It’s Time to Reconsider Fanfiction

Awoken, Serra Elinsen, Createspace, 2013

Death Battle, ScrewAttack.com, 2009For almost four years now, the popular YouTube gamer channel ScrewAttack! has hosted a show titled “Death Battle!” In each episode, two commentators (Ben Singer and Chad James) pick two characters from separate geek properties and glean the extent of their powers and abilities based on a particularly thorough combing of each character’s history and appearances. These characters then engage in an on-screen fight—complete with written dialogue and, in the case of “Goku vs. Superman,” a backstory for why these two are fighting—and the commentators come back in to say why the fight ended the way it did.

To make these videos, each of which has a viewer count in the millions, the creators rely on a thorough knowledge of the characters and their respective properties, a sense of—if not storytelling—at least pacing, and the ability to replicate the characters’ voices and discern what they would do in a fight. These are all skills crucial to writing, dare I say it, a good fanfiction.

While fanfiction has hit the mainstream in recent years—Rainbow Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell. St Martins, 2013Rowell’s YA Novel Fangirl stars a fanfiction writer and in the TV show Bob’s Burgers Tina Belcher writes “erotic friend fiction”—the popular fan activity/artform is still often maligned. Some question the legality, others dismiss it as gross pornography, and still others think of it as some variation of laziness. If you were a “real writer,” they say, you’d make up a story with your own characters.

These are not charges that are levied against the creators of other transformative works. When I went to Small Press Expo this past month and in previous years, several artists sold art of characters they did not create, art that the creators of the property probably did not know about. Some of those have been in the form of a comic with an actual storyline, but any zines of just fanfiction were pretty much non-existent. Fanart and fan comics can be considered just as much of an infringement as fanfiction, but creators will reblog one on Tumblr, and sometimes even feature them in art shows, but completely ignore/disdain the other.

I will admit it’s natural for creators to be more interested in fanart than fanfiction. It’s surely much more palpable to have a fan come up to you with a piece of work that’s usually trying to reflect your vision (“Here’s a portrait of your characters in battle!”) than one that may be trying to change it (“Here’s a story that shows how your story should have gone!”). Still, fanfiction is usually not written for the creators – it’s written for other fans—fans who, while they may love the original story, may be interested in ideas that expand, re-envision or re-work the work they love.

You could argue that fanart has more respect because is not as sexualized as fanfiction, but that’s not true either. Several art archives on the web exist exclusively for pornographic fanart. Fans of female characters often complain that you can’t search their tag on Tumblr without seeing them naked, and the regular Google search of any geek-aligned character often contains not only sexualized fanart, but sexualized fetish fanart. Being commissioned for really strange stuff is a common complaint from artists at conventions—last year I bought an autobiographical mini-comic, “The Blueberry Boy of Asbury Park,” that was all about the artist being asked to draw a woman who looked like Violet Beauregard post-chewing gum. Despite all this, drawing fanart and commissioning fanart is still seen as a legitimate venture.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2, Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neil, Wildstorm, 2004As for the claims that fanfiction isn’t “real writing,” even putting aside the legitimate, celebrated pieces of work that are basically fanfiction—Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award-winning play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, John Gardner’s novel Grendel, or Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, to name a few—any type of good writing is not easy. It takes skill, it takes research, and more often than not it takes time—a lot of time. While theoretically anyone could write a new story of the Avengers going on a new mission against Loki, or falling in love with each other, or even just going to the beach and having a good time, there’s a difference between just writing any of those things and writing them well. And fanfiction readers, whatever their tastes, often desire a level of “quality.” While long, constructive critique from readers to writers is no longer encouraged the way it once was, readers of fanfiction often demand work that’s well-written, edited (or “beta-read”), and enjoyable to them.

Furthermore, as someone who had the privilege of being a full-time staff writer for two newspapers and a freelancer for several online publications, I resent the notion that the fifteen years I’ve spent writing stories for fellow fans is not “real” writing. I resent that, culturally, I have to feel embarrassed for a lot of good work that’s made—if my stats on Archive of Our Own are anything to go by—several hundred people happy. Because at the end of the day, Wrestling Isn't Wrestling, Max Landis, 2015I don’t see how what fanfiction does is any different than comedic Twitter accounts like @SeinfeldToday or @CK1Blogs, or videos like the Dragonball Z Abridged series or Max Landis’ Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling parody video (or, as it could also be called, “Rule 63 Triple H/Shawn Michaels, please R&R.”)

