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[archiveacademics]

Spotlight: My Favorite Fanfic

I have a confession to make. I did absolutely no academic reading today. Instead, I put together a bookshelf, and then filled that bookshelf with books. So, instead of continuing on talking about The Fanfiction Studies Reader, which was my plan for today’s blog, I’m going to talk about my favorite fanfic. 

I’ve already introduced you to my favorite author, back in blog post number... either 4 or 6, I think? But my favorite story is by someone else.

It’s based on the anime, Yuri!!! on Ice. YOI, as it’s called online, follows the life of figure skater Yuri Katsuki as he works his way through a tough season, cheered on by his surprising new coach, none other than figure skating champion, the Russian Victor Nikiforov. They have to work through a lot of Yuri’s anxiety and self doubt, which can cripple him on the ice. But along the way they become friends and maybe more...?

The anime itself doesn’t specifically say the two are gay, but they do kiss once (”I wanted to surprise you as much as you just surprised me” Victor says as Yuri comes off the ice) and they also exchange rings as a symbol of...I don’t recall exactly, but it’s supposed to be a symbol of hope or hard work or something. Because that’s not gay at all...

Anyway, my favorite fanfic is an AU (that’s alternate universe) story that takes place in a world where Yuri meets Victor at a much younger age in the original. Victor is his hero, just as in the original, but when he talks to Victor, the Russian skater says something that changes the course of Yuri’s whole life.

“Until My Feet Bleed and My Heart Aches” is written by Reiya on AO3. It follows the life of Yuri from age 11 up through the year that Yuri!!! on Ice takes place. A single comment by Victor breaks Yuri’s heart and his hero worship turns to burning rage. He spends the next 12 years of his life doing nothing but trying to beat Victor at a game that Victor, as a three time world champion, is very good at playing.

There are a few things I really enjoy about this story.

1) The author addresses Yuri’s obvious anxiety. Yuri get’s so much in his head that it effects his skating a lot, which is kind of painful to watch in the anime. Yuri does gain a lot more self confidence during the plot of the anime, but there are still times when I just want to beg him to please, please just seek some therapy already. The author of the story addresses this. 

2) The credits of the anime show a scrolling screen of the different skaters’ instagram posts every episode. The author actually took this into account and often brackets chapters with, not images because this is entirely text, but news headlines and comments on those headlines from the fans of the figure skating. This is really creative and I love the detail.

3) The author gives backstory to the pole dancing scene. ‘Nuff said.

This also plays during the credits. 

Anyway, the story is long and wonderful. It uses even minor details of the anime while still staying true to the AU the author has created. And best of all? It has a happy ending!

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“There are no wives...”

So let’s talk a little bit about slash.

Slash, if you’ll remember from the definition post, is fanfic stories written about same sex couples. The first and still very popular couple being K/S (the name deriving from the / in the middle), otherwise known as Kirk/Spock. Long before the portmanteau names craze because a thing (Drarry, anyone?), / was the way to name your pairs.

I’ve just been reading The Fanfiction Studies Reader, edited by  Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. Specifically I’ve been reading Part 2, Fan Identiy and Feminism. The three articles therein are “Pornography by Women for Women, with Love” by Joanna Russ, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines” by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L Veith, and “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters” by Sara Gwennllian Jones. 

So let me introduce slash with a quote from Jones:

“Almost every imaginable seduction scenario, narrative context, emotional import and sexual practice is somewhere described in slash fiction.”

Alright, pack up, I think we can go home. That’s a thorough description of slash if I’ve ever read one.

But seriously, slash is a an amazingly diverse genre, so much that:

“If [it] may be described as a “genre,” then its only convention is that it describes erotic encounters between television characters (or, more rarely, film characters) of the same sex.” (Jones)

If you have further questions about what slash fiction is, definitely check out “5 Things You Should Know About Slash Fiction” by JR Thorpe on Bustle. But I’m going to move on from here.

The question becomes, why are people (read: women) (but not entirely, but as far as researchers can tell it is mostly women who read and write this stuff) so obsessed with Kirk and Spock’s love life? Why can’t the two men just live together in peace?

Well, for one, they’re not technically both “men.” One is an alien. And while, yes, Spock is male, he’s not a human male and that, argue both Russ, and Lamb and Veith, is part of why the K/S pair is so endearingly well loved. While Russ is more talking about the kind of stuff that gets written, while Lamb and Veith are specifically engaging with the K/S relationship, both articles make a point of how both Kirk and Spock can be seen coded as both masculine and feminine. There’s a great graphic in the Lamb and Veith piece that lays out which characteristics of the men are which.

It is, both articles argue, a relationship between two true equals, in a way that heterosexual relationships in a patriarchal society can never be. And while both men take their turns as the more feminine coded partner, neither is stripped of his masculinity by being “feminine.” Lamb and Veith argue that this kind of behavior is indicative of what women really yearn for; both to be equal partners with their, well, partners and also for men to be allowed to be vulnerable without losing their sense of masculinity.

“A behavior many women presumably yearn to share with a man, to receive and reciprocate—for both partners to be capable, independent; for each to contribute a loving strength and to be loved for that strength, not for weakness; for each to be permitted occasionally to be weaker and vulnerable without having to be passive, dominated, or afraid.”

While many have argued that slash is written in opposition to the text, by which I mean that slash is written despite the source text, not because of it, Jones argues that slash is the obvious result of the way cult TV shows have to function.

Basically, she argues that since cult TV shows take place in wondrous worlds full of action and adventure, there’s no time or place for a traditional heterosexual love story. And it is a story. 

“Heterosexuality is as much a matter of social practice as it is of sexual practice. As social practice, it assumes a narrative form of its own, with plot points of courtship, marriage, domesticity, reproduction, child-rearing, provision for a family. [The] narrative form is, arguable, the most embedded and pervasive foundational structure of ordinary reality.”

Thus, no heterosexual relationship may go beyond the stage of dating. Buffy and Angel can never be together, Mulder and Scully can’t even get as far as Buffy and Angel. There must always be something in the way, lest the relationship fall into the narrative structure and become boring, losing all of the wonder and adventure that make cult TV shows as good as they are. 

The other option, of course, is a same sex partnership. Kirk and Spock, or Xena and Gabrielle. There is no worry that these men and women will fall into the heterosexual narrative and out of interesting TV. Thus, the relationships that are read as homosexual are, in fact, supposed to be read that way. 

I agree with Jones, but I don’t think that invalidates the points that Russ, and Lamb and Veith make regarding why women like slash so much. The Fanfiction Studies readers seems to portray the two as in contention with each other. I rather view them as...well, more in harmony. Side by side. Pals. Like Kirk and Spock. 

And that brings me to my title. It’s a quote from the Lamb and Veith article that I really liked. They talk about Kirk’s need to go on adventures and fight bad guys. And instead of holding his beloved back, Spock, who knows that to ask Kirk to remain safe would be to ignore everything that Kirk is, instead goes with him, to stay by his side and keep him safe. 

“There are no wives. No one stays home to worry or do the laundry.”

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But why?

I’ve talked about what fanfic is and who writes it (and who hates it) but I don’t really think I’ve talked about why. What are the benefits, why should you do this thing?

Well, first of all I’m gonna start with: love.

That’s been a theme of a lot of the articles I’ve read this semester regarding fanfic. People love it. They love writing it, they love reading it, they even love talking about it. There’s just something magical about being able to take well loved characters and stories and just play with them in a sandbox.

But there are other reasons to read and write fanfic. Or maybe, there are deeper reasons people love fanfic. However you want to put it, here are some things to consider.

“Fanfiction is a beautiful opportunity for readers who want to see themselves represented in the stories they read. For people of color who are sick of whitewashed heroes and heroines; for the LGBTQ community tired of heteronormative love stories; for disabled individuals overwhelmed by able-bodied protagonists, fanfiction is an opportunity to not just see the story, but actually be a part of it. Because in fanfic, protagonists don't all have to be white, straight, cis-gender males, female characters can be more than just love interests, and POC characters can be more than just part of the ensemble. In fanfic, anyone can be the hero — or heroine — of the story.”

So writes Sadie Trombetta for Bustle in an article titled “Why Fanfiction is a Good Thing for Readers and Writers.” And she’s right. One of the reasons fanfic is so popular with women, as I wrote about yesterday, is that we live in a very man-centric world and sometimes its hard as a woman (or a POC, or a queer person, or a person with disabilities) to find stories that feature a main character that is Just Like You. So reading and writing fanfic gives you opportunities to find yourself in the story.

Also, consider the community. Marybeth Wynen wrote “12 Reasons to Read and Write Fanfiction” for Odyssey, and number 11 is pretty important.

“Many authors bounce ideas off of each other and have a close knit group of writers in their fandom whom they consider friends. In this vein, fanfic authors enjoy immediate, constructive feedback on their works in the forms of verbal flailing, crying and yelling about all the feels, detailed commentary, kudos, likes, etc.”

I haven’t talked much about the community aspect of fanfic, because I’m a super introvert and not much a community person myself. But for writers just starting off or for teens who feel like they don’t fit in with the people around them, finding a community of people who enjoy the same hobbies and the same types of media can be a really great experience.

I’d like to end with a point by Dana Rosette Pangan from “5 Reasons You Should Read Fanfiction,” which was published on Book Riot.

“It’s still reading.

No matter what you read—a novel, a poem, a fanfiction piece—it’s still reading, so when you read fanfiction, you get all the benefits of reading, plus all the things I’ve mentioned above. Who cares if what you’re reading is not a “real book”? Who cares if it’s not written by a “real author”? As long as you’re enjoying what you’re reading, continue doing so. Never apologize for what you’re reading; life is too short for that.” (Emphasis in original)

Pangan’s got a point. When you read (and write) fanfic, you’re still reading (and writing). Just because it’s fanfic doesn’t take away from the fact that you are exercising your mind. And you’re exercising it doing something you love! 

What’s better than that?

*All images for the forseeable future will be stills instead of gifs because I don’t have WiFi at home and my data hotspot is suuuuuper slooooow and thus I can’t get the gifs to load, but pictures work pretty well.

