How do you guys feel about fan-fiction, and why do you think it comes about? Is it positive or negative?

I've seen people say it is a harmless product of engaging with a story, and others say it is simply lazy writing for those lacking in the originality to actually invent their own stories and characters.

I'm very much torn on this. Although fan-fiction has existed for a long time, its modern form is often distinctly different from its origins. Instead of seeking to expand and develop aspects of stories and characters fanfic writers felt were neglected in the official canon, characters and scenarios are now frequently taken entirely out of the context of their original canon. Why these characters/settings are used instead of more appropriate characters, or even original characters created by the writer, is, I think, at the core of fanfiction, and raises some interesting questions.

When fanfiction was just developing, through fan magazines and such, it was a way to add more depth and texture to the setting/characters of the original. Personally, I quite like this idea - I like the idea of a group of people all organically growing and defining a fictional universe, each of them doing so with a different flavour. I imagine that many of you on this forum are like me in terms of loving lore and the background of fictional universes, and I feel fan contributions to this are a positive thing. In the modern form, however, this is absolutely not what is being done much of the time. What is the motivation for borrowing characters and settings from alternate universes, especially when the context makes no sense?

Of course, one answer is obvious: that, having watched a show or read a book, the writer becomes attached to the character and therefore, for obvious reasons, wants to continue to use and develop that character, particularly knowing that others out there - other members of their fandom - will immediately be engaged with the characters and will feel an attachment.
In this case, do you view this as lazy writing, a way to avoid having to put in time and effort to create relatable characters, or as a natural result of engaging with the stories that are presented to us through several mediums every day? If the latter, then it's easy to argue that it's no different from the original goal of fanfiction - to expand characterisation and plot beyond the scope of the canon. If the former, I ask: what, then, when it is only the facade of the characters that is taken?
Often it is not as if the writer is trying to accurately represent the characters' personalities from the canon, but has instead created their own character and simply slapped the name of a known character on it. As an example, I once read a fanfiction that borrowed character names and themes from The Phantom of the Opera, set in France about the time of the revolution. It was utterly fantastic, and written extremely well - but had absolutely fuck-all to do with Phantom. The characters were well-crafted, and the "Phantom" still had a scarred face, and Christina could still sing beautifully, but in personality of the characters and in terms of plot, the fanfiction differs utterly. This writer wrote a fantastic piece of work, lovingly created characters that readers could engage with, and yet for some reason pasted the names of Phantom characters over the top, seemingly unnecessarily. Admittedly, the two works share similar themes, but that is no reason to appropriate the names. This cannot be accused of being lazy writing, as having been a cheap way to get readers engaged or as being a lack of originality, so perhaps the only explanation is, again, a deep personal engagement with the characters.

This would explain why people often appropriate beloved characters for wildly unlikely scenarios that play out like the writer's own fantasies. Of course, in their fantasy, they're going to use those they feel connected to.

The thought that prompted me to make this thread, however, is a somewhat darker one. It's fairly undeniable that we, as a society, have fallen into an increasingly consumerist attitude. Whether this is a good or bad thing is an issue for another time, but so-called "turbo-consumerism" has an iron vice on us. More and more, we are seeing people desire less to create or change things, and desire more to passively absorb. Is it possible that the increasing fanfiction phenomenon is a result of this? That the misappropriation of beloved characters is a sad reflection of a society in which we do nothing but consume and absorb, and thus can only create from that which we take in? Does our society have that much of an effect on our innate thought processes? Stories have been around since the dawn of language as a way of teaching and entertaining - they are intrinsic to human spirit, and the potential for language is now strongly hard-wired into our DNA, as is our response to stories and parables. Is it possible for that to be overridden by a modern society that discourages the creation required for new and engaging stories, and arguably encourages absorption and regurgitation of other works? A similar phenomenon can be seen in the film and gaming industries - two other ways in which we tell and share stories in today's world - with the constant, never-ending onslaught of reboots and sequels. Are we in danger of seeing a similar crisis in even our literature and writing?

I suppose the above is simply a twist on the "lack of originality" argument, but it certainly got me thinking. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. I don't think this touches on anything too sensitive (religion, politics, etc. etc. blah-di-blah), but you guys have a way of turning anything into an argument (iloveyoureally), so I'll just put a warning here: please do not lose thy collective shit at any point. Calm, rational discussion does far more for you and for humanity as a whole, no matter how moronic you think someone else is being.

I also just watched Vsauce's new video, and had another thought.

In the video, he reads an excerpt, imagining if books had been invented after the internet: "Pehaps the most dangerous property of these 'books' is the fact that they follow a fixed, linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion - you simply sit back and have their narratives dictated to you." He then goes on to discuss the difference between interactive media and traditional books, highlighting the passiveness and submissiveness of the latter - in which we learn to simply follow the plot, and not to lead - and the control the far more participatory former option grants us.

