#to be fair a lot of those 150k words are self-indulgent trash | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jixiani · 5 years ago

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In defense of fanfiction

I’ve been thinking about fanfiction lately, (really I’ve been thinking that I should really be taking some of this time to write more, but that’s another post) AO3 just had their yearly fundraiser so of course the old discourse over the site and its history was dragged up again and then Sarah had brought it up this morning and well, I have a lot of strong feelings on the subject. Let’s start with a little personal background: I have been reading and writing fanfic since the late 90’s. It started out as something silly my best friend introduced me to and we would sit in her mother’s computer room and giggle over ‘speculative fan fictions’ and participate on months-long roleplay scenarios on chat boards and take turns passing notebooks full of handwritten stories back and forth which were every bit as terrible as you’d think two 14-year-old girls could come up with. Unfortunately, we were in the Vampire Chronicles fandom so we had a front-row seat for the Anne Rice and her lawyer's debacle that will from here on out be referred to as “The Dark Times”. We watched our friends’ work get pulled, our RP sites close down, we feared that we’d get a cease and desist letter, we hid our notebooks and dreamed up our stories exclusively verbally. I was deeply ashamed of my secret love of fanfic for years. I kept writing, but I kept it secret, I kept reading it but would never admit to it. Fanfiction was something shameful, taboo, some terrible sin akin to watching porn, and not the good socially acceptable kind of porn. But time moved on and fandom moved on and fanfiction started to be more acceptable. I joined Fanfiction.net, I wrote some stuff on Livejournal (although I still kept it set to private). I read A LOT of fanfiction, jumping fandoms, and leaving reviews. People I admired came out as liking and writing fanfiction. Of course, then the purges hit. Strikethrough and the like. I’m not going to get into that here, because that’s a rant all its own. Anyway, those were also some dark days as fandom searched for somewhere to land. I stumbled over Archive of our own a few years ago and I aggressively support them whenever I can because they fight for the fandom. Now I speak out in defense of fanfiction whenever possible. I’ve attended panels at conventions about fanfiction, I support and share posts about it from my favorite authors, I let everyone know that I’m proud of my fanfic (although I still don’t post it, that’s because I tend not to finish things and I don't’ want to get someone excited for something I know I’m going to abandon in a month, not because I’m ashamed.). So let’s talk over some points because Sarah brought up a good point today. Why is fanfiction such a shameful thing in the fandom community, and in the writing community? One of the people on my friends list who I admire and is a professional, published author once rolled their eyes and scoffed when I said that I wanted to go to the fanfiction panel at a convention. Yet, no other facet of fandom is treated this way. I brought this up on Sarah’s post and I’m going to reiterate it here. Fan artists are not scoffed at, people flock to their tables in artist’s alley. Fan-made comics and doujinshi have led to careers writing and drawing comics and scripts for the same series their fanwork was based on. No professional costumer or prop maker sneers at cosplayers, in fact, there are now professional cosplayers. Fans wait in line for hours to watch masquerade skits at conventions. Fan-dubs like Dragonball Z Abridged and Nescaflowne are hugely popular and have led to professional voice acting gigs and production studios. But if an author dares to mention that they got their start in fanfiction? The horror, the outrage, the hate mail. Yet so much of our media could arguably be called fanfiction. Dante’s Inferno? John Milton’s Paradise Lost? The Aeneid? Classics? Yes. Fanfiction? Also yes. Joyce’s Ulysses is just an AU of the Odyssey. Anything written about or based on myths? Anything involving King Arthur? Sherlock Holmes? Shakespear...Oh you can cry adaptation all you want. Let’s face it if it’s written by some old white guy it’s literature and a classic and an innovative reimagining but really it’s just fanfic and it’s everywhere. West Side Story is a fanfic of a fanfic since Shakespeare based Romeo and Juliet off a poem by a similar name. My Fair Lady? Pygmalion AU. Hamilton? Real Person Song Fic! 50 Shades series, Mortal Instruments, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, hell there are literally hundreds of published Jane Austen fanfictions. John Gardner’s Grendel is a retelling of Beowolf. The Wiz, Wicked and the rest of Gregory Maguire’s books? The Wizard of Oz doesn’t enter public domain until 2035. The Magnificent Seven? Kurosawa called and he wants