Hello, and welcome back to this series, where we’re exploring the academic and personal effects of fanfiction.
This episode, we’re catching up where we left off: with a cataclysmic change in the world of fandom that would change fanfiction forever.
Paul Booth: My name is Paul booth. I’m a professor of Media and popular culture at DePaul University, and I have been I study pop culture, but specifically I look at the way that people use popular culture in various ways. So my research has looked at fans quite a bit.
Booth has been studying fans for almost 20 years, and in that time, they’ve undergone a significant publicity facelift.
Paul Booth: I think a lot of preconceived notions were that fans were antisocial or weird in some way. Some people thought fans were violent or hyper sexual, or just generally, very negative views of fans. And this is what in fan studies we call the kind of pejorative look at at fans that has changed hugely in the 20 years that I’ve been studying fans, so that now I don’t think it’s as odd or weird to be considered a fan, and I think a lot of fan practice is more normalized.
He has some ideas on why that might be.
Before the Marvel movies, if you had said you were a fan of Spider Man or Iron Man or Incredible Hulk or whatever, people would have been like, Oh, you’re one of those people that reads comic books. But now, you know, maybe you just like the movies. Maybe like the TV shows. Maybe– our media has fragmented, so, so too has our fandoms. But I think the internet has also made it much more common for people to talk about their fandoms.
The internet was like the steam engine for fan culture. All the ingredients were already there, in the form of fan culture, but everything moved a lot slower, and was spread out over a larger area.
Booth showed me a book he has, from before the Internet and fan culture collided. In it, you could look up the area you lived in and find a list of comic stores and other fan gathering spaces. The book isn’t old by any means, but it’s been rendered all but obsolete in our connected age.
Paul Booth: The Internet made it so easy and convenient to find people who like the thing you like, and I think that’s why fandom has really become very specific is because now I don’t just find someone who’s into this niche show I’m into, but I find people who are into this pairing, this ship, pairing of these two characters in this niche show during this time period, right like so you because you can do that, whereas, you know, 20 years ago, you had to buy a book to tell you where the nearest geek store was, it just is, it’s, it’s wholly different.
And that interconnectedness, and the movement towards specificity, changed the landscape of geekery forever.
Samantha Close is another fan studies professor at DePaul; she edited a forthcoming book on fan video, or fan edits, which have been around in the form of mailed VCRs since the 80s, but underwent a similar transformation relatively recently.
SC: what’s happened now is that you see fan video being incredibly accessible. If you do a search for any kind of film, TV program, podcast, whatever, on YouTube or on Tiktok, you’re going to come up with fan videos. It’s not just going to be clips of the canon, and that proximity to mainstream culture is having an impact, both on the fan video itself, and the fan video is having an impact on that mainstream culture.
Now, my For You Page doesn’t just have sports highlights; it has fan edits for individual players, complete with their own theme songs. I’m not just getting book and movie reviews; I get fan videos of everything from The Hunger Games to Bluey.
Close’s point is that fandom is migrating into the mainstream, via sites like TikTok and YouTube – which might have huge implications for how it works in the future, and for who considers themselves a fan.
SC: Having these sites means that the fan communities form in a bit of a different way. They’re more accessible in some ways, I think, because you can find them from a simple keyword search, you don’t need to know someone the way that you used to need to know someone, or need to be able to get to a specific convention the way you used to had to go to a convention to get a VHS tape of the fan video right. But it also means that they’re more diffuse and they’re less distinct, and it’s harder for things like established norms and specific cultures to maintain.
That lack of specific, agreed-upon norms – like the way individual reddit threads are strictly monitored – fandom wars aren’t just small spats or individual fights anymore. They can even end up in court – like when two authors accused the other of plagiarism, when both wrote books based on a common fanfiction trope – the omegaverse.
SC: When people who have really intense emotions already, because that’s what it takes to be a fan, get socially connected to each other. Flame wars and you know, politics are a given. … It just plays out in different ways, and it plays out at a different sense of scale, because and it plays out in a way that’s visible, in a way that it wouldn’t have been in the era of zines, where you had to have known someone to get on the zine mailing list, and that zine is only going to be distributed to a few people.
Northwestern professor Jen Comerford brought up another potential con of the digital age: the original author of a work is quite visible; authors like JK Rowling continue to interpret their own work long after it’s published.
Comerford: It’s another thing now, you know, in our mass media age of authors who are actively commenting and tweeting their views that kind of affect the way that we then engage with that work, because they’re still out there. They still have a voice. They still haven’t accepted their death as an author.
Which leads us back to fanfiction itself – what did the internet do to change our understanding of authorship and fan works?
I brought in Northwestern students Asha Mehta and Abigail Jacob for this one, to get the details on where fanfiction is on the Internet and how each site is different.
It all starts somewhere, with what Close describes as the great grandparent of all fanfiction sites.
AJ: I was a big fanfiction.net girly for a long time,
AJ: fanfiction.net, to me, gives very much, like, Library of Alexandria. Like it’s old, it’s ancient, but there’s, like, some treasures in there.
JC: So I grew up in the age where, like, the place for fan fiction was fanfic.net and as it turns out, that is no longer the case.
Fanfiction.net is more of a relic than an active site. The next branch on the family tree is Wattpad, which is widely used, but tends to get a bad rep.
AJ: I had a friend who was, like, into My Chemical Romance. And, like, it was getting to the point, like, because, you know, we like, talk about what we like. And so she would talked about MCR fan fiction. And it was getting to the point where I was like, okay, like, I feel like I need to start reading it to understand her Yeah. So that’s what I hopped on Wattpad, yeah?
AM: I feel like was pretty basic in that. In elementary and early middle school, I was a Wattpad user, and I would write on there, and I do not remember the login to my Wattpad account, so I That stuff’s all out there still. I couldn’t find it.
AJ: I think it’s like, where everyone, like kind of begins. It’s like, I think also, in my opinion, is where a lot of like, the bad connotations of fan fiction like comes from. Like I hear at least, I don’t know, maybe like, this is just the spaces that I’m in, but like, a lot of people make fun with the harry styles fan fictions and stuff like that.
And our final destination? All roads on the internet eventually lead to ao3 which is, as Mehta puts it, for true connoisseurs.
AM: And then I think in eighth grade, one of my best friends was really into supernatural fanfic, and she told me to go on ao3, and she made fun of me for using Wattpad. And was like, ao3 is what the cool kids use. And I was like, okay, you know, because I was 13, I was like, ‘Sure, I’ll believe anything you say, You’re my best friend.’
JEN COMERFORD: It’s, I was told by my students that it’s ao3 is really the space for that. …So they kind of laughed at me when I did this, but I was like, Okay, well, now that I know that ao3 is the place I went on there and I saw that there, there are plenty of Tempest fan fictions. There are plenty of, of course, Pride and Prejudice fan fictions. So I put links to those so they’re welcome to you know, bring those in.
Mehta summed up the general attitude towards Ao3 nicely:
AM: I would say, for me, from my perspective, if there’s a spectrum of fan fiction that goes from, like, would scar you for life to genuinely the best thing you’ve ever read. I would say ao three occupies both of the extreme ends of that spectrum … I feel like Ao3, is where you go to, like, if you, if you’re brave enough, that’s where you go to find the gems. Like, high risk, high reward.
Ao3 is kind of like the levels of the ocean. The deeper you go, the stranger it can get. Mehta and Jacob told me they’ve encountered fanfiction based on the boat that got stuck in the Suez Canal. They’ve read Harry Potter fanfiction that explains a different philosophical concept within each chapter. They’ve read crossover Shakespeare fanfiction.
Close agrees with their assessment, for the most part, and added some history: Ao3’s full name is Archive of Our Own, because it’s entirely fan-run and operated.
SC: I think that there’s a lot to there’s a lot to love about the Archive of Our Own. The fact that it was started by fans, it’s a non profit. It is for fans, is all to the good, right? Saying, Okay, we need to own the servers. We need to not let this be vulnerable to another commercial platform that doesn’t care about us. For instance, as Tumblr, that was the darling of fandom, proved when they’re like, Oh, we’re going to take all adult content off of Tumblr, right? Like, but this happens again and again. If you look at the history of social media platforms, and especially anything that’s considered adult can be very vulnerable, and so there’s a lot to love about it.
But Ao3 has run into some really interesting problems; it’s not censored, and the content on the site isn’t monitored. While this allows for the kind of interesting, creative works we talked about, it also opens the door to content that is actively harmful, like actively racist content.
SC: If you say we’re not going to censor anything, then you have declared that you have no standards and that you are willing to let people be harmed, and especially if they are not the dominant population on your platform. And what’s going to happen as some new research that I have just been reviewing has found out is that people will leave fans of color are significantly less likely to use the archive of our own, and I think that’s sad, because of all of the reasons that the archive is great, but they have made that choice to not make themselves a safe platform for a particular community, and that’s, that’s what’s going to happen. People are going to leave.
Fanfiction as a whole has a lot of problems that are often reflected in the sites it’s written on: a gender disparity favoring male characters, sites that don’t work, and the dubious ethicality of writing about real people are just a few examples. But according to almost everyone I spoke to, it’s here to stay. The answer isn’t trying to stop fanfiction writing or sites, but instead to look at it more closely, and the way it can often mirror the real world.
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Asha Mehta is also a creative writer. Having written several novels and short stories, fanfiction was a huge part of her journey.
I think that writing fan fiction has made me a much better writer, because it allows you to sort of build up your writing stamina, because you’ve got this world and these characters you absolutely love already feel immersed in and you can sort of explore the concepts of character development and plot development through a framework that is pre built. I think that was really valuable for me, especially as a younger writer, I wasn’t able to create these nuanced characters like out of my own mind in the same way as I can now, because that’s a skill that takes a really long time to develop, but fan fiction allowed me to write these more epic, emotionally involved stories anyways.
One of the experts I spoke to compared the way writers use characters and plots from other stories to the way budding artists often copy the work of the Masters, to get a sense of technique and style. Jacob agreed with Mehta’s take, and added a memory of her own.
I wrote Percy Jackson fanfiction on there. Yeah, like, um, I don’t know what else there is really to say to that. Like, I never finished anything because I was 12 years old and I had, like, no like, writing stamina. I remember I. Still, like, it was, like, my little secret, because, like, um, I was 12, so I didn’t have a computer, um, so I got my mom’s like, work computer at night after she went to bed. Like, I’d always like, be so sure to, like, make sure I’m, like, closing all my tabs before I leave.
Although the times and media are very different, and fan culture has experienced some significant changes along the way, Jacob’s story echoes Close’s from last episode – sometimes, fanfiction is just about wanting to express yourself to people who might hear you, or just wanting more of something. Jacob summed it up best:
AJ: Fan picture is both the beauty of humanity, but also everything wrong with it.
For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
