The Benefits of Fan Fiction

I feel so incredibly lucky to have been in the fan fiction community for the better part of my life. I'm currently sitting in my creative writing class and we're discussing "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We brought up some "strange" things that have happened in other short stories that we've covered, strange things like "necrophilia," "mental illness," and other slightly off-beat, but not off the reservation topics which are so often covered in fan fiction by fearless fangirls everywhere. Everyone else is discussing these things with trepidation and unease, but here I sit going "... so?"

I've been in the fan fiction community for so long now that I've seen, well, slightly less than everything. I'll put it this way: I've ventured into the kink memes, and you can't really escape the weirdness there; it's embrace it or GTFO. Which I did. Embrace it, I mean. I learned a lot about people from that, a knowledge which was built upon when I joined Tumblr and experienced a few choice users who reblog some really thought-provoking stuff.

So now that I'm sitting here in class, discussing necrophilia with my classmates completely comfortable while they shuffle their feet under the desks, I am incredibly glad that I've had this experience on the internet. I've become a stronger, more knowledgable person as a result, and I think that that may be one of my only strengths here in university, my abstract knowledge and ease of comprehension of these kinds of off-beat things that come up so frequently in the English department.