That’s also partly what this book is about: not knowing. In various ways, fanfiction resembles all storytelling, ever. People like to swap stories, period, and the internet is like a big electronic campfire. These continuities with past forms and traditions as well as with contemporary sources can (mis)lead us into believing that fic is a known quantity, familiar ground. It isn’t always, despite the fact that by its very nature, fic revisits known material.
That isn’t all it does.
Fanfiction also responds to—and even helps bring about—very specific shifts in technology and culture, and it does so more quickly, nimbly, and radically than anyone who benefits from the commercial status quo is ever likely to. Yet commercial culture—with its massive distribution, which helps create the fan communities that become fanfiction communities—is also an integral part of the fanfiction equation.
Example: Sherlock Holmes stories first begin to see mass distribution in The Strand in 1891. The mimeograph was invented in 1890. Sherlock Holmes fueled the imaginations of the first fanfic fandom; the mimeograph was to become the engine of fanwriting publication and distribution for decades.
Example: Broadcast television brought science fiction material to vast new audiences, including many more women. The fandom that grew up around the show quickly adapted to use phones, electric typewriters, photocopiers, and soon personal computers and desktop publishing to create networks, lobby the show’s creators and producers, and ultimately distribute their fanworks, creating the mechanisms of fanfic culture that lasted until . . . the internet.
Example: Fan culture was ahead of all commercial enterprises in using the internet as a creative space for the production, distribution, and promotion of writing. The publication of Fifty Shades of Grey drew the world’s attention to this enormous yet somehow still shadowy online culture, and the world is still trying to figure out what it all means.
Today, right now, the contracts (social and literal, explicit and only implied) between writers, readers, and publishers are changing along paths first established in fanwriting communities. When one of my undergraduate classes recently conducted an experiment in reading self-published “indie” fiction commercially available online, I asked them to imagine systems that would distribute, rate, and edit such fiction, making it easier to connect suitable readers, writers, and stories. The system students came up with resembled not commercial publishing but fanfiction communities: collectives in which readers and writers took on varied and active roles.
The way my students imagined it, these roles and expectations would be spelled out: readers, for example, might collect credits for edits or comments offered to writers; credits would grant them access to new material. In amateur online writing communities, however, these contracts governing expectations are often not explicit, and so . . . wires cross. Links break, get redirected. So you click on the story everyone’s raving about, and it’s not there. “Yeah, you should’ve been there,” internet fandom shrugs sympathetically in your direction, “back in the day. When things were good. Last year. Last month. Last week.”
My frustration and disbelief at not finding fanfiction where the internet said it would be reflects outmoded expectations of physical continuity. For a long time, the physicality of reading a story, putting it down, and coming back to it was predictable. We have a book, we put it on the shelf, and, unless someone steals it, it stays there. We might not remember where we put it, but it doesn’t move. Such an experience has long seemed basic to us, but like so many of our assumptions about how literature is created, disseminated, and consumed, this expectation is a relatively recent development.
For most of human history, of course, stories were not a matter of reading and writing. Written manuscripts and initially even printed books were not only extremely rare but also useless to most of the population. As print and paper technology evolved and literacy increased, cheaply produced abridged and illustrated versions of existing stories and histories were distributed in chapbooks and other ephemera, publications that did not always make an obvious distinction among genres, or even between fact and fiction.
Imagine that. It wasn’t always clear exactly what kind of thing you were reading.
Even as mass print culture began to resemble what we’re now used to, and the novel began to assume the commercially dominant role in fiction it occupies today, owning these books was not part of most readers’ experience. Paper was not cheap and binding was exorbitant, so novels were published by subscription, in costly volumes available from circulating libraries for a fee (see Jane Austen’s send-up of novel-reading culture in Northanger Abbey), or in serial publication (see Charles Dickens). It was long rare for any but the most affluent readers to have their hands on more than one volume of a novel at a time.
