Rewriting Unrequited Love and the Performance of Fanfic
In the episode ‘Endgame’, Straczynski wrote a classical romantic death scene for his character Marcus Cole. This Ranger was a virgin who sacrificed his life in order to save Susan Ivanova, the woman he was in love with; he had been too proud to admit this to her. The unconsummated love is a part of Straczynski’s canon. However, in ‘unsanctioned’ fan fiction found online, this love becomes requited. The ‘Unicorn’s I&M Storybook’ Web page contains a list of dozens of stories fans have written based on these two characters; the page was designed by Sarah Zelechoski when she was fifteen years old. She is currently a physics major at the University of California, San Diego (Zelechoski 1999).
In the short story ‘The First Time’, an anonymous fan-writer references a scene already viewed by fans in ‘The Summoning’ (Straczynski 1996c). In that scene Straczynski reveals that Marcus is a virgin and had decided to save his first sexual experience for the right woman. In the fan’s story, Ivanova speaks to Marcus:
‘About waiting to do things properly. I’ve been thinking about what you said on the White Star a while back about having found the right person and not letting her know it yet’ [in ‘The Summoning’]. Ivanova’s face was stern and thoughtful.
‘You have?’ The ranger looked at her in sudden horror. Maybe he had talked in his sleep after all and she’d only been waiting to rip his lungs out in private.
‘I usually don’t volunteer advice to my friends, especially not advice of a personal nature, but in the last few years a lot of people have come to me looking for it, and I don’t think I’ve been responsible for any major catastrophes to date.’ Susan’s voice was hesitant.
‘Meaning what?’
‘I think you should let this woman know how you feel, Marcus. Life’s too short. If you wait too long, we’re going to find ourselves in the middle of some kind of deviltry again and then you might miss your chance.’ She punctuated her pronouncement with little affirmative shakes of her head, as though she was trying to convince both of them at the same time.
‘Do you really think so?’ the ranger asked her in a strangled voice.
‘Yes, and I’m ready to help you in any way I can. It’s the least I can do after all we’ve been through together.’
Marcus Cole nodded mutely in shock. The woman of his dreams was offering to help him win the woman of his dreams. He suddenly found himself wishing he’d talked in his sleep.
The writer uses a narrative set-up that references the scene written by Straczynski and previously viewed by fans. This restores the behaviour of the original scene and draws the fan-reader into the plausible possibilities of the scenario. The reader can imagine the scene as performed by actors Claudia Christian and Jason Carter. Later, the writer has the characters perform their first kiss – a scene that never took place on the television series Babylon 5, and is therefore unsanctioned and outside the saga’s canon:
Susan’s mouth was on his. He’d dreamt about this for so long. Well, maybe he hadn’t dreamt about this exact sequence of events in this exact setting, but it was still Susan, it was still her lips covering his, and it was incredible. It might also be his only chance, he might as well do it right.
Marcus took control of the kiss, bringing one hand up to cup her head as he curled the other arm around her shoulders and shifted his mouth. He traced her lips with the tip of his tongue, willing them to open, and groaning in bliss when they eased apart. She was sweet, so sweet. The heat of her blasted straight into his soul as he explored her warm willing mouth. He possessed her thoroughly, until the contours and the taste of her were seared into his memory and both their breaths came in little ragged gasps. They sagged against each other in the aftermath.
Her knuckles were white from her grip on his shoulders. She was breathless, warm and wobbly. ‘Marcus?’ she breathed softly.
The ranger bent his mouth to hers again. It was a gentler kiss this time. He lingered against her, tenderly brushing the spots he’d plundered the minute before and then reluctantly retreating.
‘Oh.’ He’d never thought to hear such a small, surprised voice coming out of Ivanova’s mouth.
Straczynski might say that the story of unrequited love made Marcus’ death that much more tragic, especially when it took a profound sense of love to willingly sacrifice his life in order to save the woman he loves.
