It's clear to me that some of these people need to read Henry Jenkins, an MIT professor who actively studies fanfiction and its impact. My reasons are my own but I got into fanfic because what I read in and for school and what I saw on TV wasn't fulfilling my needs. Fanfiction gave me fleshed out homosexual characters living in their own space. It gave me powerful women. It gave me words that moved me to tears. It's part and parcel that it used characters that I was aware of thanks to the wider media, but beyond that fanfic authors made these characters mean more for me.

I can't have coherent arguments about this to people who won't listen. Fanfiction is art and has just as much right to be called literary fiction as anything else. It has form and substance, shape and plot. Anyone who denies it, is just not well informed.