When talking about fan fiction, personally I feel like this generation of readers has the genre down pat. Websites like Wattpad, Archive Of Our Own, Fanfiction.net help with easy access and even easier making of our own creation.
Now, I’ve been around the block of fan fiction for a good few years. Switched up the different fan bases on which I spent my nights under the covers with. My phone plastered to my face after devouring chapter after chapter. Wattpad has been my weapon of choice this entire time, simply because it’s an app on your phone.
The amount of 1D content Wattpad has is absolutely insane. As a thirteen year old, I was all over it. Harry Styles the mob boss, Niall Horan the badass pro boxer, Louis Tomlinson the pirate king, Liam Payne the bad boy next door, Zayn Malik the runaway prisoner. Any type of topic or genre that you could think of, somebody probably wrote about the 1D boys. The years that the boys were still in the band, stories were popping up everyday.
The positives of writing fan fiction was that you were adding to the fan base in your own way, and others could see it and also enjoy it. There are so many positives of creating fan fiction which is both a genre and an art. But sometimes the negatives out weighed the positives. You could see me on the Harry Potter side, the BTS side, the Newsies side, but most importantly I was living life on the One Direction side. I was living that not sleeping on school nights life. I was living that Larry Stylinson life.
Why is this such a negative thing? Why does the shipping of real life public figures like 1D boys such a damaging thing to the members themselves? It’s the difference in writing about real life people, and characters in a book. Harry Potter characters aren’t real people. Shipping Draco and Hermione isn’t effecting their day to day lives and relationship with each other. In terms of real life people? Pushing a fake relationship on two people without their consent is border line harassment and no doubt in my mind, fetishization.
The negatives of writing fan fiction and even contributing by reading it is the shipping between band members. We the fan base love when the members of any band shows love and affection to their fellow band members. The hugs after an award win, the backstage pictures we see of them chillin, the conversations being had up on stage with screaming fans everywhere. The most famous of ships in the 1D fanbase was Larry Stylinson. It was so popular that the show Euphoria had one of its characters writing Larry Stylinson smut. The ship was a well known fact and Directioners (the fans bases name) didn’t hide it at all.
The problem with all of this is that it extended past fan fiction. Into concert signs, interview questions, fan art, tattoos, and twitter wars. It started to become more than having a love for the boys, it became an obsession, a breach in privacy. On wether the boys could live a normal life without having to hear or read about it in life or while scrolling on twitter. That was the invasion of privacy that they must have dealt with for a good few years when the band was still together.
Overall, you can have love for a band, and have love for how the band members and their interactions with each other, this isn’t the issue, the issue is when you start to imagine the unrealistic. Fan fiction is just that, fiction for the fans. It should stay just for the fans, and not breach into how you try to effect their relationships in real life.
RED INC. 