What is the obsession people have with fanfiction?

I think people who do this for tv shows, movies, books, etc are doing it as a writing hobby or maybe to start out as a writer. Maybe come up with some ideas and then change the names. I think 50 Shades of Grey started like that.

The real creepy ones are those who write it about real life people and celebrities.

I have a friend, also a writer, mother, and part-time worker, who is something of a minor celebrity for her fan fiction. She was even flown to a convention for an all expenses paid trip. She said she was constantly mobbed by fans of her stories. I think it's pretty weird too, but it's definitely a contemporary cultural phenomenon.

I had assumed this was an Internet era phenomenone. But I read on TV Tropes that people were sharing or selling fan fic at Star Trek conventions in the early 70s. The concept of the Mary Sue started with a character in Star Trek fan fic from the 70s. I think it's become much more popular with the internet making it much easier to share and sell.

[quote]I think people who do this for tv shows, movies, books, etc are doing it as a writing hobby or maybe to start out as a writer. Maybe come up with some ideas and then change the names. I think 50 Shades of Grey started like that.

Yeah, 50 SHADES OF GREY started as TWILIGHT fan fiction.

[quote]The real creepy ones are those who write it about real life people and celebrities.

They call it 'shipping (short for relationSHIP), when you pair up famous people (or even fictional characters) you think should be romantically involved.

How out of touch are you OP that you didn't realize that fan fiction existed?!

OP, if you want to see people obsess about fiction and tv shows, read any of the Golden Girls, I Love Lucy, Housewives of " ", soaps, or porn threads. It may seem odd to some but I don't think it means people are crazy. In most cases it's harmless and fulfills some need.

Why is it creepy R1? There is gay fanfiction on Tumblr. Which I think is a good thing for young gay teens who lack mainstream gay content. It’s just fantasy. What’s the harm?

I've stumbled upon fan fiction before about real people but it was very creepy and I couldn't read more than a couple of lines before feeling like I was in someone's dangerous, gross delusion.

I haven't read any fanfic of fictional characters/shows/film franchises but I guess that would just be like what changing writers who write for a series do. Some people are very gifted writers even if they don't write professionally and those who are most successful at this hobby, those who gain a following online or win fan awards for it should probably be hired to work for the franchise.

I'm way more concerned with how fixated DL is on fanfiction and how creepy they think it is. There have been a *lot* of threads about it over the years.

I sometimes read bad fanfiction for laughs. A lot of the Brokeback Mountain fanfics were pretty funny.

R9 It's the first one I've seen but I've only been on here for about 2 years. And come on, fanfic where some famous person is written as having sex with a sibling is creepy. Irreverent jokes are made on DL about such things but for someone to secretly submerge themselves deeply in a fake world of incest between famous siblings, it can't be good for their psyche.

Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments started as Ron/Ginny incest fic from Harry Potter. It also had Draco in a green leather thong.

R11, there's all kinds of extremely creepy stuff out there, sexual and otherwise, that DL doesn't bat an eye about. And it's not like celebrity incest is an unknown topic of discussion here, but something about fanfiction seems to really trigger some people here. I think it's because it's mainly written by women.

[quote] secretly submerge themselves deeply in a fake world of incest between famous siblings

Do you actually know that this is what's happening, or are you just speculating and playing this up to make a point?

[Quote] It also had Draco in a green leather thong.

How riveting.

I write slash fanfiction about Sixties sitcoms. Last night I submitted a piece about Miss Hathaway getting it on with Mrs. Drysdale.

Yeah, that 50 shades frau is a billionaire now from ripping off Twilight and writing some of the most saccharine dreck I've ever read. Couldn't finish it.

I've read some good fanfics over the years. But a lot of it's really bad. I only like it if it stays true to the characters in the source material. I can't stand when cheesy writers take well known 'human' characters and turn them into werewolves, aliens or vampires. Ick. Some fledgling authors edit their own, original, pre-written fiction to shoe horn popular characters into the cast.....just to get readership. So you end up with a lot of stupid, poorly written fics with the characters from.....let's say Game of Thrones or Harry Potter, who don't act or speak anything like the characters in the actual book/show/movie.

I don't mind that it exists, but since these "authors" have risen up from their cubbyholes and actually published their dreck, it's given rise to the horrid M/M women-penned ridiculous romance subgenre, with inane gay characters, shape-shifters, and hetero-acting relationships.

Because they practically give their books away online, they've crowded out actual gay literature. Amazon should more clearly separate this drivel in a much lower sub-category.

R13 Fair point. I guess the level of seriousness around is also an issue, whether someone or not as created an alternate reality for themselves or they're just playing around.

As for the rest, don't mock my waist-coat ripper writing style! It serves a very necessary purpose on here, adding a intimate swell of luxurious romance to a cruel, unfeeling world!

There's definitely a crazy side to fan fiction though.

The "mpreg" story lines (male pregnancy) where Sawyer knocks up Jack from "Lost" and they have a baby together.

The m/m story lines about two characters who weren't gay on the show, where they turn the fancfic into something about the actual actors (Ian Sommerhalder and Matthew Fox getting it on off camera while shooting Lost) and where the physics.of the sex scenes don't work with two male bodies.

But mostly because enough of those fanfic writers are also obsessive stalkers of the actors themselves, the same fraus who start all the crazy fan stalker threads on DL

Fanfiction is garbage. And so is that shitty instagram “poet”, Rupi Kaur. No one respects the art of the written word anymore. It’s depressing.

There are Orphan Black stories where basically people ship Tatiana Maslany with Tatiana Maslany as any combination of the dozen clone characters she played, all of whom were basically sisters. So, it's all incest porn but so much weirder.

It can provide a great sense of story structure if one wants to play around in someone else's sandbox while honing their own writing skills. You're following someone else's rules in their worldbuilding and trying to fit your own ideas into it while still remaining true to the show. Its hard to come up with a great plot for a novel, but I had harbored thoughts of writing for a long time, starting out with short stories. For a while there, I got a bit obsessed with Breaking Bad - I don't think I've ever been that invested in a television show and its characters before - so at some point in the wait for the final season I decided to write a little thing about Gus Fring sexually subjugating Jesse Pinkman while manipulating him into cooking for his organization. For one thing, I absolutely loved the character and wanted to create a world of his past that the show only hinted at, and two, the image of Giancarlo Esposito eating out Aaron Paul's ass was hot. Plus, it was cool to throw something out there to contend with so many female authors' silly ideas of the way gay men have sex with each other. I ended up writing over 281k words for this fic, lol. 39 god damn chapters. But it definitely showed me where my weaknesses are as a writer and what I need to work on. The euphoria you get when "fans" praise your work is easy to get used to and can sustain you through a miserable week at your real job.

Reading it, however, is another experience. I really can't follow the stuff that can't come up with a way to keep the characters true to their show version.

Just look at the DL threads that I always place on 'ignore', spinning fantasies about Sam Heughan, Timotay and Armie and his wife, Dylan Geick, etc. Nutty people spinning endless fictions about them from a few IG posts. DL is full of fan-fiction.

I've dabbled in fanfiction of sorts with some Nifty.org story. I was talking to an author of one of my favorite stories off and on for nearly eight years. I decided to write my own erotic fiction, but found that my characters were basically his with a slightly different story line. After a long hiatus between our communication, and a bunch a free time while on a vacation, I wrote an ending to his story. He appreciated the contribution and that was that.

I wish I was a better writer. I have the skills for big picture arcs but lack the discipline to create characters, so copying real or fiction is a happy medium. It's all a secrete hobby so no one really knows but I understand the fanfiction group.

R22, you should beta for those fraus and teach them how to write men. They would love you for it. You might even be able to find a way to make some money helping them edit. There is a real thirst for knowledge in that world. I don't think most of them are defiantly choosing to be inauthentic, they just lack some basic knowledge of how men interact with each other in same sex relationships. How they talk, and, yeah, have sex. I'm actually not as bothered by their ignorance of the mechanics as I am with all the whining, hand wringing and angst between characters that is just too...... womanly. And all the talk in bed. Yackity yack yack yack instead of just getting down to business. Yeesh.

it’s a secrete hobby alright, r24!

"you should beta for those fraus and teach them how to write men."

R25, I'd rather crawl through a field of broken glass.

R22 I would love to read that! Would you consider uploading and linking to it somewhere like Nifty perhaps?

I can't find anything on the Internet older than 2009, but in 1997 there was a LOT of 'California Dreams' fanfic where the male characters were having sex with each other.

This thread is actually interesting.

Fanfiction is an opportunity for writers to generate content that is not allowed by ordinary media outlets. Originally the gay and lesbian content was a theme because gay fiction didn't get the mainstream treatment -- so fan fiction filled a gap in gay fiction by revising pop culture to include otherwise excluded voices.

Now it is more of a training ground for writers to play at drafting narratives for an audience that likes the interactiveness of online fandom communities. But the cringe is still huge.

"Tenderly but passionately Master Yoda removed the shell of Darth Vader's armor, exposing the yielding flesh within crying out for attention from Yoda's wrinkled and hairy green lips..."

You sure about that R30?

I thought most m/m fanfic was written by straight women

Eh, so what. Men (both gay and straight) have been writing female characters for centuries.

Fanfiction is porn for women. Non-explicit versions is wish fulfillment.

Men react to and are sexually stimulated visually. Hence, porn magazines and the proflieration of porn on the internet. The picture alone is enough.

Women aren’t as easily stimulated visually. They need the mood set, so to speak. They use their imagination more. Fan fiction is a convenient way to ease into the imagination. The characters already exist and are pleasing to them. Then they they need a scenario, and away they go.

These women authors are obsessed with finding a gay male couple and having them turn bisexual for the book's fantasy woman.

It's really creepy.

R30, let me do a rewrite:

Fanfiction is an opportunity for talentless wannabe writers to spew content that is far beneath, and justifiably snubbed, by ordinary media outlets. Originally the gay and lesbian content was a masturbatory theme because gay fiction that is garbage didn't get the mainstream treatment -- so fan fiction filled horny, womens' secreting gaps that literary gay fiction proved too difficult for them to read or write. By pseudo-plagiarizing pop culture, they include otherwise deservedly excluded voices that ramble on with absurd and derivative porn.

Now it is more of a training ground for untalented writers to play at thieving narratives for a lowbrow audience that needs the interactiveness of online fandom communities to fill the gaping void in their otherwise unsatisfied lives.

The cringe is still deserved.

Those sound like people who desperately need a bowling alley in their middle-of-the-nowhere towns.

R35. The vast majority is the opposite. Straight men/characters written as gay.

