When Fifty Was Fic
“IT’S NOT JANE AUSTEN.”
My mother’s blanket critique of all books, excepting the six of which it isn’t true, applied with equal disapproval to Samuel Beckett and, I would imagine, to Fifty Shades of Grey, although my particular mommy is not likely to make it through the first page of that book. (As in, Mom, I’m in the Wall Street Journal. —how exciting, what for? Amateur BDSM erotica, what else? —is this about that book again?) My mother would apply her phrase equally to Twilight, which she’s also unlikely to read, although Stephenie Meyer claims a “classical inspiration” for each of the saga’s books and identifies the first volume with Pride and Prejudice. Presumably, Meyer has in mind the basic structure of “Boy meets girl. Boy hates girl. They are destined to be together,” and less, say, elements of style.
I often teach Jane Austen. I also taught “Master of the Universe” (or MotU), the fanfiction version of Fifty Shades of Grey (names changed to protect the copyrighted), which was loosely based on Twilight, which was loosely based on Austen. I confess, however, that I teach Austen in courses labeled “literature” and taught Snowqueens Icedragon, now better known as E. L. James, in a course labeled “popular culture.” While Jane Austen would qualify as pop culture (now with more zombies!), Fifty Shades is unlikely to be designated as literature in the critical hive mind anytime soon. E. L. James would probably agree. She may have name-checked Tess, but she knows it’s not what she’s writing.
“It ain’t Kansas.”
A phrase from a popular 1980s T-shirt, featuring “New York” with a picture of a gun. I sometimes fanfic it in my mind: “Twilight. It ain’t Austen,” with a picture of hands holding an apple (the original New York reference retained in a big apple, because that’s how fic evolves, a series of echoes). Or now, “Fifty Shades. It ain’t Twilight,” with the Twilight hands bound together by understated (grey) handcuffs, no sign of New York or its echoing apple. The original referent long gone, only the basic structure remains.
Retelling known and loved stories is nothing new. Jane Austen’s ne’er-do-wells Mr. Wickham and Willoughby are recognizable reiterations of “The Rake,” a stock character in Restoration drama. Does that make it fic? What is the difference between revisiting or revising myth and the writing we refer to as fanfiction? Does the distinction rest on how closely the revised vision resembles its source, or on whether the source is in the public domain, not copyrightable? Or does it simply come down to a label and finances: if you can earn money from it, it’s no longer fanfiction—a commercial distinction that makes no claims about literary value (whatever that is)? Is a text simply fanfiction when it is labeled as such, this label, in turn, proclaiming amateur status?
I taught Twilight fanfiction in a course that examined genre in both the traditional and popular sense of the word. In the more traditional literary critical sense, genre means simply a kind or category. If certain formal, stylistic, or thematic elements are common to a group of stories, these stories constitute a genre. In contemporary and popular usage, however, “genre” fiction refers only to certain genres, which are also understood as distinct from “literary” fiction, and as a term it is often used pejoratively. The course was dedicated to “genre” in this sense, as well: the Western, science fiction, detective fiction, and … Twific. We looked at all-human (no sparkly vampires), alternate universe, novel-length, Edward/Bella fanfiction as a stand-in for the romance genre, but also in order to pose questions about genre in both senses. Was this body of work simply another variation on an established category? Did it behave enough like a genre to be one in its own right? Or was it something else entirely?
During the class, though, we kept returning to the same broader question: What makes fanfiction different from any fiction? I asked a group of contemporary novelists, all participants at a 2010 Comic-Con panel on retelling myth, what besides copyright separated the work they did from fanfiction. One jumped in faster than the others with an acerbic single-word answer: “quality”—and this wasn’t a New Yorker panel. This was Comic-Con.
Such attitudes, even in geek culture, are remarkably entrenched. If genre fiction is something like literature’s ugly cousin (from literature’s point of view), and romance is sci-fi, fantasy, and detective fiction’s annoying girl cousin, a tagalong picked last for the team, then fanfiction has long been the ugly cousin’s stepfamily’s misshapen mixed-breed dog, the one everyone is too ashamed to let out in public but unable to quite put down or even neuter.
One goal of my course was to examine the assumptions that underlie our understandings of categories like “literary,” “genre,” and, particularly in the case of fanfiction, “originality.” Students soon identified one of the primary assumptions people have about a “literary” or “original” work as its autonomy. It’s the kind of myth that the literary economy is so reliant on, it does not matter how frequently or systematically each top-selling work of fiction gives it the lie (pitches read like this: “It’s Emma meets Terminator!” And not: “You’ve never read anything like this before”). It’s one of those myths we simply know is true: work is more valuable if it originates with its author and afterwards can stand on its own, and less valuable if it is derived or in any way requires propping. A copyright holder owns the rights to derivative works. They cannot stand on their own: it’s illegal.
