temris

It's not news that to the mainstream eye, fanfiction is usually thought to be either just porn, or Mary Sue self-inserts -- which is of course "so cringe". And therefore, whatever is written there is automatically bad. The other day, someone retweeted a TikTok user's post, mocking fanfiction readers for thinking that there can be very good written sentences in fanfiction, and quotes were filled with people pointing to the "worst examples" in the replies of OP's TikTok.

This has been a long discourse that I think has gone through enough talking points, so it's tiring to see it resurface almost every few months. What I've seen, though, it's people who do not create hold this belief that published (non-indie) work is the only kind of work that has any sort of literary value; and this automatically makes fanfiction, in their eyes, lesser. I feel like this is part of a result where every piece of media they consume is curated by either following through classics only -- not particularly bad in itself -- or just picking whatever is trending; and instead of trying to understand why they're considered a classic or a good piece of work, they equate being put on a higher regard to it being popular. (I guess this is a problem that we can see in other fields as well?)

Majority of the people in the fandom spaces were supportive, of course. We have to remember that this is just a fan space and none of the authors of these transformative works are trying to write the next classic, so there's an expectancy of mediocrity. And when the writing is above such level, it piques interest.

I also think this kind of outlook, the looking down of "fanfiction prose" is a part of the way people view some sort of art space I feel as quite pretentious. It just never bodes well with me --- that kind of huge paragraphs with long descriptive sentences, filled with the thesaurus equals of usual adjectives just for the sake of sounding literary (don't know if that's the right word exactly in English); rather than trying to make a good story. (It was one of the reasons why I couldn't read Pandora by Anne Rice when I picked it up this year, but shh.) This is something that repulses me especially in Turkish literature where every writer who does that is immediately seen as the next big thing. (Don't even get me started on the book titles...)

I feel like the mocking was halfly done as a reaction to this pretentiousness, which I can see their POV too partially. But in contrast to published space, nearly every fanfiction is written for the sake of the author themselves anyway, so there has never been the need to please anyone with their high-spoken language. What irritates me (and most of the QRTs I've seen) is when these people think lines in the same wavelength are actually good when they're by traditionally done authors.

Maybe it's something that's been said a million times, but even a self-insert story can be a classic to their eyes when the critiques say so --- say for example, MC gets to isekai-d, along with their favorite man from Antiquity and travel together... It's only a literary masterpiece if the MC self-insert is Dante, because why?

There's a reason why this example has been given many times, because most people don't even view it as fanfiction... Then where exactly do we draw the line?