[quote]They call it 'shipping (short for relationSHIP), when you pair up famous people (or even fictional characters) you think should be romantically involved.

The origin of shipping had nothing to do with famous people though it encompasses them now. It came from early in the X-Files fandom and whether you wanted to see Mulder and Scully engage in an overt romantic relationship on the show.

Slash (pairing seemingly heterosexual male characters in a gay relationship) came from the Star Trek fanzines of the 70s that used K/S as a signifier of their content— Kirk and Spock paired romantically. It’s a weird rabbit hole where you can learn about Vulcan dick amongst other fan theories.

r39 I learned a thing — I had always equated “slash” with “snuff”

Then you aren't searching the right fandoms R29. A poke around in the Wayback Machine will turn up fic from 2002/3 and even earlier.

This thread has stoked the morbid curiosity I've always had for this subculture, and last night as a result I went looking for some of the exact stories I liked at around 14 years old (so the early-mid '00s). To my mild surprise the archive I used to read is still up and technically still live, though none of the dozen main posters have contributed in a decade and the formatting of the site is broken af in the browsers we have today. I even tracked down a few of the stories I remember reading (as if they were The Decameron) and to my surprise some even hold up fairly well. Perhaps in niche fandoms from way back in time the writing is better quality than it often is now...

It's all so ridiculous and time-killing as a pursuit in retrospect, but at the time it filled a void of what I now guess was extreme boredom & loneliness (as R38 points out) stirred in with hormones and my romantic wangst. The sad reality that I grew up in a Conservative, repressive, gender-segregated environment pushed me further in.

I don't read these now and probably wouldn't get into reading new ff again unless I was depressed or trapped somewhere alone with nothing else to do. But I don't regret reading all the stories I did, and in fact I believe that sifting through so many stories good and bad made me a better writer (the same way RPing did for me as a kid).

As if academia wasn't already going to hell:

Care to share the site r41?

From r42:

[quote]Organized into four thematic sections, the essays address fan-created works as literary artifacts; the relationship between fandom, identity, and feminism; fandom and affect; and the role of creativity and performance in fan activities. Considered as literary artifacts, fan works pose important questions about the nature of authorship, the meaning of “originality,” and modes of transmission. Sociologically, fan fiction is and long has been a mostly female enterprise, from the fanzines of the 1960s to online forums today, and this fact has shaped its themes and its standing among fans. The questions of how and why people become fans, and what the difference is between liking something and being a fan of it, have also drawn considerable scholarly attention, as has the question of how fans perform their fannish identities for diverse audiences.

[quote]Thanks to the overlap between fan studies and other disciplines related to popular and cultural studies—including social, digital, and transmedia studies—an increasing number of scholars are turning to fan studies to engage their students. Fan fiction is the most extensively explored aspect of fan works and fan engagement, and so studies of it can often serve as a basis for addressing other aspects of fandom. These classic essays introduce the field’s key questions and some of its major figures. Those new to the field or in search of context for their own research will find this reader an invaluable resource.

I wrote some fan fiction back in the early days of the internet. Ideally it's a way to "treat" your fellow fans with more of what they love, by giving them something like a new episode-like story from the original "Star Trek" when they've seen all the existing episodes 10,000 times each. Yes, I had no life at the time, and was wondering if I could write, the fan fiction was a way to put something out there that other people would actually read.

But it's also a way to force your ideas into places they don't belong, to release your repressed inner perv, to show you don't understand anything about the source material, to argue out petty fandom issues, and to get into vicious arguments with 13-year-old girls. I think it was the last that made me give the whole thing up.

DL is Ground Zero for Golden Girls fanfic.

Way back in the late 1960s I had a neighbor who worked for the gas company. He was married and had kids, but spent a huge amount of time writing "scripts" for [italic]Star Trek,[/italic] which had come out a couple of years before and was a mild hit on TV. I looked at a couple of these "scripts" and they were terrible. He said he was writing them to submit to the show's producers. As far as I know, he never did, but he continued writing them, I guess for his own amusement. God, he would have loved fan fiction. He was writing it before it was even a thing.

R41, Do you have any suggestions on how to make more images show up in searches on the WayBack Machine?

Many things are archived supposedly but the links end up 404 or go into an endless loop.

r48 i can’t promise how far back the works span in time, but you could check out An Archive Of Our Own.

Years ago I learned that a woman I had gone to college with was writing fanfic for Star Wars... she had created a character to add to the universe - Han Solo's sister. She was the character... I say that because she illustrated her stories and Han's sister was the spitting image of my friend. I let it go, didn't think much about it at the time (I already knew she was way in Star Wars).

Now the fanfic I tried reading that was dreck, the continuation of Knots Landing - ouch, that was bad.

By chance was this your neighbor r47?

I think OP should mind her own business.

Why do you care about a harmless hobby, OP? Why the hostility towards total strangers amusing themselves by doing something creative on their own time, at their own expense? Would you feel the same anger and contempt if they got drunk every night, or spent hours watching sportsball all the time? Do you spew vitriol at people who participate in fantasy football leagues?

The author of this 'California Dreams' gay fanfic is a woman, of course, who feels like she's a gay man.

[quote]R6 ..., read any of the Golden Girls, I Love Lucy, Housewives of " ", soaps, or porn threads

Where is the best GOLDEN GIRLS fan fiction porn?

R36 wins. Thank you, Scribblo 👏

R51 beat me to the punch.

Fat horrible women with zero writing skill.,..fucking tragic

I've read a few theories positing that fanfiction is about women trying to subvert or escape from the stereotypes & subjection applied to female characters by traditional heterosexual narratives, often using gay men & women/relationships as a way to explore new models of relating outside of these constricting norms. It seems some straight women feel grossly misrepresented and mistreated by their representation in popular fiction in the same way gay men do, so to circumvent this poor writing of their gender they jump into another sandbox.

Perhaps as more and more women make their mark as writers for film & television instead of just novels & magazines, we'll soon see the output of fanfiction diminish (or straight men will be the ones writing it).

[Quote] "Tenderly but passionately Master Yoda removed the shell of Darth Vader's armor, exposing the yielding flesh within crying out for attention from Yoda's wrinkled and hairy green lips..."

That's hot!

[Quote] But it's also a way to force your ideas into places they don't belong, to release your repressed inner perv, to show you don't understand anything about the source material, to argue out petty fandom issues, and to get into vicious arguments with 13-year-old girls.

You'd get roasted if you said this on tumblr.

Golden Girls FanFic exists!

As I said, I used to write fan fiction in a small way. A lot of people do it for attention or to just get other people to read something they wrote, and yeah, I didn't mind being read, but mainly I did it as a sort of immersive experience.

Say you love Harry Potter, writing fan fiction is a way to mentally immerse yourself so deeply in the world of Harry POtter and Hogwarts that you can describe every little detail of the environment or understand every interaction between the character. It's a way of spending time in that world, instead of reality, because face it, some times reality sucks.

I think they like it because the romance genre doesn't have any frontiers left to explore. It's all been done to death. The key to romance is conflict. You have to have characters who can't be together for some reason. Someone or something is always keeping them apart (family, class, race, ethnicity, religion, war, etc.) That's why a lot of novels are set in the old days when there were lots of reasons people couldn't be together. So you set your story in the deep south on a plantation with a white southern belle who falls madly in love with one of the slaves. Lots of angst and prolonged tension until they can't deny their feelings anymore and have wild passionate affair that could cost them both their lives.

Anyway, I think they write slash because they see it as a last taboo. You can set the story in just about any time period and your off to the races with a pretty powerful and dangerous forbidden love you can build a story around.

[quote]I've read some good fanfics over the years. But a lot of it's really bad. I only like it if it stays true to the characters in the source material. I can't stand when cheesy writers take well known 'human' characters and turn them into werewolves, aliens or vampires. Ick.

I remember that period when True Blood and Vampire Diaries were very popular and fanfic writers were taking characters from Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, and Glee and setting them in setting similar to the vampire shows.

I think part of the appeal is that these fans love their shows and want to give their favorite characters more stories/adventures and there is usually an audience seeking the same. Particularly if a show has been cancelled and there are no more new episodes. Besides Star Trek, there are Dark Shadows fanfic writers, etc.

[quote] The key to romance is conflict. You have to have characters who can't be together for some reason. Someone or something is always keeping them apart (family, class, race, ethnicity, religion, war, etc.).

This doesn't account for the 'fluff'/'schmoop'/'domestic!' subgenre of fanfiction, which sees popular characters in very boring & saccharine established relationships happily going about their daily lives with no impediment whatsoever. These are big categories in fanfic, along with all the hardcore sexual stuff in the stereotypical line.

As more Gen Z teens get into fanfic the polarities between fluff and R-rated PwP are becoming more extreme.

Have you seen the Tolkien fanfic? Some erotic (plenty), some not.

I know very little about all this. How do the authors of the original material feel about fan fiction? Are they flattered or do they feel possessive of the characters they created? I would definitely be torn if it were me.

I would be pissed if I was the author of the Twilight books, even though they're dreck themselves. She had to deal with that 50 shades frau getting paid millions for ripping off her story.

I went through a couple phases of reading fanfic of the porn variety. Some of it was really hot, though even the well-written ones (which are sadly uncommon) work in part because you already have a mental image of attractive actors. The author of a story about two random dudes might have to work a bit harder than the person writing about Mulder fucking Krycek. (Incidentally, ISTR that that the term ship/shipping/shipper originated in the X-Files fandom.)

One of the reasons I lost interest is that so many of the stories have a female perspective on sex that often feels a little distant from my own sexual experiences. Not just getting technical details of the homosex wrong, though that is immediately distracting, but a more subtle accumulation of emphasizing romance and emotion, dynamic characters being portrayed as passive and needy, all the rape fantasies and hurt/comfort stuff...obviously I'm generalizing, but if you read a lot of fan fiction you definitely notice is has its own trends and cliches...and that some is written by teen girls with little experience of sex or relationships, let alone any insight into sex between men. It's a fascinating subculture really, with its own jargon and celebrities and scandals and drama.

I ship Harry Potter / Draco Malfoy. What can I say..

R68 I remember the author of famous cult teen novel THE OUTSIDERS going off about fanfic writers on Twitter. She also lambasted anyone who @ her asking whether any of the characters were meant to be gay or not.

Is there anyone else who can corroborate the hysterical Mary at R9's assertion that DL is "obsessed" with fanfiction? I've been reading DL on and off for the past 6-7 years, and this is literally the first time I've ever come across a thread on the subject.

R9/R13 sounds like an oddly defensive, fanfic-writing frau.

Sorry, I kind of went off on a tangent and didn't actually address OP's question about the appeal of fan fiction.

