#should be tagged genre? what genre?

[solarpunkani]

Am I legally allowed to say that

“Solarpunk started as an aesthetic/literary movement so stop getting pissy when you see a lot of aesthetic/literary stuff in the tags and convos people have about it.”

And

“Solarpunk has and continues to rapidly evolve to include much more than aesthetics and thats great and valid and awesome expanding our aesthetic ideals into tangible work we can do for a better future and better now is fantastic.”

And

“With that being said, you don’t have to diss on the people who post mostly aesthetic stuff, and you don’t have to try and act like solarpunk was Always a Political/Radical Action Movement and had no history as an aesthetic/literary genre in order for your actions to be Valid.”

Are all points that can and should coexist?

[corviiids]

THANKS @kimdokjafan you are so kind and generous. ok im cashing in the first of three blank checks to talk about faith trust and pixie dust (most recent chatfic) because the last two directors commentaries were too serious so let's do a silly one.

some p5r spoilers, and this is mostly about sumire, and it's long again. do i need to keep disclaiming that these are long? you should know me by now.

i had this written for a while before i started formatting it because i wasn't really sure if i should post it? i feel like silly chatfic is something people go to for predominantly lighthearted nonsense so i was like, maybe there's too much plot and dramatic misunderstanding and i should just keep this one for myself. but then i was like well nothing matters and maybe someone will have fun with it. it's kind of terrible how much fully or mostly completed fic there is my docs that just doesn't see the light of day lol. write for yourself etc but i like sharing! too bad it comes with the mortifying ordeal etc. anyway that was a tangent

potato counter is a neopets game. there's no deep lore i just like neopets. i guess in this universe ryuji doesn't play neopets? or maybe he's just never played potato counter specifically. i also have a different fic where ryuji DOES play neopets. it's about neopets and ryuji and goro talking on neopets.

i think this might literally be the first time ive written sumi in a fic because i haven't actually written that much fic for royal, like, now that im looking, literally almost none? and none that had a group dynamic. so it was kind of fun to find her voice for the first time in a silly groupchat like this. i was worried people would find her exclamation marks annoying but i personally thought it was endearing so i added it in there.

every time i do a gag where a character corrects their own typo i have to code more stupid little bubbles to make it happen but i think it's worth it. all the effort that goes into making tgis look as much like a real chat as possible

this obviously doesnt take place in the canon p5/r universe, but im imagining sort of a postcanon sumi personality where she's more comfortable being herself and isn't borrowing kasumi's brand of confidence, but she's visibly a really anxious person without that kasumi veneer. i also think in this universe sumire is a fairly recent addition to the friend group, and while everyone likes her a lot and she really likes them, i kind of wanted to emphasise that feeling of being in a friend group where everyone's established and you're sort of a plus-one? you don't really fit yet. part of that is her being new, part of it is her anxiety, part of it is just the kind of person sumi is where she's so polite and self-conscious she ends up taking herself out of things with her own good intentions. stuff like her interrupting the flow of an existing conversation by greeting everyone instead of jumping straight in because she doesn't feel comfortable inserting herself, which means everyone else stops to greet her even though that doesn't normally happen in a friend group, or making a point of thanking everyone for being invited to events while the others take it as a given.

idk i love that she feels a bit out of place with the phantom thieves in p5r. and part of that is a natural consequence of being a new addition in royal who can't be naturally integrated with an existing dynamic but i honestly feel like the writing team realised that and acknowledged it, and really leaned into it, and that made it work incredibly well for me. like, it's part of her character that she's sort of an outsider. it's not like p4g's incredibly clumsy integration of marie and subsequent attempt to shove her down everyone's throat as the canon love interest in p4ga (knife). sumi has that outsider vibe on purpose and it makes me really like her dynamic with the thieves as an individual

goro also feels slightly out of place in these chats, but his conversational style blends more naturally with the other thieves at this point and he even uses their codenames sometimes. i keep saying my chatfic series isn't a real Series because the lore keeps changing, but if we accept that they're all kind of following a General Continuity, assume this takes place some time after the last fic in which ren added goro to the groupchat and they made an effort to integrate him into their friend group. he's kind of there now and has settled into being the weird boyfriend. that's his role.

every time goro says something like "ren and i" assume it's the text equivalent of him talking to the group with his arm around ren's waist.

