Fanfiction

I love fanfiction.

I’m not sure how much I need to clarify this.  One person to whom I mentioned my hobby of writing fanfiction asked in puzzlement what the term meant, and whether it was short for fantasy fiction.  I explained that no, it just meant not-for-profit stories written by fans of any book, film, TV series, comic etc, imagining other episodes in the lives of the characters.  However, I must admit that most of the fanfics I have written have been based on science fiction or fantasy series.

Fanfiction offers almost limitless possibilities for exploring the lives of characters.   I love humour, exploration of the interactions between characters, missing scenes of conversations the characters might have had when the original author wasn’t looking, and crossovers where characters from two different stories meet.  But in particular, I enjoy stories about characters recovering from emotional or psychological trauma.  There often aren’t enough therapists in novels where the characters badly need them.

Some fanfics, of course, can just send the idea up – ‘Ha ha, a wizard goes to see a therapist who knows nothing about the magical war that’s just been going on, she hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about!’  Others use the theme of healing from sexual trauma as an excuse to write lots of explicit descriptions of kinky sex involving bondage, domination and sado-masochism.

The ones I enjoy reading, though, are the ones that explore psychology realistically and show a character believably working towards recovery.  If the protagonist is a character who dies young in canon, and in the fanfic he gets to survive, overcome his psychological issues, fall in love and get married and have children and live a long, healthy, happy, fulfilling life, so much the better.

There is one fanfiction series of this kind which I had been particularly enjoying for over two years.  Then, in February 2025, the author posted a chapter which shook me so much that it made me question, not just whether there was any hope in this fanfic, but whether there was any hope for anyone trying to recover from depression in real life. 

I knew that it made no sense to obsess over a fictional story, when everything I had read about psychology and neurology in real life indicated that depression is definitely treatable and not a permanent condition.  Yet I could not stop obsessing over this fanfic and its implications – partly because I had been encouraged by its message of hope and now felt devastated by the absence of it, and partly because I couldn’t understand what seemed to me to be inconsistencies in the conversations that the characters had in this chapter.

It took four months of arguing with the writer before I realised how far I had misunderstood what he had written.  I had misread the situation in the first few lines of the chapter, and interpreted everything else in the light of that.

The protagonist is one of the survivors of a magical war.  Since defeating the Dark Lord, his life has been getting better but he (like several other characters in the series) has deep psychological problems going back to childhood, and someone suggests that he ought to see a therapist.

By the recent instalments, our hero has now been in therapy for a few months, and has made considerable progress.  However, everyone experiences stressors from time to time.  In the chapter that had obsessed me, he comes into a therapy session feeling stressed and overwhelmed by simply having to make a mundane decision in his daily life (but one which triggers painful memories of his childhood).  

He complains that whenever he tries to take control of his life, something goes wrong.  In context, he is talking about external, practical matters like selling his house, but I thought he was indicating that trying to take control of his mental health through therapy had been just another false hope which had now turned out to be an illusion, and that his therapist had just been manipulating him for her own purposes, the same way that everyone he had trusted up until now had done.

He is frustrated with himself for being floored by ordinary everyday problems, when he has lived through so much worse.   He comments that he used to wish his life had been different, with a normal job in a peaceful setting, but he now suspects that it was inevitable that he would always have been just as depressed, regardless of his circumstances.  He adds that he had never noticed before, because he was continually depressed, but now that he sometimes experiences moments of happiness, he hates the way that it never lasts.

In context, he is just venting about how frustrated he feels right now, and the therapist, quite reasonably, encourages him to talk in more detail about his experiences lately, so that he can come to realise for himself that, in fact, he is getting better.  She agrees with him that even if he had lived a seemingly perfect life he wouldn’t necessarily be happy all the time, since depression is at least partly influenced by genetics.

However, I read this as his asking for factual information about his prognosis: is it true that his depression is hardwired and unchangeable, so that he would inevitably have always been destined to be miserable nearly all of the time for a lifetime, hate himself, and wish he was dead, regardless of what his upbringing had been like? 

So I took the fact that the therapist didn’t immediately say, ‘It’s not quite as simple as that, because the way our brains develop stems from a mixture of genetics, environment, and chance, and we keep on developing throughout our lifetime, not just as children,’ to mean that she agreed that his mental state was inevitable and irrevocable.  After all, if having had a completely different upbringing for his entire childhood could not have made him grow into any different an adult, how could having a couple of therapy sessions per week as an adult make any difference?

The patient says that in this case, he’s glad he never had children, or he would have doomed them to be as miserable as he is.  The therapist says (thinking of her own experience of being transgender, which in the time when this story is set was seen as a mental illness) that the patient’s children, even if they face difficulties in life, would not necessarily be unhappy, and that for some people, their experience of facing adversity is part of their identity.

