Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Read online

  ANNE JAMISON

  Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

  An Imprint of BenBella Books, Inc.

  Dallas, Texas

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Copyright © 2013 by Anne Jamison

  Smart Pop is an imprint of BenBella Books, Inc.

  10300 N. Central Expressway, Suite 530

  Dallas, TX 75231

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  Send feedback to [email protected]

  First e-book edition: December 2013

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jamison, Anne Elizabeth, 1969–

  Fic : Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World / Anne Jamison.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-939529-19-0 (trade paper : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-939529-20-6 (electronic) 1. Fan fiction—History and criticism. 2. Literature and the Internet. I. Title.

  PN3377.5.F33J36 2013

  809.3—dc23

  2013029129

  Copyediting by James Fraleigh

  Proofreading by Chris Gage and Brittany Dowdle

  Text design and composition by John Reinhardt Book Design

  Printed by Bang Printing

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  www.perseusdistribution.com

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  Please contact Glenn Yeffeth at [email protected] or 214-750-3628.

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Foreword © 2013 by Lev Grossman

  “Mad as a Box of Frogs” © 2013 by Wendy C. Fries

  “Fables of Irish Fandom” © 2013 by Andy Sawyer

  “Recollections of a Collating Party” © 2013 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  “Literary Playtime” © 2013 by Ron Hogan

  “Mulder/Scully versus the G-Woman and the Fowl One” © 2013 by Bethan Jones

  “Fic U” © 2013 by Jen Zern

  “An Excerpt from Percy Weasley’s University Thesis” © 2013 by Chris Rankin

  “How Harry Potter Fanfic Changed the World (Or at Least the Internet)” © 2013 by Heidi Tandy

  “Twilight’s True Believers” © 2013 by Jolie Fontenot

  “A Million Words” © 2013 by Lauren Billings

  “On Writing—and Being—a Mary Sue” © 2013 by Cyndy Aleo

  “Becoming Bella Swan” © 2013 by Randi Flanagan

  “The Fandom Gives Back” © 2013 by Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings

  “Bittersweet” © 2013 by Tish Beaty

  “Fifty Shades of Gold” © 2013 by Andrew Shaffer

  “Just Change the Names” © 2013 by Tiffany Reisz

  “Preying for More” © 2013 by Rachel Caine

  “An Archive of Our Own” © 2013 by Francesca Coppa

  “The Epic Love Story of Supernatural and Fanfic” © 2013 by Jules Wilkinson

  “Pon Farr, Mpreg, Bonds, and the Rise of the Omegaverse” © 2013 by Kristina Busse

  “Real Person(a) Fiction” © 2013 by V. Arrow

  “#BradamForever” © 2013 by Brad Bell

  “Hobbyhorsing” © 2013 by Peter Berg

  “From a Land Where ‘Other’ People Live” © 2013 by Rukmini Pande and Samira Nadkarni

  “Conceptual Writing as Fanfiction” © 2013 by Darren Wershler

  “Blurring the Lines” © 2013 by Amber Benson

  Contents

  Foreword • Lev Grossman

  Introduction

  The Theory of Narrative Causality

  Why Fic?

  PART ONE

  Writing from Sources

  A Prehistory of Fanfiction

  The Look of Fic: 1800s

  The Sherlock Holmes Material: A Study in Fanfic

  The Early Adventures of the Apocryphal Sherlock Holmes

  The Look of Fic: 1920s

  Mad as a Box of Frogs • Wendy C. Fries (Atlin Merrick)

  “Love Is a Much More Vicious Motivator”

  The Slasher Who Is Not One (An Interview with Katie Forsythe and wordstrings)

  PART TWO

  A Selective History of Media Fandom

  Science Fiction, Star Trek, and the Birth of Media Fandom

  Fables of Irish Fandom • Andy Sawyer

  I Am Woman, Read My Fic

  Recollections of a Collating Party • Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  The Look of Fic: 1970s

  Interlude: Growing Up Fic

  Literary Playtime • Ron Hogan

  The X-Files, Buffy, and the Rise of the Internet Fic Fandoms

  The X-Philes

  Mulder/Scully versus the G-Woman and the Fowl One • Bethan Jones

  The Look of Fic: 1995

  The Bronze Age

  Fic U • Jen Zern (NautiBitz)

  The Look of Fic: 1999

  Megafandoms: Harry Potter and Twilight

  An Excerpt from Percy Weasley’s University Thesis • Chris Rankin

  How Harry Potter Fanfic Changed the World (Or at Least the Internet) • Heidi Tandy (Heidi8)

  The Look of Fic: 2001–2002

  The Twilight Fandom

  Twilight’s True Believers • Jolie Fontenot

  A Million Words • Lauren Billings (LolaShoes)

  An Interview with tby789 (Christina Hobbs)

  The Look of Fic: 2009–2010

  On Writing—and Being—a Mary Sue • Cyndy Aleo (algonquinrt/d0tpark3r)

