Fanfiction Essay
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clocketpatchFor my final paper in linguistics I choose to write on fanfiction. This would probably have been longer if I hadn't run out of time. However, that's probably a good thing since, as is, it's close to six-hundred words over the recommended limit. Anyway, I'm posting it here to give full disclosure to my 'research subjects' heh.
‘Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal’
~ T.S. Eliot
‘There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.’
~Audre Lorde
‘If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.’
~Toni Morrison
A Golden Age of Intertexuality: fanfiction and the internet
Often dismissed as a dysfunctional activity pursued by a minority of fans with an unhealthy attachment their object of fawning, the production of fanfiction has increased exponentially with the invention of the internet. The sheer bulk of fanfiction being posted online is staggering; it has been estimated that the yearly postings to the site www.fanfiction.com form the equivalent of 8,200 novels each of 50,000 words (Evans, 2006: 27), and that is only one website! In its broadest sense fanfiction is the act of writing stories based on characters and situations which do not belong to the fanfiction author. In this context fan fiction can include everything from Romeo & Juliet – Shakespeare pinched the idea for the famous play from the earlier poem the Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet –, to the pastiche of the Baker Street Irregulars, to a Harry Potter songfic. However, the fanfiction genre is associated more with current popular media than literary works. The first modern example of fanfiction distribution came with the “Spocknalia” fanzine produced in 1967 (Evans, 2006: 16).
Before the advent of the internet fanfiction was a highly marginalized activity despite the large numbers of people engaged in writing stories and producing homemade fanzines. Distribution of these stories, especially slash stories (to be defined later), in the pre-internet world was problematic, and the very activity of production heavily stigmatised. The anonymous internet offers a far safer forum for this activity, and google searches put a multitude of stories at the finger tips of fans who might have been too embarrassed, or lacked the funds, knowledge, or gumption, to seek fanfiction from its traditional distribution methods through fanzine mailing lists and at conventions. With online fanfiction not everyone posting stories or ‘lurking’ – reading without reviewing – is a diehard fan. Now the curious can, and do, access fanfiction, and “those engaging in online fan activity may never dress up as Klingons” (Bird, 2003: 32).
Fanfiction offers a way for audiences to escape their submissive position as passive consumers and to become producers. “[…] fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions. In the process, fans cease to be simply an audience for popular texts; instead they become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.” (Jenkins, 1992: 23). “I pinched it”, is practically the motto of fanfiction. As said by Michael Warner (2002), “A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.” Not only do writers take ideas from the particular fandom they are basing their work on, but they may also find inspiration in the stories of other fanfiction authors creating a virtual public; a land with writers, readers, and copy-editors which parallels the real publishing industry. Except, unlike in the real publishing industry, in fanfiction the line between the audience and the producer is blurred, not only on the grand scale between the producer of the source and the producer of the copy, but also within the fanfiction community where fanfiction writers are usually fanfiction readers, and vice versa. It is certain that some degree of this does occur in main-stream media. The writers of today's books and the producers of today's movies and television are not deaf, dumb, and blind. They read and watch the products of other producers, but there is still the underclass, the vast class of the everyman and everywoman who can only consume, who cannot produce. Fanfiction changes this. In fanfiction not everyone is a producer, some individuals are lurkers by nature, but everyone has the opportunity to become a producer if they so wish.
Indeed, one of the primary reasons individuals begin to write fanfiction is because they read and come to the conclusion that ‘I might be able to do that’ (Evans, 2006). Through reading widely in the genre – albeit usually limited to a few fandoms of interest – fanfiction writers gain an idea of what is ordinary, what is bad, and what is good. Most online communities have rules to monitor story quality, and authors are often encouraged to find a beta-reader to proof their story. Also, most archiving sites have some form of author contact, allowing readers to give authors reviews, whether those are private emails or public postings. By reviews other authors can suggest new turns for a story, give tips on grammar, or request a certain ending. Of course, the author is at full leisure to ignore these suggestions, but it still gives a level of communication between reader and writer not often seen in other kinds of media.
The online fanfiction community has a rich lexicon. This ‘fic jargon’ contains terms which span the entire fanfiction community, while other words are specific to certain fandoms and websites. A short list of the terms used by the entire community include: slash, cross-overs: super intextual stories which combine elements from multiple fandoms, AU: stories which take place in an alternate universe where aspects of the original text are distorted or inverted, Mary (Gary)-Sue: an idealised authorial self-insertion, defined by Paula Smith in 1974 (Evans, 2006: 58), and many more. Also, these communities often include forums where writers can discuss the source text, advertise their stories, ask for help etc. The websites which host these communities are often maintained and governed by adults who got their start in the ‘zine distribution circuits of the 70s and 80s. Many writers of fanfiction are children or young adults who are given a chance to enhance their skills under the guidance of these older authors (Evans, 2006).
Fanfiction writers not only produce new stories based on the source material, but create rich apocryphal writings which are sometimes elated to the same level of regard among fans as the source which spawned them. For example, The Weight, an epic Star Trek novel by Leslie Fish (Jenkins, 1992: 177), or the Missy Good Xena novels which were eventually adapted by network producers into actual episodes (Boese, 1998; Evans, 2006: 75). Writers borrow and built on the universes they create, making new clichés and forming giant meta-texts. The entire fanfiction community is something of one huge sand box in which various authors can model their castles off one and other. The following summary from “And Is There Still Honey For Tea?” a story archived on the site A Teaspoon and an Open Mind (www.whofic.com) by an individual who calls herself uktechgirl, demonstrates the ways in which fanfiction writers build off of each other and exchange ideas:
“In Kitty Fisher’s inestimable BDSM Five/Turlough slash epic “Dreaming of England”, there’s a wonderful moment where the Doctor indulges in a little fantasy: of retiring from the adventuring life, to a quiet English idyll replete with scones and jam, where he and Turlough can while away the time debating the relative merits of clotted versus whipped cream.