[archiveacademics]

The Shame We Feel

If there’s one theme that I noticed in my reading for today’s post it was shame. Shame about reading fanfic. Shame about writing it. Shame about being a woman who reads and writes it.

Ok, maybe that last one is me reading into it a little bit. But I don’t have to read very far to get there. Take these quotes from two of the articles I read. 

“My parents were ridiculously encouraging of my nerdy shenanigans, and I'd never heard anybody talk about it before, but even then, I was mortally embarrassed by what I was doing in a way I couldn't articulate — not in my preteen years, when I was brand new to it; not in my teenage years, when a male classmate of mine somehow found my username and threatened to tell everyone, and I went home and promptly burst into tears; not even at 21, when I had the most popular fic in a fandom and somebody asked to interview me for their website, and my first, heart-stopping reaction was, NO!”

“I started writing fan fiction when I was 11 years old, predictably based on Charmed, because I reserve the right to bring Chris Halliwell back from the dead however illogically I please. And even though I was only 11, I still had the common sense to keep my mouth shut about it. Writing fan fiction was considered the ultimate in weird, and I only felt progressively more embarrassed as I got older and realized that it wasn't just a "phase," but in fact something that I still enjoy doing well into my twenties.”

There are lots of things to feel shame for if you’re female, especially if you’re a teenage female. Things such as liking a band, the way you talk, the way you use your phone, and existing. 

This seems like a good place to mention: the things I’m talking about today don’t just apply to teenage girls and women in general. They can apply to genderqueer and nonbinary people. Also lesbians, and gay men, and bi and pansexual folks. They can apply to POC too. Basically, anyone who’s not a cis, straight, white man is included in this group. That being said, I happen to be a woman, both straight and white, so I can only speak from where I stand. I by no means want to alienate or exclude anyone though, so just keep in mind that everything in this post applies to more than just the one group I’m discussing.

Back to shame.

Let’s start with Beatlemania. It’s a tale you might have heard. Or maybe you haven’t. Maybe you believe the Beatles were popular with everyone from the get go? To which I reply, “Oh, my sweet summer child.” 

“The media's attempts to explain this wild new development to bewildered adults were at best comically square ("Beatles Reaction Puzzles Even Psychologists," reported one science journal), and at worst viciously snobbish and misogynistic. In an infamous New Statesman essay Paul Johnson sneered: "Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures.””

Dorian Lynskey writes for The Guardian, and “Beatlemania: 'the screamers' and other tales of fandom” is a wonderful exploration of the craziness that teen girls had for the Beatles. It wasn’t until the “mainstream” decided the Beatles were worthwhile that everyone became a fan. Suddenly, you weren’t “the dull, the idle, the failures” if you liked the band. You were just one of the many.

And of course, if you can’t hear the heavy sarcasm with which I write “mainstream” it’s because the internet as a medium isn’t advanced enough yet. One day we’ll get there.

Anyway, back to the main topic. Things that teenage girls like are almost never considered to be...cool? Ok? Worthwhile?

“We track them, we gawk at them, we sexualize them, we use them to sell things, we hope they buy things. We allow them to shape the direction of our culture and then scorn them when they move the needle. They are “shrill” and “self-absorbed,” and we can easily conjure up images of screaming “fangirls” who fall to pieces at the sight of their favorite boy band/singer/YouTube star.” 

Emma Gray writes for Huffpost, and I linked the article, “What We’re Really Doing When We Shame Young Women For Their Selfies” above. What she’s saying, though, really strikes a chord with me. “We allow them to shape the direction of our culture and then scorn them when they move the needle.” Sit with that for a moment.

Now, let’s move it back towards fanfic. Women who admit to writing fanfic are shamed, are considered to be only writing porn, and awful porn at that. They feel the need to hide. 

“Both my eagerness to write fan fiction and my shame for it were borne of the same thing: a large amount of fan fiction is centric on female desire,” writes Emma Lord for Bustle. “Why Fan Fiction Shaming Is A Feminist Issue” discusses why the “mainstream” finds it so easy to dismiss fanfic as something silly and worthless. Because it’s written by young women who are just discovering a new world. A world where they can create their own stories and explore their desires. A world that is wholly their own, but that they are expected to apologize for if anyone ever finds out about it.

If you want to know why the desire of young women is so taboo, you can check out “Welcome To The Sex-Positive Wonderland Of Erotic Fan Fiction.” Written by Claire Fallon for Huffpost, the article explains that:

“To many in the fan writing community, however, the aspects of fanfic that can make it seem icky to outsiders are exactly those that allow readers to feel comfortable with the sexual content within. While boys are expected to sneak glances at porn or fantasize about feeling up their classmates’ boobs (boys will be boys, right?), girls have rarely been offered such a direct pathway into sexual self-discovery. It’s still far from simple for a girl to own her sexuality. But giving those urges to other people — familiar characters from books or TV, members of their favorite musical group — well, that feels less implicatory. In fanfic, girls can remain off-stage, able to glance sideways at their fantasies and desires without ever having to directly claim them.”

Trying to tell people that you like fanfic is exhausting. Especially since Fifty Shades of Grey, but even before then. Everyone thinks it’s all porn and smut. When in reality, it’s like the end of the Seanan McGuire manifesto from my last post “No It’s Not All Porn And There Wouldn’t Be A Problem If It Was.” 

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Authors and Fanfic

Sometimes published authors are into fanfic. Sometimes they’re not. These are their stories.

We’ll start with those who don’t like fanfic. Namely, Diana Gabaldon.

In 2010 (as far as I can tell) she went on an epic rant on her blog about how much she hates fanfic and why. There’s three whole chapters to it (not shocking from someone who writes books that could potentially be used like a concrete shoe: chain someone to it and drop them in the river, never to be seen again.) While it was eventually deleted from her blog, it was luckily saved by a few enterprising fans and is recreated on this LiveJournal page for your enjoyment. 

Since I read the whole thing, I’ll give you some highlights.

“OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I know it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.”

“[Reasons people use in argument for fanfic] 2) I want to write, but I don’t know how to make up characters, and it seems less scary to use some that already exist, and just make up stories for them. You know…it’s practice!

I have a lot of sympathy for people who want to write. I used to want to write, and I had no idea how to develop characters. Oddly enough, the notion of using someone else’s characters never occurred to me. I just tried to do it on my own. Surprise! It worked. Suck it up, guys. If you want to write, write—and write your own stuff. It does take courage, but that’s the only way to learn how, believe me.”

“Beyond the specific arguments against the concept remains the unfortunate fact that a terrible lot of fan-fic is outright cringe-worthy and ought to be suppressed on purely aesthetic grounds.”

“The thing is, though, that the central—the only truly vital part—of a story, and what makes it unique, is the character or characters. Everything else springs from that. In essence, a story is its characters. Therefore, while all kinds of things in a piece of writing can flow throughout the collective consciousness and inspire new work—theme, style, form, setting, mythical archetype, ideas of any kind….a character is not merely an idea. He or she is a real thing, and no less real for having no bodily presence. They do exist, even though they are embodied only in words.

Characters—good characters, “real” characters—derive their reality from the person who created them. They are the person who created them, refracted through the lens of that writer’s experience, imagination, love, fear, and craft. Another writer seeking to duplicate that character might equal—or conceivably surpass--the craft; they can’t touch the essence. When you mess with my stuff, you’re not messing with my characters—you’re messing with me.”

OK, so that’s a lot of quotes, but it saves you from having to go on the whole journey with Gabaldon. It’s a long one and though she seems to soften a bit towards fanfic (acknowledging that she never imagined maybe it was just written out of love while still taking the shot that the reason she never imagined it is because all of it is terrible) she still ends the rant by stating, unequivocally, that she does not want fanfic written about her work. 

George R. R. Martin is of the same mind, though he’s a bit nicer about it. 

“I don’t think it’s a good way to train to be a professional writer when you’re borrowing everybody else’s world and characters. That’s like riding a bike with training wheels. And then when I took the training wheels off, I fell over a lot, but at some point you have to take the training wheels off here. You have to invent your own characters, you have to do your own world-building.”

Anne Rice also hates fanfic. Famously so, in the face of fandom. There’s even a fanlore page that describes the personal harassment campaign that was launched against several fanfic writers in 2000. Pretty intense stuff there.

Meanwhile, there are other authors who not only support fanfic, they still actively write it.

That’s right, Rainbow Rowell is one. She features on the Fansplaining podcast episode “Rainbow Rowell” and talks all about her fannish history and how she came to write the book Fangirl as well as Carry On (which is actually not fanfiction.) 

Fangirl tells the story of Cath, a college freshman with social anxiety who is a big name in fanfic and is trying to complete a novel length fic about her favorite series, The World of Mages by Gemma T Leslie, before the final book of the series comes out while also completing her first year of college. It’s a fun coming of age story and I’d highly suggest it if you’re into that sort of thing. 

It’s basically a love letter to fanfic, with Cath having to defend her writing to everyone from her professor to her best friend to her boyfriend. Apparently, Rowell came to the internet late and so she was discovering and exploring the world on online fanfic at the same time she was writing Fangirl, which adds authenticity to the book. Cath’s experience of reading and writing is very much tied to Rowell’s own. 

She even admits to writing fanfic today, though she does not publish it. 

“I was trying to write Landline and it was the first time I had written about an existing relationship. So Landline is a book for adults about adults, it’s about a marriage that’s kind of having a hard time. They’ve been married like 15 years and they’re having problems.

I was kind of nervous about writing an existing relationship, because I had written only falling-in-love stories, and so I decided to write a really short Harry/Draco where they’ve been in a relationship for 20 years and they have, like, grown stepchildren and this sort of middle-aged thing...

So it was kind of my experiment with, like, can I write—like, let me do this as fanfiction where I don’t feel as much pressure to pull it off. So I’ll just do this short story and I won’t show anyone and I’ll see if I can write a compelling story about two people who’ve been in love for a long time.”

Needless to say, she pulled it off. The book got written and published, though apparently the fic will never see the light of day.

Other authors aren’t so shy about their fanfic and they write a lot of it. 

