The relationship between a writer and the characters she both reads and writes is a varied and complicated one. Fanfiction adds a layer onto that — the original characters in question aside, most of the people we write about started out as someone else’s characters, at least before the original work went out in the world. In the hands of fans, individually or collectively, a character often becomes someone else in the process. I should clarify: I don’t mean that fans are likely to render them out-of-character. But with the space and care that fanfiction can afford, fan writers often draw a favorite world’s characters as richer, more complicated — more human.