When we read fanfiction, though, this question of a work standing on its own is not at issue. Although an individual fic may be able to stand on its own (be read without knowledge or consideration of its source), it doesn’t. Fanfiction invites readers, collectively and collaboratively, to join in. Clicking on a fanfiction link is like joining a perpetual online writing and reading party, a party that celebrates, consumes, and jubilantly re-creates a loved (or at least a known) work. Fanfiction identifies a particular taste and promises satisfaction—a particular kind of satisfaction, with warnings for plot twists that may seem to deviate. (A typical warning from a summary: “Edward starts out with Tanya, but don’t worry! This fic is Bella/Edward all the way!”)
When E. L. James/Snowqueens Icedragon wrote for this system, what did she get out of it? How is what she did different from sitting down to write a novel, alone in a room? If Fifty Shades started as fic—and it did more than start that way, the text is all but identical—is it still fic after selling (at current count) over 20 million copies? How does the way the narrative was produced, self-consciously derivative and interactive, affect the end result or how we judge it?
Like a Dickens novel, Fifty Shades of Grey (and the whole Fifty Shades trilogy) retains traces of its serial origins—a looser, more sprawling structure, but also more cliffhangers. Certainly, in the case of Fifty Shades, more climaxes. Can these serial rhythms and even the book’s perceived flaws help explain its popularity? In many respects, Fifty Shades is the antithesis of more than a century of narrative and stylistic orthodoxy: say only what you must to get your point across, to get your character from A to B, and not more. Less is more. These are values that have been associated with literary fiction and commercial storytelling alike, as it happens, and these qualities are often what we mean by “good” writing. Fanfiction, on the other hand, and Fifty Shades in its wake, is founded on the principle that more is more. We are not done yet, fanfiction says; more would be better. Why not? Women like multiples.
Other traces of its fanfic origins mark Fifty Shades—again, at the level of construction. Fan writing, as fan writers who also write “original” (traditionally authored?) novels are quick to explain, allows a number of shortcuts. Usually, new fiction doesn’t come complete with a cast list, but fanfiction based on television and movie franchises does. So, fic tends to catalogue certain perfunctory details of appearance that cue known quantities (Bella: bites lip, stumbles, soft brown hair, smells of fruit, can’t imagine why Greek gods look at her, etc. Edward: sex hair. And other impossible perfections). In much the same way, character names foreshadow plot trajectories: in Twilight fanfiction, you know that no matter how nice that fellow James may seem to be, he’s up to no good. James will betray you; Edward will rescue you. The Jacob character may appeal to Bella and cause a jealous scene, but if the fic has an Edward/Bella label, the reader can rest assured Jacob will not prevail (Jacob fans have their own subgenre).
E. L. James/Snowqueens Icedragon took all these shortcuts. Her descriptions of Christian/Edward and Ana/Bella closely conform to fandom standards, with only the slightest cosmetic changes to the published version. When she took her story from its fanfiction context and published it, though, it turned out that a lot of that “missing” characterization and attention to setting that even high school–level creative writing instruction stresses was superfluous for millions of people. James’ readers simply didn’t need a fully detailed world or finely wrought characters. The Twilight template was working fine for them even without reference to the original. Less is more, in some cases, after all.
I confess, I don’t really read that way. I would argue—somewhat quixotically—that E. L. James’ Fifty Shades was more valuable from a literary perspective when it did not stand on its own, even though the fanfiction and the “original” published novel are all but identical. I’m not arguing that Fifty Shades somehow can’t stand on its own (20 million+ readers say otherwise), but rather that the same work was more literary (read: more complex, discursive, critical, stylistically motivated) when it didn’t. “Master of the Universe” was more engaging intellectually as part of a complex system of interwoven, mutually commenting fictions and character studies than it could ever be on its own.
As Twilight fanfiction grew more widespread and its community more diverse and sophisticated, it drifted farther and farther from its Twilight source, often revising or reversing it very pointedly. Bella’s not graceless, she’s a ballerina, or a gymnast—but still, undeniably, this poise is understood in relation to that initial annoying stumbling, a reversal of a known quantity we’re reminded of every time we read her name. Those revised fanfiction stories end up functioning as commentary: reversing grating characteristics or, alternately, imagining what circumstances could have led to the Twilight characters’ troubling passive (Bella) or controlling (Edward) behavior. Fanfiction Edward, for example, often grew up emotionally stunted after watching his mother die in some horrible way—whether culminating years of abuse or neglect, as in “Master of the Universe,” or violently curtailing an idyllic Oedipal bubble. Would this be enough damage, each successive fic asked, to explain Edward’s withholding, controlling tendencies? What trauma could lead Bella to her perpetual state of passive acceptance, her lack of self-insight, of basic self-worth? This was a fandom game my students loved to watch: What exclusively human trauma would make the behavior of Twilight’s main characters seem psychologically earned? A different take on these traits could be found in BDSM Twific: Bella’s a sub; this isn’t psychological trauma, this is sexuality, and Bella can be self-aware about it, assertive and proactive about her desire to be controlled in the bedroom, without having these desires take over her whole personality and life.
