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

[coffeethyme4me.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for sharing it, Elr! I'm so happy to see that the writer is treating fanfiction with respect, maybe a teeny bit of awe. :-)

[rabidchild67.livejournal.com]

fan fiction based on the bible? I totally ship Jesus/Judas now, man....

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who started out in HP fandom, fandoms that big are a whole different animal. Something like whitecollarfic would be unimaginable. People make giant thematic reclists. Specific favorite tropes become the size of most other fandoms. Slashers, het writers, and gen writers barely speak. And my favorite ship still manages to be tiny. (Sirius/Snape in case you're interested. I like my slash antagonistic)

[veronicasleeps.livejournal.com]

Good old HP fandom. I started out in there. Ten years ago.

[elainasaunt.livejournal.com]

The comments here about Bible fanfic are great! I loved the article, which someone linked me to yesterday - and I immediately passed it on to a couple of my non-fandom friends who, on the rare occasions when I mention my involvement in fandom, tend to get these infuriatingly patient looks on their faces.

I kept waiting for the writer of the article to bring up Calvin & Hobbes fic, which is one of my favorite discoveries. Not many stories in it, but what's there is cherce.