Fandom is on the rise. Right now, two topics are on everyone’s minds: Avengers: Endgame and the final season of Game of Thrones. I suppose a third one could be when on earth The Winds of Winter will be released, but right now, that’s on the backburner. Regardless, people are looking to media for conclusions that maybe they feel are lacking in the real world. That’s where fanfiction comes in.

Fanfiction is exactly what it sounds like: fiction written by fans, using characters and settings that were already created. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories most likely began the first major advancement of groups of fans creating work. Doyle’s creation was so popular that when he decided to kill off Holmes in 1893, 20,000 people canceled their subscriptions to The Strand in disgust. Doyle had gotten sick of the character, but was forced to bring him back to life to pay his bills after his historical fiction (what he saw as his magnum opus) failed to take off.

Jane Austen novels would be next, considering their popularity in the early 20th century. With the publication of her biography in 1870, Austen and her work were introduced to a wider audience than the literary elite, and fans took off from there, calling themselves Janeites; they could be seen as the first subculture group. However, the first community of fans writing fiction began with Star Trek. The word community is key in this case. Fanzines (magazines created by fans) and conventions quickly got off the ground, and the Star Trek fandom was born.

Other fandoms quickly sprang up, Doctor Who and Star Wars in particular, and by the 1980s writers were jumping from one fandom to another with ease. In the 1990s, the first fandom to venture en masse to the Internet was The X-Files, though it was quickly followed by others. At first, communities congregated on LiveJournal, but most current fanfiction can now be found on fanfiction.net and the Archive of Our Own.

Authors have differing opinions on fanfiction. Some, such as science-fiction and fantasy author Diane Duane, known for her Young Wizards series, began careers writing fanfic, and have no problems with fans creating their own stories. Others, like fantasy author George R. R. Martin, known for A Song of Ice and Fire (upon which the HBO series Game of Thrones is based), are opposed to it, believing writers would be better off writing their own characters and settings.

On the one hand, writing fanfic is a good way to practice the basics of writing: dialogue, description, plot, etc., while not having to worry about creating characters or settings. On the other hand, you aren’t learning how to write as professional authors do, i.e. creating everything yourself. It’s also easy to get lazy and write characters away from their own characteristics, especially if you want to write characters into a particular situation they wouldn’t normally be in.

Regardless, fanfiction is an inherently comforting community: you are writing about characters you love, situations you want them to get into, and readers and supporters of your work are eager to see them go there.

Quite a few current prominent examples of professional fanfiction abound. The most famous, is, of course, E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, previously known as the Twilight fanfiction “Master of the Universe.” Another is the recent film and novel After by Anna Todd, based on the One Direction fanfiction of the same name. Both of these stories relied heavily on the communities in which they were born. Anna Todd thanks the readers, in particular, in her dedication to the published book. The community engagement aspect of fanfiction allows readers to overlook parts that readers of professional novels would scoff at: namely, the amateur writing and abusive overtones obvious in both works. Fans of both managed to enhance the professional publications, so much so that Fifty Shades of Grey turned into just as much of a phenomenon as Twilight.

After garnered enough attention that a movie adaptation was made, but it has received mixed to negative reviews. In his review for Variety, Owen Gleiberman wrote: “After, which is based on a new adult romance novel written by Anna Todd, with the Hardin character reportedly modeled on Harry Styles, is an innocuous teen pulp soap opera that flirts with “danger” but, in fact, keeps surprising you with how mild and safe and predictable it turns out to be.”

Sadly, both of these current examples serve mostly to prove how ‘bad’ fanfiction is. Fanfic writing, like most fandom culture, has always had shame attached to it, seen as something weird and off-putting. Why would you admit that you write stories about characters someone else created, or even about real people with RPF (real person fanfiction)? Fanart, on the other hand, shows an artist’s love for the characters due to the detail in the drawing, but fanfiction can complicate that love, with out-of-character characters, poor writing, or any number of other factors.

Yes, put your love into your writing, but take a step back every once in a while, in order to see the whole picture.

There is a difference, though, between writing stories on the Internet and serving as a professional writer for a television series or book series with pre-created characters and settings. For example, the long-running series of novels affiliated with the Star Wars universe has had a large number of authors, a few of whom have gone on to write their own novels, such as Jude Watson, known for her children’s novels as well as her series set in the Star Wars prequel era.

Furthermore, Sherlock Holmes is now in the public domain, and so several adaptations have been launched in the past few years, such as BBC’s Sherlock. Steven Moffat is another creator who doesn’t begrudge the fans for their writing. Arguably, you could call this another form of fanfiction. Sherlock Holmes had a creator who was careful with what he was writing, and unlike, say, characters from Greek mythology (also in the public domain), Doyle’s characters are fully-fleshed out and well-written. Writers creating a modern adaptation or an affiliated novel have a lot more to work with, while still writing their own plots. Therefore, for me, adaptations and tie-in media can confuse the difference between professional work and fanfiction.

Beginning writers write fanfiction for the comfort, but also for the adventure of it. I’m writing about characters I love, who are going off to do something because I want them to, and I get to decide how the story goes. Fanfiction is odd, though, compared to other media in that readers know what they’re getting before they even open the story, due to tags that explain (if the author so chooses) what the rating is, whether the story has a romantic element and what it is, whether the story is set in the characters’ universe or somewhere else, etc. This element enhances the comfort aspect of reading fanfiction, but also enhances the strangeness of the whole venture.

Humans like continuity, and fanfiction gives it to us in spades. It’s unfortunate that the worst aspects became phenomenons, but maybe fanfic needs to stay more of an underground element in order to flourish. After all, no one wants the legality of fanfic to be challenged or even brought up in a court, which could conceivably happen if it kept making the headlines.

Fanfic proper began as printed-out fanzines passed around at conventions, and now it’s stored in archives on the Internet where most writers are anonymous. Perhaps, in the modern age, that’s mostly where it belongs.