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Introduction

Represent—
Hamilton: An American Musical

Hamilton: An American Musical opened onstage in New York City in 2015. A musical about Alexander Hamilton, the US founder who helped create the country’s banking system, seems an unlikely hit. But its creator—writer, composer, and performer Lin-Manuel Miranda—composed it in hip-hop rhythms and rhyme. It made history by quickly reaching beyond the usual Broadway theater crowd to attract an international fan base.

Then Hamilton fans did what engaged fans of any media do. They wanted more of what they loved, so they made more of it themselves and shared it with other people who are passionate about Hamilton. Their creations include new and altered stories about the musical’s characters, as well as animations, song lyrics, artworks, costumes, and even illustrations for a video game. Love of Hamilton and the burst of creative output it inspired illustrate how a modern media sensation becomes part of the wide world of fandom.

Lin-Manuel Miranda (center) performs with the cast of Hamilton at the 2016 Tony Awards. The show won eleven awards that night, including best musical.

What Is Fandom?

Fandom is a community of people who share a passion. Originally used to describe the state of being an avid follower of something, the word fandom now also describes the collective followers of a particular media source, or “fan domain.” Each of these fandoms has its own culture, with rules and expectations. This book uses the word in both senses, focusing on people with a passion for media-based storytelling. Media fans dive deep into books, movies, television shows, video games, and comics, among many other sources, and transform them into new content. In a syllabus for a college course, media scholar and fan Henry Jenkins defined fandom as “the social structures and cultural practices created by the most passionately engaged consumers of mass media properties.” Video blogger Dan Howell, in his humorous video “FANDOMS,” shared a more personal description with his six million YouTube subscribers: fandom is “one of the most amazing . . . forces on this earth,” he said. “You can like something so much that it actually destroys your life.” Howell illustrated his point by filming himself slumping to the floor, wondering what to do with his life after finishing the last Harry Potter book.

One of the hallmarks of fandom is that it’s easy to join in. Anyone can make fan stories, videos, costumes, visual art, and other creations—known as fanworks. As more and more people have access to the Internet, smartphones that record sound and video, and computer editing tools, it’s easier than ever to share and access fanwork online. Fandom has grown into a kind of creative, participatory democracy—or, as fans say, a huge sandbox where everyone can play. As with any community, there are problems: sometimes “everyone can play” is an ideal rather than a reality, and hostilities break out. But the fandom ideal is to empower people to build on their passion and find others who share it.

Hamilton itself can be seen as a fanwork. As fan journalist Aja Romano put it, “It’s literally a creative text written by a fan that reinterprets or expands upon a previously existing source material.” Lin-Manuel Miranda drew on different sources to create an entirely original work. His inspirations included Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton and Hamilton’s many writings, as well as the experiences of Miranda’s Puerto Rican father in New York City politics. Hamilton’s rivalry with Aaron Burr reminded Miranda of the old-school, sometimes deadly rivalries between rappers such as Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur in the mid-1990s.

Types of Fanworks

Fan-written stories based on existing media, called fanfiction, or fic, can be read in the millions on sites such as the fan-run Archive of Our Own (AO3). In fact, the musical Hamilton is similar to a genre of fanfiction called real-person fic. Miranda mostly stuck to historical facts, but fanfic writers are under no such limitations. They take the story further, or deeper, or into an alternate universe. Thomas Jefferson in a pink space suit on Mars? Hamilton and Jefferson in a romantic relationship? Debates about which Hogwarts house each character would join if they attended school with Harry Potter? (No one suggests hotheaded Hamilton is a Hufflepuff.) Variations of all these scenarios exist.

Like Hamilton itself, fanworks based on the musical are an every-which-way mashup of media, history, and genres, an intersection of genders, races, and imagination. A teenage fan who goes by the username GinnyWeasley calls herself “a huge musical nerd.” She said, “My fandom that most takes on social injustice is Hamilton, and they have an entirely PoC [people of color] cast, and it makes you think about how most of our country was built on nonwhites. I think that it really makes you think about history and how we never talk about the PoC who were even more important than the famous white men.”

Another type of fanwork is fan-made videos, or fanvids. These are film clips set to music, or fan-produced versions of favorite media, often hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms. For several years, Hamilton was available only as live theater—there was no film footage to make into fanvids. That didn’t stop intrepid video makers, or vidders. They made their own animated vids or set the songs to clips from other sources. In the vid “If Lin-Manuel Miranda Wrote High School Musical,” YouTube user huffley6 created a visual pun by pairing footage of high school basketball players with Miranda’s song “My Shot,” about leaving a mark on history. Some vidders make animated storyboards, edited and set to music. Filmmakers call these storyboards animatics. YouTube user kimi kohi created the vid “the room where it happens (animatic),” using Adobe Flash animation software, one of many free apps and programs available to make simple animations. Within nine months, kimi kohi’s vid, set to Miranda’s song “The Room Where It Happens,” had more than one million views.

Costuming is a popular kind of fanwork, with fans creating looks ranging from detailed historical replicas to robot suits, aliens, and gravity-defying outfits, makeup, and hairdos. They meet up at costume balls, game events, and fan conventions, or “cons,” such as the huge San Diego Comic-Con. A fan costumer—called a cosplayer—might make an eighteenth-century dress like one worn by Eliza Schuyler in Hamilton and then take on that role while walking the floor at a con, acting out how Eliza would react to meeting the Doctor from Doctor Who or comic book character Black Widow. Or the characteristic dress might be reenvisioned as a space suit or reinterpreted in the style of an animated show.

