"I got possessed by a MCU yaoi demon and everything I thought I knew about storytelling was existentially destroyed"
(the essay about storytelling I'm never going to properly finish writing)
Back in December of 2025, I wrote this:
I read a piece of advice to actors. It said that if you are failing to truly inhabit the mind space of the character and portray them, you must imagine yourself as the body through which the character is allowed to live. You must become a conduit for the character’s spirit, screaming to exist and have life. They cannot breathe except through your breath, they cannot speak except through your voice, they cannot live except by living through you. I can’t even express it the way that it was expressed. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
The verb “animate” keeps coming to mind. Not to animate, but to be animated. That is to say, to be moved by something else, to have your body filled by the life of a something that lives through you. I can’t stop thinking about it.
It's a long story, which I will shorten considerably because this is an essay about storytelling, not an attempt to explain the ecology of the Doohickey that is my brain.
The previous summer, I had a dream that told me to watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and I became obsessed and I mean OBSESSED with the character Bucky Barnes.
And I had never really read fanfiction before, nothing beyond short one-shots, but that summer I read an absolute FUCK TON of Bucky fanfiction.
What is annoying me about the intro to this essay, is that I keep trying and completely failing to convey how hilariously absurd the situation felt. It was like a demon was trying to possess me. I was fighting it. I was losing. I didn't give a shit about the MCU. I didn't read fanfiction. I definitely didn't write fanfiction. This was not going to be a thing that happened to me.
I made a spreadsheet, analyzing 20 of my most favorite long-form (shortest 20k, longest 275k, average 70k-100k words) fics and their characteristics and themes, with quotes.
I swore up and down that I would NOT write my own Bucky fanfiction.
I started writing my own Bucky fanfiction.
In this process, everything I thought I knew about storytelling was existentially destroyed.
This is not the beginning, but I'll begin there anyway
I had a major mental breakdown in 2021, and thereafter became obsessed with plants. I delved into a fascination with and immersion in the natural world that felt like a spiritual revelation and changed me irreversibly.
But I didn't know what to do with the self I had built before this, the one that was "a writer" as my fundamental identity. I had been consumed with being a writer every single day of being sentient thus far, and now, it was like I wasn't that person anymore at all. Suddenly, I had a self outside of my creative work; I had an identity, a consuming passion, that didn't revolve around writing.
I knew that a re-synthesis of the two "selves" was coming, but I demanded, when? I was frustrated with the immovable message that there was something in there I still needed to uncover or to understand before I could return to writing stories again.
I kept trying to come back to it, and every time, there was a quiet, "No, not yet."
I had been wandering a creative desert for 2 or 3 years, and this had never happened before in my life. I felt like I didn't understand what being a writer was all about anymore.
Early in 2025, I wrote this journal entry:
I want to make something, to do something with meaning. I want to be creative again like I was back when publishing a book seemed like the goal of my life. I have suddenly outgrown so much of myself. Maybe I need something that feels like a divine calling, to be illuminated and animated by the inevitability of my purpose.
(I started using the pronoun "you", talking to myself)
You’re like that with your plants. It’s an oddly religious fervor. You need to save the world so bad. You need to do something special and great and essential.
You made writing your identity in an intense and self-annihilating way. It wasn’t just who you were, it was what you were for, it was why you were. Then you had a time in your life where that hugely important and meaning-making thing was empty and alienating to you. The poetry could not save you. And if it couldn’t save you, was it saving anybody?
You found yourself repulsed by the things that had once felt so essential to humanity understanding itself, because you saw that they were full of false and cruel messages, preoccupied with despair without any inkling of how to move beyond it.
And it seemed to you that this idea—that art, specifically storytelling, literature, was what gave humanity the ability to lift a lantern to the darkness—might be one of those false and cruel ideas. These writers were egotistical, yourself included.
They wallowed in the idea of a dark and comfortless world lit only by the lanterns of writers to show us how to be human and relate to one another. But they did not love reality.
Now you still have this feeling that whatever you write has to perfectly capture all you want to do and be and say in some way. It’s very silly.
The problem with stories as fixed, owned things
So I was wrestling with this idea in my head, that writers don't necessarily actually create the things that they write, that they are more of an amplifier or something that stories flow through.
I felt that, even though it was tempting to think that writers were able to solubilize everything they took in and completely re-synthesize it into something “new,” whether this was stories they read, experiences they had, or what arrived with the even murkier provenance of imagination, writers weren't a special class of person capable of creating "new things."
Furthermore, I was beginning to feel that it was virtually impossible for the entire depth and breadth of a world that opens up within a story to be explored and plumbed by a single person. Fantasy and sci-fi authors toy with this idea of "world-building," but the "worlds" are mostly flat and repetitive of others' worlds.
Reading large amounts of spec fic as a teenager, I'd had the same thought over and over again, but just wasn't sure how to express it: all of this is so superfluous. It was so excessive to have each writer playing in the little tidepool of their own little "fantasy/scifi world" that they "created," which was 90% the same as every other "fantasy/scifi world," and had 2 or 3 incredibly powerful, compelling ideas in it, which would languish and wilt because no one else was allowed to use them and likewise the writer wasn't allowed to use anyone else's cool ideas.
Everything in "original fiction" is wildly derivative, but for bizarre legal and cultural reasons, we are forced to obscure or conceal the derivative nature of it. Our space wizards can't be Jedi, they have to be Auii'thar, and they don't use the Force, they tap into the Essence. And they can't use laser swords because that idea is Taken, so they have to use, like, bows and arrows or something.
But the thing is. You can't come up with something cooler than a lightsaber.
When "writers" are considered to be "creators," and to own the stories they "create," it means that engaging in storytelling as a "writer" excludes that story from being told by other people.
