A little fanwork manifesto

I’ve been told many times that fan fiction, fanart, cosplay and the like are not art; that none of them can possibly say anything; that artists who indulge in them do not progress and learn nothing; and that complete originality is the only measure of artistic success. There’s some wisdom in this, but I can’t agree.

I think the best way to start is to discuss what fanwork can do, and these examples come to mind. All of them are fiction-related, but hopefully the ideas work across the board:

1. Fan fiction, above all, comes from empathy with the characters, an understanding of the character as a personality separate from the work and from one’s own aims — which is a wonderful antidote to the lit-major idea that characters are little more than scalpels and levers. It changes how you write original fiction. Perhaps it’s not always for the better, as the more powerful the tool, the more disastrous the slip. But it certainly makes the act of writing more alive, more organic, and more amusing.

Sensitive interpretation is a skill that’s prized in actors and singers, but dismissed in writers for no good reason.

2. Fanwork is rarely paid for in cash. It is usually assigned a value anyway — often social capital — but  it comes closer than any bought work to being written solely for pleasure, which is politically impressive.

3. Fanwork, in intelligent hands, teaches us originality — by allowing us to observe close-up the boundary between the character we see and the character we write, and by bowing us before the understanding that every creative act has roots in earlier ones, and that’s how it should be, because we are involved in mankind, etc., etc., etc.

Advertisement