“What is the purpose of literature?” asked my new acquaintance, a student of engineering. Never has there been a piece of text written without social, cultural, and/or political purpose. Shakespeare wrote in a time of monarchs, and so some of his plays presented answers to the problems of the monarchy: What does it mean to be a legitimate heir? Is it better or worse to be deceitful and cunning? How does the struggle of holding power restrain and get rid of the self?

This holds true throughout literary history. American literature has always had the presence of African American writers, often challenging one aspect or another of the ways in which oppression lingers. Confucius, a chinese philosopher who supported state order based on familial order, wrote in the late Warring States, a time where China was a politically fractured, unstable region, challenging the disorder with his order. So what of the now?

In particular, where does fan fiction lie in this literary history. Though we live in a time of greater literacy, where most in first world countries and read and write, and many of those can become great authors, it still becomes a similar state to that of yesteryears, where only elite few become writers and poets. How does fan fiction navigate a world set by the upper bounds of writing?

For many the answer to this problem is imitation. Fan fiction has been a mode of transferring ideas between different works, and even different mediums of media. Though this was once the method of training scribes and scholars and nobles to write in medieval and Renaissance Europe, modern writing must navigate the modern world, where originality is prefered to imitation, where the new astonishes better than the old, and where copies are knockoffs of the original.

My challenge is projection. Projection of contemporary life onto contemporary fictional worlds. Very specifically, projection of contemporary life onto the world of Equestria. It is already common in the fandom to reimagine the princesses as secretly incompetent, insane, or abusive of power, headcanons that are easily molded to the political climate in America. This is an example of drawing parallels while subtly offering a larger question: what are the consequences of a democratic government in a culture highly interested in popularity and celebrities, to the point that people in power are treated the same? You should not, of course, copy this exact example, but find something similar.

Through various techniques of comparison, which I will go over in my next presentation (whenever I get to it), a fanfic writer enters the literary world, using fiction to mirror reality, in a world where its lies convey our truths.

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I don't think it's true that only the elite few become writers. Or rather, it's not true strictly in the context of literature. The ecosystem of literature in the current world coexists with many others, and sometimes those other ecosystems have a huge impact on a writer's standing in the literature ecosystem. For example, people that are well-connected, even if they're not the best writers, have an advantage in becoming a writer by profession.

Fan fiction is just another ecosystem in this broader context, but the fan fiction ecosystem has properties that the broader literature ecosystem does not. Regarding just the successful authors in both ecosystems, circumstances that would make an author of broader literature successful tend not to help a fan fiction author become successful. This is in part because the fan fiction ecosystem is far less developed and networked, and so networking is less effective here. Being less developed also means that the means of advertisement and distribution are less effective, and so writers of fan fiction have to depend more on word-of-mouth to have their writing known, which inherently makes a writer's skill as a writer (as opposed to skill as an advertiser) relatively more valuable in the fan fiction ecosystem than in the broader literature ecosystem.

The main thing pushing writers in the literature ecosystem to become better is the larger competition pool, though operating in a broader context inherently means they have more tools available to them to compete in ways other than in writing talent.

Your larger point on the clash between canon and relevance is pretty interesting, though I wish you had expanded on it a bit more. I look forward to your next post.