Contestshipping is a story about May and Drew, two friends who embark on a new adventure together in the Johto region. As they grow older, their passion for coordinating fades, and they face challenges such as misunderstandings, confusion, and feelings of hurt or comfort. May saves Drew’s life on Mirage Island, while Drew dislikes owing debts. When May gets lost and hurt before a contest, she becomes oblivious to the situation.
May and Drew start a romantic friendship, but something is going on under the surface. They decide to get married, and someone from May’s past comes to haunt her and her friends and family. The story revolves around May and Drew’s journey to the Johto Grand Festival, where they meet at Pallet Town. At the afterparty, Drew starts to get romantic, and Harley helps him in his case.
After six years of not seeing each other, May and Drew enter the house some time, and they discuss their future together. In a fanfiction, May and Drew share a brief moment of delight, and Drew reveals that he has taken up contests as soon as they got back from their honeymoon.
The story explores themes of love, friendship, and the challenges faced by May and Drew as they navigate their new world. The story also touches on themes of love, friendship, and the consequences of not seeing each other. Overall, Contestshipping is a captivating and engaging story that explores the complex relationship between May and Drew.
📹 han – is tHat type of Husband who will~~ #ff #skz #hanjisung (Sry,it’s not that good)
ɪ ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ ᴏᴡɴ ᴀɴʏ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇs ᴏʀ ᴍᴜsɪᴄ ᴜsᴇᴅ ɪɴ ᴛʜɪs ᴠɪᴅᴇᴏ. ᴄʀᴇᴅɪᴛ ғᴏʀ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇs …
📹 An Exhaustive Defense of Fanfiction
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I’ve read exactly two fanfictions in my whole life: one was a persona 4 fanfiction that ended up being a very deep story about how easy it is to get trapped in an abusive relationship and ignore all the red flags just because you want to be loved, and how it might leave you scarred for live. The other one was My Immortal. So yeah I think I see your point here.
people say “fanfiction relies on being familiar with already existing characters instead of creating your own” as if that’s easy. Do you know how hard it is to know an already existing character so well that your writing feels true to them? Your fic straight up will not succeed unless you have a strong understanding of the character’s motivations, fears, and idiosyncrasies. That to me sounds like excellent practice for media analysis.
I’m probably gonna regret this, but I wrote so much fanfiction as a teenager and genuinely thought that was the extent of my writing ability. Now I’m 14 days away from my first published book coming out. Without writing fanfiction, I would not be achieving this goal. I had a lot to learn as a writer, and I learned by having an audience who gave me feedback with every single chapter. I grew from fanfiction and I loved every single moment of it. Honestly, the goal is for people to write fanfiction of my original characters, then it’ll feel like I’ve come full circle.
It doesn’t even matter if fanfictions are badly written. We need to stop associating art with a piece that “holds the potential for artistic significance and great quality” and just… accept that bad art exists. Art as a synonymous for “good art” is something that should have been left behind in the 60s. Just accept the existence of poorly made art.
my first thought with the “Gatsby was problematic” point was not that the people who read it weren’t paying attention to the story, but that their teachers wouldn’t allow any analysis that criticized America or capitalism. my Gatsby teacher was actually pretty good, but the teacher that introduced Lord of the Flies did so by showing us a documentary on the Stanford Prison Experiment and repeatedly reiterating this was human nature and wouldn’t hear any argument to the contrary. Some of it absolutely rests on people simply not paying attention in English class, but others seem like a reaction against an educational system that’s chugging along during the failure of an empire that does not allow for more radical readings
I think a lot of people just forget: there are a lot of bad fanfics. But there are also a lot of bad books. We just don’t get to read most of them bc they die in the publisher’s office. Edit: I didn’t think people would notice this comment but I guess they did. I wanna emphasize two things: 1, I said “most” die in the publisher’s office. I’m well aware a lot of “garbage” gets published anyway. 2, I don’t really care if someone reads or makes bad art or writing. It exists, and there’s not much I can individually do about it except avoid what I don’t want to read. Even if some of the stuff out there imo should’ve never been posted, like people need to be a bit self aware about the kind of stuff they post *publicly* (if you really wanna delve into a deep rabbit hole of despair, try the mcyt explicit fics on AO3. It’s bleak how many people wrote explicit fics about actual real minors. Like I’m not exaggerating the way people do about MHA characters, I’m being literal).
If you complain about hastily written, poorly edited mediocre quality fanfiction using the same washed out tropes again and again, wait until you find out about penny novels or the books you find on Walmart shelves. Any book salesperson knows that those clichéd romance novels with the classic book cover of a white man passionately embracing a white woman sell like hot buns, and nobody holds them to the standard of high art. And they don’t have to be!
I think a good counterpoint to “Fanfiction doesn’t require you to worldbuild,” is that fanfiction has a contrary pressure of needing to write in a way that conforms to people’s existing expectations of these characters. If you’re writing an original work, for example, then as long as your lead character behaves and thinks consistently within the work, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to say they’re out of character, while in fanfiction it’s entirely possible to write a character in a way that is self-consistent within your work, but will get criticized for having that character act out of character. Even if you want to filter things through a commercial lens, this isn’t a bad skill to hone. Given that the original creators behind Superman died over a decade ago, any modern Superman work is necessarily being written by people who didn’t originally create him, and yet fans will still have various expectations for who Superman is, and they will respond negatively if you write a Superman who doesn’t feel like Superman. In today’s world of blockbuster fictional works being built on the foundation of stories and characters who already exist in the public conscious, being able to write a character in an interesting way that still conforms to those kinds of expectations is a very important skill that writing wholly original work will not teach you.
I’d say a pretty rule of thumb definition for fanfiction would be “a work created solely for non-commercial enjoyment that primarily exists within the framework of an existing piece of fiction”. And I’d definitely say the only real differences between “fanfiction” and professionally published works are: – Less gatekeeping for better and worse – No profit motive
The profound irony of people holding up Shakespeare in contrast to mass marketed repetitive story telling is that Shakespeare *WAS* mass marketed repetitive story telling. Very few of Shakespeare’s stories were original stories the vast vast majority of his works were adaptations of older works and that’s what people expected. People didn’t go to the Globe Theater to see new original plays by Shakespeare they went to see his take on their favorite stories. It actually took A Midsummer’s Night Dream a couple decades to catch on because it was *too* original. This really gets at a larger question: what actually separates fan fiction from adaptation? What sepeeates Shakespeare rewritibg the Tragical History of Romeo and Juliet from someone rewriting Naruto on the internet?
