Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  Whatever the motivation, I seem to remember having a near-complete cast, which we’d frequently use to recreate scenes from the movie—but that would get us only so far. Naturally, we started making up our own scenes: Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker both had those little plastic lightsabers embedded in their right arms, so it made perfect sense to have them fight each other, anticipating the climax of The Empire Strikes Back by a couple years. (Admittedly, we didn’t see the family angle coming.)

  As we got older, and the action figure market expanded, we picked up characters from other franchises; I vaguely remember Killer Kane from Buck Rogers becoming Vader’s sidekick while Han Solo teamed up with Captain Decker, the Stephen Collins character from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I’ve long since forgotten what explanation, if any, we came up with for everybody being in the same world. I suspect that after a huge influx from the Fisher Price Adventure People line, we just wound up improvising.36

  That childhood play is the heart of fic.

  II.

  A few years into this—1980 or ’81, as best I can figure—I discovered James Blish’s Star Trek adaptations in my public library and promptly set about reading them straight through, in order. I know I was already into Trek by then;37 I remember owning a fotonovela version of the Chicago gangster episode, “A Piece of the Action,” when I was in first or second grade, as well as a book where you could fold together paper replicas of phasers and tricorders. But I think I might actually have been into the ’70s cartoon more than the original series, most of which I still hadn’t seen at that point. (In fact, I never did see “Space Seed” until sometime after its “sequel,” The Wrath of Khan, came out, but thanks to Blish I at least knew the background to the movie.) In retrospect, those books feel like a turning point, a moment at which I might have subconsciously realized that there was something more to the world of Trek—for that matter, David Gerrold’s The World of Star Trek, also in that library, was a critical introduction to the notion that the significance of a franchise could extend beyond the content of the original episodes.

  Soon after, when I stumbled onto Stephen Goldin’s Trek to Madworld, it was Gerrold’s endorsement on the cover that convinced me to buy it and read it, and that set me down the path of other Star Trek novels. It didn’t really register with me that these were “official” Star Trek spinoffs; by this time, I’d read the New Voyages anthology, which featured short stories set on the Enterprise introduced by members of the cast, and somewhere along the line I’d picked up on the idea that fans of the show had gone off and written stories on their own.

  To a pre-adolescent me, it just made sense that “everybody” was off doing their own Star Trek stories, and some of them were getting published.

  III.

  Skip forward another two or three years. Now fully committed to reading science fiction stories about other people besides the crew of the Enterprise, I’ve worked my way through the entire collection in the public library’s children’s section, and I’ve moved on to the main floor. That’s where I found Philip José Farmer’s Tarzan Alive, a “definitive biography of Lord Greystoke.” Now, I hadn’t actually read any of the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, but of course I knew who Tarzan was, so I checked it out—whereupon my mind was fully and properly blown by the literary conceit that there was a real person behind the character, and that Farmer had managed to track him down.

  But I was most bedazzled by the “Wold Newton family tree,” found in an appendix near the very end of the book.38 Here, Farmer expanded on his initial premise: not only is Tarzan a real historical figure, but so are many of the other legendary characters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular literature, from Sherlock Holmes to Doc Savage. Actually, I recollect that I was probably at least halfway on board with the idea that Holmes was real already, as I’d devoured my one-volume complete stories with annotations by W. S. Baring-Gould and—even as I was working my way through the library’s science fiction section—I had rifled through the mystery shelves looking for Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and its sequel, The West End Horror, along with Michael Hodel’s Enter the Lion, which was a memoir by Sherlock’s older brother, Mycroft.

  Maybe I was just an especially susceptible young reader, but I willingly accepted the proposition that Holmes and Watson were real and those who came after Conan Doyle really were passing along newly discovered Watson manuscripts. (Part of the pleasure of the sequels, perhaps, is in the tales the authors concoct to explain how they’ve come upon the previously unfound documents.) From there, it wasn’t much of a leap of faith to assume that other stories were “really real,” too, and here was Philip José Farmer, tying them all together into one amazing bundle—and, in the process, handing the adolescent me a list of stories and characters I ought to track down.

  I had only middling success finding the other “primary documents” of the Wold Newton family. I had much better luck getting my hands on other books where Farmer borrowed classic characters, from Doc Savage and Phileas Fogg to Glinda the Good Witch, and either told “the story behind the story” or gave them all-new adventures. To this day, I’m still half-convinced that Glinda was behind the death of Warren G. Harding, as suggested in A Barnstormer in Oz.

  As that last line indicates, I could be particularly gullible when it came to the presence of real-life people in fiction, and Farmer wasn’t the only person to divert me with a rather idiosyncratic version of history . . . but that’s a story for another essay. For now, the takeaway is that it was impressed upon me early that telling stories with other people’s characters, digging into the world of the original stories and giving it your own spin, was—well, maybe it wasn’t perfectly ordinary, because I’d read around enough to learn that these Farmer stories were somewhat notorious (as opposed to other Farmer stories that were notorious for their frank sexuality). So, ordinary, not so much, but natural? Yes.

  IV.