For well over a century, though, we’ve expected to be able to buy a book, a discrete object of more or less uniform size and shape that would, upon purchase, take up residence on our shelves and stay put. We owned that copy—or maybe we borrowed it, but still. It might burn, it might wander, we could certainly lend it, but it didn’t simply vanish out of existence.
Not so with the internet, I thought, staring at the Sherlock Holmes fandom discussion with chagrin. The vaunted story, “The Theory of Narrative Causality,” was simply not where the internet said it was going to be, forever replaced by a posting on a fandom discussion site that didn’t even seem interested in the show (BBC’s Sherlock) whose fans kept linking me to it.
This kind of commentary is an integral part of the online reading environment fanfiction helped create. In fact, my interest in fanfiction per se started with fan commentators, not their stories. I first discovered fanboards when I was a TA teaching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a course at Princeton (Tamsen Wolff’s course on musical theater, inspired by “Once More, with Feeling,” the series’ musical episode). Fans, it often seemed, were paying more attention and saying smarter things than my Ivy League students (or, for that matter, than their TA). Plus the fans did it for fun. They enjoyed attending closely and making arguments based on their observations. For all I knew, some of these fans were my students, but how could I get students to do this stuff as students?
It was in quite serious pursuit of this teaching question that I initially engaged fan culture. As I moved on to the kind of commentary that could be found in fic—a slow development, because first forays into fanfiction seem invariably to turn up nearly unreadable texts—I began to connect this kind of writing with other research interests. I’ve been interested in the ways fanfiction blurs a whole range of lines we (mistakenly) believe to be stable: between reading and writing, consuming and creating, genres and genders, authors and critics, derivative and transformative works.
“The Theory of Narrative Causality.” In a way, by using that absent fic’s title as my own, I’m ficcing it—twisting it, taking it out of context. Perhaps as revenge. It bothered me. The history of the Sherlock Holmes fandom is interesting (I promise), but I wanted to write about the fiction, not fandom dynamics. I do write about fandom dynamics, and I do find them relevant to fanfiction as a writing culture, but there’s been a lot of ethnographic study of fandom done already, and I’m your literature professor, dear, not your anthropologist. However, since I planned to be writing about Sherlock fic for this book, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on some of the personalities of the greater Holmes-related fandoms.
So. Sherlock Holmes Fandom Dynamics 101. “Theory of Narrative Causality” kept linking to the following conflict: Consulting Detective is clearly one of those “Big Name Fans” (BNFs) common to any fandom—he’s an artist, an illustrator. Other fans love his work, but they are sick of his telling everyone what’s good, what’s bad, what to post, what not to post. Fandoms are full of these self-appointed arbiters of good taste (their own, of course). I couldn’t read Consulting Detective’s actual opinions on other matters, because a lot of the links on this page were weirdly inactive, although it was a fairly recent post. The di
scussion did link to some recent Conan Doyle–inspired fanfiction. I love this. I love that people are still writing for Sherlock Holmes. J. M. Barrie wrote Sherlock Holmes fanfiction when he wasn’t busy writing Peter Pan or collaborating with Arthur Conan Doyle on a failed drama. Rex Stout was in this fandom and wrote genderswap “meta,” infamously claiming that “Watson was a woman”; some speculated that Stout’s Nero Wolfe was Holmes’ son. It’s like Conan Doyle wrote the best writing prompts ever.
This discussion page helpfully glossed some of the basics of this fandom history:
So Sherlock Holmes fandom has been small and refined for the longest time. (Many would have it that it’s the First Fandom Ever, and that Holmes/Watson is the first slash ship sailin’ the seven seas, back when all fapping [masturbating] material fans had were ’zines and mail chains.) The original stories have been adapted left, right, and center — see Basil Rathbone and Bumblin’ Nigel Bruce, or the scrumptious Jeremy Brett and his two Watsons. And then there’s been the ’09 movie by Guy Ritchie, starring Robert Downey Junior as a disheveled, scruffy Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as gambling, gun-savvy John ‘REALLY FUCKING HOT’ Watson.
