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Well said, Elfwreck, thank you. I've been trying to stay away from this thread since it's such a volatile topic for me, and I found some of the comments hurtful. I value my online community as much as I value my real life friends, and they were my pillar of strength when my mother was fighting cancer and then lost that battle.
I think it's important to have in mind that we are living in many different countries that treat this issue differently, and not all the solutions are the same, so that when we meet online, the laws one person lives by might not be valid for another person. I am firmly in the "fanfiction is transformative, therefore not violation of copyright". I have read numerous stories that asked serious questions and answered them - or tried to, in the form of a story containing characters the fandom was familiar with. They used those characters to tell their story because with preexisting characters, you already know what they are like, what their circumstances were like, what their reactions to an event will be, and you don't have to set up a character and spend time on its characterization if you only want to criticize or comment on an issue. To take Elfwreck's example of Thor, a fic may delve into whether or not Loki committed genocide against the Jotnar in the movie, whether the Aesir did, whether the Jotnar are monsters or misunderstood, what are the gender roles among the Jotnar: bi-gendered, monogendered, fluid? - all topics that were prompted and spawned lively discussions on some very important issues, and sometimes gave answers in the form of a narrative. To me, that's criticism.
Whenever someone starts talking about fanfiction as something that is hurtful for the original creators, I bring up this little gem: some 10 years ago, there was this western show called The Magnificent Seven; you may have watched the original western feature films or the even more original Japanese Seven Samurai. Michael Biehn, Ron Perlman, Eric Close and Laurie Holden were some of the actors. Anyway, the powers that be decided to shut it down after the first season, and the fans started a campaign to get it back.
And lo and behold, they were successful. The fans - who wrote fanfiction for the show, did fanart, filks, craft projects - spent thousands of dollars of their own money to enable the creators, cast and crew to work for an additional season. The woman who spearheaded the campaign was given a cameo in the first episode of the second season as a thank you, and the series composer gifted the fans with the score, which was shared between the fans. Look up the story sometime, and think about what that kind of devotion means.
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