Fanfic, a Memory: The Beginning: First Shot Fired
I shared a piece of creative writing on the internet for the first time while my parents’ home was being renovated and I needed a place other than the motel to kill a few hours during the day. At my request, Mom dropped me off at what we call a PC room but is probably recognizable to more English speakers as an “internet café.” In gaming-obsessed Korea it was and is primarily a place where people can get on high-spec computers to play online games. Starcraft was the leading obsession at the time.
This was in 2001, three years since I had first gone online on the wide Web as a college freshman. I had been reading a lot of stories on fanfiction.net, and by this point I had decided I wanted to try writing—and, more scarily, sharing—my own. Either I copied-and-pasted a chapter I had pre-written, or pecked out my first chapter right then and there while my neighbors inhaled cup noodles and battled (as) Zergs.
I published my chapter. It was the start of a decades-long preoccupation.
When fanfic was good, it was very, very good
Since that day in 2001 I wrote fanfic on and off for around 20 years, through years studying abroad and overseas moves, marriage, career changes and more. The habit persisted across several different fandoms including Final Fantasy VIII, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Star Wars. Fanfic was my first opportunity to show my writing in public, talk to other writers, and join in fandom obsessions.
The built-in community of a good-sized fandom was a great platform for me to share my stories, get feedback on them, and join in world and character discussions. As a beginning author, or even realistically as part of many “real” writing careers, I was unlikely to get hundreds of comments over the years, get sent fan art of scenes from my stories, or be translated into Japanese and Spanish. In that sense I’d call my fanfic writing years a creative career of itself, right down to making no money from it but getting plenty of fulfillment.
A highly flattering comment that stuck in my memory from my early fandom days was “What are you doing writing FAN fiction?” Well, I was getting comments and reactions like these, to my great joy! :D
Fandom peaked for me with Avatar: The Last Airbender in the early 2010s. This was the period when I wrote Shadow of the Dragon King, a political pre-show fic that not only engaged deeply with the show’s lore and my love for it, but also showed me what directions I wanted to take my creative writing. For me it provided some of the best experiences fanfic can provide, with existing characters, lore, and world providing structure and inspiration to build on. I got great reactions and intense conversations out of this fic, exactly the kind of thing I wanted as a writer.
Things were very, very good. They were ready to turn horrid.
Then fandom went from limiting to excruciating
Even while I was having the most fun I had ever had in fandom, cracks were appearing in my relationship with it. Some of these were small and harmless mismatches, like realizing that my English-speaking audience understood ATLA canon differently than I did, so much so that some readers thought my painstakingly canon-compliant fics were AU. That was perfectly fine: I don’t own anyone’s understanding of any work, including my own. The author is dead, long live the author, etc.
However, for the first time fanfic started feeling like less of a boost and more of a constriction. The old joking question—what I was doing writing fan fiction?—started taking on more weight. More and more I hankered to play in a world of my own creation or interpretation, exploring stories that pulled at me. Now that the experience with Shadow had given me confidence that I could finish a long fic, I wanted to try my hand at the wild wide world of original fiction, so-called.
Other fandom discordances were more serious. My severe disappointment with the ATLA sequel Legend of Korra was another and deeper crack that not only distanced me from the franchise but led me to question my love of the original show. As I put it in an early ’10s book review, my political and literary views had become inextricable from each other. I was increasingly facing down the fact that I could not rely on corporate media to tell the kinds of stories I wanted.
Looking back, Disney’s new Star Wars was my last stab at making fandom work out for me. There were definitely good times, lovely camaraderie and intense nerdiness, but the unending sludge of antiblack racism against the character Finn and his Black fans brought home just how sickeningly white supremacist fandom could be, and had always been as incidents like Racefail ‘09 demonstrated. I just hadn’t smacked into this face of fandom quite so hard before because the franchises I was into didn’t have major Black characters (which is a whole conversation of its own).
After these experiences I couldn’t enjoy Star Wars or even my earlier fandom obsessions the same way anymore. Between major life changes and the work of developing my original fiction ideas, I didn’t want to spend that kind of energy on a space I no longer found enjoyable. From around 2020 my fandom activities including fanfic became sporadic and I have not engaged in fandom with the same intensity since.
So I left… or did I?
It’s funny, because while I’m mostly out of mainstream fandom now, I’m still as fannish as ever and more happily so than I ever was. I simply shifted the lens of my obsessions from a focus on for-profit corporate media to smaller, queerer, more liberationist works, often created by friends I trust and regularly talk to. My emotional well-being and creative energy have skyrocketed since I started engaging in works that are more aligned to me, while spending my time on gentle, compassionate, and fun conversations based on a mutual love of stories and not reactions to repetitive bigotry that wore me down.
The best parts of writing fanfic have followed me out of fandom. I pursue the exact kinds of stories I want in the world while taking part in welcoming yet endlessly stimulating creative communities. My “original,” or saleable, subject matter puts me in conversation with what has been and is being created in queer history and mythology, anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism, labor solidarity and more. I’ve been fortunate enough to have my queer and critical works in prose and verse accepted by publications I enjoy and respect, and found more community in fantastic editors and fellow authors.
In a way I’ve lost fanfic and fandom, but in another sense I haven’t lost them at all. I simply moved on and found people and spaces that better fit the shapes I’ve come to take, that allow me to stretch out in ways that make sense to me.
I needed to write and share fanfic that day in 2001 and for many, many days afterward while my world and self shifted around. When those changes came to a head, I needed to stop writing fanfic and being part of fandom so I could work on other things and be parts of other conversations.
Fanfic and fandom in the formal senses are mostly in my past now, but the ongoing give-and-take of creation, the shaping of worlds and meaning in joyous collision with minds near and far, will never stop as long as I live and will long outlast my individual life. I am deeply content with where I have drifted to and looking forward to what comes next.