For a very long time in my project, I hadn’t felt like I was being heard, and I felt like I was working extremely hard at the wrong angle of what fiction, and fanfiction is. It had something to do with characters, it had something to do with stereotypes and what other people thought, but for several months I couldn’t piece it together.
At the end of September, my project took a heck of a large detour. The medium of my project consisted mainly of TEXT, and I missed VISUALS so much that I tried to wrestle my research question to let me put something visual to it, hence “cosplay”, because that related to fiction, and that contained visuals, and that somehow in my mind related to masks that I was always mindlessly drawing about.
I still remember the objects from my Box of Uncertainties from the very start of the course: the Patronizer, the Pin of Norse Myths, the Book of Narnia, and the Trial Frame that creates fiction through fragments of reality.
Inside the box are two basic things: Rules and Mythology.
When we write fiction in the world we are right now, we have to follow certain rules. The rules of copyright, and the rules of making it a real job. Fanfiction breaks those rules by simply allowing people to have a hobby.
Yesterday I had a conversation with Abani about my project, and I told her that I couldn’t help censoring myself when I faced the tutors (which, however I tried, could not get rid of the student perspective that they were a representation of authority) and how at the start of the course I thought this course wanted everybody to be activists of a certain area. But I wasn’t an activist. I’m just someone who likes stories and likes to tell stories, and I was having huge trouble writing a report about this because I’ll instinctively censor myself again.
Abani suggested that I write a report not to the tutors, but to a fictional character whom I really liked, and since they do not exist in this world, I wouldn’t have the anxiety of how they would think about me.
This led me to think and experiment. I picked Jinx from Arcane 1 and 2, went to ChatGPT, programmed it with my words to make it sound like Jinx, and started a conversation with her.
(Below is an intro to who Jinx is as a character: https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Jinx/Arcane)
After the convo with Jinx, I felt more relaxed in general and clearer in what I’m doing.
Talking to someone fictional can work wonders…this I haven’t thought about before.
This reminded me of a young adult series I really liked when I was about 16…Story Thieves by James Riley. https://jamesrileyauthor.com/story-thieves-series
Story Thieves is about the adventures of a half-fictional girl, who has the ability to use fictional books as portals to explore otherworldly places.