I have no clue why fanfic is being touted as some sort of advertising and a “worshipping capitalism”. Wouldn’t anything and everything qualified as advertising then??? From online critics to memes to summary vids to articles regarding the scandals of the creators, if fanfiction (or indeed any fan content) is “free advertising” then anything is free advertising.
The Tweet at 6:27 was so overdramatic and ridiculous I just had to laugh. I’m not exaggerating, it literally made me unexpectedly snort-laugh. Hilarious. What an absolutely unhinged take. Acting like fanfiction is some sort of capitalist conspiracy by big IPs to crowd-source unpaid labour is the sad-funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Sometimes, people enjoy things, and they do things for fun, because they enjoy it. Is that hard to understand? God, that person’s life must be utterly joyless. Twitter was a mistake.
This article made me realize something quite odd: the most analogous medium to fan fiction isn’t books, it’s article game mods. Both are fundamentally derivative and transformative, both are broadly community driven and have problematic and/or adversarial relationships with their associated capital, and both reward the creator significantly for their ability to operate within a network of pre-existing constraints. Hell, they even both have the same problem having gems of high quality and artistic merit being surrounded by a sea of impossibly horny silliness.
I recently wrote a Gaston x Beast fanfic as an exercise in media analysis. I had recently watched YouTube article essays looking at Beauty and the Beast through a queer lens (including interpretations of the Beast’s story as an AIDS allegory) and I wanted to explore some of these ideas. I also wanted to write a different relationship dynamic than the one between the Beast and Belle and tackle a potential flaw in the Disney movie, that being the protagonist’s relative lack of an arc compared to the Beast. I thought, “If Gaston was in Belle’s shoes, he would be much more judgemental at first, so him learning to love the Beast would be more satisfying.” I don’t even ship Gaston x The Beast in a traditional sense, I just thought it would be an interesting thing to write about. I wish the anti-fanfic crowd could see fanfiction as its own form of literary analysis and critique. Hell, fanfiction’s tendency to make established straight characters gay serves as its own criticism of the heteronormative mainstream media landscape.
One thing I wish was mentioned more when fanfic gets critiqued by the traditional book crowd is the fact that “spicy fanfic” is not the only kind of fic that exists. Fic isn’t a genre but a medium with every genre that can be applied to similar to that of traditional media. There’s romance, sure, but there’s also sci-fi fics, drama fics, slice of life fics, fantasy fics- the list goes on and on. Plus fanfiction can give a writer a way to express their unique perspective in ways that traditional media sometimes fails. For example, the whump genre is about a character whom gets physically or emotionally hurt by an event and the story is about their journey through that. Sometimes reading traditional books can trigger a reader who have similar experiences but writing fic helps the author control the narrative and find catharsis. The hurt/comfort genre also has similar themes except with more of a positive ending mostly. It’s kinda funny now that traditional media is sort of in the same boat as fanfic where they have to defend their medium by saying, “Not all books are spicy. People need to explore more than booktok.” Well not all fanfiction contains spice. People need to explore AO3. 😉
the way 1:17:00 is taken out of context, her next words talk about how classics aren’t often accessible to people who don’t have the tools or teachings to understand them unless they receive a higher education. it’s an excellent point and cutting her off, taking her words out of context, and not even crediting her seems lazy. Not to mention the creator is uncomfortable with you using her tiktoks without her username attached to her face, especially in a negative light and taking the meaning from her words.
One thing I’m not sure if you mentioned was the emotional argument for fanfiction. Sometimes when I finish a book, I need time to say goodbye to the characters, or if the ending isn’t how I imagined, that is when I can turn to reading fanfiction. Fanfiction can give the opportunity to resolve outstanding character issues or time to process the grief of a book ending.
I feel like anytime the question of “Is X art?” comes up the unspoken argument being made often boils down to “X isn’t art because I don’t think it’s good enough to be” which to me is just very silly? Like, something can be art and still suck. I don’t particularly like fanfiction and I think a lot of the culture surrounding it is pretty anti-intellectual, but like… it is an artform lol. Like, it’s just writing, which we’ve all pretty unanimously agreed is art for a pretty long time now.
A lot of people forget that art doesn’t necessarily mean good. Art is subjective, and anyone can find something good or bad. Bad art exists — we can’t have good without bad, after all. Is a 2-year-old’s drawing of a dog good art? Probably not, but it’s art nonetheless. Art is a creative medium, including writing, which can extend to fanfiction. Is fanart art? Yes. So why would fanfiction not be considered art? It’s still created by someone, transformative or not, just in a different medium. An 11-year-old’s self-insert fic probably isn’t good, but if they took the time to write it, then who’s to say whether it’s art or not?
I really do think fanfic should be respected for its accessibility. As someone with adhd and autism who had “gifted kid burn out” with books, it’s absolutely amazing I can still enjoy reading without undergoing the mental wrestling match of moving my thoughts away from a special interest for what’s supposed to be a leisure activity.
I think I remember seeing a comment from comic book writer Mark Waid about fan fiction. He said that the only difference between fan fiction and all the stuff that he has written for marvel and dc is that someone paid him to do it. He didn’t create most of the marvel or dc superhero that he has written for, but people still love his comics. He didn’t create characters like the flash, but if you ask people “what is the best flash run?” Most will say “mark waid’s flash comics.” Heck he introduced a lot of concepts that were picked up by other writers, like the speed force.
I haven’t been reading for fun for YEARS, since university has had me reading so much. I’ve never read fanfiction before, but fell in to a OFMD fanfic hole and am now deeply invested in a fic that has brought me through two? three? naval battles, hanging, imprisonment, all planned and written out in incredible detail and by an author with such skills in writing dialogue and drama. I think it amounts to around 300 pages that I’ve consumed within days, glued to my screen, ignoring my thesis. What I’m trying to say is: I don’t care if fanfiction is art. I enjoy it, and it has brought back my joy of reading. I’ve even started a list of books that I want to read when my thesis is finished, and I have the time.
