Musings: On Fanfiction

[alnair_tair]

 there are sometimes when i wonder about the nature and the feeling of fanfics. nothing very serious. today, i read a fic in ao3 from 2008 in livejournal. in the comments, an user was asking the author about another fic of theirs and the author was saying that they had erased it because it was embarrassing. i thought the title was cute, and that by the fic i have just ended to read the erased one would have been funny and embarrassing in that good way that gives good vibes. you know the fic is ridiculous and that what it happens there wouldn’t have happened in canon anyway, but it’s so nice, so well written in spite of the ridiculousness… you can’t help but love it.

and anyway. it made me think that we are always talking about how fics are transformative, and how they help young people to experiment things safely and how it’s the playfield of woman and how they help us all to communicate and share feelings about fictions and our lives in a comforting way. (let’s go away the bad things, for now. everything has its counterweight) but it made me think… fanfics are ephemeral creations too. they exist in a fragil media, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, without the security of being guarded of the pass of time by being a material thing. or maybe their irreal nature in the world of dates will make them endure far away from their origins. but it made me think about how they depend on authors that could get frustrated or embarrassed with them, on the reaction of their readers which could make the author to delete their work, in web page owned by people who don’t care and can get them erased simply by being everything they couldn’t think of, never in their lives. they depend on shared emails, and the memory of the people who catched the lucky moment to save the words or read them. 

and someday maybe you revisit an old page and you don’t find nor author nor fic, or the page itself has been absorbed again in the net and not even with timesalving machines would you ever encounter them again. maybe you find out a good sinopsis o review and a link that doesn’t direct to anywhere anymore. and you would think, melancholy in your heart “oh, how good could it have been?” to forget about it in the next half hour. maybe one day the only thing remaining of that good ol’ fix-it or whatever fic, is only your memories, and that of the one who wrote it and that of the other who where there too. 

i think all these feelings are beautiful sad things about the fandom experience. it’s fragility, like live. because the stories are changing things. and some of them die and others remain. internet allows us to see the process more near and clearly.