The concept of face claims is something that has changed a lot in the five-ish years I've been on this platform.
In the beginning, I was obsessed. It would irritate me when fics didn't have faceclaims. I spent hours not only trying to find faceclaims, but the "best" ones. I remember when I was writing Welcome to Hawkins (my ye olde first Stranger Things apply fic) and I spent hours finding a faceclaim that had a shaved head. I ended up choosing Sophia Lillis, and that was "settling" for me, because her hair was only very short instead of buzzed like El's was.
Luckily for me, I grew out of that quickly.
Turns out my problem with the lack of faceclaims was more that those fics tended to just be...lower quality? Not that a faceclaim is required for quality writing, just that there seems to be a correlation between if people are willing to put effort into introduction sections and if they're willing to put effort into the writing (and similarly between people who make five hundred, unnecessary, introduction chapters with people who never even post a chapter at all.) Also it was jarring to jump write into a fic when people often struggled to make good starts.
Meanwhile, I realized that there were a lot of gifs for the shows I was writing for, and I could just use those. After that I used whatever faceclaims I wanted, but I still used faceclaims. I still have to have something.
Recently? That's changed. I use faceclaims sometimes, but that's because they are a faceclaim I already wanted to use and made a character to do so. It's not a big deal for me. I constantly advocate for less uses of faceclaims. Especially when it comes to apply fic requirements, where often the expectations for faceclaims are unfair at best.
But let's be real. If you're not convinced that faceclaims are pure evil, the fact that I dislike it isn't going to convince you. So I'll give reasons. If you're as faceclaim obsessed as I once was, maybe this will give you an understanding. If you totally agree already...well, we will commiserate our shared suffering.
1. DIVERSITY
Way back when, I use to do statistic reviews of different fandom's fan fictions. I would go through the tag and just take notes. I still have some two of them up, though the last one was made in 2021 and the only update I've done was to change Viktor Hargreeves's name. One part of this was to keep track of faceclaims. Now, not much was found there name wise. However...well...look at the collages I made
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