"Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language."
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The Boy Who Lived Forever | Time Magazine
THIS! Can I reblog it over and over again?
(via trappedinamatchbox)
#so much stigma around fic #i don’t get it #it seems so natural to me to want to write more about characters and worlds you feel you don’t get enough of #ugh i wish people would just stop making into a super weird thing that only older basement-bound star trek nerds do #…because do those people even exist anymore? did they ever exist? #people who read and write fic are people who appreciate something so much they need a new medium to express it #sigh #NERD CULTURE IS MAINSTREAM NOW AND WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT FIC DEROGATORILY YOU’RE THE ONE THAT’S OUT OF THE ZEITGEIST
(via laralaralara)
a few days after this article came out i flew home to see the last harry potter movie with friends, on the plane i was reading a game of thrones on bria’s nook and the guy next to me asked what i was reading so we started chatting a bit. i told him that i was flying to charlotte to see harry potter with my best friend and we talked a bit about the books we were reading. eventually the conversation drifted a bit and he asked me (it wasn’t totally out of the blue) ‘so you’re not super into a game of thrones or anything; you’re not going to write fanfiction of it?’, it was pretty clear he meant it in a slightly mocking way and i just smiled along and laughed a little bit and said ‘oh no probably not’ and i may have said something about grrm being really anti-fic anyway (which probably outed me as a nerd whoops), but ever since then i’ve suspected that fanfiction was on his mind because of this brilliant article that wasn’t meant to be derogatory at all. somehow this man who seemed to be otherwise a reasonably intelligent and nice person read this article that (finally) explained fanfiction and fandom without being condescending and still mocked the people involved with it., it breaks my heart a little bit, and it bothers me that i didn’t have the nerve to say ‘ACTUALLY some of my very good friends write game of thrones fanfiction and i write harry potter fanfiction and guess the fuck what? WE’RE JUST LIKE YOU.’, in a society that’s perpetually jaded and cynical and pessimistic all being a nerd means is that you looked at the world around you and said ‘no. fuck all this feigned disinterest in everything that makes up our lives. i’m going to be ENTHUSIASTIC.’, when you boil it down every application of the words ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ basically just mean ‘someone who loves something.’ band geeks love band. computer geeks love computers. policy wonks love policy. straight-up nerds love learning., IT KILLS ME THAT I LIVE IN A SOCIETY WHERE LOVING THINGS AND WANTING TO LEARN THINGS MAKES ME WEIRD, actually i’m pretty sure that the stigma around fandom is related to the pervasive anti-intellectualism that’s also present in our culture. being educated and well-read and intelligent makes you a snob so what are people who don’t even do those things for money. doing it for money is bad enough but imagine people who analyze literature FOR FUN. and people who write stories (brilliant novels and heartbreaking epics and everything else) that they’ll never be able to make a profit from?, the TIME article actually touches on that when it mentions that because most people don’t think of writing stories as something FUN they have trouble grasping that for some people it really is. they just see this odious task and then they see that the people doing it won’t ever be able to make money from their work and they’ve somehow just missed the point. the point isn’t that i might someday be able to make money from writing (nice as that would be). the point is that i have a story bouncing around my head and demanding to be told and the point is that NOT being creative makes me feel cramped and claustrophobic. writing stories and dissecting plots and staying up until 2 AM debating why characters in movies act the way they do is kind of like playing football except that i think watching baseball (where people obsessively remember stats and names and games and all kinds of shit) except that to me putting that much effort into memorizing a bunch of players’ battingh averages sounds horrifyingly dull whereas being able to recite huge chunks of the west wing from having seen it too many times sounds like a blast,but hey, you don’t see me calling you a loser for it, YOU DON’T SEE SOCIETY CALLING YOU A LOSER FOR IT, (oh holy shit this got away from me), things that matter, fan culture,
(via maelstromofmymentality)
15
October
This quote was reblogged from deactivationwarning and originally by previouslygalfridian-deactivate.
#fanfiction #fandom #reblogging again
