It honestly blows my mind when I see adult writers and journalists talking about how fanfiction is “ruining fiction” because “kids are investing all their time and talent into something that doesn’t matter instead of applying their skills to creating something original that they could actually make money off of.”
Like, imagine if people had that attitude toward other things - it’d be completely ridiculous:
“I can’t believe my sixth grader would rather use the basketball hoop to play Knockout instead of organizing competitive games and striving to join the NBA. What a lazy, unmotivated kid.”
“YouTube videos? Just making free videos on the internet for anyone to see whenever they want? Why don’t you just produce a movie? A whole fucking movie. You’re in high school, you can figure it out.”
“Are you really so uncreative that the only songs you can play on the piano are ones other people wrote? The only real piano players are the ones who write their own music, I’m just saying. People like you are the reason originality is dead.”
SOMETIMES PEOPLE DO THINGS BECAUSE THEY’RE FUN! MAKING THINGS AND SHARING THEM WITH OTHER PEOPLE IS FUCKING FUN! NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT MAKING MONEY!!!
Also writing fan fiction is great practice for writing original stories, plots, editing, time management, grammar, sentence structure, etc. so don’t hate those who are practicing something.
Dante’s Inferno is self-insert Bible fanfiction. Most Renaissance and Medieval art that isn’t portraiture is Bible fanart. Lord of the Flies is a dark, AU fanfic of a previous book that had a bunch of English boys getting stranded on an island where everything turned out just hunky dory. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is fanfiction. Lancelot and Guinevere are French fanfiction additions to the King Arthur myth.
90% of all Disney movies ever made are fanfiction. In Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid? The little mermaid DIES. In Beauty and the Beast, Beauty has two sisters, and her father is a merchant, not an inventor. The villagers never storm the castle. The Disney movies are reinterpretations of pre-existing stories aka fanfiction. Is anyone shitting on Disney for writing ‘fanfiction’?
BBC’s Sherlock is modernAU fanfiction. Elementary is modernAU always-a-girl!John fanfiction. BBC’s Merlin is fanfiction.
Age of Ultron is fanfiction.
Fanfiction is natural and has happened since the dawn of time. Stop looking down on people (and I gotta say, a lot of the people writing fanfic that I know are female) who write fanfiction for fun and their own enjoyment.
I have read fanfiction better than actual booms. I have seen fanfiction better than the movies. Like stupid Mario brother is way better than many Mario games and infinitely better than the movie or show.