#also please do not underestimate fanfic writers' ability to do EXQUISITE worldbuilding thank you

[darlingofdots]

That comment seems kind of reductive about both fanfiction and popular romance, in my opinion. Fanfic and romance are really close cousins, and people who study them academically often use resources and theory from both fields (including me!) because the overlap is that big. @ibex-ascendant is absolutely correct and I (and many romance scholars) would even argue that Regency Romance as it exists today is a form of fanfiction that evolved from Georgette Heyer's romances in the 1920s and Jane Austen, and it functions basically the same as, like, soulmate AUs or omegaverse: there's no official manual that tells you how to play in this space and every author will do something slightly different with it, but through the process of lots of people reading and writing stories inspired by each other, we have established a general understanding and expectation of what to expect when we see a fic or pic up a book with this tag. A lot of romance is also just kind of fanfiction, anyway, considering how much of it is retellings/re-imaginings of pre-existing stories like fairytales or mythology. For some really meta shit, check out Maya Rodale's "Keeping Up With The Cavendishes" series--they're all Regency Romance adaptations of classic romcoms, including one that's a Regency adaptation of Bridget Jones' Diary, which is a modern adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, which is basically the blueprint for all of Regency Romance.

When I pick up a new Regency Romance, which is the subgenre I'm most familiar with so I'll keep using it as an example, I'm not expecting and don't really want an in-depth explanation of how the ton works and why the protagonists can't be caught alone together. I already know! I want to get to the fun bits, I want to see how this author writes certain tropes (which are often the exact same as in fanfiction! Seriously, if you read a lot of fanfic, I can almost guarantee that there is a romance author out there who writes the exact stuff you're into. Yes, even if you're into gay stuff. Romance really isn't just white cishets, people just don't bother looking past their own preconceived notions about this genre. But I digress.) or explores certain dynamics. Romance novels have a specific structure--not necessarily a formula! Think of it like a hero's journey but for two people falling in love--that a lot of shippy fanfiction also follows, because humans like stories to work a certain way and we've figured out that this is how we enjoy our love stories with happy endings. Look up Pamela Regis' Natural History of the Romance Novel or, for more of a writing advice perspective, Gwen Hayes' Romancing the Beat. Obviously there is a lot of variation in how that structure plays out and different authors can be good or bad at it, but to say that 'fanfic has different story beats than traditional fiction' is just a really inaccurate statement, unless you don't consider romance novels to be traditional fiction, in which case you should work on your biases.

I'd also argue that there is like, absolutely nothing wrong with fanfic-turned-published-romance. I kind of love picking up a book and reading the summary and going 'oh this used to be fanfiction' but usually that's because I have a pretty decent awareness of fanfiction and can usually figure out what pairing it used to be, but your average non-fanfic reader probably won't even notice. Yes, a lot of the time fanfiction only works as fanfiction because the character dynamics etc. are so specific to the source material that you can't really file off the serial numbers without destroying the whole thing, but the kind of fic that gets published usually is already an AU! A good writer, working with a good editor, can absolutely turn a decent fanfiction into a decent published romance novel.

I'd argue that the issue with fanfic-turned-published-romance has nothing to do with either of those forms or genres. There's probably way more of those around than anyone realises. But the ones you hear about are the outliers that have a lot of hype around them and like, I'm sorry to say this, but those aren't necessarily going to be the ones that are good, you know? You see this in fandom too, the most popular fics are not necessarily the ones with the highest quality of writing or the most complex and meaningful themes, the most popular fics are the ones that appeal to the broadest audience. That's just how it works, in any form of entertainment. So if you have specific tastes or high standards for what you want in a book, yeah sure you probably won't enjoy the One Direction fanfiction that was such a massive hit on WattPad that it got a publishing deal. Publishing deals don't go to the best, most nuanced, richest texts out there, they go to stories that people in charge of making money think will make them the most money. Simple as that. The company paying to print that One Direction WattPad novel is going to put in the absolute minimum amount of effort to make sure they're not going to get sued and then they are going to print it and enjoy the payoff. At the same time I guarantee you that there are a lot of fanfiction writers out there who look at the 80,000 word AU they're crafting and realise, huh, this is pretty good, and then they put in a bunch of effort on their own and shop it around as if it were any other manuscript and if they're lucky they'll get a publishing deal, and I might pick it up and go 'oh lol this used to be fanfic' and then I'll read it and have a good time because they're a talented writer of romance stories, which is what fanfiction often is.

TL;DR: stop making sweeping statements about entire genres based on non-representative samples especially if you don't know enough about those genres to back up your argument.

this comment on that vulture article about the "fanfic-to-romance novel pipeline" is very interesting and not something i've seen articulated...much to think about...