, when I scroll through someone’s profile, I keep finding posts I completely missed – posts that never appeared in my feed. Maybe it’s just my perception. Maybe I’m wrong. But this didn’t used to happen.

The beauty of fan spaces, as I knew them, was that even a rough sketch – even an illustration that was, let’s be honest, not technically impressive – could be thrilling if the sensibility behind it matched yours. It was about resonance, not polish.

Or rather: that’s the version of fan culture I loved.

And here’s the important thing: this isn’t the same conversation as “creators chasing likes” or “it’s all about validation.” I genuinely believe this is not a problem we can think our way out of on an individual psychological level.

If algorithms are applying statistical models to predict “success,” then the standards being used are the ones that should apply to original commercial content – to the “source material” in this analogy. Those metrics are being imposed on fan creators too, and the actual point of fan work – the messy, personal, connective quality of it – simply doesn’t register in the calculation.

The real issue is that the spaces where professionals, aspiring professionals, amateurs, and fans all operate have collapsed into each other.

Solutions

To be blunt: I don’t have one.

I’m not a programmer. I’m not a platform architect. I can’t build a new community or reshape the internet. All I can do is write something like this and hope someone, somewhere, reads it.

(For now, I’ve stopped posting on X and moved to Bluesky, which feels more consistent in how it handles feeds and updates. I’ve also gone back to a genuinely ancient approach – linking out to a personal site where I can control the context – as a stopgap for the content warning problem.)

I know fan creators have always occupied a precarious position. That’s nothing new. But watching a culture I love thin out and twist under these pressures is its own kind of grief.

“What about Pixiv, or other dedicated platforms?” I’ve already considered that. But those spaces come with their own implicit threshold of technical skill, and they’re not built for genuine exchange. What happens there is mostly one-directional: someone creates, someone consumes. The “creator and audience” dynamic is replicated wholesale, not dissolved.

If I’m being fully honest, I’m someone who ended up with a creative career because of fan work. The experience I gained, the connections I made, the skills I developed; all of it fed into where I am. I can’t claim I didn’t benefit from exactly the “sacred greyness” of fan creation that I’ve been describing. I’m aware of the contradiction.

But that’s precisely the point. These spaces mattered. They were incubators. And in an internet where only polished, “already-finished” work gets any traction, the next generation of creators is losing that runway before they even get a chance to find their footing.