  It can start, as I described earlier, when we treat the stories we grow up with not just as texts to be read, or movies or programs to be watched, but as toys with which we can play. In some cases, that process is facilitated by the existence of actual toys; even without physical objects, though, our imaginations can take hold of the story elements and adjust them to our liking—whether it’s a simple tweak here and there or the development of an all-new narrative.

  Some of us just move on to another stage, where instead of getting the results of our playful imagination out of our heads by moving figurines around on our bedroom floor or living room coffee table, we set them down in text. That makes them much easier to share, and that raises a complex set of issues—one I’m sure other folks in this book can do a much better job of addressing. Sometimes, though, you get lucky: either the “toys” have become community property, and nobody much minds if you borrow them, or the people who do own the “toys” actually invite you to play with them.

  Even if that never happens, though, “playing” with other people’s stories is a creative activity I’d liken to others we accept as quite natural for children—and adults—to engage in. Just as you don’t need to have serious aspirations of becoming a professional musician to learn how to play “Für Elise” on the piano, and you can carry a sketchbook around without being expected to become a fine artist, we should encourage everyone to create their own Star Trek (or Star Wars, or Harry Potter, or whatever) stories simply as a way to exercise their own imaginations.

  For now, I’ll leave the practical aspects of protecting creators’ economic interests for other contributors to elaborate. What I know, what I can attest to, is that I grew up in a world of fic that spurred me to spend more time deeply engaging the stories that I loved, figuring out the structural elements that made them work. As Michael Ann Dobbs suggests in a post at io9.com, reading fic offers valuable creative writing lessons, including (but not limited to) a healthy respect for all the characters in a story and their underlying motivations.39

  Reading fic also taught me to lo
ok for the threads that bind seemingly disparate stories together, and that’s a lesson I’ve brought to many of my attempts at cultural criticism. When I first read Lipstick Traces as a college student, I was prepared for Greil Marcus’ chain of connections running from Dada through Situationism to the Sex Pistols, having been thoroughly indoctrinated in the secret history of pulp culture as a teenager. Fifteen years later, as I worked out the central thesis of my study of Hollywood in the 1970s, The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane!, there was never any doubt that I’d be putting films like Empire of the Ants and Americathon on equal footing with Annie Hall and The Deer Hunter. It made perfect sense to me that they were all part of the same story about American culture; I just had to sort out what that story was.

  Fortunately, I had the Star Wars section down cold. After all, I’d been finding my way through that material for more than thirty years.

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

  WITH THE RISE of personal computing in the 1980s and of the internet in the 1990s, fanfiction increasingly has been electronically produced and digitally distributed. The effects of this shift on the community, the literature it produces, and the broader reading and writing public are really only beginning to be understood. With stories such as “The Theory of Narrative Causality,” fic writers are bringing this medium shift to bear on their storytelling, and internet fandom’s visual and social atmosphere is already worlds away from where it started, on Usenet groups and discussion lists. From these earliest network incarnations, though, one tremendous effect of these changes has remained: speed. Communities, conflicts, and conventions form faster than ever before—probably by orders of magnitude. As my students and I found, genres evolve and spread like lightning—whether within a single canon (post-Reichenbach Sherlock or post-finale Buffy the Vampire Slayer stories, for example) or across fandoms (coffee shop AU, male pregnancy, the BDSM universe in which gender and sexual orientation are secondary to D/s identities).

  In addition to speed, the internet brought anonymity. No more mailing addresses or phone numbers were needed to receive fandom news. At first, emails and IDs (anonymous or pseudonymous) sufficed, and then fanboards sprang up—many requiring no registration. Fanfiction became free, open, public. Readers were free to lurk. Writers remained as anonymous as they wished—even to those who ran the websites. Geek-genre shows—like Buffy and The X-Files—drew fans who were removed from geek culture and unlikely ever to physically make a zine or attend a convention, but who were happy to read and write on the privacy of their own screens. Revealing someone’s “real life” identity and location quickly came to be understood as a sin of great magnitude, whereas in the days of zines, such information was commonly shared.

  The option of anonymity led to the possibility of identity play. Plenty of people who would never dream of dressing up as Princess Leia or a Klingon at a fan convention were drawn to create online personae that were themselves a kind of fiction. While in the early days of the internet, the lurid possibilities of such anonymity were used as bogeymen to scare children and their parents, in (virtual) reality they far more often gave people the opportunity to try on new styles, genders, sexualities, and appearances—to live differently, sometimes with more daring, than they did in real life. Today, in female-majority fic communities, a woman writer might take on a male identity to get attention, to experiment with interacting as male, or sometimes to make a political point. A male enthusiast can pass as female and avoid extra attention. People often claim no gender or race or orientation, although many find the same issues and tensions resurfacing in online communities or grow weary of assumptions made about them. Sometimes writers take on sock puppet identities to praise and promote their own work and tear down the work of their rivals. The internet, in other words, has had its plusses and minuses for fic writers, their work, and their communities; as a stern Structuralist tutor once corrected me, “Literature does not evolve; it changes.” The internet changed fanfiction. Period.