Fandom, as a result, exploded in many and various ways. Fanfic was written. Fanart was drawn. Discussions were had. There were challenges. And at least two kink memes.
Online, each of those underlines acts as a link that takes you to a different corner of the Sherlock Holmes fandom. (I can’t do that in a book.) It’s a snapshot of an internet fandom reinvigorated but also dismayed by a new reworking of its source material.
The rest of the discussion also gets at some of that multifaceted writing culture, how it transpires among and around sites and authors and artists, responding to prompts and challenges (to give a famous example from the X-Files fandom: “Exactly five hundred words and an eggbeater”). Sometimes, at some of its best times, fanfiction is a game writers play for the game’s own sake. A great game, even.
Sherlock Holmes fans have long played something they call the Great Game, which entails very intently insisting on the “fact” that a real biographer named John Watson chronicled the real adventures of a real detective. In the game, these chronicles are known as “the Sacred Writings,” for which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle served as literary agent, and they are discussed exhaustively in these terms. The Great Game is itself a kind of participatory fiction—a roleplaying game (RPG) in which the fans play exaggerated versions of themselves, taking their obsession seriously and ironically at the same time.
This fandom post mentions another kind of game, though, one less tweedy and respectable: the kink meme. This game ushers us into the nitty-gritty of online fic-writing today, a writing underground where stories start and percolate. Sometimes these stories evolve and make it on to less chaotic archives, sometimes not. Sometimes they are finished, sometimes not. It’s a very mixed bag. The furthest thing from pure.
A kink meme typically posts a pairing, or grouping—whatever floats the poster’s boat—with a “kink.” The kink doesn’t have to be kinky in the sexual sense, though of course it often is; it could simply be a kink as in twist, or plot element (the eggbeater, for example, in the X-Files challenge). Writers then fill the requests. So a kink meme prompt could be Sherlock Holmes and John Watson and a seabird, specifying fluff (that is, sweet, not upsetting, a happy ending), or it could be Sherlock Holmes and John Watson and the implied sexual abuse of a seabird, with the stipulation that Sherlock is asexual.
Although not, to my knowledge, actually written for a kink meme, the latter is a superb short Sherlock fic by A. J. Hall titled “Breakfast at 221B.” (Summary: “Anyway. Enough of my embarrassing sibling brothel stories. Tell me yours.”) The story draws not just on the new BBC production but on deliciously arcane Holmesiana. The cormorant (the variety of seabird in question) has a rich Holmesian history, in the fan-authored pastiche “The Adventure of the Trained Cormorant,” originally published in Blackwood’s in 1953. This story (and the many that have since followed) is a “fill” for one of the cases Watson refers to but does not recount—in “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,” he threatens those who have attempted to destroy his archive: “The source of these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes’s authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public.” This untold story in turn hearkens back to Doyle’s own 1881 (pre–Sherlock Holmes) photographic sketch “After Cormorants with a Camera,” which details the author’s own adventures photographing seabirds near a lighthouse. You don’t need to know the trivia about cormorants—but if you do, you get rewarded. A. J. Hall’s title also taps into the original stories’ beloved Holmes/Watson breakfast scenes—even casual fans of Doyle’s stories will recognize this allusion. The best fic writers are fantastically close readers, and they write layered stories for layered audiences. If not, there’s still the brothel story. That’s the game.
So, a kink meme is also a game—sometimes, a kink meme is a great game—but the writings it produces aren’t sacred, nor are they put up to be. It is really no place for purists. This Consulting Detective fellow would not feel at home in one. Consulting Detective embraces canon, and the much-loved Jeremy Brett, and not much else. He has scathing critique for the Ritchie movie franchise:
The Ritchie movie is nothing more than American-bait with many explosions and basic appeals at the impressionable human psyche with supernatural stupidities
How To Butcher A Strong Female Character, or why they turned the most intelligent woman of the entire stories into a trousers-wearing, fighting-savvy, men-dominated femme fatale with red lipstick and no brains of her own
I liked those movies, but you could see Consulting Detective’s logic. Fandom can be pretty exacting on matters of gender representation.
