Roald Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf is, certainly, by no means unique. Without the already existent idea of Little Red Riding Hood, the tropes that Dahl leans upon for humour—Little Red Riding Hood’s familiar listing of what big this that or the other thing for instance—wouldn’t have nearly as much humour. The subversion of the expected lends the work its punch, with the remaking of Little Red Riding Hood into Miss Riding Hood. At the same time, beyond the expected tropes and borrowed plotline, Dahl’s authorship, sense of rhythm and rhyme, are something that many authors would struggle with and give the story a unique feel—the flickering eye, drawn pistol, and lovely furry wolfskin coat.

Clearly it’s a work, distinct in its own way and possessing artistic merit in its own right, but at the same time such a work is heavily reliant on the pre-existing narrative of Little Red Riding Hood. In a sense, Roald Dahl’s version of Little Red Riding Hood is essentially just fan fiction of the ‘original’—in so far as anybody knows the original—tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

Then, when considering authorship, and what works can and should be critically and academically studied, how far off is fan fiction, in the modern context, from that? Fairy tales were once considered not worthy of applied academic rigour—now it’s a sizable field in its own right. Fan studies is currently more the study of the culture of ‘fandom,’ but I’d hope one day it incorporates literary examinations of works of fan fiction as literary works in their own right, similar to what happened with fairy tales.

All in all though, the idea of authorship, of borrowed plotlines and reused tropes is one that’s interesting to me.

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.