Chapter 1
The Extraordinary World of Fan Writers
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a story exists, there’s a fanfiction version of it. That sentence itself is an example. It’s a mashup of the famous opening line of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Rule 44 of the unofficial, always changing Rules of the Internet—if something exists, there’s a fandom version of it.
Fanfiction, also called fanfic, or fic, is writing based on already existing source material, including, but not limited to, books, TV shows, games, movies, and comics. Fic writers chronicle the new or altered adventures and relationships of characters and their story worlds. Writers may send characters traveling through time and space, to face dragons or to work in a coffee shop, or imagine them falling in love, maybe in a crossover with characters from another source. Fic might pair Sherlock Holmes with Black Widow (Marvel Comics’s Natasha Romanova), for instance, as well as Black Widow with Dr. Joan Watson from Elementary, a TV show that changes the Sherlock Holmes character Watson from a white British man to a Chinese American woman. It may bend or swap characters’ genders, races, cultures, or other characteristics, such as a male Wonder Woman or a South Asian Rapunzel. Fic also includes nonfiction writing, such as an essay about vampire biology, an exploration of the physics of the sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who, or reviews of movies and commentary on games.
Anyone can write fanfiction! Some people write just for themselves, while others share and discuss their work in busy online communities.
The genre is far from new: fanfic belongs to a long tradition of participatory storytelling. Professor Henry Jenkins says, “If you go back, the key stories we told ourselves were stories that were important to everyone and belonged to everyone.” An ancient stew of tropes, or common storytelling devices and themes, inspired and continues to inspire retellings. Among the longstanding stock characters are vampires (Dracula and Twilight’s Edward Cullen), tricksters (Robin Hood, DC Comics’s Joker, and Harley Quinn), and orphans (Jane Eyre and Harry Potter). Fic writers re-present magicians (Morgan Le Fay and Gandalf the Grey) and logicians (Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek’s Mr. Spock). Today, blockbuster media entertainment is the source of most fic. The fantasy role-playing video game Dragon Age and the TV show Supernatural have dominated fic in the 2010s. But there’s room for tiny, rare, and seemingly outdated fandom sources too. Does the Trix Rabbit, who has been denied a bowl of cereal in advertisements since 1959, ever get to taste any? There’s fic about that.
The desire of readers and viewers to enter into, expand upon, or change a story from the official version fuels fanwork. Teenage fan Julia Osmon explained, “Fans take a storyline they really like and they tweak and change it to be the way they want it to be.” She usually reads fic from the site FanFiction.net on her smartphone, especially stories about characters in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series. Fans write fanfiction for love, for other fans, and (due to personal preference as well as copyright restrictions) for free. According to the New York Times, “As long as fan fiction writers don’t try to sell stories based on copyrighted works, they can write and post them legally.”
Fanfiction was once a small, self-published expression of love for a story world. But during the 1990s, the tidal wave of Harry Potter fandom, combined with the rise of the Internet, pushed fic into mainstream culture. Since then fan stories have appeared by the millions on online fic-sharing platforms, fan sites, and forums. They can be as short as one-hundred-word “drabble” or as long as a multivolume series. Fic is considered a literary genre of its own, like science fiction, Western, or romance, though it can draw from and even mash up other genres.
Literary Cred
Anyone can self-publish fic. Its quality varies wildly, and it hasn’t enjoyed the highest reputation in literary circles. Fans, however, are quick to point out that fanfiction has a noble pedigree. Sometime before 29 BCE, Roman author Virgil lifted Aeneas, the hero of his epic Aeneid, from a much older tale, the Iliad, by Greek storyteller Homer. And Homer’s epic was composed by many people—we could even call it crowdsourced. Bards had been retelling the tale about the Trojan War for a long time, possibly hundreds of years, before it was credited to Homer around 700 BCE.
Adam Nicolson, author of Why Homer Matters, described the process in a way that could apply to fic too. “I think it’s a mistake to think of Homer as a person,” Nicolson said. “Homer is . . . a tradition. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it. Homer is essentially shared.”
