Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  When I ordered Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from Amazon in December 1998, I was twenty-seven years old, newly pregnant, and already an internet veteran. I’d been online for over six years and had done stints on staff at the New York Times Electronic Media Company, modding the Cyberlaw forum on America Online, as the chat room coordinator and freelance writer for TheKnot, as a fill-in moderator at the Crowded House fansite, and as the attorney for Cybergrrls/Webgrrls.

  While I’d read scripts for Twin Peaks and the original ’70s version of The Tomorrow People in Gopherspace, posted actively on alt.weddings and, um, extended the Melrose Place Drinking Game, my “fandom” participation was comparatively limited. I didn’t read fanfic, or link to fanart, although I knew what they were.

  However, thanks to a mailing list run by a grad student at Dartmouth, in September 1994, I became somewhat involved with the fandom for a brand-new TV show called Friends. Back then (it sounds almost like I’m discussing something from a hundred years ago; yes, it was the last century, it’s nearly 20 years on!) newspaper articles and TV programs regularly warned that if you had “real-life” meetups with people you had come to know online, you’d learn that they were ax murderers or a different gender than they claimed. But most likely, they were an ax murderer.

  I had no idea that there was a small, intense, dynamic, and talented mass of writers, artists, debaters, obsessive list makers, analysts, gossips, academics, and technologists creating magic every day. (There were also some trolls, as there are throughout the internet.) But those fanwriting communities had no idea that their below-the-radar subcultures were soon to be flooded by thousands of “feral” fans, be written up on the front page of the New York Times, show up on Fox News and MTV, and somehow become part of the mainstream.

  In 2001, a fan suggested that people put buttons (we’d call them icons now) on their websites or fics to show how long they’d been part of the Harry Potter fandom. Nobody had been around for more than two years at that point, so even a line of lightning bolts, one per month, wouldn’t take up too much space.

  Now? It’s been half a lifetime for many; for millions of people, there is no “before Harry Potter.”

  When I joined Harry Potter for Grownups the day before Goblet of Fire came out, there were a few hundred people on the list; eight months later, there were over 1,000, and now, over 25,000. When I joined The Leaky Cauldron in the spring of 2001 to post blurbs about new Harry Potter merchandise in WB stores, Harry Potter fans who wanted to create a fansite used Tripod or Geocities to do so, then typed their site name, URL, and summary into the Directory on Yahoo! so someone could manually approve and add it so subsequent fans could find it. During that summer, AOL added House seals and the Hogwarts crest as emoticons in AIM and launched 1-2-3 Publish setups for creating homepages; on most websites, comments from visitors were posted to a guestbook.

  There were massive debates among fandomers as to whether the series was for children, whether adults could legitimately read it, and whether fanfic writers were creatively inspired by J. K. Rowling’s wizarding world or thieves lurking in Nocturne Alley and The Restricted Section.

  Everyone was afraid that Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and/or Warner Bros. would show up within the next hour and shut everything down, but the few lawyers in fandom, including myself, didn’t think they’d have a leg to stand on if they tried.

  Nearly two years after the release of Goblet of Fire, with one Harry Potter film already on DVD and another set for release a few months down the road, fans were getting desperate for new canon. There had been thousands of posts on Yahoo! groups, on ship-specific forums and more general Harry Potter discussion boards, and at small meetups at movie theaters and during DVD releases. While those were awesome and fun, every one of us wanted something more from J. K. Rowling. And if we couldn’t get it, we would read something else.

  I spoke with a reporter from the New York Times about how thousands of fans were passing the time before the release of Book Five (we didn’t know the title yet) by writing and reading fanfic, as well as participating in roleplaying projects in communities on LiveJournal. On May 5, 2002, the Times ran the front-page article that quoted me, linked to FictionAlley.org’s fanfiction/fanart/discussion archive, and reported that fans were writing fanfiction to pass the time before a new book from J. K. Rowling was released. The article mentioned slash fiction; it seems that it was the first time that the Times had ever reported on slash.

  Some panicked, and even I was nervous. When I checked my email on Monday morning and saw an email from someone at Warner Bros. asking me to give her a call, I downed a Diet Coke for courage before picking up the phone.

