![]() Fan fiction is the same thing: a fun hobby. Once we come up with our own (which we frequently do), we have the same enthusiasm for our own work that we do for fan fiction.Īnd even if we don't-what's the big deal? We don't go up to kids on little league baseball teams and tell them there's no point in enjoying themselves if they aren't planning to make a career out of it. We obviously have the chops to commit ourselves to long pieces of works, and the imagination to go wild with somebody else's characters. ![]() We totally can, and absolutely do, write non-fan fic stuff as wellįan fiction, for many people, is just a gateway drug to all other fiction writing. Let it be known, "normal people": we are not immune to your mockery, and it sucks. ![]() The fact that people in my life have dug them up and used them to make fun of me in the past makes me want to go ape shit on them for it. I worked hard on them, I was proud of them, and I wanted to enjoy them privately and anonymously. I can't even look back on some fics that people in my life have made fun of, and it's so unfair. I cannot tell you how many pieces of fan fiction I have thoroughly enjoyed writing that were then completely wrecked by someone tainting them with meanness. I think the reason people feel so comfortable mocking fan fiction authors is because we're somehow less "real" or "legitimate" than other writers in their minds, and they don't think we'll take personal offense to them mocking our work. So, without further ado, here are all the things we are one hundred percent tired of explaining to the rest of the planet and will probably still have to explain in our last gasps of fandom life: We’re not trying to "copy" anybody I will protect this wonderful, weird hobby and the beautiful, weird people who do it with me until the day I fic my last fic. People make weird assumptions about us and get super judge-y, and yeah, I could just keep my mouth shut about it for the rest of my life and not worry about dealing with this, but fan fiction is important to me. Unfortunately, fan fiction writers are in a constant stream of this kind of judgment on all sides. It didn't take long for the convention to cancel the whole thing, because duh, WonderCon, you can't make fun of the very audience for your event and expect them to not get defensive about it. (He would later call anyone who questioned him "ignorant" in the letter he released, claiming we were "harassing" him, and that he's now super disappointed in us, blah blah-sorry not sorry, bro, but I feel less bad about tweeting than ever after reading that, especially after he told us all we needed to work on our "reading comprehension". Like many fellow authors, I took to Twitter to question what the panel was for, and within thirty seconds of my incredibly civil tweet asking what was up, I'd been blocked by Chris Gore himself. The most recent example of fanfic weirdness comes out of the place we all least suspected it: WonderCon recently had to pull Chris Gore's "Fan Fic Theater" panel, in which he was going to read out loud actual fan fiction and make fun of it for sport. I guess I had this notion that at some point when all of my friends were adults, the weird stigma would go away, but it turns out it wasn't just friends I had to worry about. (See what I did there? "Fic"? LAUGH, DAMMIT). Clearly, by virtue of this article, I have stopped giving a fic about what people thing. I did not breathe a word of it in middle or high school, and eventually told a few close friends in college, which leads us to today. It took me a very long time to become someone who isn't ashamed of writing fic. People still have so many weird misconceptions about what fan fiction is, what kind of people write it, and it all results in lots of really awkward conversations that, frankly, fan fiction writers are super tired of having. "I write fan fiction" for some reason garners roughly the same reaction of someone waltzing in and announcing they ate their twin in the womb. Even in 2015, when fan fiction is more prominently known than ever, I can see people getting genuinely uncomfortable with me mentioning it. It's sad that, as a kid, with no prompting from the outside world or other fan fiction authors, I already knew that talking about writing fan fiction was social suicide. It has gotten to the point in my life that I probably spend more time explaining my fan fiction writing to people than I actually spend, you know, writing fan fiction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |