I ❤︎ Erasermic

I have been writing fanfiction since 2010, back when I was in middle school. I would write for hours and hours, exploring characters and ideas in ways the original source material (in this case, the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series) never intended. I would then post these works onto fanfiction(dot)net for mostly my irl friends and a few dozen strangers to read and enjoy. Over the years, I’ve cycled through a few different fandoms and made the switch to the currently-preferred fanfic-posting website, Archive of Our Own -otherwise known as “Ao3.”  LiveJournal, FFnet, Wattpad, Ao3 -all of these websites and more have had hundreds of thousands if not millions of fanfictions posted and consumed. Fanfiction isn’t just a small circle of Star Trek fans sharing secret magazines through the mail -and in some ways, it never was just that. 

Many “classics” today are, in some way or another, fanfiction by another name. Consider, for instance, the well-known fact that Disney’s 1994 hit movie, The Lion King, is just a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When anonymous authors online turn all of their favorite characters into lions or wolves, it’s considered “furry cringe,” but when multi-billion dollar corporations do the same, it’s considered “art.” 

House is a modern-day hospital-au version of Sherlock Holmes. 

All fairytale “reimaginings,” such as the TV drama Once Upon a Time, are fanfictions in every sense of the word.

The current Batman cannon has so many reimaginings that it’s a gag in The Lego Batman Movie!

And these are just some American/European examples. The first “modern” novel, The Tale of Genji, has such a long history of fanart and fanfiction in Japan that there are literal traveling museum exhibitions to display small fractions of what has been (and continues to be) produced. However, in these exhibitions, the words “art” and “fiction” are never preceded by “fan.” These works, though just as “derivative” in content as anything you would find in internet fanspaces today, get to once again simply be “art.” 

What is the difference? Where is the line between literature worthy of “respect” and literature considered worthy of constant derision?

I do not have all the answers, but please allow me to present some for your consideration.

As you may have noticed in my above examples, most of the original works being reimagined are, indeed, in the public domain. This means that no one owns the rights to these original works anymore, and thus they can be reproduced faithfully or completely changed without threat of legal trouble. This also means that all reproductions can make money for the reproducers without hassle. Batman is a somewhat curious case in this instance, since many of his reimaginings are in and of themselves canon while still carrying many of the hallmarks of fanfiction. 

We will return to the curious case of Batman later, but needless to say legality and potential monetary gain make up an important component of the supposed high-literature/lowly-fanfiction divide. If you ever click on “older” fanfictions, particularly those from the 2000s and early-2010s, you will see constant repetition of phrases such as “I do not own X” or “please don’t sue me”. Later authors, including my own childhood self, repeated these out of an abundance of caution without really knowing why. Afterall, no one on websites like FFnet honestly thought the authors owned the “original” works in question to begin with. The problem, as I understand it now, arose from the infamous response of author Anne Rice to fanfiction of her book series, The Vampire Chronicles. In 2001, she made it very clear that her works and characters were protected by copyright, and that she was willing and ready to sue any supposed-copycats. Fanfics were purged by both individual authors and entire websites who were either afraid of the mere threat of legal action or had been notified of impending legal action if there was no change respectively. 

The state of fanfiction legality has come a long way in 20+ years, but even Ao3, which has lawyers on hand to defend both its own existence and the rights of its authors, does not allow authors to talk about taking commissions (ie, getting paid) or post links to websites such as kofi or patreon. The idea of “making money” off of fanfiction still exists in a dangerous gray zone that not even the lawyers of Ao3 can protect you from. 

Still, one of the stereotypes of the true artiste is that they do not create with money in mind to begin with, so this cannot be the only factor in fanfiction’s discrediting as an art form. Another consideration, then, is the content of fanfiction itself. So far, I have not endeavored to try and define the word “fanfiction.” Everyone reading this surely has their own conception of the word in mind either from first-hand experience or cultural osmosis. To me, defining fanfiction is as fruitless a pursuit as trying to define any other medium of artistic expression. What is sculpture? What is painting? What is documentary filmmaking? Definitions require limits, and limits breed exceptions. 

Perhaps the broadest stereotypical definition of fanfiction is that it is derivative work containing sexually-explicit love stories of a primarily homosexual-male variety. Many of the most famous pairings -KirkxSpock, SasukexNaruto, DanxPhil- would seem, to the distant observer, to fit this stereotype. A related stereotype replaces the homosexual-male romance with a heterosexual romance between a male celebrity/fictional character and a female oc or “original character” who is thus presumed to be the author’s self-insert (meaning that the female oc is a one-to-one reflection of the author herself). Think of all the most infamous One Direction fanfiction for a taste of this stereotypical form. 

