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For me fanfiction was always if you use existing characters and/ or world they live in then that is fanfiction, but now I’m not so sure. I have been writing what I thought was fanfiction since I was 7. In fact my first short story was a X-Files fanfic. I started giving Mulder and Scully new cases to investigate. This seems to be what most fanfiction is or at least to me what it is. in many of my fanfics I make myself a character in what ever world I am interested in. Fanfiction for me was a way to play in the worlds of my favorite stories. In fact that is what reading and writing in general is for me a new world to play in. For everyone else though it seems that fanfiction is about changing the meanings or identities of the stories themselves, which is not what I do at all. I guess I just see stories in a different way. For me its about playing around with questions or possibilities that arise. Like, when a character in a video games says they own your character’s soul now, what would happen to that character if they died in the context of the game world? if this world was real that is. The possibility of answering that question lead me to start writing my current Elder Scrolls fanfic. I think that fanficion is different for everyone. Some people what new meanings and identities. Some people want to rewrite aspects they didn’t like, mistakes the reader thinks the author made, that’s where shipping seems to come from. Some people just want to escape and play in the worlds they love withe the characters they love.
Jennifer, I really like your statement “Fanfiction for me was a way to play in the worlds of my favorite stories.” The use of play is appropriate, there is something about fan fiction that involves play, that we are placing these characters in new scenarios to “play” with them. Would a good fanfiction be a story that is believable, but new?
Do you think fanfiction is a way to comment on the text?
A good fanfiction would be believable in the contexts of the world you are playing in. I say this because most of the worlds I write about or read about both original and fanfiction are purely fantasy and have some very unrealistic plots and/ or world physics, but are still fun to read and write. For me fanfiction is not about commenting on the text. For me, it is about having fun in worlds I don’t live in and would like to or at least would like to visit. it is also about answering unanswered questions that I have about the story.
“it is about having fun in worlds I don’t live in and would like to or at least would like to visit. it is also about answering unanswered questions that I have about the story.” Awesome! It seems as though you are getting at the fact that writers of fanfiction take ownership of the story, they make it their own instead of the author’s.
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