FANFICTION: HUMANITY’S SOLE SAVIOUR

It’s 7:30pm on Christmas Eve that I decide Art is dead. I’ve got popcorn in my lap, a remote in my hand, and Art buried six feet deep.

Christmas is a strange phase. Not quite the end of the year, but close enough. It’s a bizarre pull between too little time and too much of it. Few torturous days for you to consider all the ways you’ve changed, and all the ways you didn’t. An endless swallowing of all the dreams you had and abandoned, all the ways you’ve been poked and prodded and then cut wide open in the year that’s passed. All the memories you’ve made, taking them out frame by frame just to make sure you’re carrying them into the next one. All the books you promised you’d read.

And isn’t it just the perfect icing on the cake that you can’t find a single good new movie to distract you? What you find instead, while your popcorn cools to a pathetic lukewarm, is approximately twenty bad ones. Twenty low-budget films with threadbare scripts that ought to be credited to AI. Flat tones, flat acting and virtually nothing to come away with. So, of course, what else is one to do but resort to infallible classics? I could recite The Holiday in my sleep.

The commercialization of media is a plenty hot topic. We’ve seen it time and time again, credited it to greed and capitalism. It’s always about the money. The Oxford dictionary has twelve listed definitions for the word, but for all intents and purposes, it really only just means one thing. Value. We know this. It is a measure of worth. Countries have risen and fallen, because money makes the world go around. It’s a necessity, the desideratum of scientists and bankers and entrepreneurs and agents and, though we scorn it, artists too. It is all that we live for. It is what kills us in the end. 

Money’s a deeply human concept, born of logic and reasoning. Like most man-made things, it was designed for the better, for rationing and equity and a means of distributing the once plentiful resources that humanity had to offer. But we are no longer plentiful. And we’re only barely human. We made money from nothing, and now blame it for capitalism. We built AI from the ground, and now blame it for doing that which we built it for. 

What is it about us that makes us self-destruct?

I think it’s the same thing that makes us create.

There is something restless at the core of us artists, something that’s never content to simply absorb. We’re not built for pure consumption. We were not made to sit still and accept what we are given, and be grateful for it. We have always compulsively, pathologically, reached back. We always need an answer. A little boy hears a story and immediately begins revising it in the dark of their bedroom, thinking of the embellishments they’ll add when they tell their friends and spread the tale. Tucked under the covers is a head full of but what ifs. A teenager watches a film and falls so hard and helplessly in love with it that loving it is no longer enough. Music, shows, cartoons, books. We need to inhabit it. We need to take it apart with our hands and put it back together with our fingerprints all over the inside. So that when it’s reassembled, it’s new. Ours.

Welcome to Fanfiction. 

We are so accustomed to dismissal, to closing the tab the second one leans too close. It’s a derivative, the literary equivalent of tracing over someone else’s drawing. The mainstream cultural narrative has never been kind to it, the very same cultural narrative that profits from turning you from an artist to a consumer. If you’re busy engrossed in official merchandise, movie adaptations, sanctioned sequels, if your love has a price tag attached, then you are manageable. You are, in the language of capitalism, a market. 

Fanfiction refuses to be a market.

It exists almost entirely distinct from the economy of media. Typos in stolen hours, posted for free, read for free, and revised not for algorithm-approved engagement metrics, but on the sheer, ungovernable urge to keep going. Nobody is getting rich. There is no shareholder waiting on the quarterly reports for that horrific Hunger Games story from when you were twelve. It’s just you, and the six anonymous readers from Indonesia to the Amazons that found your words compelling. And in a media landscape increasingly built for demographics instead of human beings, that absence is nothing short of radical. 

Think about what the market has done to storytelling. Think about our beloved franchises stretched beyond recognition, the reboots and live-actions nobody asked for and all of us watched anyway. Walking out after a movie, closing a book, finishing a series, and feeling… nothing. When was the last time you were surprised? The machine has learned what you “enjoy”, and it will give you exactly that. In perpetuity, forever, until you die. 

There is a particular intimacy in fanfiction that commercial media simply can’t emulate. Because it must speak to everyone, it speaks to no one. Fanfiction assumes your love. It speaks to you from inside the thing you love, directly. It is accountable to no one’s bottom line, and is therefore accountable only to its own freedom. Some of the most emotionally gutting words I have ever encountered have lived on a fanfiction archive, by someone whose first language isn’t even English, and yet is so imperfect and achingly sincere that I’ve had to stare at my ceiling fan in silence many, many times. 

Fanfiction communities have built something that corporate media never could. An ecosystem of creation, for its own sake. Writers leave little notes at the end of their chapters, apologies for long hiatuses (they simply got kidnapped by a cult and almost took part in human sacrificial practices, but all good, we’ll get another chapter next week!). Readers build reading lists and fanfiction-dedicated playlists and wikipedia pages and fanart that catalog every single potential subplot before you’ve read a word of the story. Mentors and collaborators and people who will read your work at midnight because they believe in it. In you. 

There is no paywall. No algorithm. Only the act of making something and leaving it for the world to find. And what one finds in it, more often than not, is themselves.

This is the final indictment of the capitalist model of media: it does not, and never has, cared about you. It is interested in you, yes. Your attention, which it converts to revenue, your demographic, a cluster of viewing habits and curated feeds. It is very much not interested in that specific ache in you. In the particular texture and shape of the thing you’re missing, the story you need that doesn’t exist yet. Fanfiction cares. It always has.

Art is not dead. It was never going to die, because it’s too damn stubborn for that. Somewhere, far in the trenches of the internet, it’s doing exactly what it’s meant to.

It’s surviving us. Despite us. Because of us.

It always does.

Vedika Sengupta