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Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Fandom School (3rd period): Creating Fan Works To Deal With Feels

And now it's time for your favorite part of this blog (or so the statistics suggest), Fandom School! Today's topic is feels. To catch up on the subject, read my earlier posts, I Can't Even: The Heart of a Fangirl and How To Deal With Feels. In the second post, one of the strategies I suggested was creating something to deal with the feels, and I'd like to expand on that here.

There are many types of fan works fanwarriors may create, including fanfiction (click here to learn about different types of fanfiction and here to read my fanfiction), fanart, and fan music (click here to see my original fandom songs and fandom parodies of existing songs). One of the many reasons people create fan works is to deal with feels.

How can this help? Well, if a person is feeling sad about something that happened in their fandom (by "fandom", I mean the book/movie/TV show, not the people who like it), they may create a fanwork to unleash all that grief. Doing something with your feelings makes it much easier to deal with. A few examples of fan works I have made to deal with feels are a parody of "I Dreamed A Dream" (to deal with my sadness about Rose's separation from the Doctor), a parody of "Let It Go" (to deal with my feels about the Tenth Doctor's regeneration), and Lake of Lament (a poetry fic to deal with my feels about all the people Merlin has lost).

Also, a person may create a fan work to deviate from canon and change the outcome to what he/she wants it to be. There's a reason lots of people write Fix-It fics. In this way, the creator can pretend that the bad stuff never happened, or that it's better somehow, and this alleviates the feels.

When you create a fan work to deal with feels, it's much the same as any other fan work, except that you pour your heart and soul and the deepest depths of your anguish into it. You give it your all, hoping that it will make you feel better, and often it does.

Your fan work may give other people feels, but that's a risk you have to take. And by sharing your feels through fan work, you connect with others who understand your pain and appreciate the homage.

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