fanfiction and the transformative act of creation
Fandom and fanfiction has been an integral part of my life for almost as long as I can remember. I grew up with spotty internet access at best—we had no home computer and I didn’t get my own until I left for college in 2008—but in the sacred two hours allotted to me at the public library every day, I immersed myself. The internet was different back then. I spent my time reading LiveJournal blogs, scouring fanfiction.net, and talking about my interests on gaiaonline. Even typing the names of these websites now feels like digging up the artifacts of a time long gone, nothing left but the stories us millennials and older tell those who came up after us.
My point is, I have always been drawn to fandom. I am someone who gets incredibly invested in the media that I love and wants more. The media doesn’t even have to be objectively good —actually, it’s better if it’s not. It’s better if it’s flawed, if it makes awful blunders in its storytelling. If it makes you want to burst into the writer’s room and demand they answer for their crimes. That’s where the magic is, the place where a fandom blooms and takes over, the creative work of people around the world rising to fill the gaps. To fix things or to break them in better ways. To explore and expand and transform.
This is the place that I really learned to create for myself. I always wrote, don’t get me wrong. From a very young age I was scribbling out short stories inspired by the Mary-Kate and Ashley movies I watched and the middle-grade fantasy novels I used to get lost in. (Anyone else read the Avalon: Web of Magic series?) Fanfiction, however, is what taught me to dig in. And okay, listen, I don’t want to take all the credit away from my English teachers; I was very lucky in my schooling to have had great teachers who cared a lot about their work and encouraged me in ways that were vital to the self-conscious and depressed young child that I was. They helped give me the tools—a love of words, critical thinking skills, etc—and then I discovered fanfiction and ran.
The first fandom I ever wrote for was the one which shall not be named, but I was getting into Kingdom Hearts fic before that, although I never wrote for it. Well, okay, to be completely honest, the first fic I ever read was handwritten Vam fic (if you know, you know, and if you don’t, I’ll spare you) a friend of mine was scribbling in a spiral bound notebook. But Kingdom Hearts was what pulled me into places like fanfiction.net. In the fandom that shall not be named, I was definitely engaging with people’s head-canons and role playing on forums like GaiaOnline, LiveJournal, and AOL chatrooms, but I read Zemyx fanfiction before I ever got really into my wizarding spiral. KH fic was what introduced me to a lot of the language around fanfiction. This was in the mid to late aughts, so some of that isn’t really prevalent anymore (the citrus scale for example) but nonetheless it was an induction into a whole new world.
I wish I could say that once I was in, I never fell out of fandom spaces, but that’s not true. It’s something I have come and gone from in cycles. I was either otherwise preoccupied with things like college (or bad relationships) or I was trying to distance myself in an attempt to “grow up.” As if the backbone of fandom isn’t adults who dedicate their time and energy to creating art, writing, organizing events—the list goes on and on.
Every time I have come back to fandom, it has transformed me in some way. That’s what I’m getting at here. It is within the safety of a fandom space that I first questioned my own gender, giving a tentative voice to some of the tangled feelings inside of me. I shuffled away from it after that first time, not quite ready, but it planted a seed of knowing within me. Maybe if I had heard the term nonbinary before that, things would have been different, but this was back in 2014 and even the queer spaces online weren’t talking quite as widely about gender queerness. I just didn’t know that you could be something in between the binary genders that had been laid out for me. I thought that all women must feel like this sometimes. That they all must just have this ache inside them, this feeling of not fitting quite right. I assumed it was simply the toll of patriarchy, and it is, just not in the way I thought.
Fandom is a playground for queerness. It’s a rite of passage to take your favorite little guy (gender neutral) and project yourself onto them; your fears, your hopes, your trauma, your life. The gender you wish you had. It opens up a door. Nothing is off limits in fanfiction. Don’t get me wrong here, people will always pitch a fit about the things other people write. There will be discourse about “problematic themes” and those crusading for the rights of people who don’t exist. (This is a whole other topic that I could go on and on about but I’ll keep a lid on it for now.) But when it comes down to it, you can write whatever you want. I’ll repeat that:
You can write whatever you want.
You can make that character a woman or a man. You can make them trans. You can make them gay or poly or a werewolf or an eldritch horror from the deep. You can give them a happy story or a sad one or a deeply fucked up one. You can turn them into a bunny. Use them like a stress ball and squeeze them over and over again. There are no rules. Fanfiction is an infinite playground. And when you post it for others to read, no matter how weird, someone else out there is going to read it. Someone else is going to get it. For me, that is a truth that has never wavered. Someone else out there feels the way you do, and fanfiction is one of the many ways that we can bridge the gaps between us and find connection.
And the thing about writing is that while you create, it’s also working its magic on you. Writing is transformative. Writing allows us to dig into ourselves, to uncover the truths about ourselves that we can sometimes struggle to confront without that creative conduit. For me, the act of writing is divinely led. Even when I’m writing m/m monsterfucking of my favorite Genshin Impact characters. (Kink also reveals ourselves to us, by the way.) Writing queer fanfic is what led me to understand my own gender queerness. It shows me the possibilities. That kind of power is potent. It’s magic. A tendril of the divine reaching out and guiding me before I ever knew it was happening.
The universe always finds a way. If you open yourself up, even a little, the light will get in. How we crack open is different for all of us, and it’s rarely just one thing. It’s usually a series of small things that build up, stretching our hearts and opening our eyes. And one of those things, my loves, as silly as it may sound, can be fanfiction.
P.S. If you want to read my fanfiction, you can do that here. Mostly these days I write for Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail.