As an English assignment, I began my affair with fanfiction. I was forced to attend a local cram school when I was 12 years old. In July, it was about 6PM. Our English instructor knew she was losing us when we didn't eat dinner. Ms L looked at us over the top of her glasses and said, "Your assignment for the weekend is to write a one-page alternative ending to William Shakespeare'sRomeo and Juliet."
Fifty Shades of Grey became a decades-long guilty pleasure because we were told to write fanfiction.
I don't like the extra homework school crams on my plate. Something in my brain was triggered by that assignment. If you want to get good at math and vocabulary drills, you have to go to a cram school. The homework packets didn't ask us to ponder what if.
If Juliet decided to run away from her family and go to the nunnery, what would it be like? I was up late Sunday night and working on my one page masterpiece. The B-plus was the equivalent of a double F-plus in my family. Something had changed in my soul.
I spent most of the summer obsessed with the show. I have no defense other than being a weak preteen because I was raised on a good diet of Toonami. I sneaked into my living room after my parents fell asleep and prayed that the crackle of a 56K modem wouldn't wake them up. I was led to the world of fanfiction by the search engine. I had never used the internet for anything other than schoolwork.
I had a heart attack almost all of the time. I hid my face behind my fingers while reading. As I was scandalized, I was equally happy. There were thousands of people asking what if. Most of the questions were about what if the two main characters were killed in a very deranged way. They asked a question and wrote about it in detail. It's public.
There were thousands of people asking what if.
That confidence was appealing as a preteen. I wanted to explore what ifs. I stayed up late into the night on LiveJournal and wondered how I could tap into that. I ended up at Fanfiction.net after clicking many links. A free library full of thousands of stories offered a glimpse into a world beyond the one my parents planned for me. It was the first time I understood what the internet was all about.
I started asking my own "what if" questions when I finished a movie, TV show, or book. I began to give myself permission to write down answers.
My teachers didn't like it. The way in which creativity was expressed was untigious. They said that true genius came from original work and that it was a waste of talent to ponder what-ifs. This is how I got to know about the fair use doctrine.
I didn't want to say I was tired of reading stiff prose of dead men. I wanted to say that there was an army of deranged authors writing some of the most deviant stories I had ever read. You can tell that some of them are written by people who don't have a good grasp of the English language. I couldn't find it on the shelves of my bookstore. This was one of the few online spaces that introduced me to the idea that queer people could have a happily ever after. I kept my mouth shut because I didn't have the right words to say.
I continued to read my uncouth stories on top of my legitimate reading.
I spent a year trying to read and write hieroglyphics after reading The Mummy. I discovered more about the Civil War by reading a 130,000-word alternate universe novel written by a graduate student. The footnotes were better than those in Pale Fire. After two years in the Les Misérables fanfic community, I learned about classism. Did you know that Victor Hugo had a 100 page digression in his novel?
It isn't a taboo to read fiction. Since the beginning of Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal, it has crept into the mainstream. The Fifty Shades of Grey fanfic was turned into a film. Fangirl is a novel about a college student who writes a mega popular fanfic about a Harry Potter series. Carry On and Wayward Son is an incredibly meta sequel series where you can read the story the Fangirl wrote. A One Direction fanfiction with a billion readers on Wattpad was turned into a movie on the streaming service. The Love Hypothesis, a romance novel that went viral on TikTok and got a movie deal, started out as a Star Wars fan fiction. Several more examples can be found.
When I was a kid, it felt impossible to celebrate the genre in this way. When I was a teenager, I read a lot. Adult life leaves less time for guilty pleasures because of fandom. Old habits don't last very long. Archive of Our Own is the first website I open if I dislike the end of a story. Thanks to the internet, I don't ask myself "what if I had the confidence to write?" anymore.
Victoria Song is a photographer.
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