Article on fan fiction

[veronicaluv]

Fifty Shades of Grey seems to be the current touchstone for mainstream media to try and quantify fan fiction and as usual, they haven't done a very good job. I don't think I've ever read an article regarding fan fiction that didn't come across as, at the very least, condescending, and at the worst, condemning. This article falls into the "vaguely

Comments

[angstosaur]

I've not read the articles, but back in the '80's I bought Star Trek paperbacks, published books, not fanfic per se - but there was a homoerotic undercurrent in many of them ... at the time I wasn't reading for slash, but the close relationship between pairs of male characters (I did the same with other fandoms at the time) ... with the increase in online fanfic there has been a much larger range of people writing it where it can be read by a wider audience - some of it is excellent and a lot of it not so good, and it's the less polished attempts, often by younger writers, that get the attention and denigration by those 'real writers' which is sad

[veronicaluv]

Your experiences are a lot like mine (a lot - I was hooked on the ST novels until they really got bad) and it's no surprise that the ones with a lot of K/S overtones and hurt/comfort were my favorites. They even published a collection of fanfiction and *gasp* sold it for money! We'd evolved from the fanzines - or so we thought.

I have to confess that I never thought of the stories I wrote (write) as slash. My purpose was never to co-opt anyone's culture or genre, I just wanted to write love stories about characters I cared about, characters that shared such an obvious connection and chemistry that to me, a sexual layer to that relationship simply seemed natural. That's my niche, but that's all it is. And dammit, it's still just a hobby, but a hobby that so many people participate in, either by writing or reading or vidding or whatever, that I find it hard to believe that the media still view it as something less than honorable.