As a fandom musician, I find the conversation about whether fan works as a whole are art or not to be very interestingly inconsistent. There’s a lot more debate around fan fiction – no one is saying that what I do isn’t art. Clearly I rubbed my grubby hands and funny little chords all over these songs, whether or not they’re about cartoons (or covers of songs FROM cartoons). They are by nature transformative – but music already has a better culture of acceptance of call backs and references and variations of songs in transformative ways, at least if you take a step back away from the mainstream world (where there are just absurd copyright cases). Jazz, for instance, is just full of references and indeed even whole phrases from songs that came before. I think effectively all art is inherently built on and from what came before, and all art is referential in nature – it’s just that some spaces are more accepting of that fact than others.
Fanfiction is all about playing with original material. Experimenting. You can write, adhering to strict rules and try to change as little in initial premise as possible other than intended course correction, you can move through stations of canon (and story would still be good), you can go off the rails completely or you can change any number of background and backstory details and still reach the same beginning of the story… to have it diverge wildly again. As long as you understand what you work with and who you write to, original work is more like a draft you can paint anything you want on top of. \r \r Some fanfiction stories are downright bizarre and incomprehensible. Some crossovers make no sense and their authors still decided to give them a go. In a way, fanfiction biggest boon is the lack of expectations and ease of relatability. It’s hard to sell an original franchise. It’s hard to make your characters instantly relatable.
My favorite movie called Mona Lisa Smile is about a progressive art teacher teaching a class at a conservative college in the 40s. They literally have this moment towards the beginning of the film where the teacher shows a few slides of art. One of them was a snapshot of her mom and she asked, “Is it art?” And the students replied, “It’s a snapshot” and the teacher had said that it was taken by a famous photographer. And a student went, “Art isn’t art until someone says it is” which has really stuck with me. Sorry for the long ramble, it’s one of my favorite movies and I feel like it fits very well with this article.
What gets me about the anti fanfiction rhetoric (and some of the pro fic rhetoric that turns its nose up at most published literature) is that almost all of us fic writers got into fanfiction bc we were already bookworms who enjoyed writing and were excited about the idea of writing stories for our favorite texts.
The phrase you mentioned, “he toed out of his shoes” IS common in published books. It’s common in historical romance. I see so much discussion on tiktok and YouTube about fan fiction’s idiosyncrasies that’s just like this, where the commentator makes a statement about something that they assume is specific to fan fiction because they haven’t read it anywhere else, but actually, what they’re describing is literally just romance novels. I see complaints about a lot of romance novels “reading like fan fiction” when really they just mean “the book was tropey” (like news flash! Genre fiction is all about the tropes! That’s not specific to fan fiction or romance! It’s literally the point of genre fiction!). This is a pretty minor gripe in an overall great article, but I just see stuff like this all over the internet and it bugs me.
I believe fanfiction should be taken seriously in the sense that it isnt just “steamy stories by teenage girls on wattpat” like its often seen online. I’ve seen stories that are completely separate to the og canon except for the names of the characters. Ive cried to fanfiction, been conforted, etc. Its more accesible. Its an artform in its own way and a love letter to the og works they derive from.
As someone who enjoys both books and fanfiction, I personally believe that there is no inherently inferior medium . Although I do agree with some of the arguments made by both sides. Books and fanfics each have their own strengths and weaknesses and what is best for one person might not hold true for another. In the end it comes down to personal preference. It’s not productive to shame people for whatever they choose to read or write, as neither medium is completely flawless or superior to another. So I hope that eventually everyone can have a civil discussion and not insult each other over such a harmless topic. This is basically just a long-winded way of saying: Let people read what they want without screaming at each other. P.S. have a great day/night to whoever is reading this.
the existence of doctor who alone is enough to question what defines a fan fiction. a show that’s spanned numerous executive producers/show runners, writers, main cast members, etc. in it’s nearly 60 year life. plus there’s the expanded media (audios and books) still licensed but not technically canon to the show. how is this show anything other than fan fiction of the first three seasons
Disappointing with how you used IcarusPendragon’s content without permission or credit, and on top of that completely misrepresented her take on fanfiction and classic literature and took it entirely out of context. She has a bit of response on her tiktok, and reiterates how the point of her article was that fanfiction is more accessible than classic literature, not that she’s anti-literature
I really love what you’ve created in the past, but it just doesn’t feel right perusal and knowing a article from another person who had no say in the matter was cut down and framed the other person as anti-intellectual, completely reshaping what they were saying instead of leaving the rest of the article where their argument is the strongest. Really not sure how to feel here
Again, only about 8 mins in now, but I just want to say as a queer black woman, y’all just started promoting books w characters who are queer, black, and either the main character or in a mostly poc cast like, maybe 5 years ago. And for at least the first 3 of those years about 95% of those books were pretty heavily centered around our trauma around racial abuse and homophobia, as literally every movie, tv show outside of sitcoms or shows where we’re pretty much just there to be a mammy/designated black friend for the main character, and so for me personally, the whole “all books are becoming soft wish fulfillment bullshit” argument is so painful to hear because it’s like, I’m glad that you are tired of having every character in the world look like you and get everything they want Jonathan, but I just started Almost getting books like that like last year. Fanfiction is by no means always an anti-racist or queer friendly area, like, at all, there are dozens of stories that are “reader inserts” that proceed to describe a blonde haired blue eyed woman who’s 115 pounds in every other paragraph, but like at the very least I have the option of going into the original black character tag and knowing that every chapter isn’t going to force me to relive trauma. Like it’s important to discuss these things of course, but not every impactful book needs to be about suffering. More often than not in the media I’ve seen it ends up just feeling more like torture porn or a minstrel show than feeling like actual representation.
