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[sakura_no_miko]

The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fanfic and the Modern World

Back to elementary school, where bit by bit, the number of girls who admitted to making up their own stories also dropped off. The rest of us, well. We learned that “I had an adventure…” made people laugh at you. We stopped writing about ourselves and started writing avatars, characters who could represent us in the stories without quite being us.

Only writing avatars also got us laughed at when people found out about it, got us accused of Mary Sue self-insert wish-fulfillment bullshit, as if half the stories on the shelves weren’t exactly that for those lucky few who matched The Default. We stopped making up original female characters. Many of us stopped making up characters at all.

If we used only existing characters as our avatars, we didn’t get laughed at as much. If we used only existing male characters—characters we had all been trained to view as The Default, capable of anything, not just of being The Sidekick or The Girl—well. Suddenly we could write ANYTHING WE WANTED. Suddenly we were GODS OF THE FICTIONAL WORLD, and we could finally start telling the stories the shows and books didn’t want to give us. Our stories were finally judged based on what they were, and not what people thought they knew about us, and them.

This is a good read.