Fanfiction seeps into the mainstream?
A younger relation who reads no sf or f recently asked me, in a tentative voice, as if I might explode, if I had ever heard of fan fiction. I had to laugh before I said of course, and asked the context.
She said she was talking to some people about how Fifty Shades of Grey was reputed to start out as fan fiction, and also Twilight. I said I haven't read the first, as it didn't sound like my cuppa, but I read the second one before it went viral, and I thought it came straight from the id vortex, which was one of the draws of fanfic.
Id vortex? I defined it, then pointed out that literature has been in conversation with itself since the gitgo, that the Arthurian cycle, which was written all over europe for centuries, could be considered one of the greatest of shared worlds, blah de blah.
So she asked when I first became aware of it. I said that I was writing it as a kid in middle school, either fix-it fic or satiric fic (in which my kid adventurers tackled various canon and kicked butt and took names) though I wasn't aware that it was a thing.
When I was a teen, though I'd stopped writing it just because I was busy with my own world [the icon up there is a snap of a couple of my handwritten books from around 1970], friends were busily writing spinoffs of Trek and Lord of the Rings, and one friend, in ninth grade, unlimbered an entire novel about the Beatles (it's a full on Mary Sue, of course, but you expect that at fourteen) and again, I didn't know it was a thing.
The Doh Moment came when I encountered my first purple mimeo fanzine in the late sixties, so, yeah, fan fiction and I have been acquainted for over half a century. Hard on that I discovered that fic had it subgenres, (m/m h/c being the biggie) which was crack for many, though not my particular flavor: swashbuckle and funny were my particular brand of crack.
So her last question was so freighted with assumptions that I wasn't sure where to start, when she said, "Do you think it's bad?"
I finally pointed out that there are dreadful traditionally published books, as she well knows, but there is also brilliant fic out there. Including ones that I find much better written than canon, though canon-dependent. (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, being one) Fic's been happening for centuries: the cross-dressing tropes in Ariosto reflects in current cartoons and comics as well as books. Literature comes in many forms.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/993675.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
She said she was talking to some people about how Fifty Shades of Grey was reputed to start out as fan fiction, and also Twilight. I said I haven't read the first, as it didn't sound like my cuppa, but I read the second one before it went viral, and I thought it came straight from the id vortex, which was one of the draws of fanfic.
Id vortex? I defined it, then pointed out that literature has been in conversation with itself since the gitgo, that the Arthurian cycle, which was written all over europe for centuries, could be considered one of the greatest of shared worlds, blah de blah.
So she asked when I first became aware of it. I said that I was writing it as a kid in middle school, either fix-it fic or satiric fic (in which my kid adventurers tackled various canon and kicked butt and took names) though I wasn't aware that it was a thing.
When I was a teen, though I'd stopped writing it just because I was busy with my own world [the icon up there is a snap of a couple of my handwritten books from around 1970], friends were busily writing spinoffs of Trek and Lord of the Rings, and one friend, in ninth grade, unlimbered an entire novel about the Beatles (it's a full on Mary Sue, of course, but you expect that at fourteen) and again, I didn't know it was a thing.
The Doh Moment came when I encountered my first purple mimeo fanzine in the late sixties, so, yeah, fan fiction and I have been acquainted for over half a century. Hard on that I discovered that fic had it subgenres, (m/m h/c being the biggie) which was crack for many, though not my particular flavor: swashbuckle and funny were my particular brand of crack.
So her last question was so freighted with assumptions that I wasn't sure where to start, when she said, "Do you think it's bad?"
I finally pointed out that there are dreadful traditionally published books, as she well knows, but there is also brilliant fic out there. Including ones that I find much better written than canon, though canon-dependent. (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, being one) Fic's been happening for centuries: the cross-dressing tropes in Ariosto reflects in current cartoons and comics as well as books. Literature comes in many forms.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/993675.html. Please comment there using OpenID.