his seven samurai back, he’d also like to reclaim Yojimbo from A Fist Full of Dollars. Speaking of tv, how about Black Sails? It’s a fanfiction prequel to Treasure Island. Any comic book not written by the original creator. Any book series based on Star Wars, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, etc. I could go on all day. So why is it, when so much of our popular culture consists of what basically boils down to fanfiction, that fanfiction is seen as a shameful indulgence, as “cheating”, as trash?Part of it boils down to sex. Read any article that brings up fanfiction and there will invariably be a line where the author distances themself by saying something along the lines of they don’t personally read it, or how slash fic isn’t their thing but to each their own. (Both quotes from some of the sites I pulled the above list from) A lot of people seem to think that fanfiction is just porn, and while yes there is some fanfiction that is porn and some of it is very good, the same can be said for regular fiction as well. People don’t blush and giggle over Lord of the Rings, yet when I say that I’ve read fanfic that’s longer than Tolkien’s trilogy I may as well be talking about how I read Aragorn/Boromir slash fic regardless of what the actual subject matter was. Yes, there’s sex in fanfiction. A lot of it is gay sex. You can read Lolita in school but Harry Potter fanfic? Gasp, think of the children! Even if that fanfic happens to be about what if Petunia loved Harry like a son instead of pushing him away and neglecting him. There is some really fantastic fan fiction out there. Some of it has sex, some of it doesn't. Some of it deals with queer characters and experiences, some of it doesn’t. There’s nothing inherently wrong with erotica and it’s an entirely separate issue. Not every fanfiction is a 50 Shades-eque erotic rewrite of Twilight, and even if they were, so what? A lot of fanfiction has to do with wish fulfillment. You want to know what happens next, or what would happen if this had happened instead, or if there was this character. You want to see someone like you in your favorite fandom. I had wanted to adventure with Bilbo when I was a kid. I wanted to go on adventures and fight and ride dinosaurs. These desires don’t go away just because we grow up. I got into roleplay and larp and gaming because I still enjoy make-believe. I write for a lot of the same reasons. Everyone wants to be the main character. Fanfiction gives you that chance. You can write yourself into a story, you can write someone that’s like you, you can write someone that’s nothing like you but what you want to be. So, let’s discuss our old friend Mary Sue. She gets trotted out as an example every time someone brings up fanfiction (or any uppity female character ever). Mary Sue was born in the 60’s. She is an actual character from a Star Trek Original Series fanfiction. Yes, fanfiction existed in the 60’s. Mary Sue was the brightest and prettiest girl to come out of Starfleet, she managed to be in all the right places at the right times to save the ship and capture the heart of Spock. Self insert fics and Mary Sues are at the heart of why we should be terribly ashamed of our fanfiction habit. Except, what was Luke Skywalker if not George Lucas’ self insert Marty Stu? There are countless male characters that are as bad or worse than your typical Mary sue and they are never called out for it. Seanan brought this up in a post once about her character October Daye, her editor had said that the character was too competent, too cool, and that it was unrealistic and she should tone it down. She had him replace the character’s name with ��Harry Dresden” and reread the story and suddenly it was fine. There are a great many articles and essays about our friend Mary Sue and I implore you to read some of them. She is not the enemy we make her out to be. Fanfiction, on the rare occasion that it is accepted, is seen as some sort of training wheels, or baby’s first writing. It’s amateurish, it’s juvenile, it’s just not very good. If we are not ashamed of it, then it’s expected that we are only using it as a starting point to hone our writing and move on to professional published works. It’s either that or something terribly self-indulgent that should be kept to ourselves. Some fanfic writers do go on to become “real” writers. Seanan McGuire has always been very open about how her agent first approached her after reading some of her Buffy/Faith fanfiction. Some “real” writers also write fanfiction. Neil Gaiman won a Hugo for his Chronicles of Narnia Fanfic. Ursula Vernon and Mercedes Lackey write fanfiction in their spare time. Some fanfiction writers never become published authors, not everyone wants to. Some are happy to have a dozen 150k fics about their favorite fandom, or maybe just one 500k epic, some, myself included, may only have one short fic posted somewhere. There is nothing that says that you have to use your hobby to turn a profit. (By the way, for