I thought it sounded nice, so I pinched it, with much affection and apology.”
Uktechgirl’s story is over 70,000 words long. The story which inspired it is even longer, dates to a pre-internet era, and is considered a classic by fans. The great length of Uktechgirl and Kitty Fisher’s stories is not common, most fanfictions are short stories which range from a few hundred to a couple thousand words, but great epics are in no way uncommon. The quality of both stories from the snippets I read was extraordinarily good – better than some published novels – but again, quality, like length, varies drastically. These two stories also serve to highlight another fanfiction phenomena: the slash genre.
Slash is not, as might be inferred by the name, a genre of violent slasher stories. Rather, it refers to a genre of male-male erotica which, with the exception of some Manga publications (Evans, 2006: 19), does not have a counterpart in mainstream, published literature. The slash refers to the / symbol used to conjoin names, example: Kirk/Spock, Harry/Draco, or, in Uktechgirl’s novella, Five/Turlough. Slash can range from innocent hand holding to graphic, drawn-out descriptions of sex. Some stories make no secret of their aim by labelling themselves as PWP (Plot? What plot? or Porn Without Plot). Female-female versions of the genre – femslash – can be found, especially in places such as the Xenaverse which contain many strong female characters (Boese, 1998; Evans 2006; Jenkins 1992), but are generally rarer than the male-male examples. Many reasons have been put forward to explain the slash genre, which has been evident in fanfiction since the early 70s (Jenkins, 1992).
Since around 80-90% of fanfiction, and nearly all slash fiction, is written by woman (Evans, 2006: 17) it has been reasoned that slash is simply the female counter-part to the idea that men enjoy lesbian pornography. Also speculated are ideas that slash provides a two-for-one of erotically enjoyed characters; That it alleviates possible jealously issues which might occur for female readers and writers if the male character of their desire were to sleep with another female character; That, in situations where there are no strong female characters, slash allows writers to tell a stories about a sexual relationship between equals without inserting original characters, which run the risk of being labelled Mary-Sue, or having canon females who act OOC (out of character). In most fandoms the very act of a romantic relationship between men is OOC, but often less so than having a female character on equal footing with the men (Evans, 2006: 21-22). Slash provides a way in which to extrapolate situations within the source canon in ways which would probably, and in most cases certainly, never be explored in the original text. Writers of this kind of fiction read into gestures seen in original text which could purport a potential, never realised, relationship. Sometimes characters are thrown together, seemingly at random, because of an interesting dynamic, or just to see what will happen. Finally, because of the era in which began, slash may be seen as a way of alleviating anxieties and coming to understand gay culture (Jenkins, 1992).
Slash, because of its complete alternativeness to any publish genre and its bending of sexual norms, is a highly subversive kind of writing which has met with much controversy and resistance from fans, from websites which archive fanfiction, and from those who own the copy-rights to characters involved. Despite this, slash is one of the most popular genres of fanfiction and has a long tradition of underground distribution. The advent of the internet allows slash writers a broad, and anonymous forum for distributing their works. Stories which, in the age of fanzines could often only be distributed among friends – slash was banned from many fanzines and conventions (Jenkins, 1992) – can now be displayed to a large audience of interested readers. The internet, because of its anonymity, makes the reading and writing of slash fiction safer for the parties involved because there is no print version lying around for unwanted parties – such as parents, spouses, or employers – to stumble across and question.
One of the most interesting points on slash is that, in the internet age, its primary authors seem to be young women, some as young as 12 or 13 (Evans, 2006). ‘Family friendly’ archive websites such as fanfiction.net have made strides to prevent graphic slash, and indeed, any adult story content, from being posted to their archives. This rule is skirted around by fans who give their stories innocent sounding summaries while using recognised codes such as PWP, and variety of symbolic citrus fruits, to denote the story’s real content to potential readers. Those not familiar with this code may find themselves shocked when a seemingly innocent story descends into pornography.
Slash highlights a main point of fanfiction: authors of this material do not simply reproduced stories of the type given to them by their source text, but rework the material, sometimes drastically. Fanfiction gives its authors opportunities to explore possibilities raised but never pursued in the source text. It allows the audience to re-work endings and modify scenes which they were dissatisfied with as a viewer. Fanfiction can be used as a vehicle for erotic fantasy fulfilment, for philosophical debate, or simply as media for releasing repressed creativity. Fanfiction goes beyond this however. A story posted to a fanfiction website online has the potential to be read by thousands. It will be peer-reviewed. It may go on to inspire other stories. This is a kind of impact that, twenty years ago, was completely out of reach for an amateur, unpublished author.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boese, C. (1998). The Ballad of the Internet Nutball: Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse. Retrieved April, 2008, from http://www.nutball.com/dissertation/. Rensselaer polytechnic Institute.
Bird, E. (2003). The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. New York: Routledge.
Evans, A. (2006). The Global Playground: Fan fiction in Cyberspace. Retrieved April, 2006, from http://www.freewebs.com/alisonresearch/DISSERTATION2.pdf. Rpehampton University.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Paticipatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counter-Publics. Duke University Press.
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