The importance of Fan Fiction is that, while very few people can (like Tolkien, Rowling etc) primarily create a meaningful, purposeful, participative Imaginative Universe – a much larger number of people can take such a universe and secondarily create within it; can incrementally extrapolate, interpolate, combine it with other such Universes, deepen and extend characters from it, make new plots using characters from it – and so forth.
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Since this secondary creativity is typically done within a better ‘world’ than the self-hating mainstream secular-alienated-nihilistic world of modern public discourse; and since the world of Fan Fiction is a part of a person’s life; this can serve to make a person’s life more meaningful – which is to say Fan Fiction can make a person’s life not just better but deeply better. And it has done, for very large numbers of people.
One thought on “In praise of fan fiction”
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I like that.
I also think for some people, fan fiction seems to have almost a therapeutic role – it allows an exploration of emotions and problems (all the “sad” Pony fan fiction out there I’ve seen). And it does allow a person to “join in” to a world that may be nicer and happier or more noble or more adventurous or in some other way “better” than the one we inhabit.
I know I’ve whiled away time spent waiting somewhere by writing The Further Adventures of Twilight and Company in my head.