- The Daily Nebraskan looked at how fanfiction gives the audience control. “To Busskohl, writing fanfiction is somewhat like role-playing.’Sometimes I just want to explore what a character would do if put in a situation they didn’t have to deal with in the original…Nickie Bonar, a 40-year-old small business owner from Omaha, has been writing fanfiction with her 15-year-old daughter, Ari, for years. ‘(Fanfiction) is a great way to develop as a writer before going out into the world,’ said Ari…’The ‘plot bunnies’ don’t leave you alone until you write. It’s the feeling of people wanting to read your stories. The fans make or break the writer.'”
- The Boston Globe looked at the importance of what-ifs. “Fanfic writers are too fervent and independent to be passive viewers or readers; they’re inspired to be creative by the visions of Stephen King, Shonda Rhimes, Julian Fellowes, Rowling (whose books are the most fan-fictioned of all), and countless other creators. They find joy in expanding plots only hinted at, joining together characters from different sources, and sometimes, correcting what they see as flaws or oversights in a story they otherwise value — it’s all a kind of folk art.”
- At The Verge, Adi Robertson wrote about trollfic. “If fan fiction is about negotiating where a canonical story ends and your original fiction begins, trollfic moves outward: at what point can you safely place a line around something and say ‘that’s the author’ or ‘that’s the text’? Narrators address the audience not to to break the fourth wall, but because they just aren’t capable of writing a scene without an external reference point…More than anything, trollfic forces the artificiality of what we write to the forefront.”
- Turning to the best, Juli Monroe at Teleread discusses How to Find Great Fanfiction, With Little Hassle. “Single fandom archives are often tricky to download from, but they often have the best stories. A Teaspoon and an Open Mind (Doctor Who/Torchwood archive) is an excellent example. There’s no way to directly download, but the overall quality of stories is high enough to make the effort worthwhile.”
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