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Fanfiction is a formidable force against traditional media
The internet has given fans the chance to challenge the authority of their favourite authors, taking power over their beloved stories with the unassuming act of writing fanfiction.
The internet has always been an anarchist dreamscape for those that know where to look. Where else can we create and share whatever we like so easily? Placed next to hierarchal traditional media, it’s no surprise the digital revolution caused some tensions.
“The idea is that the audience has agency,” says Sophie Browning, fanfiction fanatic of over a decade and admin of the holy grail of meme accounts, @joan.of.arca. When she’s not posting memes, Sophie is busy studying History and Strategic Communication at the University of Minnesota – so she can apply the theory to internet culture, of course.
Sophie’s involvement in fandoms and academia has allowed her to dig a bit deeper, tracing how fanfiction has turned notions or authorship and ownership on its head. “Think about Harry Potter, it came out around the same time that the early internet was becoming accessible to everyone. Suddenly they could discuss or even refute JK Rowling's characterization, it allowed fans to enter a sort of co-ownership. Fans believed they owned Harry Potter as much as JK Rowling did.”
Fanfiction as a disruptive tool of agency is hardly the most common narrative that surrounds the genre. Those of us that had a hardcore fanfiction phase in adolescence probably wouldn’t have been happy if everyone at school found our search history. Dr Judith Fathallah, author of Fanfiction and the Author and Research Associate at Lancaster University, traces this contempt back to misogyny and fanfiction’s lack of traditional legitimacy. “We dress up distaste for feminised forms of cultural production as a concern for ‘quality’, to disguise misogyny and make it seem socially acceptable,” she explains. “It’s also to do with fanfiction’s context of production: the lack of institutional gatekeepers, price point, and the usual absence of hard copies and paraphernalia we’re trained to associate with ‘proper’ writing.”
As Judith stresses, fanfiction has been slowly shedding its poor reputation. Fan studies has developed as an academic field, and fanwork has been taken on by established media industries – just look at the upcoming Anne Hathaway romcom The Idea of You, which fans have long speculated is based on a Harry Styles fanfiction.
With the rise of fan studies, the academic world has been taking a closer look at where fanfiction sits in our culture. Judith’s research has landed us with her ‘legitimation paradox’ theory. On one hand, fanfictions are ranked – for example, with the Kudos feature on A03 – depending on traditional markers of prestige and how well they fit into our idea of quality authorship. “On the other hand, fanfiction’s very existence works to deconstruct this author figure and discourse,” she explains. “Literature that ‘writes back to’ an established text always operates between reinforcing and subverting it, and this has opened up some really interesting spaces.”
Just look at ‘Fix-it Fics’, a genre of fanfiction that aims to fix ‘mistakes’ made by the author. The writer of a ‘Fix-it Fic’ might strive towards traditional criteria of quality authorship, but is simultaneously subverting the original author’s power.
23-year-old Izzy Abelman first came across fanfiction a decade ago, as a saviour for her dissatisfaction for the ending of the Divergent book series. “The ending infuriated me because the heroine doesn’t end up with the guy, who I thought of as my imaginary boyfriend, of course. I googled for alternative endings and found fanfiction, which helped how insanely upset and angry I was with the author’s ending,” Izzy explains.
This genre of ‘Fix-It Fics’ shows how fans can use fanfiction in their rebellion against the author’s prerogative to shape their own story. “It implies the author of the original text is more a scribe than a creator. Fans accuse the author of misinterpreting the character, but the character belongs to the author,” Sophie comments.
BBC’s Sherlock is the perfect case study. If you cast you mind back to the 2010’s, you might remember that viewers of the show were pretty insistent that the two hero’s, Sherlock and John (or Johnlock), were in a romantic relationship. At the time of writing, there are 64,725 Johnlock fanfictions on AO3.
The creators of the show found this attempt to subvert their intended plot pretty frustrating, with writer Mark Gatiss attempting to set the record straight at Comic Con 2016: “We’ve explicitly said this is not going to happen. There is no game plan, no matter how much we lie about other things, that this show is going to culminate in Martin [Freeman, who plays John] and Benedict [Cumberbatch, who plays Sherlock] going off into the sunset together,” he explained to With An Accent. The reception of this interview was, in true fandom fashion, to doubt that it was even real, leading Gatiss to confirm that it wasn’t an elaborate fake.
“Fans thought that they were denying is so that the payoff would be better – I suppose just to cope with the creators seizing control over the narrative,” Sophie explains. As BBC Sherlock is derivative of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original text, this conflict exemplifies the power struggle between authors with traditional legitimacy and power – the show’s creators – and those without – fanfiction writers. Although the creators didn’t give in to the pressure of Johnlock fans, they did pepper in metatextual acknowledgements of the uproar throughout the show. A power move from the creators, sure, but this also legitimised and empowered the Johnlock fandom.
The power of fanfiction has led to more than just a few metatextual acknowledgments – arguably, our media landscape is shifting to appeal to the formidable fanfic community. “Media franchises are now writing with fandoms, or potential fandoms, in mind,” Judith explains. Derived from ‘relationship’, shipping is a fandom term for pairing off two characters. Frustrated that two characters aren’t together in the original text? Just head to Fanfiction.net. There’s nothing more powerful than a fan’s craving for their favourite ship to finally get together, and recently, its looking like established media is catching up to this phenomena’s financial potential. “Franchises are setting up competing ships with premade hashtags, or creating media suitable for tagging, tweeting, or circulation on TikTok. ‘To ship’ seems to have made its way into common parlance,” Judith says.
So, who comes out on top in the fight between audience and author? The truth is, while the push and pull of power can leave heads spinning, it’s a constructive conflict. As soon as an author takes the plunge and releases their work into the world, it stops belonging to them alone; the experience that an audience member has with the work is theirs. No matter how much the original author might want ownership, they just have to deal with sharing as soon as their story finds an audience. And who doesn’t want an audience?
Indulging fan cravings for a satisfying story might not lead to the highest quality of media, but neither will allowing a tyrannical author to belittle the readings of their audience. If the goal is better art and entertainment, then the grinding tension between creator and fandom isn’t a problem to be solved, but a fruitful process to be appreciated.