The hill I will die on: Fan fiction is real literature, whatever the snobs say

[hunter]

Fan fiction is democracy in its purest, most chaotic form. It’s the people seizing the means of production. Every “what if?” is a tiny revolution. What if the side character got a backstory? What if the finale didn’t end in heartbreak? What if Harry Styles and Zayn Malik kissed just once, for morale?

Of course, many would argue that fan fiction isn’t real literature. It borrows worlds and characters that someone else created. It’s often unedited, published online for free and written by people with no verified experience. To the purists, it lacks originality, polish and commercial value, the hallmarks of what they believe “serious” writing should be.

--more--

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/03/hill-die-on-fan-fiction-real-literature

I had a sort-of-girlfriend who wrote some Star Trek slash back in the days when fan fiction was distributed as stapled paper copies at conventions and such; often really crappy copies made on battered self-serve machines in the library by people who feared exposing themselves to some bored copy store clerk.

A few years after the internet was opened to all in the Eternal Septemberof 1993 I was poking around looking for other fan fiction and saw my friend's story posted in multiple places, sometimes by people claiming authorship. I confronted a couple of them for my own amusement, telling them I was in the room as my friend was writing the story, but I didn't get any confessions. These days the same sorts of people are probably passing off AI slop as their own.

Such is the internet.

[viva la]

1. One of my favorite novels is Nan Dibble's Buffy-Spike story--

Old Blood.

[hunter]

3. Archive of our own is a site you can spend all day on.

https://archiveofourown.org/

[viva la]

2. As for "using worlds and characters created by others"....

Well, that's a very long tradition. James by Percival Everett uses the characters and world from Huck Finn.
Christopher Nolan is releasing a film this month-- got Oscar written all over it-- based on Homer's Odyssey (as was Brother Where Are Thou, James Joyce's Ulysses, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Circe by Madeline Miller, Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood... and I could go on and on).

This tradition allows different perspectives on immortal stories.

[PATRICK]

4. Immortal "out of copyright" stories

Parodies are still OK for the few that can actually make quality humor. Permission to add to a series is still required but some Like Tarzan are out of copyright. Well policed estate franchises and company owned rights are actually dangerous to mess with. AI slop sludges the shores of the declining readership and the now widely in print "slushpile".

AI the fraud that it is will perish, but Homer, maybe not. AI writing seems emotionally like the strange sewer that goes through the uncanny valley. Erasmus the robot trying to ape Mozart(Dune prequels) had that special psychopathic something, but then he(it) was a mad fan of dissecting humans.

[PATRICK]

5. But to finish

since so many writers are forced to write without recompense anyway the readers can be competed for freely anyway.. Like Microsoft and Linux there are consequences to forcing people to be victimized by an unsustainable money trap when there is valuable work to share freely of greater value and no heavy price. Fan-fiction(even a withering parody), by the way, obviously grows the whole franchise. This kind of power destroys the claws of corporate greed.