  It has never been only the technology that changes fanfiction, of course. Like any other aspect of culture, fanfiction responds to and shapes other broader cultural shifts. The shift in technology during the 1980s and ’90s also coincided with several fic-inspiring genre shows that took an interest in playing with gender and genre conventions—much as fic had been doing. Both The X-Files and Buffy had large, groundbreaking, and long-influential internet fandoms, and each in its own way took established gendered tropes from genre fiction and movies and flipped them, giving central roles to strong, dynamic women characters. The X-Files played on the Sherlock–Watson and Spock–Kirk rationalist-to-intuitivist dynamic but the “doctor” was now the rationalist and the rationalist was a woman—one in no way subordinate in rank to her male partner. In an even more dramatic switch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer took the stock horror movie victim and made her the superhero. These reversals were not restricted to representation, either. While the vast majority of the many screenwriters for The X-Files were men, Buffy creator Joss Whedon went out of his way to hire women writers, among them Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson, each of whom has more writing credits on the show than anyone besides Whedon himself. Noxon eventually went on to become showrunner. Certainly other nongenre shows and even other fanfic-inspiring shows had employed women: D. C. Fontana wrote for both the original Star Trek and The Next Generation, for example, the latter of which employed a number of female writers and also included strong female characters, although both writing staff and starship were headed by men. Xena, which immediately preceded Buffy in the kickass female lead department and produced its share of fanfic, employed female writers on a handful of episodes. With Buffy, though, women were not only prominent characters but also prominent writer-producers, and what’s more, as the internet made such information more readily accessible all around, Buffy’s women writers were seen, and heard from, in internet forums in a way that was then new.

  Of course, whether a show inspires fic has more to do with relationships on screen than those behind it, and both these shows pushed gender boundaries in that regard. As each series progressed, it increasingly went to edgy places with gender and sexuality. In one X-Files episode, another character’s talking tattoo (voiced by Jodi Foster) helped inspire Scully to get inked as well, which seemed to lead her to a level of sexual promiscuity out of character for her—but possibly only repressed. Mulder had a porn addiction, and a psychic suggested he’d die of “auto-erotic asphyxiation”—the first time, certainly, such a term made its way into a prime-time show. Buffy had the first lesbian lovers in prime time; underage sex (that controversially unleashed a supervillian from its hero); and a season-long exploration of dubious consent, rough sex, and BDSM tropes. Both prime-time television and fandom had changed a lot since the early 1970s, when erotic content was relegated to furtive word-of-mouth stories like the ones Jacqueline Lichtenberg described. Erotic fanfiction was already big enough to have exclusively devoted het and slash zines, and all such content was soon to be found online, sorted by kink and by pairing. But with these shows, canon began to follow suit.

  Thematically speaking, both The X-Files and Buffy also had a great deal to say about the power dynamics that play out between renegade, counterinstitutional forces and the institutions they seem to work for and within. As it turned out, these dynamics mirrored the relations between fan communities and corporate copyright holders throughout the early days of internet fandom. Mulder and Scully, Buffy’s Scooby Gang, and fan writers and their communities all lived under constant threat of being shut down, or at least of having their work devalued and interfered with if officialdom took too much notice—whether by the FBI or an alien conspiracy (X-Files); the world of the Watchers’ Council (Buffy); high school principals, parents, and police (Buffy and fandom); or a cease-and-desist-order-wielding Fox executive (fandom). “The Powers That Be” was a phrase used in fan culture, to refer to a show’s official creators and decision makers, and ultimately even adopted by Buffy
spinoff Angel to refer to an evil law firm’s lurking supernatural overseers. Fan writers could look to the shows’ characters as compatriots in an us v. them world.

  The two sides of ’90s media fandom, fans and official (paid) creators, had something else in common: both took permissions, precedents, and possibilities from the short-lived, genre-bending series Twin Peaks and the broad-based if also short-lived fan culture it created. In the early ’90s, “the net was out there,” and Twin Peaks fans pioneered this new technology’s potential for active, collective watching and reacting to television.

  Mark Frost and David Lynch’s cult show has been credited for paving the way for The X-Files creatively as well as in the minds of television executives (and in terms of casting!). Of course, The X-Files was a very different show—more procedural, more sci-fi, an episodic/myth-arc hybrid, as opposed to Twin Peaks’ intensely serialized nature. Twin Peaks also embraced its soap opera and paranormal mystery sides equally, while in The X-Files, the soap opera—as relationship-centered narrative is often disparagingly termed—was something Chris Carter was insistent (if unsuccessful) about resisting, at least in the early days. Still, taking David Duchovny from FBI agent on the paranormal mystery Twin Peaks to FBI agent on the paranormal procedural The X-Files helped bring the kindred spirits of alt.tv.twin-peaks fans from Usenet to the new show. (Speaking of going to edgy places with gender and sexuality: David Duchovny’s Twin Peaks character was a not-at-all-feminized FBI agent who preferred wearing dresses.) The casting of Major Briggs (the father of Twin Peaks’ Bobby) as Scully’s father in the first very Scully-centric episode also helped cement this relationship.