To add to the reasons already stated, historically LGBT characters were underrepresented in popular media. Fan fiction allows people to fill that void. I heard about a lesbian who wrote Heroes slash featuring Mohinder/Sylar. Not so much because it turned her on, but because it was fairly believable to take the characters in that direction. It was the obvious way to add some queer content.

[quote]I know very little about all this. How do the authors of the original material feel about fan fiction? Are they flattered or do they feel possessive of the characters they created? I would definitely be torn if it were me.

Some of them love it and encourage it (JK Rowling), some of them absolutely loathe it (Anne Rice). At one point years ago, I think Rice threatened to sue, but you really can’t contain it because no one is making a profit from it. I think Rowling’s attitude is the healthiest- you can’t fight it so why bother? Let the fans write. It keeps the property alive, so to speak, though I’m not sure how the studios that own the properties feel about it.

[Quote] I remember that period when True Blood and Vampire Diaries were very popular and fanfic writers were taking characters from Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, and Glee and setting them in setting similar to the vampire shows.

They probably still do that. Some crossovers are really random or just have waaay too many characters.

I love reading fanfiction. If you enjoy a show but are left wanting more than the scripted episodes provide, fanfic is the way to go. And it's been around forever!

To the best of my knowledge the Kirk/Spock paring from the original series was when it all started for me. Then came Starsky/Hutch, Gage/DeSoto (Emergency!) and so on.

I'm willing to bet just about every show out there has a small but dedicated fanbase that writes and reads it. Some of the stuff that's written is truly atrocious but some of the writers are amazingly talented. better than some of the dreck that actually gets published by the big money publishing houses. The folks who write fanfic do it our of love for the characters.

The only thing I don't like is what is called Real People Slash. I'm a-okay with reading about a romance between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers (Iron Man/Captain America) but the idea of reading a story about RDJr and Chris Evans strikes me as … icky and intrusive.

Yeah, I think the authors who despise it to the point of suing take it as an affront to their ego. They claim it's based on writing principle (i.e. it's lazy, as a true writer you should create your own stories, etc.), but deep down I think they feel incredibly threatened by the idea that maybe--just maybe--others can write their characters better than they can.

And as someone who has read a lot of fanfiction, I can definitely attest that is true. Yes, the majority of it is dreck written by teenage girls, but I have read some truly beautiful fanfiction that (in my opinion) was so well-written it ended up transcending the original source material, to the point where I felt that the fanfiction author had a better grasp on the plot and motivations of the characters.

They ended up taking the story and characters in far more interesting directions, while still maintaining better character consistency and story continuity than the canon author.

It's sacrilege to think that a lowly fanfiction author could surpass the original, but I've read a few gems that I distinctly remember actually ruining the original source material for me because I felt it was so much more interesting, artistic, and well-written that what the original author ended up producing.

I think that possibility (however slim) pisses off a lot of authors who are insane control freaks (ahem Anne Rice and George RR Martin) and think they have some unassailable ownership to their creations. Legally, of course, they do--but not creatively. Once they offer it up for consumption, the work is no longer truly theirs anymore. People will interpret and build upon it.

When an author resorts to suing, when the fanfiction author is making absolutely no profit, it says a lot about their own insecurity more than anything else.

[Quote] I'm willing to bet just about every show out there has a small but dedicated fanbase that writes and reads it.

You'd be right.

[Quote] The only thing I don't like is what is called Real People Slash.

It's creepy and i don't understand the appeal.

[quote] It's sacrilege to think that a lowly fanfiction author could surpass the original, but I've read a few gems that I distinctly remember actually ruining the original source material for me because I felt it was so much more interesting, artistic, and well-written that what the original author ended up producing.

I experienced this with STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE. I'm one of the few people on Earth who actually liked that film at all, and even still I've found stories based on it written by fans & amateurs that make the movie proper seem like a trite and hacky half-finished filler arc (which, yeah, we all know it is, however you slice it).

I can't find it now, but I once read an incredibly beautiful and well-rendered retelling of the story in the film from Count Dooku's POV (including flashbacks to Old Republic novels in the SW book series, half of which are basically bought-and-paid-for fanfic anyway), and after finishing it I could no longer see the movie without deep disappointment in how superficial it was. It helps that Dooku is my favorite character, of course, but I also appreciated the way the writer redefined the world of the Jedi in TPM and made it seem deeper and more tangible than Lucas did. This author also dared to suggest that the Jedi were a transgressive & controversial group of individuals and better contextualised their history.

[quote]I would be pissed if I was the author of the Twilight books, even though they're dreck themselves. She had to deal with that 50 shades frau getting paid millions for ripping off her story.

The Twilight author Stephenie Meyer had to put a book on hold because of the 50 Shades book series. She was probably pissed for awhile, but she is still wealthy at the end of the day. Meyer and E.L. James are both crappy writers, but they aren't constantly releasing crappy books like Nora Roberts.

Every movie based on a book is fanfiction.

Good point, R82.

ITA @ R78. Great post. I have definitely felt that way about some fan fiction I've read over the years. I was a big fan of the movie Pitch Black several years ago. The fanfic was amazing with characters that were much more fleshed out /complex. And they took the story to other worlds/planets while introducing new characters. It was like a never ending sequel.

R78 great post. I remember I randomly read a fan fiction about the movie Casablanca (shipping the characters of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines!). It seemed to fit so naturally with the film that it was almost like a sequel. The best stories are like that.

I've read RPS - most of it is bandslash, if memory serves me correctly - and while yes, it is...disconcerting to read, some of it is really quite good. A very small amount, but still. Sometimes it seems to tie in with the band's own publicity attempts - for example, My Chemical Romance and One Direction were big in the bandslash world and they did plenty of on and off-stage queerbaiting (or maybe some of it was legit, who knows, but that's the draw, the "what if"). At other times, there have been questions and gossip about the performers' relationships even by the general press or public. Examples being Jagger and Bowie, or Lennon and Mccartney.

"Yeah, I think the authors who despise it to the point of suing take it as an affront to their ego. They claim it's based on writing principle (i.e. it's lazy, as a true writer you should create your own stories, etc.), but deep down I think they feel incredibly threatened by the idea that maybe--just maybe--others can write their characters better than they can. "

Nobody but a complete hack like the "Fifty Shades" woman would ever seriously worry that fanfic writers might be better than she is.

If writers hate fan fiction, it's they're not making money from it, and because most of it is devoted to attempting to rewrite what the author has put years into writing. Most of it is about changing the sexuality of characters, or making them fall in love with people the authors didn't intend, or reducing them to domestic bores like the fanficcers, which has got to make the writers feel defensive towards their creations and annoyed with the fans who don't understand what they claim to love. Watching "fans" make a mess of their creation has got to be an offense to their aesthetic sense and a blow to the ego, so if an author like Rowling says "Sure, go ahead and play in my world", that shows a certain generosity of spirit.

I used to love reading X Files fan fiction, and other sci fi.

yaoi hell tbh

Yup, R85. Same thing is going on with CMBYN fan fiction right now. A lot of it has Armie/Timmy as the leads (RP or "real person" fiction) not the characters of Elio/Oliver. The weirdest aspect of it is their "fan service" tweets and general gushing over each other actually feeds the beast. There are stories about them hooking up at the very industry events they're attending together.....so it's real time.

There is a movie on Amazon Prime called Slash. I watched it the other night. It was actually OK. It’s about a high school guy who gets outed for writing gay slash porn. It starred some guy from Teen Wolf. It also featured Michael Ian Black as a 40+ year old fan fic guy who lived with his mom. I never even realized that world of slash porn and conventions existed. Also in the movie was Lukas Neff from Raising Hope. Wow, he has an awesome chest.

Shipping is confusing enough without rpf...

There's actually Stevie Nicks fanfic out there but it's disguised as "I know the REAL story about Stevie's life, here's the truth..."

And some moronic women fall for it and believe it's real.

Let's see, one "true story" that was written in excruciating detail was about when Stevie was addicted to the tranquilizer Klonopin and went through detox in Late 1993. The "insider" wrote that Lindsey Buckingham went to Stevie and was dismayed at her zombied-out state and he drove her to detox himself, holding her hand daily as she went through the painful withdrawal. Of course, in reality, Stevie mentioned several names of the people who actually helped her in this difficult period, and Buckingham was not one.

Then Stevie and Lindsey resumed their romance secretly in 1994, despite his wife and children, and continued it for many more years in secret, even up to 2011, which is when I read this ridiculous story. I asked the authoress why didn't Stevie and Lindsey just come out of the closet with their romance, and she said that it would hurt Lindsey's family. Of course, in reality, Stevie had many times wrecked other men's marriages without a second thought as to the consequences and collateral damage.

But these insane shippers believed every single word of this crazy bitch's fake story, even when she got details glaringly wrong.

Wonder what GRRM would think of the fic where Jon Snow gets fucked six ways to Sunday by Ramsay and his men (okay, I guess gangraped would be more accurate). What's funny is that the author is actually incredibly talented and does an amazing Euron Greyjoy (who partakes of some Snow himself). The language is perfect and the action scenes are pretty thrilling.

For someone who used to read a lot of transgressive lit in the 90s, I like fanfic writers who go really dark. Like, nothing is off the table.

[quote]The "mpreg" story lines (male pregnancy) where Sawyer knocks up Jack from "Lost" and they have a baby together.

Those kinds of stories are creepy and hilarious. Then there are those awful gp(girl penis) fics where one female character has a dick and impregnates another female character.

[Quote] There is a movie on Amazon Prime called Slash. I watched it the other night. It was actually OK. It’s about a high school guy who gets outed for writing gay slash porn. It starred some guy from Teen Wolf.

Of course he had to be from Teen Wolf lol

I dare anyone to try finding a slash story more off-the-rails than this Tom/Jerry smut.

Fanfic is only hope for people with no talent.

And I'm their patron saint.

I wrote an original novel having nothing to do with any tv show, but I did sort of loosely base a couple of characters’ looks and personalities on some from my favorite show. It helped me to picture them in my own mind. Is any character truly original? Doesn’t the author usually have someone in mind, whether real or fictional?

R96 read this, if you dare.

[quote]The Twilight author Stephenie Meyer had to put a book on hold because of the 50 Shades book series. She was probably pissed for awhile, but she is still wealthy at the end of the day. Meyer and E.L. James are both crappy writers, but they aren't constantly releasing crappy books like Nora Roberts.

I actually give Stephenie Meyer a lot of credit there. She was within her rights to sue EL James and had a strong case against her. But she didn't, and that prevented fanfic, even the ones written for non-commercial purposes, from being shut down. I think the hobby is a little odd, but the people writing it aren't hurting anyone.

