Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  Just as important, the Twin Peaks electronic fandom paved the way for the X-Philes. Like the early science fiction zines, the pioneering alt. tv.twin-peaks—active at a time when most people had never heard of something called “the net”—primarily devoted itself to discussion, dissecting Twin Peaks’ many mysteries, clues, and red herrings rather than rewriting these elements as new fiction. Of course, in obsessing over Twin Peaks, the Usenet crowd was just doing online what so many of us were doing in our homes and offices. I obsessed over Twin Peaks in a West Village apartment with a group of friends. We weren’t writing fic, but we were engaging in “spec”—a direct if unwitting descendant of the Great Game of Sherlockian speculation—pondering the same what-ifs (“Did you see this?” “What do you think this means?”) that also inspire fanfiction. While researching this book, I’ve found many a future fandom writer—and more than one contributor to this volume—who was similarly engaged with Twin Peaks in those days. I’ve found the same holds true for nonfandom (that is, official and paid) television writers and producers; our own little group of fanatics included several who would go on to successful careers in television (a producer, a writer, and more than one actor).

  It wasn’t just us. Today an executive with NBC/Universal, Tom Lieber has been involved with the genre-stretching geek-cred shows Battlestar Galactica (BSG), Caprica, Warehouse 13, and, pertinently here, Psych, which aired a very fic-like Twin Peaks homage episode. Given this last fact, it’s unsurprising Lieber is a Twin Peaks enthusiast despite what sounds like a somewhat traumatic introduction:

  I was in 5th grade when Twin Peaks was on the air, and the only reason it was on my radar was my father forced me to watch an episode, saying he thought I’d really like it. I sat down to watch, and the first episode I viewed was the classic, violent, traumatic episode in which BOB/Leland brutally murders his niece Maddy. I was devastated, sickened, and terrified. But my dad was right: I loved it. I had no idea television could be so visceral and disturbing one minute, and so funny and bizarre the next. The tonal schizophrenia fascinated me, and was probably the watershed moment of my career in wanting to pursue a life in television.40

  Jane Espenson—who has not only written for Buffy, but also for Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, BSG, her own online sitcom Husbands, and too many other shows to name—describes her reaction to Twin Peaks’ mix of tones and genres:

  I was in college when Twin Peaks came out. I huddled with my roommates to watch it, which wasn’t something we normally did. We were all blown away. The idea of a continuing mystery was compelling and unusual, but it was the sheer darn quirkiness of it that really hit me. Agent Cooper and his voice memos and love of cherry pie . . . the log lady . . . I’d never seen anything so unapologetically weird. It was a mixture of tones, from macabre tragedy to surreal humor, that kept feeling like it should pull the viewer out of the story, but didn’t. In fact, it actually ended up being strangely realistic, because I’m not sure anyone else making TV had quite noticed yet that actual life blends those exact same tones.41

  The insight here—that “actual life” blends tones in a way that does not lend it to being tidily sorted into genres or bookshelves—may help account for quirky-hokey-tragic-epic Buffy’s extraordinary emotional resonance, despite the sometimes apparent seams around monster ears and suchlike. Buffy creator Joss Whedon has also listed Twin Peaks as a favorite, and the idea that quirkiness does not mitigate or interrupt tragedy is surely nowhere more apparent than in Whedon’s body of work (on which Espenson remains a frequent collaborator).

  This direct and indirect influence on a generation of television professionals notwithstanding, an argument could be made that the Twin Peaks Usenet group had an even greater impact on the future of television culture: by taking it from a then largely passive medium to an interactive one. The Twin Peaks Usenet group ushered in a new stage in the relationship between the official and fan creators. Alt.tv.twin-peaks captured the attention of network decision makers when it spearheaded a fan campaign to bring back Twin Peaks—although the campaign’s success was mitigated by the show’s perceived decline in quality and audience, and ultimately was not enough to stop cancellation. Fan activism in favor of TV shows was nothing new, of course; memorable campaigns such as those to save Star Trek and Beauty and the Beast had similarly limited, qualified success. But the online campaign for Twin Peaks not only coordinated faxes, letters, and other tangible, real-world activities noticeable to networks, but it also showcased the lightning-fast communication potential of the web. At the time, the net was still very much understood to be the province of geeks, but it would go on to change the fanfiction writing and reading experience, and then the writing and reading experience for all of us, soon enough.