ok i got really fond of this silly running joke where sumi brings up the weather when she's feeling uncomfortable. she's so polite. i like this thread because setting it up meant i got to tie it off like this:

this just made me happy lol i liked writing this. i tried to use it to demonstrate that despite goro's abrasiveness he obviously knows sumire pretty well, he's attuned to her quirks and knows how to tell when she's having a bad time with her anxiety, so he uses her little weather habit to ground her.

i honestly dont think goro and sumire could be considered close in p5r and as much as i like the "royal trio" in canon they're not really... like... friends? with each other? they're both attached to ren, so it' more a V shape than anything else. but that said, i really LIKE goro and sumi's canon dynamic. he takes a really grouchy but politely attentive supervisory role to her during their few forays into the palace as a trio where he doesn't really know her well but clearly identifies her as a harmless little tryhard who needs some guidance and steps into that role grudgingly, and she immediately looks up to him despite being very wrong footed by his ruthlessness, which i find incredibly charming. i think given time they could be good friends, they just didn't get much chance to know each other very well in canon. so i tried to kinda do that here.

once goro stops being evil and joins the group they all kind of tiredly accept that his role is to occasionally push a cup off a bench while smirking and refuse to clean it up. emotionally, i mean.

wait i need to backtrack chronologically to talk about akeshu.

in this scene they're in the same room lol talking and snickering while typing. im trying to get at that vibe of the annoying couple who is flirting with each other, via you. you know? like ostensibly they're talking to you (sumire) but everything they say to you is part of their stupid game. sumi is incidental to goro and ren teasing each other about flirting with someone else, goro is reporting everything ren says because his boyfriend is so eye-rollingly foolish in a cute way. they're very tickled by how amusing and charming they are. gross. disgusting. sumire im so sorry for putting you through this

anyway here are too many of my favourite jokes from the fic

[quatregats]

I got tagged by @zsofiarosebud to make this picrew and take this quiz, then share my results! Graziñas <33

Coincidentally, I do feel like this about 99% of the time :')

I'll tag @thiefbird @aurpiment @lemonadeandlanguages @spraakentusiast @kutyozh @cherrybucket and anyone else who wants to!

[bonebrokebuddy]

Kryptonian Biology Prompts #1

Due to the combination of the facts that Clark’s heart canonically thrums rather than beats and his voice has been mentioned to have a resonant quality to it (generally by Bruce).

I propose that evolutionarily Kryptonian have some form of their anatomy that connects their heart to their vocal cords, causing their voice to automatically “hum” whenever they speak, think evolutionary wackery akin to the laryngeal nerve in giraffes.

Thankfully, it could likely be written off as a naturally gravely or raspy voice that would decrease during times of lack of physical duress.

While this means that Kryptonian’s could theoretically purr, it also means they would only do so when under extreme amounts of duress or physical exertion as their heartbeat would need to rise above normal levels to cause their vocal cords to thrum without also speaking. As a result, it could only be heard in circumstances where a Kryptonian is horribly injured & near death or is exhausted & out of breath (a Very difficult feat.)

[akkivee]

idk if i ever got around to just commenting how strange it was that juto and rei swapped palettes in their bp outfits but it’s strange that they did lol and now we got juto straight up wearing his blazer the way rei wears his fur coat in the mtc album art

and now i’m really wondering if there was more to those duos in the block party lol

[e-n-t-r-o-p-i-c-f-r-o-g]

I stg every time I go on Instagram I'm bombarded with fandom/media takes that make me feel straight up wrong with what I'm doing and how I'm engaging with fandom

(Long ass ramble in the tags. I have no idea what I'm getting at or if this is even my arena to talk about it).

[the-everqueen]

for the AMA: what compels you most in a fictional character!

rage as a trauma response.

it compels me when a character spits in the face of god. when the response isn't "why did you let all this happen" but "how dare you let this happen." something about the assertion of agency in the wake of un-meaning. something about "there was never a Purpose, the point is what you make of it." this is undoubtedly because i was raised evangelical and continue to struggle with what i believe vs what i want to be true. pero also i think i was denied anger for so long (and even now my reflex when i'm hurt is to divert/repress/hide/sublimate anger) that it's cathartic for SOMEONE to get to be mad at the powers that be.

misogyny means it's usually (white) male characters who get these narrative arcs. this is evident in my blorbos: astarion from bg3, the corinthian from sandman, will graham from hannibal. (my immediate first thought was actually emilio sandoz from the sparrow, very literal autistic brain serving me well here lmao, what does it mean to be god's whore.) but my favorite female and genderqueer characters have this, too. saga anderson from alan wake 2 (LITERALLY tells both the in-game narrative force and the meta "fuck off, i'm done with other people writing my story"). essun from the broken earth trilogy (everyone who says they can't connect to her...i need you to examine yourself for misogynoir). vic from nos4a2. eurydice from hadestown. erica slaughter from something is killing the children. jade from my heart is a chainsaw.

