There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fanfiction.
I never understood the pure hatred with which people spoke of fanfiction. Sure there’s low quality things, hell even harmful things, but the act of producing and consuming more content for the things you enjoy? Why is that in itself so awful. Why is a fanfic author denagrated but an amature author revered.
Writing is hard. It takes time and skill and patience and determination. If somone, anyone, is interested in making a thing with words, who am I to discourage them? There is joy in creation. There is joy in making something for yourself and there’s joy in producing content for a very particular audience.
(I mean, we could talk about how fanfic is a “”””woman”””” thing, but I can save that rant for a little while)
The first thing I ever wrote was fanfiction of Saint Michael the Archangel and Saint Cecilia the patron saint of music. They had a daughter (her name was Tara because she was just 10 year old me with WINGS. They were rainbow for the record). Now it wasn’t good, of course not I was 10, but it made me think about a lot of things young children take for granted. Dialogue, prose, action, character, and accuracy. I worked hard to produce all 27 pages of that story because it was a new exploration of media.
In order to write fanfiction you have to examine what you enjoy about a piece of media, translate mediums if that media is not a book, and channel that love into a new adventure. It takes work to create, and in order to spark that joy, to learn.
I learned about dialogue tags, grammer, sentence structure, formatting, diction, character, syntax, theme, foreshadowing, and a billion other thing. Did I suck for a while? Hell yeah. Did I really need that experience? Hell yeah.
And you know what? Sometimes it’s fun to write some stupid stupid bullshit. Last term I wrote a memoir-esque thing that was painful and harsh. It took a lot for me to write it, and you know what, I needed a break. Instead of just focusing on that, I wrote a fun fluffy fanfic where Clark Kent accidentally reveals he’s Superman to Lois Lane because cried during the Iron Giant. I want back to the memoir and finished it stronger because my garbage had given me a break.
Then in fanfic you can have literally whatever you want. I can have my stupid space gays to boldly go. I can have my flower shop owner and tattoo parlor owner fall in love over tea for the 3000th time. I can see someone like me, on a starship with her wife, and no one can tell me to be ashamed. No network can kill the one gay character I care about for cheap clicks. These stories are inherently representative of a neglected part of a fanbase.
Hell, even without the excuse, sometimes I just wanna have fun. Can I write a dumb fic where the captain of a starship and an ex borg drone bake a cake, or the wicked witch of the west accidentally adopts a puppy, or the reaper of death goes to pottery barn? Yes. I can just… Do that. And laugh about it. Fanfiction is fun. Go and write whatever your weird little heart desires.
Cold Critical 