reference, War and Peace is 561,304 words, Dune is 187,240 words, you cannot make the argument that fanfic writers don’t put time into their craft when they have more words than Tolstoy under their belt.)Some of the ‘training wheels’ analogy is true. Fanfic is a terrific gateway to writing. It teaches pacing, plot, character development, how to take criticism. If I ever do write something professionally I will not be nearly as afraid of the red pen as I am of bad reviews. Anonymous readers are the most ruthless critics. May the literary gods preserve you from ever having your fanfic read aloud as an example of how terrible and ‘cringy’ fanfiction can be. There is a lot of fanfiction out there that is written by teenage girls, and it reads like it was written by a teenage girl, but the only way to get better at something is to practice. Fanfiction allows budding writers to do that. There are no rules, no one standing at the gates to bar entry, and entire communities of people willing to give advice and commentary. Sometimes it’s less helpful than harmful, but there is something about posting a new fic and waiting for that first ‘like’ or ‘kudos’ or a review. There’s something to be said for instant gratification. I have read a lot of really terrible fanfic. I have slogged through stuff that would make Mary Sue herself cringe. I have read about the ½ vampire, ½ werewolf, ½ fairy long lost princess. I have read grammar that would make your eyes bleed. Not all of it has been confined to fan works. I have read fanwork that has had me convulsing with silent laughter to the point that I wondered if I would die. Dialog that was ten times better than anything I had read in a professional novel. Fanfiction should not be judged by its worst offenders. We don’t hold Dune to the same standard as Twilight. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not terrible and cringy because 50 Shades of Grey overuses the phrase “Oh my.” There is some absolutely terrible fanfic out there and there is some pretty terrible published fic as well, but we don’t hold that against most novelists, so why do we hold it against fanfiction writers?I guess that brings us to the elephant in the fandom. Sexism. Fanfiction has historically been something written by and for young women and there is nothing more shameful than something liked by a young woman. Boybands? The color pink? Horse Girl books and Sparkly Vampires? Society hates them. We mock them. It is not acceptable to enjoy them. Sound familiar? How many times is something considered cool until a woman decides that she likes it? We as a society hate women and hate the things they enjoy and we hate teenage girls the most. Think of how much people hated selfies and duckface and instagram. How much hate was directed at Britney Spears, One Direction, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber? Whether it has a basis in something or not, we hate them, we make jokes, we share the memes. We write them off as having no substance, as being stupid, not worth our time. Belittling of teenage girls for their interests and fandoms isn't a new phenomenon. Remember Mary Sue? Not only that, but a lot of fanfiction is gay. Women and gays are still the punchline to a lot of jokes and we can’t ignore that that plays a big part in people’s hatred of fanfiction, even if it’s not on purpose. Fanfiction has always been a bastion for people that couldn’t find stories about them in popular fiction. A lot of mainstream main characters are straight guys. A lot of fanfiction main characters are young women or gay men. Now, I admit that I’m oversimplifying this, and especially in recent years as it is becoming safer for people to come out as other genders and queer and as having mental illness or not being neurotypical, you are seeing more of that reflected in the fanfiction community. I don’t want anyone to think that I am purposefully leaving anyone out of this. The fanfiction community has not always been so great at being inclusive of people of color or transgender, it’s getting better, but I’m not going to stand here and pretend we’ve always been perfect. In the last several years I’ve seen a lot more inclusion. As I said, fanfiction has always been a home to the “Other”, as that expands to include more individuals so too does the community. Fanfics provide us with a place to work through issues and present perspectives that we don’t get to see anywhere else, without having to create an entire world from scratch. It’s accessible to everyone. I’ve spent the better part of an afternoon researching and writing this. I hope that I was at least partially coherent and I got you to at least take a look at why you feel the way you feel about fanfiction. I’m not sure if I exactly got across the points I was trying for, there’s a lot more eloquent, well thought out arguments out there from more knowledgeable people. Check out Seanan McGuire, she’s got a lot to say on the subject.

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