Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Read online

  “The Theory of Narrative Causality” spins an irreverent alternative origin story for the irreverent BBC Sherlock—but it doesn’t just riff on plot and character. It fics Sherlock’s method: its relationship to authorship, media, and source material. Where Sherlock updates investigative and communicative technologies (John blogs; Sherlock prefers to text) and its mode of storytelling (highly produced effects, John Watson’s blog actually being on the internet), “Theory” twists internet fandom technologies into both plot device and narrative medium. It creates and links to the fic and art of its characters; it stages “watchalongs” of prior Sherlock Holmes productions so (fictional) community members can comment on their own predecessors while advancing their own plot. It features BBC Sherlock’s characters as fandom personalities playing key internet-appropriate roles: Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, and Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade as moderators; supervillain Moriarty and his various sock puppets (aliases) as obsessive internet trolls; Mike Stamford as the man who introduced John to the fandom—all ultimately contributing, according to the logic of the fanfiction, to the creation of their own story.

  As in any internet fandom, in “Theory,” anonymously authored “wanks” stir up drama about the BNFs. In this fanfiction, the drama arises around fanfiction, specifically “Real Person Fic” (RPF)—fanfiction about real people rather than created characters—written about the BNFs themselves. In “Theory’s” fictional fan community, RPF is banned and derided—as it is on many other fanfiction forums in real (virtual, online) life. When the (fictional) “real persons” jumperfucker and Consulting Detective themselves OK RPF and even start writing it themselves, about themselves, the plot, well, thickens. And, in a common enough sequence of events after thickening, the plot disperses, spreads itself around.

  The characters in this fictional world have “real” social media accounts—active virtual identities. These accounts have comments, some from fictional characters, some from nonfictional characters (from real people, or at least from real internet personae. Real virtual people, then). But these fictional accounts of fictional characters weren’t recruited by the “original” author of the “original” “derivative” “origin story” (that is to say, of the initial fanfiction “The Theory of Narrative Causality”). Readers created them, and started playing along—taking the fiction in different directions than the “original” (first?) author ever intended. It’s hard to know which are the fictional and which are the “real” readers, where one author/character/reader stopped and another took over. The visual codings that signal our (virtual) presence in these (virtual) virtual venues are exact enough to fool experts—not just professional observers, like myself, but people who have actually run Sherlock Holmes communities (I asked around). (The (real, nonfictional) author did not do these codings, but rather enlisted a friend.)

  As part of its plot and part of its telling, “The Theory of Narrative Causality” gives a snapshot of fandom activity, fiction exchange, and typical fandom relationships. It also transposes the story of its source and inspiration in the terms and dynamics of its own online media. And in rewriting BBC Sherlock’s “origin” as taking place among fans, it only tells the truth: Sherlock’s creators are gleefully creating fic for fic for fic.

  Of course they are. As Jacques Derrida (frequently cast by detractors as a literary supervillain) might say if he stumbled into a Sherlock fic, that’s what writers do.

  But “The Theory of Narrative Causality” doesn’t stop there; it goes all Roland Barthes, and the readers take over. The story morphs into a multiplayer internet RPG. It continues outside itself, as successful stories and characters have always done—but with a difference. However similar to past forms of collective storytelling, this is something new.

  This newness has to do with technology, speed, format, and the conventions and forms these changes enable. Fanfiction communities collect people who may be very far apart in physical space and connects them, in “close” proximity in virtual space, through near-simultaneous activities of authoring, editing, responding, and illustrating. Neither the codex nor our contemporary notion of literary authorship could accommodate the models of authorship we see in “The Theory of Narrative Causality.” It’s the fic that is not one. The author is not dead; the author is legion.

  I can’t help but think of “Theory” in terms of, well, theory—the literary and critical kind. I know that stuff; I teach it. I like it. I’d bet that some of the “Theory” writers and readers and collaborators know it, too, though I’d also bet that many of them don’t. All that theory didn’t keep this fiction from completely surprising me, again and again—despite the fact that knowing the structure of the show meant I knew what would happen in a fic where “things happen because the plot says they should.” How the fiction reached these points was an endless surprise.

