Random Thoughts Monday: Fan Fiction

I wanted to do another post on Star Trek, but every way I thought about it fan fiction always crept into it.  Once fan fiction is mentioned there is inevitably a tangent on why I (or anyone) would want to read fan fiction.  There would be excuses, explanations, justifications, and then inevitably a defensive 'because I can like whatever I want to, dang it'.  So, I am going to get this out of the way up front.

Wikipedia describes fanfiction thus:

"Fan fiction or fanfiction (also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic or fic) is fiction about characters or settings from an original work of fiction, created by fans of that work rather than by its creator"

I personally am a fan fiction lurker.  I have tried my hand at a few drabbles (stories that are generally less than a 1000 words in length) and am occasionally inspired to leave a review, but mostly I just read.  Perhaps if I was more involved in the community I would be less defensive about admitting to liking fan fiction.  So why read works by rabid fans when I could read edited finely polished and vetted works from professional authors?  There are a dozen different ways I have answered this question and I will likely have a different answer tomorrow, but today it is because you can choose your own adventure.

First it is difficult to read fan fiction without having consumed the original (I say consumed instead of read because there is fan fiction about books, movies, tv shows, comic strips, games, ect.).  In the case of Star Trek my progression went like this: I saw the movie Star Trek Into Darkness; I wanted more so I searched out fan fiction; the fan fiction referenced the original 1960s Star Trek series so I searched those out and watched them; I discovered story lines being referenced that were not in the original series which led me to discover the 1975 animated series; I found the official novelization of Star Trek 2009, hated it, decided it didn't exist (eventually I will give the novelization of Into Darkness a shot); and through all of this I continued to read fan fiction on line.    

One other tangent, before I get to the point.  Fan fiction suffers from a 'which came first the chicken or the egg' conundrum.  I have read fan fiction for many different works, but if there isn't an active community I quickly run out of stories I want to read.  Then my interest dies and I move on.  An active community needs two things to exist: writers and reviewers.  Fan fiction writers don't get paid, except in social interaction and encouragement from reviewers.  If there are no reviewers writers move to another fandom.  If there are no new stories reviewers move onto another fandom.  Because of this the most popular fandoms tend to be those attached to largely popular original works (Harry Potter and Star Wars being prime examples) making it more likely that a sufficient amount of writers and reviewers will converge on the fandom to create a sustained community.

Now the point, with a large sustained body of work being created around a fandom a reader can choose the direction they want that fandom to go and what kind of story they want to read.  For example reading a story that pairs off Harry and Draco (or Harriet and Draco, gender bending is always an option for an author) is almost guaranteed to include some kind of conflict relating to the characters status in society.  Whether this takes the form of being on two different sides of a war or in navigating the differences between their social standing there is almost guaranteed to be a clash of classes.  Perhaps, instead, the reader wants a story that explores a darker Harry that decides to put his life before everyone else's.  With a large enough community all of these stories would be out there to find and read.  A reader literally gets to choose their own adventure.