What’s so important about the history of fan fiction, you may ask? Aside from possibly helping you on Jeopardy, it makes the concept seem less trivial. If fan fiction as we know it had first come to be in, say, the late 1990s instead of the 1960s, would you really look at it the same? No, and that’s just in… Read More

In my last post, I talked about how fan fiction is something you may hear about without actively searching for it—although frankly speaking, it’s more likely to be discussed on the Internet than in, say, a college cafeteria)—including a mention of creators’ opinions. While some creators are supportive of derivative works based on their stories and/or characters, there are some… Read More

It’s far from uncommon to see pop culture being referenced in everyday life, and especially common to see it referenced in other works (for instance, Marty McFly refers to Darth Vader at one point in Back to the Future). As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that the concept of fan fiction has been mentioned in ‘official’ fiction. Perhaps the most… Read More

Fanfiction.net Founded in October of 1998, Fanfiction.net has millions of users from across the globe, with stories in 40 languages in such fandoms as Star Wars, Pokemon, and Avatar: the Last Airbender. The stories in question are divided into multiple categories–Anime/Manga, Books, Cartoons, Comics, Games, Movies, TV Shows, and Miscellaneous–then organized further by the specific fandom (ex. the Yu-Gi-Oh subsection… Read More

The concept of fan fiction is surprisingly not as new as you might think–for instance, many of Shakespeare’s plays were based on stories by other authors of his time, and in the 19th century, pastiches and ‘unofficial sequels’ to well-known classic literature (such as stories about Sherlock Holmes that were not authorized by Arthur Conan Doyle) were not unheard of.… Read More