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writeouswriter · 4 years

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Been seeing a lot of rude and degrading fanfiction discourse these past few weeks and I’m tired of it. Guess what:

You can read real books and read fanfiction, they’re not mutually exclusive. But if you don’t wanna, well hey, that’s your life, have at it.

Fanfiction is NOT just smut and coffee shop AUs, and anyone with such a narrowminded knowledge of it shouldn’t be speaking on the subject at all. Most people pour their heart and soul and time into it just like any other art form. They write epics and novels and explore conflicts and consequences the original writers never dreamed of. There’s originality even among the unoriginality, with unique writing, unique concepts, unique details created out of love for a world they wanted more of. But even if it were just the former, who cares? People read and write this for fun. And no one is actually unironically out there saying their slash fiction or whatever is equal to Dante’s Inferno. You know how a square is technically a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square? Maybe Dante’s Inferno = fanfiction, but that doesn’t mean people are saying all fanfiction = Dante’s Inferno. They’re saying there’s more to fanfiction than you give it credit for and there is a place for fanfiction in history and in the future and in humanity in general.

But even if it’s not some big world changing epic? So what? It can still be important. Not every piece of writing has to change your entire world view. Simple consumable entertainment is not necessarily a lower form. Sometimes you just want to read something familiar: familiar characters with new plots, new styles, or old plots, old styles, but either way, it’s something free and accessible and easy to filter to fit exact tags, warnings and tastes. Hurt/comfort? Check. Romance? Okay. Short fic? Long fic? Super specific tag that’s ridiculously niche? They got you covered. Sometimes you don’t want to get to know new characters or worlds when you have perfectly good old characters right there, and when you want to continue the journey with them even if their original media has ended. Sometimes bite sized fics are a lot easier to consume and focus on than a whole book. Or sometimes, you know, it’s just none of your business what other people read or do in their free time and you can’t dictate that.

Is there a lot of bad fanfiction out there? Hell yeah, I’m not going to deny it. But there’s a lot of bad original fiction out there too, as there is with anything. It’s a sliding scale for both. But we don’t judge the entire art form of novel writing just because hur de dur Twilight bad. Not every published book is the level of Dante’s Inferno either, not every published book changed the world. And I’ve read plenty of fics with better writing than popular novels. Maybe none have reached a level of recognizable scale yet, but that doesn’t mean anything. With so much writing and reading material readily available at your fingertips, with the internet giving everyone the chance to put their work out there, to put their own spin on things, to do whatever, no, you’re not going to hear about them as much as you would with the limited travel/tech and resource in 1492.

And finally, this is a big one: FANFICTION IS NOT A DIRTY WORD. People are out here acting like calling Dante’s Inferno (that’s the one I saw most often so that’s the one I keep mentioning) or whatever else ‘fanfiction’ is some grave insult. But it literally just means something that was written by a fan, featuring pre-existing characters?? Like, pretty sure Ole Dante there did not, in fact, invent the poet Virgil, who he was a fan of!!, or go on a journey to Hell with him. That, my friends, is fanfiction, albeit on a large, large scale, and that’s okay.

Don’t @ me, I can’t hear you over the sounds of all these ghosts as I walk through the afterlife in 1200 years with my good friend Elvis Presley. Like yeah, read books too. Yeah, maybe that coffeeshop AU is not the same as Dante’s Inferno or Gilgamesh or whatever the heck else, (who said it was?), but why are you out here punishing people for creating? For consuming? For loving to the point of creation? And for finding amusement and interest in the fact that humans have always been the same, for 500 years, for 2000 years, writing about each other, writing about their favourite characters, their favourite people who are worlds apart, meeting against the impossible, going on adventures, changing how people view aspects of the world, etc. And if you truly believe people writing or reading such things have no influence, no power, why do you care so much in the first place?

#fanfic #fanfiction #fanfics #the discourse #long post

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