  This element of surprise is what I love about fanfiction generally, which in “Theory” is concentrated and made explicit and maybe too postmodernly clever for a lot of readers. But they don’t have to like this one—there’s plenty of other fic in the sea. Similar dynamics unfold in more traditional fic, especially when taken as a large body of collected, interactive, related narratives rather than fixed, isolated stories. Most fan readers read around in fandoms; some read around in taste groupings similar to genres (hurt/comfort, slash, gen, fluff, BDSM, PWP, plot-driven, etc.), but they read around, often following many unfolding stories simultaneously. These stories are read comparatively; they riff on one another, borrow back and forth. Plot threads cross, become confused, create patterns—if not in the individual stories, then often in the readers’ minds. Fic experienced in this way is more like a web (appropriately enough) than like a series.

  Plenty of literary theorists would say this is what’s always happening in literature. They’d use a word like intertextuality (if they were Julia Kristeva) or palimpsest (if they were Gérard Genette). Then they’d remember, along with Walter Benjamin, that text comes from the Latin word for web and they’d hug themselves and smile. Fanfiction makes all that theory very, very apparent, and makes those theorists appear a bit redundant.

  A good deal of the literary theorizing of the past half-century has been devoted to dismantling the ideology of the single, autonomous work of art as a literary standard. But no fic pretends to be an autonomous work of art. Fic makes no claims to “stand on its own.” It doesn’t need anyone to point out its props and sources because it doesn’t hide them; it celebrates them. A work of fic might stand on its own as a story—it might be intelligible to readers unfamiliar with its source—but that’s not its point. Asking whether fic stands on its own is “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective”—to put a famous quote by the well-known fic-opponent Anne Rice to a use she would likely hate. Fic can be uncomfortable for writers who believe they create autonomously in a void. Fic lets its seams show in ways other works that also build from sources and predecessors may be at pains to hide—even, apparently, from their authors (later in the same text, a response to an Amazon review, Rice claims that for her, “novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art.” Someone should let Bram Stoker and John Polidori know).

  I began this book with “The Theory of Narrative Causality” because it condenses the universe of fanfiction: it feeds on its predecessors and its contemporaries, interacts with them, makes them new. It is in a constant state of conversation and exchange. It is often unclear where its boundaries are. It is often unclear who is a writer and who is a reader and what the difference is. It sometimes references actual “real world” events; it sometimes custom-crafts fictional elements masquerading as real. It extracts what usually transpires over many texts and places them in a partly real, partly fictional virtual network. It’s also funny and romantic and erotic at times. It showcases complex relationships, which are sometimes fraught and angsty and sometimes very sweet. Like its important predecessor, Tristram Shandy, “The Theory of Narrative Causality” is at o
nce entirely typical and not at all typical of its genre.

  OK. “The Theory of Narrative Causality” impresses me because—much like fanfiction, but in a very condensed way—it broke my mind a little bit. But I have peculiar tastes in these matters.

  The wages of sin, Watson, the wages of sin.

  Images from “The Theory of Narrative Causality.” This story began life on the BBC Sherlock kink meme. The author falling voices credits user misha0529 for “formatting and coding what was previously a terrible mess of fake hyperlinks and html confusion into actual LJ entries, TV tropes articles, and gmail chat.” (LiveJournal has been a popular platform for fic writers and readers since 2000, and continues to be used today.)A

  Why Fic?

  WHY FIC? Why Fic?

  Fic. Fan writers call it “playing in someone else’s sandbox” or “borrowing someone’s toys.” I call it “writing.” Opponents call it “stealing”—and I call that bullshit. Whatever else we call it, though, today we largely understand fanfiction as writing that continues, interrupts, reimagines, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have already written about. Fanfiction means writers getting their feet wet, their hands dirty—and if in their stories other body parts are sometimes getting wet and dirty, too, that doesn’t mean those same stories can’t be smart. If we call a piece of writing fanfiction, we usually (though not always) understand that it wasn’t published for profit.