What literary scholars call the intertextual use of Homer––one text borrowing from another––didn’t end with Virgil. The characters made their way from the Mediterranean world to what is now Great Britain. There, around 1135 CE, Geoffrey of Monmouth expanded on the Aeneid. In Geoffrey’s book The History of the Kings of Britain, Aeneas’s grandson Brutus leaves Rome and travels to an island inhabited only by a few giants. He kills the giants and names the land Britain, after himself. His royal descendants include King Arthur, whose life story Geoffrey tells in racy detail. Geoffrey claimed he was merely translating an ancient text. His fellow historian and contemporary William of Newburgh scoffed, “It is quite clear that everything this man wrote . . . was made up, partly by himself and partly by others either from an inordinate love of lying or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.”
Ever since, the Arthurian legend has spread and morphed. A bridge of stories spans from Geoffrey to the medieval Canterbury Tales by Chaucer to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s feminist retelling The Mists of Avalon (1983) to the British TV show Merlin (2008–2012) to the 2017 film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Each has its fic-writing fans, and there is no end in sight.
Janeites
British author Jane Austen (1775–1817) began to write as a teenager by mimicking and creating parodies—humorous exaggerations—of the romance novels of her day. (Parodies remain a popular form of fic.) She went on to anonymously publish six novels. Her books were quite popular at the time, but most readers thought them light entertainment rather than serious literature. But Austen, who began her literary career as a fanfic writer of sorts, soon became one of the first published women writers known to have had an actively engaged, interactive fan base.
By the end of the nineteenth century, members of the literary elite calling themselves Janeites declared Austen to be one of the great writers of English literature. British writer Rudyard Kipling, whose hypermasculine characters tromp around the British Empire, was a fan. He read her stories to his family and even visited Bath, the site of an Austen novel, to reread her novels there. He also wrote a story, “The Janeites,” about a group of soldiers during World War I (1914–1918) who form a secret Austen fandom. Though one soldier in the story says that Austen’s books “weren’t adventurous, nor smutty, nor what you’d call even interestin’,” another declares, “There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.” According to his biographer, Kipling wanted to capture “the sense of fellowship felt by people who shared a powerful joint experience—whether fighting in war, or membership of a Mason’s Lodge, or even familiarity with the works of an author such as Austen.” The power of shared experience is a big part of fic.
Sherlock Holmes and the Game
Most of the sixty Sherlock Holmes tales appeared in the Strand, which printed fifty-six Holmes short stories and one novel in serial form. Two of the remaining three were novels, and the last appeared in another magazine.
Sherlock Holmes stories are one of the first sources of fanfic in the modern sense: amateur stories based on copyrighted source material. (Legal protection of original work didn’t exist until Great Britain passed the first copyright law in 1710.) Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty adventures featuring his famous detective Holmes, most of them serialized in the Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1927.
In 1893, tired of the character, Conan Doyle killed Holmes off. Holmes fans were outraged, and they let the author know it in letters. Then, in a classic case of fans wanting more of what they love, they wrote their own stories, which they called pastiches, a word borrowed from French. Some, in what modern fans call fix-it fic, found ways to resurrect Holmes. Conan Doyle eventually brought Holmes back—but by then an influential fandom had been born.
Sherlockians named or invented many practices that modern fans still use, such as the key concept of canon. They took the word canon from the world of religious scholars who pored over the Bible and other ancient texts and hotly debated what was official—that is, canon—and how to make sense of pieces that didn’t seem to fit. In fandom, canon refers to works by the creator of a source. Fans generally include the creator’s public pronouncements as well as their published work. It is canon, for instance, that Voldemort killed Harry Potter’s parents. It is also canon that series character Albus Dumbledore is gay. Although author J. K. Rowling didn’t state that in the books, she declared it so later. (By bringing Holmes back to life after decisively killing him off, Conan Doyle anticipated the practice of retroactive continuity, or retcon, which is the official replacement of a previously established detail in canon with a new one.)
