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

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

You know how people in cities often end up having a neighborhood that functions like a small town? Large fandoms break into neighborhoods. Sometimes it's a really popular fic writer who has her own fanbase, sometimes it's an interest, like time travel fics, sometimes it's a character, pairing or gen pairing (there is a sizable archive just dedicated to genfic about Harry and Snape interacting), or a time period (Marauders, Tom Riddle's school days, Dumbledore's adolescence, the founders) but either way, you end up with subgroups that each function like separate fandoms. Also, I have never run across a prompt fest that wasn't designed to create long oneshots and chapterfic, but that might just be a quirk.