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cory doctorow
only with others’ universes, for the sheer joy of it. Some fanfic
is great — there’s plenty of
Buffy
fanfic that trumps the official,
licensed tie-in novels — and some is purely dreadful.
Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people
who write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose
work they’re paying homage to; and second, that the people who
write and read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their
labors. This is great news for writers.
Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that
they’ll make it their own are fans forever, fans who’ll evangelize
your work to their friends, fans who’ll seek out your work how-
ever you publish it.
Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work
out their own creative urges, are fans who have a damned good
reason to stick with the field, to keep on reading even as our num-
bers dwindle. Even when the fandom revolves around movies or
TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something undertaken
in the world of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit.
In Japan, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called
Dōjinshi — some of these titles dwarf the circulation of the work
they pay tribute to, and many of them are sold commercially.
Japanese comic publishers know a good thing when they see it,
and these fanficcers get left alone by the commercial giants they
attach themselves to.
And yet for all this, there are many writers who hate fanfic.
Some argue that fans have no business appropriating their char-
acters and situations, that it’s disrespectful to imagine your pre-
cious fictional people in sexual scenarios, or to retell their stories
from a different point of view, or to snatch a victorious happy
ending from the tragic defeat the writer ended her book with.
Other writers insist that fans who take without asking — or
against the writer’s wishes — are part of an “entitlement culture”
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