I would like to know, what do you think of fanfiction and how did you discover it? I remember back in late 2000s early 2010s I was interested in Star Trek vs Star Wars stuff and I have managed to stumble across a fanfic by Mike Wong called Star Trek Conquest. I liked that fanfic and I then tried to search for other fanfics like it.
Like any other mass-published-but-not-edited writing form: some is good, much of it is bad, most of it is very bad. We’re talking about probably tens of thousands of works, I don’t know that you can come to a more specific conclusion.
I rarely think about it at all, until the authors have learned enough of the craft to be considered professionals.
I am not (in general) a huge fan of stories set in someone else’s creation. Make up your own damn background and characters!
Unless it’s Sherlock. You can tell as many variations of Sherlockian stories as you like.
To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, (when referring to Sherlockian fanfic): “Remember, please, always to call it pastiche!.” 
I like good fanfic in the fandoms I enjoy (particularly Doctor Who) but I’ve pretty much given up on finding it, because you have to wade though so much garbage to get to the good stuff that it’s not worth it. No offense to every starry-eyed thirteen-year-old girl out there, but…your stuff isn’t good. Get some practice and come back in five years. Then we’ll talk.
I also am not a fan of “shipping,” which seems to be the predominant activity in fan fiction (at least in the fandoms I like–DW, Harry Potter, House, original Sherlock Holmes (not the Cumberbatch series–the Doyle books)).
At its best, fanfic can provide readers with the kinds of stories they enjoy reading (because if you like something and the fandom is popular enough, it’s almost certain that there’s something out there–quality notwithstanding–that will scratch your fannish itch). On the rare occasions that I seek it out, that’s why I do it.
I generally dislilke it, and don’t see the appeal. Even the much-lauded “Harry Potter And The Methods of Rationality” was mostly meh for me. The only fanfiction I can tolerate is some Star Wars vs Star Trek fic (as long as they acknowledge the vast superiority of the Star Destroyer over the Enterprise, of course) Which is a bit odd, because I love fanart and cosplay in most every fandom I partake in.
That, and fanfic’s the meta-genre gave us that “50 Shades Of Grey” dreck, so it has much to answer for.
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I liked it, but what got me to stop somewhere around part 60 was that I didn’t know any of the secondary characters because I’d never read the original novels, hence the constant introduction of unfamiliar (to me) names without any background details. Reading, reading, reading… who the fuck is Angela Featherhammer…?
Anyway, I went through my own fanfic phase about 15 years ago. I did my best to write NextGen and DS9 stories that explored concepts from the episodes (such that were often plot devices in a single story and then completely forgotten afterward) without blatantly contradicting anything in canon.
I write it. It’s a nice hobby and it helps me sharpen up my writing for more legit venues.
Most of what’s out there is horrible dreck, but there are plenty of gems.
I like fan fiction, some stories are fun and cute and some are written by some sicko perverts.
Back in my earlier days, I would just read fan-fiction for the smut and sex scenes, in some sick way I learned about the “basics” of sex.
They are getting practice.
I don’t read it much anymore, mostly because I don’t follow many TV shows these days, but back when I was a teen/early 20s, my god did fan fiction scratch an itch. I read it, I wrote it, I even met a very close friend through it. I have a binder of, oh, 25 fan fictions from various fandoms. Some I’m kinda proud of. Most, however…every so often, I consider throwing the whole thing out, but can’t bring myself to do it. If I ever die suddenly, though, I’ll be less embarrassed about the vibrator and lube in the closet than that binder.
As for how I discovered it, I think it was back in 1997, when I first started getting online. Googled “The X Files,” found a Geo site, and the rest is history.
I don’t think of it as something that I’d read for entertainment. I think of it as something that other people write for entertainment.
Grin! Tell it, Solar Pons!
It’s a relatively good form of “apprenticeship” for new writers. It’s writing with training wheels.
At some point, many fanfic writers suddenly figure it out. “I change ‘Kirk’ to ‘Joyce’ and ‘Spock’ to ‘Appix’ and ‘The Enterprise’ to ‘The Fair Phyllis’ and – I’m suddenly a creator!”
(You know the “Geek Hierarchy Chart?” I occupy every single level on that chart!)
What is the point of the almost offensively sexual type of fanfic? There almost seems to be a perverse rule 34 thing in fanfic writers that I have never understood, it almost seems like they are trying to “deface” the original work somehow.
*I remember running across a sex fanfic that paired an elderly man and a prepubescent girl characters, in the original work they had a few lines of non-sexual interaction. This author almost seemed to be trying to find the most offensive pairing they could.
This. I’ve been on something of a fanfic-reading kick for a while (there’s a lot of it on another forum I frequent), and while some of it is around as good as officially published fiction, most of it is just so-so or awful.
The only fan fiction I ever read that didn’t suck was “Soldier of Spira.” The quality did start dropping off in the last few chapters, though, and the author never finished the story. Still, he knew how to write the characters and his expansions on the FF-X story were actually improvements for the most part.
I like the IDEA of fanfic, but I’ve read very little of it, and don’t have much interest in doing so. Still, I’m all for people getting creative with their favorite characters and shows. Let 'em rock out, I say! The criticism that most fanfic is awful does not hold much water to me: most officially published work is uninteresting to me, however well polished. Then I again,I lurves me some bad writing.
I’ve read a few fanfics. As noted, most of it is pretty bad writing, but then, these are amateurs. I think it can be an entertaining hobby for many people, and a few of them actually progress from “terrible amateur” to polished, professional author via that route.
There are one or two I really enjoyed, but beyond that I don’t have much interest in it either as writer or reader.
I rather enjoy it. I even write some, when I can.
Sturgeon’s Law is in effect, sure, just like everything else.
As for the “playing in someone else’s universe” angle, I don’t really see it as being that much of a new thing. It’s not like every one of our myths, legends, and folktales was each written by one guy in a cave, springing forth fully formed, like Pallas, and passed down perfect and unchanging through the ages.
Really, though, I think some stories just want to be told—for some deep meaning, for the exploration of a “what if,” or even just for plain fun—and they don’t really care where they end up coming from.
The truly bad stuff is fun sometimes. My problem with fanfic is that so much of it doesn’t even reach the level of “entertainingly bad”–it’s more like listening to a three-year-old tell a story: “And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this–oh, wait! I forgot about this, and then…” – except it’s usually got bad sex in it too.
Combine that with the generally atrocious mechanics (I will sooner forgive a baddish story with excellent mechanics than a goodish one with poor ones–I can’t slog through bad mechanics) and it usually just isn’t worth the effort for me to hunt through all the crap to get to the good stuff.
That said, one of the best fanfics I’ve ever read was called “Kid Dynamo.” It was written sometime in the '90s (pre-web, even) and was about the Marvel superhero team The New Mutants during the time when Magneto was headmaster. Even after all these years I still remember it. That’s how you do fanfic. “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” is excellent too, but just too damn long. And the “James Potter” series is excellent if you like your Harry Potter fanfic relatively canonical and covering the next generation of Hogwarts students.
It’s interesting how blurry some of the lines are getting these days. Sure, many folks consider fanfiction to be, as put above, apprenticeship writing because you don’t make up the backstory and characters yourself (though the plots are definitely original), but would something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies have been so popular, let alone published, 20 years ago? I’m not certain. Or better example: what about that Brady Bunch story in the New Yorker mentioned in another thread?