by flagamuffin

In fanfiction you can write stories set in someone else’s universe that you didn’t invent to be exploitable, a universe which readers nonetheless aren’t pre-blinded to the way they’re blinded to the opportunities and horrors of real life. Furthermore, your readers will know that many readers of canon accepted the background inadequacy as something that wasn’t out of character for human beings and their civilizations. “Unrealistic, you say? Did you leap out of your chair and yell ‘Nobody in real life would do that!’ while you were reading canon? You did? Well, literally millions of other readers didn’t.”

In HPMOR, I can point to Azkaban and say “Because it is there.” Just like how, in our own universe, it is not my personal outlook on life to believe that governments would sell and advertise lottery tickets, even after the introduction of lotteries had been shown to cause an average 3% reduction in spending on food by low-income families. That is not me making a great display of how cynical I am about politicians; it is a fact that I could toss into an Earthfic as a background truth without needing to justify it. In HPMOR I get to say the same thing about Cornelius Fudge, albeit the source is Rowling and not reality. The important thing is that the civilizational inadequacy is given to me, and not depicted by me as my own statement.

And so there are stories you can tell in fanfiction that you can’t easily tell in any other mode of literature, because in fanfiction the reader knows that you didn’t create the problems the hero faces.

This is a very, very good point. I would have been hard-pressed to name an advantage inherent to fanfiction over other forms of literature until now. (At least, to name one that didn't come with its own set of disadvantages.)