“[Naomi] Novik scorns the idea that published authors should turn their back on fanfiction. She recalls being on a panel where one member said he couldn’t understand why someone would waste their time writing it over an original work: “I said, ‘Have you ever played an instrument?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I play piano’. I said, ‘So, do you compose all your own music?’”

For Novik and many other writers, fanfiction is a fundamental a way of expressing oneself, of teasing out new ideas and finding a joyous way to engage with writing again after the hard slog of editing a novel. The journey to become a published writer isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral, as we grow older and continue to explore the characters and tropes we love.” (The Guardian)

Novik, who helped found The Organization for Transformative Works, is not shy about the fact that she writes fanfic. In fact, she considers it an important cultural artifact, according to her soundbite here. Though she asks that her fanfic pseudonym not be attached to her in the google-able sense (I couldn’t find out what it is. I think you have to know a guy who knows a guy and I apparently know no guys) she’s not shy at all about the fact that she writes it to this day.

Neither is Seanan McGuire (who is, in case you were wondering, my favorite author of all time.) She discusses fanfic at length in this GeekDad interview that is well worth a read. I couldn’t decide what snippets to quote so I’m quoting none of them. (It was that or quote all of them.) She also wrote a great...”manifesto” might be too strong a word but “essay” doesn’t convey the power of her words, for Tor.com. 

“Fanfic is a natural human interaction with story. Children do it before they know its name. People who swear they would never do such a thing actually do it all the time, retelling fairy tales and Shakespearean dramas and family anecdotes in new lights and new settings. FANFIC WILL NEVER DIE. We need to acknowledge that fact: we need to accept that fanfic is never going away, and that it would suck a sack of wasps through a funnel if it did, because we need it.

So if you know someone who wrinkles their nose at fanfic, or who would tell a former fanfic author that their original fiction is somehow worth less because of their roots, or who is just generally an impacted asshole with legs, remember:

They are wrong. Fanfic is beautiful. Writing fanfic teaches you important storytelling skills. I have a funnel and access to wasps. Thank you for coming to today’s episode of Seanan Gets Mad About Things, and join us next time for No It’s Not All Porn And There Wouldn’t Be A Problem If It Was.”

McGuire especially gets into the questions of race and gender than plague fanfic (do women write more? Why? Is it considered bad because more women write it? PS, the answer to that last question is YES and McGuire’s argument is pretty solid on that front.) She doesn’t pull her punches and if you want to dive more into why fanfic is Important, I’d highly suggest checking out what she says. (And then, once you’re awed by her words check out some of her fiction!) 

[archiveacademics]

Spotlight: My Immortal

So it’s been awhile since I updated this blog. Not going to lie, I just got way behind on all my school work. So, in proper catching up fashion, I will be posting a new blog post every day this week until I’ve caught up.

Now that that’s out of the way, onto the topic of the week (from three weeks ago): MY IMMORTAL.

Yeah, that’s right. This post was original supposed to come out the Sunday after I talked about Fifty Shades of Grey, and I thought, why not pair awful writing together? 

My Immortal is widely considered one of the worst pieces of fanfic ever written. In every single article I read to prepare for this week, that’s how they introduce it: Worst. Fanfic. Ever.

And yet...any yet something about the worst fanfic ever is strangely compelling. Who wrote it? Why? Was it really hacked? All these questions and many more are spawned by the story. 

“The Bizarre, Unsolved Mystery of ‘My Immortal,’ the World’s Worst Fanfiction Story” by Abraham Riesman explores the weird and winding path My Immortal has taken. 

First published in 2006, My Immortal tells the story of Ebony Darkn’ness Demential Raven Way (no relation to Gerard Way, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance) as she does the gothic teen version of skipping her way through Hogwarts. But this is a Hogwarts like we’ve never seen before, a Hogwarts plagued by Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. Or whatever genre My Chemical Romance, Evanescence, and Good Charlotte are. 

I personally never read My Immortal but I had friends who did and they told me all about it. Apparently, it was a big deal in 2006-2007 throughout it’s 44 chapters. People read it and waited for chapters to post with bated breath, the kind of bated breath that proceeds some sort of horrifically fascinating train wreck. 

There are three possible explanations for My Immortal. 

One, its completely serious, written by a teenager with too much time and very little care for grammar or the basic rules of writing.

Two, it’s a satire of the fanfic genre, and a genius one at that.

Three, it’s a trollfic, written specifically to drive people mad with curiosity and just, the worst writing.

““It’s really brilliant, in its way,” said Anne Jamison, an associate professor of English who’s teaching a course about fanfiction at Princeton University this semester. “It’s all the things that people in the fanfic community most hate.” She’s of the opinion that “My Immortal” is a satire, and a viciously intelligent one, at that.”

So that’s Anne Jamison’s opinion (she’s the author of Fic, if you’ll recall, a wonderful book about the history and existence of fanfic.) But others are of the opinion that it’s a trollfic.

“More than anything, trollfic forces the artificiality of what we write to the forefront. In their little world, a character might be the coolest person ever, throwing out one-liners and saving friends from certain death, all while wearing amazing clothes. It’s a fantasy we’ve all had at one time or another, but the authors undercut it at every turn, making us see how silly it all looks when the rest of the world can’t join us in suspending disbelief.”

So writes Adi Robertson in “The Worst Thing Ever Written.” (I really wasn’t exaggerating the horribleness of this story.) 

In 2017, another answer came to light: the author was using My Immortal to find her brother. 

Rose Christo, who claims to be the author of My Immortal, was supposed to release a memoir called Under the Same Stars through a subsidiary of MacMIllian Press. That didn’t happen, though, because the very same brother she was supposedly trying to find stepped forward and basically called her a liar. So the memoir was cancelled. 

And thus ends the story of My Immortal (...for now...). 

There’s a lot of details I couldn’t cover in this post (as I didn’t want it to be a million miles long) so if you don’t already know the story I’d suggest checking out a few of those articles I linked. 

[archiveacademics]

Monetizing your Vampire BDSM Fanfiction for Dummies

Yeah, that’s right. It’s E L James time. 

My title there is a little misleading, because Fifty Shades of Grey was actually a human, billionaire BDSM AU of Twilight. Which is different than vampire BDSM. But I digress.

There are lots of different feelings in the fanfic universe about monetizing your fic. Many of what you might call “old school” writers who lived through the cease and desist letter era are very much against it. Newer writers, especially those post Fifty Shades, might not see the problem. 

There are two different ways to monetize your fanfic. 

One, you can file off the serial numbers, remove names and the more distinctive plot points, and try to publish the usual way. This is sketchy enough as it is. 

But there’s another, more insidious way to monetize your fanfic, and that is to set up a Patreon account and to put your fic behind a paywall, as discussed in this Reddit thread.

“I think it’s shady as hell to ask money for fanfiction.”

“Holding things behind a paywall feels a bit... not good for me when it comes to the legal side of things.”

“Never ever do anything that remotely resembles taking money for fanfic.”

Needless to say the participants are not fans. They do discuss the difference between having a Ko-fi tip jar set up and a Patreon paywall set up. One is a nice way to ask for someone to kick you some cash if they like your work, a one time donation that might buy you a cup of coffee. The other is shady as hell, and potentially falls on the wrong side of the fair use doctrine. 

The Fansplaining podcast discusses the fair use doctrine and other issues with monetizing fanfic in two different episodes: “The Money Question” and “The Money Question 2: The Appening.” For that second episode, they invite fanfic writer and lawyer Earlgreytea68 to join them and discuss a kerfluffle that happened in the fanfic world where an app was hosting free fanfic from AO3 and putting it behind a paywall. There was also another app that simply skinned AO3 for mobile use (which there is currently nothing that does that) and asked for tips. 

Sound familiar?

The hosts, Flourish and Elizabeth, discuss with Earlgreytea68 what constitutes fair use (it varies, as I’ve posted about before, from case to case), and about the dangers of putting your work online where anyone can access it and potentially do whatever they want with it.

It’s an interesting conversation and one I would highly suggest you listen to if you are curious about the monetization of fanfic. 

One of the most poignant things that Flourish says, in a third episode about fan labor titled “User Generated Content”, is about how the world sees fanfic. And by the world, they specifically mean Capitalism.

“Fanfiction, as much as people love mocking it, I think, is more respected when you have Fifty Shades of Grey or something happen. Because then people who don’t have any investment in art, or don’t have any positive or negative feelings about fanfiction as far as aesthetics go, can just be like, “Oh, but you can make money off of that. That’s how we assign value to things.” And that’s sad and weird but it’s true.”

And now we’ve come full circle.

There are lots of different articles to read about the whole phenomenon of E L James. Like this one or this one or this one. But at the end of the day, it happened. The serial numbers were filed off, the book was published, the movie was made, history happened. There is no changing that. What matters is how the fanfic community moves forward and decides to monetize, or not monetize, their work. 

I personally don’t think filing off the serial numbers to publish is wrong. It’s maybe in a grey area, but at the end of the day I have no problem with it. That being said, I do think there is a problem with someone actively asking for payment for the fic they are writing.

Fanfic is, in large part, a labor of love. And it’s not that we shouldn’t be paid for our labors of love, far from it (see the User Generated Content episode of Fansplaining I quote earlier for more on this topic). But it’s a labor of love that skirts the line, legally speaking. Asking for payment is just asking for a cease and desist letter. Should you be sued, it’s much harder to argue “fair use” if you’ve been paid for your work, potentially at the expense of the author’s original work being bought. 

I would never ask for money for fanfic, it just doesn’t feel right to me. Though a friend of mine pointed out to me that I’ve put my own labor of love novella, based on the Iliad, on Kindle. And she’s right, I guess I’m technically asking for payment for my fanfic. But considering the Iliad was composed long before authorship and copyright were quote-unquote “a thing” and also that even if copyright had been a thing the Iliad would by now be in the public domain, I don’t think it really counts. 

And with that being said, I think it’s time for me to say “Goodnight Gracie!”

[archiveacademics]

Spotlight: Some retellings

Guys, I have a confession to make. I read...a lot.