Fifty Shades, then, grew not out of one source—Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga—but out of a system of mutually derivative and transformative texts. In fact, another reason for teaching “Master of the Universe” was that it was so multiply derivative: The “Office” genre. “Mogul” Edward. The BDSM fic. The more-assertive Bella (submissive Bellas were always depicted as more assertive than Meyer’s original characterization). The dial-a-childhoodtrauma game. “Master of the Universe” read like a pastiche of all these established moves.
This isn’t cheating. Drawing obviously and explicitly from other fics is standard practice in fan writing communities. Watching it happen is like watching genres develop at warp speed. Someone writes a popular faniction—take “The Office” by Tby789. Edward is a corporate type—a CFO—and Bella is his assistant. They hate each other. They have sex. A LOT. They are destined to be together. (The Pride and Prejudice template—now with more sex! Etc.) This fiction takes off, inspires countless variations on a theme.
When I first became interested in Twilight fanfiction in 2009, “The Office” was one of the stories people were talking about, and it had just been taken down from the web by its author. At that time, it had over 2 million hits on FanFiction.Net. The fandom assumed the author was trying to publish it (she wasn’t), and this was already causing anger and rancor. Although the original “Office” story was “gone” (officially, but old fanfictions, even “Master of the Universe,” are never really more than an archived PDF away), its mark was everywhere. By the time I finally got a copy of the story, I had seen it recycled, recast, retold so many times, I felt like I was rereading it.
“The Submissive” was the well-known BDSM romance that rose in popularity before MotU was first posted. Edward is an emotionally damaged, wildly successful, piano-playing corporate executive Dom; Bella is a librarian and a willing, eager, but inexperienced sub. They have secrets: the secrets are feelings. Can a Domward love Subbella and continue to pursue the lifestyle they both want? Can BDSM, a relationship based on trust and honesty, fail to hurt in the decidedly wrong way when partners hide their true feelings and motivations? Can Bella help heal damaged Domward to love? And, crucially, can she overcome his anxiety about her diet for long enough to seduce him by brushing against him while cooking? Of course it all sounds familiar. It’s fanfiction.
When I started reading MotU, I immediately recognized elements of Stephenie Meyer’s Edward-point-of-view Midnight Sun fragment (posted on her website) and of the parody “Midnight Desire” by Twilightzoner, in which Edward’s shocking monster is nothing more than a healthy teenage boy’s libido—which nonetheless soon takes on a life of its own as a character, cheering complete with pom-poms when it seems that Edward might finally get laid. MotU had reversed the dynamics so that Bella, rather than Edward, was arguing with her inner monster, or her “inner goddess,” a more adventurous (if strangely detachable) sex drive than she could acknowledge as fully a part of her. When seen as a gender reversal of teen Edward’s lack of sexual self-awareness, Bella’s naiveté takes on a different tone. In their fanfiction context, the “inner goddess” dialogues worked well as a parody of two distinct, known quantities, the kind of inside joke with which fanfiction rewards dedicated “inside” readers.
It wasn’t just plot points, settings, or scenes from other fanfiction that Snowqueens Icedragon built on. It was also strategy. By many accounts, for example, “The Office” was one of the stories to really spur Twific’s departure from “canon” characterizations and story lines. Angstgoddess’ “Wide Awake” (Snowqueens Icedragon claims to have spent sixty pounds sterling downloading it to her phone in Spain) was another—likely still the most universally admired story in the fandom. There, both characters have suffered childhood traumas, and will go to any measures to avoid sleep and its nightmares, a reimagining of canon-Edward’s vampiric sleeplessness. In “The Office,” however, the narrative was driven by the (all human, nonsparkling, sexually voracious and adventurous) characters’ sex lives. Sex wasn’t an embellishment or endgame; it was the story. On the other hand, there was still a story; it wasn’t what fandom calls “PWP” (“Porn without Plot” or “Plot? What Plot?”). Before “The Office,” Twilight fan writing had often explored the Twilight characters’ sex lives, following the well-established “missing scenes” or “continuation” fanfiction tradition. After “The Office” (and a few other stories that were subsequently published by the fandom-derived Omnific publishing venture), canon and vampire stories experienced a drop-off in popularity. Twilight itself soon contributed little more than a paradigm for some of the most popular fanfictions, offering a basic plot trajectory and characterizations along with a ready-made cast to be manipulated onto porn images, transformed into electronic banners and icons, or montaged onto videos. These evolutions in Twilight fanfiction paved the way for both MotU and its reframing as “original,” by which, here, I mean copyrightable.
