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Although fanfiction’s reputation has improved somewhat in recent years, with authors well-known for their fanwork earning publishing contracts in the real world, it remains a practice often regarded with disdain or, at best, tolerant amusement. Even in fandom itself, where most participants read or write fanfiction (or both), discussions about fanfiction often include such terms such “Mary Sue,” “self-insert,” “shippy fluff,” “porn without plot,” “cracktastic,” “sporking,” and “canon-rape,” few of which sound particularly normal and none of which sound very literary. Fanfiction itself, under the most charitable of definitions, is at best a creative exercise with no hope of publication and at worst poorly-written copyright infringement, and thanks to the lack of standards for posting such stories, the vast majority are indeed likely to be poorly written. Despite all of this, however, at its most basic level, fanfiction can be seen as the ultimate literal expression of reader-response theory. This seemingly non-literary practice validates and concretizes readers’ participation in and construction of a given text, regardless of the quality of the text or fanfiction in question.
Understanding the ways in which fanfiction functions as literal reader-response requires some understanding of fandom itself, however. Matt Hills begins Fan Cultures with an attempt to define “fandom” and “media ‘cult’” academically, but in doing so he primarily demonstrates the areas of overlap between the terms used and the ways such academic definitions tend to miss important parts of the fan experience. Defining fans themselves, though, is easier:
It’s somebody who is obsessed with a particular star, celebrity, film, TV programme, band; somebody who can produce reams of information on their object of fandom, and can quote their favorite lines or lyrics… Fans are often highly articulate. Fans interpret media texts in a variety of interesting and perhaps unexpected ways. And fans participate in communal activities—they are not ‘socially atomised’ or isolated viewers/readers. (ix)
These communal activities take a variety of forms, the most basic of which is simple discussion on blogs or forums. Beyond that, however, fanworks run the gamut from professional-level artwork and publication-quality novels, to badly Photoshopped images and incoherent stories churned out during a sugar rush…and everything in between. Other kinds of fan creations include original songs on fannish topics, themed mixtapes, role-playing games, costuming, and fan videos. As with most creative endeavors, fanworks tend to follow Sturgeon’s Law—“Ninety percent of everything is crap” (Gunn)—but even more obviously than published work, since the only thing necessary to make any fanwork available to a potential audience is an internet connection. The better fanworks, produced by those who care enough about the original canon and the craft itself, tend to receive some peer-editing and a reasonable amount of effort, but given that these fans are already something of a minority, the vast array of fanfiction available to the casually interested non-fan is likely to result in a negative or somewhat inaccurate impression of fanworks in general. Popular articles tend to assume that crossovers of semi-incompatible fandoms (Burns and Webber) or seemingly empowering but actually clichéd portrayals of female characters (Chander and Sunder) make up the entirety of fanfiction, when these elements are only two points on a spectrum that results from the overlap of countless interpretive communities—but more on that later.
At its most fundamental level, fanworks—and fanfiction, in particular—constitute a literal manifestation of reader-oriented theory, regardless of the quality of the work in question. Although reader-response theory is most applicable in this area, the precursors of this field can be considered relevant as well. Phenomenology, for instance, begins with a reduction of the world to the reader-subject and his experience of a given text or situation, making the author’s history or intentions not only irrelevant but essentially nonexistent (Eagleton 48). Further use of phenomenological criticism is not as useful in this area, however, thanks to its focus on the individual consciousness, but Husserl’s phenomenological reduction paved the way for other kinds of reader-oriented theory that emphasized some aspect of literature other than those relating to the author. Reader-response criticism, in particular, is especially relevant for its emphasis on the reader’s interpretation and the ways in which texts are not truly created until they are read. In many ways, fanfiction allows the reader-subject to take this even further, forming a new text that depends entirely on the subject’s interpretation of the original. The author may still be considered important as creator of this original canon, but for the fanfiction itself, it is primarily the reader-subject’s view of the text that matters.
Stanley Fish’s ideas about readers and their interpretive communities is especially relevant for a broader examination of fandom, the context in which these fanworks are created. According to Fish, readers bring pre-understandings and assumptions to every text they encounter, and those assumptions are never formed in a vacuum. Every reader is a member of many interpretive communities, all of which color the understanding of any new text, even if the reader is not aware of these influences. Fandom as a whole is itself a community, one that functions as such an interpretive community in both the reading and writing of various texts, but it is considerably more complicated than this preliminary description might indicate. Members of fandom, in general, are aware of their presence within an interpretive community and the ways that community informs their reception of various texts, but because fandom is far from a single homogenous entity, every participant in fan activities belongs to a number of overlapping sub-communities—and that is true even if the participant in question is only devoted to a single fan text. In reality, most people who participate actively in the fandom for one text also consider themselves members of many other fandoms, most of which have their own conventions and common interpretive strategies. In addition, the actual spaces in which fans participate in various kinds of fan behaviors can have a considerable effect on what is considered standard or acceptable. New fanwriters who tend to be unaware of what is considered cliched or particularly distasteful in a given fandom often come first to FanFiction.net, the largest and probably most well-known fanfiction archive on the Internet; it is open to all users and has no form of quality control. In contrast, some fandom-specific archives are moderated for content or frequented by users who value well-written stories, while some specialized communities on blogging sites like LiveJournal can restrict stories to certain pairings or characters. The tastes and interests of any given fan’s friends in the fandom will also inform the tone of any writing produced—if, say, someone’s only experience of fandom is in the Twilight section of FanFiction.net, the standard of quality expected by friends and readers is likely to be low.
Of course, it is not only this community aspect that makes fanfiction a literalization of the ideas central to reader-response theory. Fish sees texts as not truly existing until they are read and readers actually writing texts as they read and interpret them according to their particular communities and histories, but in most readers’ experience, this act of creation does not involve the literal writing of a new text. Fan activities, in contrast to those of more casual readers or viewers, make this process literal and concrete through creating actual texts that supplement and sometimes rewrite the original through the lens of the writer’s interpretation. At its most basic form, such fan activities might consist of forum or blog postings discussing a particular movie or television episode, through which many of these various interpretations are formed. Based on their level of engagement with and feelings toward a particular text, many fans choose to develop these interpretations further through different kinds of completed fanworks. However, even the more casual kinds of engagement represented by blog and forum discussions mark fans as more productive participants in fan texts than non-fans interested in the same texts, in contrast to one of Hills’ arguments (27), so it can be argued that fan behavior sometimes more closely resembles theories of literary criticism than that of non-fan consumers or academics.
The fanworks themselves can take an enormous variety of forms, with stories using characters, settings, and situations from the original text representing the most literal form of a reader’s response to and interpretation of a text. In each case, fanwriters interpret the source text in a certain way based on their backgrounds, their friends and past experiences in fandom, and the particular areas of fandom they inhabit, and these interpretations are then given more polished, concrete form through fanfiction published online for others to read. A considerable part of the point of writing fanfiction is this community aspect, allowing fans to use their stories as another way of discussing fan texts and forming or refining further interpretations; the process becomes something of a feedback loop, in which fanwriters read and leave comments on their fellow fans’ stories and thereby encourage or implicitly discourage a certain interpretive thread. Some fandom sub-communities may be heavily into same-sex pairings or explicit sexual content, for instance, while these and other elements may be less common in certain other areas of fandom.
The level of engagement with the text displayed by different kinds of fanfiction also varies widely depending on the fanwriter and the area of fandom with which the writer is most familiar, but the fan-written texts themselves can be examined by the degrees to which they attempt to supplant or merely supplement the work of the original author. All such attempts at categorization are somewhat arbitrary and must also acknowledge the overlapping boundaries of these divisions, but from the perspective of reader-response theory and its emphasis on the creation of a text through the reader’s interpretation, some kinds of fanfiction are more relevant than others. On the first level one might place self-insertion or wish-fulfillment stories that allow fanwriters to place themselves in worlds they wish they could literally visit and experience situations they are unlikely to encounter in real life. The majority of fan-written stories can probably be placed in this category, in large part because many new fans attracted to a particular character or actor rarely go much further than this celebrity infatuation. A fan of the Harry Potter books and film adaptations might be attracted to the actor Tom Felton, for instance, and proceed to write a story in which a thinly-disguised version of herself attends Hogwarts and wins the immediate admiration of Draco Malfoy, the character Felton portrays. In this case, the story in question will involve significant changes to the original canon, since it will focus on a character who does not exist in canon and will likely change plot events and the behavior of canonical characters to suit this new focus. Rather than engaging with the text to interpret it differently or comment on certain aspects, though, this kind of writing merely warps the original story by placing a reader-proxy at the center of the narrative and its world. The same could be said of stories that pair up characters who, canonically, have no interest in one another or are of incompatible sexual orientations, but the fanwriter finds the characters attractive together and puts them together romantically without examining how such a change in orientation might occur or what effect it would have on other narrative elements.
Further along the spectrum could be stories that make few actual changes to established canon but play with it in other ways, such as by speculating on the motivations behind actions the characters actually took, describing narrative events from the point of view of someone other than the protagonist, or focusing on minor characters and giving them interactions or events not shown in the original text. In a similar category would be fan-written stories that try to explain elements of a particular canon that seem inconsistent with other established elements. In each case, the fanwriter is not attempting to replace the existing text with her own, but she is still creating new text based on her interpretation of the original rather than holding strictly to the precise narrative as laid out by the original story.
