I let this response sit for about two minutes and decided I didn't like it, so I deleted it to rewrite it much more concisely.
You can think of "fanfiction" like you can think of the term "romance". You can have a Romance Novel, that is, a novel with a loadful of cliches about molten sapphire eyes and sex and dark angsty men, or, you can have a novel that happens to have romance. There are plenty of novels that happen to have romance that are good. Heck, most classics (off the topic of my head, Scarlet Letter, 1984, everything Shakespeare wrote) have some kind of romance in them, because it's a large part of human existence. We procreate, man.
In the same way, I think before anyone really has a serious talk about it, we need to define "fanfiction".
Amusingly, dictionary.com has an entry on fanfic but not fanfiction (it says "see fanfic").
fan⋅fic /ˈfænˌfɪk/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [fan-fik] Show IPA Use fanfic in a Sentence See web results for fanfic See images of fanfic -noun Informal. 1. fiction written by fans of a TV series, movie, etc., using existing characters and situations to develop new plots. 2. a work of fiction in this genre.
Strictly speaking, things like Dante's Inferno are pieces of fanfiction, since it's a fictional work written by a fan of another work, using existing characters and situations to develop new plots. Hell, Dante's Inferno is a self-insert!
I think when people talk about fanfiction, even people like us who used to love it, we think too often of the meaningless gratifying pieces in fanfiction. In this metaphor, we're thinking about Romance Novels, not novels that happen to have romance. I think when have always recognized "good fanfiction", the pieces revolving around character development, characters' struggles and losses, and not so much "here buttsex and it is cute". These pieces, I feel, are more like pieces that are good writing but happen to be fanfiction.
In my own case, I find it difficult to spend more than an hour doodling off something that is Fanfiction, but I quite frequently enjoy playing off worlds and writing pieces that happen to be fanfiction. In real life, in original works, you can only assume the reader has read a narrow scope of works, and you can't take prior knowledge for granted. But with fanfiction you can assume the reader is intimately familiar with several aspects of your source, and it gives you so much more freedom and so much more room to be clever.
You can think of "fanfiction" like you can think of the term "romance". You can have a Romance Novel, that is, a novel with a loadful of cliches about molten sapphire eyes and sex and dark angsty men, or, you can have a novel that happens to have romance. There are plenty of novels that happen to have romance that are good. Heck, most classics (off the topic of my head, Scarlet Letter, 1984, everything Shakespeare wrote) have some kind of romance in them, because it's a large part of human existence. We procreate, man.
In the same way, I think before anyone really has a serious talk about it, we need to define "fanfiction".
Amusingly, dictionary.com has an entry on fanfic but not fanfiction (it says "see fanfic").
fan⋅fic
/ˈfænˌfɪk/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [fan-fik] Show IPA
Use fanfic in a Sentence
See web results for fanfic
See images of fanfic
-noun Informal.
1. fiction written by fans of a TV series, movie, etc., using existing characters and situations to develop new plots.
2. a work of fiction in this genre.
Strictly speaking, things like Dante's Inferno are pieces of fanfiction, since it's a fictional work written by a fan of another work, using existing characters and situations to develop new plots. Hell, Dante's Inferno is a self-insert!
I think when people talk about fanfiction, even people like us who used to love it, we think too often of the meaningless gratifying pieces in fanfiction. In this metaphor, we're thinking about Romance Novels, not novels that happen to have romance. I think when have always recognized "good fanfiction", the pieces revolving around character development, characters' struggles and losses, and not so much "here buttsex and it is cute". These pieces, I feel, are more like pieces that are good writing but happen to be fanfiction.
In my own case, I find it difficult to spend more than an hour doodling off something that is Fanfiction, but I quite frequently enjoy playing off worlds and writing pieces that happen to be fanfiction. In real life, in original works, you can only assume the reader has read a narrow scope of works, and you can't take prior knowledge for granted. But with fanfiction you can assume the reader is intimately familiar with several aspects of your source, and it gives you so much more freedom and so much more room to be clever.
[/pretentious rant]
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