It was quickly clear to my students that most of the fanfiction we read was at least as “original” as much published work, and very often more so. Yes, certain characterizations and outcomes were given, but their paths could be extremely varied, more full of surprises than traditional novelistic structure allows. Nonetheless, most of the fan writers we talked with assumed that their work, however different from its source, could not stand on its own. It appeared, after all, on a Twilight fanfiction board, usually with a disclaimer and a firm statement of its amateur, nonprofit status. It was not original by definition.
Many of these writers also understood the work’s nonautonomy as key to another way writing fanfiction differs from the “original” model of a writer alone with a blank page (or screen). Jane Austen read aloud to her family in the evenings, of course; the Brontës shared with each other. But an audience of friends, family, even editors, is not quite the same as an anonymous target audience of thousands of active, and interactive, readers.
In fanfiction, this interaction can get quite elaborate. On some sites—including Twilighted, one fanfiction archive where MotU was hosted—authors hold court after publishing a chapter, engaging and chatting with fans, taking suggestions, sharing jokes, and, in the case of Snowqueens Icedragon, virtual Oyster Bay Chardonnay. I was taken with her sometimes funny and desperate pleas about narrative pacing: How do I move time forward? On other social media platforms, fan authors answer questions—sometimes as their characters. Also, many stories have editors (betas)—Twilighted had its own team of (volunteer) editors, and authors given permission to post there were required to use them, although big stories that drove traffic to the site (MotU was one) could choose to ignore their suggestions.
Even with a good critique group, no novelist gets a cheering squad quite like this while the work is in progress. And it’s not just cheers or even jeers: it’s illustrations, contests where fans can campaign and vote for stories, promotional videos, posts on review and recommendation sites—all in exchange for stories given freely. Most fan writers will tell you that this kind of interaction is what fanfiction is about. Writing a novel, on the other hand, is largely a lonely business.
Then, too, it’s not just the writing that’s collective, it’s the reading. My students and I read ten different Bellas, ten different Edwards, all the same and all different, encountering ten different iterations of the same problems and issues—distinctive, but not quite distinct. It was a big narrative conversation. The authors talked to us—they were happy to! And then the names. How much does it change things that these related characters all have the same names and undergo such similar trajectories? No matter how many times you read Pride and Prejudice, Darcy’s still Darcy, and very different from Mr. Knightley in Emma. It would be weird to talk about “that Darcy” from “the one where Elizabeth’s father was sickly.” It would be strange to think of Mr. Woodhouse as a revision of the caustic Mr. Bennet. Names mattered more than we thought, going in. For the most part, E. L. James just changed the names to create Fifty Shades, and it does, indeed, make for a very different reading experience.
In terms of our initial course questions, students found that Twific operated as genre in the broad sense: a category or kind of romance narrative, an obsessive love story that evolves across a literalized power gradient. At times, however, it seemed Twifics were at once too similar (the names, the plot structure) and too disparate (so many different settings! So many different traumas!) to function as genre in exactly the way genre fiction traditionally has, although reading so many fics in close succession felt closer to reading extensively in a single genre than any other reading experience we could think of. More broadly, though, my students also felt that fanfiction puts a kind of microscope to the way fiction works—genre fiction certainly, but not only genre fiction. Our studies served as a reminder that novels and characters are always in conversation with one another. Read in its context, among systems of stories, fanfiction “lays bare the device,” as Russian formalists aspired to do to literature, revealing narrative and character as a cobbled-together patchworks of preceding traits, stories, and styles. Our notions of originality and autonomy in fact are relatively recent, tied to the ability to profit from our writerly labor, which is tied, in turn, to the rise of mass literacy and the technology of print. Fanfiction muddies the system by offering labor and its products freely given—but to a mass audience. Fanfiction is fiction with its seams showing, its threads becoming “original” only when authors successfully lay claim to them, as E. L. James has, in print.
ANNE JAMISON is associate professor of English at the University of Utah, where she teaches and writes about literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton and is the author of Poetics en passant (Palgrave, 2009), the forthcoming Kafka’s Other Prague, and a blog on teaching Twilight fanfiction that has been cited in publications from the Wall Street Journal to Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch. Go figure. Anne’s forthcoming book on fanfiction (www.smartpopbooks.com/fanfiction) will be published in late 2013.