Page 5 - Fandom: Fic Writers, Vidders, Gamers, Artists, and Cosplayers

Anyone can write fanfiction! Some people write just for themselves,
while others share and discuss their work in busy online communities.

or altered adventures and relationships of characters and their
story worlds. Writers may send characters traveling through
time and space, to face dragons or to work in a coffee shop,
or imagine them falling in love, maybe in a crossover with
characters from another source. Fic might pair Sherlock
Holmes with Black Widow (Marvel Comics’s Natasha
Romanova), for instance, as well as Black Widow with Dr. Joan
Watson from Elementary, a TV show that changes the Sherlock
Holmes character Watson from a white British man to a
Chinese American woman. It may bend or swap characters’
genders, races, cultures, or other characteristics, such as a male
Wonder Woman or a South Asian Rapunzel. Fic also includes
nonfiction writing, such as an essay about vampire biology, an
exploration of the physics of the sonic screwdriver in Doctor
Who, or reviews of movies and commentary on games.
The genre is far from new: fanfic belongs to a long

THE ExTRAORDINARY WORLD OF FAN WRITERS 13