Am I resurrecting a dead thread? I hope not. Yet, even if I am, I think it makes no difference. you've given me an opportunity to talk about the thing I love best: the people in my head.
So. Not all the people in my head are mine by creation. I have to admit that. Even so, in some strange, mystical somebody-dropped-five-dollars-on-the-ground-and-I'm-going-to-pick-it-up sort of way, they have become mine.
It is for this very reason that I avoid fanfiction like a political rally. Characters in fanfiction are so rarely ever written to the standards I have set in my head. I think, Alec would never say that! or Felix would never be drawn in by such an obvious, clumsy taunt, and then I get offended. Offended like somebody called my child stupid.
Yet now and again, when the mood takes me (usually a bored, had-too-much-to-drink mood), I turn to fanfiction (and its little brother--slash fiction) in the hopes of finding one brief moment of reintroduction with one of the tenants in my brain. And when I find something done right...
There is almost a magical quality to meeting a beloved character in an unfamiliar place, under a set of unexpected circumstances.
I should, it occurs to me as I write this, get out a little more often.
But then I would have less time to read, and less opportunity to write.
Alas!