FAN FICTION is to the literary world what Tasmania is to Australia. It’s a pocket ecosystem plonked just off the more frequented mainland, happy in its distance and difference but altogether separated by rough waters. Rough waters that have become more turbulent with the rampant success of textbook case of fan fiction – Fifty Shades of Grey.
Fan fiction is an endless cycle of storytelling
where beloved characters can live forever in the imagination of its readers. Where
violently loathed villains can get their just desserts, Bella can choose Jacob
and have his devilishly attractive werewolf babies, and Elizabeth Bennet can be
a kick-ass zombie fighter.
Taking a text—be it a film, book, comic, play,
musical or television show—and playing with its world and characters to create
new stories is part of a grand tradition dating back to the likes of Homer and
the Iliad. Fast forward a few
millenniums and we have Jean Rhys’ Wide
Sargasso Sea, a parallel narrative of Jane
Eyre; Geraldine Brook’s March
that tells the story of Little Woman
from the point of view of an absent character; Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz; and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an
alternative universe to Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice.
Popular culture is riddled with fan fiction; only
it isn’t called fan fiction. To the mainstream, fan fiction is a dirty word
interchangeable with soft porn and wannabe writers. From erotica about
vampires, bodice-busting women, and men with washboard abdominals, to Romeo and Juliet soliloquies in broken
iambic pentameter straight out of a Year Nine creative writing journal, the fan
fiction community houses many of the sex-obsessed, semi-illiterates of this
world.
Realistically, though, the bad and downright ugly
in fan fiction get a disproportionate amount of attention. That is if fan
fiction gets media attention at all—which it often doesn’t. It’s the bastard
child in the corner no one in literary circles like to talk about. Unless the
case in hand is Fifty Shades of Grey,
which was originally Twilight fan
fiction, and has now beaten J.K Rolling’s Harry
Potter series to be the fastest-selling paperback of all time.
Love them or loathe them, fan fiction communities are
on the rise thanks to the Internet. Fanfictiondotnet – one of the largest online
fan fiction archives – holds over half a million Harry Potter stories and receives over six million hits per month. Australians
make up a significant chunk of that traffic. A study of fanfictiondotnet users
last year found Australia has the fourth-highest number of member accounts on
the site, after the US, UK and Canada. Chances are your partner, sibling,
children, friend or colleague reads fan fiction. They might even write it.
Whether they’ll tell you or not, though, is another
matter entirely. It is common for authors to keep their fan fiction habits on
the quiet. Dana Jenks, as she is known in the fan fiction community, is a high
school music teacher and composer. Her students and colleagues don’t know that
she writes fan fiction, and Dana is determined to keep it that way. Dana writes
Phantom of the Opera stories to free
up creative juices for her opera compositions, and finds fanfictiondotnet is a
good testing-ground for her ideas. “I’m interested in learning what makes a
story work musically and gaining insight into the minds of music-loving
fans,” she says. “Fan fiction is a giant playground where it is fun to
experiment without much risk.” It’s a private hobby that feeds into her public
and professional life, but never the other way around.
Theatre stagehand, Caitlin Kenny, on the other
hand, will happily tell anyone willing to listen about her love of River Song/Doctor
fan fiction in the Doctor Who fandom
and Sirius/Lupin pairings in the Harry
Potter stories. Caitlin has battled in heated arguments on fan forums about
why River – not Rose – is the Doctor’s true love. For Caitlin, reading and
writing Doctor/River fan fiction is a legitimising, cathartic process for her
own life choices. She says what makes a text appealing is the individual
meaning and relevance people find in stories to their own lives. “[River] is
beautiful, but she’s a size 12 and sexy, and the Doctor finds her attractive. I
like that because it feels like my life is legitimised with my beautiful,
English boyfriend,” she says. Just as writers of canonical texts insert their
own values, romantic interests and personalities into their characters and plot
scenarios, so too do fan fiction writers when re-crafting such stories.
It comes as no surprise, then, that fan fiction
offers some of the most diverse insights into how readers make sense of
themselves and the characters they interact with. Far from intellectual junk
food, fan fiction academic at the University of Sydney Joseph Brennan argues
that fan fiction is a useful anthropological object of study that reveals a lot
about society and the way it makes meaning.
Joseph’s research focuses on slash fiction. That
is, the “queering” of stories to reflect homosexual elements. In the slash
community, Joseph says engagement becomes an exercise in asserting power and
reclaiming a text to reflect the sexual diversity found in society. “When
reading texts I look for gaps, and in those gaps I find problematic representations,”
he says. The homophobic characterisation of Dean in Supernatural is a case point for Joseph. “Dean regularly cracks gay
jokes on the show, but, by reclaiming Dean, [through slash fan fiction] readers
can fix a lot of the negative stereotypes he projects,” he says. By allowing
characters the happiness that is denied in the canon, writers and readers can
share in a semblance of their happiness. “It’s quite personal,” he says.
Academically enlightening, personally fulfilling,
and creatively gratifying, fan fiction fills a gap in many people’s lives. What
makes Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead different from Jo Blo’s re-telling of Wuthering Heights through the eyes of Heathcliff
can be whittled down to the quality of ideas and writing proficiency. This
admittedly can be a deal breaker, but the action of the mind, of thinking
beyond what readers are hand-fed, is the same. It’s human curiosity. In a word,
it’s storytelling. The value lies in what you make of it. As fanfictiondotnet’s
motto says, “unleash your imagination” and make of it what you will.
(NOTE that this is a re-working [and re-sizing] of an earlier fan fiction feature published on this blog).
