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i was going to interact with the latest "fanfiction is ipso facto bad" hot take and then i remembered: i don't care what other people think
like disdain fanfic all you want. hate fanfic all you want. it's going to keep happening. if anne rice and all her lawyers couldn't kill us nobody on twitter can manage
if i was going to form a real argument, it'd be "fanfic is just a format." can a format by itself determine the quality of the content created for it? maybe fanfic is just a methodology of response. same question, does that make it all bad by default? probably not how that works.
i personally no longer bother with the "but wide sargasso sea is fanfic!" argument. those were very useful points when we were arguing fic's legal status. but the basic premise of fic is just rewriting or responding to existing stories. like literally that is all it is.
so when a Real Writer wants to throw their hat into the ring to beat fanfic, what i understand them to really be saying is, "writing stories that are responsive to other stories is an illegitimate act and those stories can't be any good" and truly when i hear that, i can go
like if you think it's thoughtcrime to want to process somebody else's story by writing one of your own, i got nothing to say to that except goodnight and good luck
it's just a format! we can, if you want a serious conversation and not a baby 101, talk about how the *culture* around fic can reinforce sameness or consumability. but then of course the book market would be right there tapping its feet like, "what about me!" you too honey
it's capitalism that makes stories suck. that's what makes stories suck. it's constructing a narrative with the primary concern of selling it instead of telling it. it's stripping out somebody's voice or their needs or their truths to cash a check.
and sometimes the "selling it" isn't literal or whatever, it just means making every story anodyne and palatable even to the unpalatable people who want to consume stories without ever seeing anyone depicted who doesn't look or think like them.
i have read fanfic that flipped me on my fucking ass, with the force of its heart and truth and unflinchingness. and i have read published praised novels that had absolutely nothing the fuck to say. all i can conclude from that is that it is not the format making the choices.
read better fic. shit, read mine. it ain't bad. it's fine. at the end of the day whatever we write is fine. and i don't mean that dismissively. we're doing it for fun out of a compulsion in our hearts to say something to other people. i can't hate that. i sure can't disdain it.
and again i'm actually happy to talk about how fandom attaches to big corporate IPs and the trouble that gets us in culturally. but it's not fic writers' fault. it's the reverse. why is media controlled by three gigantic corporations? why is this so much of what we're served?
