Fanfiction was the guilty pleasure that helped me unlock the internet

My affair with fanfiction began off as an English task. On the tender age of 12, my tiger mother and father compelled me to spend each free second at an area cram college. It was about 6PM on a Friday night time in July. None of us had eaten dinner, and our English teacher knew she was shedding us. Ms. L checked out us excessive of her studying glasses, lips pursed, and stated, “Your task for the weekend is to write down a one-page different ending to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”

On the time, I didn’t understand we had been being advised to write down fanfiction, however that’s how the identical medium that begot Fifty Shades of Gray ended up turning into a decades-long responsible pleasure.

Usually, I resented the additional homework cram college piled onto my plate. However for no matter motive, that Romeo and Juliet task sparked one thing in my academically fried mind. Cram colleges revolve round brute forcing math and vocabulary drills till you’ll be able to issue quadratic polynomials in your sleep. Not one of the 20-page homework packets ever requested us to ponder “what if…”.

What if Juliet determined Romeo’s corpse was an indication she ought to run away from her abusive household and get herself to the nunnery Ophelia shunned? I stayed up late Sunday night time writing, enhancing, rewriting, and reediting my one-page masterpiece. It received a B+, which in my household, was the equal of a double F-. I used to be grounded, however one thing deep and primal in my soul had modified.

It’s cringe to confess, however I spent most of that summer time obsessive about Gundam Wing. I used to be raised on a nutritious diet of Cartoon Community’s Toonami, and I’ve no protection aside from being a weak preteen. In protest of my grueling homework load, I snuck into my lounge after my mother and father fell asleep and prayed that the crackle of a 56K modem wouldn’t wake them up. Google was beginning to pop off, and it led me straight to the sexy world of Gundam Wing fanfiction. It was the primary time I used the web for something aside from homework or AOL video games.

Ninety-nine % of it gave me a coronary heart assault. I hid my tomato-red face behind my fingers whereas searching by means of fan-curated libraries. But I used to be equally thrilled as I used to be scandalized. Right here had been hundreds of individuals reaching by means of the pc to ask “what if?” Granted, many of the questions had been, “What if protagonists one and two boned in essentially the most deranged means potential?” However they’d the audacity to ask such a brazen query and write about it in excruciating element. Publicly.

As an anxious preteen, that confidence was alluring. I wished the liberty to ask unhinged “what if” questions and discover them. I stayed up late into the night time on LiveJournal, lurking as smarter folks than I created communities round fandoms they beloved, questioning how I may faucet into that. I clicked hyperlink after hyperlink till I ended up at Fanfiction.internet. Immediately, I gained entry to a free library stuffed with hundreds of tales that supplied a glimpse right into a world past the one my mother and father deliberate for me. It was the very first time I understood what made the web and the subcultures it spawned so thrilling.

Earlier than I knew it, I began asking extra of my very own “what if” questions each time I completed a film, TV present, or novel. Finally, I began giving myself permission to scribble some solutions down.

My English academics disapproved. This was an unprestigious strategy to categorical creativity. True genius, they stated, got here from unique work, and it was a waste of expertise to ponder legally doubtful what-ifs. (Sarcastically, that is how I realized in regards to the honest use doctrine.)

I wished to spit again that I used to be bored with solely studying the stiff prose of lifeless males. I wished to yell that there was a military of deranged authors on-line writing a number of the most transgressive tales I’d ever laid eyes on. Positive, you’ll be able to inform a few of them are written by of us with a tenuous grasp of grammar (see: My Immortal, a Harry Potter fanfic that’s broadly considered the worst on the web and has its personal wiki). However I couldn’t discover something prefer it on the cabinets of my native bookstores. I wished to argue that, in 2001, this was one of many few on-line areas that launched me to the concept queer folks may have a fortunately ever after. However I didn’t have the vocabulary to say any of that but, so I stored my mouth firmly shut.

Out of spite, I stored studying my uncouth fics on high of my extra “legit” studying.

Studying The Mummy fanfics led me on an in the end fruitless yearlong try to learn and write hieroglyphics. I realized extra in regards to the Civil Conflict by studying a 130,000-word alternate universe fic written by a historical past grad scholar than I ever did from AP US Historical past. The footnotes in that story rivaled those in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Hearth. I undoubtedly realized about classism in French slang after a two-year stint lurking within the Les Misérables fanfic neighborhood. (Do you know writer Victor Hugo had a 100-page digression within the novel about French slang?)

Fanfiction isn’t such a taboo pastime anymore. It’s wild, however for the reason that early days of Fanfiction.internet and LiveJournal, it’s crept into the mainstream. Fifty Shades of Gray is a Twilight fanfic that additionally received became a film. Rainbow Rowell wrote Fangirl, an acclaimed novel a couple of school scholar who writes a megapopular fanfic a couple of Harry Potter-esque sequence. That was then spun off into Carry On and Wayward Son, an extremely meta sequel sequence the place you get to learn the story the Fangirl protagonist writes. There may be a whole Wattpad-to-movie pipeline, the place a One Course fanfiction with a billion readers on Wattpad received became Netflix motion pictures. The Love Speculation by Ali Hazelwood, a romance novel that not too long ago went viral on TikTok and received a film deal, began out as a Star Wars fanfic. There are a number of extra examples.

The style remains to be met with loads of derision, but it surely’s additionally brazenly celebrated in a means that felt unattainable after I was 12. I don’t learn as a lot of it as I did after I was a teen. Fandom has gotten a little bit too on the market for me, and grownup life leaves much less time for responsible pleasures. However outdated habits die arduous. I nonetheless have alerts arrange for my favourite fics, and Archive of Our Personal is the primary website I open if I hate the ending of a narrative. I could have grown up a bit, however due to this delightfully bizarre web subculture, I don’t ask myself “what if I had the boldness to write down?” anymore.