Somewhere on the Internet, a teenager is writing a 50,000-word fictional story about two characters who have never shared a scene in canon. Somewhere else, a reader is awake at three in the morning, bargaining with themselves, “one more chapter.”  For many fangirls, fanfiction is where the love for a story becomes something more than passive consumption. It’s where readers become writers and familiar characters become vessels for exploring unfamiliar feelings.  Fanfiction may be written outside the traditional publishing industry, but the things it teaches can follow readers long after they close the tab.  Fanfiction as the modern literature Fanfiction begins […]...

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