  I’ve been studying fanwriting communities for a while now, but I never really was part of one, not from the inside. I wrote a few fics eventually, but they started as thank-you gifts for a community I was looking in on with an academic interest. I’ve been a fan of Sherlock Holmes since grade school, but I just loved the stories and movies, mostly memorized them, then moved on. I might have read Sherlock zines when I was younger, if I’d known they existed—much later, I listened to and admired fan-produced works for the Grateful Dead—but the way my fannishness worked was more academic: I like Kundera, so I’d best learn Czech. I’d written things that amounted to fanfiction for classes that didn’t call it that—narrate Notes from Underground from the prostitute’s point of view! Write Ten Ways of Looking at Socks!—but like many writers who have done such things alone in the isolation of a notebook, I didn’t refer to this kind of writing by any special name. Unlike many who call themselves “aca-fans” (and I don’t), I was not a fan first. (Well, there were those years following the Grateful Dead around, but we didn’t write Jerry/Bobby slash, an omission that may well evidence the existence of a merciful God.)

  Fanfiction is an old story. Literally, of course: fanfiction takes someone else’s old story and, arguably, makes it new, or makes it over, or just simply makes more of it, because the fan writer loves the story so much they want it to keep going. But fanfiction is also an old story in that people have been doing this since—to borrow a phrase I absolutely disallow my students—the Dawn of Time. Reworking an existing story, telling tales of heroes already known to be heroic, was the model of authorship until very recently. This book is organized to highlight both this kind of continuity with the past, and also what I see fanfiction doing that I believe to be new. Often, what is new in the history of fanfiction—as in the history of writing itself—comes down to writing’s relationship to technology and media. New technologies enable new and different kinds of stories to be told—and read—by different kinds of people. Paradoxically, fanfiction, the cultural enterprise apparently dedicated to revisiting familiar ground, ends up leading us to new models of publishing, authorship, genre, gender . . . and to voyeuristic aliens who resemble lava lamps, vampire peaches, sex pollen, and an entire universe based on the structure of a canine penis. None of that is in Homer (lotus flowers just made people drowsy).

  Sex pollen aside, part of what is new in fic in recent years simply comes down to scale. Look at some of the 500,000-plus works of Harry Potter fic on FanFiction.Net alone. Remixings, crossovers, astonishing Lego-like recombinations (if you can find a “tab A” on any character, it’s been in the “slot B” of some other character in fic), but also serious alternate point-of-view or alternate-ending retellings: what-ifs, could-have-beens, or (more often) should-have-beens, rewritten because the original writer, from the fan’s point of view, lost her way, got it wrong, needs correcting. Or suggested a different path she couldn’t or wouldn’t see or fully explore on her own. Or maybe her characters should end up in space, or in a TARDIS, or just in a coffee shop—alternative worlds imagined and populated with familiar, loved voices.

  Who writes this stuff? Kids. Parents. Teachers. Married couples—together. Professional writers moonlighting, free from market forces. Tweens working out sexual and writerly grammar online, simultaneously: fumbling “first time” stories written, fumblingly by and about middle-schoolers writing for the first time. And, lest we forget them, legions of fan writers horrified by all the sex, fearful that with the publication of Fifty Shades, sex is all their work will be known for. The world of fanfiction is a very big, very mixed bag.

  The majority of this not-for-profit writing is written by women, or if not by women, then by people who are willing to be (mis)taken for women. I’ve spoken with a number of male fanfiction writers—some at length—and with a number of fanfiction writers who refuse to identify in terms of gender binaries. Gender online is far from transparent in the ways we (mistakenly) sometimes believe offline gender to be. Importantly, fic increasingly offers a space where gender, like sexuality, is not an either/or phenomenon, and gender and sexual dissent, even rebellion, has long been a part of fic’s story. A favorite fan writer of mine (wordstrings, interviewed here) has been writing an erotic romance about an asexual character. It’s hardly the only one. Just tonight I clicked on a rec and the summary warned me: “This is not an after-school special about trans folk.” Male/male erotic romance by straight women for straight women was just the beginning. Fanfiction transforms assumptions mainstream culture routinely makes about gender, sexuality, desire, and to what degree we want them to match up. Sometimes not matching is precisely the point—there are all kinds of possibilities we might like to imagine or look in on, even (especially?) where preference or plumbing would preclude our actual participation.