Holmes fans also created the practice they called the Game: treating the stories as historical documents about a real detective written by his real friend, Dr. John Watson. In the Game, Conan Doyle is just their literary agent. Modern fans know the Game as the “in-universe” point of view, which treats a story as if it were all real. Sherlockians called nonfiction commentary on and discussions about the Sherlock Holmes stories the Writings on the Writings. In modern fandom, this kind of bird’s-eye view is called meta, a philosophical term meaning “beyond.”
“We Live in an Entirely New World”: Letters and Zines
The first issue of Amazing Stories featured cover art by Frank R. Paul. Publisher Hugo Gernsback autographed this copy to a fellow science-fiction fan.
Early Janeite and Sherlockian fandoms were small and rather exclusive. Fandom began to spread more broadly after publisher Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories in 1926. It was the first US magazine devoted to science fiction––or scientifiction (scientific + fiction), as Gernsback called it—and it would further the careers of Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, and many other famous authors.
In the first issue, Gernsback appealed directly to fans to get involved: “How good this magazine will be in the future is up to you. Read AMAZING STORIES—get your friends to read it and then write us what you think of it.” Crucially, Gernsback added something new to the usual Letters to the Editor column: he printed the addresses of letter writers along with their letters. For the first time, fans could contact one another directly. Inspired, the magazine’s fans—most of them male—exchanged letters, met in person, formed clubs, and argued with one another in print. It was much like Internet fandom but in slow motion. By connecting fans, Gernsback planted the seeds of the fan community.
In the 1930s, fans began to make their own magazines. These do-it-yourself publications are called fanzines (from fan + magazine) or just zines. Most contained some combination of fic, reviews, and essays by fans, as well as letters from readers. Collections of fan letters were called letterzines. In the vibrant science-fiction culture of the time, “fanzines were the social glue that created a community out of a worldwide scattering of readers,” according to fan historian Camille Bacon-Smith. Made on the cheap, zines were often mimeographed on 8½” × 11” typing paper, folded and stapled. Mimeographs were hand-cranked duplicating machines that forced smelly purple ink through a hand-typed stencil. Zines passed from hand to hand at local fan clubs or conventions, or they circulated through the mail. Their price covered printing and mailing costs.
In the mid-1950s, the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy sparked another long-lived fandom and helped create modern fantasy as a genre for adults. Excited fans used zines to discuss Tolkien’s characters, speculate on the evolution of orcs and forging techniques for magic swords, and write their own stories set in Middle Earth. The first organized Tolkien fan group, called the Fellowship of the Ring, formed in 1960 and published a fanzine, i-Palantír, containing articles, original stories, and even a musical.
The Rise of the Media Fan
Science fiction and its fandom had been male-dominated for decades, but in 1966, the TV show Star Trek busted it wide open. Women, kids, college students, and fans of all stripes claimed the show as their own, attracted by plots that went beyond typical sci-fi of the times. Following the voyages of the starship Enterprise as it explored the universe in the twenty-third century, Star Trek plots were often thinly veiled commentary on hot topics at the time, including US military involvement in Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights at home. The show’s hopeful view of the future struck a chord for many.
The crew of the starship was multiracial, and women held positions of power: at the time, these qualities seemed almost as strange as spaceships and aliens. Lifelong Star Trek fan Caryn Elaine Johnson, an African American, was nine years old when the show premiered. When she saw Lieutenant Uhura, a black officer, on the spaceship, she recalled, “I went screaming through the house, ‘Come here, Mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!’ I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.” Johnson grew up to be Oscar-winning actress Whoopi Goldberg.
Fans talked about Star Trek in person, formed clubs, and wrote to pen pals they found in magazines. They also began to write their own stories based on the show. Thirty years before the Internet, there was no easy and obvious way to share fanfiction. Zines dedicated to Star Trek sprang up, to be swapped at cons and mailed to fan clubs.
