I think another part of fanfiction that I Don’t Get is how it seems to view writing with a sort of… ‘fungibility’ is the only word that comes to mind.
A warning in advance that this is probably going to sound overly mean towards fanfiction, and maybe everything I say is equally applicable towards both bad original fiction and/or good fanfiction, etc etc etc.
Anyway, a while ago I was listening to Tim Grahl’s *Story Grid* podcast, and he said something that stuck with me which I will roughly paraphrase below:
“It’s a mistake to just ‘worldbuild’ in the abstract. Don’t build your world separately from building your characters, don’t build your characters separately from the story. Everything needs to support the main themes of your story.”
And of course we can nitpick about 'everything,’ maybe it’s something more like ninety percent, there are plenty of great books with fluff, and so on and so forth.
But well-made fiction has a *rhythm* to it, not just in the line-by-line reading, but a rhythm between the scenes, the beats, the chapters, and the book as a whole. I’m going to give an example from the Fight Club movie, not because I think it’s the best movie ever but because it has one of the most on-the-nose examples of this. It’s in the early scene with the testicular cancer support group. The narrator places himself among people who feel like they’ve 'lost their manhood,’ but the presence of Marla forcibly reminds him that he’s a “tourist.” The testicular cancer support group scene is basically the entire movie writ small.
The chapter in Don Quixote with the galley slaves has always stuck with me in a similar way, it’s like this switcheroo where suddenly you aren’t sure who’s making sense and who’s silly, but it all works because there’s still that thematic glue: a self-deluded vision of chivalry versus a mucky but engaging reality.
But you can only achieve this if everything – the characters, the setting, the plot – is first and foremost built around a theme or idea. So when I see people talk about like, their Berzerk AU where Guts opens a coffee shop in Rhode Island, it always seems Frankensteinian to me because now the building blocks of the story are pulling against each other. Less like fiction and more like… just poodling around. Which, sure, plenty of good fiction (and even nonfiction) is poodling around, but even then, original fiction has the advantage of all the parts being made together with the other parts in mind.
And there’s a sort of mini-canon of works that people like to bring out whenever someone talks bad about fanfiction, but they’re sort of the exception that proves the rule, e.g. *Grendel* isn’t just “hey *Beowulf* was neat, let me crib some stuff from it,” it uses Beowulf’s story and legacy *thematically* to support its ideas.
So uh, that’s sort of what I mean by 'fungibility,’ the idea that characters and setting and plot events can be harmlessly mixed-and-matched without really being 'different’ from 'regular’ fiction.
I’d say my BNHA fics have this fungibility, especially this one.
