What fanfiction and literature means to me

[hwarium]

(background, there was a tweet on 2020/10/18 about how fanfiction could never be as good as literature and the reaction against it went viral to the point that authors were weighing in, this is a response to a cc that asked: what's your take on the discourse of fic vs literature?)

Published literature has a lot of advantages that should result in better works. It’s writing that have been looked over and proofread by professionals who are paid to make it worth publishing. Editors who are trained, perhaps academics and historians and people who have first hand experiences. Most importantly, it’s written by a writer who was paid to write. It’s a privilege to write 50, 000 words, and I say privilege because having the time to write is a privilege.

Additionally, any literature older than a decade has been baptised by time. There’s something in the story that’s intergenerational, timeless and worth immortalising. So I approach literature with humility.

I don’t always enjoy the literature I read. And that’s okay, because it means I’m reading someone who thinks differently to me, someone from a different era, with different values, who lived a different life. A book may have ideas I don’t agree with and characters I hate, but I will still read it because someone who is real decided that it was a story worth sharing, and I will respect that. I will read and take notes because one day I will write characters that I don’t sympathise with: teenage boys, father figures, devout nationalists, monarchs that believe in slavery and imperialism. If I want to create a world that is real, I need to understand the world I live in.

If I don’t like something, I try to understand why I didn’t. Was the narration disjointed? Why? How can it be improved? Were the characters one-dimensional? How could they be fleshed out? Sometimes it’s because I have a bias, like against stories about white male academics contemplating adultery during their mid-life crisis — and that’s fine too because I become aware of my biases.

Most importantly, if I don’t enjoy a piece of writing, it means that this work wasn’t written for me — and that’s amazing. It’s like I’ve eavesdropped on a tapped telephone line and always, always, I learn the most from these kind of works. I may never understand James Joyce’s [Ulysses], but I can see Dublin through his eyes, learn about the Easter Uprising, and resonate with the history of Ireland.

Conversely, fanfiction is free. It’s a labour born from selflessness and sometimes, without the expectation of being read. And I think that is so precious. It doesn’t need to have a sellable plot or a character that can resonate with a thousand readers. It doesn’t need to align with the vision of a board of editors for a magazine, and most importantly, fanfiction is not gate-kept by privilege. The privilege of time, education, language.

This means that fanfiction is accessible, it reaches through class and lets the marginalised have a voice. It helps me find stories that mainstream media can never accomodate. The stories which truly pierced my soul, have always been fanfiction. There’s a common ground between those who drift to a fandom; if we like the same content, then we will likely have similar backgrounds and ideas about the world. It’s themes like growing pains, homesickness, imperfect loves, missing someone that is no longer there. In Kpop there’s always exploration of insecurity and disillusionment, the tension between public and private personas, loving someone as an idea, the stage as a liminal space. Something like the Bleak Boyband Bingo could never be in a published book because its so niche and reactive. But these are ideas I think about, people like me think about it, and fanfiction is the only space in which these ideas can be voiced. It will always be irreplaceable.

Both literature and fanfiction mean so much to me and I will spend my whole life reading. Both are created from the hard work and dedication of real people, and real people find value in both, so I will never belittle them. But at the end of the day, why does the question matter? Real life is hard, fiction is fiction. People will read what they want regardless of someone’s opinion, and some people don’t read. I think that’s the greater pity.

Note: all this talk about fiction makes me want to plug non-fiction!! Long form journalism is incredible, as is historical non-fiction and creative non-fiction.

+ I still haven’t talked about fandom studies and the incredible value of approaching fanfiction critically. Also how within fiction there's a debate about what is literature vs what is fiction. And the double moral standards for fanfiction and literature! And the power of derivative works!! And ahhh, how fanfiction just hits because sometimes you’re just thirsty for content.