Although I suspect that a lot of fanfic writers have pivoted to writing formulaic male/male erotica for your Kindle.

[Quote] She was probably pissed for awhile, but she is still wealthy at the end of the day.

Lol that reminds me of when she got mad that the first chapter of Midnight Sun got leaked. It was supposed to be from Edward Cullen's pov.

I once accidentally found out the identity of a fan fiction writer whose work I rather liked, and with whom I'd had some very pleasant online conversations. She turned out to be a gray-haired protestant minister, someone who took time out between officiating at masses and weddings and funerals to write erotic fan fiction. You just never know about people.

And no, I didn't tell her I'd found her out, or anyone else. And I learned a valuable lesson about putting any personal information on the internet, at least in relation to your secret hobbies.

I used to be into reading and writing fan fiction.

[quote]R68 How do the authors of the original material feel about fan fiction? Are they flattered or do they feel possessive of the characters they created?

They surely feel a bit nauseated, and just pretend it doesn’t exist.

I used to love MSTings back in the day. They were basically Mystery Science Theater but for crazy rants and fanfic that people posted online. Not sure if that counts; I guess it pretty much is fanfic to an extent.

Fanfiction is hardly new though. There was plenty of Jane Austen fanfic in the 1800's where people would write about the characters' lives after the books ended. Sherlock Holmes had a ton of stuff too, I believe.

“Dorothy lay on the couch, the remains of the cheesecake swathed across her proud, though now weary, breasts. The nipples themselves, still tender to the touch, Rose had licked clean, and licked clean again. Thrice Rose had licked...”

So...nobody reading yaoi? Lol

We need fan fiction about Elaine Stritch‘s surely sad and boozy marriage to gay actor John Bay....heir to an English Muffin empire.

[quote] I used to love MSTings back in the day. They were basically Mystery Science Theater but for crazy rants and fanfic that people posted online. Not sure if that counts.

R105 idk, I feel like MST-ing is meta and akin to liveblogging or Discord nowadays, not really fanfic. Still fun.

[quote]I think they like it because the romance genre doesn't have any frontiers left to explore.

I'll just leave this link right here...

Those of you who've said that women are writing m/m sex scenes that are anatomically impossible for two male bodies, do you have an example. I just can't imagine what they could possibly have come up with.

r111 meet mpreg, for one

Usually mpreg are put when they talk about alpha/omega/heat cycles.

R112, I think they were referring to sexual positions.

I know they're not supposed to even read it, but I feel like the writers for some tv shows use fanfic to either try out ideas they're not sure will work or to explore/conclude storylines that have been axed. I haven't read much, but more often than seems likely there'll be a writer with only a couple of stories and they'll be actually really well written and the plots of these stories will later appear in the real show nearly to a T. Similarly, I've seen interviews with writing teams who mention having wanted to do this or that storyline and then you see one of these one off or two off writers do exactly that and do it well.

I consider this the soccer mom version of Penthouse Forum. It's the secret vice hidden in the linen closet, hauled out along with the bubble-bath and scented candles for "special" moments.

R115 There was speculation that writers for Glee would look at fanfic sites for ideas.

Stephenie Meyer was always a supporter of fanfics. From interviews, she seems like a mellow laid back type unlike other authors who bitch up a storm about fanfics.

R110 Lol i [italic]almost[/italic] forgot that was a thing.

Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, the creator of the wildly-successful fan-favorite comic/cartoon MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM, has no problem with it and actually credits fan-works with keeping his project so popular all these years. He wisely points out that, "a work becomes more attractive the more people play with it".

[quote] YY: "...The light parody doujinshi* scene, including yaoi (gay m/m stories), was growing with women at the center of it. Their work was fresh, completely unlike the stodgy parodies being made up until then, and took me off guard. Some were angered by it all claiming it made a mockery of the source material, but I didn’t think so. It was a brand-new culture, after all. So while keeping in mind issues of copyright, be it parody, yaoi or cosplay… I’d like to encourage everyone to continue enjoying Gundam in their own unique way."

*Doujinshi are fan-made comics and zines which are most often either comedic, romantic and/or pornographic and are usually sold exclusively at cons or posted on sharing websites like tumblr. Because such comics are labors of love not commonly sold for profit, they are not considered in breach of copyright.

R120 Never heard of him.

R120 Well, he knows where the money is.

[quote]Every movie based on a book is fanfiction.

Sounds like a smart observation but ultimately it isn't.

Fanficcers don't buy rights to books and their output is not supposed to be a commercial product for which the book author is compensated accordingly and/or is involved in.

Movies based on books typically don't invent entirely new stories to put known characters in. They retell the same story with largely the same characters with some latitude to fit the story into 2 hrs. screentime.

You can call fanfiction movies that take known characters and imagine new or rework the original stories. For instance, all the spins on the fairytales, such as Hardwicke's movie Red Riding Hood or Snow White and the Huntsman.

R123 has it right re. fans vs. adaptors.

For the people in the back I'll use an ancient fandom of mine to illustrate. The PRINCE OF TENNIS comic/cartoon has stage adaptations (I linked a clip below) that are very popular in Japan. To watch early incarnations of these stageplays you'd think them fan-produced; full of meta/in-jokes/fanservice not found in the original works, playing fast & loose with the official storyline, and designed in a cheap & silly 'cosplay' fashion. These plays are official adaptations and not fanworks, though, because they are sanctioned by the creator of PRINCE OF TENNIS and produced/performed by paid professional cast & crew to make a profit.

By contrast you could browse DevArt right now and find countless photos of goofy teenage girls dressed up and acting skits in their spare time as these very same PRINCE OF TENNIS characters. These photoshoots are the fan-works, because they've been set-up using the fans' own money and on the fans' own time for fun, without permission from the creator. These fans also get no compensation for their elaborate photosets & costumes, beyond getting SM likes or photo-ops at Comiccon or maybe winning a cosplay contest.

The same applies to adapted books/scripts vs. fanfics, or adapted comics vs. doujinshi.

I always just assumed it was wank off material for people to embarrassed to buy porn lit.

R125 That’s basically...hentai manga hahaha

R34 - “Fan-fiction is porn for women.”

I always saw it as a way for women to imagine different sexual scenarios for their favorite TV, movie, book characters.

The Alpha/Omega trope sounds like something a DLer invented. The bottom,which is the Omega,has to submit to their Alpha and bear his "pups". It's gross and rapey.

[Quote] I always saw it as a way for women to imagine different sexual scenarios for their favorite TV, movie, book characters.

It is!

[Quote] The Alpha/Omega trope sounds like something a DLer invented. The bottom,which is the Omega,has to submit to their Alpha and bear his "pups". It's gross and rapey.

You should say that on AO3.

A lot of fanfic is written by either teen girls or middle aged fraus. I somehow stumbled on some gay fanfic and it seemed really “off”, I kept thinking no man would say/do that. Turns out it was written by a teenage girl so that explains it. My own opinion of it and all the tumblr pages and forums about it is that it’s a way for women to be filthy and express their deepest fantasies without being slutty. Slutty to them meaning looking at porn, reading smut others have written or unloading on ivillage. Guys don’t need fanfic because we’ll say it on any forum. Find a forum about gardening, weight loss, football, plane spotting and there will be a thread with a pic of a celebrity and a bunch of guys saying “would bang”, “would stick it up her poop chute”, “would tongue her ass”, why bother write 1000 words to legitimize the feeling. I’ve never seen women get graphic about their desires on a mainstream forum like that. It’s a bunch of frauy new age #blessed #lucky #datenight shit. But their fanfic is filthy, nasty shit, just as graphic as porn for men. And not surprisingly has just as much gay male sex and MMF threeways as straight porn had FFM and lesbian sex.

Channing Tatum quipped he’d run out of ideas for the Magic Mike series but he would leave it to fan fic writers to come up with some creative idea. Other writers, producers, actors also refer casually to fan fiction about their shows. It is a thing and a form of flattery really. Most of it is schlocky but there is some good stuff out there. Not all of it is written by women, even though most of it is. The biggest problem is that the same themes are done to death and fresh ideas become hard to find. Especially once shows have ended, there is only so far you can go and still retain interest in characters and plots that are no longer evolving. Some QAF writers wrote epics that took the characters decades into the future, creating new plots, characters and relationships along the way.

I want to write one about Corey Booker and Lindsey Graham, in which these two seemingly opposite stalwart public servants and judiciary committee foes discover sometimes, where there are sparks, there is SIZZLE.

Alas, I just don’t have the time. Perhaps a DL collective?

I’m sure someone has mentioned, those Fifty Shades books started as Harry Potter fan fiction! I know a woman who bragged to me that since graduating, she has read just one book. You got - Fifty Shades. Ugh.

Wasn’t there a movie based on a book that was essentially a GWTW fanfiction?

It's fascinating to see which shows develop fan fic followings. It's rarely shows that were huge hits in their day, but rather cult hits or shows like Queer As Folk (on my mind because R131 mentioned it) that have a very fanatical fan base.

In terms of sex, I know I was surprised to discover that the majority of people following and interacting with gay male porn stars on Twitter were female. Seems if you're an outcast type and want to appear cool, you develop a knowledge and appreciation of gay male porn stars.

Guess it beats having a gay BFF

[Quote] Other writers, producers, actors also refer casually to fan fiction about their shows. It is a thing and a form of flattery really.

There used to be a video of the Teen Wolf cast reading fanfic and most of them were confused. Naturally their fandom went nuts over it. So i don't think they always find it flattering.

^^nothing can ever surpass Dylan Sprouse reading twincest fanfiction about him & his brother Cole. He finds it, in his words, "hilarious" and "sweet".

I strongly suspect DL itself fulfills the same function as fanfic for a lot of the frauen, especially the relationship threads and a lot of the bottoming threads. The blowback against the nephew-type trolls and CMBYN smacks of it, the hysterical rationalization when the grotty reality of male sexuality punctures female romantic fantasies about men.

The main physical fallacy of m/m sex by frau fanfic is a total ignorance of refractory time. They have guys instantly hard again and cumming all night long, even men well into middle age. They are also obsessed with extensive finger penetration prep before anal intercourse. They often have men kneeing each other’s groins in a way that would probably be painful for testicles. Erections are usually portrayed as straight up against the abs. Descriptions of blow jobs are sometimes tortuous and humorous. They lack personal experience of male anatomy and physiology and experience, so they try to imagine it. Sometimes they get it right though and then it is very erotic. There is also a lack of understanding of what it means to be gay so many characters have frequent sex with both men and women, pretty much indiscriminately, without the slightest concern about it.