  She’d seen the article in the Times, and thought what we were doing on FictionAlley was very interesting! I took a deep breath, hoping this wasn’t going to be the “but you can’t continue . . .” call I’d feared since we’d started the website.

  Instead, she asked, “Are you interested in becoming an affiliate of the WBShop? We’re about to relaunch the site!”

  In other words, it was the complete antithesis of what I’d been expecting. Of course, the article wasn’t the first time WB, or Scholastic, or Bloomsbury had read about Harry Potter fandomers and their creative ways of sharing theories, debating ship viability, and proposing possible character arcs. But it was the first time that the Harry Potter Powers That Be had publicly reached out to a fansite in such a positive way—although it wouldn’t be the last.

  What I, as a newcomer to online fandom, didn’t know at the time was that a few fans who’d come to HP from other fandoms thought that the only proper response, if The Powers That Be asked you anything, was to shut down your site, pull down your fics and your discussions, and go away—maybe even change your online name, which definitely had no link to your real-world self.

  But how could you be a fan of a book that was premised on standing up to evil and saying no to overreaching by The Authorities, and just do that?

  A few months later, Warner Bros. asked me (no, they never demanded or even suggested that they would kick us out of the store’s affiliate program) to recategorize all fanfic on FictionAlley that included gay characters as “Rated R.” I said we wouldn’t. I pointed them to our policy on ratings that didn’t rate kisses between Sirius Black and Remus Lupin any differently than kisses between Percy Weasley and Penelope Clearwater. (Years later, when J. K. Rowling said that she had always thought of Dumbledore as gay, it made me wonder whether she had ever even been aware of WB’s requests, and she reinvigorated my confidence in that 2002 decision.)

  Warner Bros. weren’t the only ones who were concerned about slash fiction. There have been significant strides in LGBT rights since the early 2000s, but while slash fanfic, gay characters, and gay couples are common in Western media in 2013, ten years ago it wasn’t yet part of the mainstream within fandom, or on tv, in films, or even in books. The Harry Potter fandom was no different, as Nimbus–2003, the first Harry Potter fan convention, made clear. In July of 2003, over 600 fans from all around the world converged in Orlando, Florida, years before Universal even thought about placing the Wizarding World amid its palm trees.

  To its attendees, the event was a smashing success; dozens of fans and academics presented on aspects of the series, Harry/Hermione and Ron/Hermione shippers debated where the series was going, and the Welcoming Feast turned into a wake for Sirius Black, killed on page 806 of Order of the Phoenix, which had come out barely a month before. Judith Krug, Director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, spoke about the growing problem of book banning, especially as parents demanded schools and libraries ban the Harry Potter series because it promoted witchcraft (it doesn’t).

  But two vendors were not happy and clearly hadn’t attended Dr. Krug’s presentation. They complained to attendees and other vendors that we were hosting a smut-fest, griping about the panel that explained and discussed slash and the sentence uttered by one of the Ron/Hermione proponen
ts to start her debate: “Harry Potter has two best friends—Hermione and Ron. Will he end up with one of them or will they end up with each other?”

  In other words, the very idea of two characters in a book being gay offended them deeply; discussion of homosexuality was inherently wrong and should be banned. Just after lunch, we refunded their money and asked them to leave.

  But they were outsiders to fandom. What about webmasters and academics and adult fans?

  Some of them were anti-slash, too. When I started at The Leaky Cauldron in the spring of 2001, I tried to convince the site’s then-webmaster Rames to allow me to create a fanfic section for the site that would accept all Harry Potter fanfic regardless of ship or lead characters. He said that he didn’t want to host slash somewhere that kids could read it, even if the characters didn’t go beyond kissing. In the mid-2000s, MuggleNet took the same perspective: stories with same-gender relationships shouldn’t be easy to access and wouldn’t be hosted on MuggleNet’s fanfic site.

  Fans who wrote slash fanfic were pilloried in articles in papers from Scotland to San Francisco, and Warner Bros. was concerned that kids doing internet searches for Harry Potter (in those pre-widespread-use-of-Google) days would find “problematic” material.

  Fanficcers, fan artists, and those who enjoyed fanworks kept their names and their Potter interests hidden from friends and family. Many were worried that if people found out, they’d be called freaks—dangerous freaks—and anonymous trolls stirred the cauldron of concern when they could. Anons would show up a few times a month on forums and mailing lists to condemn mods for hosting fics with gay characters where kids could see them, even if the characters were barely kissing. In 2004, for example, an anonymous user wrote:

  While I understand that the majority of the writers here at fictionalley may be adults, or at least well into their teens, some of the readers may not be. Even if you consider your fic to be PG, with just a bit of kissing or whatever, I think that any level of homosexuality from the main characters would be sufficantly [sic] traumatic for a child that one might want to consider rating all of those fictions R.89

  And ten years ago, this sentiment wasn’t uncommon. As one fan commented back in 2000, “And as to Ron/Harry shippers- let ’em ship. I know that JKR would never screw up a perfectly lovely series like HP because she wanted to make the main characters boyfriends. That would instantly make me set down the book and run screaming.”

  In 2002 or 2004, it wasn’t unusual for a Concerned Netizen to post on a forum or email a site’s mods and warn that “making” the beloved Harry Potter characters gay was libelous, confusing, a slap at J. K. Rowling, and, worst of all, noncanonical.

  But in 2004, J. K. Rowling gave her first website award to Immeritus, a Sirius Black–centric site that hosted fanfic and fanart as well as discussions and speculation . . . and in some of those fics and some of that art, Sirius was snogging or shagging Remus Lupin (or occasionally Snape or Lucius Malfoy). Rowling said, “For a while I had a picture of the four marauders drawn by Laura Freeman on my desktop. It is a particularly accurate portrayal of Sirius and Lupin . . .” There were discussions about what she meant by that, focusing on the characters that comprised one of the most popular ships. Was she okaying it? Was she granting permission to fanart in general, and same-gender, romance-centric fanart in particular?

  Three years later, though, when she stated that she had always seen Albus Dumbledore as gay, everything changed, not only for slash readers, writers, and artists, but also for fandomers across the net.

  Back on October 19, 2007, thousands of fans posted comments and essays about Dumbledore’s sexuality; many if not most comments criticized Jo for celebrating homosexuality, for making it all right to be gay, for “ruining the books” or this favorite character. “Now people are going to call HP fans gay . . . lol hope it doesn’t come to that!!”

  By 2010, the world was different, and so was fandom. MuggleNet changed its website in support of Spirit Day, in memory of six young men who killed themselves after being bullied because they were gay. Hundreds of fans posted support for those gay teens, for the inspiration fans had gotten from the Harry Potter books, and their memories of how terrific it felt to hear that J. K. Rowling had always seen Dumbledore as gay.

  A decade ago, I was slammed as immoral for letting teenagers discuss whether gay wizards even existed; in 2007, J. K. Rowling told us they did. Kids who were thirteen in 1999 and 2002 and 2004 are in their mid-twenties now, and those who were college students then have kids and nieces and nephews of their own. If you told them that it was immoral to let thirteen-year-olds read YA stories about gay teenage wizards, they would probably laugh and tell you it’d be immoral to ban them from reading those stories.

  Or anything else.

  The Look of Fic: 2001–2002

  The homepage of Harry Potter fanfiction archive FictionAlley, 2001G

  Alicia/Sue’s Harry Potter fanfiction “An Unlikely Coven,” as posted to FictionAlley, 2002H

  The Twilight Fandom

  Mainstream publishing wasn’t giving us what we wanted, so we made it ourselves.

  —tby789, author of “The Office”

  THE TWILIGHT FANDOM. Maligned and mocked, belittled and ridiculed all over the internet. “The Feral Fandom,” people called it. A fandom with zero geek cred, none, no idea what fandom or fanfiction was, how it should work and had worked for years. They were rabid, ridiculous Twihards.

  And that’s just what they said about each other.

  This is what MSNBC said, in a 2009 headline: “Devoted ‘Twihards’ get their fix online. Many ‘Twilight’ junkies hit the Web to connect with like-minded devotees.”90 The article elaborated: “Just try prying a Twihard away from the computer screen and a rousing tweet or a lusty blog. You might come away badly wounded.” It went on to discuss fanfiction: “Believe it or not, there are Stephenie Meyer wannabes out there who have taken her characters and expanded on them.” Conceding that some of these “wannabe” fics are “quite good,” the article cites AngstGoddess, whose massively popular “Wide Awake” many fans felt was “better than anything Meyer has churned out.”

