Writing fan-fiction saved my life.
One of the first things I loved about Canada as a child had been the endless number of tv channels.
Back home in Iran, though almost everyone had a satellite tucked somewhere on their roof, most channels were either in Turkish or German. The first summer we came to Vancouver back in the 90’s, I spent every morning cushioned on the bed of our rented apartment with a bowl of Cereal, and jumped from one channel to the other. It had been a glorious summer.
That same year, I fell deeply in love with Sailor Moon. My English had been frail and I wasn’t able to follow the storyline the whole time, but watching the five superhero best friends keeping the city of Tokyo safe, quickly became a favoured morning routine. I bought a huge poster of them posing like a bunch of fabulous teenagers that they were, and took it back with me to Iran. I often role played with my friends, who had been well aquatinted with the heroines. Not a day went by without me wishing that I could live in their world. The second summer we came back, I had already forgotten the name of the channel that showed my treasured anime. I flipped through every single channel for days during different hours; nothing. That had been my very first heart break.
Our satellite in Iran didn’t show Sailor Moon and for a while, I had to focus my love on to other manga/anime. Back then, RTL, a popular German channel, used to show a renowned anime by the name of Kodocha. The heroine, a teenage tv star, was not as amazing as Usagi Tsukino (aka, Sailor Moon), but she had a normal quality to her that made me resonate with her more.
My addiction to anime, most of all, shojo anime, followed me to high school and the first year of college. And then, I stopped watching it for good. I had just become a political science student and it seemed rather fitting to be burying myself into political essays and memorizing quotes by Voltaire and Kant. The mystical world of magic and opportunities suddenly seemed so colourless in comparison to the wisdom of John Locke and Thomas Hobbs. I still watched films by Studio Ghibli of course, but for years, the thought of Sailor Moon and her adventures was kept neatly folded on the back of my mind.
Then came summer of 2014. I had been a new bride and my husband and I had just started a new company. The stress of the new life and career had been suffocating. I had envisioned a life of a busy journalist for myself and suddenly, I found myself stuck behind a desk for hours and working on projects I had little knowledge about. I still tried to do freelance journalism work. I pitched ideas and wrote feature stories. But that specific thrill of journalistic curiosity that could only be satisfied through hours of research and interviews and late night note taking, had been wiped from my life.
On one lazy afternoon in the winter of 2015, my lost longing for Sailor Moon came back to me. My husband had been away on a business trip and I had rejected every single outing with friends. I knew something was not quite alright, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. On paper, I had an amazing life. I had a healthy marriage, my parents and my sister lived only fifteen minutes away, I had friends who loved me and I had a busy schedule at work. Still, I woke up every morning feeling as if I hadn’t done anything worthy in my life. That night, I spent hours looking at video clips of the classic Sailor Moon anime on YouTube and little by little, that intense feeling of adoration seeped through me once more. I watched the show as if it had been my very first time. I laughed at all the monologues I hadn’t understand as a child and was pleasantly surprised of the amount of life lessons that was hidden inside each episode.
On the second day of my newfound leisure time, an ad popped up on YouTube. “Unleash your imagination: Fanfiction.” I rarely ever click on ads, I mainly just get annoyed at them, but the tagline on that ad had been too attractive to ignore. I opened it and I entered a whole new world.
For those of you who might not be familiar with fanfiction.net: it’s an automated fan fiction archive site. It was founded on October of 1998 by Xin Li, an LA based computer programmer. Right now, the site has over 12 million registered users and it has stories in more than 40 languages. You can create stories based on fiction, movies, anime, classics and etc; you name it. There are certain authors and publishers who have expressed their disinterest in archive entries based on their work, and thank goodness, Naoko Takeuchi, Sailor Moon’s creator, is not one of them.
I dived deep into fan-fictions based on Sailor Moon; the allure had been instantaneous. I stayed up well into dawn and read stories by these amazing writers who hid behind their corky account names. I quickly discovered which writer’s stories is closer to my heart and whose plots made me stay rooted on my spot. I barely blinked while I read and when the first arrays of the sun spread on my carpet, I couldn’t believe that I had been flipping through the website for more than eight hours; I couldn’t remember the last time I had read something with that much vigour.
