For what it’s worth, I’m a 28 year old with a Master’s degree in English Literature and I can tell you that I have read several fanfictions that were better than some of the published novels I had to read for grad school. Not even exaggerating. There’s some insanely talented authors out there just giving out Art™️ for free.

I still distinctly remember a fanfic written as the published war diary of Bucky Barnes. The author had like ten footnotes per chapter for movie references, period slang, troop movements, airplane manufacturers, what a southeastern French village would pave their streets with, etc. Everything was meticulously accurate, down to the color of the grenade pins. A fucking bibliography the length of my arm. I'm a history major, and my brain hurts even THINKING about tackling that type of project. That's the level of historical fiction I'm assigned to read for classes. Sigrid Undset got a Nobel Prize for that. All Quiet on the Western Front type shit. A fuckin Bucky fanfic.

"anyways i'm gonna go read twilight because i'm too young and hot to read Shakespeare" is going to be used by me constantly now, thank you

I knew the moment I saw that post about Dante’s inferno it was someone arguing against a straw man after seeing a joke about it being a self insert fic. If we want to talk about the internet’s effect on reading comprehension maybe fanfic isn’t the place to start👀 Anyways shoutout to one of my favorite fic writers who recently sold her original novel to a major publisher at auction

Look, I’m almost in my 30s and I started writing fanfic just last year after I got really into a video game series. I don’t write masterpieces nor do I seek to, but it’s freeing and fun to play with tropes as well as becoming better at writing on my own time. It’s the only excuse I really have to write and I’m gonna fuckin do it.

the way u said vonnegut or whatever sksjdjsksd the camera pans to me with my three open ao3 tabs sitting beside my copy of slaughterhouse five the duality of man

Also the fact that you were propelled to make a 17 minute video essay by a couple of posts that didn't even reach 100 likes is ICONIC

One of my favorite things about looking at Tom Holland Spider-Man fanfic is seeing all the trans Peter stories. Other LGBTQIA+ rep too, but trans boy Peter seems to be a thing. And there are so many stories that you can see are kids fantasizing about acceptance (and unlimited resources for things like HRT and chest surgery. And yeah, most of that isn't anything like a "real book"(whether or not that book is fanfic itself) and social media feed fics are...whatever they are, but this is one way that these kids have found to deal with their experience and share with eachother. and while they're doing it, they might even be cultivating some very basic writing skills. I think most of the short fiction I wrote before I sold my first short story was probably fanfic.

11:05 FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT Guys, good books exist. Bad books exist. They do. Good fanfiction exists. Bad fanfiction exists. I'm willing to guess that most regular fanfiction readers are also prolific readers of "real book" as they're saying. That's me. I consume a lot of crappy fanwork tbh AND I have read and thoroughly enjoy classic books. I kinda keep fanfiction in a little place in my brain. Like, both have their place. I think it's so obvious that I shouldn't really be worshipping any piece of media. Fanfiction and books are different bc they are.

THANK YOU! this is a fabricated problem indeed, and as you said this kind of opinion reads as very condescending to me. Very well-spoken, thank you for sharing your take~!!

I think that if you could add up all the great works of art that were made by people having fun and trying to amuse people/friends in the moment and compared that number to the great works of art that were made by people who were trying to "achieve immortality" or some haughty bullshit like that the fun artists would win by a mile.

Honestly someone needs to suggest to Chuck Tingle to write “ Two guys fucking is Dante’s Inferno”

I'm an old fuck. At some point in the late '90s, I realized I wasn't having fun going to the X-Men, Batman, and Terminator movies I felt almost obligated to go to as a member of the target demographic and decided that I no longer wanted to experience any more media that was created by people who had been hired by a corporate entity to generate profit from "intellectual property" (often created by dead people) because that generation of profit was always going to be the main priority of the stories told, not telling the stories of characters and worlds whose stories are allowed to actually end instead of remaining eternally static cultural signifiers. Fan fiction isn't created for profit and isn't created at the behest of property owners, so it does have that big advantage over Marvel movies and the like, but it's still centered on appealing to our nostalgic attachment to corporate property. I'm looking for stories that come from the personal struggles of their authors without having to fit those experiences and passions into overly limiting pre-existing molds. I don't feel superior to anyone who enjoys creating or reading fan fiction. But fan fiction, like the officially licensed products of Marvel, Star Wars, James Bond, etc., doesn't have what I'm personally looking for from the creative expression of other people. I want to know what they have to say when they aren't working as day laborers maintaining the relevance of zombie creations of dead people.

so i am not dumb for printing out a 100 page HS fanfic back in the day?😌

My first fanfic experience was handwriting it on scrap paper as a high-schooler in the early 2000s (we're talking pre-Internet 2.0, one computer in the library for the whole school, Geocities/Altavista/Yahoo days) after an 'alternative' friend told me about it. I did a full X-Men one and a few non-starters. Years later, when my friend made fun of me for being an efedder (like Jane said, if you don't know, you're lucky) I shot back that SHE could talk, being a *fanfic writer* - AKA, at the time, the only form of non-dark web Internet lifeform lower than an efedder.

A video perfectly made for my interests?! Thank you very much!

We need to abolish copyright, so EVERYTHING can be official media….

