Guys, It's Time for a RAH-RAH! FANDOM! Post...

I came home from work today to find some people on Twitter a bit glum about the Benedict Cumberbatch OUT interview. And I said, "Oh, no, I think it's time for a rah-rah fandom! post!" (I also said, "Oh, Benedict, Joseph Gordon-Levitt kind of beat you in the 'who would be better at killing bugs' competition we had *and* he's doing all this stuff with collaborative creativity that I really respect and you keep talking about having sex in space and why are you so fixated on the sex in space thing?")

TANGENT OVER.

Here's my rah-rah fandom! post:

You guys. Point #1. Are you ready?

1. Fan. Fiction. Rocks.

This drives me crazy. I hate-hate-hate reading condemnation of fanfiction by someone who has either never really read fanfiction or Googled "Craziest Sexual Situation Ever Found in Fanfiction." If you went on AO3 and you sorted fics by kudos -- and I've done this in many fandoms to get myself started -- the ones on top are ASTONISHING. They are *so good.* Every time I read someone saying something stupid about fanfiction, I want to anonymously send them one of those top pieces of fanfiction with the character names changed, just to trick them into reading it.

Fanfiction exists in every genre, in every length, for every character you can imagine. It is one of the most prolific, varied, diverse modes of creativity existing in the world today. It takes gender roles head-on and tackles them, it deals with issues of sexuality, it tells stories about abuse, about outsider-ness, about growing up, about growing old, about finding the right person, about finding the wrong person, about learning to love yourself, about learning to love others. It tells stories through dialogue, through song, through first-person and second-person and third-person. It messes with timelines, or it goes chronologically. It is severely realistic or it is frivolous hilarious crack. It is everything, it contains multitudes. It should never, ever be belittled to one single thing.

It tells stories. Important stories. Stories that most of the time we can't find in the "mainstream" media right now. You know how people talk all the time about pushing the envelope and challenging conceptions, etc., etc., etc.? We do it every. Single. Bloody. Day. And never let anybody make you think differently.

2. And even if we didn't: WHO. CARES. If every single story we told was horrible, awful, tacky, disgusting...who cares? Let me tell you something, I watch A LOT of television. And if you think that a bunch of the stories being told on television, from reality television to gross lazy comedies, *isn't* horrible, awful, tacky, disgusting... It *is*.

3. I don't like to make fanfiction all about teenage girls, because it isn't exclusively written or read by girls, and it definitely isn't exclusively written or read by teenagers, and it drives me crazy that this idea continues to persist. But I will say that the heavily female composition of it definitely triggers this knee-jerk reaction by men that it should be condemned. YA suffers from a similar knee-jerk. It can't possibly be serious, because *women* like it. You know what one of the biggest pieces of fanfiction in the world is? A TELEVISION SHOW CALLED "SHERLOCK." Notice you never see anyone call that fanfiction? Don't let them get away with that. That's exactly what it is.

4. And this is all about ownership, by the way. Who gets to own the narratives of the stories society tells? Talking about the stories has been an occupation for as long as we've had stories. Why don't I get a say in that conversation? Why don't we all get a say? We took their narrative, and we made it about something they didn't like. I'm a creator myself, so I get that's not pleasant, but it isn't different than any act of interpretation that scholars have been doing for centuries. We've got voices, and we can make them heard, and that's all we're doing, and *that's* what's apparently so annoying.

So, I don't know, this is a lot of babbling, and the tl;dr is:

Fanfiction is awesome. We've all read pieces of fanfiction that we could hold seminars on, the same way we could Dostoyevsky or Dickens. We could have reading groups. We should really all take some kind of correspondence course on fanfiction, we really should. And so here's my challenge to you: You have to create a syllabus to study fanfiction. What do you assign? I want ALL THE RECS. Spread the love, you guys.