At this point, the whole discussion devolves into an account of an enormous wank—not, despite the terminology, a group masturbation session, but rather a blanket term for a particular kind of fandom drama: usually, fans in a terrible race to take down other fans. It’s a pattern familiar to anyone who’s spent any time around a fandom. The site fandom_ wank (from which this post is apparently a page) is explicitly dedicated to mocking “self-aggrandizing posturing. Fannish absurdities. Circular ego-stroking.” Seeming to take seriously the activity to which you devote hours of your life can be a kind of fandom high crime. You can see how this Consulting Detective would be a prime target.
This, too, is familiar territory. The disagreement starts, then the insults, then a moderator comes in and tries to calm everyone down. In this case, the moderator is called “let_us_trade”—heh. Lestrade. Police officer. Keeping the peace. Cute. Someone else steps in to recommend fic by “jumperfucker,” apparently another Big Name Fan, but this one with a Martin Freeman icon. At least someone here likes the BBC Sherlock—Martin Freeman is a fabulous Watson, seamlessly honors and updates canon, and does look adorable in his jumpers.
But wait. Now I’m in the middle of his LiveJournal post . . . not on the same fanboard, but on the same page, that is, the same web page, the same address, I was on before. It’s confusing. It’s not the usual way of things, not protocol. And then . . . I’m in the middle of a private message exchange between jumperfucker and Consulting Detective, discussing how they’ve been paired in something called the Sherlock Holmes Big Bang, a collaborative fiction and art challenge and exchange and . . .
The game is afoot. Or rather, as BBC Sherlock—whose fandom I am apparently in after all—puts it, the game is on. This is the metafiction I’ve been looking for.
The Theory of Narrative Causality. It’s fiction, it’s theory, no, wait—since when do I think that’s an either/or question? I feel like my students must when in literary theory class I assign them Borges’ “Pierre Menard” and they write saying they read the Don Quixote essay but couldn’t find the story. I let my judgment about what I was reading be swayed by the context I found it in, and the form
that context led me to expect. Of all people, I should know that like art in the blood, fanfiction is liable to take the strangest forms. But I didn’t. Isn’t it glorious?
As it turns out, there’s an explanatory post; I just didn’t see it. “The Theory of Narrative Causality” started life on the BBC Sherlock kink meme. It is named after a trope—a popular culture and fandom convention—on the website TV Tropes, to which it also links from time to time. In fact, the story uses a range of TV Tropes to define its characters and advance its plot. It even creates a fake entry on the real TV Tropes site for Consulting Detective, an entry that in turn proceeds to confuse the readers of the real site, who did not sign on to become a part of a fanfiction.
“The Theory of Narrative Causality” is what fandom calls “meta.” It is fiction as cultural criticism and self-commentary. It not only evokes but eventually performs in the internet formats via which fanfiction—not just its writing, but its community activity—is created and disseminated. It is a fanfiction about fanboys writing fanfiction, and the fanfiction they write closely resembles the fanboy-penned (legal, professional) fanfiction of a television show that “Theory” is fic for. “Theory’s” own source—this Sherlock Holmes fanboy–penned show—is famous for expanding what is meant by “canon.” What is more, it does so from within the first fandom to use the word “canon” in its current, more restrictive sense of the official, authorized storyline. Referring to the fifty-six stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as “The Sacred Writings,” and subsequently “canon,” was the Sherlockian Great Game’s (and hence modern fandom’s) original defining gesture. But Sherlock creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat explicitly include all Sherlock Holmes’ many film, play, and pastiche iterations: “There’s an enormous amount of stuff and everything is canonical, the Billy Wilder film [The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes], the Basil Rathbone films—they can all be drawn upon as a Sherlock source.”1 One of Sherlock’s finest episodes is named after the Great Game. Fandom is canon. It’s all fine.
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 2