Women were the pioneers of this new fandom. Editors Devra Langsam and Sherna Comerford printed 350 copies of the first issue of the first all-Trek zine, Spockanalia, in 1967. Named for Spock, the half-human science officer from the planet Vulcan, the ninety-page zine published fans’ stories, art, lyrics, and commentary exploring the character and his culture well beyond what the show offered. “A Proposed Model for the Vulcan Heart,” by Sandra Deckinger, RN, included a medical illustration of this alien organ. In “The Vulcan Gambit,” Shirley Meech analyzed the chess games Spock is seen playing in the show. The zine also published letters from show creator Gene Roddenberry, writer D. C. Fontana, and others involved in the series. Roddenberry gave copies of Spockanalia to his staff for insight into viewers’ reactions, the way present-day showrunners might look at fan sites.
Shipping
Star Trek inspired fan writers to explore the inner workings of the characters. These writers, many of them women and girls, wrote character studies and action/adventure stories, supplying missing scenes and follow-ups, and fixing or parodying elements they didn’t like. They wrote about relationships as well as spaceships, filling in characters’ backgrounds and development that the show’s writers didn’t touch. Fans of another show, the 1990s’ X-Files, would later give a name to the practice of exploring romantic relationships, or “ships,” among characters: shipping.
The most famous kind of shipping to emerge from Star Trek was slash. Named for the punctuation mark in Kirk/Spock (abbreviated K/S), slash fic explores noncanon romantic or sexual relationships between same-sex characters. (No TV characters were identified as LGBTQ+ until the mid-1970s and then in only a few appearances.) Fan writer Charlotte gravitated toward writing stories about Kirk and Spock in love. “It’s the perfect recipe for a great love story,” she said. “You have two radically different people from millions of miles apart whose lives fit together perfectly. . . . That’s a great friendship story. If you add a sexual element to that, it becomes a great love story, and some of us see that sexual element.”
Slash fans were cautious about sharing their work in the face of the era’s homophobia. Fan Shelley Butler recalled her discovery of slash in an interview years later: “I was going to all the Star Trek conventions in the Los Angeles area,” she said. “I began to see . . . fanzines with ‘those’ covers—artwork showing Kirk and Spock in an intimate embrace or just looking at each other. I was intrigued and started hearing about this very subversive genre called K slash S. At this time, K/S was barely tolerated even by Star Trek fans, in fact, it was looked down upon, if not hated outright. Everyone in K/S had to be very discreet.” They kept writing, however, and the practice of exploring “what if?” relationships spread to other fandoms as well.
Fanzines grew in popularity, and as fans found new stories to share, new fan communities popped up. When the film Star Wars came out in 1977, a new group of fans began to produce zines and hold cons. Cheree Cargill founded the Southern Enclave (SE) letterzine for Star Wars fans in 1983. In the first issue, she wrote, “We hope you enjoy SE and will feel inspired to . . . and send us . . . reviews, zine listings, consumer news, etc. SE is designed to be your sounding board, an instrument for fans to communicate with other fans.” It also stated, “No public backstabbing allowed.” Fans wrote to discuss (sometimes in great detail) their favorite Star Wars movies, and the letterzine remains an active community after going online in 2000.
Moving Online
At the dawn of the Internet era, in the early 1990s, fans began to find one another online through Usenet groups, bulletin board systems, e-mail listservs, forums, and chat rooms. The fan community grew, and soon it was as easy to connect with fans on the other side of the world as it was to meet up at the movies. TV and other media fandoms provided a common language, allowing fans to bond and create community.
Jane Austen fic writers were early adopters. The New York Times noted that in 2000, Austen’s was “the only classic literature to inspire a sizable collection of online fan fiction.” Ann Haker, founder of Austen.com, summed up the call of fandom when she explained, “Fanfic writers make no claims to be able to reach the literary heights of Miss Austen, but we feel the need to expand on the world, the characters and the stories, that she created. There just is not enough of Jane Austen’s own words to read, so we write our own.” Some Janeites insist on fic that is true to Austen’s voice and worldview. Others move her stories to different times and places or mash them up with other fandoms, such as the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Discussing favorite worlds with readers, commenters, and other writers encourages friendships as well as writing. Seventeen-year-old Katie Gowen, who wrote fic about the boy band One Direction (1D), said, “What’s amazing is I’ll post a chapter and an hour later I’ll have, like, eighty comments. I like being able to know that there are people who are reading what I write.” She uses the platform Wattpad, a commercially owned site geared toward mobile use.
