Fandom Power – knitting in the dark

Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be.

At this late date, fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse that the canonical works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can imagine and probably a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality. Culturally speaking, this work used to be the job of the avant garde, but in many ways fanfiction has stepped in to take that role. If the mainstream has been slow to honor it, well, that’s usually the fate of aesthetic revolutions. Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture’s attic, but the attic won’t contain it forever.

Anne Jamison. Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World. 2013

(via notenoughgatorade)

tofixtheshadows:

I think my favorite thing about the fandom culture on tumblr are the headcanon posts. They’re all revolutionary, because they almost invariably come from marginalized voices. We who have been unloved by the world imagine our favorite characters loving us, fighting for us. Where their creators expect us to exalt them through uncritical worship, we do it by humbling them instead. We make them better by making them one of us.

We racebend, or we explore and celebrate the cultural backgrounds of non-white characters whose ethnicities have been canonically overlooked. We reclaim them as queer or non-binary or neurotypical or disabled, and then we imagine them loving themselves and being loved by their communities. We take characters who have been broken in their battles and envision for them days of quiet happiness, of rest and healing and small comforts, because we’ve been there and we know exactly what you need. We turn them into the role models we should have, that we desperately need, and I think it helps us love ourselves more too.

So don’t ever stop writing posts about Scott McCall hearing his mother sing lullabies in Spanish or Bucky Barnes helping kids get prosthetics or charity-starting bisexual Steve Rogers who stands up for women’s rights or Hogwarts houses validating their trans students. Give me all your fan art of fat Feferi and hijabi Rose Lalonde and the Avengers in a big cuddle pile of mutual self care. This is so important, don’t let anybody tell you differently. I appreciate it all so much.