I don’t understand the point of a fanfic….

Fans want to tell stories in a world they love. Or they want to tell stories where the main character that totally isn’t them… get invited to Hogwarts, Draco falls in love with them and becomes good.

what’s your problem with it? that JK Rowling didn’t write it? that it is not “canon”?

consider that things did not use to be like this; the Iliad and the Odyssey are works composed on the backs of thousands of legends told and retold over and over about tons of heroes and gods. People don’t really care if this story about Zeus promising to make Achilles glorious was not told by a certified Zeus priest or whatever. They cared that the story was good

Every story ends, but the audience isn’t always ready for it to be over.

For that, they have fanfic.

Sometimes a story is at a crossroad and the author writes that out in keeping with their plot, characters, or themes but people wonder ‘what if *not*.’

For that, they have fanfic.

And sometimes there’s just a road a particular work never traveled but some people were really interested in.

For that, they have fanfic.

And other times there’s something in the audience’s head they’ve attached to the work and the work becomes a medium through which that other thing is translated.

My Theory of Fan Fiction in a nutshell; Fanfiction is a creative outlet for the audience of a particular work who still have emotional baggage or creative curiosity tied to that piece that the original work never capitalized on or concluded to their satisfaction. So someone in the audience went and did it themselves.

And it gets wacky because there are people who *read fanfics* before they read the original work because of internet communities. Fanfics can evolve into their own creative ecosystem centered on a particular work while simultaneously growing and taking on lives of their own as the very thing that spawned fanficiton in the first place happens to those fanfics and the snake just starts eating its own tail.

For me, I enjoy it when it expands on the original world building or explores aspects that you felt would have realistically been addressed by someone.

In the case of Harry Potter, there are some truly lovely stories that delve more into the political world of the stories or others that really address some of the issues present in the Wizarding World and perhaps the characters work to address them.

As for whether characters stay in character or not, depends on the story. Are they doing a story that is an alternate universe (AU) of the world where they can have different events occur which would address why a character might be different due to different formative events in their life?

Honestly I read a lot of fanfic in my youth when there were gaps waiting for books (and still read some now in different worlds) and some were honestly written better than Rowling’s latter books.

One good one I can recommend as an example of both above points is The Second String. AU of being sent to the past with Harry eventually working at the Hogs Head in the seventies. Also addresses the issue of squibs and how they’re treated in the world in far more depth than treated as a joke in the books.

There’s the same point in fanfics as in any other work of art.

The person writing the fanfic doesn’t necessarily have to stay true to the character. Or to the original story. Or anything else. It’s a separate work of art that ranges from continuing the original story, filling in gaps, providing alternate points of view, to a completely separate story very loosely based on the original book/film/series/etc. The scope for creativity is limitless.

Are there fanfics that unintentionally butcher characters for no reason other than the author’s mildly lacking writing skills? Yes, plenty. Are there fanfics that are just as good, if not better than the source material? Also yes.

It’s for when I loved a piece of media and want to stay inside that world and setting. Explore things that were not explored.
Think about how many adaptations of sherlock holmes exist. Did you enjoy some of them? They are a form of fanfic.

Eh. Think of it as porn but not the type that does it for you.

Let others be happy with it.

There’s a long history of fanfiction in literature. Someone already mentioned The Iliad and The Aeneid. Also Dante’s Inferno is fanfiction of him getting to meet all of his favorite historical and literary figures. Two-thirds of Shakespeare’s characters and stories were taken from earlier authors or from history; he didn’t write much original work. Not to mention about 90% of Western art is Biblical or Greco-Roman fanart.

It was perfectly acceptable up until about a hundred years ago to adapt other people’s characters and plots to create your own new work. Only since we’ve become such a super-litigious society have people started thinking there’s anything strange about it.

Something I’ve come to understand about art is that no piece of art was pulled fully formed from the aether. Every artist has influences and every work of art has traces of works that came before it. When an artist of any kind, be they visual artist or musician or writer, starts down the path of learning how to create art, they don’t start by making their own unique works; rather, they start by imitating other people’s works. If you’re learning guitar, you start by playing other people’s songs. If you take a painting class, you start by copying other people’s paintings. Likewise, if you’re an aspiring writer, you start by copying works that you already like, reusing the trappings, themes, or verbiage in order to gain a better understanding of how they work and what you like about them.

If you’re an aspiring writer, fan fiction is a great way to practice and improve. If you love Harry Potter and want to write a Harry Potter fanfic, you can skip the arduous process of worldbuilding and just borrow the world and characters people are already familiar with. From there, you can simply build upon it, fleshing out parts of the world that are less explored or exploring themes and ideas that the original work didn’t. Maybe you like Snape and want to explore how he became the character he is, so you write your own take on what he went through and how it affected him. Maybe you wonder what is going on in all the houses that aren’t Gryffindor, so you create some characters from Hufflepuff, Slytherin, and Ravenclaw and send them on their own adventure, maybe even while the main story from the actual books is happening in the background so your characters can comment on it. Maybe you see potential in making the original story darker or more political or more erotic, so you just recreate parts of the original story in that new light. It’s all a process of playing with other people’s works so you can improve your own skills through practice and find out what you like and dislike as an artist.

