We Are Exhausted

The comment prompts are listed in order of the grid (rows 1 through 4, columns A through D):

1A: user's first work

1B: a drabble (exactly 100 words)

1C: comment more than 100 words

1D: a work you have bookmarked or saved

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2A: written before canon (jossed)

2B: less than 500 hits

2C: non-fic (audio, art, poetry,meta,...)

2D: liveblog in comments

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3A: quote your favorite sentence

3B: a genre or trope you've never read before

3C: first comment on work

3D: one of oldest 20 works in a fandom or ship

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4A: anonymous work

4B: describe how it made you feel

4C: an old fandom of yours

4D: by user with less than 10 works

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This is based on my personal views on fanfiction which have only gotten more passionate over the years since I first started reading and writing it in 2008, helped in part in recent times by the wonderful @headspace-hotel articulating thoughts on it much more clearly and radically than I managed to (or dared to) before.

From a recent post I particularly liked this part:

"the buckyfic universe extends way beyond the confines of what 'canon' could offer or appeal to people, and it is not beholden to canon, it is a collective story we are telling together"

It was part of a conversation about a particular character (Bucky from the MCU), but I think it applies just as well to any fanfiction community centered around a character (like Naruto), setting (Vertumna), or even just general premise (Pokemon Mystery Dungeon stories, which are only united by having a world with a pokemon society and no human-looking humans). Because I don't want to derail it when turning that into a general point like that, I thought I could make my own post here.

Like premodern storytelling, fanfiction is a collective experience!

It's (almost) always done in a community, where a bigger or smaller group of people write or read them in the same place together, now usually through a website, or before that through fanzine contributions and conventions.

Whereas both writing and hearing/reading mainstream literature has become much more or even entirely solitary, in a way that fanfiction at the most basic level is not. In fact, writing an "original" story is perhaps one of the most prototypical solitary jobs in modern times, unless they are collaborations (which is rare), or the author has a big team of proofreaders and other people employed that keep close contact (even rarer).

Like myths, fanfictions tend to have many origins, but also always one connecting element!

1. Source materials As the quote above shows, contrary to what many people (wrongly) believe about fanfiction, there's never just a single source material for all fanfics of any community, and much less one authoritative source that all have to follow.

Many authors enjoy using more than one source material, either explicitly in crossovers (making their story part of several communities), or as inspiration the way it is normally seen in mainstream literature and discussions about it.

Even many stories that don't overtly draw from various existing works will ignore whatever they want from their "canon", as the popularity of Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe and parody shows. They exist for basically every fandom, even small ones with just a couple writers and a few hundred stories. 2. Other fanfictions But, as the quote emphasizes, it's by far not just existing works that serve as sources of inspiration! ALL fanfictions rely to various degrees on other fanfictions as inspiration (whether other stories from the same, or from other communities) as much as the single thing that connects them and binds them all together as a community. Which can be, as said above, the passion for someone like Bucky, an exoplanet that you only got glimpses of or the fascination with the idea of a society of a huge variety of weird creatures, but no normal humans at all, that leads to thousands of people imagining thousands of settings each with their own characters! The last one basically requires you to do everything that an author of mainstream literature also has to do, describe and bring to life an original setting, with original characters (even if their appearance is based on existing designs) and an original storyline. 3. Archetypes, tropes and storylines that often originated in fan communities Though it's not just communities like that which end up giving rise to shared archetypes, popular tropes and recurrent storylines, every fanfiction community has those! Some types of characters might reappear in the work of many different authors, or popular interpretations of source material (or "canon") characters that didn't exist in the source get widely adopted across a big range of works, which is sometimes called "fanon". Romance (usually called shipping, from relationship-ing) stories, which make up the bulk of fanfiction, particularly will also re-use many tropes that have no presence in the source either, such as the infamous But There Was Only One Bed, or And They Were Roommates, which originate more as "funny or interesting situations to put characters into". And while many popular storylines will be lifted from "canon", such a journey stories in Pokemon fanfiction taking after the anime or the games, many, especially those that have become popular across communities were entirely fan-created independent of any work, like Coffeeshop AUs! Cozy "original" coffeeshop literature only appeared relatively recently around 2020. 4. Personal feelings, experiences and passions... and the mundane And of course, personal feelings of any fanfiction writers will consciously or sometimes unconsciously show up in what they write, just like with any other author! Fanfiction is used to deal with difficult emotions or experiences just as much as "original" writing is.

Many people will also happily include small and big joys of their lives, their passions, or their jobs in it. And having a more mundane workplace such as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation hasn't stopped fanfiction writers.

They will simply have Naruto and Sasuke's dynamic show up in their approach to office politics and bureaucracy, or have Naruto's ambition include becoming adapt at packing boxes and factory banter instead of ninja stuff. This is known as the Take Your Fandom to Work approach.

FanLore, a wiki encyclopedia dedicated to fan communities or fandoms in general has an article on the Public Bureaucracy Naruto story and how popular it has become with Canadian public servants:

The Factory Operative Naruto idea goes back to the user manta on a small writing community on Discord, the WIP Project:

"ugh naruto, don't you know anything? any REAL factory operative knows you need 612 code cardboard boxes for pouches, not 621s... stop embarrassing yourself and just quit already..." "oh just you see sasuke. I'm going to become the best factory operative you've ever seen. Someday, I'll even wear the specialist green coat. I'll treat all the temps with respect. I'll be the height of efficiency AND playful banter! That's my factory operative code! Believe it!"

--manta (mantaofthebanter)

The only meaningfully different change compared to premodern times is that we now have additional means of communicating and hence passing on stories. But I haven't heard anyone say that this makes other kind of modern literature or stories fundamentally different from premodern ones. Like, love stories are still love stories, stories about adventure are still stories about adventure. etc. Like with fanfiction, the style, themes etc. and means of preserving and telling them has changed, but fundamentally they are still very similar. But as said in the beginning, fanfiction retains in many ways the collective storytelling part that mainstream literature, especially commercial literature, absolutely does not have anymore.

In fact, fanfiction is fundamentally all that which commercial literature struggles to be or simply can't be, because fanfiction is unmarketable and refuses to bend to market or social pressures at large, and so never has to follow what's currently popular, profitable or promoted by a government.

It makes room for all those who find no place in mainstream literature, especially for many of those at the margins of society like queer people or anyone who seeks a community of completely free self-expression, authentic representation, radical themes that does writing exclusively for the art, where money matters nothing and truly anyone can participate. Or to sum it up with an edit of one of Sarah Anderson's webcomics, Sarah's Scribbles: