Okay, so. I just had a conversation with Cookingbaconshirtless that recalled a bunch of other conversations I’ve had before with other people. Let’s call them ‘Mundanes**,’ for now – ‘people who do not grok fanfic.’
See, there are people who ‘get it’ intuitively, immediately (some of us writing it before we even knew there was a word – let alone a [sub]culture – for it), people who ‘get it’ after being exposed to That One Fanfic That Changed Their Life, and Mundanes.
There are ‘passive’ Mundanes who get that Fanfic is a Thing, but don’t grok it, and pretty much leave us alone. And then there Those Mundanes who are vehemently Against Fanfic because it’s Literary Heresy and blah blah blah fishcakes.
So I’m going to talk about what fanfic is (to many of us) and why some of us find it fascinating and why some of us spend so much time talking about it and reading it and, most importantly, writing it.
I read this before Christmas and loved it, but I ended up hunting it down today because I couldn’t stop thinking about it since then. And I also couldn’t stop thinking about The Heirs, which I’ve watched twice and still can’t decide if it was any good; I only know that in my mind, that love triangle really, really needed to be an OT3.
saathi1013 says that:
Fanfic exists in the interstices, in the ellipses and the enjambment.
I would add that it also exists in the cracks and the faults: in the things that aren’t right or that don’t make sense. Fanfic can be a kind of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken objects in a beautiful way. Fanfic can be an act of repairing the broken parts of the narratives that we have been given, only, as saathi1013 says,
A transformative work doesn’t actually transform the original media it is based off of (because the original medium exists in a fixed state and cannot be literally changed by fans unless the canon creators allow it to be so)
so we are creating these pieces of gold that fit into the cracks in the original, and we are offering them to the reader to do the kintsugi in their own minds:
So yes, absolutely, fanfic exists in the negative spaces of the original, in the ellipses and the enjambment, but it also exists in the cracks and the faults, another kind of negative space.
We write because we can see the potential in all of these negative spaces, and in the stories that aren’t being told. And sometimes, we write because we’ve been given this story, and some of it is amazing, but some of it just isn’t right, so we feel driven to share with others what we think it could have been.
Tumblr Exodus 