Like, so much. Just...books, everywhere, all the time.

So it’s safe to say I’ve read a lot of retellings in my day and after last week’s discussion about what I deemed “literary fanfic” I’d like to share some of those wonderful retellings with you. For the sake of not making this blog post a mile long, I’m sticking solely to fairy tale retellings and even then, there’s a lot of them. Many of them are YA, but don’t let that distract you, these are well written and well loved books.

Series Retellings

I’d like to start off with a series called “Once Upon a Time is Timeless Once Again” put out by Simon and Schuster. It’s a wonderful set of books written by a few different authors covering a number of different fairy tales. There’s a Sleeping Beauty who defies her fate and goes on an adventure, a Cinderella who grows pumpkins on her mother’s grave, the Frog Prince set during WWII, and other retellings of tales you might not know as well like Shahrazad from the 1001 Nights and story of The Magic Flute.

What I love about these books is the creativity that goes into the retellings. I guess that’s kind of what I love about all retellings, but it’s hard to pinpoint just one thing over the course of so many books, so I’ll leave my praise a bit generic. 

Next is The Frog Princess by E. D. Baker. First in a series of books about an adventurous, clumsy, magic using princess who breaks all the rules her mother sets about what it means to be a princess. This book came before the Disney movie, but has a similar beginning: Princess kisses frog and turns into a frog herself. From there, it takes a very different turn from the movie. The two hapless frogs journey from the swamp back to the castle and along the way make lots of new friends, including a dragon and a talking bat. It’s cute and fun and there’s numerous sequels, though they’re not really retellings themselves, just continued adventures. 

The Wide-Awake Princess by E. D. Baker, however, does continue its fairy tale retelling theme through the rest of the series. The main character is Sleeping Beauty’s younger sister, on whom magic does not work. When her sister is pricked by a spindle it’s up to Annie to gather together a bunch of princes and bring them to her sister, in the hopes that one is her sister’s true love. Each successive book sees Annie taking on adventures in the realm of fairy tales from Snow White to Rose Red.

Jessica Day George has written many wonderful books, including Princess of the Midnight Ball, a retelling of the 12 Dancing Princesses. There are three books in the series about the twelve daughters of a widowed king who fight against the goblins and witches that want to destroy their happiness and take over their world.

If you’re a fan of Ella Enchanted (which I’ll get to later) then you know that Gail Carson Levine is a talented author. She also wrote a series of short books called The Princess Tales and they are simply delightful. From a fairy who gives a blessing that turns into a curse and vice versa, to a girl so obsessed with parsley she eats it until her teeth turn green, the characters in the Princess Tales are not what you expect out of a fairy tale, and yet they are just what they need to be. (My personal favorite is Cinderellis and the Glass Hill.)

Last but by no means least there’s The Lunar Chronicles, begun by the Cinderella retelling, Cinder. The Lunar Chronicles are a futuristic sci-fi masterpiece that bring us a cyborg Cinderella, freedom fighter Red Riding Hood, computer hacker Rapunzel, and alien princess Snow White. I honestly cannot recommend this series enough, it is so well done and quite fun to read.

Cinderella retellings

Ella Enchanted might have been one of the first times I ever read a book and realized it was a retelling of a fairy tale. I was absolutely delighted and perhaps a bit obsessed. But this book still holds a special place in my heart and if you’ve never read I insist you must (even if you’ve seen the movie because, well, there’s just no comparison!)

Do you like choose your own adventure stories? Do you like fairy tales? Then boy howdy are you going to love Maureen McGowan. Cinderella: Ninja Warrior is the choose your own adventure you never knew you needed in your life! It does exactly what it says on the tin, and it is so much fun to go through all the different options and see what happens.

And finally, if you want a little bit more LGBT in your life, I’d suggest Ash by Malinda Lo. It’s a beautiful tale and well worth a read. 

Sleeping Beauty retellings

If you want a more modern retelling, A Kiss in Time by Alex Flinn is great. Sleeping Beauty wakes up alright, right into the modern era. It’s told, at least partially, from the point of view of the hapless teen who managed to kiss her awake, only to end up having to take care of her and teach her the modern world.

Princess of Thorns, by Stacey Jay is based more on the original Italian version of Sleeping Beauty than the one you might be used to. There’s an Ogre and twin children, and lots of adventures.

Princess Ben by Catherine Gilbert is a great coming of age story about a princess struggling to find her place when everything she’s known is suddenly ripped away.

Adult retellings

So all of these books are YA, but I wanted to include a few more adult retellings.

Enchantment by Orson Scott Card is a fascinating retelling of Sleeping Beauty that span continents and centuries. There’s time travel and Russia and Baba Yaga and a bear...I could go on and on about the delights of this book.

The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines is the first book of series that, according to Goodreads is apparently just called “Princess”? Either way, its a great mish-mash of different fairy tales and wonderful adventures. When Prince Charming goes missing, who better to find him than his beloved Cinderella?

And finally we’ve got the 500 Kingdoms series by Mercedes Lackey, one of my all time favorites. The first book is called The Fairy Godmother and tells the story of a Cinderella whose prince was too young. Magic has a way of forcing things to go it’s way, though, so who better to take the poor girl in as her apprentice than her very own fairy godmother?

And with that, I’ll stop throwing books at you.

So...that was just a really long list of books that I think are cool. I could list so many more. I really just adore fairy tale retellings. But this could have been a list of mythology retellings as well...

Speaking of which...I’ve actually written a couple retellings myself. It feels a bit self-important to link to them here, but...

Witches and Wolves

Cassandra

One is a fairy tale retelling, and one a mythology retelling, based on the Trojan War. 

You get bonus points if you can tell me which fairy tale the other story is based on.

[archiveacademics]

Retellings: Fanfic or not?

In my first post I discussed the definition of fanfic and came to the conclusion that it kind of depends on your intent. Did you intend to write fanfic? Great, you did it! 

But what if there was a kind of fanfic more insidious than that, a kind of fanfic you didn’t even know you were writing? Anyone could write fanfic and not even know it. They could publish it, become a huge success, spawn movies, and not even realize they’d written an AU, OC masterpiece. 

Anyone could...including Dan Brown.

Yeah, that’s right. I just called Dan Brown a fanfic writer. Specifically, a person who writes OC AU fanfic about the Bible. And maybe the Catholic Church? I don’t know, I don’t remember Angels and Demons that well. 

Now, there are some who would argue with me. And they might even be right. Take Jill Bearup’s first History of Fanfiction video where she discusses the definition of a derivative work. And yes, technically, that might be what Mr. Brown is doing. But he’s not necessarily basing his books on the Bible, he’s just relying hugely on Biblical canon...in some cases even changing the story...

It all goes back to the idea of authorship, which didn’t really come about until the 1700s and the Statute of Anne, mostly driven by book sellers rather than authors themselves. 

“The concept [of authorship] emerged as the result of a number of related influences--technical, philosophical, political, sociocultural, legal, economic, and literary...perhaps because our own experience of what it means to be an author is so concrete and internalized--so present to us--we may not adequately grasp all that the concept of authorship implies. We may not sufficiently recognize, for instance, the fact that authorship is a concept, something quite distinct from the physical act of inscription.”

So writes Lisa Ede in “The Concept of Authorship: An Historical Perspective.” The historical perspective she takes is that there is a lot more to the concept of authorship than just writing something down. Monks used to do that all the time, but they weren’t considered authors. 

“When we are faced with medieval authors and readers alike, we are faced with a foreign, nonempirical sensibility. We are confronted by authors who are for the most part content to repeat inherited materials, making their own primary contribution...primarily to the area of decoration, and often content to remain anonymous.” (Emphasis in originial.)

Ede quotes Judson Boyce Allen’s “The Friar as Critic: Literary Attitudes in the Middle Ages” here. And I’m so struck by that word, “nonempirical.” What does it mean in this context, though, the context of authorship.

In general it means faith or theory driven. So a nonempirical sensibility in medieval authors and readers is likely meant to convey a sense of being laid back, uncaring of the specific authorship of any given work and more concerned with, perhaps, the content of the work. 

It’s an interesting thought, and downright bonkers when compared with the modern era’s obsession with authorial control. The Disney corporation would have a collective anuerism, can you imagine? Communal Mickey Mouse. 

So if authorship is so important, but the Bible was written before the concept, is Dan Brown writing fanfic or not? 

I’d also like to talk a little bit about the concept of pastiche. (Dan Brown’s not doing this, so forgive me if this paragraph feels shoehorned in, it had to go somewhere.)

Pastiche is like parody, except it celebrates the mimicked work instead of mocking it. It’s a term used a lot in the old school Sherlock Holmes fanfic community (as opposed to BBC Sherlock). The question becomes, if you’re writing an entirely new Sherlock Holmes story in the voice of Sir Arthur himself, where does the line fall between pastiche and fanfic? Are they possibly the same thing? Or may it’s a venn diagram?

Maybe, like my original definition of fanfic, it’s all the intent of the writer. If you intend to create a pastiche (and you do it well), congrats! You did the thing! But if your pastiche is intended to be fanfic, then congrats! You did the other thing!

(And maybe if you intend to write pastiche but it’s not well done you can just call it fanfic and call it day.)

But back the question of the day, are retellings fanfic or not?

I’d like to argue that they are a kind of fanfic, maybe like a subgenre. Because the intent is not necessarily to write fanfic, it’s to tell a story you love or are fascinated with again, but in a different way. Again, but highlighting different characters or hitting different themes in the plot. Which...now that I’ve written it out, sounds a lot like fanfic. But because it can be counted as “literary” it’s not necessarily considered fanfic. 

There’s the subgenre name: literary fanfic*.

So there you have it, Dan Brown writes literary fanfic. Who knew?

*Honestly, I love that stuff. I eat it up. Give me a retelling, excuse me, a literary fanfic of a fairy tale or of mythology and I am 100% going to be excited to read it. Never fear, my next spotlight will hook you up with some of my favorites!

[archiveacademics]

Spotlight: The Boy with a Scar

After talking so much about why people write and read fanfic it absolutely behooves me to introduce an actual fic to this blog. I’m starting with The Boy with a Scar series. 

