BOOK TALK – FAN FICTION

Never have I ever in my 20 years on this earth wandered on the treacherous path of fan fiction. Yet I know that it exists, I know that people close to me read and/or write it and I know some people give a great amount of their time to it.

I have always thought of the parts of internet where the fan fiction is to be the dark, deep pits from where there is no return to normal, functional life and so I have made my own prejudice on what fan fiction is. I’ve seen it as something that is crap, the fart of internet, I have not even tried to begin to understand it. Whenever it’s been mentioned I’ve kind of just shrugged and let the conversation slide smoothly to other matters, matters that I think are better to talk about. Fan fiction has been some kind of a taboo to me, something that you should not mention in real life conversations. And I think that it is the same to many others as well, since it’s a scene not often talked about publicly.

But I have had this odd fascination towards the fan fiction scene for a while now, and I’ve been wanting to maybe either change or confirm my view on it.

So I decided to embark on a journey to find out what fan fiction really is about and to find out whether it could be regarded as a genre of its own. So hop in and buckle up and let this fan fiction rookie take you on a ride to the mysterious, unspoken world of fan fiction, or “fics” as they are more commonly dubbed.

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First things first, I needed to find some fan fiction to read since I have only read two or three, which weren’t too good and to be honest, I remember nearly nothing of them. Luckily I had my twitter followers and friends to help me on this. I asked them to link me to their favourite fan fiction of any kind with no restrictions whatsoever, and oh man did I get plenty! Huge thanks to everyone who linked me this stuff, you’ve been a huge help in making this journey possible! I thought I should give myself about a week or so to read all of them. Turns out it took a little more than that, but here I am now and I can proudly announce that I have read fan fiction. Shall I say it louder?

I HAVE READ FAN FICTION.

And here’s what I observed.

1. Terminology
   When you talk about fan fiction you have to have in mind all these weird terms and words that don’t really exist outside of it. For example M/M, which means Man/Man which means that the pairing (=couple) in the fic is a male-male one. These pairings are also called ships, and that I can not explain.
   Also there are things like PoV (=point of view), AU (=alternative universe, which means that the story is written to take place in a different place/time/universe/planet/whatever than where they actually “exist”) and words like fluff, one shot, smut, kudos (I still have no idea what those are) drop often. Although not knowing the vocabulary isn’t really a big deal if you’re just in it to read.
2. Exclusiveness
   I read this one Kingsman fic, and I have not seen the movie (though I want to) and therefore had no idea who the characters in it were, nor did I want to google it because I wanted to keep an open approach to the writing itself. But the story was so good, well-written and absolutely heartbreaking that I found myself having a couple of tears in my eyes as I got to the end of it. It didn’t matter that I had no idea who they were, it was a beautiful story. Though I didn’t really manage to get the hang of the timeline (was it WWII or modern day?) but since it wasn’t really relevant to the work it was okay, though confusing. And the names too.
   On the contrary, I read a fic in which I knew the characters before reading it and since it wasn’t too well written and the characters didn’t really stay true to themselves I was disappointed and didn’t like it at all.
   So I guess the fandom exclusiveness is kind of fluid. You can read stuff from any fandom, no need to be a part of it, but it’s risky. It might work, or it might not work. Just like it works with any other kind of literature.
3. Ships
   They have names. Like real ships do. So you take parts of the two persons you ship and mash them together and you get stuff like Harry + Draco = Drarry.
   One thing I noticed was that all of the fics I read had male-male pairings only, and that was rather interesting to me. So I once again turned to twitter and got this amazing answer that manages to sum up the reason: “Because queerbaiting is a thing and writers/tv networks/hollywood don’t have the balls to go through and SHOW gay relationships. They just tease them and expect the viewers to be satisfied with that before giving the characters hetero relationships.” -@notgomen
4. Uniqueness
   To quote my cousin, who is a fan fic writer: “every fic is an original work of fiction minus the characters.” I do agree in a way, but I can’t leave out the fact that I see fic writing as sort of “limited creativity”, in which you own, say around 80% of the stuff (your own writing) and the last 20% has been pre-thought and made by someone else. The saddest thing is that the writing is brilliant, and many of the stories I read could’ve just as well been short stories or novels of their own, if the characters had just been made by the writers themselves. I mean, every writer dreams of their own collection, right? Even if these writings were discovered by a publisher there is no chance they’d ever get published as they are. So my question here is why not write original stories?
   With imagination as good as these writers seem to have there is no need to rely on a character or a world that has already been made. Though of course it is easier because a fan base already exists and therefore fan fiction gets more readers than original stories, I get it. And I also get the point that the ones who write this stuff are just simply so in love with these worlds and characters that they expand the world by their works, which is I have to admit it, awesome.
5. Freedom
   With fan fiction freedom of expression is definitely at its finest. You can change the point of view in a text for just a couple of lines and then change to another person, or you can make huge time jumps and never have to explain yourself. You can experiment with your writing skills, get better, write comedy, fantasy, drama and horror, there’s no need to label yourself as someone who only writes comedy fics.
6. Alternative universes & non alternative universes
   In an alternative universe the freedom I mentioned is much larger, you can change the appearance of the characters you write of and make them live in a whole new place. Take Tumnus from Narnia and make him a human instead of a faun and have him live in a nice apartment in modern LA. That’s alternative universe for Narnia for example. Non alternative universe is where the writing can go very wrong, since it has to stay true to the characters and the world. I see this side of fics as the more problematic one, it’s more like copying the original writers work. So my personal preference falls to the alternative universes, although again surfaces the question: why not just go original instead?
7. Skills
   Many writers don’t use English as their first language, which easily results in poor writing. And many native English speakers just lack the knowledge in grammar, which again lowers the quality of writing. So the variation in quality based on writing skills is huge compared to published books. That’s just what you have to cope with. Certainly it’s sad to see a good plot but poor grammar, it’s wasted potential.
8. Violence in a plot
   This is way too large a subject to talk in this post, so I will leave this un-addressed for now and I’ll come back to it on another Book Talk -post.

Final thoughts… This has been a very thought-provoking and eye-opening experience, I’m more open-minded now than in the beginning, surely. And I highly recommend you go and read actual fics if you think of it as I did in the beginning of my journey. And if you still don’t get it after you’ve gotten involved, just let it be and don’t hate on the writers. They put so much work and thought to writing stories that don’t even give them any profit, it’s truly admirable. The stigma that fan fiction has is unnecessary, and it should not be a taboo in real life conversation. There’s nothing bad about it and to denigrate the work of the people who write fics is simply stupid.

The only down side that I see is that due to the skill-based quality the amount of “bad” fics is large, and the “limited imagination” issue still exists but I don’t really mind it anymore. I’ve realised that the point of fan fiction is to cherish the original work. Who knows, maybe someone’s fic written out of admiration to a series might spark an interest in someone else to find out about the original work. Heaven knows when I’m done writing this post I’m going to rent Kingsman simply because of the fic I read.

I think it’s amazing that we have internet that enables this kind of action for fans. I don’t think I’ll read fics again, but who’s to say? If I happen to hear of a good one I just as well might give it a go.

Fan fiction is legitimate and no writer should be ashamed of making it known that they write this stuff. Harsh words are easy to say anonymously in the internet, but if you have a problem with just the idea of fan fiction or the pairing or the homosexuality or the plot and not with the writing itself, don’t say it, because no one gains anything from it. Let the fans have their fun, because that’s what fan fiction is about, it’s fun.

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Anything to add? Do you read or write fics? Can you link them to me so I could read them? Why do you write/read fan fiction? What are your experiences of it? Comment down below!