Because fandom is the province of young women and, culturally, we find young women terrifying. Previous entry: Canon, fanon, shipping and more: a glossary of the tricky terminology that makes up fan culture.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Why we're terrified of fanfiction.
Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Beatles fans in Indiana. Getty Images This article is part of a series on fan culture and its many related topics.
A new "fandom is broken" article and the ensuing avalanche of responses is only the latest iteration of a familiar cycle Most recently, Birth Movies Death editor Devin Faraci declared that " fandom is broken. All of these arguments are very familiar. To wit: Fandom is a mass of lightsaber-clutching nerds camping out all night on the sidewalk to buy movie tickets, and fundamentally either sophomoric or solipsistic.
All fanfiction is slash , and all slash is pornographic. All slash is by straight teenage girls. No, all slash is by middle-aged gay men. Or, worst of all, fandom is a group of oversexed teenaged girls writing porny and borderline illiterate fanfiction, which is wrong for moral , aesthetic, and legal reasons.
And the fan counterpoints: Some fans are curative , which means they're into knowing all the trivia about a given piece of media or canon and discussing it in minute detail. Some are transformative , which means they're into writing fanfiction or drawing fan art and making fan vids.
Some are into both! Fandom is not a monolith. Fanfiction writers are mostly women. Writers for the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own are mostly but not overwhelmingly just out of college ; other sites, like Wattpad, skew younger.
There has been lots of respected literary fanfiction. That fandom mostly comprised women, she wrote: Male fans of the show generally balk at the restriction and prefer to engage in activities such as costuming or crafts, for which payment is not a traditional reward.
Elizabeth Minkel, for instance, expanded it for t he New Statesman : My preferred explanation is the idea that the vast majority of what we watch is from the male perspective — authored, directed, and filmed by men, and mostly straight white men at that.
Why are we so afraid of fandoms? Media for young women has long been considered a threat To some, feminine media has always been considered gross and dangerous, going back as far the novel.
In , an anonymous pastor pronounced it the greatest threat in the world to young women: I have seen a young lady with her table loaded with volumes loaded of fictitious trash, poring day after day and night after night over highly wrought scenes and skillfully portrayed pictures of romance, until her cheeks grew pale, her eyes became wild and reckless, and her mind wandered and was lost — the light of intelligence passed behind a cloud, and her soul was forever benighted.
When presented with slash fic, Dan Bergstein writes , you can do only five things: One: Giggles. Two: Gently whisper "No" to an empty room. Three: Solemnly shake your head at humanity. Four: Stare out the window as you try to make sense of it all. Five: Send links to all of your friends. They make their fan works anyway: We all wrestle with feelings and we can recognise them in stories when we see them.
I have pale white skin. Workshopping with a larger community, which might be an alien experience for many entering my department, is almost a daily routine for me by now. We found that not only were fan fiction authors writing original fiction; they also learned life lessons, becoming more tolerant and willing to help others. When I started writing fan fiction at age 13, I was a queer, autistic middle schooler who had not yet realized that she was either of these things.
I had difficulty with many of the social situations that came naturally to others my age, and I became isolated from my peers at school. Fan fiction communities were a vital social outlet for me. That definitely had an impact on who I am. We expected to find traditional mentorship pairs, with an older or more experienced author serving as a beta reader for a younger or less experienced one. What we found was different.
Millions of authors and readers communicate via multiple channels—including Skype, official beta reader groups, fan fiction user groups, and other messaging and social-media platforms, as well as story reviews. Many authors feel encouraged as well as educated by their reviewers. As one young person told us:. Luckily I had people to push me up and advise me to turn me into the author I am today, so I found it really important to do exactly the same for her.
One key attribute of distributed mentoring is its abundance. Authors who have written both traditionally published work and fan fiction have noted that they may get more feedback in a week on their fanfics than they receive in years on their original fiction.
It is a difference not only of degree, but also of kind. We believe distributed mentoring could be used to help improve formal writing education in schools.
Research has shown that writing skills can improve significantly during adolescence, and the popularity of writing fan fiction in that age group shows what an opportunity there is to use it as a learning tool. Students with similar interests from school districts across the country could be connected with one another to get and give anonymous or pseudonymous feedback on their writing. Teachers could moderate the channels to ensure that feedback was constructive, as well as helping students learn from it.
If this work grew burdensome for teachers, hierarchical moderation could help. In other words, members could report negative or abusive comments, and volunteer moderators from among the students could decide which ones to delete, with teachers weighing in only when necessary. This technique is used in many large online communities, and many adolescents are familiar with it.
This vast and vibrant resource for kids who have something to say is especially meaningful to me when I contrast it with the isolation I encountered growing up.
Fan fiction is a private universe that has become a welcoming community, particularly for those from marginalized groups. In it, young people are mentoring each other to become skillful writers and thoughtful readers—and they are doing it entirely on their own time and their own terms. Adults would do well to listen to and learn from them. You should add another one: 6. If your fanfiction is about an anime, make sure to add random Japanese words to impress readers with your vast knowledge of the language.
Such words include: kawaii, onegai, gomen, aishiteru and the like. Love it! Bonus points if your fanfiction is NOT about an anime but you still use those random Japanese words. Do not let anything get in the way of your One True Pairing, whether it is the plot or another character, and especially not a canon pairing that you disagree with. She also deliberately followed rule no.
On top of that, she turned a main canon character into a Sue. It was too bad, because her premise was fine and she actually has some promise. Maybe she will get it out of her system. Refia, in the InvisionFree forums.
For my part, when I was writing Xena fan fiction, I did use quite a few OCs, but in the same way that the series did: villains, henchmen, allies, villagers and so forth. For the more important of these, I tried to give them reasonable backstories. Some, like my Amazon OCs, were to flesh out that particular section of the Xenaverse. Where canon characters were more appropriate, I used them.
In my one-offs I had to shorten that, of course. And I will also admit to inserting myself into one of my favorite stories, Educating Joxer. Call it a Hitchcock cameo, if you please. Now I get to scratch the self-insert itch though my MSTs. That is too funny! I love when the author has clearly inserted himself or herself into the story, especially to fulfill some sort of fantasy they have about a fictional character.
I like a good, well-developed OC that makes sense — or an undeveloped, pre-existing character in a series that can be reasonably developed in a story. It is always entertaining to read a story where the author has forced a non-canon OTP or completely changed the characters.
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