Face-to-face fan networking is thriving too. High-schooler GinnyWeasley only spends about an hour a day online. “I mostly just talk about my fandoms in person with my fellow fangirls at school,” she said. She swaps recommendations about her favorites, which include the TV show Doctor Who and the musical Hamilton. “It’s an awesome feeling to come into school,” she said, “and just see the wonderstruck look on their face as they explain where they are in the story.”
Copyright and Mainstreaming Fanfic
US copyright law protects creators’ original work from theft. To allow for creative development and freedom of speech, however, the law also permits the “fair use” of copyrighted material. Four factors determine fair use. The new work must transform the original work, it must not use a substantial part of the original, it must not damage the original creator’s ability to make money from the work, and because you can’t copyright facts, the law grants more leeway in using nonfiction works than fictional ones.
Unless it literally copies the original work, which is plagiarism, fanfic is generally considered “transformative,” and therefore legal, fair use of original material. Especially if fic is not published for money, many people in the entertainment industry support fanwork, considering it free advertising for their media.
Individual authors vary on how they feel about fic. J. K. Rowling has said she welcomes it—within limits. A spokesperson for her literary agency said, “Our view on Harry Potter fan fiction is broadly that it should be noncommercial and should also not be distributed through commercial websites. Writers should write under their own name and not as J. K. Rowling. Content should not be inappropriate—also any content not suitable for young readers should be marked as age restricted.” Some writers ask that fans not write fic at all.
Anything published before 1923 is no longer protected by copyright and is in the public domain––that is, it is free for anyone to use. Modern works based on copyright-free sources are a booming genre for fanfic and commercial publishing alike. Dozens of professional authors and moviemakers retell and sell Jane Austen’s romances, for example. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice gets a modernized homage in the bubbly Bridget Jones books and movies. The same tale is mashed up with horror in the 2009 book and 2016 film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and is Americanized to good effect in the 2016 novel Eligible. Fans consider stories written with the intent to be professionally published to be “pro-fic,” not fanfic.
Some fic writers rework their fic to publish it professionally. Cassandra Clare wrote highly popular Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fanfic, which she deleted before publishing the urban fantasy novel City of Bones, first of the Shadowhunters series. It follows the adventures of Clary Fray, who learns on her eighteenth birthday that she is a Shadowhunter, a human with angelic blood destined to secretly protect humans from demons. The series, which reused some of her fanfic, was adapted for film and an ongoing TV series.
The Shadowhunters series was a huge success, as was E. L. James’s best-selling, erotic Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, which started as AU (alternate universe) fanfic based on the Twilight young-adult romances by Stephenie Meyer. Publishers began to scour fanfic sites for new authors. They found Anna Todd, a twenty-three-year-old 1D fan who wrote on Wattpad as Imaginator1D. In her alternate universe, 1D member Harry Styles is not a sweet-natured singer but a hard-drinking college boy who begins a love-hate relationship with naive Tessa. Soon Todd’s fic, After, was drawing serious numbers of readers. Between shifts at her waitressing job at Waffle House, Todd wrote and messaged other Wattpad users for hours a day, usually on her phone. “The only way I know how to write is socially and getting immediate feedback on my phone,” she said.
When her fic had racked up eight hundred million views, publishers competed for the rights to print it. Todd negotiated a six-figure book and movie deal and worked with an editor to revise and expand the story, including changing Styles’s name. (Fans call name changes for copyright reasons “filing off the serial numbers.”) Some 1D fans were angry at Todd for going commercial. But, Todd says, “I still feel the most at home in that fandom.”
