Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  So I did what any rational person would do, of course: I took Stephenie Meyer’s characters hostage. My experimental fanfiction “Becoming Bella Swan” was an exercise in critique by self-insertion. My protagonist was essentially my id setting fire to the Twilight universe and playing in the ashes. And no Swan rose from Phoenix, Arizona, in this particular fanfiction; a thirty-something, broken woman woke up in a mental institution in Tacoma, Washington, faced with the task of becoming Bella Swan. Isabella Flanagan, my alter ego, gave Bella Swan a voice to scream with.

  Part Two—Fucking in Twilight

  So here’s a personal question every woman needs to answer for herself: if you could fuck your way through the Twilight universe without any consequences, what would you do?

  No, I’m serious! Imagine a universe without consequences, where you can revisit themes the author neglected to resolve, and you can give Edward and Jacob their cocks, since Meyer seemed to have forgotten men have them.

  Fanfiction makes us God in a world that doesn’t belong to us—it lets us break through the proverbial fourth wall.

  And while we’re there, oh God, do we want to fuck Edward Cullen. But why?

  A profound power shift occurs as a woman leaves her teens and twenties and ventures on toward middle age—one that renders her both impotent and aggressive. As a teenager, I noticed girls seemed to own the sexual power in a relationship, whereas boys were the pursuers. (This hunter/prey metaphor persists in Twilight, with an interesting twist: Bella can’t be certain if Edward craves her body or her blood.) While boys reach their sexual peak at eighteen, it doesn’t happen for women until thirty. Thus the shift in sexual power—the hunter becomes the prey. It can be inferred that the women who fell for Edward’s charms both enjoyed the fantasy of being pursued—and craved so desperately that said pursuer didn’t just want to fuck her, he wanted to eat her, too—but they were also free to lust after a grown man in the body of a teenage boy.

  Of course, if you ask “Becoming Bella Swan” protagonist Isabella Flanagan, she’d say: we’re all horny bitches who want to transform Edward into the fuck-beast that he’s capable of being. We want him to live up to his potential. We want him to fuck us. We want him to dominate us, and sometimes, we want him to take it up the ass.

  Isabella Flanagan can speak to Meyer’s characters in a way that Bella Swan couldn’t. While Bella Swan blushes and hides her face, begging for Edward to make love to her, to give her the only human experience she actually craves, Flanagan simply shoves her hands in her underwear and forces him to watch her masturbate:

  On my hands and knees I crawled the length of the bed to my virginal centenarian vampire lover. I kissed him very softly on his unyielding mouth and said, “So you want to see my pussy?” . . . Part of me felt guilty, like I was defiling Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy or some shit. Whatever, though . . . everybody fucks. Sex is the great equalizer.

  T. S. Eliot wrote, “That is not what I meant at all,” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he speaks of Lazarus returning from the dead. That line always echoes in my mind when I’m interpreting an author’s meaning. And, as Flanagan deconstructs Meyer’s world, I have psychotic flashes of Meyer screaming that line at me, shaking her fist.

  In “Becoming Bella Swan,” the sex is extreme, sometimes even violent, but the heroine—this ménage of Swan/Flanagan/me—is always in control and owns the sexual power in almost every situation. She has no power over her own identity, but the Edward and Jacob archetypes are completely at her mercy.

  But the “Becoming Bella Swan” universe isn’t all candy and roses. Flanagan chases the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole, not just to live in the fantasy but to escape something sinister that pursues her, lurking out of reach from her conscious mind. In canon Twilight, Edward leaves Bella in the woods and she wanders, disoriented and vulnerable. In my fic, Flanagan also faces monsters in the woods, but not of the fairy-tale variety:

  “Hey, darling.” A voice materialized from behind me. I pulled myself off the ground but got kicked back down onto my knees. “Get on all fours, pretty thing.”

  No fucking way. No fucking way was this asshole going to fuck with me.

  “What do you want?” I tried to speak calmly but had trouble controlling the hysterical timbre in my voice.