(horror is obviously a huge medium for this...the final girl is a figure of righteous anger, the avenging angel, the woman who mows down the ultimate horror with a baseball bat or a butcher knife and she's right, she's in the right, she's the monster slayer, fuck you fear me.)

[c1trvswurld]

Genji and hanzo being absolutely coke and acid brain fried rave teenagers gives me such a good laugh to hc

[loveologystudies]

thinking about isat flight rising au.......

[sojourner-between-worlds]

I normally don't vague post about other people (and I'm not really here, even) but someone in the tag suggested that Jack would make a better Team Leader than Yusei and it made me realize something, in part, about why people think that Yusei is boring.

tl;dr: Yusei isn't boring; he was written as the MC in the wrong genre.

See, Shonen protagonists typically have the following personality traits: loud, brash, hot-headed, sometimes abrasive. Yusei is none of those things, and Jack is ALL of them. Which, I'm sure, is what led that person to say that Jack would make the better leader and what leads so many people (who are mostly only fans of Shonen anime) to say that Yusei is boring. He doesn't fit their expectations of what a Shonen protag is supposed to look like, therefore he's boring.

But the thing is, if you popped him into, say, a Slice of Life, he'd be perfectly at home (well...except for the Trademark YGO Hair anyway) and well-loved by the fan base. I can say this with fair certainty because I've at least never seen anyone say that Natsume Takashi (Natsume's Book of Friends) is boring in any way, and honestly the two of them have very similar temperaments. The difference is, obviously, the genre of their respective stories.

Slice of Life allows for its protags to be softer-spoken, more reserved; Shonen often does not.

It's time people stopped saying that Yusei is boring and just admit that they like loud, brash characters as opposed to quiet ones, and that Yusei just doesn't fit what they expect from a Shonen protagonist.

He's not boring; he was just written for the wrong genre.

[lucky-numberme]

your honor, I am obsessed with them (the characters of A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows) (Especially Liran, he is everything to me)

ID in Alt

1/20 Queer Book Draw Challenge

updated version

[brynn-lear]

I never got too deep into enstars but there are days where I miss Mama 😔

[theywontletmebeprincipal]

I miss playing multiplayer games I haven’t played any since overwatch started sucking :( does anyone know of any good ones that don’t suck !

[hellonearthtoday]

sometimes my mutuals will post smthin and idfk what they're talking about but ill like that shit anyway. its like spinning around w your eyes closed and choosing a random team to root for in sports. but in this case it's me watching my mutual talk about their blorbo ass shaker 2000 from the planet zoingo and being like Yeah...YEAH!!!

[hyperfixated-homo]

y’know it kinda feels like psychological horror is kinda perfect for Leo, but i still wanna hear your reasoning

Psychological horror is my favourite genre to read. Maybe it's because I'm so intrigued by understanding how others think, but it just really hits the spot for me.

There's such a heavy focus on our mental and emotional states in psychological horror that you don't get as much with other genres. That's part of the reason that I chose it for Leo, because it's not based on any real, tangible fear, but rather what is going on inside your head. It works well for him because Leo internalises literally everything! And represses the hell out of it! He's literally the perfect psych horror protagonist. He wouldn't trust himself- much less the people around him- with what he's thinking, which would lead to spirals and inevitably more dangerous situations.

I also think that Leo wouldn't be scared of that many other genres unless it was a very specific sort of fear caused by a phobia. I can imagine him maybe having a fear of death, or of losing his family, but neither of those fears have a full genre based on it (like Raph's fear of the paranormal). Both seem more likely to be used as plot devices in a psychological horror story.