  “Churned out”? I didn’t care for Twilight, neither the movies nor the books. Not my cup of tea. Curiously, not even the cup of tea of a lot of Twilight fan writers, or maybe “a cup of tea they would admit to no one” (although “S&M and Bible Studies” could pass muster as a Belle and Sebastian–penned Twific prompt). But “churned out”? This mainstream media coverage—and it’s hardly the least respectful article out there—clearly characterizes thousands of women as dangerous lustful junkies so devoted to the ridiculous stories of a “churning” hack that they’re forced to make their own stories to feed their habit, as if fanfiction were some kind of cut-rate home meth lab.

  It’s remarkable how poorly this characterization fits the women the article actually quotes. AngstGoddess, for instance, is quoted describing fic-writing not as a desperate bid to get more Twilight or as a way to emulate Stephenie Meyer, but as a learning process: “‘It’s kind of like training wheels,’ she explained, ‘to be given the opportunity to explore writing styles and techniques using a template in which the relationships and logistics have already been decided and proven enjoyable to the fandom.’” MSNBC relied on AngstGoddess to explain the various categories or niches most Twific falls into in the Twilight-specific use of terminology: “Canon”—close to Meyer’s world; AU—loosely based on Meyer’s world; and “‘All Human,’ the most controversial, which usually consists of original fiction with ‘Twilight’ names attached bearing little resemblance to the original works” (MSNBC’s language, paraphrasing AngstGoddess). The article also has her describe the Twilight fandom’s pan-generational appeal: “‘I think the most notable aspect is the variety of ages we see,’ she said. ‘With every generation, you see differing trends in what they enjoy and create with the characters. Niches notwithstanding, this also provides an opportunity for people to find something in comm
on with one another.’” She doesn’t sound like a rabid junkie. Neither do the women who run LettersToTwilight.com, a fansite that also poked fun at itself, the fandom, and the objects of the fandom’s love. The article quotes them, too: “‘Twilight’ isn’t really that great of a movie. The books aren’t always written so well. But that doesn’t mean it’s not great, amazing and captivating. That doesn’t mean we don’t love it and don’t go all fan-girl crazy over it.”

  Despite the preponderance of self-aware, even self-ironic, professional women in the Twilight fandom, however, Urban Dictionary defines Twihards as “stupid obsessive people (mostly teenage girls) who are in love with fictional characters and wouldn’t know a good book if it punched them in the face.” Such misconceptions are extremely widespread. It’s the fandom even other fandoms love to hate.

  It’s tempting to parse some of the intra-fandom hatred of Twilight as paralleling the prejudice of (mostly male) science fiction fans against the emerging (more likely to be female) communities of media fans in the late sixties and seventies, but this Twi-hate cuts across gender boundaries. I’ve seen enormous disdain for anything Twilight related expressed in any number of equally female-dominated fanfiction communities. Some of the most intense Twi-hatred has been expressed by Buffy fans, perhaps in reaction to the idea that one vampire-themed teen-based franchise would resemble another. A typical response: “Twilight is very bad fiction of the worst kind. On the level of Mary Sue [self-insert] fanfic bad. Not witty, concise, well-plotted, or at all interesting, its themes are generally anti-feminist and the protagonist is the exact opposite of Buffy: largely helpless and whiny. Stephen King put it best when he said, ‘the moral of Twilight is how important it is to have a boyfriend.’”91

  Often, we see other fangirls disdain Twilight and its fandom because they see it as girly—not challenging gender stereotypes, but reinforcing them, like a vampire version of the Disney Princess line. It’s hardly the case that I can’t imagine—or make—a really strong feminist critique of Twilight. But frankly, I can do one for Buffy, too, and that’s a feminist show of which I’m a big, flaily fan. Furthermore, lots of Twilight fanfiction itself explores feminist critique from a variety of different perspectives—including the one that says, “We’re grownup women, and our sexual fantasies don’t govern our politics. Or the other way around.”