I assumed this meant that she considered depression to be, like gender dysphoria, a hardwired part of someone’s identity that they cannot change and can only learn to accept and, if possible, be proud of.  After all, if she didn’t think of depression as the same kind of thing as gender dysphoria – not an illness that anyone either could or should want to recover from, but simply a difference to be celebrated – why should she even draw a comparison?

But on the other hand, if she did think that way, why was she trying to help her patient work on being less depressed?  And why was the patient willing to go through with therapy if it couldn’t possibly help, instead of doing the logical thing and killing himself?

I wrote a comment on the fanfic asking about this, and the fanfic author wrote back, but we kept talking at cross purposes.  I told him how a therapist I had once (and only once) gone to in real life had told me that ‘Your feelings of self-hatred and self-destructive urges are a vital part of what makes you you, and in time you will learn to love them,’ and (when I talked about my distorted take on religious belief and how I was convinced that the real message of the Bible is that God wishes He had never created humans, regards us as totally evil, and sent Jesus to teach his disciples to hate themselves and those who loved them so that they would all kill themselves, and that God wanted me to kill myself), had said, ‘Well, everyone has a different interpretation of the Bible, and if that's how you interpret it, then it's right for you.’

The fanfic author had commented that this was obviously bullshit, but I wasn’t clear about how this was different from what the therapist in his story was saying.  Still, he pointed out, as PDB11 had reminded me about reading words in the Bible, it was no use my taking words at face value without considering the context in which they were said, the intentions behind them, and the ways in which I might be misinterpreting them.

A little over two months after we had first started arguing about it, the author explained that what the therapist in his story means is that the experience of overcoming depression, not depression itself, can become a positive part of someone’s identity.  However, it took four months of arguing back and forth on the internet before I really got the point.  The author was probably puzzled that I was being so obtuse: after all, this was a story about recovery, it had been a story about recovery for over 720,000 words, and the patient in the story wasn’t giving up hope or quitting therapy or killing himself because he knew he was getting better.

I thought: ‘Yes, he had believed up until now that he was getting better – but this is the point in the story where he realises that it’s inevitable for him to be miserable nearly all the time.  Isn’t it?  Wasn’t that what he said?  Didn’t the therapist admit that he’s right?’

After four months of worrying and many sleepless nights – including having ruined what might have been a pleasant seaside holiday by worrying about this fanfic, amongst other things – I actually asked the fanfic writer directly whether the therapist really believed believe that the patient is fundamentally right that it was inevitable that his life would have been like this: that even if his upbringing had been completely different, he would still have grown up to be just as depressed and living just as miserable a life because it was genetically determined?

At this point, the writer laid my fears to rest by clarifying that she (the therapist) doesn’t, and he (the author) doesn’t.  He quoted some statistics from a medical journal explaining that someone with a family history of depression has a 20-30% risk of developing depression at some point in their lifetime, and only a 12-25% chance of suffering from recurrent depression, as distinct from just suffering a depressive episode at some point in their life, maybe only for a couple of weeks.  But even then, ‘recurrent’ does not mean that it is lifelong and untreatable.

Moreover, he pointed out, it isn’t that the patient himself really believes that his situation is inevitable and inescapable.  The patient might say so sometimes when he’s feeling frustrated, but that’s because he’s an unreliable narrator, not because he is giving his considered, scientifically validated conclusion.

The author pointed out that I do seem to have some unique experiences with therapists if I have accurately reported the things I remember them saying to me.  As he said, part of my problem in communicating with anyone, whether therapist or fanfiction author, is that I need to have things spelt out to me with minute clarity. 

I do have a tendency to take words over-literally – but only when they are depressing.  In the fanfic, I took it as established fact that depression is inevitable – but when the therapist suggested, ‘Even if your children inherited some of your conditions, they wouldn’t necessarily be unhappy,’ I thought that she must mean something like, ‘Even if they inherited being neurologically incapable of experiencing happiness, they wouldn’t necessarily feel that being unhappy was a bad thing,’ because otherwise it would be inconsistent with the established principle that depression is inevitable.

I can see that this is the same thing I do in filtering the words friends or family members have said to me.  Even if I can’t count how many times the people who love me have told me that I am kind, intelligent and deserving of happiness, I dismiss it all as, ‘Oh, my dad’s just biased because I’m his daughter,’ or, ‘Oh, my friend was just saying that to be nice.’  But the handful of times that anyone has said anything condemning to me stand out in my mind as permanent truths: that I am useless, narcissistic, and do nothing but spread misery.

As PDB11 says, I behave like a drowning man clutching at lead weights.  And this is what I need to work at changing.