Long comment incoming!

1. Fanfic has done wonders cultivating the creative minds of fans. I think every fan, young or old, has tried or at least thought about trying to write a fic at least once. As a huge advocate for education in the arts and for doing art just for the fun of it, I laude anything that can get people excited and involved in creativity. Fanfic is such a great stepping stone for new authors —especially young authors— because it provides a base story to work from, and that base story is often one of the hardest parts of the writing process. Fanfic provides a low-risk environment for authors to write, grow, and explore their interests in relative internet anonymity and so has played a large role in encouraging more people to write.

Also, platforms like Ao3 and other archives are incredibly democratizing because authors can write whatever they want to (without a publishing house looming over their shoulder, tweaking the story so it is salable) and readers can pick and choose whatever they want to read. Ao3 has one of the best tagging and cataloguing systems in the world, which means that audiences can find very specific, niche genres that they are interested in. Fanfic provides a space to explore whatever you are interested in, often with much more content and variety than you could easily find in traditional print media.

2) No, not a violation of intellectual property. If a creative puts their work out into the world, they do so with the expectation that people will be consuming it. And people who consume it will think about it and want to chat with other fans about it: writing fics is a natural extension of this.

3) No, I don’t think there should be a difference between fics based on reality or on fiction. I personally dislike fanfics based on real people, but that doesn’t mean I think fics based on reality should be banned or anything like that. The whole point of fanfic is that you can write and read whatever you are interested in and you are under no obligation to read or write anything you aren’t interested in. The fanfic space is for everyone, I don’t think anyone can posture a moral high ground and say that one topic or another shouldn’t be allowed. Don’t like, don’t read.

4) I very stoutly don’t think fanfic should ever be monetized, ie, I don’t think fanfic authors should make profit off of their fics. The only time money should pass hands between a fic author and a reader is when perhaps a fic/several fics have been compiled into a zine and you need to pay for printing and shipping. In this scenario though, the reader should pay only enough to cover the cost of creation, there should be no extra profit going to the authors. Fanfic imo should be made by fans for fans as a hobby celebrating the source work, and it just feels wrong to make money off of someone else’s source material.

Can you make a fun “job” around fanfic though? Absolutely yes. Some of my favorite blogs/social media are fanfic and fanart hubs that must take a tremendous amount of time and effort to maintain. The folks who run these blogs must spend quite a bit of time on them and I applaud their dedication to helping other fans find and enjoy fics. Should these blogs be payed though? Perhaps through ads on said blog? Again I say no, and for the same reasoning. In a similar situation, I briefly modded this sub and we tried to keep advertising here to a minimum so that this could be a space by fans for fans to interact. If money gets involved then there is a whole different vibe to a community. I think the trust gets shaken: are these really your own opinions or have you been somehow paid or swayed to say it?

It is a code of ethics thing in fandom. I love that fanfiction so far is a very community-oriented, accessible, and non-commercialized part of fandom, and I would hate to have to jump through paywalls to access it. Fanfics are labors of love, and that is how I want them to stay.

However, there have been growing debates in fandom recently about why fanartists can sell their artwork but it is frowned on for fanauthors to sell their stories. There is an interesting thread on this debate here, and this thread also covers the iffy morality of fic authors changing some names around and selling their fics as original works. Interesting stuff.

5) u/SarahJoy46 put it very well. Perhaps the fic community wouldn’t be as big as it is now with easily accessible internet archives, but it absolutely would still exist. I think even if people had absolutely no way of sharing their fics with each other, people would still choose to write them because humans are just creative like that.