[quote] The main physical fallacy of m/m sex by frau fanfic is a total ignorance of refractory time. They have guys instantly hard again and cumming all night long, even men well into middle age. They are also obsessed with extensive finger penetration prep before anal intercourse. They often have men kneeing each other’s groins in a way that would probably be painful for testicles. Erections are usually portrayed as straight up against the abs.

True. If you think about it these female writers, unwitting or no, basically describe the fingerbanging and hard clit-rubbing of lesbian sex between two male bodies. In its own way that's sort of a fascinating conceit albeit inaccurate.

"Channing Tatum quipped he’d run out of ideas for the Magic Mike series but he would leave it to fan fic writers to come up with some creative idea." - R 131

Gay bareback onstage stripper gangbangs, of course.

I’ve never read a serious description and realistic on top of that about m/m sex. Really wanna meet those writers who get it right. R138

I was in SF/F fandom for a very long time until fanfiction took over, and my dislike of it was so strong I ended up disengaging from the community. Too many people were writing homophobic things, hassling the actual creators because they weren't "writing their stories right and had to be corrected," getting into fights with others in the same fandom because they disagreed over fanfic which had no hope of ever becoming canon, seeing real shitstains get elevated to "big name fan" status because of mediocre fanfic, etc.

There was no room for someone who wanted to appreciate the actual shows. In fact, one day I mentioned that I didn't care for some avatar altered to make a Firefly actor look half naked, and within two hours an entire 100-post thread full of people threatening me and calling me a "secret member of the Taliban" popped up on LiveJournal. Apparently the avatar was based on some "famous" fanfiction.

I have no idea where people on this thread go to find sane fanfiction fans.

Loser sport. Lazy bone types. Fats.

Their homes must be filthy hovels. These people don't get off their asses for anything besides surviving day to day.

[quote]you should beta for those fraus and teach them how to write men. They would love you for it.

Don't count it. I was in a Facebook writing group with those women and gave a mild critique about a male character looking and behaving more like a woman than any man and I was not only booted from the group but also attacked for months with attempts made to ban me from Facebook altogether.

The same woman who ran that group later got busted for plagiarizing multiple straight romance novels and simply changing the woman to a man. It was all over book-related websites and even got coverage in The Guardian.

Those women who write m/m are the worst. They claim to be gay allies but then will turn around and snarl that "we're writing for women so don't care what actual gay men think" and meanwhile many of them pass themselves off a gay men online which results in the regular exposing of their fraud every few months where everyone pretends to be shocked.

R145 Hahaha. I share your sentiment. I have a male friend who writes fanfiction in a fandom which consists largely of women and every time they think that what he writes is “inferior” to their works.

R146 What I found really funny/pathetic is that there is an m/m writer by the name of Josh Lanyon who has a huge following and wrote a book specifically to teach these women how to write like a gay man and was occasionally snotty in interviews about female m/m writers not being authentic and thus not as good as him. Naturally Josh was later exposed as a woman who was just masquerading as a gay man online in an effort to sell more books.

You'd think that would piss these women off but the bulk of them still deify the fraud. I guess they enjoy being lied to and told they're shit writers compared to "him".

R147 Didn’t know that, I’m not so updated with this all online fake male identity. But, at least this friend of mine writes more realistic m/m sex scenes and he’s male because I know it haha. But, again, he’s not so popular among this crowd. If I might add something about the girls....usually the ones more steady are part of the lbgt community or pro in real life as well not only “tumblr” friendly pro.

What puzzles me more than straight fanfic fraus is the lesbians who write gay male fanfiction, especially if the show, etc., they write for has a lesbian couple.

As for the frauds, it's straight fraus usually trying to pass of as gay fans or fanfic writers. But I've also seen them faking being lesbians. All that to 'legitimize' themselves in order to gain cachet and attention, and satisfy their egos.

It's not people in general, OP. It's women. That's how women deal with their fantasies. Men masturbate to porn. Women masturbate to other people's fanfiction, or write their own.

So if m/m is totally dnw then how about f/f? Aka yuri, aka 'girls' love', aka fanfiction about lesbian relationships & encounters?

Is it more acceptable writing when women "stay in they lane" and only write about women? There is some very good f/f out there...

R151 That’s a question for someone who actually reads those. From the beginning to the end.

I don't care about women writing m/m and I think lesbians should try to care less about straight men watching lesbian porn, as well.

It's the height of hypocrisy for certain types of "queer women" to shit on the lesbian porn that straight men watch, and then say that they have the right to compose m/m stories whether gay men like it or not, and if gay men dislike it, it's only because they're privileged, snotty misogynists (and yes, I have seen "queer women" make this argument, on metafilter for example).

One of the nice things about the Internet is that people can’t see you and judge you by skin color, looks, age, gender, etc. If you can’t tell if something is written by a female, then it is good enough. I don’t think people should deliberately try to pass themselves off as something they are not, though. That’s just lying.

I shouldn’t laugh at this but I do. A few years ago here on DL someone innocently asked “What is fanfiction?” and one of you cunts responded “It’s what fat girls do while they chew.”

"I have a male friend who writes fanfiction in a fandom which consists largely of women and every time they think that what he writes is “inferior” to their works. "

Every amateur writer thinks he's better than every other amateur writer, if not most of the pros!

And as for women writing gay male character and getting them all wrong... at the end of the day, no fan gets to tell another fan what to do, even if they're being an idiot. We can only hope that anyone who posts this shit on the internet is interested in improving their work and making it readable... but the fact is that some just aren't. And nobody can make them get more literate, more accurate, or more believable, if they don't value literacy, accuracy, and believability.

I read some microfanfiction (under 100 words) last night, some good, some trite, about the silent era: for me fanfiction is the internet text version of Tijuana Bibles.

LOL, R157. 90% of the M/M FF gals wouldn't even know what a Tijuana Bible is.

Poor research and a lack of accuracy really bother me a lot. Like nails on a chalkboard. And not just about the mechanics of sex or how people relate to one another. It can be mundane things. I remember reading a fanfic years ago where the characters went out to a fine French restaurant and then proceeded to order items off the menu that you would find at your local Applebees. It was clear that the author had never stepped foot in a high end restaurant in her life, much less a French one. When I gently suggested a few edits, she practically had a melt down. LOL.

They really botch up medical conditions and treatments too, which are common themes. Some of it is laughable, some just sad.

[Quote] A few years ago here on DL someone innocently asked “What is fanfiction?”

That lucky sweet summer child.

I used to work with a woman who wrote Brokeback Mountain fan fiction. She was hardcore--her series ran to hundreds of chapters. A thoroughly unpleasant woman, pedantic, abrasive and humorless, difficult to work with. I heard at one point she heard from Annie Proulx's lawyers and she just changed the names and soldiered on. I read some of her stuff on LiveJournal and it was as laughably over the top as I expected, but because of it, I assumed Brokeback was as mawkish and heavy handed as the fanfic it inspired so I didn't actually see the movie till years later. I was profoundly affected by it, but my experience was tempered by how it seemed to touch such a deep chord in so many unbalanced people, most of them straight women and young girls. I'd never heard of slash or m/m romance back then, don't know if it even existed as such in 2006.

I never told my coworker I was gay or that I knew she wrote fan fiction about gay men. She was a contractor with us and her contract wasn't renewed when it ended--her work was competent but no more than competent, and she she had so many conflicts on the job that we were just counting the days, really. Not surprisingly, she has popped up here on DL--I'm pretty sure it was her, I'd know that writing style anywhere, I read enough of her emails and of course, her immortal fiction.

Proulx has said that she got a lot of correspondence from people who had "fixed" BBM so that Jack and Ennis would end up together happily ever after. I think Anne Rice's hatred of it is OTT, but if she gets stuff like that from her fans, I kind of understand where she's coming from.

R152 from the hitcount it's clear that a good several hundred people have read the f/f story at the link. Perhaps it was a handful of people each reading it a hundred times over instead, but that seems much less likely.

Either way, there does seem to be readership for f/f - though interestingly a smaller one than for m/m. Why? Do fangirls/straight women/frauen/tortured internet writers really find females so uninteresting or despicable?

[quote]They are also obsessed with extensive finger penetration prep before anal intercourse.

I've noticed that in gay romance books I've read that have written by women. A bottom is fingered for four pages before he gets a dick in his ass. And what about those clipped declarations, such as, "Clothes. Off. Now."?

I read one that had some guy rimming Jack Twist and his tongue was so long he was somehow able to rim Jacks's prostate, which left me with a mental image of Gyllenhaal getting down with Gene Simmons.

I'm sure one can lay blame for much of the egregious material at the feet of otaku culture.

[quote]"Clothes. Off. Now."?

Hahaha! Love it.

I've read A LOT of bad fanfic. We should post some other cringy cliches. I'll start:

1. "He smelled like citrus and summer rain and something that was uniquely........him." (Every fanfic has a character who smells like himself. LOL)

2. The dark haired man was immediately smitten with the blond. (FFS, what's wrong with calling characters by their names?)

3. " I'm gonna fuck you so good you won't remember your own name" (This is popular in fanfic world-- people get amnesia after a good rogering).

4. "I was so overcome with passion I couldn't think, couldn't breathe". (Similar to above, lust often inspires a fit of asthma).

5. As we kissed passionately, his arms encircled my neck while he tenderly caressed my thighs (Huh? Always weird body the mechanics)

I don't think a lot of the authors understand how bodies fit together.

Probably helps if a female writer has had anal sex herself, but she still doesn’t have a prostate.

Neil Gaiman is cool with it.

[Quote] Either way, there does seem to be readership for f/f - though interestingly a smaller one than for m/m. Why? Do fangirls/straight women/frauen/tortured internet writers really find females so uninteresting or despicable?

The short answer to that is yes. White male ships are the in thing. And it's even better if the characters aren't gay.

R164 I honestly think that yuri pairs aren’t so popular for female writers. It’s always m/m/ yaoi/ whatever. I remember that once I met a Naruto fanboy, he was into the Sakura/Ino ship and wrote some fanfictions about it, whereas most of the girls were Naruto/Sasuke shippers.

I also was an avid manga reader in my teens ( didn’t go for a particular genre) and from what I could tell the yuri stories were on par with the hentai ones, basically just “jerk off” material. Meanwhile the yaoi ones had more plot development....but still the same “tropes”.

[quote] Yuri stories were on par with the hentai ones, basically just “jerk off” material. Meanwhile the yaoi ones had more plot development....but still the same “tropes”.

R173 speaks sad truth. Lesbians or w/w are just systematically used and abused by all & sundry as masturbation dolls, and little more. Even in fiction.