I always feel the need to point out that you can get paid for fanfiction if you can get a deal for licensed novels or short stories. My mother personally knows writers who have things like Hercules novels in addition to their original stuff. Are the Doctor Who short stories written by Neil Gaimam or Holly Black not "real" either?

As a 28 yr old who has never really been into fanfiction (not for any particular reason, I just never got into it) and always loved classic literature, I really like and agree with this video. There is so much more nuance around this topic than people want to give it, lol. And it's even more ironic that tumblr, of all places, feels this way. Lmao. Also, the few fics that I have read were actually really enjoyable! There are a lot of people with some really cool ideas and I'm glad that they have a place to share their work.

As someone who has pretty mixed feelings on this whole discussion I also find it really funny in some ways. I've ben on tumblr since like, 2012 and i distinctly remember a pretty long period (i'd say it lasted somewhere between 2014 and 2019) where the whole idea of being an avid reader, especially if you enjoyed so called "classic literature" was being mocked. Like all of these popular bloggers would make and reblog posts about how "reading books is not a personality trait lol" and mocking people who talked about how much they loved to read. To see it go from that to the current climate of "People making and enjoying fanfiction are responsible for destroying media literacy in the population" and "If you are an adult who occasionally enjoys watching cartoons and reading YA you're a stupid illiterate baby" is just kind of hilarious.

Can't believe that in the year of our lord 2021 people are still trying to gatekeep art 😪 guess what, fanfics are literature and elitism is a bad look!

I’ve read Vonnegut (and no I don’t care if this is the correct spelling) and it pales in comparison to the Harry Potter AU series my roommate is writing ( the Gray Witch Trials ). Sorry if I sometimes like understanding what’s going on in a story. There’s a difference between having hidden meaning and having a poorly thought out concept without enough explanation. Also not all reading is about being intellectually challenged, it’s okay to read for fun. I have slogged through too many “classics” in my day I think I deserve some fanfic that has realistic representation of people and where I get to see myself represented.

That ending 💁🏻‍♀️.

9:15 I’ll be the first to say,Shakespeare is fucking boring to me and idc who gets upset 🤷🏽‍♂️🤷🏽‍♂️ I don’t care what’s praised as art and what’s not,if something is appealing to me...it’s appealing to me and that’s that. 12:49 using review scores to prove a point literally goes against the point you were trying to make by saying classics aren’t always good just because they’re labeled as such. Lmao

They’re right it’s not Dante’s inferno it’s better 😂 Dante’s inferno is also fanfic just the yeold kind

I don't really think putting any adaptation into the 'fanfiction' box is at all accurate. Something like Dante's Inferno, which uses a system that has been taught through religious texts and simply has the author explore said system, isn't Dante literally writing a derivative work of the Bible text itself. It's taking inspiration of just one aspect of a whole religion and then writing an epic poem that follows a specific structure and form of written text in order to tell his story. You really can't compare it to something like Captain America fanfic in which a writer already has a ready-to-go template of characters, complete lore, time and even situations to write their own story in. The same goes for frankly any other written or shot piece of media that takes inspiration from something. Even certain fanfictions do this, where they consist of characters from one story, yet the plot takes place in a whole different universe that is directly inspired by another piece of media. You can't really claim "oh, so this is a fanfiction of two pieces of media" when the fanfiction in question is about characters from only one of them, and the backdrop is from another, but ultimately is used as a plot setup for these characters from the first piece of media. I don't mean to come after fanfiction authors in general, but I also feel like this overall discussion frankly neglects many other aspects of book publishing and writing overall. Fanfiction is what you write for free because it's a derivative work. Once a writer even tries to publish it as a book, they don't just have to take out all references of said derivative work and clean up the plot, they would also need to go through an editor and publisher before it's given an ok to be published. And specific examples of badly published novels that were once fanfics like EL James' books are their own cautionary tales because I believe she received a lot of freedom when it came to publishing her books since they were first released as e-books. It wasn't a scenario like a well-known publishing company pouring money and time to have your work on paper. Then there's another aspect of book publishing at hand which is, having to change or switch up your own work in order to make it more marketable or appealing to a more general audience. Again, fanfiction writers, with the exception of some who want to maybe get more support for their work, don't do this. Their works don't have to go through 2-3 layers of people, along with how many more versions of their work that has to be revised constantly with an editor at hand, before publishing their piece. It also opens up the work in question to a more limited audience when compared to a published book that can receive a greater amount of criticism or acclaim from people for whom this book isn't directly written *for* . Also, the argument about bad books/media that you and some other people try to make in these comments is at the end of the day purely subjective. Even you took to diminishing a producer's point by showing what kinds of movies he produces as a rebuttal to his overall comment, similarly to how those tumblr posts demean the overall meaning fanfiction may have to some people. At the end of the day, people can read or write what they want, and their opinions on what they prefer is overall theirs, but just because a piece of media brings them comfort and they have strong positive feelings about it doesn't mean it has to be or will be considered high art or "even better than" some classical books that are studied for particular reasons, ones that aren't just about preferred plot structure or "more understandable" writing.

OMG 😍💋 💝💖❤️

I always feel the need to point out that you can get paid for fanfiction if you can get a deal for licensed novels or short stories. My mother personally knows writers who have things like Hercules novels in addition to their original stuff. Are the Doctor Who short stories written by Neil Gaimam or Holly Black not "real" either?