Stop Stigmatising Fanfiction – You Are Ruining Everybody’s Fun by Emily Gough

Aren’t you tired of being judged for the things you enjoy? Tired of being ridiculed for admitting that you indulge in simple pleasures like children’s cartoons, or fanfiction, or fanfiction about children’s cartoons?

Typically, fanfiction is shouldered with a negative reputation. It is often stigmatised and labelled as juvenile or cringy, whilst its writers get handed a cone of shame and refused the title of a “legitimate author”. However, fanfiction is actually a totally harmless and wonderfully creative practice that writers and readers have been engaging with for centuries.

An article in The Atlantic points out that people have been writing fanfiction as early as the 1700s (about Gulliver’s Travels, of all things) (Chamberlain 2020), and that it has crossed over into the publishing world on multiple – quite prevalent – occasions. John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost? Biblical fanfiction. Dante’s Inferno? Shameless self-insert and Biblical fanfiction. Jean Rhys’ The Wide Sargasso Sea? A feminist response to and reimagining of Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason. The Fifty Shades trilogy? Literally started life as Twilight fanfiction on the internet before being picked up by publishers.

All of these contradict the idea that fanfiction is some weird internet phenomenon created by teenage girls and proves that it is good to have such creative responses to the media we consume. Why shouldn’t we give a minor character a back-story? Why shouldn’t we re-write the endings that don’t satisfy us? Why shouldn’t we write feminist responses to older texts? Why wouldn’t Edward Cullen be into kinky sex in a CEO/college student/vampire-less alternative universe?

Whether you’re reading or writing it, fanfiction offers a break from reality and the chance to engage in content we enjoy and want to see. Readers can often request stories to be written, making the reader-writer relationship stronger and giving readers the opportunity to see characters like themselves in the media they consume, making fanfiction a very inclusive form of storytelling. Similarly, fanfiction offers a break from the fiction that dissatisfies us. Many writers completely refigure a character’s storyline to suit their needs, and some re-write the endings to pre-existing stories to make them more satisfying or to “fix” them.

The way fanfiction is viewed needs to change. It’s not shameful or a dirty secret. It is an immersive and wonderfully creative corner of the artistic world that thousands of people flock to for comfort and gratification. It is probably one of the most underrated creative writing tools that we have at our disposal, with pre-established audiences and comment or chat functions that allow writers and readers to communicate with one another. It is a thriving community of like-minded, open-minded, creative people and it should be treated as such.

We should not be made to feel guilty about enjoying it.

Sources:

CHAMBERLAIN, Shannon. 2020. ‘Fan Fiction Was Just as Sexual in the 1700s as It Is Today’. The Atlantic [online]. 13 February 2020. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/surprising-18th-century-origins-fan-fiction/606532/ [accessed 5 June 2021].

Words by Emily Gough

Image from Unsplash

Edited by Tillie Holmes