I love reading good stuff,not giving much importance to the genre.It happens from time to time that I stumble upon a decent fanfic that's classy,not trashy with a decent plot,vocabulary and perfectly portrayed characters that are not too far fetched from their real selves.But these kind of discoveries happen only once in a while,large chunk of fanfics are so pathetic that I become astonished as how people manage to take such dump out of their sane minds.Seriously.

I think fanfiction can be great. The good fics give you a way to either continue on or expand upon your favorite books/movies/video games. You can usually tell if it's going to be trash within the first paragraph and can just back-click. Of course, there's a LOT of back clicking, but when you *do* find a good fanfic, it's rewarding.

Not that I've read that many (so I don't have the best reference pool to draw from here), but it seems to me that the most successful examples tend to be set in the same world with the same themes, but few if any of the same characters. Characters that already exist in a franchise tend to be too well defined within the official story, so you're either stuck with kind of a nothing story if you try to stay true to it, or else have to change so much that they're not really the same character anymore. In contrast, sticking with the same setting gives you a lot of what makes a franchise interesting to use, but also leaves the story much more open to you. To use A Song of Ice and Fire as an example, you'd have a hard time writing good fanfiction that focused on anything that's happened to Daenerys since she left Pentos, or anything that's happened to Jon since he left Winterfell (or maybe ever, depending on how much more backstory GRRM eventually gives him), but you could easily write a story set a couple hundred years earlier... Maybe a character study on a Stark who went to the Wall when it was still a noble calling, expecting to save the realm, only to see nothing but boredom and cold- could lead to interesting questions on the nature of duty or something like that... Same settings, same themes, different characters.

Fan-fiction is something that has gotten a bad rep due to copious amounts of bad writers, bad writing, and/or fetish material. Derivative works are nothing new and they are not necessarily bad. The internet just makes for it to be more accessible. In fact, would you believe a work of fan-fiction made Time's 100 best English-language novels list? "Wide Sargasso Sea" serves as a prequel and backstory for a side-character from "Jane Eyre" but it stands on its own, exploring themes of race and colonialism. (I had to read it in a college literature class.) Yes, it's a long ways away from some awful story about Shrek and Sonic the Hedgehog having sex in Middle Earth and having each other's babies or a "Mary Sue" character who is a blatantly an author self-insert who is perfect in every possible way. But it can serve as an example that fan-fiction itself is not entirely a bad idea.

No literary work is completely isolated. Whether it is character types, plot devices, or narrative structure, no story exists purely in a vacuum. As budwinys said, it can expand existing literary universes in good and interesting ways.

Yay.
Some fanfiction can be written better than the tv/book/game series it was based on. Yes, there's quite a bit of NSFW fanfics, but I'm sure there's something that can filter that out for people who'd rather not see it.

I've never really tried to read any properly. I find people who are obsessed with their "fandom" largely off-putting, so this kinda falls into that category. I can see why people enjoy them though.


Side note, but I read a "fanfic" about Jesus and Hitler once. That was weird...

The best fanfic that I've seen recently is the game Life Is Strange: Before the Storm.
Because the actual game is so nearly just a vehicle for the story, I claim it's fair to treat it as a story rather than as a game.
And in that case, the kind of story that it is, is fanfic.
In interviews, the second game's developers & artists firmly identify as fans of the first (Life is Strange, done by a different studio),
and use words like "tribute" and "homage", such as musicians use when uploading their covers of LiS music to YouTube.
And lastly, it reads like fanfic in that some of it is overdone & tries too hard.

Scifi would be ok but anything historical puts me off entirely, especially sequels to Pride and Prejudice or any other historical novel. The complete lack of historical knowhow is astonishing. I once read a fanfic story about Georgette Heyer's Devil's cub which wrote about hiring gyneocologists!

I used to love fanfiction. Especially fanfiction.net. Used to write my own stories on there (for multiple things). Haven't been on there in a long time. If I do, it's just to read.

They’re okay

It's ok but I really don't like shipping for incompatible characters and incompatible orientations. Don't get me started on X-Readers, those are so far off-canon it's not even funny. Just IMO, if they are a side story or missing pieces it's ok. Bottom line, people all have their own opinions, it's art after all.

I used to write fanfiction and may go back some day. If you have halfway decent writing skills (or pick a popular pairing) it can be very rewarding. I did a lot of beta reading and made friends in the fanfic world I've met in rl and am still in touch with. As for reading it, the quality varies from professional level to incomprehensible nonsense but you can usually tell within a chapter if not a few sentences. IMO the best stories are about a fandom's main characters and part of the challenge is to keep them in character, which doesn't preclude convincingly putting them through experiences that change them. Another big challenge is constructing a story with an interesting idea and a beginning, middle, and end - harder than it sounds. I learned a lot about writing fiction in an effort to improve so it was a great experience.

TLDR: Fanfiction Yay.

Yay for fanfiction.
It can be difficult to find good ones to read though. People have such different shippings, preferred AUs and everything. Writing it is pretty cool, it's a chance to not have to world-build or create characters and just write.

I have to agree with that!

Right. I would struggle with knowing when to start character growth and when to stop development. I just went with mixing the two. I would add my own characters often time. In 2013 I took a comic class at my Uni to graduate with, and we made comics about our lives. So I wound up doing this a lot since the easiest person to draw is yourself.

Awful spelling is my only turn off with fanfiction. I might be interested in a story only to see it has a load of spelling and grammar mistakes then my enthusiasm dies.

Definitely yay one just has to find the right ones. Just like with books.