After a few months of being an active reader (and reviewer), I started to change the endings of each story for myself. Where the main character succeeded in defeating the evil, I would add a little glitch, a heartache, that would turn that success into a bitter sweet emotional turmoil. Where friendships failed to create a safe haven for the protagonist, I would give them the strength to stay on their own feet.
Slowly, the fan-fiction community became my safe haven. The day would look brighter when I’d receive an email telling me that my favourite writer had just posted a new story, or a new chapter. I sent messages of encouragement to the people I read. I gave them ideas, wanted to brainstorm on new plots and most importantly, I wanted to know where they got their inspiration. The answer was simple: “Everywhere.” As one of the writers messaged me once. “I’m always inspired to write fan-fiction, because I’m constantly in the state of imagining how the story would turn out if something else had happened.” She then urged me to write. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” I messaged her back. “Right now. Start right now. The idea you were just talking about, start putting it on paper right now. I’ll follow up with you in a few days.” And she wasn’t kidding.
For weeks, she messaged me and asked me about the story. She wanted to know if I had added more characters, or if I was thinking about recreating an old episode of the anime. Her excitement slowly uplifted my mood as well. Under her kind attentions, I began to write. At first, I simply recreated some parts of the original screen; nothing major. I didn’t have the confidence to create characters from scratch and throw them in there with some of the most beloved heroine and heroes in the manga history.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Write what you want. What’s the worst thing that can happen? No one would like the story? You don’t owe anyone anything. At least you’ve done something you love.” My husband said to me, and today, I’m so grateful that he did.
I published my first fan fiction in the spring of 2016. I knew the story was going to be a multi-chapter drama, and I had already written three chapters when I published the first one. I had also promised myself that I would post new chapters every week and wouldn’t leave the reader at a cliffhanger for too long. After only a few hours of posting chapter one, I received a review: “I hope this isn’t a one shot. You should continue it.”
It might be a tad dramatic to say how happy I was when I saw that review, but it’s true. Someone had just read my fictional work, and had enjoyed it enough to leave me a comment. I wrote the next two chapters and continued posting and the reviews kept coming. “I love this plot. I love your characters. Keep doing what you’re doing.” People wanted to know more about the plot; every week, they wanted a sneak peek into what would happen next; they’d even give me ideas on potential endings. The spring of 2016 would always be one of the best seasons of my life.
I wrote more stories then. I even became a beta-reader, and started to edit other fan-fiction works. I had entered a world where I could talk about my love for manga/anime and more precisely, for Sailor Moon, and no one would tell me how odd it was that a grown woman had this much obsession with the genre. Amongst the avid anime lovers, who collected posters, action figures and early-edition magazines, my enthusiasm didn’t seem strange at all.
In the most subtle way, my daily routine had started to change too. I no longer woke up feeling unmotivated and down. The thirst to work on a new idea, write and edit, somehow, gave me the inspiration I needed to progress in my career as well. I gave my job my 100% during the day, so I would feel extra good about my afternoon writings. In my first few stories, I can still hear my depression. From the words I’ve used and the descriptions I have tried so hard to bring into life, a lost soul’s longing to be found is as clear as day.
Over the years, I have received so many emails about how my stories have helped people through tough times. I had a young mother who had just lost a child and one story in particular, had persuaded her to seek professional help. Once, a young man in love asked me to write a short and cute story for his significant other’s birthday; to date, that remains my most cherished story.
I wrote my last Sailor Moon fan-fiction when the pandemic started and the world went into lock down. But this time, it wasn’t because of depression. For months, I had been thinking about a plot I had harboured for years and I knew the time had come for me to stop thinking about it and start putting it into words.
Those couple of years of writing fan-fiction restored my faith in me. I knew I could write; I had so many stories in me and I wanted to share them with the world. Writing fan-fiction was like a self-paced practice that I had missed for a long time. Being in a community that valued ideas more than technique, gave me the opportunity to make mistakes, acknowledge them and learn from them; what more could I possibly want?
I’m not a motivational writer/speaker. For what is worth, I don’t even know if I believe in them at all. What I do know, however, is that anyone can feel lost at some point in their lives. We can create our own paths, try hard and reach the goals we had set for ourselves and still feel dejected. I know; I’ve been there. But like the title of one of my fan-fictions, I’d say, that “it’s never too late” to stay still for a moment, take a deep breath, and decide what you want to do next in life.