Author Anna Todd wrote much of her first fic, After, on her smartphone. Since she revised it for publication, it has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Many fic writers are not looking to become professional writers. They prefer working within fandom culture, valuing the give-and-take with other fans. Fic writer Mithen explains, “Writing fanfic is not necessarily a warm-up for other things. . . . It CAN be, but it involves a totally different set of challenges. You can scrimp on physical descriptions of characters, for example, but using canon deftly to create allusions that will have impact on the readers is a challenge that most writers of original fiction don’t run into.”
Some writers write fic even after they find professional success. Rainbow Rowell is the author of best-selling young adult (YA) novels, including Fangirl, a novel about a teenager, Cath, whose fanfic about Simon Snow, a Harry Potter–like wizard, is hugely popular with fans. When Cath goes to college, she must balance her rewarding online life with her real-life social anxiety and shyness. After Fangirl was published, Rowell went through a period of depression and found that writing fic helped. She took a break and wrote a thirty-thousand-word Potter fanfic based on some of her own real-life issues as a parent. “It’s Harry and Draco as a couple,” Rowell said, “who have been married for many years, and they’re raising Harry’s kids.” She never posted it online, though she has shared parts of it at readings. In writing fic, she regained her joy in writing.
Types of Fanfic
Fanfic falls into several different types, some of them overlapping. Gen, or general fic, is any fic that does not focus primarily on romantic or sexual relationships. It may be a plot-driven piece involving something as serious as the death of a major character, or it may be just a piece of fluff. Parody and satire, which poke fun at the original material, are popular too.
AUs place characters in different places or times. They come in various flavors. One kind may change just one detail but otherwise stay within the canon. For instance, what if no major characters died in The Hobbit? Another AU fic may turn everything on its ear. In the popular coffee shop–type AU, for instance, characters work in or frequent a coffee shop. In a Hamilton coffee shop AU, Alexander is a law student and the server at his favorite espresso place is Thomas—Thomas Jefferson. Fic writer Mithen says of these, “It’s all about the appeal of translating the unusual into the ‘mundane’ and finding the magic in it there anew.”
Crossover AUs mix different fandoms. “It’s great when you can have completely different fandoms and make references and connections between them,” says GinnyWeasley. In a Hogwarts and Star Trek crossover, for instance, Star Trek characters could attend the school for magic with Harry Potter, or Hogwarts students could attend Starfleet Academy.
Brad O’Farrell calls the crossover fic he writes “sort of absurdist. I like writing crossover fanfiction because you can see the story happening, but the two things are so completely unrelated.” His favorite fic, “Beverly Drive Chihuahua,” is a crossover of the dark movie Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, with the family comedy Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Both movies are set in Los Angeles and involve heists, but otherwise are opposites. “I just made Ryan Gosling fall in love with a chihuahua,” O’Farrell said. “I guess the stupider the crossover is, the more I think it’s funny.” Crossovers can mix two, three, or more fandoms, and multifandom crossovers can get really wild.
Slash remains one of the most popular fic categories and is still written primarily by fans who identify as female. Almost any media fandom has slash, although the punctuation mark is often replaced with mashed-up character names. Popular pairings on AO3 come from the TV shows Supernatural (Dean/Castiel, mashup name Destiel) and Sherlock (John Watson/Sherlock Holmes, or Johnlock). The Captain America movies gave rise to Steve/Bucky, or Stucky. Slashing female characters is less common.
Though LGBTQ+ relationships are still few in mainstream films, more and more canon sources include them. The animated TV show Legend of Korra broke new ground in children’s television in 2014 when it ended with Korra beginning a romantic relationship with her female friend, Asami Sato. AO3 hosts about three thousand Korra/Asami Sato fic, including “Jurassic Avatar,” a crossover with the Jurassic Park book and film series. Its author, westoneaststreet, describes it as “Legend of Korra . . . with dinosaurs!” AO3 hosts about another three thousand fic about Nico di Angelo/Will Solace—Solangelo––that are also based on canon in the Percy Jackson books.
