Why Do Peopel Write Negative Reviews on Fanfiction
Rohini*, a master's educatee in Wellington, learned final month that a fanfic story she wrote has surpassed 100,000 readers worldwide. This is her start-person account of the feel, as told to Shanti Mathias for IRL.
I never expected my fanfic to have 100,000 readers. The story was based on a superhero TV evidence my all-time friend and I had become very invested in. Nosotros didn't have anyone to talk to about it, so we wrote a fic. It was set in an alternate universe, and information technology took the characters of the prove and gear up it in a high schoolhouse. It turned into a whole enormous world.
Nosotros wrote a chapter a calendar week, working together – ane person would take up the writing when the other got stuck. Each affiliate was v,000 to 10,000 words long. When we finished information technology was 342,000 words – that's 100,000 words more than the biggest Harry Potter volume, then information technology'south pretty massive. It'south massive because the point of fanfiction is to be self-indulgent. It exists for the piddling details, the insanely indulgent things y'all would not be able to get from a Tv set bear witness. I knew that if this was in an actual book those details would be culled instantly – but the people who are reading this specific fanfic wanted to read it, and then I wrote it anyhow.
There was a big turning bespeak in our fic, around affiliate 20, months after we started posting on Archive of Our Ain . An online friend of mine texted me and said, "Hey, await, do you have Twitter? You should make an account." When I did, I was immediately bombarded with dozens of followers and messages who were like, "I love this fic so much", "information technology's the highlight of my week", "I love it more than than the actual show", "this story ways so much to me". We were also starting to get messages on Tumblr – some people had made a group chat to discuss the fic, people made these cute gif edits, in that location was fan fine art.
Every bit a kid, when I started reading fanfic and seeing how pop they tin get, all I always wanted was to write a fanfic that got that big. But it was and then surreal when that really happened. It's different to writing a published volume, considering authors don't usually become to interact with the readers as they're writing. Merely with fanfiction, you're non doing it for money, yous don't care if it becomes a real book; y'all're writing because you honey information technology and you lot get feedback from people who also dearest the source material. Information technology'southward collaborative: we'd add an author'southward annotation with each chapter that we released and enquire readers if they had ideas or predictions, and if we liked it, we might add it to the story.
When I was younger, I'd see a movie in the theatre or I'd read a book, and I'd think, "I want more". I would be writing tiny, 600-word fanfics for everything I ever watched or read so I could stay in that world a little longer.
It was such a relief when I discovered fanfiction online. I idea I was this weird kid who obsessed over everything I read and watched. When I was eleven I institute fanfiction.cyberspace, and I establish LiveJournal – back in the twenty-four hours those were the chief platforms for fanfiction. Online, I wasn't alone; in one case I started getting more involved in fandom civilization I realised at that place was this whole community of people talking about the media that they honey in their spare time. There were hundreds of thousands of people doing the verbal aforementioned matter that I was.
I started making close fandom friends on my gap year, when I actually threw myself into fan communities. I got invited to bring together a group chat to talk about a bear witness, and we became really good friends – people from all over the world; Europe, the Usa, the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. I've at present met about one-half of those people in existent life on trips overseas.
The person I wrote the fic with, she lives in the Great britain, and she's my best friend. Nosotros talk every day. We met on Tumblr – nosotros followed each other'south accounts so messaged each other, and we realised we got forth actually well, which makes sense since nosotros had like interests and hobbies. It'due south a absurd affair to encounter someone through something you lot love so much and have it blossom into a friendship that lasts.
When I first got into fandom spaces a decade agone, TV and books and movies were very white, straight and heteronormative. Fanfic and fandom provided a space where people could create original characters to insert into this earth that provided that diversity, or to interpret queerness into characters that already existed, to look at that through a new lens – something you didn't necessarily get that in the original work . That was ever quite a big pull for a lot of people towards fandom and fanfic; it becomes a infinite that has a lot more than diverseness and representation of the world y'all want to see, that'due south more than authentic to the existent world anyway. Then y'all look at the original work and realise that oh, it's really lacking. I remember that's part of why our fic resonated – it was queer and it was about a coming out experience based on our own experiences of coming to terms with our own sexualities.
There's a stigma, even at present, around fanfiction, and fandom more generally. Information technology's the aforementioned mode that teenage girls are shamed or stigmatised for the things they savour whether it's boy bands or TV shows – there'southward a huge percentage of people in fandom who are teenagers. In that location'south a shamefulness about how intensely people will similar something, that they dedicate that much thought and effort into art and writing. Only when you think about how much people will invest in sports or that kind of thing, it's not that dissimilar.
Fanfiction is more socially acceptable at present. My flatmates and my friends knew about it considering I was always talking almost information technology, I was ever excited virtually it. It was kind of an inside joke that if I wasn't at uni or wasn't doing work, I was writing the fic.
I'm and so proud of it. I've written a lot of things in my life, but I wouldn't go back and modify anything about this 1. It feels like a haze, I don't call back I could e'er do that once again in the aforementioned manner, merely I am insanely proud of it.
Thousands and thousands of people have read it in the two and a half years since nosotros stopped posting. It has been getting a few thousand hits every month, and at the end of 2021 nosotros hitting 100,000 views. It feels ridiculous considering we never went out thinking near who and how many people were going to read it, nosotros just wanted someone to. And that wish came true.
*Proper name has been inverse for privacy.
Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.
Source: https://thespinoff.co.nz/irl/12-01-2022/how-it-feels-to-write-a-wildly-popular-work-of-fanfiction
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