That whole thing about fanfiction.
May. 10th, 2010 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avreliaI don't why I suddenly decided to chime in, but several latest posts on the topic put me into thinking about my own feelings about it.
I am no writer of fanfiction, but that was purely incidental. The only fandom I ever wanted to write in was Buffyverse, and when I wanted to write I couldn't write in English the way I wouldn't be ashamed to present my work to anyone. Writing fanfiction in Russian was not under consideration because the characters spoke English in my head, and my fandom was an English speaking one. I did wrote several little pieces, but nothing that would be noticeable. I am, however, a fan of fanfiction. I don't read it now – almost never, because of this “having no time for cool stuff” thing, but I remember how it was...
Sometimes a story would enchant me so much – in a book, TV or movie – that it kept on living in my head. The story would have an obvious ending and it would be not enough. Sometimes the story would have an ending I didn't like, sometimes I just wanted to know what would happen to my beloved characters after the end of their official story. And sometimes the story really wasn't over – I just couldn't get a hold of the rest of it. Imagine the anguish. Well, I am sure you can. You had it the same.
So obviously, the characters began their new lives in my head, independent of their creators' minds. I imagined better endings (everybody survived and married each other), or a continuation of their adventures (and then they discovered America and created the communism there). I just never wrote it down. It was fun and often somehow necessary way to process a story. I did it with The Forsyte Saga and Orlando Furioso, some silly movies I can hardly remember now and Sharpe series with Sean Bean (Sharpe books I didn't like), Hitchhikers Guide, and many, many others. I didn't know about fanfiction itself, however, until I started to watch Buffy. Then I started to look for things to feed my burgeoning obsession in the Internet, and found the fandom, and fanfiction.
My first reaction was: “icky!” My second reaction was: “useless crap”. Then the curiosity, obsession, and a lack of new episodes made me take the plunge. I read several fill-in-the-blanks types of stories. They were neither icky, nor crappy, and definitely not useless. Then it was the slippery slope for me: I started to read more and more – large epic stories, drabbles, humour and angst, characters studies and pwp, good stories and bad, AU and human AU, unconventional pairings, including slash. There was a time, when I read voraciously almost everything – there were so many great stories, and there was a great thurst. The series were over, but letting go the characters was impossible. So I wrote (meta) about them and read about them and thought about them all the time. For a really long time Buffy and Spike lived in my head. I created stories that I never wrote, and some that I did write, and I read and discussed what I read with my fellow fans and friends and it was good. It was what being a part of fandom was about: that shared love, that shared obsession, that shared brains and that shared thirst. Fanfiction has caused me a lot of wasted hours and brought me a lot of friends that I love and memories I cherish.
Then another process started: culling. I stopped reading bad fanfiction, I stopped reading pairings that didn't interest me, and I stopped reading authors I didn't agree with on our take on characters. It was a very liberating feeling. I still remember with pleasure my post about not reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
herself_nyc anymore. Ok, no one forced me to read them before, but admiring and discussing her fics seemed such a huge part of my corner of fandom that I felt like a renegade abandoning the admiring crowd. And she writes really well. Just, you know... not for me.
Then came a time when I stopped reading whatsoever. The love is there, but there is no time to read it, and the fire has all but gone out. I still love the show, still love Buffy, still love the stories. Just don't read them anymore.
I am grateful to fanfiction – for some finest hours wasted, for good friends, for good stories, for challenging discussions, for sucking me inside of the fandom. For being silly and brilliant, beautiful and funny, engaging and distracting.
I read it because of love. I wrote it because of love. And fun, lots and lots of fun.
Salieri's take on stuff.http://st-salieri.livejournal.com/357221.html
Why can't I search through my friends' list for something? there were lots of links and I don't remember where.
Here is another post I liked: http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/582169.html
I am no writer of fanfiction, but that was purely incidental. The only fandom I ever wanted to write in was Buffyverse, and when I wanted to write I couldn't write in English the way I wouldn't be ashamed to present my work to anyone. Writing fanfiction in Russian was not under consideration because the characters spoke English in my head, and my fandom was an English speaking one. I did wrote several little pieces, but nothing that would be noticeable. I am, however, a fan of fanfiction. I don't read it now – almost never, because of this “having no time for cool stuff” thing, but I remember how it was...
