I also just watched Vsauce's new video, and had another thought.

In the video, he reads an excerpt, imagining if books had been invented after the internet: "Pehaps the most dangerous property of these 'books' is the fact that they follow a fixed, linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion - you simply sit back and have their narratives dictated to you." He then goes on to discuss the difference between interactive media and traditional books, highlighting the passiveness and submissiveness of the latter - in which we learn to simply follow the plot, and not to lead - and the control the far more participatory former option grants us.

Perhaps fanfiction is simply the way in which a modern generation of people, who have grown up with access to and a society-wide extensive use of participatory, interactive media is reacting to the traditional passive/submissive engagement we have with stories others have written. The idea of power, control, and choice is enormously important in Western society - as has been noted in the "Normal?" thread here, we are constantly bombarded with messages of both rebellion against conformity, and individuality, and we have a fixation on "heroes": those who control and change the world with their actions; those who have, in some way, "mastered" the world rather than simply "coping" as the majority of us must do, living in a largely reactionary capacity. As fanfiction in its modern form largely arose in tandem with the idea of interactive, participatory media in which we have control, a "say", a way to express ourselves in a less linear fashion (think about navigating the web - it is a web, non-linear, in which we can jump about, unlike either fictional or factual books which are linear), is it not arguable that they are linked? In fanfiction, we take control of characters we know and love, and do with them as we will - we take control of and interact with something previously linear and dictated. In accordance with our changing tastes in methods of storytelling and media, we turn what was once a passive relationship into an active one.

Interestingly, this is arguably the opposite of my "consumerism" point, in which we passively absorb and regurgitate the same ideas.