  “Ah, shit, baby. Don’t be like that.” He flashed something metal in my peripheral and my hysteria was replaced with terrorized shock. My limbs went completely numb with fear and my breathing quickened beyond my ability to catch up.

  Fight or flight. Fight or flight.

  I never thought I’d be the damsel in distress. I always imagined that if I was ever attacked, I would somehow be brave and kick ass. I knew the rules: never beg for one’s life.

  “Please?” I begged.

  And so, both Bellas are victimized, leaving the reader wondering which Bella is using the other’s identity to work through her trauma.

  Is Swan using Flanagan’s strength to confront Edward?

  Is Flanagan using Swan’s traumatic experience in the woods to suppress her own?

  Did I create Flanagan to work through my own issues?

  The answer to all three questions is yes, because it’s not the truth that matters in this story but the journey—the opportunity to deconstruct the book by becoming a part of it.

  Part Three—Mass Hysteria

  I’ve read so much Twilight fanfiction that I have difficulty distinguishing canon from fanwriting at times. All of the stories seem to happen simultaneously in parallel worlds.

  “Isabella . . . you’re expecting me to entertain the possibility of multiple universes?”

  “Why not? I believe in vampires. How’s it a stretch?”

  “I see. So, how is this a metaphysical question?” I couldn’t read Carlisle’s expression. He had an excellent poker face.

  “Well, because I’m questioning standard beliefs about existence. How do we know something exists, what’s real and what’s fantasy? And, by that same token, can fantasy become reality if enough people believe in it?”

  Flanagan explains to a room of people (with a tenuous grip on reality) that if enough people believe a pink elephant is in the room, the elephant will materialize. Belief affecting reality is a central theme in “Becoming Bella Swan,” and it’s one that is an allegory for the Twilight fandom.

  Participating in social media is part of the fandom experience for many readers and writers, and the pink elephant phenomenon can be witnessed daily in this forum. We adapt and amplify popular opinion, spreading information like wildfire.

  As participants in this community, we worship the idols of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan to such an extreme degree that we impose their personalities onto the actors who portray them in the movies.

  Particularly of interest is what happens when the fantasy is destroyed. When Kristen Stewart cheated on Robert Pattinson last July, there was a broad sense of disillusionment in the fandom, and you could witness participants exhibit the Kübler-Ross model stages of grief via social media.

  Part Four—Becoming BellaFlan

  Who the fuck am I? If you asked me that three years ago, the answer would have been simple. Now? Not so much.

  In the process of adopting Isabella Flanagan’s narrative voice, an unexpected by-product was created—one that took the form of my avatar, BellaFlan.

  BellaFlan is better than me. She’s louder and funnier and more interesting. She’s the person I thought I’d be when I grew up. She’s that snarky voice inside my head that screams over my own voice of reason.

  And as I type this, trying to be mature and eloquent, BellaFlan is goading me to have several shots of vodka so that she can take over. She has such loose fingers, whereas mine are rigid. She pounds the keyboard when she writes while I squeak along, clicking my mouse, moving the cursor over her cursing. Delete! Oh, for the love of fuck, delete!

  No, BellaFlan says. Shit just got interesting.

  The first time BellaFlan appeared was in my
author’s notes. I had a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde reaction to an unkind review:

  Why do people flame? Any ideas? I call it random acts of unkindness. Fuck, if you don’t like a fanfic, then don’t read it. No one is holding a gun to your head. And if they are, include it in your review. I’ll call the fucking police for you.

  Lot’s of love and stuff.

  BellaFlan became more brash and egotistical as the story garnered more readers and reviews:

  Hello. If I didn’t reply to your review, then I’m a shit eating monkey cock. Let me know.

  She then started a nasty rumor that she masturbated to her reviews via a buzzing iPhone:

  Okay, so I’m putting my pretty iPhone in my pocket. All I need are a few buzzes to take me home. I could go all night, baby.

  As I communicated with readers and writers in the fandom, I found myself adopting the BellaFlan persona more and more.

  Was becoming BellaFlan a natural evolution? I think so. Not just because I created a character with dissociative personality disorder. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m not insane. I can’t be certain since insane people don’t realize they’re unwell, but no one has tried to institutionalize me so one can only assume . . .

  We all create avatars online—these elevated, “epic” versions of ourselves. We don them like masks. I’ve met people in the fandom who self-identify as evil cats, cock-loving whores, zombies, pundits, squirrels, and cupcakes. It’s part of the fandom experience—the opportunity to not only lose ourselves to the fantasy world of Twilight, but to become someone else.

  I’m a pink elephant. None of us are really who we seem to be.

  As anyone who knows anything about fandom generally could tell you, fans have a long tradition of raising money for charity. But as we’ve seen, the Twilight fandom by and large didn’t know anything about fandom generally. d0tpark3r (as she explained in her essay here) and others like her would express their frustration with Twilight fandom reinventing the wheel and calling it new. This lack of familiarity with general fandom history and tradition, however, meant they could do things their own way. They did it huge.

  The Fandom Gives Back auction, the focus here, was by far the biggest charity undertaking, but even smaller scale, in Twilight terms, meant big numbers. The Twifans for Haiti drive, organized quickly in response to the devastating 2010 earthquake, raised over $85,000 in the space of just two weeks. The drive organizer, Ms Kathy, explains that immediately following the January 12 disaster, stories were solicited, donated, compiled in a PDF collection (labor donated by manyafandom), and emailed to donors, all between January 13 and January 25. The collection is sitting on my hard drive, 1,800-plus pages by 260 authors. A huge amount of work—and a huge amount of money raised in very little time.

  The Fandom Gives Back was much more complicated. Authors auctioned off story chapters, alternative POVs, and made-to-order fics. But it wasn’t all fic; artists, crafters, and web designers got involved, as did celebrity fansites and bloggers. It was a fandom-wide effort. Some of the most popular Big Name Authors were intensely involved not just as contributors but as organizers. tby789 and LolaShoes (Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, aka Christina Lauren), both of whom we’ve heard from individually about their experiences as fandom authors, were instrumental in this enormous campaign, with the fandom writer Ninapolitan being the other major organizer. AngstGoddess did the website. Each of these women donated hundreds and hundreds of hours to the cause.

  Since the Fandom Gives Back: Eclipse auction was going on during my 2010 course, I joined “teams”—collective bids to receive outtakes—for fics we were reading in class, including “Master of the Universe” (now the Fifty Shades trilogy), “The University of Edward Masen” (now Gabriel’s Inferno), and “An Introduction to Swirl and Daisy” (PG-rated, middle-school Harry Potter fan Bella v. Lord of the Rings fan Edward). My students followed along with the auction as part of our look at the nonprofit economics of Twilight. It’s my recollection that these three teams alone raised over $50,000 for childhood cancer research.

  Fandom Gives Back was created as a charity and inspired an enormous collective outpouring of fandom pride and generosity that far surpassed the expectations of the organizers, as we learn below. But this auction also played a leading role in the story of unintended consequences in the Twilight fandom. The creation of teams and the large sums of money they were able to raise also had the result of translating the economics of online fandom (e.g., review counts, hits) into actual financial numbers that people outside the fandom could understand. If a single alternate-point-of-view outtake of a single fanfiction could raise $30,000, as the “Edward Point-of-View” chapter of “Master of the Universe” did, then there was obviously actual money to be made. Furthermore, this fic, written as a charity donation, was repackaged and resold as part of the record-smashing trilogy. From my perspective as observer, it was obvious that this enormously successful nonprofit charity event was an important step in demonstrating the cash—as opposed to cashless—economic potential of fanfiction.

  Here, Fandom Gives Back organizers tby789 and LolaShoes describe the time, effort, and excitement that went into planning and administrating this vast event.

  The Fandom Gives Back

  Christina Lauren (Christina Hobbs/tby789 and Lauren Billings/LolaShoes)

  While huddled together in line at San Diego Comic-Con, we (Christina and Lauren, along with our fellow FGB organizer Ninapolitan/Nina Cello) saw a pair of young volunteers pushing a cart full of lemonade, selling each one for a dollar. It started a conversation: What would happen if each person there—or each person in the fandom—donated a buck to charity? It could make a huge difference. Too often, Twilight fans are portrayed in the media as screaming teenagers or overzealous cougars. We’re not. We’re strong women, even some men, who were inspired and impassioned by a story and a group of characters. We may have come together because of Twilight, but we stayed because we found friendship, community, encouragement, and sometimes even love that stretched across the globe.

  But where to start?

  We went through a group of charities, stopping when the name Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation—a cause Nina was already heavily involved in—was brought up. ALSF emerged from an actual front-yard lemonade stand of then four-year-old cancer patient Alexandra Scott. Although she lost her battle with cancer in 2004 at the age of eight, her goal of raising money to fund pediatric cancer research lives on through volunteers and virtual stands all over the world. We had four small children between us, and we talked about our love for them and the unfathomable devastation we would feel should one of them fall seriously ill. Within an hour, we’d named our cause and formed the basic structure of The Fandom Gives Back (FGB).

  It was our hope to harness the frenzy surrounding the The Twilight Saga: New Moon, so we chose the week leading up to the film’s release as the time for our event. Organizing the virtual stand was one of the biggest challenges we’d ever faced, and with only a month to go before New Moon hit theaters, it would be a massive undertaking in a very short amount of time. Thankfully, we were surrounded by a community that was not only willing but thrilled by the opportunity to donate their time and talents to support the cause.

  We bought the domain and started a Twitter account, and within hours word had already begun to spread. By the end of that first week we had over two hundred affiliates, ranging from fanfiction and LiveJournal communities to sites dedicated to Twilight and the upcoming movies. The original plan was for fic authors to offer outtakes or even multichaptered stories written specifically for the auction. But soon, people were donating voice work, site design, and podcast interviews; compiling a cookbook of fandom recipes; and offering cast-autographed merchandise and books, graphics, gift baskets, craft items, and much more.

  We used a free forum and spent the next few weeks, together with volunteers, both planning the event and moderating the actual auction. And since all donations were made directly through the ALSF virtual
stand, no funds were ever dealt with by any FGB organizer or volunteer.

  Organized in just eighteen days, the first FGB event was a rousing success. With an initial goal of $10,000, we were left speechless as we watched the total raised grow with each passing hour. Fandom Gives Back: New Moon ran from November 15 to 20, 2009, and raised $87,640 for ALSF.

  In 2010 we wanted to do more. The fandom had grown and FGB hoped to, as well, with all proceeds again to benefit ALSF. The Twilight community rose to the occasion. We bought hosting and enlisted the help of AngstyG (AngstGoddess003), a fandom writer and web designer who volunteered hundreds of hours building a beautiful custom site, which included a landing page for information pertaining to FGB and ALSF; a live auction board; and even a forum. More volunteers were needed to run and moderate the sites, and many stepped forward to do their part.

  I remember there being worry that with the number of hits we’d experienced with FGB: New Moon, and with the sheer number of items being offered for auction this time around, there was no way the server could handle the traffic. We had several test runs, asking thousands of people on Twitter to click the test site at once, and—surprising no one more than our webmaster—it worked perfectly.

  Bloggers from several fandoms beyond Twilight’s, including those focusing on Harry Potter and Beautiful Creatures, heard about our project and encouraged their readers to participate and spread the word. Fic writers noted in their updates that they would be participating and offered outtakes or entire stories for auction. In addition to more of the same items offered for the first FGB, published writers outside of the Twilight fandom donated signed books and merchandise, even blogging or tweeting to promote the cause. You couldn’t go on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the auction without seeing the hashtags #fandomgivesback or #vivalafandom all over your timeline.

  The number of people participating this time around meant that organization was key. Online spreadsheets were made available for the many writers, artisans, and graphic designers to register their offerings, and something that had caused only slight controversy in the first FGB—the formation of teams—became an even bigger force.