just something @domesticc - Tumblr Blog

The thing about fanfiction after writing original fiction for so long is that it feels like taking weighted clothes off. If I wanted a cool plot twist or a reveal or a mystery I had to set up all the expectations myself. I had to set up the red herrings, the clues, the boundaries of what was reasonable.

In fanfiction I drop a name from canon I never referenced before and it will carry the weight that a hundred pages of set up would carry in original fiction.

Do you have any fucking idea how intoxicating that is.

abilusanji

The shared language of a fandom in fanfiction is so amazingly conducive to a type of story telling that we lost when public domain was gutted as a legal concept. And it’s such a thrilling way to make stories and I weep for how rare it is to encounter.

Like you sort of get a ghoulish attempt with star wars style “look it’s revan” but it’s still only a handful of people who get to play. With fandom everyone gets to play with the full toolbox, with infinite chances to try.

dsudis

It’s striking me really hard after reading this post–so much of what is considered the ~canon~ of western literature really arises out of this situation where everyone who wrote (i.e. a tiny minority of educated men and the very very rare educated woman) was operating with a common set of referents. There were just so few books, back then, and if you were educated enough to write, those were the books you had read, and that your teachers had read and told you about. Everyone got the same references.

We talk about the Divine Comedy being Bible fanfic and so forth, but it really was in a way we don’t always articulate–it wasn’t just that it was repurposing other stories the author had read. It was the product of an author who felt himself a part of a community that had this shared set of referents. He only had to allude to things, and his intended readers knew all of the context. Being in modern fandom allows us to be part of a community that likewise shares a canon and shares references and influences, something that is increasingly lost in modern copyrighted fiction where everyone is constantly desperate to be original.