You may or may not know what I'm talking about with the title there.
To start, some of you may have read my ode to fanfiction sometime back, in which I espoused the joys and even intimated the necessities of the craft. Fanfiction is in my heart and soul and there's pretty much literally no downside; it allows fans of a work to express their love for it, critique its flaws, play around in the sandbox that was left to them, and even advertises the original work--there's more than one story/webcomic/movie I've read/watched/consumed primarily because my friends were writing fanfiction about it.
Of course, fanfiction, like all fiction, has its downsides, like the dreaded (or maybe overblown?) Mary Sue character that wrankles everyone's hides, or the inevitable kinky stories that come about, inspiring nosebleeds and squick in roughly equal measure. But perhaps most divisive, and extremely unique to the fanfiction genre (medium?) are ReaderX stories.
These are stories that are typically told in the second person (the "you" form), and insert the reader as a character into the world of the story (or often an AU), as a potential love interest or current paramour to one or more of the characters within. Occasionally these stories are told in a platonic sense, the Reader just hanging out with their best buds or going on an adventure, but it's usually romantic and often sexual.
These types of stories take Mary Sue to the next level--Mega Sue perhaps? MarySuetron? Sailor Maryoon?--and don't even try to disguise the self-insert into the narrative; it is blatantly and purposefully an adventure of wish-fulfillment in romance land, often poorly written and more than a little clunky in execution. This is largely because these types of stories are usually written by young (usually teen or preteen), inexperienced writers still trying to get a feel for how to write a story in general. To compound the issue, that very phenomena creates an echo chamber of young, inexperienced writers with very few solid examples of how to pull off certain techniques which are in actuality quite advanced--the very idea of a ReaderX, while an old tradition, is still experimental, seldom done, and more extremely seldom done well. How often have you seen someone write well just in the second person?
R.L. Stine, Andrew Hussie, and a few fanfiction writers are the only examples I can think of. Then you add an attempt to actually make it about the audience member sitting at home--not just a character which the audience member assumes the shape of in the telling--and it becomes a thousand times more complex.
But many are still enjoyable despite the clunkiness, and some are even excellent in quality! Like any other genre of fiction, there's a whole spectrum of quality.
And yet, regardless of the quality of any individual piece, the ReaderX is a genre which is extremely polarizing; it seems like you either love it (in which case you consume and produce it voraciously) or you absolutely detest it, in which case you either distance yourself from it or make it part of your life's work to shit on it.
To be clear, there are a lot of very valid reasons for people to hate the genre; some people don't care for second person, some people can't separate certain conventions of the genre from the potential that lies beneath, some people just don't care for it, and that's fine. I'm not writing this to insist that everyone love ReaderX stories; what I am doing is entreating you to listen, open your mind, and allow me to make my case in their defense--and thereby, in the defense of those who write and read ReaderX.
There's this thing that's very prevalent in the fanfiction community in which people are unable (or unwilling) to separate a fictional work from its author, so when something bothers someone they take it out on the person who wrote the piece. Sometimes this is rooted in validity--when an author writes something that very clearly promotes queerphobia, misogyny, or racism, for instance, the desire to correct them stems from a good place, and is usually the right thing to do.
But often the issue isn't with the author at all--the reader just doesn't like the genre of the fic, or the way it's written, or something about it squicks them, and instead of just saying, "I don't like this" or trying to give the author constructive criticism, they take it out on the author for having the audacity to write something so atrocious, how dare they, and they lump anyone and everyone who writes in that genre into this category of HORRIBLE BAD EVIL and toss them in the public fires of shame.
Again, there's nothing wrong with not liking something! But publicly shaming an entire group of people for the things they like to read and write isn't a solution to the problem; the solution is to not look that thing up. Put it on Tumblr Blacklist, read the tags or summary before you dive in, and avoid it if you know you don't like it; don't beat kids up for liking something. Because that's what you're doing, in this specific instance; beating up kids.
ReaderX fics are silly, self-indulgent, are often poorly written, contain too little substance, and can on occasion develop their own cultish subfollowings that are breeding grounds for toxicity (like any and every work of literature that has ever existed), and they're difficult at times to take seriously. but they aren't meant to be taken seriously!