I find the “all or nothing” nature of fandom communities to be absolutely exhausting. I absolutely love some stories and characters, I have tattoos of them, I watch super in depth articles about “every detail you missed” or “what does x mean” after I’ve consumed some piece of media I really love, and I get it- it’s nice to be able to keep interacting and loving the thing actively after the story is over, and it’s nice to exist in communities of people who also love that thing.That said, some people truly make these IPs, ships, etc. their entire personality and hitch themselves to it so tight that if you say one thing that could even be slightly construed as negative, they lose it on you. (Identity-wise I’m not talking about legitimate lgbt+, racial, etc. identities, but like the type of people who have an unhealthy obsession with stuff like BBC Sherlock back in the peak Tumblr fandom days. There is a lot to be said about the lack of diversity in published works, although we’re seeing progress being made here, and I do think it’s beyond words how important accurate and non-tokenised representation is through all forms of media.) When it comes to fanfiction, people are similarly polarized because they develop a love of these stories, characters, and communities so anything outside of them feels bad by comparison. I think most modern readers will look at “the classics” with a similar disinterest or passion across the subject broadly. I fucking hated Lord of the Flies and, to this day, think it’s an awful book with awful messaging.
I think the idea that fanfiction is “free promotion for corporate products” relies on the assumption that people are just going to stumble unto fanfiction of a specific property and as a result will gain an interest on the original work and that’s just not how it works. The way fanfiction is store nowadays requires that the user has to make an effort to seek it, it’s not like fan art that randomly appears in your twitter feed, you have to actively search for it and if you’re alternative searching for it that probably means you already have an interest in the world. Now I’m not saying no one has ever search for an fanfiction out of curiosity, then enjoyed it so much they decided to check out the original source material, I’m just saying that is not widely indicative of how people consume content on the internet. Like I agree that we live in a landscape where art, media and discussions of said media are dominated by mega corporations and that should stop, but fanfiction is not the cause of it. If you pressed a button that could instantly delete all of fanfiction and prevent new ones from being made that would not lessen the stronghold corporations have in popular culture and viceaversa if the button prevented corporations from producing any art, that would not stop fanfiction.
Tbh, I think the medium of published story telling that most closely resembles fanfic isn’t TV, but comic books. Particularly if we are looking at the superhero genre. Well established, popular characters with no one single definitive cannon. New publications or reboots pick and choose which previous works to build off of and which ones to retcon or pretend never happened. Multiple timelines, crossovers, alternate universes, new interpretations of existing characters…Avengers, anyone?
hey, this was clearly very well researched and well-written, but this is the second time you’ve used someone’s content without crediting them/took them out of context without their permission. i think since you’re spending so much time on research and scriptwriting (plus filming and editing) you should also take the time to do your due diligence when it comes to sources. great article, poor execution of sourcing
I like this discussion because it reminds me of a similar thing that happened about a decade ago in the article game community. There was a relatively new genre of game that was gaining popularity, dubbed the “walking simulator”, with games like Gone Home and Dear Esther. These games were quite controversial at the time, considered by many to not be “real games.” They focused more on narrative and storytelling rather than exciting gameplay and flashy visuals, and this was just something you didn’t really see before then – yes there were the famous audio logs and whatnot in games like Bioshock, but that was never the real focus of these games. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that these games that were basically all about the audio logs and lore notes you could find were initially mocked relentlessly for supposedly being too simplistic and not worth the money. I remember a article of a guy who managed to “complete” Gone Home in just about 60 seconds after which he started staring directly into the camera for another few minutes as reviews from people praising the game were mockingly presented next to his face implying: “How could anyone like a game that is so short and easy?” Nowadays the stigma against these games is pretty much gone, although they’re still quite niche. I really enjoy games like What Remains of Edith Finch that expertly combine a strong narrative with gameplay elements that tie directly into the story being told. You even have masterpieces like Outer Wilds which are also kind of “walking simulators” but that take the concept much further.
This is a really GREAT and nuanced take. Both fanfic and published books have their place, and they scratch different itches at different times. I write both fanfic and original content, and again. Different itches. Seeing people bash one or the other pisses me off. I’m also really glad you touched on the Pro-fic/anti-pub crowd completely missing the point of pieces of literature. Like, fuck gatsby, fuck most of the straight white male canon that they use in most schools….. but not every book is like those. There are a LOT of great books out there in every genre. (there are also a lot of bad ones too) and you just have to !!! find the ones you like. anyway thank you for your spendidly spicy hot take, I wish you many bags of salt and vinegar chips and none of the ouchy mouth feeling from eating too many.
100% agree with everything said here. I also think— and I know we’ve talked about this a bajillion times before– it continues to be relevant that most distate for fandom and fan culture is pretty directly linked to a distate for teenage girls and anything teenage girls like. Fanfiction is wrapped up in this. It’s seen as anti-intellectual because a revialed demographic loudly enjoys it, and then is it any surprise that said demographic doubles down and attempts to return the fire by devaluing published literature?
I remember when I saw someone saying the best fanfiction can only compare to mediocre published books. I couldn’t disagree more, I’ve read fanfiction that’s so great it could, unironically, be compared to great books. And they said they already read quite a lot of fanfiction. That person must be really unlucky to just find mediocre-level fanfiction…
Hi. Fanfic author here. I haven’t seen the entire article yet, but as someone who’s written a Star Wars fic that’s longer than the entire Harry Potter series, I’d argue that at the very least, fanfic shouldn’t be dismissed. I’ve no intention on ever getting published, but I do love writing as a hobby, and even for something that’s not my own creation, I’ve put so much time and effort and creativity in crafting a narrative that much of it feels like my own. I think there’s a lot of value in taking an existing piece of media and shifting an aspect of it to see what new or different thing can come of it. At the very least, it’s an exercise in creativity, and I think that’s enough to be respected.
In regards to many people saying they just can’t read most published fiction, there is another element; Many Neurodivergent people do in fact experience this, where the standard structure of writing that is ubiquitous in publishing since its standard just flat out doesn’t make any sense. A couple Self published authors I know off have said they also had struggled with this and it was painful, and a lot of them said it was also a major factor in their choice to pursue self publishing; With self publishing they could honestly tell their editors that the changes that they suggested flat out made it so they, the AUTHORS of the work, could not understand their own work anymore, whereas standard publishing would’ve forced the changes among other things. These authors also say they regularly get comments and messages from fans saying they loved their books precisely because they could actually read it and it was the first things they could read in years and that they thought they were stupid because they couldn’t read anymore etc.