It is not enough for fans just to wonder what it would be like if Marcus were not killed. Some fans want to know what Marcus and Ivanova’s love would have been like, how they would have performed their first kiss if Straczynski hadn’t killed the character. Within the canon, fans have to rely wholly on Straczynski to provide this scene, and if it is not forthcoming (which it will not be, since the character is dead), fans create their own personal texts in order to perform, enact, share in, and see scenes that the canonical author never created. Fanfic, as these fictional stories written by fans are known, revolves around such issues. The ‘forbidden kiss’ between Marcus and Ivanova becomes the site where fans enter Straczynski’s universe and shape it in their own image. ‘The idea is to change the object while preserving it’, cultural scholar Constance Penley says about fan writing (1997: 3). It allows them to perform Straczynski’s characters in an ‘alternative universe.’ ‘This story is just a short speculation about what might happen’, the author writes, ‘if Susan Ivanova decided to help Marcus Cole get his love life straightened out’. The author even makes sure to give the original creator and copyright holders their due: ‘These wonderful people and places belong to JMS [Straczynski] and Warner Bros. I make no claim to them and have derived no profit whatsoever from their use (other than having a whole lot of fun!).’ Fans are not necessarily looking for money and may not care where the stories end up – they want to have their works read. And it seems that with over 33,000 hits (as of January 2000), this Web site and these writers have gained an audience allowing them to approach ‘best-seller’ status.
Not entirely wanting to just view someone else’s story, Babylon 5 fans write their own narratives based on characters created by Joe Straczynski. This does not necessarily reflect a lack of satisfaction with the story of Babylon 5, but as with other categories of the imaginary entertainment environment, fans want to participate in that universe. If fans can’t live in the imaginary fantasy, they can at least participate in the culture of creation. By writing fan fiction and publishing Web pages, fans immerse themselves in the Babylon 5 universe. One way they do this is to take favorite characters and put them into new stories. The writers become reconfigured through the stories they write and publish. Sometimes these stories go beyond the canon of Straczynski’s one-hundred-and-ten-episode saga. Yet the fan writer’s creations intersect with and become absorbed in Straczynski’s universe.
‘Fandom here’, media scholar Henry Jenkins tells us, ‘becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and a new community’ (1992: 46). Fans may create new cultural texts, but they do not necessarily build a new full-sized community. If anything, what evolves out of their creative productions are micro-communities. Straczynski’s original narrative provides the spark for fans to create these micro-communities in which fan-created narratives circulate. Fans write new fictions and post them on Web pages, and they also create fan clubs online, which usually revolve around particular characters and the actors who perform them. Entire Web sites with multiple pages and links may be devoted to one character or theme. (‘The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5’ lists over two hundred Web pages dedicated to the show; these range from pages about particular actors to trivia.) Web pages and fan fiction allow fans to explore the universe of Babylon 5 on their own terms outside the original creator’s authorial presence.
Fans who perform such acts, Jenkins says, enter a ‘realm of the fiction as if it were a tangible place they can inhabit and explore’ (1992: 18), and where they are ‘active producers and manipulators of meanings’ (23). The very act of producing new texts and posting them online reconfigures the fan into the imaginary universe of Babylon 5. As fans restore memories of watching episodes of Babylon 5 – by writing and reading fan fiction – they become reconfigured. To a neophyte, these texts do not mean much. In original stories, readers must delineate the characters and environment in their minds. In media tie-in stories the world and characters are already stored in participants’ memory. Fans write these stories in order to immerse themselves in someone else’s premade universe, previously visited vicariously when they watched episodes of, for example, Babylon 5 on television. Now, however, they can tangibly enter this imaginary environment, inhabiting and exploring it by placing preexisting characters in new scenes. Many of the characters are already familiar. Memories of the actors’ performances of these characters reside within the fan texts, and writers as well as readers restore these performances through this work.
