Tumblr’s hatred of first-person fanfic gets me down, and not just because I’ve written so much of it. Every time I see one of those “oh, the first word was ‘I’ *closes tab*” jokes I’m just kinda reminded that for all the good work people have done bringing fanfiction into the mainstream, for all that folks are beginning to understand the importance of transformative works, it’s still seen as fundamentally lesser than published fiction. It can’t just be that people don’t like first-person narratives, or else The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Colour Purple, Jane Eyre and countless others would never have made it to print. The implication is always “first-person fanfiction, i.e. a lot of fanfiction, is just teenage girls making dumb self-inserts” and I always figured we’d have got past that by now.
And also, yes, because I’ve written so much of it.