Once again I’m reminded that despite how chronically online I am, there will be forever more niches filled with many, many people who need to touch grass as urgently as me. There will always be art snobs who are art snobs, but the online ones give out some pretty unhinged takes, and a good number of the the anti-snobs are just as braindead.
really good article and I agree with all your points but I was waiting for you to comment on how hollow the “fanfic is better because it’s diverse” argument is when fan spaces are so hostile to fans of colour and tend actively shut down discussions or fanfics unpacking those topics. your article was almost two hours so you already did more than enough for the discussion but those are my two cents
I think it’s important to bring up doujinshi in the context of this essay. While doujinshi is a catch-all term for self-published manga, a large portion of it is fanfic, and it’s incredibly popular. I believe comiket is the largest con in the world at this point? So, I don’t really think western readers have the privilege to discuss the merits of fanfic, it has already been legitimized in the east and is an incredibly popular market.
Hey the clip you use at 1:17:02 is by an awesome tiktok creator (idk if she wants me to share her handle) but that clip is kinda taken out of context of a larger discussion she was having which isn’t acknowledged and she’s not credited here. It might be nice to credit her for the use of her article or at least ask to use it
Honestly the way the US education system pushes those books as the Highest of High Art and Should Never Be Criticized For Any Reason Ever it’s really not surprising that teens would act that way. I mean, I heard similar views being expressed back when I went to HS in the late 2000’s, it’s just social media wasn’t the huge thing it is now. The whole ‘the curtains are blue’ thing makes perfect sense in the context of how schools try to force kids to just take the teacher’s word as law with no explanation to the reasoning behind it, and questioning things or having an alternate interpretation was treated as insubordination. It’s really a natural reaction to things being treated this way as most schools don’t actually teach any sort of actual literary critique or analysis until college. I don’t think ‘teenagers acting like teenagers’ is such a widescale problem here. Rather the issue is poor education. Also, the negative stigma about fanfiction isn’t a new trend at all, it’s been there since at least the early days of the internet.
the debate about how good fanfic writers are or are not is also pretty silly to me as a former art student. pretty much the first thing you’re instructed to do in a drawing class is to “learn from the masters”, to recreate, embody, and emulate the works of famous artists with the goal of incorporating their strategies into your own style and original work. many book fanfic writers that i’ve spoken to write in a very similar way, taking the foundations that someone else created to make their own work, something fresh with the same bones. this isn’t to say that fanfic writing is practice for traditional fiction, but rather that those bones exist in pretty much every art form.
as an avid fanfic writer and reader, i enjoy the medium because because when i get invested in a new thing, when its done, i still want more. im neurodivergent and get hyperfixated on things easily, but i love reading, sometimes i just want to exist with these characters more in a way that isn’t just rewatching/rereading the original media, so that’s where my love of fanfiction comes in. fanfic can be fun oneshots or long over 300k pieces of writing that completely reimagine the universe, it cant be judged just because some of them are bad or “cringe”
If fanart drawing can still be considered art why can’t fanfictions?? It’s just so weird to me. Imagine if people yell about how Sans feet drawing or something isn’t comparable to Monalisa therefore fanart isn’t real art. No shit but a) you know there are OTHER better examples to use and b) art shouldn’t be gatekeep in the first place
I think the fact that I wrote fanfiction as a kid in the 1990s for all of my elementary school writing projects helped me overcome my dyslexia, or rather learn to love writing despite my dyslexia. Most of the stories I wrote were natives I wrote to fill in the gaps left in JRPG story telling of the day. While I don’t think my teachers recognized that I was making fanfic my class mates did, and many of them took a lot of interest in my work because they were already excited about the source game. This positive interest in my work was just the thing I needed to keep trying to write even if it was difficult for me. In that time I developed most of the themes that I still use in my writing today. A lot of what I write now is transformed enough that I don’t think most people would recognize it as fanfiction, but I can still see the bones of the old JRPGs in my work. They also helped me share ideas that I don’t think people would take the time to read if it hadn’t started as a fanfic.
I think a lot of these problems with “is X art” could be solved if the people who are most invested in that discussion could realize that not everything has to be art to have value. I see people praising and tagging scientific discoveries that are aesthetically pleasing as art and then turn around and bash the math and technical knowledge that brought it into existence. Like okay, then the Rennaissance and the centuries of color theory, composition, material experimentation, and the general mechanics of why we find things pleasing is science. But calling a painting science “devalues” it in their eyes, because calling science art is elevating science while calling art science is an insult to it. Such BS.
Okay, so I’ll admit it, I’m one of the “The Divine Comedy is fanfic” crowd with a… Varying degree of sincerity. But I do NOT say that because “oh Dante took characters from the Bible, therefor it’s Bible fanfic.” No no, I argue it’s (again, somewhat sarcastically but also not really because art is complicated) fanfic because it’s a work in which the author teams up with his all-time favorite writer on a journey to be with his crush in heaven while simultaneously dunking on DOZENS of people-both fictional and real-and institutions that he didn’t like, up to and including multiple Popes and the Catholic church in general. Yes it’s a masterful work that basically invented the concept of world building and defined the Christian view of the heaven, hell, and everything in between for literal centuries, but it’s also a work where the phrase “VIRGIL-SENPAI I’M YOUR BIGGEST FAN!! :D” could be put in a modern adaptation and a very much non-zero number of literary critics would just laugh their asses off because of how accurate yet absurd it is. It can be both, that’s perfectly fine and plausible, because art-just like the people who make it-can be both incredibly insightful and amazing while not precluding the possibility of being stupid or hilarious. I think part of the main problem is that people tend to lump art into categories like “the classics” and “high art” and “modern art” and treat those labels like they’re some immutable box that creates a magical almighty hierarchy. Shakespeare had dick and fart jokes, Virgil wrote the Aeneid as propaganda while taking potshots at Emperor Augustus, Aristophanes was basically the South Park of ancient Athens, Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in part so he could tell people he hated to LITERALLY go to hell.