Fans shape their texts with Schechnerian strips of behaviour, applying them in new ways. The process of restoring this performance leads the reader into the act of imagining the actors performing in new scenes built from these stored strips of performance behaviour. Mackay, writing about performances occurring in fantasy role-playing games, describes how players use ‘fictive blocks’ – fictional tropes culled from popular culture images – as an ‘interface to the immaterial material from which a player assembles an imaginary character’ (1998: 90). These ‘fictive blocks’, Mackay contends, ‘are stored by the potential role-player as strips of imaginary behaviour – non-real behaviour that takes place in an imaginary environment’ (90). The performance is not seen. Rather, it takes place in the ‘imagination: not only the liminal stage, but the stages of decontextualisation (of the fictive block) and of recontextualisation (the strips of imaginary behaviour culled from the fictive block) take place in the player’s mind’ (91). Mackay calls these strips immaterial, because, as opposed to a fully realised, concrete performance, role-players have to imagine the mise-en-scène of their performance. Through a similar process (but executed differently from the role-player), a fanfic author places strips of behaviour garnered from watching episodes of Babylon 5 into new contexts. The reader of the fanfic imagines the immaterial behaviours occurring in the story as being concrete, or performed. Part of this imagination is realised through the recontextualisation of actors’ performances from episodes of Babylon 5.
So, in this sense, performance scholar Peggy Phelan’s contention that ‘Performance’s only life is in the present’ is wrong. ‘Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations’, she contends: ‘once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’ (1993: 146). Furthermore, Phelan argues, if ‘performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology’ (146). However, performances occurring within fandom – the sites that comprise the imaginary entertainment environment – rely on the circulation of the performance’s originating production. Only by relying on the representation of the original – the circulation of reproduction – can fans ‘play’ with it: reperform it (apply the strip of performance behaviour) and make it into a new kind of performance. Phelan agrees that performance can be ‘performed again, but this repetition marks it as ‘different’’ (146). Yes, it is something other than the original performance – but it is a performance nonetheless, despite how much it enters the ‘economy of reproduction’, deviates, or is applied differently. In the Schechnerian sense, a recorded, documented performance – such as a media image of Babylon 5 – can be performed again. Fans take strips of recorded performance behaviour and reperform them in the present, embodied in new concrete performances.
Performing as textual nomads staking individual authorial claims, fans poach the primary text of Babylon 5 in order to enter its universe. They do not betray and lessen the original performance’s ‘promise of its own ontology’ – they heighten it. These writers create their own characters and then place them within already familiar scenes and/or with preexisting characters. Some of these scenes may be extensions of existing histories occurring ‘off-screen’ in episodes of Babylon 5 that were never depicted on-screen. Fans can write new histories in Straczynski’s imaginary universe. They circulate their own objects of preference in the Babylon 5 universe and place them in an already familiar imaginary environment, like the author who wrote about Marcus and Susan’s first kiss.
Rather than these stories being circulated in the traditional outlets of fanzines, magazines or novels, online technologies allow fans to publish them with no additional cost beyond the original purchase of a computer and modem. Those who do not know how to publish their own Web sites or lack the means to build and post pages can send stories and images to already existing sites by using regular email. Users can log on and view these different Web page performances. As fans publish their own Babylon 5 sites, they provide ‘a foundation for future encounters with the fiction, shaping how it will be perceived, defining how it will be used’ (Jenkins 1992: 45). Through a confluence of high-tech capabilities, designers of Web sites have embedded these pages with preexisting images and sounds, creating their own new texts from them.
Fans who create these kinds of sites reconfigure the master narrative of Babylon 5 into their own vision. This is different from CD-ROMs, where official producers create official texts (or products), usually in the desire to sell as many as possible. Fanfic also contrasts with Babylon 5’s official canon as created by executive producer Straczynski. Scholar Michel de Certeau has argued that ‘official’ canonical texts interpose ‘a frontier between the text and its readers that can be crossed only if one has a passport delivered by these official interpreters’ (1984: 171). The official interpretation of texts causes other readings of texts to be considered ‘either heretical (not ‘in conformity’ with the meaning of the text) or insignificant (to be forgotten)’, he argues (171). And so, he continues, the ‘literal’, correct interpretation of texts becomes a ‘cultural weapon’ wielded by ‘an elite’ – the ‘socially authorized professionals and intellectuals’ (171). In the case of material media culture, producers want to keep control over their own creations. Profits belong to a corporate franchise. From this point of view, fandom is okay, as long as people purchase and circulate ‘official’ products and texts created and sold by licensed manufacturers.
Due to the litigious nature of Hollywood, producers are afraid of fan-created fiction and Web pages, the belief being that a producer could be blamed for stealing a fan-writer’s idea or scene and then placing it ‘accidentally’ in a television episode – opening themselves up to a potential lawsuit. Executives also become concerned when fans take images from their copyrighted material and place it on Web pages without paying proper (and often expensive) licensing fees. Studios want to create their own sites in order to maintain tight copyright control over their images.
Yet Straczynski maintains a ‘don’t see, don’t tell’ approach when it comes to fan fiction. He can’t officially sanction it, but he says that the material should not be ‘put it in a place where I can see it or stumble over it … I’m not here to be [the studio’s] eyes and ears’ (1994b). Executives at Paramount and Fox, for example, have been less gracious toward fandom, threatening and forcing the shut-down of many fan-created Web sites for Star Trek and X-Files. Yet, when asked outright about sanctioning such stories, Straczynski is more reluctant to side with the fans, stating that it is a ‘form of copyright infringement’; if he did sanction such stories, then he would be ‘at legal odds with [Warner Bros.], which owns the copyright’ (1999b). Straczynski’s ambivalent attitude is different from the attitudes of other studio executives, probably because he himself is a science fiction fan, attends science fiction conventions regularly (now as a guest speaker), and certainly understands fan culture intimately. And yet as the creator of the characters that appear on Babylon 5, he probably is not thrilled to see other people writing stories about his characters. He has even created sanctioned story outlines for the professional authors who write Babylon 5 novels for Del Rey. However, fans continue to create texts and ‘borrow’ images from copyrighted material as a way both to challenge the establishment and to circumvent its attempts to control how they participate in fictional universes.
The anonymous Critical Art Ensemble, writing in The Electronic Disturbance (1994), believes that plagiarism is a necessary and healthy consequence of the electronic age. (In fact, their book ‘may be freely pirated and quoted’, the copyright page states.) Their definition of plagiarism widens the conventional definition of theft, where one takes another’s work as one’s own. It comes closer to what fans do with fanfic and Web pages: ‘Readymades, collage, found art or found text, intertexts, combines, detournment and appropriation – all these terms represent explorations in plagiarism’ (85). They believe that ‘no structure within a given text provides a universal and necessary meaning’ (86). The Critical Art Ensemble challenges what de Certeau defines as the ‘official’, literal or canonical meaning of texts coming from a social elite – where the dominant interpretation is the only correct reading.
With online Web pages, fans circulate their own poached products throughout cyberspace, avoiding the dominant social structure’s conventional route for circulating creative production:
author » text » agent » editor » contract » publisher » printer » distributor » sales rep » bookstore » book » bookstore » consumer
In this sense, fan web designers and fanfic writers are plagiarists, for they not only disrupt the conventional process of getting an author’s text to a reader, but they give readers texts that would be considered unacceptable in the conventional bureaucratic process of publishing ‘official’ texts. ‘One of the main goals of the plagiarist’, the Critical Art Ensemble contends, ‘is to restore the dynamic and unstable drift of meaning, by appropriating and recombining fragments of culture’ (1994: 86). By placing strips of Babylon 5 behaviour within new contexts online, fans circumvent the cultural elite’s power structure and publish their texts much more easily and quickly:
author » text » Web » story » web » reader.
Bibliography
Certeau, Michel de (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Critical Art Ensemble (1994) The Electronic Disturbance. New York: Autonomedia.
Jenkins, Henry (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
Mackay, Daniel (1998) The Dolorous Role: Towards an Aesthetics of the Role-Playing Game. Master’s thesis, New York University, Department of Performance Studies.
Penley, Constance (1997) NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. London and New York: Verso.
Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge.