Apparently, we’re having another round of “that’s just fanfiction.” Implying that fanfiction is below prowriting quality standards and should be dismissed, and that if you want to insult a prowriting piece, just call it fanfiction.
For those that live under rocks, fanfiction or fanfic is a derivative work of another creator, usually created out of love for the original work. More often than not written for fun and just because. Fanfic is largely created by women for women. And fanfic is infamous for its explicitly erotic stories, which do constitute a significant portion, though not all fanfic. Erotic fanfic often falls into Rule 34: if you can think of it, there’s probably erotica/porn on the internet about it.
Works that can fall under fanfiction:
- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
- Anything on Archive of Our Own
- The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
- Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
- Anything on Fanfiction.net
- The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
- Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli
See what I did there. A lot of those are published books! A lot of them are famous and well-written! There are even whole sections of GoodReads devoted to stories declared rewritten fanfiction by readers.
I’d like to admit: I’ve written, read, and recommended a ton of fanfic. Continue reading “The Art of Becoming: a Fanfiction Journey”