However, as you may have guessed, these stereotypes lead to a superficial understanding of what fanfiction can be. If you go to Ao3 right now, you will find that there are five content ratings that can be attached to a fic: General Audiences, Teen and Up Audiences, Mature, Explicit, and Not Rated. By definition, there is no way to know what sort of content is in a “Not Rated” fic, but putting that aside, let us for a moment be ultra-conservative and assume ALL “Explicit” and “Mature” fanfictions have sex (as an author who has used this system, I know for a fact that they do not). Even with this ultra-conservative assumption, going to any popular series with over 200,000 archived stories will reveal to you that sexually-explicit fanfictions make up less than half of what is published. What types of stories are contained in the majority of fanfictions, then?

Well, let’s take a moment to look at the chat fic as just one example. Chat fics are not the most popular type of fanfiction, but they often attract a fair amount of readers. Chat fics are meant to be, well, group chats between fictional characters. Some may have suggestions of romance, but many of these fics would be better described as chaotic, humor-driven affairs (the humor in this case, as in all cases, being somewhat subjective). Authors often have the freedom to play around with each character’s screen name, as well as what other characters might have someone saved as in smaller or private chats. Details like these reveal that, while chat fics may appear on the surface to be some of the most simple and easy-to-write fanfictions, they often require in-depth knowledge of not just canon facts but also fanon (“fan canon”) tropes to be accepted and enjoyed authentically by readers. The implementation of this knowledge is doubly impressive when the original source material exists in a world without cellphones and the internet, and thus the author must find a way to strike a balance between referencing the original character/trait/meme/etc while making it seem congruent in the new setting. Indeed, the achievement of a particularly impressive “reference” in any fic is often met with high praise by readers in the comment section of the story.   

I should say now that none of this is meant to stigmatize or label sexually-explicit fanfiction as somehow “inauthentic.” It is authentic and it is important, but it is not all that fanfiction is. One of the greatest beauties of fanfiction, as has been observed in pieces like Dan Olson’s breakdown of the Fifty Shades movies on the Folding Ideas YouTube channel, is that it lets both authors and readers get to the “good stuff” without having to be bogged down by character introductions and worldbuilding. In the contract of fanfiction, both the author and the reader have already done some amount of prior “research” so that everyone is more or less on the same page about certain aspects of the work. This is why the many iterations of Batman work no matter the change in scenery or storyline: both authors and readers are bringing assumptions to the table that they are ready and willing to see both reaffirmed and challenged. 

Again, a common reason for praise in the comment sections of fanfictions comes from the perceived accuracy of a character’s depiction within the story. In this case, it doesn’t matter if the creator of the original work would actually agree with the characterization in the fanfiction, just that the fanfic author and the reader agree that it is authentic. It is understandable, then, that creators like Anne Rice would feel threatened by fanfiction. In some cases, this fear is legitimate: no well-intentioned creator would want their work altered in order to spread hateful messages, afterall. Additionally, when characters in a story are not merely fictional but are real, living celebrities/singers/idols/youtubers/etc., there are some reasonable questions about ethics and consent to consider. However, what I have mostly found throughout my years as a writer and reader is that the fanfiction contract allows for a deeper exploration of themes that mainstream media simply does not or will not explore.

This brings us to the final consideration today for why fanfiction is so often belittled and mocked, and to put it quite simply it is the creators and audience themselves. Returning to stereotypes once more, people often imagine that fanfiction is written by and for heterosexual, teenage, cis-gendered girls. The social trend of shitting on the interest of teenage girls is another topic for another time. For now, I certainly will not deny that these people exist within the space, but I also would not say they are necessarily the majority. I can only speak from my own experiences, but I have found is that fanfiction holds a strong attraction for individuals of queer genders and sexualities. These individuals, searching both to express their own feelings and to find a community, can use fanfiction as a means of attaining both. This is partially why sexually explicit fanfiction, while not the majority of what is written, can be some of the most powerful and subversive content that is produced. Fanfiction written about men is almost never fanfiction written for cis-gender men, and the truth is that pornography written by gender/sexual minorities for gender/sexual minorities just hits different. 

And when it comes to minority or disadvantaged groups, queer individuals are by no means the only ones who find freedom in fanfiction. Taking characters “everyone” knows and writing them with depression, anxiety, ADHD, Autism, etc., allows authors and readers to feel fully realized in fiction for the first time. Fanfiction can be just as, and sometimes even more, resonant than traditional fiction because of just how strong people’s feelings are for their favorite characters. If those favorite characters were dismissed or betrayed in the source material, they can be given a second chance at “life” in the fanfiction. Even when this is not the case, there may be elements to characters that simply resonate with minority voices and inspire further creation even after the canon story ends.

Fanfiction is not perfect by any means. There is quite a lot to be said about problems such as the misogyny and racism that can “slip by” or be fully adopted by a fandom uncriticized. Once again, however, this is true of any artistic medium, and that’s what fanfiction is: a medium of expression, not a genre. Fanfiction can be romance, but it can also be sci-fi, mystery, comedy, thriller, historical drama, adventure, and more. It is creation constrained only by the written word itself.