^^^not really, I've seen enough "lesbian" porn aimed at straight men and read enough airplane novels with a "lesbian" storyline inserted for pruroent thrills to say confidently they bear no resemblance to non-quotation marks lesbians.

R175 Except I was talking more about mangas, not novels. Never read those.

Another constant example of M/M sex written as het sex: they always write the top fucking the bottom, the bottom hard af fuck the entire time & coming, then the bottom lying there in sated awe gazing up at the top as the top starts fucking hard in order to finish off as well.

Ladies: getting fucked in the ass HURTS after you come. Men don't have a glow-y turned-on afterglow. Get the fuck out of my ass. It's an instant off switch.

In het sex, the height of being a good lover and romanticism is the man making the woman come first. So, they're writing that for M/M anal -- which is the exact opposite. Come first, top! Often a bottom isn't even hard goddamn!

"A bottom is fingered for four pages before he gets a dick in his ass" R165 i love you lol

Mainstream TV writing has the same issue when it comes to gay m/m sex, though. It's all just two guys thrusting and fondling with no mechanics, and no shrieks of pain or uncomfortable moments either. I think some of these replies try to scapegoat ff-fangurls for the poor writing of straight Mad Men.

Maybe there'd be fewer shrieks of pain if we DID finger bang for fours first hmm?

OP Fanfiction is for fat as fatty fraus with no lives nor friends nor will that change. Just see any of the horror fan threads here for people we care little about for examples, (the Sam hueagueeuehan one is best for mental fraus being frau

It's crap.

I have to wonder with the success of people like EL James, Cassandra Clare, and the current real life publishing trend of no one getting published unless they're already famous, maybe it's not a bad idea. You could do what James and Clare did, use existing fandom characters, write whatever the hell you want and call it AU. I could use my own plots to write a story with characters named Harry, Hermoine and Draco if it gets me enough attention for a book deal.

R183 That's pretty much what they do.

I was obsessed with fanfiction as a teenager and wrote some bad stories myself. Now that I'm in my 30s, I'd rather read actual books.

[quote] seen "lesbian" porn aimed at straight men and read enough airplane novels with a "lesbian" storyline inserted for prurient thrills to say confidently they bear no resemblance to non-quotation marks lesbians.

That's the rub, really.

When confronted with it straight men probably wouldn't find it at all sexy to watch real-life crunchy-granola lesbian trysts, and by the same token straight women would probably see two average non-'bishonen' gay men rutting and sweating away as a horrorshow.

A large portion of fanfiction - particularly the fare written by tweens and teens - is all about the softcore sparkly fantasia element where you get to erotically conjure and play with not just one desire object, but two (often with one character subconsciously written in to act as an author-avatar). In many stories t's the same psychology at work as the drive that kids get to pay pretend with Barbie & Ken or My Little Pony.

However, that's not the only impetus. I think another attraction for fic writers is a sense of closure or completion, writing or rewriting scenarios in ways that assuage some real-life anxieties projected or otherwise. For example I had a 26-year-old college roommate who wrote stories about the continuing adventures of a particular musical theater cast she loved, because she struggled to accept that the friendships between this cast had such a short life (as is the case in the performing arts). Some part of her wanted to believe that this cast stayed in touch and stayed close friends in spite of the challenges of their industry, and so wrote sweet dialogue-heavy fanfic about this very thing to cheer herself up. She didn't really have many friends herself hence using them as a stand-in, and I also suspected he secretly wanted a job/life centred around performing arts like the people she wrote about. I saw it as quite harmless and in some ways quite a cute creative way to deal with her inner loneliness and dissatisfaction. I hope she's ok.

Interesting analysis, R186

But, all of them are like that. Some have also high profile jobs and writing is just a form of escapism.

[Quote] I think another attraction for fic writers is a sense of closure or completion, writing or rewriting scenarios in ways that assuage some real-life anxieties projected or otherwise.

Accurate.

Fan fiction springs from the whole "what if" notion that you can change the outcome, or you can keep the characters 'story alive beyond what a movie or a popular novel presents. I've seen websites for characters from Lord of the Rings, or Brokeback Mountain, or Twilight, or for fantasies about popular celebrities. People who wrote stories about Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp getting it on after hours on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean. Most of it is poorly written but some of these people get famous in their own little universe.

[Quote] Fan fiction springs from the whole "what if" notion that you can change the outcome

It cracks me up when some fans get the fanfic they've read mixed up with actual canon.

[Quote] Most of it is poorly written but some of these people get famous in their own little universe.

Which isn't always a good thing. BNFs continue to baffle me.

I love writing and reading fanfiction. Such a cool creative outlet. The best I've ever read was a Harry Potter story taking place at Hogwarts while Harry, Ron, and Hermoine were off destroying the Horcruxes.

I have written about Pokemon, Eragon, and right now am working on the Inheritance Trilogy by NK. Jemisin.

The fanfiction community is extremely supportive and positive

R192, do you post on Live Journal? Or maybe there is no Live Journal anymore. LOL! That's where they used to hang out. A lot of them use fanfiction as a writing exercise and then eventually publish.

[Quote] do you post on Live Journal? Or maybe there is no Live Journal anymore. LOL! That's where they used to hang out. A lot of them use fanfiction as a writing exercise and then eventually publish.

Lol i don't think Live Journal is really a thing anymore. Unless you like ONTD. For fanfic, Archive Of Our Own is the popular choice.

I actually use fanfiction.net. Archive of our own is generally more for sexual works (though definitely not for that exclusively)

R193 LiveJournal fic writers recently migrated over to DreamWidth en masse.

R196 How recent??

I used to enjoy prowling around Live Journal. Someone told me it was run by Russians and it often went down and was hard to log in to so I lost interest. This was a few years ago. Maybe 5 or 6 years ago. Maybe longer.

[Quote] Someone told me it was run by Russians

I've heard that too.

Thanks to an earnest fanboy-weirdo of my acquaintance, TIL of....Poké-p h ilia.

Yes, it is what you think and yes it is real. And yes, there's fic up to and including Ash Ketchum mpreg; there is no taboo about writing either a human & Pokémon or two Pokémon of different species in congress. Guess "you teach me and I'll teach you" covered carnal knowledge as well as all that noise about friendship or whatever.

Further to this it may interest DL to know ripped Mewtwo is considered an exclusive Dom Top. Have at it, gang.

What

[Quote] And yes, there's fic up to and including Ash Ketchum mpreg

We should do a DL Christmas exchange with Yuletide letters specifying what kind of threads we want made for us (instead of fics) - someone makes you a thread about something you're interested in (a 'fandom') and with the kind of topic/theme you like ('preferences') and you make one for them in return. It's sweet.

Here's mine as an example....

Thread preferences: I prefer gen friendship, ideally slash & femslash. No het please. I also prefer if a thread has some juicy intricate plotting and/or characterisation/character study as well as just gratuitous porn...

Preferred tropes/devices/narratives: Epistolary style, slice-of-life, post-canon/future focus, unreliable narrators, second or third-person POV, slow-build/burn, master-planning & thwarted schemes, snarky dialogue, worldbuilding (canon-compliance/shootfabe if not AU), magical realist or supernatural elements, existential questions, falling in love (especially pining or reluctant), a few certain specific dark themes (pretty much exclusively spooky demonic stuff, gore & in-cest), anything that passes the Bechdel test, bittersweet or ambiguous endings, anything with dogs in it, making fun of Ts and Anteefas, Dark Lesbians.

Dislikes & squicks: domesticity (I find it boring), crack (I find it silly), first-person POV or narrative shift (confusing), songfic (blah), monologues, Mary Sue/Marty Stu charas (no Timotee or anyone like him), 'fix-Its', alternate timelines (I gave up Marvel comics for a reason), genre AU unless otherwise specified, abuse or kink themes unless otherwise specified (especially but not limited to scat, torture, bestiality, rape statutory or otherwise, abuse of animals or children), happy endings (either kind), gratuitous porn (ikr, what am I even still doing here), anything with even a hint of re ichw inging or homophobia or misogyny (so, Ts n' Anteefas).

Fandoms: classical musicians, 20th/21st C. European theatre (inc. musicals and pro-wrestling), modernist poetry, 80s-00s pop/indie music, teen or underground/cult movies of the 70s-80s, podcast radio, cult cartoons (think Peanuts, Adult Swim fare or vintage Hanna-Barbera/Looney Tunes), paganry.

Thanks in advance, and happy Yule!

But no one takes umbrage at the idea of male writers creating female characters, and pretending to know what they’re about.

The obsession is that these people figured out that if they can't interfere in the lives of actors, they can interfere in the lives of their fictional characters by rewriting their stories.

I just don’t think I could read any fan fiction. There’s something inherently pathetic and creepy about it.

[quote]But no one takes umbrage at the idea of male writers creating female characters, and pretending to know what they’re about.

Exactl! I said as much upthread. Women have had to deal with males interpreting them for centuries. They weren't even allowed to write our own stories until a few hundred years ago.

And gay men getting all huffy that women are telling 'their' stories. Get over it. Gay men have dominated and controlled the female fashion, hair and make up industry forever. Why? It has nothing to do with you.

R203 um

Fanfic also fills in the gaps left behind by movies or tv shows.

I confess I like Avengers fanfic. Guilty pleasure, though I don’t read as much these days. Fic writers can conjure up all sorts of delightful scenarios they’d NEVER include in the Marvel movies. Readers LOVE to read about Avengers going for coffee, having spats in the common room, working out at the gym. Romance is pretty much ignored in the other formats. Fanfic fills that desire.

Yes, it is largely a woman’s art form and often a young woman ‘s at that. Hence, like boy bands, it gets degraded and devalued by the culture at large.

How DARE young women explore creative writing in a way that is free and harmless to others! How DARE they be beginners. Would you show them more respect if you knew many were college students or already have graduate degrees? Of course they must be fat and unlovable if they express themselves in fanfic and their dreams and their fantasies all to a willing and enthusiastic audience.

The critique of fanfic on this thread is banal, misogynistic, and lacking in both imagination and compassion.

An History.....

[quote] First there were zines, lovingly mimeographed and stapled by our fandom foreparents, and those who remain to us from the Zine Age are powerful and wise. Then there was Usenet, where formatting went to die. You know not the strength it takes to read 60k fics entirely in Courier New, or the pleasure of a really artistic looking section break marker composed of ASCII characters. Then there was the Great Schism, as fandoms spread far and wide across the Web, and basic HTML was the whole of the law. Many of us lied our way into private “18+” listservs, and roamed the webrings, lamps aloft, in search of one virtuous author (or at least somebody else who shipped the thing). From this dark age rose FF.net, that pit of voles from whose bourn many a hungry reader has returned, starved for citrus and heartsick from the cutesy author notes. And FF.net begat Livejournal, which allowed easy archiving, threaded comments, flocked posts and invite-only communities. And it was Livejournal, in its death throes, that begat AO3, which once seemed like only a utopian vision and now bestrides the world like a Colossus....

