Saturday 12 April 2014

In Defense of Fan Fiction: Introduction



Fan fiction is for fans, by fans, and often kept a secret from the uninitiated (or, gasp, the original creators). The secret's kind of out, though: with the infiltration of geek and fan culture into the mainstream consciousness, online fan fiction is one of those things that we all know exists. And it isn’t new. Literary scholars have identified fan-works and recreations of existing works from as far back as the 15th century. Stay up until 4am writing frantic and witty Sherlock fan fiction? So did 19th century Conan Doyle fans! The more you know.

Later, by the 1970s Star Trek fandom developed mail order fanzines and held conventions to share their hardcopy fan fiction with the community – which means that folks have been reading Kirk/Spock smut for over 30 wonderful years! So although we may have a vision of the avid fan ficcer as a lone basement-dwelling teenager, the current online fan fictioneers of the world actually constitute part of a huge fannish legacy, spanning generations, cultural borders, and contexts.1

 Yeah!
Image from comicvine.com

With that history in mind, let’s characterise today’s typical fan fiction practice. Not fan art, fanvidding, or anything like that: let’s look at garden-variety fan fiction web culture. Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen are quick to point out that fandom is not a monolith; there are a diverse range of fan practices, and indeed fan fiction practices.2

But for brevity’s sake, bring on the generalisations! Let's define what we mean when we talk about fan fiction.

// Okay, stating the obvious: fan fiction is when fans take the existing characters and/or settings from their favourite original works, and go nuts recreating, expanding, hypothesising, retconning, and telling their own stories within these pre-existing worlds.

// After the requisite engagement with the source text, fan fiction practice involves three steps: the creation of fictional works based on the source text, the distribution of these works, and subsequent communal analysis/evaluation/revision/sharing/typing in caps lock. Today’s fan fiction is largely published, shared and discussed online, and can be found through database searches or on fan web spaces or social media platforms such as LiveJournal, Fanfiction.net, Archive of Our Own, and Tumblr.3 

Also counted under the umbrella of fan fiction is the headcanon, in which a writer describes ‘what if?’ situations, or posits their own theories or ideal outcomes for a source text, without creating an actual piece of fiction. 

// These are communal texts: stories are released over time in chapters, sometimes devised as ‘gifts’ to other users, and often they are revised in reaction to readers’ comments or prompts. 

There are numerous linguistic codes, varying between fandoms, which are revealed gradually to the reader through exposure, like learning a new language: AU, Harmony, WIP, beta’d, Faberry, crackfic, fluff, and myriad ratings systems. These codes are constantly evolving and being revised: does anyone still say H/C, PWP, or lemon?4

// Whilst it’s possible to make a profit from selling or commissioning fan art, I haven’t yet heard of a fan writer making money from their stories. Fan fiction writers are all aware that they do not own their characters.

// Another characteristic of fan fiction is what I’ll call an Extended Rule 34, or Rule 34 ¾: if it exists, there’s fan fiction of it. This does not imply that all fan fiction is necessarily sexual; just that even the weirdest or most seemingly insignificant cultural texts – commercials, sports teams, the random hottie elf staring meaningfully at the back of Legolas’s head for .45 seconds in the extended edition of The Two Towers - have probably prompted someone, somewhere, to write fan fiction.

Now, on first glance, fan fiction may seem utterly trivial and unoriginal – they’re just writing stories about characters that already exist, right? 

It may even seem creepy or socially unacceptable – why do they care so much about fictional characters? They want Dean and Castiel to do what

However, myself, along with a group of academics, aca-fans, and creative, posit another vision. We say that fan fiction is inherently subversive, postmodern, and intellectual. We say that at its best it is a powerful method of resistance against mainstream authority and pop cultural narratives, and has huge potential to change the ways we understand and engage with popular media.

Wanna hear more? Excellent, let’s head to episode one!


Official-looking disclaimer/my history in fan fiction:
I’ve been involved in fannish online communities for about 10 years now, so I’m well-versed in the community laws, the tropes, and the terminology. However, I’d call myself an innocent bystander when it comes to fan fiction – not a big reader of it, and certainly not a writer. I can distil my active experiences with it into three bullet points (the first one’s the funniest):
// At 13-15, my friends and I ran a Harry Potter role play community on Greatestjournal (anyone remember that? all our posts are somewhere out in web oblivion now). I was Cho Chang. I made her a lesbian and she may have dated a female Blaise Zabini.

// After I finished watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was so destroyed by the ending that I thought ‘surely somebody’s written an alternate ending/epilogue!’ and took to the c2003 Angelfire and Geocities Buffy fansites where I uncovered some great, pretty darn literary and true-to-character fanwork. Thanks, fans of Whedonverses past! Now I can pretend the Dark Horse comics never happened.

// I use Tumblr. If you’re on Tumblr, and you don’t just follow hipster blogs posting sunny, distressed photographs of Starbucks and steering wheels, then chances are you’ve seen links to all kinds of weird and wonderful fan fiction.

I know with this list, it sounds like I'm being a bit disparaging of fanfic - I'm not, I promise! I just want to make my biases clear: I don’t read or write fan fiction. I’m not trying to get you to read my fan fiction, nor am I trying to assuage any kind of “kinky fic writer’s guilt” in writing this. However, I am a follower of online fandom, and have been since dial-up modems. So although I’m about to discuss some academic theories, I promise you that I’m not interested in discussing fandom like a sociologist, or from any kind of distance: I’m first and foremost a fan. One of us, one of us, etc.

Anyway, once again, onwards and upwards to episode one!


1 For more on the history of fan fiction and off/online fannish practices, see Mary Kirby-Diaz, “Buffy, Angel, and the Creation of Virtual Communities,” in Buffy and Angel Conquer the Internet, edited by Mary Kirby-Diaz, 1-6. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009.

2 Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationship (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2012), 9.

3 Also Quizilla, fan-owned message boards, MSN and Yahoo Groups, Angelfire hosted webpages, and chiselling drabbles on cave walls. Comment if you used any of these, and I will salute you for your long-running duty to fandom.

4 Wandering off on a language tangent, Katrina Blasingame discusses the development of slang in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom, seeing fans expand upon the language used in the source text to create their own subcultural language. Read about it at Katrina Blasingame, ““I Can’t Believe I’m Saying It Twice in the Same Century... but ‘Duh...’” The Evolution of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Sub-Culture Language through the Medium of Fanfiction,” Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 5.4 [20] (2004): http://slayageonline.com/PDF/Blasingame.pdf

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