  Becoming Bella Swan • Randi Flanagan (BellaFlan)

  The Fandom Gives Back • Christina Lauren (Christina Hobbs/tby789 and Lauren Billings/LolaShoes)

  Snowqueens Icedragon (E. L. James) and Sebastien Robichaud (Sylvain Reynard): A Fandom Exchange

  An Anatomy of a Flame War

  Bittersweet • Tish Beaty (his_tweet)

  PART THREE

  Fic and Publishing

  An Interview with Eurydice (Vivean Dean)

  Fifty Shades of Gold • Andrew Shaffer

  The Briar Patch

  Just Change the Names • Tiffany Reisz

  Preying for More • Rachel Caine

  PART FOUR

  Fanwriting Today

  An Archive of Our Own • Francesca Coppa

  The Epic Love Story of Supernatural and Fanfic • Jules Wilkinson (missyjack)

  Pon Farr, Mpreg, Bonds, and the Rise of the Omegaverse • Kristina Busse

  Real Person(a) Fiction • V. Arrow (aimmyarrowshigh)

  #BradamForever • Brad Bell

  Hobbyhorsing • Peter Berg (Homfrog)

  From a Land Where “Other” People Live • Rukmini Pande and Samira Nadkarni

  The Look of Fic: 2013

  PART FIVE

  Fanfiction and Writers Who Don’t Write Fanfiction

  Conceptual Writing as Fanfiction • Darren Wershler

  An Interview with Doug Wright

  An Interview with Jonathan Lethem

  Blurring the Lines • Amber Benson

  Acknowledgments

  About the Contributors

  About the Author

  Endnotes

  Index

  Art isn’t your pet—it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

  —Joss Whedon

  Foreword

  In 1966, three things happened t
hat changed the way we think about fiction.

  First, Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, her feverish reimagining of the story of Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s first wife, from Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. That same year saw the first performance, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which expands and improvises upon the brief lives of two hapless supernumeraries from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

  The third thing that happened that year was the premiere—on September 8, 1966—of Star Trek. It would run for only three seasons, but Star Trek was one of the first shows to attract not only an audience but a fan community, a group of people who collectively discussed it and analyzed it and criticized it and obsessed over it. Eventually the Star Trek fandom became so intense that the canonical fabric of the show itself was no longer enough for it. The fans needed more than the show’s creators could give them.

  So they staged a revolution—they seized, as revolutionaries do, the means of production. They began publishing and circulating mimeographed zines about Star Trek, with names like Spockanalia and T-Negative (it’s Spock’s blood type), containing—along with articles, essays and editorials, and fan art—fanfiction: original, unsanctioned stories about the characters from the show, set in the world of the show.

  It’s unlikely that Jean Rhys or Tom Stoppard would have been much tempted to contribute to the pages of Spockanalia, had they even known it existed, but in a way they and the Spockanalians were engaged in very much the same project: the breaking down of a long-standing state of affairs that made stories and characters the exclusive province of their authors, and that locked readers and viewers into a state of mute passivity. In Spockanalia the fans dared to raise their voices and speak back to the TV screen—in the TV screen’s language, the language of narrative—just as Rhys spoke back to Brontë and Stoppard spoke back to Shakespeare. They turned reading and viewing from an act of silent consumption into one of active conversation.

  In doing so they changed our whole relationship to story. They were coming at it from opposite directions—Rhys and Stoppard were tunneling through from above, as it were, via high culture, and the Star Trek fans were working from below—but the goal was the same. Like Wide Sargasso Sea and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, fanfiction asserts the rights of storytellers to take possession of characters and settings from other people’s narratives and tell their own tales about them—to expand and build upon the original, and, when they deem it necessary, to tweak it and optimize it for their own purposes.

  Not that they were the first to do it. They had plenty of forerunners. Fans have been engaging in illicit, unsanctioned interactions with other people’s characters and stories since at least the nineteenth century. Jane Austen’s niece once wrote her a letter addressed to Georgiana Darcy. In 1893, no less a fan than J. M. Barrie wrote a story starring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Holmes was a particular focus for early fanfiction: when an American actor named William Gillette wrote a stage play about Holmes, he contacted Arthur Conan Doyle asking for permission to marry Holmes off. Doyle replied, accommodatingly enough, “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.”

  Not everybody is that enlightened about fanfiction. The mainstream understanding of it, to the extent that there is one, is that it’s (a) slavishly adoring of its subject matter and (b) pornographic. We’ll get to (b) in a second, but it’s even more important to correct the record about (a). It’s not about simply churning out more and more iterations of existing characters and worlds, or rather, it’s not just about that. It’s about doing things with those existing characters and worlds that their creators couldn’t or wouldn’t do. It’s about boldly going where no man or woman has gone before, because oh my God, who would even have thought of that?