Stories fulfil a variety of needs people have to explore ideas and feelings, personality traits, characters etc.

As a reader it’s not uncommon to imagine a story going differently, often in a direction the author has no interest in exploring.

Some people are really passionate about exploring this element or the world, and write fan fiction about.

So someone writing about a Draco redemption arc might be interested in exploring themes of nature vs nurture or overcoming a toxic upbringing.

They might be interested in exploring the culture of Slythetin, who Rowling is happy to label “the evil house” without thinking about how that would effect the students inducted into it.

Or they might just think Tom Felton is really hot and want to imagine a romance with him/draco.

The intentions of the original author are irrelevant, and to an extent so is the original work.
Many fan fictions are in many ways new stories with new characters, but creating original worlds is hard, and it’s a lot easier and more legible to write in a derivative of a popular existing property.

I don’t think this is lazy though- it’s efficient practice to skip over a bunch of work to get to writing what you want to write.

Fanfics are generally “what if” type stories. Like what if x & y were friends instead of enemies? What if the characters grew up in this situation? What if the characters experienced regular high school? What if this nice character actually got mad? What if we saw the story through a’s eyes instead of b’s?

Like the age old discussion “can Batman defeat Superman?”. But instead of just giving your opinion as points. Fanfic writers can create full blown stories about how they think it would or would not work.

Fans who love a character, universe, or media often try to explore them outside of the confines of what is black and white canon and fanfics are just another avenue for that. Would you say fanarts are also worthless because they are not official and will occasionally depict characters in clothes or situations that are not in the source?

At the end of the day no one is forced to look at or enjoy fanfics or other fan works. But it should be recognized as another valid platform for fans to continue engaging in a thing they love.

And a plus for fanfics is, if you don’t agree with someone’s depiction of something, then it’s just one fan’s opinion and you can move on to something else that may match your ideas better.

Do you refuse to watch a Nolan Batman film because Bill Finger’s ghost didn’t come bless the script?

Just because the original author didn’t write it doesn’t mean someone else can’t enjoy it. Art is art on its own merits.

Not that I don’t understand why people write it or enjoy it, and hey, they are all entitled to it as long as they don’t expect or plan to make money off of it. It’s just laughable how some people equate it to some of the most iconic adaptations of comics to cinema. Sure, your wattpad lucubrations about the YA you loved are on par with the latest Batman movie because neither were written by the original creator.

I think it’s about self expression for the fan.

Because it’s fun.

Then it’s not for you. I write fanfic. I wrote 42k words worth of one, and that doesn’t touch the other stories I have in the works (so many). Technically, I think I wrote a book (if we’re going by word count).

I write it because my favorite was killed for Man Pain, and she deserved better. She had so much potential, and they tossed it out for To Let The Man Grow.

So I gave her a better ending, and we try and stick to the personality because otherwise, what’s the point? Not everyone has it nailed down, but we try really hard because we want to share all the good things, and we want our stories to be compelling.

I’m not quite sure what you’re reading, friend, but look for other things in other fandoms.

And I agree, wattpad is NOT the place to go. You want archive of our own.

You don’t need to understand it. I personally don’t care for fanfic either, but that doesn’t matter. There’s no harm in someone reading it.

Do you think that only the original author of a text can tell a really good story with that world or with those characters?

When I think of fanfic I compare it to something like Arthurian literature. There is no real “original” text telling the complete story. We have early histories by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace; we have many romances from Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes to later French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and even Hebrew authors. If Sir Thomas Malory had stayed his pen because he thought that he could not adapt the stories and add new ones because he’s not “the original author,” we wouldn’t have the stories of King Arthur as they have been adapted from the 19th century to now. They would be different, sometimes substantially, if we cared to adapt them at all.

Fanfic is really a post-copyright perception of how to use someone else’s intellectual property to tell one’s own story. The joy is really in continuing to explore the world and the characters, especially after the original authors have stepped away from their work. There is a lot of fun exploratory work that happens in fanfic. Also, it’s a great engine for a fandom; in some cases, fandoms may persist through fanfic or novel adaptations (a more legitimized version) beyond wide windows of releases, as Star Trek did between the Original Series, the first films, and The Next Generation.

That’s not to say fanfic writers are always good (they aren’t) or that they never deviate from the original text (they do), just that people who enjoy fanfic get a lot out of it, and fanfic has the potential to deliver wonderful new stuff.