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Hey guys. Okay, so, a few weeks ago one of my coworkers asked me this question. And it has been bothering me ever since. 

Y’see, there’s this problem about explaining fanfiction, or fandom for that matter, to people who have never been a part of this culture. And, no, I don’t think that culture is too grandiose a term. The problem is everyone wants to rationalize fanfiction, justify its existence. Anyone who is not a part of fandom, literally any fandom, wants you to explain why you use your time this way, why you create this way, and why you feel entitled to do so. People struggle over basic things like creation existing outside of monetary gain or copyright, but even that’s not the intrinsic thing outside people don’t understand. 

I spent minutes trying to explain to my coworkers why as they pestered me with the same series of comments we’ve all been called to answer a hundred times before, “Why do you do that?” “But it’s not yours!””Who don’t you write your own work?” “That character wouldn’t do that!” etc, etc. And between trauma flashbacks to 2004 when I was 12 years old and we had the wars of What Is And Is Not In Character, I realized what the problem is: fanfiction is for fun. 

That’s it, plain and simple. I do it because it’s fun. You do it too! You draw or write or read or make or remix or whatever! You participate because it’s fun! That’s really all there is to it. And you and I don’t ask for more reason than that. But I was talking to outsiders. 

And here I should explain that I work in a college. I was talking to academics. Hell, I am an academic, I teach college English. And English professors, god help me, English professors are the absolute WORST at justifying fanfiction. You get two flavors of English professor when it comes to fandom: 1) that’s stealing or 2) that’s deconstruction. If the first, fuck you, I don’t have time for your precious proprietary sensibilities, learn what derivative means and then tell me if your near-and-dears are so goddamn original. If the second, I love ya, pal, and I know you’re trying, but you do too much. You do too much. 

For all of us in fandom, we understand that for every meta-critique, every genderqueer retelling, every better rewriting of a poorly articulated story, there are fifty hackneyed, hand-on-the-crotch, author-kink-specific “adult content” fics (Just in case tumblr got any ideas about censoring this post). And THAT’S NOT A BAD THING!

If you haven’t yet, you will meet people who will go out of their way to defend fanfiction’s literary qualities, but they Bowdlerize it! Sanitize! Clean! Purify. Intentional or not, and sometimes it is definitely intentional, many people feel that in order to justify and defend fanfiction, they must eliminate the porn, forego the smut, ignore the self-indulgent, half-crazed teenage lust that is the life’s blood of fanfiction. And that is some hypocritical, restrictive horseshit. Never mind the fan that chooses to throw the first stone, but what a fundamental misrepresentation on behalf of the authority! 

One of my favorite professors of all time offered fanfiction as an assignment option in every one of her classes. But she always did this with this fundamental misunderstanding of what fanfiction is and what it is for. Yes it CAN be incredible critical thought. Yes it CAN be a literary revolution. Yes, yes, yes. But it is not only this. And it always made me cringe to listen to her sing fanfiction’s praises without embracing all of the gutter trash that is my heritage, my home. I am by no means saying that fanfiction should not do all the meta-analysis and social critique that it can, will, and does do. But that is not all that fanficiton is nor should it be. Fanfiction is also the 18th coffeeshop AU you’ve read for the same ship. Fanfiction is also the soulmates AU for your rarepair. It’s the LOTR crossover. It’s the character death fic that serves no purpose but to make you sad. And it’s the OOC crack nightmare that you wrote at 4 am when you were 13 and don’t share with anyone, but it gave you joy to write. I will never defend fanfic without defending these also. 

And this is what my coworkers struggled with when I tried to explain. They could not accept this simple fact that fanfiction exists, primarily, for joy. And I would not treat fanfiction as high art existing only to hold a mirror up to media. Absolutely fuck that ivory tower bullshit. And they could not wrap their heads around enjoying this. 

One of them understood why I might write fic, but did not understand why I might want to read another’s. For this I can only cite his ego as the reason he would perhaps not like to read from someone else’s imagination. Another insisted that I ought to write my own work, rather than manipulate someone else’s characters. And this was someone who espoused death of the author and freedom from censorship! But still I could not convince her why it would be fun to play around in someone else’s sandbox. And the answer I gave at the time was not what I wanted it to be. I played it off as cowardice, fear of judgment about my own work. And, to be fair, that is one of the reasons I balk at original fiction, but again, fanfiction needs no justification! It is NOT second best! It is a full and legitimate art form in its own right, requiring new and different skills every bit as nuanced and delicate and time-consuming to acquire as those for any other kind of writing. Social acceptance does not make a creation good. Nor does profit or being studied by institutions. These things are accolades and easily recognized to mean value, but they themselves are not what make a creation good. You already know what does that.

