when you think about it fanfiction is actually amazing
there are thousands of brilliantly written novel-length stories kids wrote from their own brains about characters and shows/books/movies they love all twined into the internet and other kids read these 50k+ stories in their own time and invest themselves in it
nobody’s being paid to write it and nobody’s being told to read it, people do it because they legitimately enjoy it
that is just kind of amazing
#and fanvids #and fandom in general #it’s a (largely) art-centric community built around distance which is really amazing if you think about it #like most grad programs for the arts or artist communes or what have you are all about being locked into a singular place with similar pe… #*people for a predetermined amount of time #just so you can have that energy and produce and critique each other #and fandom has created that here #i mean it predates the internet (with the zine and the trekkie letter circles and whatnot) #and the fact is that somehow we all googled and ended up here #and if you think about it it’s one of the last open apprenticeship places around #fascinated with henry jenkins’ theory that it has to do with women being excluded from other circles of art and making their own in a spa… #*space of their own #(not just women; other minorities as well) #fandom is largely about reclamation and not just narratives but people and issues and things we care about #we come here and we make awful things and we read more and we teach ourselves how to be better #artist commune unto itself #messy yes but also free and open and largely informational #think of how many tuts exist for photoshop #at it’s heart fandom is about art for art’s sake #that’s why i’m surprised people don’t want to study it more #(and believe me when i say i know it’s because at heart people think we are worthless #because we are doing something that is not for profit and only for love #because we are messing around with characters that are not our own #but that kind of misses the point doesn’t it? because the point of fandom is to make it our own because no one is going to make our art f… #*for us in the way that we want) #isn’t it funny how everyone has a ‘when i first started my shit was so awful’ story? #i just want to be like how did you get better? who did you read? whose graphics did you look at? what videos did you watch?#because chances are you were inculcated into this culture the same way everybody else was – by participating in it #and how many other things in the world can you say that about now (for free)?