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I love it when Mamoru calls Usagi “Usako”, and although I’m sure everyone already knows what -ko means, let me gush over it for a second😂 

So adding the suffix -ko, make someone’s name sound more feminine (which I’m sure everyone is well aware of). It’s a bit old-fashioned but -ko is a fairly common nickname for women. But on top of making it sound more feminine, calling someone -ko sort of displays the speaker’s affection AND possessiveness towards the other person. Like if my name was Nana and someone called me “Nana-ko”, that would pretty much sound like “You are my girl (whether that’s a girlfriend or a wife)” to me. And for those listening, it will sound like “you know, she is my girl”. And because of this -ko is usually a nickname only allowed for your significant other (and maaaybe a really good friend). So If someone calls you -ko out of blue, and you don’t know this person very well or don’t LIKE this person, it could be super awkward, intrusive even. 

Here Mamoru calls Usagi “Usako” for the first time and Usagi blushes hearing it. This shows that 1) Mamoru has feelings for her (obviously) and is willing to let her know his feelings 2) Usagi has feelings for him too (obviously), enough to be comfortable with him calling her that. ….Yeah, I mean, how sweet is that? (And personally I don’t even know how Mamoru would know -ko in the first place because he could not have picked it up from his parents and he doesn’t really seem like the person to watch a lot of romcom tv shows and stuff) 

Ah, fanart. Also known as the art that girls make.

Sad, immature girls no one takes seriously. Girls who are taught that it’s shameful to be excited or passionate about anything, that it’s pathetic to gush about what attracts them, that it’s wrong to be a geek, that they should feel embarrassed about having a crush, that they’re not allowed to gaze or stare or wish or desire. Girls who need to grow out of it.

That’s the art you mean, right?

Sports is a fandom. It requires zealous attention to “seasons,” knowledge of details considered obscure to those not involved in that fandom, unbelievable amounts of merchandise, and even “fanfic” in the form of fantasy teams. But this is a masculine-coded fandom. And as such, it’s encouraged - built into our economy! Have you *seen* Dish network’s “ultimate fan” advertisements, which literally base selling of a product around the normalization of all consuming (male) obsession? Or the very existence of sports bars, built around the link between fans and community enjoyment and analysis. Sport fandom is so ingrained in our culture that major events are treated like holidays (my gym closes for the Super Bowl) — and can you imagine being laughed at for admitting you didn’t know the difference between Supernatural and The X Files the way you might if you admit you don’t know the rules of football vs baseball, or basketball?

“Fandom” is not childish but we live in a culture that commodified women’s time in such away that their hobbies have to be “frivolous,” because “mature” women’s interests are supposed to be marriage, family, and overall care taking: things that allow others to continue their own special interests, while leaving women without a space of their own.

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The concept of fanfiction formed and forged the earliest stages of literature in Europe. Because the majority of authors in France, Germany and Great Britain looked at that funky little Celtic dude Arthur and thought “hey, he’s neat. I wanna write about him”.

The entire concept of a book outside of religious purposes was born out of fanfiction in my country.

There is no “first canon” for Arthur where he came as the prince of Camelot, with his sidekicks Lancelot and Merlin and his endgame love interest Gwen.

Arthur was some random hunter when he started out.

Someone’s fanfiction made him a prince.

Someone else’s fanfiction gave him a round table.

Someone else’s fanfiction gave him Merlin at his side.

Someone else’s fanfiction gave him Morgana, gave him Gwen, gave him his swords.

And, to this day, we still write Arthurian fanfiction. Literally last year there was a movie adaptation that is, by all intends and purposes, fanfiction, because it wasn’t even close to a literal adaptation of the source material (The Kid Who Would Be King). Heck, BBC’s Merlin, itself an Arthurian fanfiction, remains one of the biggest fandoms that people today write for on AO3.

You were a joke in the middle ages if you tried to write your own stuff. Who’s interested in your stuff? You were only a respected author if you wrote fanfiction. The most famous medieval German authors are famous because they wrote fanfiction about some knightly OCs they created who served on Arthur’s court. That is the literary legacy of the middle ages. Arthurian fanfiction.

Yet somewhere along the way, this concept of “I find x story/element cool and want to elaborate on it more, shift the focus onto an aspect of this original source material” has gotten this “eh, it’s fanfiction” connotation and lost respect.