Fic about male/female relationships is called het. But as mass media gradually expands its presentation of genders and sexualities, lines between these fic categories blur. Some fans no longer use the terms slash or het. They simply note whether a relationship is canon or noncanon. A fic writer who goes by Skylar Dorset started writing Doctor Who fic because she wanted to see more of the canon relationship between the Doctor and his traveling companion Rose Tyler. Dorset said she felt she “was only being told half the story,” so she started writing the other half . . . and didn’t stop until she’d written one million words (ten novels’ worth) and had brought the couple to “a happy place,” with three grown children.
In genderbent, or genderswap, fic, a writer changes a character’s sex. Genderbending can help make up for the underrepresentation of girls and women in mass media, especially in roles of power. “It kind of annoys me there’s not a lot of strong female leads,” Julia Osmon says. A fan of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, she makes up for the lack by reading fic that recasts the male characters as female. “I like genderbent fanfic, like fem!Percy,” says Osmon. The exclamation point marks a changed trait in fic, such as making Percy female. (A Captain Kirk with wings, for instance, would be winged!Kirk.)
Tropes and Prompts
Fic writers use many literary tools in their works, including tropes, which are common literary themes or devices. Tropes are used across fandoms and fanworks, and some fandoms even develop their own unique tropes. The podcast (digital audio show) Fansplaining is produced by, for, and about fans. In one episode, hosts Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel discussed the results of a survey in which 7,610 respondents voted and commented on 144 fanfic tropes. The survey found that the favorite trope was the classic “friends to lovers,” in which friends fall in love. Another familiar trope, the slow burn, teases the reader as characters secretly pine for one another . . . for a long time. Fluff is, as it sounds, light and happy fic. Also in the top ten is the opposite of fluff: the hurt/comfort trope, a kind of intentionally disturbing darkfic in which one character takes care of another who is physically or emotionally wounded. The most hated trope was noncon, short for nonconsensual sex, such as rape or the complicated issue of love potions. Among other most disliked tropes was centaurification, turning a character into a half-human/half-horse centaur. The Fansplaining hosts were baffled as to why this trope inspired so much disdain.
To generate stories, fic writers often use and exchange prompts, or fan-generated story ideas. For example, Tumblr user the-fifth-movement shared a fic-writing prompt that invites writers to explore the experience and backstory of Buck Vu, a character from the scary, sci-fi TV series The OA, who is a transgender young man in high school. The idea is, “Buck is probably the only trans kid on the swim team at LHS [his school]. Is he allowed on the boys team like he’s allowed in boys choir? If so, is he allowed to wear just his binder [a chest-flattening top] and trunks? Or is he forced to be on the girl’s team, forced to wear a body suit that makes his dysphoria [feeling of being assigned the wrong gender] 10x worse????” The show also vividly and sometimes disturbingly portrays other real-life issues that spur fan discussions, such as self-harm and trauma survival.
Vu is played by fifteen-year-old Ian Alexander, a Vietnamese American actor who is trans. Alexander shared the swim-team prompt on his Tumblr lilskeletonprince, encouraging fans who were excited to see trans characters played by trans actors gaining visibility in canon. In an interview, Alexander said that he is excited by the fans’ creative responses. “That used to be me,” he said, “someone creating and sharing content about shows they like. Now, I see it happening with something I’m involved in. I want to encourage it as much as I can.”
Ian Alexander was a fan long before he landed the role of Buck Vu in The OA. He advocates for better representation in films and on TV, giving more fans the chance to see themselves on-screen.
In a few decades, modern fanfic has gone from a handful of stapled, mimeographed pages to billions of digital words. With so much to choose from, fanfic readers value the tradition of creating lists of recommended reading, or recs. In the introduction to the forum for Harry Potter fic, Reddit user NedryOS wrote, “Like all art, it’s whatever you make of it. It’s humorous, it’s a power fantasy, it’s emotional, it’s sad, it’s dark, it’s erotic, it’s silly, and more often than not, it’s really bad. For every Picasso and Rembrandt there’s a thousand pseudo-students poorly imitating Bob Ross’s happy little trees. But finding the gems among the rubble is worth the effort.”