I'm done explaining why fanfic is okay.
Note: this post was originally made in 2010 in response to Diana Gabaldon’s epic rant about fanfiction. The original version is still being updated. I’m reposting it to Tumblr by request, but if you have any additions, please feel free to drop a comment at LJ so they can be added to the masterpost!
Dear Author of the Week,
You think fanfic is a personal affront to the many hours you’ve spent carefully crafting your characters. You think fanfic is “immoral and illegal.” You think fanfiction is just plagiarism. You think fanfiction is cheating. You think fanfic is for people who are too stupid/lazy/unimaginative to write stories of their own. You think there are exceptions for people who write published derivative works as part of a brand or franchise, because they’re clearly only doing it because they have to. You’re personally traumatized by the idea that someone else could look at your characters and decide that you did it wrong and they need to fix it/add original characters to your universe/send your characters to the moon/Japan/their hometown. You think all fanfic is basically porn. You’re revolted by the very idea that fic writers think what they do is legitimate.
We get it.
Congratulations! You’ve just summarily dismissed as criminal, immoral, and unimaginative each of the following Pulitzer Prize-winning writers and works:OH. MY. SAINTED. AUNT.
get a cuppa, get comfortable, and read the WHOLE fucking thing. Aja brought so many receipts the table just collapsed.
This is back on my dash today! And I’m just reblogging because I love the phrase “Oh, my sainted aunt!”
The R E C E I P T S this is beautiful, a work of art
You know, honestly, when this post was made way back in 2010, and @seasquared and I were chatting and started brainstorming this list, we were both just so exasperated that we even needed to make it?
Like this was 2 years before 50 Shades blew open the floodgates on legitimizing fanfiction, but in 2010, we were just so baffled that this backwards, regressive conversation about fanfic still was being had, when there were uncountable examples of culturally sanctioned fanfiction everywhere.
And I was very much like, “this is a no-brainer, everything i’m writing here is so obvious, it’s SO OBVIOUS, it’s redundant and rhetorical, this list is pointless,” lol. I was so certain that most people, at least most people within fandom writing fanfic, already knew that these cultural works existed. And I was sure most fic writers already operated under the assumption that they had absolutely zero reason to be ashamed or defensive or cowed by the cultural contempt for fanfiction, because they knew that these equivalencies were out there, and they were too obvious to ignore.
but then i posted that list, and people were just blown away by it, and it went kinda viral, and seemed to change so many minds!! and what really got me was that within fandom, so many people were thanking me for it, because they honestly hadn’t realized that there was such a huge vast repository of culturally sanctioned fanfiction, and it made them feel validated in a way that I don’t think they had before.
And basically that was the day i learned that sometimes there’s a huge, tremendous value in stating what you think is blatantly obvious, because it’s not always obvious, at all, to everyone else.
And the whole thing kind of profoundly opened my eyes to how much fucking internalized shame there is in fandom, about fanfiction, for absolutely no goddamn reason.