Eli Cugini

What do I want to put on the page?

Or what do I want, like, in myself to express?"

or something.

But fanfiction gives you this kind of ready-made structure.

It asks you to tap more deeply into a kind of register of desire that can be kind of shameful for people, partly because it can be sexual, but it doesn't necessarily have to be sexual, it can be.

emotional but I think it can be very vulnerable for people a lot of like queer people for instance are going I want to see the queer thing that they won't put on the screen because my particular minority is persecuted or whatever also there's something even deeper than that in terms of I want something and sometimes I don't 100% know why or this thing makes me cry and I'm not 100% sure why it does but I want to explore that

It's, I think, a very valuable kind of emotional work when it comes to being in the world of going, okay, how do my emotions work?

How do my emotions work in community?

Because it's not just a kind of personal project.

It's like, I'm trying to connect with other people.

Like, you can end up really being in touch with what do I want out of my life and out of the world?

And I think fanfiction is one of the ways in which I learned to articulate desire at a very pivotal point in my life.