As someone who comes from the world of comics books, I find very relatable the discourse around comparing medias to literature, and then judging this medias by the same standards. Also comics have a lot of similarities with Fan-Fic in how the society tend to look them as “Low art”. Very good article!!!
kind of weird for you to use someone’s article (that shows their face nonetheless) without their permission and take what they say out of context to prove your point (1:17:00). i generally enjoy your content but this is disappointing to see, makes me wonder how many other things you’ve taken out of context in your articles.
I feel like there’s a lot of benefit to be gained from an analysis of the classism and elitism inherent to how stories are told as well. Take Cyrano De Bergerac, for example: just about every long-running television show has an episode that uses the fundamental story of Cyrano, and nobody decides those episodes are less valuable or artistic than more original concepts. The only difference I can perceive between, for example, the Bob’s Burgers Cyrano episode and a Supernatural or Doctor Who fic where the skeleton of that tale is used is that one is written in a persons’ home, while the other is developed in a writer’s room. There’s a fallacy of authority at work here, and I think it’s costly to our consumption. Also there’s the Sinatra effect. Frank Sinatra was super popular with young women, and was largely dismissed until he died, when men started picking his work up. The Beatles were initially loved predominantly by women as well, and didn’t get taken properly serious until they were noticed by men. I think there’s a lot to be said on this issue about the gender makeup of fanfic writers, and why we might be ready to dismiss it as less artistic than another given piece.
The idea that fanfiction is asking mainstream media to be repetitive, tropey, not challenging, etc etc etc is so insane to me It’s very clear that that critique in particular has only heard of the classically bad Y/N wattpad fanfiction, and has never read an AO3 fanfiction with major character deaths, massive takes on race and capitalism, with horrific scenes of trauma, all within a fic that’s the length of the entire LOTRs trilogy And tbh- kinda same with the weird “fanfiction is idolising corporations” feels like something that could be a fair critique, but also misses an entire genre of fanfiction that is rewriting problematic works (like the MANY Harry Potter rewrites), and the general side of fandom culture that fucking hates the fandom’s source or hates the company behind the fandom’s source, and that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that, ya know, a lot of people in fandom are anti-capitalist Liking a thing doesn’t mean you like how that thing came to be, or the people behind the thing
Some fanfic is fully developed and basically a completely different story with characters that may at a base level have a similar personality or history to a fictional character which already exists but the overarching plot and development of the story is something entirely original. In this case it really is a filing off the serial numbers type of thing that if you’ve maybe didn’t tell people it was fanfic then they wouldn’t actually know it because it bears so little resemblance to the original property. In any case people putting any type of effort into work deserves some sort of praise. Whether it’s a SpringBoard to original original fic or whether you’ll never move on from that does not really matter. Somebody somewhere is going to enjoy it and that’s what matters to an author 😊
Literally every piece of work ever is transformative. People write/create art about what they see in the world, and what interests them. Nothing is ever truly, fully “original” ALSO who said all art had to be “good” art?? All these arguments are like “you’ll never be as good as these published authors” but who ever said you had to be? Just let people do what they enjoy and let others get enjoyment out of that without it being hyper analyzed and criticized all the time.
I would like to nitpick the meme shown at 49:30. Wicked is absolutely fanfiction. It’s fanfiction soup to nuts. The guy who wrote it was not an “established literary titan” in any way shape or form. Wicked was his breakout success. This is a man who literally went to the state school in my city, and dated my friend’s mom. He’s a townie. Like legit. If he’s “established” enough when Wicked was published to make that book not fanfic, then none of my friend’s fanfic is fanfic either. Because she’s a literature professor with a few unsung children’s books under her belt and that’s literally the same credentials Gregory Maguire had when Wicked was published. I know this is pure pedantry, and as someone who doesn’t need fanfic to be art in order to enjoy it, I have no dog in this fight. But I had to say it or it was going to annoy me all day.
I really like your content, and I’m a fan of your articles on internet pop culture, but it’s in bad form to use someone else’s content and remove their name/user name, making it hard for those unfamiliar with them to actually find them. I’m not sure why you, as a content creator yourself, chose to do so with TikToks in this article.
You cropping icaruspendragon’s article and removing it from its context (besides using someone’s article without permission and taking out their @) is something I would have never expected from this website. Can’t help but to feel a little dissapointed. I actually think Icarus’ (full) article makes a point
I just wanted to add a little comment– Saying “libraries” exists as an argument against the claim that fanfiction is way more accessible, is ignoring that fanfiction is not only being read in english speaking countries, and there is a big number of countries which their libraries just don’t have modern books, and they only exist as a source of academic ones (mine as an example). In a lot of cases, fanfiction is the ONLY way a lot of Latin American people have to read something that can touch their identity or read themes that makes them have another view on their own life, as a close example.
Hi there! I’m curious as to why you’ve used my content, removed my username, not given me any kind of credit, and also misconstrued my words and misrepresented me via clipping the article at 1:17? For whatever reason you stopped the article right before I said “unless they’ve been given the tools through something like, I don’t know, higher education, which is further inaccessible to a lot of people, to be able to understand them.” Where you decided to end the article completely changes what I was saying. My argument for the article in the first place was not that I hate the classic literature, that I’m anti-intellectual, or that I’m anti-book, it was that fanfiction exists as an accessible means of storytelling. Which I do say in the article but for whatever reason you decided to leave out. I’d heard lots of really great things about your content as we do post about similar things (I’d actually been putting off perusal your stuff even though I was interested because I didn’t want to accidentally emulate you in anyway) and I really hate that this is my first encounter with you. And I can say after this it will be my last. Please do right by the people whose content you use to make your content and credit them accordingly and don’t misrepresent them. Have a lovely whatever time it is where you are and I hope you get better soon! With supposed intellectual dishonesty, Berk (icaruspendragon)
Not sure what valid points you actually made when you skew people’s position to invent your own strawmans to refute or use as an example. You cannot redact someone’s main point of a article to use as content. You’re misleading your audience and intentionally setting up topics for you to win. Taking someone’s words out of context like this is like inventing your own sources entirely. I liked your content before this but now it will be entirely viewed with the lens of me questioning what else you’ve spun, changed, redacted, or removed from it’s established context. I hope you enjoyed having an argument with yourself.
Hey just for the people wondering! The article of @icaruspendragon doesn’t stop there! It keeps going on with “..they’re dense and boring, and hard to understand for most people unless they’ve been given the tools through something like, I don’t know, higher education, which is further inaccesible to a lot of people to be able to understand them…”
I absolutely adore the work you and Emily put into these article essays, it’s so entertaining to watch and you guys are so spectacular at conveying your argument. I usually have article essays on in the background as I do things, but I find with yours I end up focusing on your arguments rather than whatever I was actually supposed to be doing! lol
1:19:33 i’m pursuing a ba in english and i literally feel like people who make these kinds of comments missed the point of what they actually talked about in class. like did you engage in any discussions?? or did you just read titus andronicus and go wow this play has things that are morally wrong which means this play is morally wrong! brb let me condemn every agatha christie book because there’s murder in it
As someone who’s had a mix of good and bad English teachers/professors over the years, the bad ones can definitely hurt classic lit’s reputation by teaching it badly (ie caring more about the dry memorization of plot points than analysis of the text or only considering one narrow interpretation of any given work ‘correct’)
Great article and all points well-taken. Something I’ve noticed in the “all fanfiction is better than all literature” discourse is the tendency to treat classic literature as something that no one could enjoy sincerely. It’s assumed by some that anyone who claims to genuinely enjoy the classics is, somehow, lying for clout – just a grad student conspicuously reading Hemingway on the bus in the hope that a girl will think he’s deep, or something. But people who read literature out of high school/college generally aren’t trying to “look smart,” or whatever – they like the books for their own sake. Yes, even Ulysses.
I clicked on this but as someone who’s written nearly 2 million words of fanfic I don’t know if I’m emotionally ready to start perusal it! Most of what I wrote is for fun, but there are a few things I’ve written that I really care about, that I feel are transformative/valuable as a representation of my love of that fandom in particular. One bonus thing about it for me is that, as Brandon Sanderson says, you have to write novels to know what Novel Writing You is like, and writing fanfiction novels teaches me that without leaving me with a bunch of poorly-written messy original works that feel like a waste of the good idea on the ‘novice writer’ phase!
hi sarah! i doubt you’re going to see this comment but i just wanted to kindly point out that because it seems your closed captions are taken directly from the article’s script, they don’t always exactly reflect what you’re saying. this is especially true when you go off-script a bit at 1:04:37 and it makes it hard for me as someone who struggles with auditory processing to enjoy this part of the article. not trying to be rude, just bringing it to your attention 🙂 love your articles by the way!
My preference for fanfiction comes from my desire to explore plot ideas. I love being able to do this using characters that i love, settings i enjoy, etc. I love seeing aus, rewrites, and all the rest. I always think of how a plot could’ve been different, and fanfic lets me see those ideas explored. Time travel fix its are so fun because everyone has their own ideas. I love seeing everyones aus, because everyone has their own ways they wanted plot to diverge, or how they want to change canon. I love published books, there are many books id readily reccomend, but fanfic gives me what i enjoy about media.
This entire discussion reminds me of the discussion between digital artists and traditional artists about whether or not digital art is “real art”. Functionally digital painting and traditional painting are two different mediums, with different skillsets and criteria needed to excel at each of them. But people often talk about digital painting as a “lesser” form of traditional painting, and saying that because it’s easy to erase mistakes, copy and paste, or resize and use special effects, that it’s a crutch for young artists who don’t want to go through the pain of having to learn how to paint traditionally. And the fact that it’s usually traditional paintings and not digital ones that are being displayed in museums and galleries makes traditional painting seem more legitimate. It’s a very interesting parallel, that as a digital artist, I couldn’t help but notice as the article went on.
Regarding Neil Gaiman writing a sequel being not fanfiction but you doing so would be, it makes me think about the case with the Dune books. Herbert’s son took over writing after he died, supposedly with his private notes on where things were going. The books aren’t known for being worthwhile, especially compared with the ones written by his father, and as a result I see a lot of people call it “essentially fanfiction”. Not outright, presumably because of the connection he has to the original source of the writing, but because of how strongly they feel about the difference in feeling and quality it can’t be considered “real” books either. It’s an interesting relationship! I bet if they were as good as the first 6 people wouldn’t call them that.
There is an interesting case study for anyone interested in the Worm fandom. It’s an original superhero webnovel clocking in at 1.4 million words with a pretty active fan community. One of the interesting parts of this is that there is a significant phenomenon in the fan community of people who haven’t actually read the source material. It’s a pretty grim story, with a fundamental undercurrent of ‘everything gets worse’, but the fanworks are much more varied and diverse; hence why a lot of people dont go and read the original work. Hell the author even wrote a sequel which has nearly 2 million words and even less people have read that. A lot of people didn’t like the grimdark theming, despite that being the whole point of the work, and so community fanfiction often creates an environment where things are a lot more positive. There is little to no LGBT rep in the main work but because the main character is a woman and is written by a straight man there is a significant gay undercurrent, especially in how she mentally describes her friends Lisa and Aisha where she consistantly notices their physical appearances. As a result there is a significant amount of lesbian shipping in the community and even when people write the main character in a straight relationship I rarely see it happen in the ‘canon’ pairing. There are literally more fics where the guy gets into a relationship with the other guy on their team as opposed to fics recreating the canon relationship he had with the main character.
Why does every hobby someone has have to be productive or impressive to someone else? Sometimes you just want to read something that caters to your own interests and that doesnt make you somehow dumb or a bad person. And at the same time, fanfic can do things that are intellectually or rhetorically stimulating even if someone else wrote the characters.. Also, the lack of nuance from people who claim to be so intellectual really speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
I dont even read fanfiction but to be honest this whole discussion has made me realise that I cant wait until the concept of “artistic merit” is culturally annihilated and people look at you confused if you try to discern something as art or not art. All human made things are art the moment they are viewed as art.
When the barrier to enter is lower and nobody is “checking” if it is art – can it be art? Except we are checking. We “peer review” each other, in a way, by giving kudos or recommending a fic to others. There are rules to fic writing too, formatting and tagging, norms (ever changing), gate-keeping and trope traditions. (Fansplaining podcast breaks down a lot of this excellently!) I posted fic when I was 13, and it is rubbish, but I also posted 100k thought out, edited fic at 27 which I hope is a little better. I readily admit there is a quality difference, but that’s OK. I love books and I love fics. The only thing that matters is that we read what we enjoy 😊 A lot of fics are bad, a lot of books are bad. It’s all G. 🤓 Why not love both?
I’m at 32:56 in the article and I have a number of points I want to make: 1. If fanfiction is truly its own separate medium from traditional writing, then when a person creates fanfiction, they are doing something fundamentally different from traditional writing, and I find that thought fascinating. 2. I would say that fanfiction can’t be considered a totally new artistic medium because it’s still fundamentally a form of writing. Rather, it’s a new type of writing, in the same way that poetry, scriptwriting, and essays are. Specifically, it’s a new form of prose writing (unless it’s not prose, but I haven’t personally come across any fanfiction that doesn’t adhere to the prose form). 3. This might be covered in the rest of the article, but a key condition of fanfiction seems to be that the work it’s based on is within copyright. Neil Gaiman wrote a story called ‘A Study in Emerald’ that’s a mashup of Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft, and that’s not by and large considered fanfiction. This is also part of why Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy aren’t fanfiction (another reason is that religious texts have a different purpose to works produced for entertainment, e.g. Twilight or the MCU). Anyway! On with the article. EDIT: Re: point 3, oh man, it’s way more complicated than that. EDIT 2: ‘Derivitave fiction’ is a very helpful concept.
We should think of fanfic and fan culture in general as a form of folk culture. Specifically fan culture is a folk culture centered around the consumption of commercially produced copyrighted works, making it the form of folk culture indigenous to capitalism. Fanfic is the verbal folklore produced by this community as an expression of its identity, written and consumed by members of that community, to distinguish members from outsiders. Fanfic’s characteristics are folklore like in many ways. Being community focused, it is not produced for commercial purposes, and as a rule almost anonymously. Members of the community are free to borrow from and iterate on each other’s work. As such, any work exists in an endless multitude of different variants. It’s tropes are similar to the repetitive patterns found in oral folklore, which serve as a tradition recognized between speakers and hearers. The narratives follow consistent, traditional structures and forms, like folktales, epic poetry, fables, or folk songs. As to the question of fanfic’s potential artistic worth, I think the best analogy to draw is with other works originating from oral folklore,such as the Illiad. First we should ask who wrote the Illiad? Homer is a made up guy, not a historical individual. It’s basically been proven at this point that the Iliad was produced by an oral tradition of performance. The performer had a reservoir of stock images and verbal formula from which to draw, and could add onto or vary the tale with each performance.
This might be the best article I’ve seen all year. I have nothing to add really bc you completely blow me out of the water in both knowledge and understanding (and I’m someone who prides themselves on being a “thinker”, someone who places great value on nuance, empathy, deeper understanding, meaning, application, and a healthy dose of intellectualism when it comes to art/culture). You display an incredibly thorough and intricate understanding of fandom art and culture, and how to contrast and compare it against art, art critic, media consumption and culture at large. Based on nothing but my personal assumptions, you have to be in like the 0.1% of most knowledgeable people on the subject (art vs fan-art). At the same time, you have a knack for synergizing and intersecting information, as well as presenting and dispersing that knowledge to a wide audience (not everyone can do that, two separate skill sets). Aaaand you make article essays (way more accessible, then let’s say, reddit threads or tumblr posts)? These traits combined make you a rare unicorn in my eyes, not just a unicorn, but also a rare one, like one of those on a special limited edition trade card with a silver border. I am thoroughly impressed and also very thankful you made this. You made a very valuable contribution to the discourse (I don’t mean to come across as pretentious like that’s on me to decide, just that I feel strongly about that =). Thank you, Sarah Z; and also a thanks to your co-writer Emily, who I assume was involved in the making of this.
I feel like the comedia del arte deserves to be in these conversations as well, since while it isnt really a derivitave work, it does have many pre-existing characters with little to no continuity between stories and allows the audience to immediately recognize each character without needing to backtrack and work so hard to explain each character and their motivations (yes i learned about the comedia del arte from brian david gilbert)
People who say fanfic can’t be as beautiful, artistic, meaningful, etc as published novels fail to understand that it’s still being written by people who have unique perspectives, writing styles, and experiences. It’s still being written by people who have a story to tell, even if they’re using characters and worlds that already exist. I rarely read fanfiction, but of what I have read I’ve found gorgeous, heartfelt stories told with real sincerity and effort. I once read a single page fanfic that somehow perfectly imitated the writing style of the author it was drawing from. Reading it for the first time was like finding a hidden excerpt from the original novel, and it was genuinely exciting to me. And while I don’t frequent fanfic sites at all, there are times when I find myself going back to the site it was published on just so I can read it over and over.
I think one of my favorite statements was in the Sherlock bonus features where the creators stated that “fans created fan fiction about their fanfiction” and “that’s how you know you made it”. I think it is so cool that someone can transform a work in such a unique way that fans want to transform it even more.
As a prolific reviewer of fanfiction, I had to really sit down and think about my approach once you started treating fanfic as its own medium. In all these years, I’ve only ever compared fics to other forms of writing, specifically all that published literature that I haven’t read since 2015 because I spend all my free time reading fanfic to review. c_c; And I’m not sure I can really change my approach at this point — it’s been over a decade now, dear god! — but I think there is a ton of merit to this approach. And even I have declared something a pinnacle of fanfiction due to the ways in it interprets and transforms the word it’s derivative of. Also, “blorbo from their tomes” may have irreparably damaged my vocabulary. XD
My niece at four years old plays out the ending of the song “Do you wanna build a snowman?” in Frozen to have Elsa open the door and give Anna a hug. Her dad teases her for this because that turn of events would have made for a less interesting movie, and she shouldn’t want to change it. But she does want to change it, just for a moment, just in her head. What is Elsa had opened the door? It’s a natural thing to wonder
I think an important aspect of the “quality” (I would more say the realization) of art embodied by Fountain is both inherent artistic value in any form and its relation to the realization of the artistic vision. In this way, fanfiction is true art, as its not only inherently valuable as art but also successfully allows the realization of artistic vision for a wide variety of perspectives and identities