Eli Cugini

They offer very enthusiastic communities that do a lot of reading and editing of each other's work, support of each other's work.

100%.

Like, I don't think fanfiction is a reliable place to learn how to become a better writer, because I don't think anywhere really is.

But I think it absolutely can become a place where you learn how to write, albeit write to the specifications of fanfiction specifically, which does not always map that easily onto a published book, for instance.

You're writing in installments, which is a little different to writing in chapters, there's different formal stuff going on.

But it is still often teaching you in community and

how to become a writer, the pleasure to invest your readers in what you're doing.

It can teach you a lot of skills.

And accordingly, a lot of literary agents are like, oh, okay, you have these writers who can build their own brand, who are writing on their own steam without getting paid.

Those are very marketable skills, in a way.

element being like thrown onto it.

I think it can be upsetting as well, like people who take part in something that part of the reason it gets to be as crazy as it often is, as queer as it often is, as like formally experimental as it often is, is this not having a direct profit motive thing.

Yes, a majority of fan fiction is slop because that's just kind of how the production of community writing works.

I think you could quite successfully argue most books are slop.

Stick around.

Yes.

Fanfiction, I think, is very tapped into wish fulfillment, although not in the simplistic sense of that would imply that all fanfiction is happy and makes the people who they want to get together, get together.

It can also be a sort of reverse wish fulfillment where they want to see particular characters be miserable.

Heroes and villains being shipped together is not new.

And so, like, imagining what if I broke that tension, what would that look like is a big draw for a lot of fanfiction.