Even though this very concept is still being used - even outside of the actual medium of fanfiction - and it is still being used for the very same purpose it was used for in medieval times. Original movies often don’t get as much recognition as adaptations of existing source material that the audience is familiar with. People see a movie about a character they’re familiar with and seem more inclined to buy a ticket to see the 10th new interpretation of Batman or Superman or Snow White. How are these new interpretations of familiar source material that usually add to the lore, reinterpret characterizations and dynamics, any different from fanfiction?

Once the “real artistes” moved on to original work, fanfiction was considered lesser, and thus allowed to be touched by those they considered lesser. Funny, that. Unless, of course, they wanted to have their turn at it again, in which it was obviously touted as innovative and fresh and original. Funny, that too.

Bitter, me?

The same arguments used when the novel took off as a literary form. Generally there was a paternalistic idea that women had to be protected from reading lest it twist their minds.

Speaking of Arthurian fanfiction:

For a period of time, the only respectable “art” was not found in the low forms of imaginative fiction but in the higher-minded intellectual works that focused on the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism and classicism. One of the common criticisms of imaginative fiction was that it focused on the way that it might disrupt the minds of women who were “easily agitated” and prone to fits of excited emotions. Women who read fiction (particularly penny novels) were ridiculed by men; women who wrote fiction were sneered at by “artists” and the intellectuals of the era. 

Until men began making the shift from Enlightenment to Romantic literature. Once that occurred, authors such as Byron, Wordsworth, Poe, etc. became respected figures of the literary canon; members of the literary intelligentsia and much of women’s contributions to the world of imaginative fiction were glossed over because men could do it so much better and once they did it was respected art. As a result, we still have male science fiction or horror fans praising the likes of Poe, Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, Asimov, etc. as the forefathers of SciFi, sharing a condescending chuckle over “fake geek girls” and how women are silly, soft fans (often just feigning interest to impress them), while remaining completely ignorant to the fact women were breaking ground in imaginative fiction first (e.g. Mary Cavendish, Mary Shelley, etc.). 

I’ve lately been consuming all sorts of YouTube essays on the history of subbranches of entertainment. From how popular music is evolving to how magical girls anime evolved. And they all have one common narrative: new waves don’t come from nothing. They evolve from what is familiar. We are drawn to what is familiar to us, be it a certain beat or an element we remember from a magical girls series in the 70s. What is most popular is never wholly “new” - but it references something beloved in a clever way.

And most of what is super popular is beloved and remade. Is fanfiction. Wicked is an adaptation of fanfiction of the Wizard of Oz. Shakespeare wrote royalty fanfiction. A lot of Monty Phyton is either bible or Arthurian fanfiction. Every second show these days is a remake of a classic and many of them are just different enough to be fanfiction. We are drawn to what is familiar to us. It’s what makes things successful. NOT when they come from nothing, but when they speak to us on a familiar level.

Think about Jung and his universal unconscious. His archetypes. How he thought we all speak the same language of deep, internalized symbolism that we collectively fill with shared meaning and that influences our individuality in a profound way. From “the shadow” as the representation of the bad, the unknown, the untrusted, the other. To the great mother, the wise old man, the Tree of life. Images we know and share across cultures and across generations and that speak to us. Some stories are AMAZING at speaking to us, and we retell and retell them. Retelling is how all our religious texts, all fables, all fairy tales in all their manifold iterations came to exist.

Fanfiction is doing the exact same thing. We’re taking narratives that are familiar to us, that comfort us, and we fill them with personal meaning, and that’s fucking beautiful.

And lets face is: Everyone of us, including those of us who don’t read fanfiction, take comfort in familiar narratives. You might not even notice it, but what speaks to you usually follows familiar patterns that you consume over and over again. A genre that brings you comfort and escapism. Tropes you encounter over and over again and that speak to something in you. Are you someone who is really into Isekai in any form? Then you’re following a pattern. Exploring different worlds that have nothing to do with your own? A pattern.

My first fan-love was Bibi Blocksberg. She’s a German audio cassette protagonist from my childhood, a preteen blonde girl witch with magical powers who saved her town a lot. My second (lasting) obsession was Sailor Moon. A blonde teenage magical girl who saved the world a lot. Then, a few years later, I was enthralled by Buffy, a blonde super hero who saved the world a lot. All my life I’ve been drawn to and taken comfort in the same narrative: of the most inherently feminine archetype I can think of: the ditzy blonde who was unapologetically female, in narratives where she was valid and badass and ok the way she was, and super important to the world. It didn’t have to be the same story to be the same story. I’ll be taking comfort in it for a while. And that is very normal, even if not everyone can see their own patterns.