Dear Fanfiction,
We first met in the backseat of a long road trip. I scribbled you in shaky car handwriting: you were safe between the margins of my cheap wire-bound notebook. You were incredibly embarrassing, and I did my best to forget about you.
It was a self-insert, Mary Sue, "Star Trek: The Original Series" fic, thankfully lost to history. My character had purple eyes, was a child prodigy, and boasted a confused genetic mix of Romulan, Vulcan, Japanese, Betazoid, and Russian. This was my beginning, raw and ridiculous: when it came to fic-writing, it was also my end.
There was a reason that my 12-year-old self wrote that story instinctively and without instruction. Fanfic, you were the child of an inspired and dissatisfied imagination. Every night before falling asleep, I made you without knowing what it was I made, dreaming that I was in Middle-Earth or in Victorian London or on the deck of a starship (U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-C or D, depending on the day.) I'd plot out new storylines in my mind and gleefully insert myself into them. I was starving for more -- more character development, more plot, more women, more story, more...something. I didn't know what.
Then, courtesy of the Internet, I discovered you again.
Fanfiction.net, an oasis in the dry desert. These were the old days of lemon and lime ratings, the dark ages of AO3's infancy, the last gasp of the great Potter Shipping Wars. A hundred thousand young nerds cackling like mad scientists at their creations. A few battle-scarred old Spock/Kirk shippers. A strange and hyper-concentrated language of tags and summaries: HS AU, shipping, slash, mpreg, fluff, deathfic, PWP, drabble, squick, tentacles (enough said). I was Luke stepping into the Mos Eisley Cantina, surrounded by all the weird and wonderful dregs of the galaxy.
Fanfiction, through my most painful and awkward years of puberty, you connected me to better worlds. At your worst you appalled me (and you can be pretty appalling at times, especially to a girl who cares deeply about grammatical accuracy.) But at best, you were a window, a sci-fi portal to a multiverse that stunned and delighted and brought me to ugly tears at three in the morning. You nurtured my imagination and my adoration. You gave me diverse characters to combat an overwhelmingly white, straight canon. (Well, you did great on queering everything, but, to be honest, you still have some real problems with your treatment of female characters and POC. We need to talk, fanfic. Maybe next article.)
You were the worst sex ed teacher of all time (y'all would not believe what I've seen passed off as lube), but you taught me what sex could be: not a terrifying or painful mystery, but a grand egalitarian climax of the heart, where the only struggle is between "tongues battling for dominance."
But best of all, you took my favorite shows and books and characters and free of charge you multiplied them, played with them, expanded them in a million iterations -- you killed one character and brought another back from an unjust grave, threw sex pollen at two and put one in a barista's apron -- you made magic, pure magic, infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Parents, I kinda hope you're not reading this -- but when you asked me what I was reading so intently on my phone, I would answer "nothing" in embarrassment, but it wasn't really that. It was something quite important to me.
It was a novel-length story about Mycroft and Lestrade where Lestrade's still the best cop in London, but she's also exasperated and smart and determinedly fine and knows how to taser a kidnapper and take care of herself, and she was teaching your daughter the kind of woman she can be when she grows up.
Or it was a fic where just when everyone on the ship has given up hope, James Kirk finds a way to cheat death and triumphantly return to his crew -- because a girl who lost someone when she was very young needs to be reminded, sometimes, that people can also be saved.
(And admittedly, sometimes it was porn. Sometimes it was even poorly-written porn. I'm only ashamed for tolerating the terrible plotlines.)
At college, now, I don't read fic as often as before -- I have buckets of homework to deal with, and stories all of my own to write. But fanfiction, I notice, is not a dirty word around here. And for the first time in my life, when someone asks me offhandedly what I'm reading, I can reply "a Merthur modern AU!" and they won't look at me like I just spouted gibberish. They'll ask me what the word count is, and if I can send them a link. They were once shy 12-year-olds scribbling in notebooks in the backseats of cars, or maybe publishing their own writing online in middle school, or discovering the quirks of their sexuality on Tumblr.
Fanfiction, you made us who we are: joyful, messed-up, creative, imaginative, unabashed nerds. What can I say but thank you?
