On Fanfiction

[elrhiarhodan]

I was alerted to this article - The Boy Who Lived Forever - on ariadnes_string's LJ. It's making the rounds, certainly - but if you haven't read it, you should. TIME has published a remarkably favorable view of fan fiction and the people (mostly women) who write it.

Right now fan fiction is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it's largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it's unbelievably massive. Fan fiction predates the Internet, but the Web has made it exponentially easier to talk and be heard, and it holds hundreds of millions of words of fan fiction. There's fan fiction based on books, movies, TV shows, video games, plays, musicals, rock bands and board games. There's fan fiction based on the Bible. In most cases, the quantity of fan fiction generated by a given work is volumetrically larger than the work itself; in some cases, the quality is higher than that of the original too.

The timing of the article's publication is very interesting - it's to coincide with the release of the final Harry Potter movie. And if you ever thought that White Collar is a substantially sized fandom, consider this - the ff.net archive has over a half MILLION Harry Potter stories.

Comments

[aisle-one.livejournal.com]

I played in HP fandom for awhile and I loved it. HP fandom tended to be known for crazy wank here and there, but I found the community pretty welcoming (I joined the slashers party, particularly for the Harry/Snape pairing.) It was also a really stimulating experience for a reader and as a writer. The talent was proportional to the fandom size and these days I miss the craving of reading HP fics and writing them.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Yes, the thing I liked best about HP fandom was that no matter what, there was somebody else in the fandom who liked just exactly what you liked and would be thrilled to have you as a friend.

I started one of the smallish epic wanks in HP. It's terrifying, and I did it deliberately.

[aisle-one.livejournal.com]

I also found the fandom to be really open with exploring various kinks in a very nonjudgmental way. It was really refreshing. Which is not to say that the previous fandoms I read or wrote in were judgmental, but the stories were certainly more inhibited. I enjoyed the creative freedom that were largely representative in HP fics (and, again, in the slashers community, LOL.)

I started one of the smallish epic wanks in HP. LOL, really? Which one?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

WC is a kinky fandom, but there are sections of HP where, whoo boy. Made it a bit hard for me, because I have a huge thing for gen captivity fic. Captivity fic in HP fandom is an excuse for porn. Not that there needs to be an excuse...

One about disability and H/C, mostly about the fact that I was writing Snape acquiring a disability, and people kept complaining because he was a prickly bastard and disabled people obviously are never like that. It went multifandom pretty quickly, and i had to delete a lot of really nasty comments about how I just hated H/C and I was harshing their squee. And about how my not wanting to cure him spoiled their happy ending.

[aisle-one.livejournal.com]

I agree that WC is a pretty open fandom, too.

I missed those discussions. I can probably find them via metafandom? What did the arguments boil down to? It sounds like it was related to mishandling the characterization of disabled people in fics. I bet it was terrifying. I certainly would have been overwhelmed by it. I was around for the review wank (which sprung from oulangi's reviews) and that got pretty heated.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

My arguement was simple 101 stuff, disability doesn't change people's personalities (unless we're talking head injury or something), and that when every disability is cured at the end to make a happy ending possible, its disheartening to real people like me who will never be cured and have to learn how to make a happy ending with a disability. The counter-arguments didn't get picked up by metafandom, but they basically amounted to "but disability is a bad thing! Having it cured at the end is the only way to have a happy ending." and "but cripple is a fine word, you're just too PC." And of course "You just hate H/C!" which is manifestly untrue. And one person said that they liked writing disabled characters because the disability made them more approachable. This was quickly countered by one writer who talked about how disability in fics was used to make characters more cuddly, and how disabled people in real life had to put up with being seen as more cuddly too.

[aisle-one.livejournal.com]

Wow to those comments people made - and not as in "wow, awesome" but "wow, that's fucking unbelievable."

It was brave of you to tackle that. Personally, I appreciate it when stories honestly portray and deal with the reality of people's circumstances -- as in what you said, learning how to make a happy ending with a disability. I get that fanfic is fantasy and play and I'm not undermining those aspects of it. Then again, when a writer makes the conscious effort to present a story well and sensitively (and I don't mean as in kid gloves, but with keen perception), I enjoy them inasmuch as tidily resolved fics. Of course, I'm an angst fan so my "happily ever afters" tend to be bittersweet anyway. I like the depiction of real emotions and stories that clean up too easily are generally unsatisfying to me.

I also hate the misuse of the term "PC." It's disheartening when people throw it against things that should validly be spoken up about.

I'm going to hunt around for meta re this at metafandom. Thanks for sharing the information and talking about it with me.