  About those gender binaries that still govern the world most of us live in: it’s important that in fanfiction, women are largely running the show. Where else is that true? Today, less than 30 percent of television writers are women;2 in film, that figure is below 20 percent.3 Oscar-nominated women directors? Four. In 2012, women comprised roughly 30 percent of the writers reviewed by the combined forces of the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Paris Review.4 Women dominate in romance writing (sometimes, even in the romances themselves)—only to have their accomplishments derided or ignored by the broader literary culture whose efforts their profits nonetheless help underwrite. In sum, those numbers mean there’s a lot of variously talented women we haven’t been hearing from. A great many of these women are writing fic.

  Again, it’s not just women, and I really cannot emphasize this enough: fic provides a venue for all kinds of writers who are shut out from official culture, whether by demographic or skill or taste. It makes sense, however, that those who are less shut out from established systems of economic and cultural credit and prestige turn less often to a cultural form that has been not only unpaid, but actively stigmatized. I know many men who write fic, but I know even more men who write fic-like stories, in fic-like ways. When they do it, though, they sell it, get written up in the Times, call it postmodernism or pastiche or simply fiction. My study of fic communities has underscored how gender imbalance in literary and mass cultural production doesn’t just affect venue, opportunity, and reception for active writers; it affects people even wanting to try. It affects people even claiming to be trying. Fanfiction has given many writers permission and encouragement to do something they’d never imagined they could do—in part because th
ey can do it in private, without seeming to arrogantly lay claim to the culturally valued and vaunted status of “writer.” Furthermore, fanfiction communities can provide a supportive network for beginning writers in a way that no commercial enterprise possibly can. Today, hundreds of thousands of new writers—young people, children—are growing up writing not in isolation, but with a ready-made community of readers and commentators who already love the characters and worlds they’re writing about. That’s very different.

  It’s also true that the world of fanfiction is not all happy anarchy. Academics can tend to emphasize fanfiction’s potential for collaboration, nonhierarchical relations, dissent, and resistance. That’s not all she (or he, or zie) wrote. Fic may be known for creating worlds in which anything goes (Men can get pregnant! Why not?), but communities and individuals can police these worlds and their boundaries with tremendous vigilance. More than one writer for this volume pulled an essay to protest the inclusion of another writer or a point of view—in some cases my own—that they felt violated the basic tenets of fandom, or even of common decency. Another writer declined to participate in any way because he felt my standard formula when asking after online personae (“identify as”) was offensive—a shame for the volume, as he’s one of the best writers I’ve seen. Wars over character relationships, about what kind of stories should be told about what characters and why, can tear friendships apart. For all that many fan writers can be shy about revealing their fic activities in real life, they can be a very opinionated, outspoken bunch—and they don’t speak with one voice.

  In considering how to do this book, one thing was clear to me: I did not want fanfiction to be represented by a single voice, least of all mine, when at its very essence, fanfiction challenges that model of authorship. When Fifty Shades was getting a lot of press and much of it consulted me, I felt my influence on this topic was a bit disproportionate, and that was a little uncomfortable. Fan studies is a field, not just one professor. Fanfiction is a collective tradition, not just one book from one fandom. Many published writers have come out of fanfiction, not just in the past two years. Many accomplished fanfiction writers have no desire to publish traditionally. I wanted Fic to reflect both of these groups, and more; literary and commercial writers who’ve had no connection with fanfiction can use some pretty fic-like techniques. I also wanted to examine, from a variety of perspectives, why and when it seems acceptable to appropriate, adapt, or recycle elements of existing works or lives, and why and when such a practice gives rise to scorn, or the threat of legal action. (I also want to do all of that without weighing in on the legal questions myself. Not my area.)