Defenders of fanfiction will often say that it’s sexism and homophobia—most writers are women and many write about same-sex pairings—that keeps the medium from getting the respect it deserves. While I think that’s true, it’s probably not in the way people think. Due to some legitimate fears of copyright infringement claims, the fanfic community was very good at policing itself for a long time. On websites and in forums in the 1990s and early 2000s new writers were told not to show their work to creators and to never try to earn income off it. This kept fanfiction communities underground, and largely undiscussed on platforms where fans would interact with creators. However, since a lot of these more public and “official” platforms have been historically hostile to women, many female fans have chosen not to participate in them at all, and retreated to the more “underground,” female-oriented spaces where fanfiction thrived.

This leads to something of a vicious cycle where the “mainstream” male-oriented spaces in fandom are not exposed to fanfiction, and thus are in a better position to dismiss it, a position that’s been partly furthered by fanfic writers’ own self-censorship. (This is of course, not true for everyone. There are plenty of men and boys who write fanfiction as well as women and girls who only hang out in more “mainstream” fannish places, but I do think this phenomenon has had the side-effect of splitting fandoms along gendered lines.)  I don’t blame fandom as a whole for choosing to do this, but I do think it’s led to the unfortunate situation we have now where the most prominent ex-fanfic writers-turned-pro, like Mortal Instruments writer Cassandra Clare, who is more well-known in fandom for plagiarizing the words of other writers in her fanfiction and her general bad behavior, and E.L. James, who basically changed the names of her Twilight fanfiction and turned it into Fifty Shades of Grey, are associated with a level of hucksterism.

While some fanfic writers still lament the time when fanfiction could fly under the radar, I don’t think there is any point in wanting to turn back the clock.

With the ubiquity of the Internet, fanfiction has become too prominent to ignore. Now, however, unlike other transformative works, it exists in a limbo where everyone knows about it, but few want to discuss or promote it—whereas sites like ComicsAlliance commonly aggregate

Now, there’s a certain element where, even with the whiff of unrespectability and weirdness rubbed off, fanfic simply can’t get as big as fanart or fan videos or cosplay. They usually involve a greater time or energy commitment to enjoy, and they’re written for a very specific sub-audience. You have to be a fan of the property and like a specific type of story, usually with specific characters. Sometimes, like in the Yuletide gift exchanges where writers make a fanfic for another person for a property that doesn’t get much attention, this sub-audience can be a mere handful of people or even just one person. Anytime I’ve seen a fanfiction go “viral” it isn’t because it’s well-reviewed, it’s because it’s particularly disturbing, bad or strange. I could recommend you my favorite fanfiction—a dark, somber Watchmen story featuring my favorite pairing—and you would still probably rather read that Goofus and Gallant slashfic written in the style of the Highlights magazine comics.

The Winds of Winter, George R R Martin, HarperVoyager, 2016I do not envision, nor do I want, a world where George R. R. Martin’s upcoming Winds of Winter competes with SanSan4Eva’s unauthorized A Song of Ice and Fire ebook on Amazon. However, I also don’t think that can happen. There are plenty of people who’ve watched every episode of Star Trek but don’t have any time for the tie-in novels and those are actually “official” in some way. While some readers may profess to love a fanfic writer’s choices more than the original creator’s, I think the original author and work will always have a natural authority in this exchange. So long as the work doesn’t pretend to be official in any way—the practice of putting disclaimers on work is good, but the fanfic author waiving their right to sue the original creator in the future if the creator happens to write a similar storyline could be even better—I think it can be allowable in the way people allow fanart, fan videos and cosplay to proliferate.

However, I don’t actually think bookstores putting up fanfiction ebooks would be the best way for fanfic writers to monetize themselves. Fanfiction has largely been able to proliferate because it’s free, and for most writing online the pay-to-read formula is thoroughly dead. In a way, fandom has already created its own work-for-rewards model in, believe it or not, kinkmemes, or communities where people can ask for a certain type of story anonymously and a writer can choose to fulfill that request, also sometimes anonymously. Add some monetary exchange, and this model becomes a commission. Perhaps these commissions can also be offered as rewards on a site like Patreon, or fanfic writers could use their Patreon to ask for regular donations. Perhaps an award can be offering their fanfiction in an ebook or printed book.