Perhaps fanfiction is simply the way in which a modern generation of people, who have grown up with access to and a society-wide extensive use of participatory, interactive media is reacting to the traditional passive/submissive engagement we have with stories others have written. The idea of power, control, and choice is enormously important in Western society - as has been noted in the "Normal?" thread here, we are constantly bombarded with messages of both rebellion against conformity, and individuality, and we have a fixation on "heroes": those who control and change the world with their actions; those who have, in some way, "mastered" the world rather than simply "coping" as the majority of us must do, living in a largely reactionary capacity. As fanfiction in its modern form largely arose in tandem with the idea of interactive, participatory media in which we have control, a "say", a way to express ourselves in a less linear fashion (think about navigating the web - it is a web, non-linear, in which we can jump about, unlike either fictional or factual books which are linear), is it not arguable that they are linked? In fanfiction, we take control of characters we know and love, and do with them as we will - we take control of and interact with something previously linear and dictated. In accordance with our changing tastes in methods of storytelling and media, we turn what was once a passive relationship into an active one.

Interestingly, this is arguably the opposite of my "consumerism" point, in which we passively absorb and regurgitate the same ideas.

Writing fanfiction most definitely isn't a passive consumerist activity. And reading it can be - but it doesn't have to be. When I read fanfiction, I am critically engaging the source material, something I do without fanfiction, though the lens of fanfiction helps with the mental processes by putting things into specifics. Take for example, the shows Buffy and Angel, a fandom I write extensively in (almost exclusively, at the moment). The shows have a lot of complexities, themes, etc. They can be just watched and enjoyed, and I do that with them to, but they also raise interesting questions, both 'big' questions (just how many lives must an immoral action save before it becomes moral? What measure is a non-human? What is human? etc, etc). But the show also has a lot of serious debate about characters, motives, mindsets, etc.

Is the Watcher's Council an evil institution, a corrupt one, a flawed organization trying its best? Was it always this way, or did it start one way and end up another? Not only is there serious engagement there, but it does again, bring back around to bigger issues about ends, means and such.

Is Angel morally culpable for what Angelus did?

Does Wesley really go insane in the times when he seems to, or is it instead that he is 'too sane', having lost the pleasant lies we tell ourselves that help us function, but make us all a little insane?

Etc, etc, etc.

I don't always think about these things when dealing with fanfiction, but no one always things about these things when reading anything - and I pity them if they do.

Fanfiction is many things to many people - its great practice in the sheer mechanics of writing, allowing someone to really get into how to write without having to worry about the issues of creating a world or characters or what have you. But plenty of fanfiction writers also create - they explore gaps in the world or the story, they get inside characters heads in ways the writers never did or never could (getting inside a characters head in a TV show, for example, isn't an easy thing to write). Its fun to play around with other people's worlds. Its a way to get feedback on your ability to write faster and sooner, and you know you'll have something of an audience to work with from the word go.

Is there an element of laziness? Yes but any genre of published fiction often uses crutches of various kinds just as much as fanfiction uses the original source material - literary norms, genre devices, character archetypes, thematic/mythic arcs, standard conceptions of various kinds of creatures, elements from RL history, cultures, languages, myths and so on.

Somewhat nonseriously, I've referred to writing and reading fanfiction as going beyond the Limits of Imagination - obviously, its not actually beyond those limits because people can imagine what you're reading, or you can imagine what it is you are writing. But in another way, it is going beyond the limits of imagination -certain kinds of stories in the world of fanfic could never be written with the same styles and manners as a work of original fiction, because fanfiction opens doors that just don't exist in orginal fiction, allows certain things original fiction just doesn't.

Most of the greatest works of the western canon (Illiad, Odyssey, Aenied, Shakespeare, etc) are essentially fanfiction, and in some cases, really fucking derivative fanfiction. Doesn't make them any less great in their own way.

There's nothing wrong with fanfiction. At best, it actually encourages creativity and new ideas in fans of a series.

Like you said, fanfiction lets fans explore areas and scenarios that the original fiction didn't touch on. And while you argue that AU (Alternate Universe) stories seem to defeat the purpose of this, I think it's an even more creative take on a series. AU's take characters people know and love and put them in situations that not only didn't happen in-canon, but would've never been possible in-canon, exploring how those characters would behave in such situations.

And this creative thinking doesn't stop at those writing fanfiction, either, but can sometimes extend itself to those reading it. Fanfiction sometimes opens people's eyes to something they didn't see in the in the original fiction - a new take on the present themes, a new way to interpret the characters, etc. Hell, Derpy from MLP: FiM really only exists as a character because of fanfiction! The pony originally started out as a nameless background character whose eyes were crossed due to an animation mistake. Fans, noticing this mistake, dubbed her "Derpy" in light of her expression and built a whole character around her in the form of fanart, fanfiction, etc. In response, the makers of the show developed her into a real character to match, keeping of course her cross-eyed look and the personality fans created for her. Now, thanks to fanfiction, little kids who watch the show can appreciate Derpy without knowing any of the fanfiction!

But, even in cases where fanfiction doesn't make wheels turn in any such way, it's still... harmless, really. For those writing it and those reading it, the worst they're doing is wasting their time by, well... writing, and reading. Even if they're writing material that isn't great, or reading something that doesn't challenge them very much, there are still far worse ways to waste one's time.