kyraneko:

wrangletangle:

kyraneko:

roachpatrol:

valnon:

shadesofmauve:

I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.

We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!

But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.

I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.

Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?

I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.

Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.

But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.

Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking. 

Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it. 

Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.

That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.

But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.

A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

This is what stories are supposed to be.

This is what stories are.

Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.

Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.

Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.

We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.

Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people.

And the people it did touch might never have read it—might never have encountered it—because it didn’t lie so neatly within the scope of their interests.

Fanfiction is a category organizer. It organizes stories, quite brilliantly, by Will I Like These Characters—simply by virtue of repurposing the ones we already know and love. It gives you the emotional connection with the characters, and background knowledge of them, right off the bat. Someone you recognize, love, know, want more stories of. We value that, and it’s an important factor in the choice of investing the time and attention to read that story. 

Why the fuck would I want to read about So-and-so and Whatsisname falling in love or saving the world or whatever it is they do in an original novel when I could read about Prowl and Jazz doing it? Do I know the characters will be people I’ll like? Do I know they’ll be of any quality? Do I have any background info on them to fill in the gaps that even the most talented author can’t help but leave? 

Heavily fanfic’d characters have a depth to them far beyond what the original source, because they’ve been percolated through thousands of writers, each adding something, until they have a presence that can work with almost any take on them. They function like icebergs, held buoyant by so much of themselves underneath the surface, holding up so much better than the romance-novel cardboard or two-dimensional built-to-suit-the-story placeholder blandness that many original characters end up being, even in professionally-published novels.

I mean, yes, I read original stories, quite a lot even, and some of them have engaging enough characters that they start mattering to me, that I want to read more about them outside the scope of the original story (the highest praise I can give)—but it’s not something that just any characters can do, and even if it does that isn’t a substitute for the ones I already love.

A big part of this is building the character from multiple viewpoints. Author A develops the character; Author B views the character and then shapes them to her perspective; Author C considers the synergy of A’s and B’s joint creation and forms her own additions; Author ZZC, much later, consults not only Canon Character but the web of traits and nature and backstories that everyone has produced and crafts the character to her story. And every reader can fill in wherever it might need filling, reshape as needed for their own enjoyment, and expand to their own inclination in reading or in writing. The character takes shape under all of them in the same way we take shape from our collection of thoughts and observations and experiences. The same way AI learns. From the flow of information, one discerns a shape.

The POINT is that you are working with something much bigger than what fits on the page. Yes, one can write original characters for original stories—and if they’re most successful they’re good enough to be built on, by the original creator, by the fans, by the readers, until they get to be bigger than their pages, bigger than their singular stories, big like people.

And if you write fanfic, you get to engage in the communal creative space of fandom and share your story with the people who are the most interested in it. You are connecting the story instantly with the people who will love it.

The world of published original fiction organizes itself by genre; the world of fanfiction organizes itself by character. And it does so much more to build those characters. Sometimes you like planting seeds, and sometimes you want to climb a tree that only someone else could have planted, watered, shaped, and grown.