guilty pleasures: thoughts on fan culture

by isabel ledezma

You’re going to laugh, I know. But before you do, consider this: I know the readership here on this website. Don’t pretend to laugh at me, because I know this is all too familiar for you too.

Now you’ll understand why I felt the need to preface this blog post. About two weeks ago, I finally started reading the absolute tome of a fanfiction, All the Young Dudes, a Harry Potter fan work by MsKingBean89 on the well-known internet archive site archiveofourown.org.

Did Isabel really just out herself as a fanfiction reader?—you’re now thinking to yourself. And to that I say, hey, we all have our guilty pleasures. Don’t act like yours is better because of the medium. Let me say my piece.

Anyways. I started reading this epic of a fan-created work after weeks of hyping up from my friends. I’ve been supplying them with updates and reactions as I speed through more than one hundred total chapters. The interactive experience I have thus had while reading thousands upon thousands of words about characters with barely more than ten average lines among them in the actual books has made me think a lot about fan work/culture in general.

Like I just mentioned, this work has taken a few characters barely mentioned in the original text and created rich, incredible personalities and relationships out of basically nothing. Not only that, but a mini renaissance has surged amongst apps such as TikTok and Tumblr, with anything from memes to in-depth analysis to beautiful paintings circulating more than ten years after the final Harry Potter book was released.

I know we all like to hide the more emotional, serious parts of fan culture, choosing instead to treat it as something silly or even shameful, but to be honest I love thinking about it in terms of how amazing humans are. I think something like this silly little fanfiction goes to show the innate creativity, curiosity, and hunger of human beings. Thinking more broadly, for nearly all of human existence we have never been satisfied with just hearing a story. We created enormous, colorful murals depicting myths and history; we generated ridiculous alternate universes for nearly any book out there (look at all of the Great Gatsby’s coming out!); we have kept stories alive in so many ways. Not only that, but the very act of creation brings us together. Even before the internet, young women excitedly gathered together to gush over Star Trek, often considered one of the first true fandoms.

I guess my point is that I don’t think anything is silly or insignificant when it comes to human beings and their stories. Why should we feel guilty about things that satisfy our need to squash boredom? When someone looks back upon us from hundreds of years in the future, will they laugh at our creative endeavors? Or will they marvel at the immensity of the human imagination as we do now to the humans of Ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia… I like to think they will be amazed at the love of creation and storytelling that all humans seem to share.