[hazellark]

Originality: Fanfiction, Genre, Trope

So I wasn't going to post this anywhere ever, but I saw a post that made me angry so now the internet, and my one follower, get my essay on Fanfiction. I wrote it for a class, in case the sectioning is a bit weird, but it is a piece of writing I'm proud of. I have an annotated bibliography I will post separately. A different title that didn't make it to the final report:

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words or is the Cost the Thousandth Minute Spent Here

Image from: “Canon vs. ‘fanon’: Genre devices in contemporary fanfiction.” (McCain 8)

I started reading at around the age of 5, and I loved it. I was one of the kids that actively went to look at the books in the book cubbies of the classroom during free time, and once I was good enough at reading, I began tearing through the series I had available. Magic Treehouse, Boxcar Children, fairy tales, books on horses, cats, dogs. My parents wanted my siblings and I to always be able to have the books we liked available to us to encourage reading practice, so my dad made us all personal bookshelves and out of necessity, I ended up with the largest one. In elementary school, I chafed against the 3 books a week checkout policy. In middle school and early high school, with my limit removed, I would check out as many as 15 (my record) books at a time. My backpack rarely went a day without having at least one book inside. When I was still a preteen, my parents tried to encourage us to read critically one summer by offering to pay us for book reports, and I went ahead and read my assigned book and two more, hiding myself in my closet for a day to read all the way through Eragon. I would take free books home to the point that my personal bookshelf was often double stacked. All that is to say that I have always really loved reading. So when a friend showed me a site that allowed me to read hundreds or thousands of stories about characters I already liked, that I could access anywhere through my phone, I fell head first into the world of fanfiction readers.

Image from: A screen capture of my bookmarks page, on 4/17/23

When a reader begins, they're given books with simple words. The books tend to have consistent vowel sounds, and use basic words from everyday life. If they learn the written language early in life, odds are they never felt the need to seek out a greater variety of literature at that point in time. Books were basic fictional stories that taught how the lines on the page turned into communication. It's only once the basics are established that a learner can start to read for themselves. Fast forward a couple years and with a solid foundation of vocabulary, a reader can begin to have choice in what they read. One of the earliest classifications for literature that a reader gets is genre. Even books built for kids can range from the fantastical, like the Magic Treehouse series, to nonfictional books about animals, space, and history. As the years stack and a child reads more and more, they will begin to both notice and be taught about patterns. Even without knowing the labels, humans are used to pattern recognition, and as Thomas C. Foster put it, “Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a whole lot is practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences”(Foster 29). The classroom and experience show similarities in story structure like the Hero’s Journey model, in characters like the tragic hero, and in story elements like a dragon fight to save a damsel.  At the point where a reader can recognize similarities, they can identify the types of stories they like, by genre, archetypes, tropes etc. Generally, people have a type of story that they like best, and shared qualities between two stories are attractive. A reader turned writer may like an idea, and want to put their own spin on it. The “what if” is the basis of all new stories. Foster, summarizing Northrop Frye, asserted that, “Literature…grows out of other literature; we should not be surprised to find, then, that it also looks like other literature”(Foster 29). In a world of literary repetition, what is originality? And in turn, what does that mean about fanfiction?

Image from: The back cover of Diana Winne Jones’ “Dark Lord of Derkholm” 

Following Frye’s line of reasoning, Foster concludes a very bold idea: “there’s no wholly original work of literature”(Foster 29). Yet contrarily, he goes on to explain that one of his favorite novels contains multiple recognizable archetypes and story elements, and called it “wildly original”(Foster 29), very intentionally using the word original once again. Those two statements seem to contradict themselves, but he draws the line at the combination of the familiar into something different from any piece on its own. My personal belief is that original literature, mixed from familiar traits like genre and trope, is spawned from the onset of the author asking the question “what if?”. We both agree that external inspiration does not deny creativity.

Image from: The fandoms tab of the AO3 main page

Genre

It’s not uncommon to ask someone their favorite genre. Most readers have a favorite genre, or at least a top two or three. It’s also not uncommon for genres to coexist in a piece: A high fantasy story can have a romantic subplot, a science fiction tale can have undertones of tragedy, and an autobiography can focus on the comedic parts of life. Introducing an element from another genre can be a strategy to keep an audience engaged, a way to fill time, or a side effect of a kind of world building. Fantasy, scifi, autobiography, romance, tragedy, comedy, mystery, westerns, horror, realistic fiction, and more are all considered genres of prose by at least some portion of the population. There are genres for nearly every kind of written work imaginable. There are letters for business, condolence, between friends, there are applications for jobs, schools, grants, and many variations of poetry. Beyond “types of things,” what is genre, and what does it have to do with originality?

