I’ve always loved to read, whether it’s in-flight airline safety cards to the Sherlock Holmes collection I accidentally left onboard the airplane. Works of classical literature, like The Count of Monte Cristo sit in my room alongside a vast array of Garfield comic books. Reading, no matter what it is, has always been a passion of mine. As a child, I often went too and from the library, stacks of books in my backpack. But, with the advent of the internet–or, more so my gaining access to it via a Kindle (as I’m certainly not old enough to have lived in a time without the World Wide Web and the like)–I discovered something that has remained, to me, special.

In certain recesses of the internet, there is a sea of stories. Stories that are unpolished, unprofessional, flawed in many ways. Despite that, there’s a charm to the amateur; an appeal to the authors whose work is inspired so directly by the work of others. Such is the nature of fan fiction. A genre, community, way of interacting with stories, and many more things besides that I have loved ever since I first discovered it. Fan fiction is the first thing I seriously wrote stories for, though looking back on my old work is quite painful, to say the least. To this day, I still write fan fiction in my free time (and often in my not free time), and still consider it my favorite type of literature.

I still remember how I first stumbled across fan fiction, using the clunky internet search functionality of a third generation Kindle Keyboard, when I was about ten or eleven.

I had finished catching up to the latest chapter of Toaru Majutsu no Index on Baka-Tsuki, a Japanese light novel (Basically a serialized novel, something that has fallen out of style in the west, especially when compared to countries like Korea, China, and Japan.), and wanted more of the world. The characters. Their stories. And so I found Fanfiction.net. And on it, Mr. Question Mark’s A Certain Unknown Level 0.

It was truly one of the best things I’ve ever read. Not from a literary perspective–the language was above average, but nothing special. It didn’t stir the soul with profound musings upon the human condition or anything like that. The word choice was commonplace, and fairly simplistic. But the way it depicted characters that I was familiar with, and a world which I had grown to adore, was so close to the original that I couldn’t help but love it. I read more fan fiction and grew more and more intrigued by the lawless lands of fan fiction. Familiar stories, told in very, very unfamiliar ways. Characters fleshed out beyond what they were in canon, twisted into parodies of themselves, or placed under the microscope of character studies that gave perspectives not seen in canon.

Of course, all of that is mixed in with an ocean of garbage. Poor spelling skills, bad narrative decisions, complete inconsistencies built upon headcanon, stories left unfinished and abandoned. Still, there’s a reason why every TvTropes page for fan fiction recommendations reminds you that the remaining 10% of fan fiction is worth reading, by which it means that the other 90% is crap–a comedic reference to Sturgeon’s Law.

But ignore that. Ignore the bad writing, bad stories, copy-pasted tropes, and over-reliance on in-jokes. Consider reading some fan fiction once in a while. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find the 10% that’s actually worth it. The 10% of fan fiction that, to me, counts as real literature.