I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.
Lev Grossman (via theadventuresofcargline)
This is very true – I’ve seen innumerable fanfics of people saying, “I could do this better than they did.”
And quite frequently, they do.
(via lil-miss-choc)
Fanfic as punk. Yeah. Yeah. Holy crap, how’d I never see that before?
It’s not ‘almost’ punk. It IS punk.
We love these stories. We ARE fans. Each of us has that story that ignites when it comes in contact with us, that speaks to us in some powerful way, that says, “This, this is YOUR story.” And it is the inalienable right of humankind to BE the hero of the stories we listen to. We want that. It’s OURS. That’s how stories work.
As fans, I think a lot of us are confused as to why sometimes it seems like many fans hate the stories they claim to love. Sometimes we’re even confused about our own feelings, because sometimes WE feel as much anger as we do love. And we wonder, “Do I really love this anymore?”
But yes. Yes you do. This is what’s happening: we love that story that’s saying something important to us, but simultaneously it’s often trying to tell us how we’re allowed to be represented in it, how we’re allowed to interact and participate with it. There’s a cultural, corporate, legal machine that seeks to take these stories we love away from us, to fence them in and tell us in what ways and times and roles we’re allowed to interact with them, how we’re allowed to have those stories represent us, and frankly, fuck that. Those are OUR rights, OUR things to decide. We’re not out to possess the publishing rights; we’re out to claim our right to be part of that story in the way WE choose.