  There’s a famous work of Star Trek fanfiction called “Visit to a Weird Planet,” by Jean Lorrah and Willard F. Hunt, that sends Kirk, Spock, and Bones back to Earth (via “a multiparallel space-time inversion”), and not just to Earth but to the set of Star Trek, where they meet the actors who play them on the show, who are in fact busy filming an episode of Star Trek. Misadventures and misunderstandings ensue, in a vein that can only be called Stoppardian, but the point is, fanfiction isn’t just an homage to the original—it’s subversive and perverse and boundary-breaking, and it always has been: “Visit to a Weird Planet” appeared in 1968, in Spockanalia #3. It’s about twisting and tweaking and undermining the source material of the fanfiction, and in the process adding layers and dimensions of meaning to it that the original never had.

  Hence also the porn. “A Fragment Out of Time,” the founding document in slash fanfiction, appeared in 1974 in a zine called Grup (short for “grownup,” a reference to a Star Trek episode about feral children). As the first depiction of a love scene between Kirk and Spock, it wasn’t just hot; it was a way of making visible the hidden thread of attraction that runs through the complex bond between the two characters. It elevated subtext to text. In doing so it gave rise to an entire writhing, sweating universe of romantic and sexual pairings. But slash isn’t just about making porn out of things that weren’t already porn. It’s also about prosecuting fanfiction’s larger project of breaking rules and boundaries and taboos of all kinds.

  At this late date, fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse than the canonical works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can imagine and a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality. Culturally speaking, this work used to be the job of the avant garde, but in many ways fanfiction has stepped in to take on that role. If the mainstream has been slow to honor it, well, that’s usually the fate of aesthetic revolutions. Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture’s attic, but the attic won’t contain it forever.

  Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be. It’s what David Foster Wallace was getting at in his famous speech, “This is Water”: “Learning how to think . . . means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” Fanfiction is about exercising this choice. It helps us not to get hosed.

  In doing this, fanfiction is breaking new ground, but it’s also trying to retake ground that was lost centuries ago. Before the modern era of copyright and intellectual property, stories were things held in common, to be passed from hand to hand and narrator to narrator. There’s a reason Virgil was never sued by the estate of Homer for borrowing Aeneas from the Iliad and spinning him off in the Aeneid. Fictional characters and worlds were shared resources. For all its radically new implications and subversions, which are masterfully theorized in the pages that follow, fanfiction also represents the swinging back of the pendulum toward that older way of thinking. When Star Trek fans published Spockanalia, they weren’t just discovering a new way to tell stories. They were helping us all to remember a very old one.

  LEV GROSSMAN

  August 2013

  INTRODUCTION

  The Theory of Narrative Causality

  “Things happen because the plot says they should.”

  TO BE HONEST, I had to click the link at least five times before it . . . clicked.

  “The Theory of Narrative Causality.” The story was recommended all over—but the links kept dumping me in this random fan opinion posting board. Some Sherlock Holmes fan going off about some other Sherlock Holmes fan g
oing off about the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. movies. Sherlockian A wasn’t a fan of this Johnny-come-lately fandom, and let his opinions be known. Everywhere. Sherlockian B wasn’t a fan of these opinions . . . and on and on.

  OK. Fine. Lots of Sherlock Holmes purists disliked Ritchie’s entertaining alternate universe steampunk fanfic of a film. I am anything but a purist—I thought it was fun—and fandoms ranting about various reboots or pro-fic (licensed, sanctioned, moneymaking fanfiction, called “pastiche” when published as Sherlock Holmes stories, called “movies” when large entertainment corporations are behind it) is nothing new in any fandom. Fan commentary can be insightful, sometimes astonishingly so, but it wasn’t surprising that a fan of the Doyle canon and Jeremy Brett’s classic Holmes wouldn’t like Downey. It wasn’t new information.

  I was looking for the brilliant fan commentary that was also smart, well-written fiction. That’s kind of my kink.

  “The Theory of Narrative Causality.” It kept coming up, site after site, rec after rec. I clicked again, hoping this link would be fixed. The title sounded so promising—at least, you know, to a fan of “theory” and “narrative,” and, well, David Hume. (OK, fine, to fans of Terry Pratchett, too.)

  But no. Same fanboard. Fans making a “meta” post (self-reflexive critical commentary, we’d call it in my business) complaining about the arrogant fan “Consulting Detective” and his arrogant ways. It wasn’t completely uninteresting, but there comes a point where you’ve seen one fan v. fan conflict, you’ve seen them all.

  Disappointing, but it happens. Links break. Sites change, fall away, or get repurposed. When amateur writers post their fiction online, free of charge, chapter by chapter, sometimes they finish it, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you go back to a story, and it’s gone: a change of heart, worry about work or family ramifications—a host of reasons to stop hosting. The archive failed (Geocities, once the third most browsed site on the web and home of many a fanfic archive, was just taken down one day—October 26, 2009—and most of its content was lost). Someone flounced—left the fandom in a huff, or a panic, or for a paid publication. You just never know.