What Would We Do Without Our Fictional Characters?

[cuddyclothes]

I just said that to a fellow fan. And then I thought, what would we do without our fictional characters?

Which also made me think, what sort of comfort or coping mechanism do you get from your characters/pairings?

For myself I find writing fanfic (lately only in my head) helps me escape from the hellscape that is America these days. And reading fanfic about my favorite pairing is soothing in a way TV and other forms of reading aren't. It's like getting my emotions massaged.

How do other people feel?

Comments

[daryl_wor]

Sorry to respond to this a bit late. (Funnily enough I didn’t notice it earlier due to working on a fanfiction show.)

I didn’t really get too much into fanfiction for a long time, I was so invested in whatever original fiction ideas I wanted to achieve as well as the massive wealth of fiction over all, how to maintain my attention on it to enjoy it, and finding the ability to choose what really appealed to me. (Our world gets us so wiped out with distractions that clear thinking becomes very troubled!)

I rather lost my muse for regular fiction due to bad life-experience. Things got so terrible that most models of escapism didn’t bring much relief. As I finally escaped for real to a much less stressful environment I got caught up in an old show loosely based on classic novels. The format wasn’t based on resolution so I figured I wouldn’t care about any of the characters. Oops! I found myself deeply caring about the characters to the point I, at first whimsically, wanted to give them a format that would resolve. Also my sweetheart and I were cracking so many jokes while we watched a new creation would easily be very fun. (I kept writing many of our heckles in a notebook as we went forward, too.)

As with my original fictional works, it seems I am very often compelled to start with farce and wind up with passion. (A good friend tells me, “Hey, that beats getting it the other way around.”) Now I’ve rather invested my current life on that continuing work because I noticed that as the characters lives changed for the better so did mine. I’d been feeling regularly awful for about 8 years and it was quite quickly lifting. It’s pretty easy to devote oneself wholeheartedly to something when getting such marvellous results.

It took ages to find enough solid friends to share the work with in order to get some dialogue over the details, as I’ve reached creating it in audio. What I anticipated would happen did: They told me, “When I listen to this and enjoy it, I feel a lot better!” or “This is making feel really good!” I found I’d created a show based on problem-solving, a lot of self-discovery between characters and tons of laughs.

I usually didn’t share any of my writings with anyone. (And in the 1990’s, why bother spending all your money at Kinko’s only to have copies of your fiction sitting in someone’s closet?) Privacy was a big deal, but I wanted to share what came out in my fanfiction to find people of like-mind and enjoyment, both with who liked the original content it was based on as well as what I was putting together. (Unfortunately I discovered just how much of a “hellscape”, as you say, we have on our hands when I did share, but I thankfully I found a way back to sanity in recent years. ...knock on wood...)

So, I suppose I do it for fun, friendship, discovery, dialogue, therapy, and overall good health. All of those important principles many vow to prefer but get distracted away from.

Man! I really got into answering this! I’m glad to have found the question today. Thank you!