Fanfiction is undoubtedly a phenomenon. From Fifty Shades of Grey to the fiery Inferno of Dante, it’s everywhere. But is anyone really studying it? Putting it under a microscope? Excavating sites like Ao3 for the real tea?
Samantha Close: I’m Samantha Close. I’m an assistant professor in media and popular culture at DePaul University in the College of Communication, and I am a fan studies researcher.
In this series, I spoke to the experts about what fanfiction is really about in the modern era. First up? What is fanfiction? And more to the point, what is a fan?
SC: What fan studies is, is basically what it sounds like. It is the academic study of fans and fandom and audiences and everything that they do,
Fan studies looks at fans and their relationship to the text, or media that they love, the third point in the triangle between the industry, the media, and the audience. It also looks at the media that fans themselves create.
Writer and Northwestern sophomore Asha Mehta describes what someone might call the basic instinct towards fanfiction — most fans describe something like this that drove them to seek out extra-texual works.
AM: I think that people don’t really understand that sometimes there’s just like, this drive to get and learn more out of a character or a world than you got from the original work. Like, I have this feeling after, after reading or watching something really good, like, I just need more of this. There’s never going to be more of this. I want there to be more of this. So I think that’s especially, especially when I was younger, that really drove me to read a lot of fanfic… I think it’s a lot more about being just really in love with the character, really in love with the world, and wanting more of it.
But as for why fanfiction has thrived, before and after the advent of the Internet, academics go one step further – to understand fanfiction, first you have to understand fandom.
SC: the way that I would define a fandom is, first, there is a fan, right? A fan is somebody who has an intense, affective or emotional connection to a media text, a media world, a particular celebrity, a particular sport, something like that. And it’s important to know that that intense connection can be positive or negative.
And then a fandom is when a lot of fans get themselves socially connected. And so fandoms can consist of many smaller communities inside but in some way, the fandom is a loose subculture that will tend to gather on a particular platform, or maybe a few different platforms, or will have its own convention. And so they’re socially connected in some way,
Paul Booth is another fan studies professor at DePaul. For him, the basic unit of a fandom isn’t the one fan – it’s the connection that fan makes with other fans, forming a network that generates the impulse to create.
Paul Booth: it’s social. I think people publish it because they they want readers, and they want to meet other people and talk about this thing they’re a fan of. I think you don’t, you don’t go into professional publishing be if you are writing about such small topics, because what you’re really looking for is that small community that is very strong. I think it’s the difference between being a fan and being part of a fandom, right? Like, you can be a fan of something, but when you want to share it with other people, then you become part of a fandom.
Northwestern sophomore Abigail Jacob agrees; she found fanfiction to read more about her favorite characters, but ended up finding people to bond with.
Abby Jacobs: it’s just really fun to, like, bond with people over like, the same stuff. And you guys, you know, you already have, like, the similar interest in whatever the fandom is about. Then to, like, I don’t know, like, even create closer bonds with all these people who you really don’t know over, like, you know, oh, like, we love, like, this dynamic, and we know we both loved, like this piece of fan fiction, because, you know, this is like a media consuming, centered community.
But like the basic units of life, fans aren’t all created equal – Close told me that there are some fans that have a stronger pull than others. Their ideas get taken up and incorporated into media fans create.
SC: The kind of cornerstone or hub, hubs of the fandom. I’ve even seen in some fandoms that particular fan fictions will come up with original characters that then other people will write stories with as if they were canon characters.
This leads us into a set of definitions that’s crucial to understanding the world of fan-created media.
First up is the canon: the media property itself. Different fans might consider different things canon, like movies and books within the same universe, but it’s usually the agreed-upon starting point for whatever media fans are creating. And from there, it pretty much goes off the rails.
SC: Then there are head canons, which is your own personal interpretation. One fans interpretation of something right, what this character was thinking or feeling at a particular moment, what the answer to a particular mystery is some question in the source text.
And then Fanon is when a headcanon is shared amongst enough fans and very and especially used as the pretext for fan works like fan fiction that it becomes a widely shared kind of agreement within the fandom, or within parts of the fandom, that this is how it is.
Fanon can be anything from agreeing that a certain character has tattoos or scars that they don’t have in canon, to inserting romantic relationships between characters that might not even have met in the canon.
I asked Close why she thinks some headcanons are destined to remain just that, and why some get to graduate, transcending their humble beginnings to be enshrined in fan media forever.
SC: I think there are a lot of reasons, and the two that come to mind are that if people are really looking for representation in a particular text and are really wanting to see themselves in this thing that they love, then they’re going to seize on moments where you say, hey, this could be.
One example is the proliferation of characters in white-dominated media, like Harry Potter, who, in fanon, are often portrayed as nonwhite. It’s another way of asking a piece of media to reach beyond itself — For example, a character’s curly hair and outsider status take on new meaning if they are headcanoned, and then fanoned, as Black – meaning that was quite likely not intended by the original author.
SC: Another kind of obvious example of an Ascended head canon that became Fanon is something like Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are lovers, right? And so queer people are looking at this very close partnership and see themselves in it and say, Hey, I think that could be me, and that is a really powerful kind of a moment. And I think that that does widespread desire to see yourself and the thing that you love, to know that it loves you back, is one of the reasons why something could become so popular.
Fanfiction offers a chance for fans to interact with one another and with the media that they love. What’s not to like about it?
Apparently, a lot. Colloquially, people can tend to think fanfiction is poorly written, deranged, and derivative. After all, it’s just taking characters and plots from other media, pilfering them and reheating the leftovers. But Close doesn’t see it that way at all.
SC: one of the things that’s most interesting about fan fiction, from an academic perspective is what it tells us about repetition. We tend to think about repetition as boring, like, Oh no, it’s just a rerun. Oh no, it’s that same old thing again, right? Where’s the new thing? But fandom is all about repetition, right? And if you look at fan fiction, a lot of it will be variations on a theme, essentially. So it’s not the same story every time. In fact, it could be radically different stories, especially if you start bringing in AU, which is alternate universe fan fiction.
Fanfiction is like variations on a musical theme. You start with a simple melody – that’s the canon. And then, you change it.
[music starts]
Variations might be more complex,
People might be transformed into animals.
[One variation]
More simple,
People might be baristas,
[Another variation]
Or sound like a different thing entirely.
people might be in another cannon entirely, right?
[Another variation]
But they all grew from the same original melody.
And so I think it tells us something beautiful about the universe of possibilities that you can create from one single seed.
And as for other allegations? That fans – or nerds, if we’re going to get pejorative – are obsessive, crazy, insular, and a little deranged? Well, you could arguably say the same things about football fans. But fans have gotten the label of “weirdo” from the beginning – and Booth says that orientation is actually crucial to how fan culture developed.
PB: Fandom is a more feminine activity, fan fiction, fan bidding, fan cosplay. These are feminine activities again, which is not to say that only women do them, but that it is culturally considered feminine, and so the the activities become devalued, because the texts And the people are seen to have less value, and that is not fair, and it is not right, but that’s the culture that we that’s the culture we live in, and the one we’re trying to change. And so I think partly, I don’t study sports fandom, because I’m more interested personally in the margins.
And that marginality Booth is interested in can be fanfiction’s secret superpower. Fan spaces can provide a safe space for ideas and dynamics that are already marginal to be explored and examined, without the pressures of open publicity.
PB: Fanfiction is a way to work through topics and issues that are not necessarily something that would get traditionally published, either because it’s niche, because it’s problematic, and sometimes you write about problematic things, not because you like it, but because you’re working through issues. I think we see a lot of abuse and a lot of assault in fan fiction, not because fan authors are like, Yes, more assault, but like, this is how this it’s almost it’s therapeutic to write about it and put it out there. So, yeah, I think it becomes a way to communicate about identity and and emotion to a targeted audience,
And as for the idea that some of it’s poorly written? Close admits that’s true, but why should that mean it should be ignored?
SC: fanfiction is one of the most generative imaginative spaces that we have. Is all of it going to be beautiful and amazing and intricately written? No, is all of mainstream media output beautiful and amazing and intricately written? Very much, no, right? And so if you take away even the filter that mainstream media has, then you’re going to have a lot more things that are a lot more amateur. But we need places to be amateur. We need places to learn. And there’s so much growth and love that you can see in the world of fan fiction.
[music]
I’ve been asking experts how they first encountered fan culture. Close told me for her, the gateway to fandom was Sailor Moon.
SC: I used to have to go to individual websites and download the fan fiction from the website and then print it out so that I could read it in the car when my parents were taking us on a trip to visit our relatives. Right? That used to be the world. How things have changed.
Things have changed. From VCR tapes to Tik Tok, and from printing out fic to Ao3, next episode, we’ll look into how the Internet changed fan culture forever.
For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
