One thing I love about fanfic is that it’s a shortcut to storytelling. So, like, you pick up a new novel, not part of a series or anything, and you start to read. And you have to map out the entire milieu in your brain: these are the main characters, these are their relationships, this is their backstory, these are the things you need to remember about the location or politics or whatever else there is.
You spend all this time absorbing all this information and learning to really care about the characters and following events as they unfold and then – it just ends. And then you pick up another story and you have to do the whole thing all over again.
The nice thing about fanfic is that you can skip all the universe-setting stuff: you can (generally) assume that a reader will know the characters, relationships, back stories, etc etc etc. You can literally start a story with the line “Dudley chased Harry down the street” and not have to explain who Harry is, who Dudley is, why Dudley is chasing Harry, why Harry can’t avoid or hide from Dudley’s attention, why Harry’s best option is to run, vaguely how old Harry and Dudley are, why Harry can’t get someone to help him - hell, you even know it’s summertime. Fanfic is a shortcut to storytelling, enabling both the reader and the writer to get to the meat of the story without (necessarily) needing to faff about explaining and trying to remember all sorts of details.
I have often described fanfic as the mythology and folklore of the modern world. Captain Kirk is the equivalent of what Hercules was to the ancient Greeks, a hero that everyone knows about and so can be an archetypal hero in anyone’s story.
Copyright is a very unnatural imposition on how this aspect of human culture has worked throughout the vast majority of history. It really annoys me when people discuss what elements of a setting are “canon” and fall back on the authority of the legal system, rather than what the collective will of the fandom feels is the correct course of things. Imagine if someone had “owned” Poseidon and had suppressed the Iliad because Homer was doing unauthorized things with the character.
I would argue that the “owner” of the mythology does have a stake in keeping the stories “authentic”. In those ancient days, sure there was no copyright, but there was heresy, which was effectively the means by which the writers protected their core IP like Poseidon and Zeus, the Bible and Gospels etc. Otherwise these stories would not have survived the millenia mostly unaltered.
Take Poseidon’s trident away and give him a sword and people aren’t going to be impressed. They might even kick your ass as Poseidon was supposed to be a real god at the time.
If you wanted to write non-canon fic back then, you made your own in-universe characters like Odesseus or Hercules and if you were lucky, they became adopted as part of the Greek Mythology expanded universe. But you had better write the gods as they were intended, or you could be exiled or worse!
Likewise today, a world like Star Trek has in-universe rules that you can’t break or else your fic becomes non-canon, and you may be mocked or “exiled” from the community.
Take Poseidon’s trident away and give him a sword and people aren’t going to be impressed.
But the point is that it’s the people who aren’t going to be impressed. Not some random “rights holder” that has that title only due to an arbitrary shuffling of tokens of value that happened out of sight in some hidden office or courtroom. Churches may try to declare particular ideas to be heretical, but if the general populace goes against those declarations they quickly change their tune or get schismed.
If someone back in ancient Greece had somehow “bought the rights” to Poseidon and decided that from now on he’d wield a sword (so that he can sell Poseidon-branded swords or something), he’d have been ignored. People would keep telling tales of Poseidon’s trident, and the tales with the sword would just vanish into irrelevance because nobody would retell them.
Having seen things much like this happen to a number of franchises I’ve loved since childhood, I really wish this was still the way of things.
Since there is no publishing barriers you end up with a lot of bad content that wasn’t filtered out from the platform in any way. That’s no necessarily bad, it’s just harder to find good writing, but it gives novice writers a way to just get out there and get feedback. When you find good stories it’s just a way to get more from characters and worlds you want more of. I specially like slice of life types of stories where you get to peek into the “boring” parts in between the cannon story lines. There’s also generally a lot of smutty content that you can filter out if you don’t want to see it.
Writers gotta start somewhere.
Like others have said some of it can be shit but you can come across genuinely good writers as well. I don’t read it anymore but when I was younger I was really into it. There’s one story that was pretty much like the length of a book and being released by the chapter every few weeks or months or whatever and the writing and story had such an impact on me, I still think about it often.
Even though the work is not completely original, something that the internet has only recently starting lacking is a mass variety of creative writing. This is due to a lot of reasons, yet mainly it’s intense moderation policies and increasingly strict advertiser friendly narratives being policed. There was more creative writing online within forums during the early 2000s. Anything that grows creative writing is a win.
I want more content of my favorite guys
I get more content of my favorite guys when i read fanfiction
I support people’s rights to make it but have very little interest in reading/watching most of it.
It can be better than the original source
Sometimes it can be better than the original source. Often the fans know just what to do with a world.
I think it’s important and I am inspired by the institutions that archive it.
I mean, if I was a writer that thought good world building and character development was too much work, it’d probably give a go.
Fanfiction isn’t a monolithic homogenous entity. Some of the most entertaining, well written stories that expand on their respective narrative universe are works of fan fiction but there are also poorly written abominations that cause psychic damage just being read.
It’s 95% cringe.
