Don't forget to cast a knowing eye over the introduction first! ♡
To write, read, or discuss fan fiction or headcanons is to question the authority of the primary text, and the authority of its original creators. Fans have taken it upon themselves to rewrite their beloved texts in their own vision, to write out perceived injustices and find space within the lines for their own stories. Authorial intent is well and truly dead, with fans reinterpreting, retconning, or even ignoring the plot and character traits that are fed to them by a text’s creator.1 That's a pretty powerful, subversive act.
Media scholar Henry Jenkins famously coined the term “textual poachers” to characterise the contemporary fan. He envisions fans as an “interpretive community,” populated by “active producers and manipulators of meanings.”2 Textual poachers are “readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests, as spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture.”3
The cliché visions of the fan as mindless cultural consumer or socially-inept
follower fail to recognise that fan communities are involved in the
democratising of popular culture. As Jenkins describes, the inevitable fan
practices of interpretation, analysis, and creation represent a “resistance to
the cultural hierarchy” of creator/consumer, professional/amateur, or writer/reader.4
Through fan fiction, fans of a commercial product can insert
their own visions of reality, their own personal values, and the values of
their fan community into the lives of characters they are already emotionally
invested in. Television networks and film companies are ultimately at the mercy
of their advertisers and investors, and as such tend to err on the side of
conservatism in terms of exploring social issues, creating unique characters,
and breaking boundaries of genre.
These pop texts are also generally bound to
their medium – Pacific Rim simply
can’t spend 16 hours delving into Mako Mori’s childhood, for instance. If a primary text
disappoints or misses the mark for an individual or group, fan fiction
opens up possibilities to change it. Fan fiction represents fans taking control
of the texts that they are presented and invested in, expanding and creating
the stories they want to hear. Jenkins expands on this:
“The fans' response typically involves not simply fascination or adoration but also frustration and antagonism, and it is the combination of the two responses which motivates their active engagement with the media. Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try and articulate to themselves and others unrealised possibilities within the original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests.”5
Ultimately, if you take nothing else from this discussion,
please remember this: fan fiction is totally punk rock, and you textual
poachers are rad. You’re taking what you want from the media you consume,
telling the stories you want to hear, and creating a diverse community and body
of work around it. Neat!
Poach on, fictioneers, poach on.
1
Retconning is short for “Retroactive continuity,” and refers to
“the alteration of previously established facts in the continuity of afictional work.”
Sometimes this is an inevitable procedure for long serial or pulp texts like
comic book series, or the work of a sloppy writers’ team, to accommodate new
information or changes – “oops, we forgot Blaine was old enough to graduate
this year, but we need to keep him around! Meh, let’s just retcon his age and
make him a junior.” – but sometimes it is used as a deliberate plot twist, such
as Dawn’s appearance in Buffy the Vampire
Slayer.
2
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers:
Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York and London: Routledge,
1992), 2, 23.
3
Jenkins, 23.
4
Jenkins, 18.
5
Jenkins, 23.
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