I don't think people actually *realize* they're writing glorified OCs. It's been a while, but I remember that the people who couldn't write unique characters to save their life in my old RP group actually believed that they were writing good, distinct characters.
My theory is that there are a couple of things going on here.
One, fanfic is more accessible and more well-known than ever, meaning that more people are writing it and more people are sharing. A quarter century ago when I was a budding writer coming up with Tortall fanfiction, the only people who ever knew about it were my two school friends. I didn't know there were places on the internet I could post it, and no archive had the same reach as AO3 or FF.net do now (to my knowledge, at least). I certainly didn't have access to zines or LISTSERVs or anything like that.
The other big factor IMO is that literacy rates in the US have utterly TANKED in the last couple decades, meaning that writers from the US (and a large chunk of the anglosphere IS Yankees) just. Don't read and write as well as they used to. I remember looking at fandom discussions fifteen years ago, and people were a LOT more clever around figuring stuff out, a lot more willing to pick stuff apart in detail, a lot more loyal to specific works, and waaaaaay less likely to give a shit about word of god. (I can expound on this observation more once I'm at a computer, if you'd like.)
There definitely ARE people who project their OC onto an existing character deliberately, but I think they're a minority. Most people are just. Bad.
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Date: 9/6/23 15:48 (UTC)My theory is that there are a couple of things going on here.
One, fanfic is more accessible and more well-known than ever, meaning that more people are writing it and more people are sharing. A quarter century ago when I was a budding writer coming up with Tortall fanfiction, the only people who ever knew about it were my two school friends. I didn't know there were places on the internet I could post it, and no archive had the same reach as AO3 or FF.net do now (to my knowledge, at least). I certainly didn't have access to zines or LISTSERVs or anything like that.
The other big factor IMO is that literacy rates in the US have utterly TANKED in the last couple decades, meaning that writers from the US (and a large chunk of the anglosphere IS Yankees) just. Don't read and write as well as they used to. I remember looking at fandom discussions fifteen years ago, and people were a LOT more clever around figuring stuff out, a lot more willing to pick stuff apart in detail, a lot more loyal to specific works, and waaaaaay less likely to give a shit about word of god. (I can expound on this observation more once I'm at a computer, if you'd like.)
There definitely ARE people who project their OC onto an existing character deliberately, but I think they're a minority. Most people are just. Bad.