The deliberate changing of canonical events in subtle ways could be seen as the next point along this continuum, largely because in these cases, the writer still takes the original text as a starting point and tries to extrapolate on how the effects of a certain adjustment might ripple out into a new future for the story and its characters. As with other kinds of fanfiction, this can be done in a number of ways, such as by ascribing a motivation to a character that explicitly goes against what is described in the text and examining ways in which canonical events might still have occurred from those changed motivations or how an alternate sequence might develop for a character who essentially becomes a villain with good publicity. Fanwriters might also speculate on events that might take place after the conclusion of a particular text, create an alternate-universe scenario in which some major or minor change requires the plot to play out in different ways, or deal more thoughtfully with a character’s potential change in sexuality. In the same category might be alternate-universe stories that transplant a text’s characters and situations to an entirely different setting, such as making the characters in the Harry Potter books ordinary teenagers in an ordinary high school or students in a futuristic academy for space pilots. The appeal in these kinds of stories tends to revolve around retaining the characters’ canonical personalities and discovering how they might interact with surroundings that may have little in common with those in the original text. Most such stories involve major changes to the world established by the original text, whether these changes are caused by minor modifications or large ones, but the writer is still exploring the results of these changes from within the general parameters of canonical situations and character behavior. The original text still remains a critical part of the fanwriter’s story and thought process, and the writer still works with canonical elements rather than actually trying to replace them.
In the final category would be stories that deliberately seek to change the established canon to the point of actually replacing it with some preferred alternate narrative. This kind of story often takes a similar form to some of those described above, but the difference tends to be in the fanwriter’s intent: for one reason or another, she is dissatisfied with the canonical narrative and creates new text as a substitute for the elements she considers unsatisfactory. A fanwriter might dislike the conclusion of a text, such as the death of a certain character or the romantic pairing of other characters over those the fanwriter preferred. For instance, a number of Harry Potter fans who wanted to see Harry romantically involved with his friend Hermione have written stories in this vein, some of which simply ignore established canon past a certain point and some of which try to work with the events provided but make considerable differences after the end of the story, such as writing about Harry and Hermione engaging in an extramarital affair or getting together after their respective spouses suddenly leave or die. Some fans may also like certain parts of a text but believe that the writing went in a negative direction after a certain point in a way that did not maintain narrative consistency with earlier material, and responses to this situation may also include attempts to rewrite the text. Fans may also believe that the original text marginalized a particular race, sexual orientation, gender, or other group, and create a replacement text that brings the marginalized element to the center of the story. To use the Harry Potter series as an example again, writers have—with varying degrees of success—chosen to change the title character’s gender or sexual orientation and construct a story in which canonical events are adjusted accordingly. This gender-swap approach tends to be viewed as a cliché in most areas of fandom and rarely seems to be handled well (“Genderswap”), but it does still stand as an attempt to replace, rather than supplement, the original text with new text created by the reader-writer.
The attitude of fanwriters toward their texts’ creators tends to vary from fan to fan, but in many respects the practice of fanfiction both reinforces and nullifies the role of the author. Many fans do consider extratextual statements by creators of various fandoms to be just as much a part of the canon as the text itself, but even a fanwork that demonstrates clear respect for and even devotion to the original work still functions by creating a text from an interpretation that is not the author’s. As Barthes put it, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (257), and in the practice of fanfiction, that statement is made both literally true and entirely false. The readers take a deeper, more creative engagement with the text by producing their own works and rendering the role of the original author unnecessary—but in doing so they also elevate the original creation to an almost religious position of authority, using terms like “canon” and “Word of God” to describe original texts and statements by the author-creators. Barthes, Fish, and other theorists likely would not see fanfiction as a traditionally literary form of responding to a text, especially considering some of its most common caffeine-fueled, ill-conceived representations, but even in its most unimpressive form, fanfiction still strikes an interesting balance between destroying the author and empowering the reader.
Works Cited
“Genderswap.” Fan History. Fan History Wiki: The Fandom History Resource, 23 June 2009. Web. 22 January 2011. Web.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. 253-257. Print.
Burns, Elizabeth and Carlie Webber. “When Harry Met Bella.” School Library Journal 55.8 (2009): 26-29. Web.
Chander, Anupam and Madhavi Sunder. “Everyone’s a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of ‘Mary Sue’ Fan Fiction as Fair Use.” California Law Review 95.2 (2007): 597-626. Web.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Anniversary Edition). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008. Print.
Gunn, James. “Addendum: Sturgeon’s Law.” The New York Review of Science Fiction 8.1 (1995). Print.
Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures (Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication). Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2002. Print.