The Boy with a Scar is a series of what if Harry Potter AUs written by dirgewithoutmusic on AO3, aka ink-splotch on Tumblr, aka E Jade Lomax*. Each story follows the course of all seven books and uses characters named in the series. 

Have you ever wondered...

What if Neville and Harry were both killed as infants, and there was no Chosen One?

What if Petunia had raised Harry like a son?

What if Ron was the Chosen One?

What if Petunia was the witch and Lily the Muggle?

What if Harry was Sorted Slytherin?

What if Harry was a squib?

Answers to all these questions and more can be found in the series!

There are a few things I really like about this series. The first is simply how lyrically the author writes. Reading this fic feels less like reading a story and more like reading poetry**.

The second thing I like about this fic is how much canon is involved. The author does not simply imagine, “hey what if Harry was a girl...” she thinks, “If Harry was a girl would she still be sorted into the same house? And if she was, who would her friends be? Would she have friended Hermione right off, or maybe bonded with Lavender and Parvati?” 

What I’m saying is she takes the smallest details from the book, names of characters you probably couldn’t say on your own, but when you read them you think “oh, yeah, that sounds familiar” and makes them central to her AU. When Harry is sorted into Slytherin, he’s not still friends with Ron and Hermione despite it, he’s friends with some Slytherin boys. Ron and Hermione are the background characters in that story.

This series is probably the best example of why I love AUs. They take the story that is and imagine the story that could be. I’m not saying I necessarily want J K Rowling to go rewrite all of Harry Potter to put Harry in Slytherin. The magic of the series is that it exists as it does, with Harry in Gryffindor. It wouldn’t be Harry Potter if he weren’t in Gryffindor. And yet...

I feel like I’m explaining this badly. 

What I mean to say is that I love AUs because I love seeing how things might have gone. I don’t necessarily want them to have gone that way, but it’s a fun mental exercise. I do the same thing with my own life, play the “what if” game. AU fic, especially good AU fic, is basically the best kind of “what if” game set in a universe I already know I love.

The Fansplaining podcast has a great episode about AUs “Alternate Universes” that I totally should have linked back in the terminology post, but oh well, it fits here just as well. 

And if you’re still confused about why I love AUs so much, go read some! Start with The Boy with a Scar and then find more. Search for AUs in a series you love be it something as well worn and beloved as Star Trek or as new and shiny as The Witcher. 

Go. Read. Enjoy.

*If you read and enjoy the fic, might I suggest also checking out E Jade Lomax’s original series? They can be found on her website and she’s just a phenomenal writer.

**Ironically, I’m not a huge poetry fan, but I’m a sucker for lyrical prose so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[archiveacademics]

Why write fanfic?

I left off my last post with a screenshot from AO3′s homepage that gave some stats about how many fandoms are represented and stories have been written on the site. And there’s a lot, over 5 million works so far. But what is it that drives people to write fanfic? 

In Fic by Anne Jamison, popular YA author Rachel Caine writes about how fanfic saved her writing career. 

“By 1999, I was ready to quit professional writing. Quit, completely and utterly. I was still doing the occasional short story...During this time I wrote another novel, Exile, Texas, a straight mystery/thriller; but although it was published, it also sold in not fantastic numbers.

But mostly? Mostly it was the fic that kept me writing, from the sheer joy of creating stories in a wold that I loved to inhabit. I also loved the challenge of working in a world that had clearly defined rules and characters. Unlike most fanfic writers, I didn’t want to write outside the lines; the highest compliment I could be offered was when readers confused one of my stories for an actual episode of the show [I was writing about].”

A similar story is told by Betts, a guest on the Fansplaining podcast episode “The Craft of Writing (Fanfiction)” Betts was working at a bank and smothered her creative and fannish impulses when she discovered a popular fanfic in the BBC Sherlock fandom called “A Cure for Boredom.” And it changed the whole trajectory of her life. She eventually got an MFA and became a writing instructor. She even uses fanfic in her classes. 

“In Creative Writing, I have a lot more freedom, and so since I went into the MFA as a…as what they called a “self-taught” writer, since I had no creative writing—traditional creative writing instruction before that point, I developed my class around how I taught myself how to write, which involved very heavily fanfic.

And so I would take, when I started writing fic, I would take a concept that I wanted to improve on—and I did this very systematically, very scientifically—take a concept I wanted to improve on, and I would do all this research, and I would find like, resources and what other people thought of it and whatever, and then I would write a fic where I only focused on that single thing. And then everything else I didn’t care about. So like, if I was focusing on character development or voice, then it didn’t matter what anything else was doing. I was just, one thing at at time.

And so I got to develop my class around that, and that, like, I have these like—I have lesson plans, and I have a week dedicated to fairy tales, and a week dedicated to…and the fairy tale week is actually about form. And how to break form and invoke meaning. And I have a week based on character development, a week based on, on endings, which is called “Exit Strategies.” [all laugh] 

And so I do very much bring in fandom context into my classroom, because we also talk about—I should say, I meet with students one-on-one, because I’m, I think I’m better one-on-one than, you know, just standing in front of people talking at them. And I can usually tell by sitting in front of someone what their interaction with pop culture is. [all laugh] And so, like, they’ll be talking about their story, and I’ll just kind of insert, “Do you like fanfiction?” [all laugh] And it’s amazing, it’s amazing how many faces just like light up, like “I didn’t know I was allowed to write that, I didn’t know I was allowed to do that.” And I’m like “Yes, please please please write fanfic, please write things that are a step away from it, please begin with a fic and then move original,” you know. 

And so when I phrase it like “You can start something with something you’re familiar with, and then slowly work it around into something original,” and that kind of branches off of what I see as a major block for a lot of people who are writing original fiction, which is there are just too many decisions to make when you face a blank page.” (From the episode transcript)

Ok, so that’s a lot of words from someone else, I know, but I think what Bett’s gets at here is so important. Writing fanfic is not only about loving something and participating in it, it’s also about learning. Writing fanfic can teach you how to write. 

A simple Google search for “writing fanfic” will bring up a myriad of articles on the subject. From Julie Beck’s “What Fanfiction Teaches that the Classroom Doesn’t” to Colleen Mitchell’s “How Fanfiction can Improve your Writing” and Vivian Shaw’s “6 Ways Fanfiction Makes your Writing Stronger.” 

As Betts says in the podcast episode “[Fanfic] is a genre of freedom.” It allows for lots of different ways of writing and reading and interacting with a piece of media (be it TV, movie, book, or otherwise) that other genres don’t generally allow because there are boundaries, rules of what makes a genre a genre that fanfic doesn’t necessarily have. And it becomes easier to focus on particular aspect of a piece, be it character or plot, when you don’t have to fill in all the blank space. So an AU gives you a new setting to play with, but the characters are still the same, and you’ve got the story laid out for you. Meanwhile a story where you add an OC into an existing world allows you to work on character development without making you create the setting or the plot as well.

I actually ran a survey, posted to Facebook and it only received 12 responses, so it’s by no means scientific. But I asked my friends if they wrote or read fanfic and why.

One of the questions I asked was about when they started writing fanfic, and the answer for most of them was between 10 and 15, though one person said they didn’t start writing fanfic until they were 22, and another said they started at 35! Fanfic is for everyone of all ages, is what I’m saying. I also asked when they stopped writing and while some are still going strong, others stopped in their twenties. 

The most important question I asked, though, was what they got out of writing fanfic. A few of the answers were the expected, about loving the world or being inspired by reading other people’s fics. Many, though, had very interesting reasons for writing their fics. 

The survey was anonymous, so here are some of the answers in no particular order:

“It was some of my first serious attempts at writing a story more than a couple pages long. It was a great way for me to practice plotting, and writing a longer piece, without having to spend all my time working on world building and character creation as well. Also, playing around with the characters and the world, almost like a set of dolls, was - and is - just plain fun!”

“I first started writing it to make my own little world where I could be important and cared about, since I didn't have it in real life. After that I was just interested in exploring a couple concepts/characters deeper than the canon did.”

“I wanted to know what happened in those side stories, but obviously the author wasn’t going to tell me so someone had to do it. I had fun, entertained myself and others, flexed my creative muscles, and learned how to emulate others’ writing voices.”

“I wanted to see the characters explore storylines that weren't getting written in the comics (Rogue was done dirty by the x-men comics in the early 2000s), half of my oc got killed off (Anakin Solo [don't get me started on how much material Disney squandered when they rendered a bunch of novels/comics non-canon]), or I just really hated all the canon pairings (HP)”

I also asked why my friends read fanfic, because a whole big part of the experience is not just writing, but reading it as well!

“The last season [of Gilmore Girls] changed writers and producers and it became a different show, so I turned to fanfic to continue wondering what would happen if the original writers and producers were on the show. Additionally, the fanfic became a lot more interesting. I realized that there were a lot more people that liked the show than I even realized. I was also really impressed with the creativity of the writers. They were able to replicate the characters, how they would act, what they would say, almost perfectly to make a completely new scenario. I would say that reading fanfic has made me more imaginative about the shows I watch, or even the books I read, but also it has opened up a realization that there is a community in almost everything you do.”

“Fanfiction gives you alternate takes so you can spend time in the viewpoint of a character who barely makes an appearance in canon. Also, importantly, fanfic is written by peers, so you can interact with the writers. We are all friends.”

“Probably the main draw is getting to spend more time with the characters that I love, and seeing how they might react in different situations that didn’t come up in the source material. Also, it can be nice to be able to search the archives online to find something to exactly match my mood at the moment (such as if I’m in the mood for angst, or romance, or family bonding, it’s easy to find exactly what I want).”

“Ff is definitely 1) an easier lift than reading something new and 2) satisfies a slightly different itch than canon. It’s easier to read just because I mostly know what to expect from the characters and the type of story. There are few unpleasant surprises and I’m already invested, and if I don’t like a story, it’s easy to drop and move on. Fix in my brain is also wish fulfillment. There are many many things I would never stand for in canon, like overly saccharine endings or pointless melodrama, that I can enjoy in ff because “real” story is already established. Canon has the hard job of making a world or a character enjoyable or interesting. Ff is where I can go to wallow (sometimes for years) in that joy or interest, whether it was a character or a dynamic or just a specific trope.”

At the end of the day, fanfic isn’t just about reimagining stories we love, it’s about reimagining those stories with other people. 

Both Rachel Caine and Betts discuss this, that it was the positive feedback of the fandoms they wrote in that helped give boost their writerly self esteem and keep them coming back to write more, which eventually led to them writing their own original fiction. 

Not that you have to move from fanfic into original fic! There are plenty of people who are completely satisfied writing nothing by fanfic for the rest of their lives. And that’s ok. 

Whatever your experience with fic, whether you are a lurker who just reads but never comments or writes your own stuff, or if you’re a BNF (big name fan) or even a fan who became a big name (like Rachel Caine or Naomi Novik), the pleasure of fanfic is that we get to experience it together.

[archiveacademics]

An Archive of Our Own

Yay, I finally get to talk about AO3!

If you’ve been following along on this blog you’ve definitely read a few mentions of AO3, but no explanations. If you’ve been curious about it and looked it up yourself you might have noticed that my blog is mildly inspired by both the name and the design of the archive. 

So, what is the Archive of Our Own really? Is it like LiveJournal, FF.net, and Wattpad? 

The answer is “kind of.”

AO3 is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works. The OTW, as it’s called, states that:

“The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.” (What We Believe)

One of the ways the OTW works to reach this goal of providing access, preserving history, and legitimizing fanworks in general is the Archive of Our Own, a repository of fanworks (at this point, just fanfic but eventually fanvids and fan art will also be hosted) that does not limit the type of fanfic you can post, unlike FF.net or LiveJournal. And unlike Wattpad, there are no original works living side by side with the fanfic. AO3 is an entirely fandom oriented space.

The OTW and AO3 came about in 2007, the brainbaby of a group of fans who faced a worrying new monster: Fanlib.com. 

“There were strangers in town, setting up shop...

The defining event was the debut of FanLib.com in 2007. Fanlib was a for-profit, multifandom fanfiction archive that billed itself as providing “the world’s greatest fan fiction by popular demand” ...When fans investigated, they didn’t like what they saw. Fablib’s press release asserted that the “launch of FanLib.com represents the coming of age of fan fiction”...Worse yet were the materials that the compay provided to its investors and sponsors, which made clear that FanLib was not putting fans first; rather, the site would be “managed and moderated to the max” with fan activity taking place “in a customized environment that YOU”--the corporate sponsor--“control.”

...FanLib wasn’t trying to help fans create and share fanworks. It was packaging fans for corporations.”

So writes Francesca Coppola, one of the founding members of the OTW, in Fic by Anne Jamison. Fic explores the existence of fanfic from the very beginnings to the modern day, spanning multiple fandoms and topics as well as controversies experienced within fandom. 

Coppola writes about the birth of the OTW and AO3, which resulted from the fear of corporations taking over fanfic and destroying what had, to that point, been a thriving, if sometimes slightly hidden, community. After a post written by LiveJournal user Astolat argued for the existence of a fan run archive and laid out the kind of design elements it would need, the community came together. Lawyers and teachers and media specialists were all galvanized to lend their talents to the newly formed OTW and so AO3 was born, as well as a few other brainbabies.

OUR PROJECTS

Archive of Our Own Fanhackers Fanlore Legal Advocacy Open Doors Transformative Works and Cultures

Which is not to say that the road has been smooth. As a nonprofit, the OTW must run pledge drives every so often and sometimes the discourse around the freedom offered by AO3. 

In “The Online Free Speech Debate is Raging in Fanfiction, Too” Elizabeth Minkel (co host of the Fansplaining podcast, but in this case not writing under the auspices of said podcast) discusses the vitriol that gets tossed around by users of AO3 in regards to there “come one, come all” policy. 

“Fans have also long disagreed about what content any given space should host. Some early archives banned specific subjects, while others put restrictions on certain characters or relationships. AO3’s free speech maximalist approach to fictional content was founded in direct response to corporate censorship as a way to ensure that all fanworks were protected on the basis of simply being fanworks, rather than meeting a standard of literary merit or adhering to thematic guidelines or restrictions.

“One of our most quoted sections from the ToS is: ‘You understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled,’” Matty Bowers, AO3’s policy and abuse chair, tells The Verge. The recent AO3 dustup, Bowers says, has been embedded in the conversation from the start. “Even back then, there were complaints that if ‘x’ was hosted, certain groups [that were against ‘x’] wouldn’t support the Archive. It pops up periodically over the years, and often gets more traction during drives.

”Some of fandom’s content wars are about preference: hating a particular character, for example, or preferring one ship over another. Simple disagreements in taste can get ugly enough, but in some corners of fandom, morality, activism, and shipping have become irrevocably tangled, and it can be challenging — even impossible — to untangle them.”

While this article was written in 2018, the issues of content, what is and isn’t appropriate, still makes waves. Newer, different waves, but it’s all the same ocean. 

Yes, that’s right. Aja Romano wrote this article just yesterday regarding the censorship practices of China and how AO3 is no longer accessible. There was some debate if the censorship stemmed from a fandom war between certain factions of fans of the actor Xiao Zhan, but that’s likely just bad timing on the fans’ part.

Not all stories about the AO3 are bad news, though. Just last August Romano wrote a much more uplifting article.

That’s right, the entire website won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work. It’s an amazing accomplishment and historical as well. No website has ever won an award like this, or on this scale. 

So that’s the basics of AO3. You can always learn more by checking out the site and playing around with the tags. You could even write your own fanfic and post it! 

And remember, if you’re a fan of something, you’re not alone.

[archiveacademics]

Tags, Terminology, and Tropes

So let’s talk tags.

No, not gang tags. Tags on fanfic. 

If you’ve interacted with fanfic, or even just fandom at large, you’ve likely experienced tags. Hell, if you’ve used Tumblr or Twitter or I think even Facebook at this point, you’ve experienced tags. Tagging is, by now, a digital way of life, a way to organize the chaos that is this giant cultural archive and project of capitalism that we call the internet.

So. Why are tags important?

I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader! Tags are important for a number of reasons. For one, they allow others to find your fanfic. Whether you read on Tumblr, Wattpad, or AO3, there are thousands upon millions of stories to wade through and it can be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. Hence, tags.

Fansplaining has a great episode called “Cataloging Fandom” where they discuss tags from an academic standpoint. If you’re into that sort of thing definitely check out that episode. Meanwhile, Tumblr user salt-of-the-AO3 has a great post explaining the who, what, when, where, and why of tagging. It’s a great starting point if you’re just learning about tags. They even have a list of tags to get you started, whether you’re writing something and want to post it or looking for something new to read.

Say, for instance, you want to read a story about Harry Potter. You type “Harry Potter” in the AO3 search bar. But wait!

You don’t have the time, much less the energy, to wade through over 240,000 stories. So maybe you decide to narrow it down a little. You still want to read Harry Potter, but maybe you want to focus on Draco Malfoy, because you’ve got a thing for bad boys.

Yeesh. That’s better, but still not great. So now you’ve got to decide: do you want to read a Draco love story or a Draco adventure? Since you’re a hypothetical construct and an extension of myself right now, you want to read a love story. Results for “Draco Malfoy, romance”?

Ok, that’s a bit more manageable, when compared to 240,000. But it’s still a lot to sort through. So we’ll give it one last shot. Who do you want Draco to be in love with? Not Harry (that would shoot our search results up through the roof again). Not Hermione, or Ginny. You’re looking for something to read, not trying to sort through thousands of hits. So let’s go with Lavender Brown. 

Eh, good enough. You’ve got it down to under 1,500 hits. From here you can either start sifting through the results to find something you like, or you can go even more down the rabbit hole and try another search by character and event. Draco and Lavender go to the Yule Ball. Draco and Lavender at a wedding. Draco and Lavender in a coffee shop AU...

The tags are your oyster, is what I’m saying. Or the world is in the tags. Or some clever reuse of a common phrase that replaces one of the words with “tags.” 

But Chris (you hypothetically ask) what the heck is an AU?

Ah, my dear sweet hypothetical reader, I’m so glad you asked that, because it brings us to the terminology part of the post.

To start with, a fanfic writer that goes by the name of Moonbeam has a great Fanfiction Terminology master post. It covers a lot more ground than I’m going to get into today, so if you’re very curious, it’s a good place to poke around and find out what things mean. There’s also an article by Aja Romano called “Canon, fanon, shipping and more: a glossary of the tricky terminology that makes up fan culture” that’s a really good starting point for this stuff. Thirdly, the podcast Fansplaining has an episode on this topic called “~fanspeak” you can listen to. Or you can just continue reading.

Now, back to AUs.

AU stands for alternate universe. An AU usually takes the characters of a story and puts them in a new setting. There are many popular types of AUs from coffee shop AUs to high school AUs to magical AUs to either a historical or a modern AU (depending on whether the story itself is modern or historical). An AU can also change the plot of a story, taking familiar characters and sending them down different narrative paths. What if someone didn’t die like they did in the canon? Or what if they did die at a critical point? Either change could send your characters down a wildly different narrative path.

So in your hypothetical search for a story, maybe you decide you want to see Draco Malfoy the barista fall in love with Lavender Brown the Instagram Influencer who comes to his shop everyday. Or maybe you want to read a story that takes place at Hogwarts where Lavender becomes obsessed with Draco instead of Ron. Either can be considered an AU.

Now, I used a word up there that may or may not be familiar to you, depending on how deeply you live in the world of fandom. 

Canon.

Canon is the original, the progenitor, the common ancestor from which all fanfic descends. Harry Potter in all it’s seven book glory is canon. As are all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And however many there are of Angel. And all the comics... What I’m saying is, canon is the original work that fanfic is based off of. It’s the official, some might say the “real” version, but there’s a bit a value judgement there, so I wouldn’t. Anyway, that’s canon.

(If you don’t already, you’ll get why this is funny in a minute.)

The word “ship,” in the fandom sense, is short for “relationship.” In the vaunted old days of the early internet and the X-Files fandom, fans who wanted Mulder and Scully to get together began to refer to themselves as “relationshippers” or “r’shippers”. Eventually, the term became shortened to simply “ship” and became both a noun and a verb. A ship is the pairing of characters you want to see together. To ship is to want a pair of characters to get together. 

In our hypothetical example, for instance, you ship Draco and Lavender. 

If you’re still a bit confused by the term, the podcast Fansplaining has a great article about it called “To Ship or Not to Ship,” and they also ran a survey that garnered over 16,000 responses which are gathered together and presented for your perusal here. And last but not least they produced two episodes called “The Shipping Question” and “The Shipping Answers.” 

Alright, I’m going to go through a couple more definitions as fast as I can because this post is getting long and I haven’t even gotten to tropes yet.

So, in no particular order I present...

Slash: A word used to denote a male/male pairing, original so called because of the “Kirk/Spock” fanfic of the Star Trek zine era. 

Fem Slash: Like slash, but with women. 

OTP, or One True Pairing: Your favored pairing in a fandom. 

OC, or Original Character: A character you introduce into a story. So maybe the new transfer student to Hogwarts or the new Starfleet lieutenant on the Enterprise. 

Headcanon: Your beliefs about the motivations of a character or potential plot points of a story that may or may not be supported by the canon (but are at least usually not actively disproved by canon).

Fluff: A fanfic that is short and sweet and not at all angsty. There’s is generally not much plot advancement but the stories are comforting and often domestic.

Crossover: Where characters from separate works are thrown together. For instance, I have a friend who writes Batman and One Piece cross over. 

Gen fic: A story without an overt romantic element. While pairings might happen they happen despite the story, not because of it. 

Filing off the serial numbers: When a fic writer scrubs their story of all recognizable copyright (names, places, vampires or wizards or whatever) in order to publish it. Think 50 Shades of Grey. 

Self insert: An original character that is obviously, consciously or not, based on the author. 

Mary Sue: A character who is “special.” The word has a pretty negative connotation these days. It’s usually a self insert character who is better and stronger and smarter than everyone around her and without whom the problem of the plot could never be solved. The line between what is or is not a Mary Sue (or Marty Sue/Gary Stu if the character is male) is pretty blurred these days, with trolls sometimes shouting that any female self insert character is a Mary Sue and thus obviously sucks. Elizabeth Minkel, of the Fansplaining podcast, wrote a great article about the issues of Mary Sue and the patriarchy and she and Flourish discussed those issues in an episode of the podcast.

There are so. Many. More. I could go on forever talking about different terms. But these are some of the big ones that I tend to throw into casual conversation, and, well, Google is your friend. If you don’t know the definition of something, look it up. I still have to do that sometimes. 

Now, let’s talk tropes!

TVtropes.com has a great explanation about what a trope is:

“A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell...

Tropes are not the same thing as cliches. They may be brand new but seem trite and hackneyed; they may be thousands of years old but seem fresh and new. They are not bad, they are not good; tropes are tools that the creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the audience. It's pretty much impossible to create a story without tropes.“

Tropes in fanfic are fun. “Five Tropes Fanfic Readers Love (and One They Hate)” is a another survey run by the folks over at Fansplaining. You can read the article above or listen to the episode on the topic. They discuss the variety of different tropes that are either loved or hated by the more than 7,500 respondents to their survey. 

As TVtropes discusses, “Tropes are Tools.” They aren’t good or bad in and of themselves. They simply exist. Fanlore.com has a great list of different tropes. AU fic itself is a trope. And thus we’ve come full circle. 

Thanks for sticking with me this long, this post kind of got away from me. 

Make sure to tag your tropes, folks!

[archiveacademics]

Spotlight: Wattpad

So this week’s spotlight is another platform that can be used to write and distribute your fanfic.

Wattpad actually didn’t start out as a platform for fanfic though. In fact, it did even necessarily start out as a platform for writing at all. 

Created by Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen in 2006/2007 (according to Wikipedia and their website respectively) Wattpad was originally dreamed up as a platform to make mobile reading easier and more accessible. The launch of the app store in 2008 made the site even more accessible and “by 2011, Wattpad [had] attracted more than 1 million registered users and over 4.1 million in funding.” 

So what makes Wattpad so special? 

Aside from the fact that it’s one of the only platforms that allows original and fanfic to live side by side*? Is that not special enough for you?!

Nah, I’m joking. It’s actually an interesting case study. The fanfic community wasn’t necessarily invited to Wattpad (like they were with FF.net or AO3) and yet somehow the community grew there completely organically. It’s to the point now that they have on staff a woman whose title is “Community Engagement Specialist for Fanfiction.” 

Her name is Samantha Pennington and she was interviewed by Flourish and Elizabeth of the podcast Fansplaining in an episode called “What’s the Deal with Wattpad?” They also interview Aron Levitz who is head of business development over at Wattpad. 

They way they discuss Wattpad in the episode is really interesting. It sounds as though Wattpad skews towards younger fans, though they run the gamut from 13 to 30 (and older but that’s the main demographic). Unlike AO3**, which tends towards older fans in part because of the uncensored nature of the site. 

Flourish admitted that one of their biases about Wattpad, before they spoke with Aron and Samantha and experienced the site for themself, was the idea that many of the stories were very unprofessional and unedited (much like on FF.net). However, apparently the community is really giving, in terms of commenting and editing, and the platform has a function called “inline commenting” that allows commenters to comment on single paragraphs or even lines at a time. As far as editing another’s work, that’s pretty much gold. So the platform isn’t as much the wild west of grammar as Flourish had assumed.

Elizabeth’s biases about the platform came from the publishing industry. Wattpad is an active agent for its more popular writers and has had a hand in helping get its writers published. The Kissing Booth by Beth Reekles is an example of original fiction that made its way from Wattpad to print and all the way back to the screen, as a movie this time. So when Elizabeth, a fandom journalist, mentioned fanfic to publishers they automatically thought of Wattpad.

Anna Todd might have something to do with that. 

If you don’t know who Anna Todd is, that’s ok. She just wrote the enormously popular book After which also garnered itself a movie. It’s a Harry Styles/Self insert character fanfic in which Harry is apparently “Punk Harry” and the self insert is a college freshman who needs her life changed by a bad boy...or something? Full disclosure, I haven’t read the story, the book, or seen the movie. 

Does that make me a bad student of fanfic?

Anyway, Wattpad themselves connected Todd, according to the article “This 25-Year-Old Turned Her One Direction Obsession Into a Six-Figure Paycheck” by Amy Odell. 

“Wattpad called and said they wanted to turn her book into something bigger. They had been emailing Todd...but she didn't believe they were really from Wattpad, so she ignored their messages. "I thought it was someone messing with me," she said. "Then, when they emailed me from a Wattpad email, I was like, Oh! This is Wattpad. Like, OK, this is insane."

Finally, they got her on the phone. Six months later, with Wattpad acting as her agent, she had multiple offers from publishing houses in New York to turn After into a multi-part series.”

So now Anna Todd has published multiple books and has a movie deal, all from writing something that was just supposed to be a side gig to keep her busy when she had few friends and no job. Not bad.

When someone turns their fanfic into a published work by changing the names and a couple of characteristics of the story, á la 50 Shades of Grey, that’s called filing of the serial numbers and it’s a very controversial practice in fandom circles. But that’s a topic for another time.

*Arguably tumblr does this, but not in the same way and tumblr’s just a whole ‘nother can of worms that I will not be getting into.

**I will be doing a spotlight for AO3, so if you don’t know much about it, just wait.

[archiveacademics]

What about the lawyers?

Fanfic is not just about the fans or the creators of the original works, oh no. There’s a third category of people who care very much about fanfic. Well, when they’re paid to.

Lawyers.

Yeah, ok, this is maybe the least sexy part of fanfic. But it’s an important part too. 

Our buzzwords for the day are fair use, transformative work, and public domain. Oh! And Mickey Mouse.

So what is fair use? The Organization for Transformative Works has a great explanation of what constitutes fair use. 

“The U.S. Copyright Act provides that certain kinds of uses of copyrighted material are fair use, and therefore are not infringing. The law provides examples of the kinds of uses that are likely to be allowed -— such as criticizing or commenting on the underlying work. The law also provides a list of factors to consider in determining whether a particular use is allowed:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

the nature of the copyrighted work;

the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Courts generally balance all four factors in deciding whether something is fair use — no single factor determines the answer.”

(Emphasis in original)

So what does all that really mean, though? Number one means that works used for education purposes have a really good argument for fair use and anything used for commercial purposes doesn’t. Number two basically means that fictional works tend to be more protected than factual ones. Number three is...honestly I’m still a little unclear the extent of number three. I read an article called “Fan Fiction and the Fair Use Doctrine” that described number three as having “the grayest area of any other factor when applied to fan fiction.” It seems to depend on how much of the original story you use (plot, world, characters) and then whether or not some of those things (characters) are actually copyright (sometimes characters are, sometimes they aren’t.) Finally, number four just measures whether or not the work in question will effect the market for the original work.

One thing that’s become very clear in my research is that the courts tend to take these fanfic copyright infringement cases on a case by case basis. There is no overarching ruling that everyone adheres to. In the infamous words of Justice Potter Stewart, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["fanfic” and “copyright infringement”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” (Wikipedia.com)

Generally, as long as the work itself is not commercial, there’s not a large chance that the author, even if they dislike fanfic*, is going to sue for copyright infringement. 

So where does “transformative work” come into all this?

Fanlore.org, a wiki run by the Organization for Transformative Works, gives a pretty concise definition of “transformative work” and why it’s important. 

“Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and graphics. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.“

(Emphasis in original)

So if I’m writing a noncommercial transformative work (for instance the events of Harry Potter from the point of view of a new, background character) then I’m well within the fair use doctrine. I’m (1) using the world of Harry Potter for the noncommercial purpose of entertainment. Harry Potter itself, of course, being (2) a work of fiction. (3) I’m using events from the books but not major characters (as my hypothetical fanfic here is from a background character’s perspective). And at the end of the day (4) there will be little to no effect on J K Rowling’s market. In fact, it might even have the opposite effect, making people want to go read the originals (either again or for the first time). 

So that’s a quick overview of fair use and transformative work from someone who’s not a lawyer (nor even a law student). If you want to hear more from actual lawyers on the topic I have a few options for you to check out.

The Fansplaining podcast had a great episode called “Buncha Lawyers” where they interviewed two lawyers who work with fandom and, more specifically, the Organization for Transformative Works. 

There is also this webcast. Kyle Courtney is a copyright advisor for the Harvard office for scholarly communication. The webcast skips a bit, but it’s fascinating and well worth a listen if you want to learn more.

Last but not least there is a tumblr called FYeahCopyright (run by one of the lawyers from the Fansplaining podcast) that answers questions about fandom, fair use, and copyright that you can check out.

But wait, there’s more!

I still haven’t gotten to public domain, or Mickey Mouse yet. I’ll be quick, I promise.

It wouldn’t be fair, though, to talk about copyright without discussing public domain. Public domain is basically what happens when copyright has expired and the work is open to the public. Fanfic is no longer questionably legal, it’s totally fine! And “as of 2019, copyright has expired for all works published in the United States before 1924. In other words, if the work was published in the U.S. before January 1, 1924, you are free to use it in the U.S. without permission. These rules and dates apply regardless of whether the work was created by an individual author, a group of authors, or an employee (a work made for hire).” (Stanford University Libraries)

“But 1924,” you say, “that can’t be right. That’s so long ago!”

You’re right, imaginary conversant of mine, that is a long time ago. Unfortunately though, it’s not wrong. Copyright law in the US last for just a bonkers long time because of, you guessed it, Mickey Mouse.

The Mouse casts a long shadow and Disney has the money and the lawyers to lobby for longer and longer copyright terms. Twice now, copyright has been extended basically entirely because of Disney. 

“With only 5 years left on Mickey Mouse’s copyright term, Congress again changed the duration with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.  This legislation lengthens copyrights for works created on or after January 1, 1978, to “life of the author plus 70 years,” and extends copyrights for corporate works to 95 years from the year of first publication, or 120 years from the year of creation, whichever expires first. That pushed Mickey’s copyright protection out to 2023.” (alj.artrepreneur.com)

So Disney’s got at most another three years before we all start writing Mickey Mouse slash fiction**. 

*And oh how some of them do hate fanfic. But that’s a topic for another time.

**If you don’t know what slash is, hang around. I’ll get to that next week.

[archiveacademics]

A short history of fandom

So I really wanted to talk about the history of fandom in my last post, but it got long and there didn’t seem to be any room to shoehorn this stuff in, so I just decided to make a “Fandom history” minipost. 

Fansplaining, the most wonderful podcast of all things fannish, has two great episodes about the history of fandom: “Fangirling through time” and “Fandom histories.”

In “Fangirling through time” the guest, Evan Hayles Gledhill discusses Victorian sentiment albums and how they’re basically just Victorian Tumblr. The collection they work with is housed at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Evan also shares during the episode that they run “Historical Squee,” a tumblr blog dedicated to historical fandom. It’s super fun! 

During the episode the three also talk about...well, basically how the patriarchy ruins everything. And if you don’t believe me you can listen to episode or, if you’re running low on time, check out this article, “Champagne From a Slipper: When Fandom Was Acceptably Male” by Veronica Howell and she’ll lay it out for you.

So there it is, your fandom history minipost. Hope you enjoyed!

[archiveacademics]

Histories and the first Spotlight

Earlier this week I looked at what the definition of fanfic is. It’s a topic of endless debate and one I will doubtless return to again and again over the course of this study. But for today I’d like to do a little look back at the history of fanfic and, more broadly, of fandom itself.

“First there was “Star Trek,” the original series, whose viewers—many of them women in stem fields—organized conventions and created self-published journals (a.k.a. fanzines) with fiction about its characters, a small but notorious slice of which included sexy doings between Kirk and Spock. Or: first there were fans of science-fiction novels and magazines who held conventions and traded self-published journals as early as the nineteen-thirties. Or: first there was Sherlock Holmes, whose devotees, hooked by serial publication, pushed for more stories, formed clubs, and wrote their own. Or: first came Virgil’s Aeneid. Or: first, the Janeites. Or: first there was you, and your friends, age ten, making up adventures in which Chewbacca met Addy Walker, and writing them down.”

So opens “The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction” by Stephanie Burt, which, if you didn’t read it when I linked to it in the last post you really should. The history of fanfic, if we wanted to be really broad, could go all the way to the ancient Greeks writing plays based on The Iliad and The Odyssey which are based on oral stories of a real war that (probably) happened around 1180 BCE. 

But we’re not going to do that, because, as Jill Bearup explains in the first of her “History of Fanfic” vlogs, The Aeneid and Iphigenia at Aulis and Trojan Women were not technically fanfic, but derivative works. As I discussed before, fanfic is about intent*.

To find the true beginnings of fanfic, you need to only go as far back as the eighteenth century.

“...popular authors such as Daniel Defoe started protesting that his work was being "kidnapped" and bowdlerised by amateur writers who reduced the value of his creations with inferior impersonations,” writes Ewan Morrison in an article entitled “In the Beginning, there was fan fiction: from the four gospels to Fifty Shades.”

1913 saw the publication of Old Friends and New Fancies – an Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen by Sybil Brinton, the first piece of published Janeite fanfic. (Janeite, of course, being the name of Jane Austen fans at the time. Much like Swifties or Beliebers today.)

I myself own a book called Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, and though I’ve yet to read it (my shelf is over full, you might say) I’m sure it’s delightful.

From the Janeites of the eighteenth century we move forward to the Sherlock fans of the nineteenth. This genteel group of readers was so dedicated to Sherlock Holmes that they managed to raise him from the dead. Well, they annoyed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle so much he raised Sherlock from the dead. 

From there, the literary club of the Baker Street Irregulars was established in the 1930s and they are still alive and active to this day. Apparently, there’s a lot to discuss, as “Conan Doyle generally wrote the Holmes stories quickly and with a minimal amount of editing, and as a result the canon contains a huge number of mistakes and inconsistencies. It was from these that the practice of "Holmesian speculation" arose, which consists of pointing out discrepancies in the canon and devising (sometimes reasonable, sometimes extremely outlandish) explanations for them.” (Fanlore.org)

From Sherlock and the Irregulars we move to the modern era, and what you could potentially call the birth of modern fandom. That’s right folks, it’s time for some Star Trek.

“The shape of those [early 2000s] fandoms, in turn, was due to those that migrated out of meatspace onto the brand new baby internet, which of course owed their structure to the zine-based fandoms of the ‘70s and ‘80s. All of which can be traced back to – you guessed it – Star Trek.

Star Trek: The Original Series is often looked to as the origin of modern fandom, and many of the networks and communities those fans established continue to influence fan interactions to this day, as does the example they set in using fandom as a means of social awareness and political action.”

In “None of This is New: An Oral History of Fanfiction” Jordan West discusses why you shouldn’t be surprised when you draw the card “Harry Potter erotica” in Cards Against Humanity and gives a quick overview of the history of fanfic. However, West argues that writing such as Shakespeare and The Aeneid count as fanfic which, by this blog’s definition, they don’t.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that everyone has their own ideas of what fanfic is and where it really began. I’m sticking with the Janeites as my point of ignition. 

Now that’s settled (insofar as anything on the internet is every “settled”) let’s move on to this week’s Spotlight. Every week, I plan on putting a platform, a person, or a particular story in the spotlight to show off the practical side of these academic headaches I’m giving myself. (I’ve gone back and forth on the definition of fanfic at least fifteen times since I posted the first blog post, much less when I was writing the damn thing.)

This week’s Spotlight is on two of the earlier homes of fanfic: LiveJournal and Fanfiction.net. 

LiveJournal was created in 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a mixed blog/social media site.  It was purchased in 2006 by Six Apart and then sold in 2007 to SUP Media, a Russian media company. (Wikipedia.com)

“LiveJournal encourages communal interaction and personal expression by offering a user-friendly interface and a deeply customizable journal. The service's individuality stems from the way highly dedicated users utilize our simple tools, along with the instinct for individual expression, to create new venues for online socializing.

Because of LiveJournal's unique combination of platform and social media, LiveJournal has a unique personality in different parts of the world. In fact every national community in every country is unique in its own way. Where a user in the United States might focus their attention on communities dedicated to topics from the popular to the esoteric, users in the U.K. may tend to rally around entertainment-related issues. In Russia LiveJournal makes up the vast majority of the blogosphere, hosting over 80 of the top 100 Russian blogs. In Singapore LiveJournal revolves around collaboratively purchasing overseas goods. And that's just for starters.” (LiveJournal.com)

Fanfiction.net was created in 1998 by Los Angeles programmer Xing Li. The largest archive of fanfic on the internet, fanfiction.net comes in second in popularity to Archive of our Own**. It has over 12 million users and hosts stories in over 40 languages. Unlike LiveJournal, fanfiction.net is not a social networking site, but a site specifically dedicated to fanfic. Users can choose from a number of categories for their work and they can rate their work as well. The site also hosts forums for fans and writers alike, and registered users can apply to be beta readers. (Wikipedia.com)

I have never had a LiveJournal (I’m honestly not even sure if I’m capitalizing that right), and if I did have a ff.net account I had to have been, like, 12 when it was created and 13 when it was last opened. Still, these are two of the earliest archives of massive amounts of fanfic from hundreds of different fandoms (just check out this list of book fandoms that have stories written about them of ff.net. And that’s just the book category!) 

A history of fanfic is always going to be a little bit messy around the edges, in part because the definition of fanfic is so personal and changeable. All I can hope is that you’ve learned something new today while reading this. If so, I’ll count that as a win.

*And as I haven’t discussed yet, it’s also about copyright and ideas of authorship. Again, this is a topic you’ll have to look forward to.

**AO3 will be the subject of a future spotlight, don’t you worry.