Let me guess exactly what came to your mind when you read the word ‘fanfiction.’ Someone being sold to One Direction. A teenage girl reading at a concert and catching the attention of the hot lead singer, because she’s just not like other girls, and heaps of sultry Dramione (Draco and Hermione for those of you not in the know).
I’m not going to waste your time countering those assumptions or arguing that all fanfiction is good. Fanfiction isn’t curated or reviewed, and it often isn’t even spell checked before it’s put on the internet. The barriers of the publishing world that act as some form of quality control do not exist. Naturally, this leads to a plethora of bad fanfiction. However, there is also a plethora of bad fiction on bookstore shelves, differentiated only by an absence of spelling and grammar mistakes.
Despite this lack of ‘quality control,’ the unfiltered nature of fanfiction is where much of its beauty lies. Fanfiction gives an avenue for anyone who wants to write to share their work, removing common barriers. Not to mention that using already loved characters and settings leads to an instant readership. Any creative would agree on how discouraging a lack of engagement can be, and sharing your writing on a fanfiction website removes this obstacle.
On the note of removing obstacles, fanfiction has continuously been a trailblazer for representation. LGBTQ representation, and especially happy endings for queer couples, were found on fanfiction sites long before they were found in published works of fiction. To this day, fanfiction sites allow queer people in countries with bans on LGBTQ content to find people like them in fiction.
One of the key arguments I’ve seen in defence of fanfiction is the increasingly common career path from fanfiction writer to published writer. Fifty Shades of Grey (developed from a Twilight fanfiction) is perhaps one of the most famous examples, but The Love Hypothesis (inspired by Star Wars) and the infamous After series (where the main character is based on Harry Styles) were also initially published on fanfiction sites. On the one hand, these books demonstrate that a successful fanfiction can launch a career. On the other hand, a list of now published books which are commonly judged to be low in quality might not be the smartest way to defend fanfiction. To this, I say: these works are not an accurate representation of fanfiction as a whole. For fanfiction to be publishable, it needs to be so far divorced from the original piece of fiction / original characters that it avoids copyright infringements. This lends itself to the success of romantic AUs (alternate universes), which can easily be lifted into a different setting and the characters can be altered without altering the plot. Romantics AUs as published books then fall into the romance genre, which is often judged to be a subpar form of literature.
The judgement of romance books, and the judgement of fanfiction, both seem to stem from the same thing: a primarily female readership. Society incessantly disregards and dismisses things that are primarily liked by women. Thus, in the case of fanfiction, where the community is formed mainly of teenage girls, its continuous characterisation as unintelligent and obsessive is hardly a surprise.
Fanfiction, however, is immensely diverse and the entire medium cannot be judged as one. In its essence, fanfiction merely refers to the use of pre-existing characters and/or settings to tell new stories. By this definition, these characters and settings act as vehicles for the author’s original ideas. Many works of fanfiction are cringe-worthy self-inserts, but there are equally stories which have a largely original plot, sharing little other than the names of characters and places with the piece of fiction that inspired them. Fanfiction cannot be judged as either good or bad — in the same way that one wouldn’t say all sci-fi books, or all romance novels are good or bad. It definitely should not be judged by its young female readership either. It is merely a genre, and an incredibly diverse one at that.
“two young women reading face to face phone and books” by Naomi Chung’s Daydream Art is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0