OptionalFiction

Obviously I'm just having a bit of fun here. Again with the meta levels like Tea Party and the dumb fanfiction like A Metamorphosis. It's a bit of a cliché that fanfiction is always about shipping characters, just like spending a little too much time on the internet will associate the terms “fan art” and “pregnant Sonic” in even the healthiest of brains. I personally am not part of the fanfic community. Not as a writer, but neither as a reader. The majority of fanfic is accessible only online on platforms like AO3 (“Archive of our own”). I mostly like reading print books and I sometimes read on my Kindle. Maybe I should investigate some way to easily load some things on there, because everything else about the fanfic community is awesome. Fanfiction gets written in a way that's very similar to the earliest novels. It's mostly published serially, meaning one chapter every week, month, or whenever the author finishes it. And then the readers will discuss the story and give suggestions where the story might go next. Popular stories will have beta-readers, which are people that will get the first version of a chapter and submit feedback before it is released to the public. This means that many fanfics are not the work of just one author, but a group of people that give input on the story. The second cool thing is that it's all done for the love of it. As fanfiction is often based on copyrighted characters and/or settings it's legally difficult to commercialize. That a group of online users is responsible for the end product just adds to this difficulty. Lastly, the community consists of a very high percentage of marginalized people. Women and queer people, for example, are motivated to write queer or gender-swapped versions of popular stories to finally see themselves represented or to exert control, even if only over fictional worlds (The same desire also draws us to TTRPGs). These queer stories then draw other marginalized people in as readers and you've got a community. I hope I could provide some deeper context on the relationship of fanfic and “smutty” stories. I hope I also got across some of my enthusiasm about the community that is really doing something special.

I know that Christopher Columbus could be confused with Christopher Robin in the second part of my story when I just call him by his first name. I couldn't come up with a better character to switch him out with. Deal with it. Also, “bearhood” is objectively really funny.