And this is why it is so terribly hard to explain why fanfiction? You may as well ask why art?

Nobody remembers this today, but there was immense fandom drama in the 1960s in the Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzines like ERBdom, the Oparian, and Burroughsania. 

Yes, this legendary fandom brawl was all because a bright eyed and bushy tailed young go-getter fanzine writer named Fritz Lieber wrote about how Burroughs was inspired by and used tons of visual imagery and concepts from Theosophy, a strange offshoot of the spiritualist movement popular in the 1890s to the 1950s. Tons of ERB imagery, Lieber argued, particularly the John Carter of Mars books and elements of the wilder Tarzan novels, came from Theosophy, like four armed men who hatch from eggs, universal planetary telepathy, mental astral projection to other planets, and Atlantean societies with both Neanderthal and evolved modern men. 

To say the fanzines got mad about Lieber with disproportionate intensity was an understatement. Lieber was absolutely correct, of course: even today, Theosophy is one of the great subterranean sources of geek culture ideas. You can see the influence of Thesophical concepts like Lemuria, or the idea that Tibet is the super-powers capital of the world. On a personal note, I have  few friends who visited Tibet, but alas, not a single one of them learned astral projection. 

However, ERB fandom of the 60s was wildly enraged by the 100% correct idea that a spiritualist movement beloved by bougie hippie weirdos (spiritualism was always a trendy affectation for rich people) inspired their “Logical and Manly” favorite writer, who had a big part of his identity being his atheism and distrust of trendy religious movements. The effect was much the same as if someone found convincing evidence that Richard Dawkins was secretly a Hare Krishna. I strongly suspect people were angry about this not because it was a lie, but because it was true. 

Also, keep in mind this was also happening in the context of the 1960s counterculture, where working class background ERB fans were often big hippie punchers. Remember, too, this was also the decade ERB, once the top selling American writer for decades, started to lose his cultural cache, as the counterculture preferred the unreal and dreamlike Lovecraft and Tolkien (both never big names before - Lovecraft in particular was forgotten for decades, and the first editions of Lord of the Rings got as much attention as Thomas Burnett Swan and the Gormenghast books did) over the action-meets-spiritualism works of Burroughs, A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, and James Branch Cabell. A big realignment in fantasy was happening that ERB was on the other dividing line of, and this was the first contact with that cleave. 

-core as a suffix serves the exact same function as -esque and yet they throw tomatoes at me when i say something is kafkacore

“Megalosaurus” © Maurice Zuberano. Accessed at pinterest here

[It’s the most spooktacular time of the year, so I’m going to be celebrating the end of October with more monsters based on SF, fantasy and horror movies. First up is a tribute to all of the films that couldn’t afford stop motion, so they glued some crap to a lizard and called it a dinosaur. The Greek root atelo, by the way, means “inadequate, defective”]

Atelosaurus
CR 9 N Animal
This creature appears to be a lizard the size of an elephant. Horns grow from its brow, and its body is decorated with frills and spines.

Atelosauruses are strange giant lizards native to remote jungles and caves. In these lost worlds, dinosaurs are often still present, and the atelosaurus is mistaken for a true dinosaur by inexperienced observers. Despite the fact that it is “merely” a lizard, however, atelosaurs make for fearsome opponents, and they are more than a match for many dinosaurs in combat.

An atelosaurus is an opportunistic omnivore, consuming plant and animal matter with equal relish. They are capable of surviving for extended periods on relatively little food, making them capable of surviving even in small, isolated habitats like caves and plateaus. After a long fast, atelosauruses prefer meat to increase their metabolisms, making them most dangerous at these times to smaller creatures.

Although an atelosaurus spends most of its life in a solitary state, they gather to mate in the fall. These mating grounds, called scrums, are full of the battling creatures, as the males thrash each other about for the chance at the healthiest females. Such fights can prove fatal for smaller or unlucky males, but mostly end before lethal violence is done.

An atelosaurus grows to thirty feet long and weighs three or four tons. Much variation is possible in the species—different individuals may have different numbers or sizes of horns, frills on the neck or back, or spines growing along the back and tail.

Atelosaurus as Animal Companions

Starting Statistics: Size Medium; Speed 30 ft, climb 20 ft.; AC +3 natural armor; Attack bite (1d6), gore (1d6), tail (1d4); Ability Scores Str 13, Dex 19, Con 10, Int 2, Wis 14, Cha 3; Special Qualities darkvision 60 ft., low light vision, scent

7th-Level Advancement: Size Large, AC +3 natural armor;Attack bite (1d8), gore (1d8), tail (1d6); Ability Scores Str +8, Dex –2, Con +4; Special Qualities powerful charge, toss, reach +5 ft. (tail only)

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