[ SECRET POST #4354 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4364 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 48 secrets from Secret Submission Post #625.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Before I could access fanfic on the internet—so pre 1995 or so—I was a shy preteen. I didn’t know that fanzines and conventions existed. I read everything I could get my hands on and if I was lucky I maybe got a new (to me) used book a month and a couple new ones for Christmas/my birthday. Otherwise every week my mom took me to our local branch library, and every couple months we’d go to the big one downtown.

Our local library system was pretty good. I tend to get obsessed with something new every year or so and the last big obsession I can remember that pre-dated my having internet access was King Arthur and (especially) Merlin. Because the Arthurian stories aren’t just public domain but folklore, there were a lot of fictional retellings and scholarly books about them in my local library system. And I still ended up running out of stuff to read before I ran out of obsession.

Thanks to fanfic, running out of stuff to read about my obsessions got a lot rarer. And fanfic is often created by writers who think about their respective canons the same way 10-12 year old me did about King Arthur—he was okay, but Merlin the side character was way more interesting.

It’s not so much that fanfic is automatically better plotted, or crafted, or more crammed with symbolism, or whatever denotes quality, than published work. But it’s like going to the library to hunt through books on King Arthur for mentions of Merlin and getting buried alive in an avalanche of books on your favorite character. Some may be shit, some are awesome, some are just plain weird, but it’s all stuff about your favorite part of a story.

I still read new books pretty often, my house is full of books, and I work for the library system I grew up borrowing books from. Fanfic for me is like finding part of the Unseen University library or the library in the Beast’s castle, or in the Dreaming, where not only can you find all the books that exist, but also all the books that ever could exist. Fanfic is probably the closest we’ll ever get unless someone sets actual A.I. to writing the complete works of Shakespeare by brute computing power a la typewriting monkeys.