E.g. if I wrote a story about a bunch of cats that live in clans, wage war against each other, are given special names at different times in their lives, and receive visions from their cat ancestors, and I named prominent characters in it Graystripe and Firestar and Yellowfang, I couldn't profit off this story and more importantly, I really couldn't have it recognized as art, because that conceptual territory is already controlled by the Erin Hunters who "created" the Warriors series.
You might say that, well, eventually stories enter the public domain, but they still spent decades with their idea-space dominated, sterilized and controlled.
Once a story enters the public domain, the writer and so-called "creator" is dead; actual transmission of stories, inter-generationally, with call and response between teller and audience, with teller and listener inverting and exchanging positions, with multiple storytellers explosively interacting and exploring in the same initial idea-space that came into being in their own cultural context and time, cannot happen.
Yes, we are free to write our own stories about Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby now and those stories are allowed to be "art" and high culture instead of "fanfiction" and low or folk culture, but for the past century this story was enclosed in a razor-wire fencing to exclude other tellers, the gravel around it sprayed with pesticide to prevent any story-weeds. We can tell the story again, but F. Scott Fitzgerald is dead and cannot sit around our campfire as a listener.
And of course, The Great Gatsby is now forever enshrined as The Definitive Version, the real version, the original version.
"Writing" and "Storytelling"
But fanfiction is something very, very different.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not the definitive, or real, or original version of the story Bucky fanfiction is telling. Bucky fanfiction is almost never retelling or competing with the "canon." It's usually not a direct continuation or sequel of the "canon," at least not one that is compliant with "canon" both in letter and in spirit.
There's a translation happening, film is a totally different medium than writing, and there is a different spirit behind the writing.
In other words, the Bucky fics aren't adding onto or seamlessly attaching to CA:TWS; they are using it for ingredients. They are taking the parts of it that are compelling and they are exploring what stories can be told with those parts. What ties the Buckyfic universe together is not that every teller agrees on a definitive version of the story or even likes the source material; it is that every teller has the same starting ingredients, just like storytellers of older times were all looking up at the same constellations.
It is not actually possible to say everything that a story CAN say in one telling. An idea-space can have multiple mutually exclusive, contradictory stories in it that are all valuable to tell, and the cultural and legal obligation to tell THE single true and exclusive version of a story, to own it and lay claim to it, extinguishes this incredibly vital aspect of the aliveness of storytelling.
I said before that I really liked reading fics where Bucky and Steve were part of a community of queer people in the 1930s and they weren’t just isolated and ashamed. That really compelled me. However, in my own Bucky fanfiction I wrote a version where Steve does struggle with internalized homophobia and the fact that he never actually expressed his feelings for Bucky. And that’s not rejecting the other version.
Different Bucky fics can and do explore suicidality, perpetrator trauma, survivor’s guilt, the effect of trauma on sexuality, loss of bodily autonomy, fragmented identity, agency and lack thereof, the ambiguity of memory, the survival behaviors created by abuse, the nationalist mythologizing of war, disability, caregiver fatigue, internalized victim blaming, and many more, and these versions become contradictory, but if you asked me to choose one Bucky fic to become “the canon” while all others were annihilated, I couldn’t do it.
They're all valuable. They all mean something and say something, and it's valuable to be able to read them all. None of them are "the real one" or "the original one." They're all equally real.
I had a moment of realizing...Oh. I am not its [the story's] creator. I am its host body.
Which raised the question of, why am *I* the host body? What does the host body *do*? What is my task, and how do I do it well?
I thought about seeing a Shakespeare play in a community theatre. The story is reanimated every time the play is performed, flowing in many different bodies. Then I thought about a storyteller, telling a story in real time.
A storyteller sits around the campfire with their audience and tells a story. The storyteller is a performer. They may not be the originator of the story; they are simply embodying it.
The storyteller sits among their audience. The writer is separated from the reader’s experience, physically, temporally; the storyteller experiences the story’s unfolding alongside the audience. The audience and storyteller look one another in the eyes; they call and respond.
When a play is performed, decisions are made about how to embody it; everyone is a participant in that story. Even when the words are exact, even when the script is the same, a live performance has to re-animate the story every time. It is a different life, a different creature, every time it is performed.
Practically every performance of a play includes some kind of accident, where a line is forgotten or a prop breaks or an actor must improvise when the performance has veered off script, and this is part of the aliveness of theatre. When you participate in a play as an actor, you have to be ready to improvise, which means you can unexpectedly be pulled into the role of creator, required to invent something new in real time.
The world of fanfiction had that aliveness in a way that the world of original fiction did not. The interactions between writers and readers, the interconnectivity between all sorts of fan creators and enjoyers of their creations, the cross-pollination and contradiction, the way fanfics inspired and were derived from other fanfics until entire tropes and ideas were born completely separate from the canon; it was a dense, layered network of collective creation, and it honed in on and developed the most compelling ideas, telling the stories again and again in different ways.
Fanfiction has given me a glimpse into what storytelling could be. What storytelling has always been, really. It's made me realize how fake and restrictive "originality" is, and how egotistical and limiting it is to think of "writers" in the way we do, as special, talented people who shut themselves up in private and generate fully formed, fixed, definitive works of art out of their insides like magic.
It really just obliterates the entire way we think about art, like, the main fact you learn about any piece of art is who made it.
And when it is something big, like a film, there is a pyramid-like hierarchy of makers, with the Director and maybe the writer on top and everyone who does all the costumes and props and the stunt people and the actors and lights and sound technicians below.
But what if art doesn't happen like that? What if we collectively create it? What if we help create it by experiencing it and responding to it? How could art change if we changed the way we understood it?
Thanks for the enlightenment, Bucky. I know less than I ever knew before!
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