Picture the scene. It's 2014, and you're an awkward high school freshman with a heavy Tumblr habit. You're sitting in your room, adorned with decor that reveals your Harry Potter house and a dedication to the SuperWhoLock fandoms. A well-thumbed copy of The Fault In Our Stars lies on the bedside table. You're at your laptop, rolling up the sleeves of your unnecessarily large sweatshirt in anticipation. The next chapter of your favorite Destiel smutfic has been uploaded to Wattpad.
The 2010s were a halcyon era for fanfiction, one of the most popular forms of creative expression on the internet. As fandoms grew from niche communities to the menace of platforms like Tumblr and Twitter, plenty of social media users became exposed to things such as shipping, headcanons and AU whether they liked it or not. Whether it dealt with YouTube stars or the main characters of a beloved film, there was a highly imaginative, extremely online and mostly teenage audience ready to write behind the scenes chapters about them (that were only sometimes pornographic).
Thanks to both the variable quality of this content and the type of audience that enjoyed them, this type of writing has frequently been maligned over the years. The fact that the former fanfiction that most people are aware of is Fifty Shades Of Gray speaks volumes. However, it would seem that some are starting to see it in a new light — and have even deemed it acceptable to study.
This has been revealed by a recent viral video from @babyodaairpods, in which they stumbled upon a syllabus for a college class dedicated to all things fanfiction. Viewers were tickled by the fact that the genre had become something worth studying, and had no shortage of jokes to make about it. Who said that those huge college tuition fees were being wasted?
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