More than money, however, what would be most useful is for goodSophie Campbell, 2012 fanfic writers to be able to use the work they’ve done in fandom to draw attention to their original material. On Tumblr and at conventions, fans buy fanart because it’s good, but also because it’s familiar. It would be nice if budding writers were able to do the same thing—draw in a potential audience, and maybe even a successful publisher—from their success in fandom. Artist Sophie Campbell got her gig as the Jem comics’ artist in part by redesigning the characters for fun. Wouldn’t it be nice if potential new writers for television shows could be found the same way?

I’ll admit that a lot of fanfiction just isn’t very good, and fanfic communities have come under fire for often being too centered on writing about white male characters to the expense of everyone else. Despite this, many marginalized people find a level of comfort and expression in fanfiction that they haven’t been able to find in other, mainstream work. I think if they could use the built-in audience of fanfiction to buoy themselves, they could reach the wider audience they deserve.

Because I genuinely do believe that there is untapped talent in the fanfiction world. Naomi Novik, writer of the Temeraire novels, has been open about still writing fanfiction for fun. Reviewer, video Awoken, Serra Elinsen, Createspace, 2013 essayist and former “Nostalgia Chick” Lindsay Ellis once wrote fanfic, and I imagine she and her friends in writing their Twilight/Cthulhu Mythos pastiche novel Awoken relied on similar fanfiction-writing skills. The same is true of Marissa Meyer, an ex-Sailor Moon fanficcer who now writes the YA series The Lunar Chronicles, which re-envisions fairy tale characters in a sci-fi future. Even if fanfiction never becomes the monetary opportunity for its creators that fanart does, I hope that writers who learned how to structure a sentence, how to build a character or how to make a reader laugh or cry with their work, don’t have to see the fact that they once wrote it as a black mark or something to be ashamed of anymore.

So, at the very least, even if it’s not for you, call it “real” writing. Or at least as real as the writing for “Death Battle!”

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Rebecca Henely

Rebecca Henely

A longtime comics fan and journalism major, Rebecca has previously written for Sequential Tart and weekly newspapers in New Jersey, Delaware and Queens. Her post-Lois Lane life involves pondering the intersection of low and high culture as she reads classic novels and watches RuPaul's Drag Race. Follow her on twitter at @quietprofanity.

4 thoughts on “It’s Time to Reconsider Fanfiction

  1. Fan Fiction is a place for people who love the same story to celebrate and expand it. For instance: I LOVE reading stories about the Marauders, JK Rowling doesn’t want to write those stories but fanfic writers are happy to oblige me.

    Also – once you start looking for “writing in character” in fanfiction, you might start noticing all the instances where the ‘canon’ violates basic character consistency. The characterization in the original Sherlock Holmes stories are wildly inconsistent, which leads to a variety of interpretations across reproductions of the stories over the years. And on that note, BBC Sherlock is just a modern day AU of the Sherlock Holmes stories and the only difference between that show and fanfiction is that Moffat/Gatiss are allowed to make money off of it because the original books are past copyright.

    1. I read the back-half of the Sherlock Holmes canon earlier this year. I was bummed that Watson got pretty Jam!Watson-like in a few of the later stories. Then I read Michael Chabon’s “The Final Solution,” which was a pretty good ending in lieu of an official one. 😉

      1. One thing that I think was hilarious was that Sherlock used to keep little mementos of his cases (especially true in the first ‘Adventures’ collection in stories like Scandal in Bohemia and A Case of Identity) – it just struck me as such a serial killer thing to do. 221B must be filled with little random trinkets like Sherlock is some kind of anthropomorphized Bowerbird. Although I suppose Batman has a giant penny in the bat cave so maybe everyone has their own little tokens.

  2. I think my main criticism with some fanfiction has been when characters are written so out of character, you wonder why they didn’t change the names and make it an original, because there is no semblance of the real characters there. That put me off for a long time. HOWEVER, when you find fanfiction that stays true to the characters, it can be amazing, particularly for a series that had no ending or a sub-par ending. And I think people are missing a big thing that fanfic writers can do – they can emulate existing characters. What profession needs this skill? Script writers for shows, comics, and serial novels! Script writers that join existing teams have to be able to emulate and carry on the heart and soul of existing characters. How is that any different from a fanfic writer, except that they’re on payroll? Hell, I know that the Black Library for the Warhammer pitches out for new novels that work within their established timeline and setting – it’s all fanfic, until Black Library says they like it and accept it for canon print.

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