In my experience, ReaderX fics are written and read by preteen and teenage girls that are absorbed in a fictional work to the exclusion of social lives they probably didn't have to begin with. They have crushes on the fictional characters in a given work--as many people of all ages, sexes, and sexualities do--and they want to explore that attraction in the only place possible; fiction. There's no chance that they'll ever meet these characters in real life, let alone have a relationship with them, and they know that. They're not deluding themselves into thinking that the laws of reality will bend so they can smooch APH Germany or go superhero hunting with Megamind.
The kids who wind up deeply entrenched in ReaderX culture are often depressed and isolated. They're the type of person who has always retreated to fiction because the real world didn't want them, and all they want is to be wanted; they need that outlet, those twenty minutes of smiling as they pretend that this person they've attached themselves to cares about them. It's no different from pretending that you're your favorite character as you read a book, except the story in question was specifically written with that in mind.
To kids like this, ReaderX stories can be very therapeutic. It's like daydreaming on paper, but sharing that daydream in such a way that others can experience it too, exposing themselves to daydream scenarios that they never would have thought up by themselves while simultaneously allowing themselves to step outside their own heads.
As one of those kids myself, ReaderX stories helped me survive depression. It definitely wasn't the prevailing reason that I lived through it, but it helped; in the seven and a half years during which my depression was at its worst, I probably put in enough hours reading ReaderXes to fill up at least a month. ReaderXes allowed me to leap into the head of a blank template that had friends that loved her and a romantic interest that valued her, and because it didn't just happen in my head, like a daydream, I wasn't beholden to all the things my brain insisted were Cold Hard Fact--the "you're unloveable"s, the "this is stupid"s, the "everyone hates you"s that often made daydreams unsustainable and entirely unsatisfying.
Even if a kid isn't depressed and has no mental health issues, if they're just a perfectly healthy child with an active imagination and they want to indulge themselves in a fluffy adventure of which they're the central figure, so what? It's as healthy as daydreaming, and more productive, since any writing at all is practice in story-telling and reading can teach a great many things (even if it's just what not to do).
Actually, it may be healthier than daydreaming, which has been linked to Alzheimer's; daydreaming can cause false memory paths to be created which go nowhere--they trail off and wither, taking up space in the brain. At least if it's written down, it has a basis in the concrete world, and when read it's neurologically no different from reading a short story.
Reading and writing ReaderXes is really no different from playing pretend as a child and trying to save the princess from the tower, though admittedly it is a less physically active pursuit.
Are ReaderXes the pinnacle of literature? Hell no! But there's nothing wrong with them, and I think it's time we stopped acting like there was. More to the point, it's time we stopped acting like there's something wrong with reading or writing them. When you attack someone for reading/writing something you don't like, you're telling them that it's not all right to like that thing, and in my experience the kids who revel in self-indulgent literature are the ones who are most likely to believe you when you badmouth them. Saying they're shitty isn't revealing new information, you're just reinforcing what they already believe about themselves, and shoving them deeper into the very mindset that made many of them flee to self-inserts in the first place.
I mean for Christ's sakes, just let kids be kids! The act of enjoying a story about themselves isn't hurting you, or anyone else for that matter. You liked ridiculous stuff when you were that age, too, and no matter how far you try to run, you'll never be able to escape that; nor should you. Interest in things that seem silly or unproductive is nothing to be ashamed of; we're all human, and we all like to indulge ourselves from time to time.
So next time you're thinking about tearing someone down for reading or writing ReaderX fanfiction, type "Reader/[your favorite character]" into AO3 and see if you still hate them when you're done.
Or better yet, just don't. Keep your complaints to the fics themselves if you have to, and away from the people who write them. Otherwise you might have to put up with me *cracks knuckles* Tourette's Girl, protector of outcast children everywhere!
(But seriously guys, being mean to kids isn't cool and it doesn't make you "edgy" or anti-establishment; it just makes you a bully. Grow up. Learn to separate the wrongs of an author from flaws in their artwork.)