You can't unsee that shipper shit. RUN RUN.

.........where have all of you come from and why are you infesting Datalounge

There you have it, the last dozen or so posts, all laid out and waiting to be spun into someone's Psych PhD thesis.

Oh, and girls? If you're serious about "honing your writing skills" and not just really looking to get off, part of being a writer is inventing your OWN characters and doing your OWN research. Real writers, yes, that's right, REAL writers have every right to sik their publisher's lawyers on you for coopting their hard work, so YOU get over it.

Oh go fuck yourself R213. Best selling novels like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and many others borrow centuries worth of folklore and tropes from older books. And don't even get me started on historical fiction. Your argument is ludicrous.

Bravo @ R214.

R214 R215 your ignorance of writing as a craft shows. The point isn't about being inspired by other stories/characters/history. The point is in the craft of the writing itself; write a fic about Aragorn & Legolas, and your readers come in already loving/knowing/being invested in your characters.

That saves a LOT of work as an author.

Write a story about Mr.X & Mr.Z and you're in a whole other ballgame of writing skill required to get your readers to understand/care about your story from scratch.

The fact that you don't even realize that perfectly illustrates the level of writing skill (low) that fanfic requires and hones.

If you you can't see the difference between writing classical and religious allegory and wholesale theft of someone's contemporary work, it's small wonder you can't make it as a writer, R214.

Also, putting your Daniel Radcliffe/Rupert Grint RP mpreg in the same category with Tolkien, LMAO.

Seriously. This whole fucking site has been infested with fanfic writers looking for gay sex/love/life info and fandom obsessives looking for 'authentic' gay mens' opinions on Timotay/Shawn/Matt/whoever (but it's just them talking in the threads)

Go away ladies. PLEASE. You're ruining what you sought!

Bravo R217

Lol you people have no idea what your talking about. First of all, most fanfiction has no sexual content whatsoever. Many of them feature original characters and almost all feature events not portrayed in any version of the source material.

And most novels don't feature any kind of complex world building. The most common setting among novels by far is mundane present day earth. So your bit about it somehow being an essential part of the author's process is just nonsense. Crafting a compelling narrative and well fleshed out characters is what makes good story telling.

^^ mmhm and "well fleshed out characters" are EXACTLY what these amateur "writers" are stealing.

You're embarrassing yourself not even understanding what world-building means lol. Hint: it doesn't mean a fantasy sci-fi setting.

When I finished watching a 6 season series, I missed the characters and their stories. I found fanfiction (by the thousands) and read some of various varieties. Most were trite, but harmless; a few were scary bad; and some were quite entertaining and even well written. I picked a few prolific writers and read a lot of theirs. Eventually, though, pretty much every possibility had been done and it got very repetitive, so I finallylet goof my obsession.

Ladies, ladies, your honor is easily saved: just go sit down and write an original story with original characters in your own original setting, then come back and tell us how it wasn't any harder to write than fanfic. Debate solved!

Once a long fanfic based on OZ that was guaranteed to be written by a gay man was recommended on this site. I had never watched the show, but I read the fic and enjoyed it and got a pretty good feel for the show. Sorry, but I lost the link.

[quote] Today, world-building is most often used to describe a component of a work of fiction, much like plot or character; unlike the word setting, world-building emphasizes that the world being created is entirely new. For this reason, it's typically associated with fantasy and science fiction

R221 Again, you have no idea what you're talking about, on writing novels or writing fanfiction. You clearly don't read either and are talking out of your ass

I have fan daydreams...like Dexter moved to D.C. and started killing Republicans...like Sarah Huckelbee Sanders and Mitch McConnell.

Most people who write fanfiction seriously (2+ stories, 5000+ words) also write original fiction. But all writing helps improve your skills and it's way easier to get people online to read your fanfiction than random original work. There's already a fan base for it

R225 Okay

You people who think writing fanfiction is weird or unhealthy or another form of stalking have no idea what you're talking about.

Most fanfic writers are obese, dumpy, ugly, semi unemployed frau hamplanets who fetishize gay men. They are homophobes, not allies. They need to be ridiculed, called out, and harassed wherever they write.

I once doxxed a Supernatural slashfic hamplanet no talent hack, and she got human excrement through the mail. Her husband found out and now they're separating because of all the gay shit they found on her computer.

Given a choice between hanging out with a fat loser obsessive fan-fiction writing frau and hanging out with R230, I'd delightedly spend an evening with the fan-fiction nutter and invite her home for coffee!

I wrote fanfiction for years, from the age of about 15. I don’t place one above the other, but my experience is that original fiction is much more difficult to write than fanfiction, because you are required to do much more, both imaginatively and technically.

The three primary requirements of original fiction absent from fanfiction are: firstly, the ideas work, creating original characters, dynamics and setting. Secondly, the technical mechanics of exposition, how to give information about what you have created to the reader. Lastly, investing the reader in what you have created, how to make the reader care about these characters, the world and its stakes. In fanfiction, those steps are skipped: The characters are pre-existing, foundational exposition is not required, and the reader comes to the story already invested in the characters and what is going to happen to them.

When I first started writing original fiction, I was frustrated by the way that I felt that what I was producing was at a much lower level than my fanfiction. I came to understand it this way: every writer has a finite amount of things that they are capable of doing in a story. If you are capable of doing five things, and then you lay them on top of the 21 things that J.K. Rowling did in Harry Potter, you have a story with 26 things in it. Or to put it another way, Rowling’s groundwork frees the fanfiction writer to use their skills enlarging or improving her world, rather than expending those skills simply building it. In the past I had frequently read fanfiction and thought, ‘This is better than the original!’ It was humbling to learn why that could seem to be the case, and to face my blank first page and realise that this was going to be a story of only five things, unless I started learning how to do more.

^^blocked and downvoted. Shameless self promotion from fat sow frau. Fuck off back to Tumblr, cunt.

[quote]R218 Go away ladies. PLEASE. You're ruining what you sought!

Oh shut the fuck update, you hissy queen.

Women are welcome here....just read around them if you don’t like it.

uh R233 i don't think CS Pacat herself fucking posted here. that's an excerpt from the linked interview.

R233 is in a hyper tizzy and cannot grasp details

"BLOCKED and DOWNVOTED!!1!" Lol someone's defensive about what a former fanfic writer turned actual published original author has to say lmfao

R168 " He wrapped his arms around my neck while caressing my thighs ". Lol, maybe one of them is Gumby.

[quote]I read on TV Tropes that people were sharing or selling fan fic at Star Trek conventions in the early 70s.

This sort of reminds me of another pre-internet fan phenom: the old "Mary Tyler Moore Masturbation Society" newsletter.

R216 is so pure in her disdain for any art that is not 100% original that she never visits museums, never listens to music or goes to plays or movies based on ANY book (or comic book). Poor thing only allows herself to enjoy art that was created by monks living alone in dark, soundless echo chambers.

[Quote] . First of all, most fanfiction has no sexual content whatsoever. Many of them feature original characters and almost all feature events not portrayed in any version of the source material.

[Quote] And most novels don't feature any kind of complex world building.

If there was ever a thread for which that tired old "Sure, Jan" gif was tailor-made, this is it. This is what pure delusion looks like: E. L. "Fifty Scents of Turd" James arguing that her Twilight ripoff is no different from Tom Stoppard adapting Anna Karenina for the screen. If fan fiction is some kind of farm team for the publishing big leagues, how come it's generated no legit writers? I can think of one, Neil Gaiman, who has copped to writing fanfic. The rest are just writing crap like The Princess Diaries and 50 Flavors of Pigshit. Their roots show. They might enjoy some success amongst teenage girls but no one is ever going to confuse them with Thomas Pynchon or James Salter. If they could write at that level, they wouldn't be wasting their energy on a ninety-chapter saga of Legolas getting on with Aragorn. If you really want to "hone your skills," you hone them on the Greats (Gaiman at least did Sherlock Holmes and HP Lovecraft.

Im not saying there's no good fan fiction out there, but I have only read one that I'd pay to read the author's othet work. It was a Brokeback Mountain fanfic, but what made it good was that he (I repeat, HE) basically wrote a prequel to the story, half from the point of view of the 2 ranchers who Ennis talks about when he relatee the story of the homophobic murder of one of them, and half from the point of view of Ennis's father, and how the events came together. The development of the men's relationship and the dynamic between the group of boyhood buddies who commit the murder is very well done--the writer I believe came from an agricultural background and it showed. He didn't try to imitate Proulx's style, a wise choice given how many writers honing their skills massacred it with hilarious results. I suspected he was a professional writer using the medium to try out a scenario he was working on, but he was about the only one I thought that of.

Calm your tits, R242. No one said fan fics were great works of literature. Only that some of us enjoy reading them. But that gets 'some' people's panties in a wad. Why I can't guess, when it's easy enough to avoid them. Most people don't even know fanfic exists.

Agreed that 50 Shades of Shit is dreck. No argument there. And as long as it stayed on the internet fan sites where it belonged, I wouldn't care. But it was outright plagiarism and that fool "author" made millions selling it like it was her original work.

R232, thanks for linking that interview. It does a good job of explaining the difference.

I used to read fanfic for a TV show. Most of it was really bad writing. But occasionally there would be some people with writing talent. I was always amazed by the good writers who put out novel length works. Why are they putting so much time and energy into fanfic when they could write their own original work? But it makes sense when it's easier. I agree with Neil Gaiman who said that writing fanfic was like using training wheels. Eventually, writers need to develop their own work, but fanfic can be helpful in their learning process.

I think the only fiction writing skills fanfic could help you hone would be dialogue writing skills? I mean like that interview said, there's a lot that's already been done for you when you're copying existing characters for an audience who's already invested in them.

[quote]there's a lot that's already been done for you when you're copying existing characters for an audience who's already invested in them

True. These amateurs wouldn't have a platform at all if not for wildly popular shows/books with established canon. It's a shortcut to they use to gain followers. I've been on fanfic forums where the authors advertise heavily to get you to read their own original work. No thanks, I'm only here for the world and characters the original author/movie created. I'm not interested in your dopey original fics about puppies and unicorns. ZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Listen, I have zero problem with people writing fanfic for fun or for porn. Just stop writing these pseudo-PhD dissertation Tumblr screeds insisting fanfic is highly respectable literature written by people who are healthy, happy, and living fulfilled lives.

