Fanfictioncom Wo Do I Read Review on a Chapter
Rohini*, a master'due south student in Wellington, learned last month that a fanfic story she wrote has surpassed 100,000 readers worldwide. This is her beginning-person business relationship of the experience, as told to Shanti Mathias for IRL.
I never expected my fanfic to have 100,000 readers. The story was based on a superhero Telly testify my best friend and I had get very invested in. We didn't have anyone to talk to near it, so we wrote a fic. It was ready in an alternate universe, and it took the characters of the show and set it in a high schoolhouse. It turned into a whole enormous globe.
We wrote a chapter a week, working together – 1 person would have up the writing when the other got stuck. Each chapter was 5,000 to x,000 words long. When nosotros finished it was 342,000 words – that'due south 100,000 words more than than the biggest Harry Potter book, so it'southward pretty massive. It's massive considering the bespeak of fanfiction is to exist self-indulgent. It exists for the little details, the insanely indulgent things yous would not exist able to get from a TV show. I knew that if this was in an actual book those details would be culled instantly – simply the people who are reading this specific fanfic wanted to read it, so I wrote it anyway.
There was a big turning bespeak in our fic, around chapter 20, months subsequently we started posting on Archive of Our Ain . An online friend of mine texted me and said, "Hey, look, do you have Twitter? You should make an account." When I did, I was immediately bombarded with dozens of followers and messages who were like, "I love this fic so much", "it'southward the highlight of my week", "I love it more than the actual show", "this story means and then much to me". We were also starting to go messages on Tumblr – some people had made a group chat to discuss the fic, people made these cute gif edits, there was fan art.
As a child, when I started reading fanfic and seeing how pop they tin get, all I ever wanted was to write a fanfic that got that big. But it was so surreal when that really happened. Information technology'due south different to writing a published volume, because authors don't usually get to interact with the readers every bit they're writing. Simply with fanfiction, you're not doing information technology for money, yous don't care if it becomes a real book; you lot're writing because you love it and you get feedback from people who also love the source material. It's collaborative: we'd add an author's note with each chapter that we released and ask readers if they had ideas or predictions, and if we liked it, nosotros might add together it to the story.
When I was younger, I'd see a movie in the theatre or I'd read a book, and I'd think, "I want more". I would be writing tiny, 600-discussion fanfics for everything I ever watched or read so I could stay in that world a little longer.
It was such a relief when I discovered fanfiction online. I idea I was this weird kid who obsessed over everything I read and watched. When I was 11 I institute fanfiction.net, and I found LiveJournal – back in the twenty-four hours those were the main platforms for fanfiction. Online, I wasn't alone; once I started getting more involved in fandom culture I realised in that location was this whole community of people talking about the media that they dear in their spare time. There were hundreds of thousands of people doing the exact same affair that I was.
I started making close fandom friends on my gap year, when I really threw myself into fan communities. I got invited to bring together a group chat to talk nigh a show, and nosotros became really skillful friends – people from all over the earth; Europe, the United states of america, the UK. I've now met about one-half of those people in existent life on trips overseas.
The person I wrote the fic with, she lives in the UK, and she's my best friend. We talk every day. We met on Tumblr – we followed each other'south accounts and then messaged each other, and we realised we got along actually well, which makes sense since we had similar interests and hobbies. It's a cool thing to run into someone through something you beloved and then much and have it blossom into a friendship that lasts.
When I beginning got into fandom spaces a decade ago, Boob tube and books and movies were very white, straight and heteronormative. Fanfic and fandom provided a infinite where people could create original characters to insert into this earth that provided that diversity, or to translate queerness into characters that already existed, to look at that through a new lens – something you lot didn't necessarily get that in the original piece of work . That was always quite a big pull for a lot of people towards fandom and fanfic; information technology becomes a space that has a lot more diversity and representation of the earth you lot want to run into, that'due south more accurate to the real globe anyway. Then you look at the original work and realise that oh, it's really lacking. I remember that's part of why our fic resonated – information technology was queer and it was about a coming out experience based on our own experiences of coming to terms with our own sexualities.
At that place'due south a stigma, even now, around fanfiction, and fandom more generally. It'southward the same way that teenage girls are shamed or stigmatised for the things they enjoy whether it's boy bands or TV shows – in that location's a huge percentage of people in fandom who are teenagers. There's a shamefulness about how intensely people will similar something, that they dedicate that much thought and effort into art and writing. But when you think almost how much people volition invest in sports or that kind of thing, it'due south not that different.
Fanfiction is more socially acceptable now. My flatmates and my friends knew well-nigh it considering I was always talking almost information technology, I was always excited about it. It was kind of an inside joke that if I wasn't at uni or wasn't doing work, I was writing the fic.
I'm and so proud of it. I've written a lot of things in my life, but I wouldn't get back and alter annihilation about this 1. It feels like a brume, I don't call up I could ever do that once more in the same way, but I am insanely proud of it.
Thousands and thousands of people have read it in the two and a half years since we stopped posting. It has been getting a few k hits every month, and at the end of 2021 we hitting 100,000 views. It feels ridiculous because nosotros never went out thinking well-nigh who and how many people were going to read information technology, we just wanted someone to. And that wish came true.
*Proper name has been changed for privacy.
Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.
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Source: https://thespinoff.co.nz/irl/12-01-2022/how-it-feels-to-write-a-wildly-popular-work-of-fanfiction
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