In a real-life mashup, fan Kendra James left the New York Comic-Con to line up outside the Broadway theater where Hamilton was showing, hoping to win a lottery drawing for a ticket to the sold-out show. While she waited with hundreds of other people, Miranda came out to give the weekly “Ham4Ham” street performance, in which he and various guests entertained the hopeful fans. Still dressed as the character Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, James volunteered to perform the fastest rap in the show, “Guns and Ships.” Other fans recorded and uploaded this and other Ham4Ham performances, sharing them with the fan community.

Fan artists create a head-spinning array of visual arts, from digital paintings to decorated cupcakes. Many post their work on blogging and art-sharing platforms such as Tumblr, which Miranda fondly said was like the Internet’s arts-and-crafts cabin. Fan artist Pati Cmak channeled the vast feelings the musical gave her to draw Hamilton in the style of a Disney animated movie. Twitter user danielledejesus1 painted a portrait of actor Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr on the ten-dollar bill, in place of the usual image of Hamilton. Inspired by a song about Hamilton’s children, sna_nabila drew a portrait of them (commenting that she should have been studying for high school final exams instead). Many depictions of the Schuyler sisters show them as the animated trio the Powerpuff Girls. Searching “Fan Art: Hamilton” on art-sharing site DeviantArt returns thousands of results. It’s not half a million, like a “Harry Potter” search turns up, but it’s impressive for musical theater.

Gaming fandoms can be a world in themselves, with practices ranging from modifying existing games and gaming equipment to designing new ones. Freelance artist Nitya Chirravur, for example, designed graphics for an old-fashioned Nintendo-style GameforHam. In one illustration, “Winter Ball of 1780, Level 1,” the player has to move Eliza Schuyler across the dance floor to meet her future husband, Alexander Hamilton. As of this writing, game designers have not yet made a full Hamilton video game or RPG (role-playing game), but if a fan can dream it, someone will make it.

Besides presenting different kinds of fanworks, this book will offer a glimpse of the ways fans supply the diversity missing from the media sources they love. When researchers analyzed 414 US films and TV shows for their ratios of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual status in 2016, their report “Inclusion or Invisibility?” found that invisibility won. Only 18 percent of stories cast girls and women in half of the speaking roles, even though slightly more than half of the US population is female. Only 7 percent of movie casts matched the country’s 38 percent nonwhite population (including Hispanic people, a group the US census counts as white). TV was slightly more equitable, with 19 percent of programs proportionately representing the diversity of race and ethnic groups in the United States. The study also found that only 2 percent of speaking characters were identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans. It did not even touch on the limited representations of religions, body shapes, abilities, social classes, and more.

Hamilton made headlines by casting mostly black and Latinx actors and giving women prominent roles—and evoked a powerful response. Hamilton fan and self-proclaimed Nerd of Color Kendra James wrote, “Characters that look like me are few and far between. . . . These American heroes have been reimagined to look like the people who actually did (and continue to do) the majority of the heavy lifting that made America what it is.” But Miranda did not write any LGBTQ+ characters for his musical, so fans began creating content depicting the characters in same-sex relationships, some of which Miranda has approvingly reblogged. With their creations and their active lobbying of media producers, fans are changing the face of media.

Fan Roots

Love of Hamilton has brought a lot of new faces to fandom, but fandom’s history goes back centuries. For example, what we think of as fan writing—changing someone else’s tales or creating stories based on them—has been around for thousands of years. But much of contemporary fandom has its roots in science-fiction fandom of the 1930s. People even had a saying for it: Fandom is a way of life. (They shortened it to the acronym FIAWOL, pronounced FEE-a-wall.) These fans felt that reading, watching, and creating works in response to media was more than just a hobby, and they found others who shared their enthusiasm. But for many years, being a fan was deeply uncool. Any high school student wearing a Star Trek T-shirt in the 1970s risked getting slammed into a locker.

Perceptions of fans changed a lot toward the end of the twentieth century. By 2015 a research study on behalf of the broadcasting industry reported that 97 percent of respondents aged eighteen to twenty-four said they were a fan of something. What sparked the change? Google researchers point out that members of Generation C (a cross-generational group, the majority under age forty, that embraces online life) thrive on creation, curation, connection, and community. Community is key to fandom. Social media sites such as Tumblr and Reddit, as well as online forums and fan-run sites, facilitate friendship and the exchange of ideas and do-it-yourself instructions. Topics of identity and social issues, such as gender, race, social class, sexuality, and the transition to adulthood, arise alongside discussions about spaceships and relationships.

Hamilton fans have affected US culture in one uniquely public way. Alexander Hamilton’s portrait is the face on the ten-dollar bill. Before 2015 the US Treasury Department planned on replacing him with an American woman. But organizers of a “Women on 20s” campaign proposed updating the twenty-dollar bill instead, and Lin-Manuel Miranda got behind the movement. It called for swapping that bill’s portrait of Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning president who drove American Indians from their land, with abolitionist Harriet Tubman. The Treasury announced that feedback from Hamilton lovers had changed its mind. Tubman will appear on the front of the twenty, with Jackson moved to the rear. On the one-hundredth anniversary of US women’s suffrage in 2020, the ten-dollar bill will show women demonstrating for the right to vote on the back. Hamilton will remain on the front.

A Note on Sources

Fandom is as wide as the Internet. Unlike mainstream media, it provides space for people to express themselves as creators and critics. This book, however, is short. It is a sample platter of fan voices and practices, but there isn’t enough room to cover even a fraction of fandom communities. Most examples here come from a few large, long-lasting fandoms, such as Jane Austen, Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter, whose fans have produced and continue to produce a wide range of fanworks. Pop culture is fleeting, with today’s fan favorites disappearing tomorrow. The sources may change, but fan practices remain much the same. If somebody loves a story, no matter how obscure or outdated, some corner of fandom probably celebrates it.

“I didn’t choose the fandom life. The fandom life chose me.”