Like how there is no singular list of major genres, there is not really a strong definition of genre that. In an article for “The Kenyon Review”, Northrop Frye grappled with two diametric definitions of genre, one being that it precurses and is “independent of creation” and the other being that genre is that it is born of and reliant upon the genesis and comparison of new works (Frye 8). His ultimate conclusions are that genres come from archetypes, and that “all literary genres are derived from the quest-myth” (Frye 15). Though he never says it explicitly, it can be derived from his statements that genre is related generally to content of works. The researcher David Chandler agreed with Frye on the difficulty in defining genre, stating that “Specific genres tend to be easy to recognize intuitively but difficult (if not impossible) to define”(Chandler 2). He goes on to say genres exist because classifications are necessary to make distinctions and descriptions, but that genre is not a static concept, something closer to a negotiation between the culture and the idea of it. He specifically notes that “Each new work within a genre has the potential to influence changes within the genre or perhaps the emergence of new sub-genres (which may later blossom into fully-fledged genres)”(Chandler 3). 

Suffice it to say, giving completely rigid definitions for genres does not work forever. Like with teaching metaphors, they work at a specific moment in time, but they might lack details, or be slightly incorrect, because the goal is to impart a main point rather than act as a perfect mapping of an idea. What can be said about genre is that it “provides an important frame of reference which helps readers to identify, select and interpret texts”(Chandler 7), and, in a later section about taxonomies of genre in film, indicates that similarities within a genre may be related to narrative, characterization, basic themes, setting, and iconography(Chandler 13). A loose definition can be drawn then, that literary genres are generally larger scale classifications of writing that involve the content of the text, useful for helping readers interact with the text for lower effort.

Due to genre being a wider classification of literature, it is not inherent that shared genre indicates a lack of original content. Conversely, because a genre tends to share enough content elements that by simply knowing the genre the reader understands parts of the book, genre forces some degree of shared features. Though not his intent, Chandler does address the mix of the two ideas, “while writing within a genre involves making use of certain 'given' conventions, every work within a genre also involves the

invention of some new elements"(Chandler 6). Though genre necessitates similarity, it does not inherently necessitate sameness. 

Image from: The YouTube channel ColeyDoesThings

(Note: Do NOT look up unknown fanfic tropes, you will SEE things)

Trope

Like every other literary happening, most people encounter tropes regularly, even if they are not always identified. They can span genres, or largely exist within one. Examples include found family, the wise mentor, friends to lovers, other worlds, the chosen one, and long journeys. They can act as a draw, a dissuasion or a cue to readers for what may lie in store. They exist normally, in altered form, in parodied form and more.

Trope mimics genre in the issue of varying definitions in different spaces, but because it is a “smaller” concept, it is a little easier. Speaking from the view of literary YouTube space, the content creator Merphy Napier identified trope as ”a literary pattern that gets used often enough that readers obviously, clearly, and quickly recognize it and generally know what they’re in for” (1:10 - 1:22). This is, again,  very similar in concept to genre, and for good reason: both need to be able to be used for clarification. Trope is, however, tied more closely to the story than genre is. Napier, later in the video, says that “All books either have tropes as the baseline of their story or as certain elements within the story. And what the author does to them to make them unique to that author, unique to that story, unique to those characters is what makes those books great” (7:42-7:55). Throughout the video essay, many examples pop up, namely characters, relationships, plot points, and setting, all of which fall under possible classifiers of genre. The general understanding that tropes are smaller scale classifications yet very similar to genre is well demonstrated by one of Napier’s examples: ”There are also certain genres that rely on tropes as their very definition. Time portal fantasy needs [time portals] to exist. If someone writes a time portal fantasy that doesn’t have the main element in it, the trope, this is bad” (4:05- 4:23). Overall, trope emerges as a smaller, similar structure to genre, though one a bit more story-centric.

Like with genre and exemplified in the second Napier quote, tropes are just a sum of a whole. They can be vital to a story, but there is always more. It should be said though, that most of the time, when people call a story unoriginal, it comes from the perception that too many genres and tropes are shared between two works- it is never just one or two. Because genre and trope necessitate similarity, the more shared genres and tropes, the more similarities are also shared. Thus, it is fair to say that two pieces of writing with enough shared tropes and genre seem unoriginal. Typically, when people do bring this up, it is due to a cause and effect- one story becomes popular and other writers jump on the bandwagon, writing similar stories in response to the popularized one. This explosion of subsequent stories is what generally leads a trope to be called overdone, and a story unoriginal. While there is merit in saying that in these cases the trope is no longer new, “overdone” is an opinion, based on the amount a reader is willing to read that trope (8:35 - 10:40). 

Image from: “The Works inspired by this one:” list of the fanfiction “Yesterday Upon the Stair”

Fanfiction

If someone spends a certain amount of time engaging with the internet, they likely hear about or see fanfiction in one of its variant forms. Though some sites are more popular than others, fanfiction, called fanfics or even just fics, exists in a variety of spaces in a variety of forms. “Household name” sites for the written format include Archive of Our Own(AO3), Wattpad, Tumblr, and Fanfiction.net (ff.net), but podfics (fics of the audio variety) can be found on Youtube, and threadfics- fics written with the thread function of social media posts to get past the character limits -get written every day on Twitter. The average reader finds their way into the fanfic space by first finding the community writing, drawing, and generally creating or engaging with the content of a published media, known as the fandom. 

Though fanfiction is sometimes called a genre, it varies in definition according to the context. The most basic definition is that fanfictions are “fictional works based on a work the author liked.” The meaning it carries in casual use is that fanfics are unmonetized, fan-made pieces of writing that are shared in an online space, generally designated for such writing. For example, fiction written by fans of Disney’s “Encanto” or the anime “My Hero Academia” would be called fanfiction, because of their format and the fact that they cannot be monetized without breaking copyright. However, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is not called fanfiction, because it is a published piece of work, based on a piece of literature whose copyright has already expired. Once again, there is more than one definition, and in this case, finding a middle ground cannot encapsulate everything. 

Fanfiction is a genre in that knowing a work is fanfiction can provide some expectations of what the story may contain, but fanfiction is a direct effect of other media, and while it is a type of fiction, it is larger than most genres are individually. The second definition may be correct by denotation, but it is not what people mean in conversation unless they want to imply even certain well known works like The Aeneid and fairytale retellings count as fanfiction. The third definition opposes the second, and even then it misses information. In her thesis, Katharine McCain, quoting Katherine Morrissey questions, ““How do we attempt to process a concept that is simultaneously claimed as an activity, an identity, and a connection to others?”(McCain 13). Fanfiction, as a concept, is too big. Fanfiction as a genre is inconsistent within itself, like every other genre. The definition of fanfiction, as it is used in conversation, misses the community that built and change the culture and practices. 

However, even if it cannot receive a codified definition, modern fanfiction can be described by some of its key characteristics. McCain identifies her subject as “a particular type of fanfiction—one that is becoming more and more prevalent among fans and acafans alike: a fanfiction defined primarily by its communal nature, its reliance on the Internet, and its desire to combine the creative with the critical”(McCain 13). Looking at this through the lens of AO3, the internet enables quick access and easy communication. An author may start a work and draw inspiration from the comments left on the works, as most writers of multichaptered works do not have everything written when they start to post. A common practice is writing fanfiction inspired by other fanfiction, as pictured above, which is born of the common attitude, “___ idea was good/bad, but what if.” Taking an aspect of a story, often a trope, and tearing it apart then putting it back together is the fandom way, and occurs both with canonical content(from the original source material, and also called canon) and fanonical content (based on a general consensus within a fandom- generally on what should have happened- and also called fanon).

With that in mind, McCain’s four main characteristics of fanfiction are the sharing and overlapping of content, common language and medium, “bad” writing, and the overlap of the creative and the critical. (McCain 15,16) The first and fourth aspect are both heavily tied to fanon and canon, the former referring mostly to the chain of inspiration from the source to a writer to other writers, and the latter referring to the practice of asking “what if” in creation. The second and third aspect both refer to the largely unmoderated nature of the fandom. Fanfiction spaces are always inventing, and are unrestricted by published work conventions. Regarding the second aspect, new terms are invented and propagated within fandoms to communicate the new ideas they generate. Fans describe genres and tropes alike as “alternate universes(AUs)” if they are not present in canon, for example fantasy AUs or Coffee Shop AUs. Formatting also varies greatly from fic to fic, as authors are free to format their story with any format they can create, and often will make specific choices to impart certain ideas or feelings on their readers. For example, keeping everything in lowercase can be used to make the reader feel like something is off, or slightly incomprehensible. The third aspect largely refers to Sturgeon's Law, a term derived from Sturgeon's Revelation, and imparts the idea that “90% of everything is crap.” Fanfiction can be written by anyone, and requires no editor to be published. Naturally, every level of content emerges for viewing- there are only filters when the author employs them themselves. 

Fanfiction is very blatantly unoriginal by most standards. It makes use of characters, settings, and tropes that can be directly traced to a source material. One writer, Patricia C. Wrede comments on her blog that “Fanfiction, as I have pointed out elsewhere, can be looked at as a sort of map of various alternate routes through the implied decision tree that the original writer used. The whole point is that it’s not purely original in itself; it has to have something to be an alternative to, or an expansion of”(Wrede, “Wrede on Writing”). An important note is on the wording “purely original.” Throughout the article, she agrees with the points of Frye and Foster, that near everything in existence draws from something else. Paired with my opinion that originality (not pure or true originality, just uniqueness) is spawned from the “what if,” this could mean that near everything has equal potential to be considered original or unoriginal. Genre and trope commonalities may have weigh-in as to the amount of uniquity in a work, but if hardly anything is “purely original,” there should not be a gold standard with which to punish other literature.

  As a final note on originality, it is important to note that even though originality is idealized, what matters most in a story is that it entertains its audience. It can contribute to that enjoyment, but as Wrede puts it, ”Originality is not the be-all and end-all of literary quality; it is simply one of the many and several ingredients that writers use to create stories.”(Wrede, “Wrede on Writing”).

Image from: The “History of Equestria and Other Headcanon Stories by Ink Rose” playlist on the YouTube channel of Ink Rose

Beginning to read fanfiction was a massive change to my life, but not in terms of type of content, or quantity. My main genre is still fantasy, and any drop in quality I attribute to Sturgeon's Law, as without the levels of review that published works receive, every level of writing makes it to visibility. Rather, it greatly increased the accessibility of reading. I no longer had to carry around books to everywhere I went, I could bring a phone or a tablet and with all my downloaded stories, I could have a much greater amount of readable content for much less to carry with me. For example, on family car trips I was capped at bringing more than 4 or 5 books to avoid taking up too much space. After I burned through them all, I would have to find books from whoever’s house we visited, hunt someone down to play cards, or set up a movie player. Fanfiction, existing in the online space or in the downloads of an electronic device, meant I could bypass the space limit, and, should the mood strike me, read near indefinitely. And I do read near constantly- waking up in the morning, between classes, while waiting, in my free time, in the bath, during breaks in schoolwork, when I really should be doing work, before bed, in bed, and possibly more. Some days I read a total word count greater than any individual Harry Potter book (the longest one is 257 thousand words). I did similar things before fanfiction, sometimes a book or two a day, but now I can read it anywhere, anytime.

Being a fanfiction reader means that for any popular media, I can typically find a story with my favorite character. It means that for any less popular media sources, I reread fics over and over, and lament the lack of a large pool of writers while bookmarking the works of my favorite authors and subscribing to their accounts, their series, and their works to catch everything they make. It means checking my email every day to see if any stories I read have a new chapter, and deciding between reading those chapters, if I remember the story, or ignoring them, waiting for the fic to be completed before reading it all at once. It means filtering out story elements, ships, or tags I don’t like, and reading the tags if I don’t, and even still stumbling upon something I didn’t want to read. It means reading vastly more than my mom, but still being told I need to read more “real” books and stories. It means walking around with downloads that make up days of reading available at any time, and that collection still not even coming close to my bookmarks count. It means having an account that some swear is the most personal thing they own, saying they’ll take their account information to the grave. It sometimes means loving and hating my fandom’s community in equal measure, and choosing to read on or leave based on prevailing feelings. It means loving characters or settings or worlds powerfully enough to read and read and read and read and only stop by the limits of the fandom size and my willingness to change my standards. 

The closest word to the love of reading is bibliophilia, or the love of reading/collecting books, but while I do love reading books still, I think I’m closer to a lover of stories. I could never read forever, as it is not where I find fulfillment, but it is where I find joy. I read everywhere all the time using my phone, from one of my dozens of open AO3 tabs or hundreds of downloaded fics. Nothing is entirely original, but it doesn’t need to be. I filter to my tastes and set myself loose, because I love reading fanfiction.

Image from: A screen capture of the main page of the fanfiction site “Archive of Our Own”