[quote]highly respectable literature written by people who are healthy, happy, and living fulfilled lives.

LOL! How many legit authors do you suppose this describes?

Plath, Woolf, Hemingway, Twain, Fitzgerald, Williams, Rice, Dickinson, Rowling, Kafka, Pound, Nietzsche, Sexton. Need I go on? There are lots more. In fact, I would bet there are many more famous authors who have suffered from mental illness and/or addiction than those who lived "healthy, happy and fulfilled lives".

Yes of course, R248, Plath, Woolf, Hemingway, Twain, Fitzgerald, Williams, Rice, Dickinson, Rowling, Kafka, Pound, Nietzsche, Sexton are no better than any fanfic writer.

^not getting it

[Quote] If fan fiction is some kind of farm team for the publishing big leagues, how come it's generated no legit writers?

I've seen some writers basically delete all their fanfic once they decide to go pro. And it's funny because alot of them are the same ones who say there's nothing embarrassing about it.

[Quote] Most people don't even know fanfic exists.

That's somewhat true. I remember seeing an article on Cosmo while ago talking about CWS and how that links in with shipping/fanfic. Of course they had to mention Larry lol.

[Quote] These amateurs wouldn't have a platform at all if not for wildly popular shows/books with established canon.

They don't even need canon. That's what fuels the majority of it. Because they're not satisfied with what/how the story happened.

[quote]They don't even need canon

Well, they need it as a jumping off point and to co-opt the characters/world from the original source material.

I don't get it either. I mean, if you're going to go to all the trouble of writing a story, why not do your own story and maybe you can sell it and be profitable. Or at least take a public domain story and twist it and make a name for yourself with it.

[quote]I've seen some writers basically delete all their fanfic once they decide to go pro. And it's funny because alot of them are the same ones who say there's nothing embarrassing about it.

Well, I think a lot of their early fanfic is embarassing. Cassandra Clare/Claire started writing with really bad Harry Potter and LOTR fanfic. I vaguely remember reading the LOTR fanfic because it was so popular, but I thought it was complete trash (Legolas going on and on about being the gayest member of the fellowship). To be fair, I would be embarrassed by any writing that I did when I was 15 years old.

[quote]I don't get it either. I mean, if you're going to go to all the trouble of writing a story, why not do your own story and maybe you can sell it and be profitable. Or at least take a public domain story and twist it and make a name for yourself with it.

Fanfic has a built-in fanbase. It's much harder to get people to notice your original story. Fanfic can get you lots of readers and gratification from other fans saying how good your writing is (even if it is trash).

[quote] Or at least take a public domain story and twist it and make a name for yourself with it.

This is why the argument against fan fiction is so completely nonsensical. There is zero creative difference between writing novels on Robin Hood or King Arthur, novels like Wicked, or any kind of historical fiction from any era, and writing fan fiction.

The ONLY difference is whether the story is in public domain and thus whether you can monetize your writing in a novel, or can't due to copyrights and have to leave it free online.

Novels generally turn out to be better quality than fanfiction, but that's solely because you have to find a publisher for a novel and that filters out the truly bad stuff. But I've read many works of fan fiction that could easily meet publishing standards if it came to it.

Most of you have this idea of a fanfiction writer in your heads, don't like that person, and so are making these incredibly dumb arguments to try and back fill logic to your judgments.

[Quote] Cassandra Clare/Claire started writing with really bad Harry Potter and LOTR fanfic.

I never read her fanfics or The Mortal Instruments books. But she sounds like a total asshole and has a very punchable face.

^^^ Exactly my point. This has nothing to do with fan fiction. The people shitting on it have never read any

It seems like a fairly innocuous pastime.

One of the best modern stories I've read was some Harry Potter fan fiction. It was about the events of book 7, but from the perspective of the kids that went back to Hogwarts (Ginny Weasley, Neville Longbottom, etc) instead of Harry, Ron, and Ginny. The story was about them reforming Dubledore's army and fomenting a rebellion against Snape and the other Death Eater staff.

Plot and dialogue were all completely original. And the author added a lot of elements to JK Rowlings universe. In the story, old cultural folk magic could go around the academic magic wizards were taught in schools

I count it alongside those people who post endless sameface fanart in online galleries like DevArt, or write up their own character bios & designs for extant games all over tumblr, or do awful song covers on YouTube in the style of Ed Sheeran or some other blah singer, or go to cons or forums and RP/cosplay characters they like. For the most part it's all harmless fun, sort of like kids' playtime only for adults - and who says adults can't play?

It's goofy and it's not a ticket to ride anywhere, but if you're someone who's pearl-clutching because a kid or a student chooses to waste her own time writing a 5k ao3 story about LOTR - just for fun and for her friends to giggle over? Maybe you're the one who needs to get a life and not her, or at least try and incorporate a little imagination into the one you've got; people RP/enact fantasy scenarios in their own bedrooms and in porno all the time...

The only gray-area is RPF (real person fiction, usually about famous or known people), and there's an argument to say even that is harmless in some cases i.e. when the subject of an RPF is historical/long-dead (essentially public domain) or when it is known that the subject is extremely unlikely to ever read or access the RPF (such as when they don't read or speak the English required to read said fic). Again, we have to tread a fine line between mocking something crass or silly and coming down on someone for using their imagination freely. You can't censor what people want to put on paper.

Star Magazine is largely real person fan fiction and I don't see anyone complaining about that.

Fiction is freedom. - Ursula LeGuin

[quote]I've seen some writers basically delete all their fanfic once they decide to go pro. And it's funny because alot of them are the same ones who say there's nothing embarrassing about it.

Assumptions again. They don't delete it because they're embarrassed, they delete it because they want you to PAY them to read it once they start publishing. It's no longer free. I can remember a few favorites I went back to read only to find a link to a paid site.

Remember when fans of RPS fic would mock-up trailers for fake movie-adaptations of their favorite stories? So '06.

Ohh Bill and Tom...good memories hahahaha.

[quote]Poor research and a lack of accuracy really bother me a lot. Like nails on a chalkboard. And not just about the mechanics of sex or how people relate to one another. It can be mundane things. I remember reading a fanfic years ago where the characters went out to a fine French restaurant and then proceeded to order items off the menu that you would find at your local Applebees. It was clear that the author had never stepped foot in a high end restaurant in her life, much less a French one. When I gently suggested a few edits, she practically had a melt down. LOL.

Those are the things that bug me about fanfics.

[Quote] The only gray-area is RPF (real person fiction, usually about famous or known people), and there's an argument to say even that is harmless in some cases i.e. when the subject of an RPF is historical/long-dead (essentially public domain) or when it is known that the subject is extremely unlikely to ever read or access the RPF (such as when they don't read or speak the English required to read said fic).

Fanfiction can be fun to read and write, especially when you're disappointed in the "official" writing for the show. I used to write fanfics for a few soap operas, when often the writing for the show was so bad that it was easy to improve upon. Satire was an especially fun genre when writing ridiculous soap storylines. But for a fanfic to be good -- or at least passable -- one must stay true to the characters and their voices. I've never gotten into the "AU" fics where they take characters from the show and place them in a different era and/or country, etc. Also, I've never been able to stomach any fanfiction about real people. That creeps me out.

[Quote] But for a fanfic to be good -- or at least passable -- one must stay true to the characters and their voices. I've never gotten into the "AU" fics where they take characters from the show and place them in a different era and/or country, etc.

AU fics are the most popular.

R269 Seriously? Ugh. I'm reminded of all the Sansa-Hound fanfics on Archive of Our Own in which Sansa is a naive girl from a small town in Indiana who has moved to the Big Apple to work for a magazine, and Sandor is her gruff building maintenance guy, etc. PUKE.

R270 as far as staying true to the characters goes....Which is why i haven't read a fanfic in ages.

One of my coworkers (a lesbian) told me in great detail about her obsession with “Stranger Things” fanfiction, specifically about the Eleven/Mike pairing. She even hated the gayling character Will because lots of people ‘ship’ him with Mike and it spoiled her ship. I’m not sure if she reads or writes sexual stuff. considering the characters are CHILDREN, but it definitely creeped me out and she just openly brought it up and discussed it with anyone. I left that job and last I heard she was fired not soon after, which I’m not surprised about. She was a loon.

r42 is so much cringe.

Someone I used to work with put me on to fanfic of the "Brokeback Mountain" genre and, um, it was awfully awful, even as a time-waster at work.

Bad writing, no ear for dialogue, no sense of a story arc, not much in the way of plot development except for thinking about fucking, working up to fucking, fucking, and then back to thinking about the fucking they'd just had as seen in the rearview mirror. It was soooooo tedious it could almost put you off fucking for good.

Annie Proulx laid it all out in what, 36 pages of big print? Some of the people writing (mostly on Wordpress as I recall) were up to 40 chapters in their magnum opuses.

[Quote] One of my coworkers (a lesbian) told me in great detail about her obsession with “Stranger Things” fanfiction, specifically about the Eleven/Mike pairing.

How does that even come up? lol. Fanfic should be treated like Fight Club, you just don't talk about it.

I write lesbian fanfiction for "Grace & Frankie."

I cannot think of fanfiction ever again without thinking of "My Immortal," the hilarious ongoing serial fanfiction someone kept posting to Harry Potter fanfiction pages. It involves a goth girl (supposedly the author) named Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way who goes to Hogwarts, which has for some reason turned into Goth Central. When she's not having sex with Draco and Harry (who has renamed himself Vampire) or painting their fingernails black, she's playing in her rock band Bloody Gothic Rose 666, which also features Harry/Vampire, Draco, Hermione (who now calls herself B'loody Mary Smith), Ron (who calls himself Diabolo), and Hagrid. Misspellings, cutting, and the bands Good Charlotte, Slipknot, and My Chemical Romance feature heavily into it.

It breaks every rule of fanfiction and gets consistently more hilarious as it goes.

R277 Wow. That's so awful it's almost good, in a really bad way.

R277 That fic killed me 😂 Truly a classic.

R275 I don’t know! I think it first came up because we were talking about Netflix shows, and once she learned I’d watched the show and enjoyed it she took it upon herself to unload all her weirdness. But it seemed like most people she interacted with knew she was a weirdo and just listened politely when she’d announce things like, “I just read a really good fic on my lunch break!” Or “I’m waiting for this one fic to update!” It was truly bizarre. To be clear, I don’t think fanfic in itself is necessarily weird, but her level of obsession and frankness about it in a workplace setting was disconcerting.

Unless someone said they were fans of a specific ship. I wouldn't mention fanfic at all.