Club Internet: No Parents Allowed!

As I left off in my last post, the internet was the ultimate secret clubhouse when I was growing up. Mine was the first generation to really get into the internet for most of their childhood. The internet started to become a part of my life in grade four when I started pirating music and helping my friend watch episodes of the oh-so-risque comedy Family Guy behind his parents back before it was on Canadian cable. It was the days before web searches got their safe-search controls figured out and every image search resulted in at least one image featuring your favourite childhood cartoon characters wrapped in a passionate pornographic embrace. That was the thrill of the internet - you could find out ANYTHING you wanted, and, more often than not, you learned things you didn't want to know just from everyday internet use. Ah, the good old days of surfing the web constantly in fear of the pornographic pop-up ad. 

Because it largely lives online, Fandom exists outside of the constricting world of adults. To many, the internet is the only place where people feel comfortable expressing their true selves. While it is a place where cyberbullies hide behind anonymity, the internet can also be the safest place a person knows to share what they are interested in(1). As a result, this is a place where adolescents feel most comfortable exploring things that are interesting to them, or that they may want to know more about; fandom offers opportunities to explore unpleasant feelings and budding sexualities. Authors can even use their favourite characters to help them heal after traumatic events (2). 

Personally speaking, fanfiction was where I learned most of what I know about sex and sexualities and it was where I first started exploring possible preferences and creating a sense of what was exciting to me and what wasn't. Fanfiction may surprise some as being graphically sexual, but it’s content fill a need that is not satisfied in most published YA works (3). Most YA lit focuses on correcting and controlling the bubbling hormones of teenagers, while also playing to those desires with stories featuring characters who have crushes and stress about their first kisses or console friends who have already lost their virginity (3). 

Fanfiction, because it is non-for-profit and not edited or censored by a publishing company, can be about any subject matter. Fans can not only read, but write about their favourite characters in any situation that they could possibly dream up - for better or for worse.  

Yes, a lot of fanfiction is the result of horny teenagers looking for a way to vent their impulses, but it can also be a way for kids who have suffered great tragedies to try to express and cope with their experiences as a way to recover. It has also been know to be a way for kids to gain understanding about subjects they don't have any experience with, like living with suicidal thoughts, or struggling with a non-heteronormative sexual preference, to help them to better understand themselves or their friends. The only editors are the people who leave comments, critiquing how believable the experiences captured in the writing was. More often than not, the comment section is an outpouring of love and support, for both the author and the story itself. Fandom, as I have said before, is a very supportive community. 

Questions for the comments:

Have you had a life changing experience with fanfiction? Has a story made you understand yourself or a friend better? I could go on about how finding a story featuring a pairing that I found initially revolting came to be an obsession for roughly eight years, but that might be a story better told another time, haha. 

sources

(1) Matthews & Adams, 2009

(2) Mathews & Adams, 2009; Tosenberger, 2008

(3) Tosenberger, 2008