Sometimes a story would enchant me so much – in a book, TV or movie – that it kept on living in my head. The story would have an obvious ending and it would be not enough. Sometimes the story would have an ending I didn't like, sometimes I just wanted to know what would happen to my beloved characters after the end of their official story. And sometimes the story really wasn't over – I just couldn't get a hold of the rest of it. Imagine the anguish. Well, I am sure you can. You had it the same.
So obviously, the characters began their new lives in my head, independent of their creators' minds. I imagined better endings (everybody survived and married each other), or a continuation of their adventures (and then they discovered America and created the communism there). I just never wrote it down. It was fun and often somehow necessary way to process a story. I did it with The Forsyte Saga and Orlando Furioso, some silly movies I can hardly remember now and Sharpe series with Sean Bean (Sharpe books I didn't like), Hitchhikers Guide, and many, many others. I didn't know about fanfiction itself, however, until I started to watch Buffy. Then I started to look for things to feed my burgeoning obsession in the Internet, and found the fandom, and fanfiction.
My first reaction was: “icky!” My second reaction was: “useless crap”. Then the curiosity, obsession, and a lack of new episodes made me take the plunge. I read several fill-in-the-blanks types of stories. They were neither icky, nor crappy, and definitely not useless. Then it was the slippery slope for me: I started to read more and more – large epic stories, drabbles, humour and angst, characters studies and pwp, good stories and bad, AU and human AU, unconventional pairings, including slash. There was a time, when I read voraciously almost everything – there were so many great stories, and there was a great thurst. The series were over, but letting go the characters was impossible. So I wrote (meta) about them and read about them and thought about them all the time. For a really long time Buffy and Spike lived in my head. I created stories that I never wrote, and some that I did write, and I read and discussed what I read with my fellow fans and friends and it was good. It was what being a part of fandom was about: that shared love, that shared obsession, that shared brains and that shared thirst. Fanfiction has caused me a lot of wasted hours and brought me a lot of friends that I love and memories I cherish.
Then another process started: culling. I stopped reading bad fanfiction, I stopped reading pairings that didn't interest me, and I stopped reading authors I didn't agree with on our take on characters. It was a very liberating feeling. I still remember with pleasure my post about not reading
herself_nyc anymore. Ok, no one forced me to read them before, but admiring and discussing her fics seemed such a huge part of my corner of fandom that I felt like a renegade abandoning the admiring crowd. And she writes really well. Just, you know... not for me.Then came a time when I stopped reading whatsoever. The love is there, but there is no time to read it, and the fire has all but gone out. I still love the show, still love Buffy, still love the stories. Just don't read them anymore.
I am grateful to fanfiction – for some finest hours wasted, for good friends, for good stories, for challenging discussions, for sucking me inside of the fandom. For being silly and brilliant, beautiful and funny, engaging and distracting.
I read it because of love. I wrote it because of love. And fun, lots and lots of fun.
Salieri's take on stuff.http://st-salieri.livejournal.com/357221.html
Why can't I search through my friends' list for something? there were lots of links and I don't remember where.
Here is another post I liked: http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/582169.html
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 06:35 am (UTC)I still remember with pleasure my post about not reading [info]herself_nyc anymore. Ok, no one forced me to read them before, but admiring and discussing her fics seemed such a huge part of my corner of fandom that I felt like a renegade abandoning the admiring crowd. And she writes really well. Just, you know... not for me.
You know, this is interesting. I could never really get into her stuff. Read a snippet here or there - and she does write beautifully, I'd like to get her book - but the characters just didn't behave like I saw them. But then, I could never get my head round Spike/Xander either, and that's *such* a popular pairing. :) Guess it's nice that we have lots of different interpretations. (Do you have a link to that post btw? I'm curious now.)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 01:25 pm (UTC)here it is. I never could get into, but I tried hard. She's always been widely recommended and her new stories discussed. So I thought - maybe I didn't understand something?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-12 12:14 am (UTC)I think I went through pretty much the same stages as you! A childhood of continuing beloved stories in my head, and then finally discovering fanfiction and the wonderful joy of realizing that other people wanted to continue these stories too and they did it brilliantly. And then the reading voraciously, and then the developing of standards, and the culling.
Anyway, hooray for kindred spirits! (And I kinda would love to read the young-avrelia fic that ends with "and then they discovered America and created the communism there," hee!)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-27 06:59 pm (UTC)There my common fascination with princesses was at odds with the feeling that they are the exploiters' class... And I loved reading and playing in great discoveries with drawing fancy maps and such.