  The X-Philes

  Giving New Meaning to the Word Ship

  Things are getting strange, I’m starting to worry

  This could be a case for Mulder and Scully

  —from the song “Mulder and Scully,” by Catatonia

  I can’t believe you, of all people, are trying to Scully me.

  —Buffy, “The Pack” (1–6)

  IN MANY WAYS, The X-Files and its fandom came of age in tandem with the internet itself. Its premise and casting made The X-Files a prime focus of the newly active, electronically connected kind of fan who had gathered on the Twin Peaks Usenet group, and many of these fans soon became as obsessed with pursuing the X-Files’ hidden truths and meanings as the show’s main characters were. The Usenet group alt.tv.x-files saw its first activity in December 1993, just eleven episodes into the first season. The fanfiction-friendly group alt.tv.x-files.creative was established in the spring of 1994. Internet fandom as a whole, and especially internet fanfiction, owes a great deal of its apparatus, terminology, customs, and conflicts to the writing and interpreting communities that grew up around The X-Files.

  For much of X-Files fanfiction, it all came down to Mulder and Scully—the noncouple who launched ship as a verb meaning something other than the transport of goods. The Mulder-Scully relationship (or MSR—X-Philes, as the show’s fans came to be known, love a good acronym) brought into currency rhetoric that meant fans could ship (verb; root for or advocate) a couple or pairing, now also known as a ship (noun). Those who ship ships are shippers. Thank you, X-Philes.

  The main tension in X-Files fandom was between Shippers (of Mulder and Scully in a romantic relationship) and NoRomos, fans who along with the show’s creator Chris Carter actively resisted a romantic relationship between the two leads. Shipper wars—which in many future fandoms would pit fans of one ship against fans of another—instead began among X-Philes as a battle over the question “To Ship or Not to Ship.” Fanfiction split along similar lines, with Shipper fic tending (at least according to its critics) to de-emphasize the investigative and paranormal plots in favor of sex and romance and NoRomo fic tending to do the opposite.

  It’s not as if such conflicts were new. Similar divisions between plot-heavy and relationship-heavy fic, friendship and romance—or het and slash—had been raising hackles among fic writers at least since Star Trek. With the internet, however, it became possible for more specific communities of taste to be established with greater ease and speed. The trend toward increasing specialization of both pairing and fanfiction genre (kink, slash, hurt/comfort, etc., each with its attendant acronyms) in the form of dedicated groups and lists and eventually web archives saw its first major iterations in the X-Files fandom.

  In the early to mid-nineties, fandom culture still largely transpired in zines, at cons, and through conversations among friends and acquaintances. Most fan writing still took place in notebooks or un-networked word processors. Novice fan writers often didn’t understand what they were doing as being “fanfiction,” as part of a tradition of fan writing; neither were they often aware of any community of like-minded writers. To find zines, you’d almost have to be seeking them out. You’d have to know about fandom, be going to conventions—or at least know people who did a
nd weren’t afraid to talk about it. As a schoolgirl in Wales, for example, X-Files fanfic writer Bethan Jones—whom we hear from later as a fic writer and an academic—had little opportunity to get online, and even less to come across zines commonly sold at fan conventions or distributed via mailing lists. When she happened to have an X-Files fan as a teacher who assigned “writing an X-File” as an assignment, it was synergy, a happy coincidence of taste. But within a few years, it would become common practice for a young (or old) person to type the name of a show or book into a search engine and in seconds find hundreds or thousands of related discussions and stories. The X-Files and its fanfiction played a big role in that transition, particularly in its early days.

  Although Chris Carter often claimed never to have seen a Star Trek episode, Mulder/Scully’s parallel to Kirk/Spock helped forge many fans’ understanding of intuitive, lone wolf-ish Mulder as the central character (as Star Trek’s creators had structured Kirk), with hyper-logical (if almost unfailingly wrong) Scully as the Spock-like second-in-command. As with Kirk/Spock, this dynamic reversed the logical Holmes and intuitive-sidekick Watson dynamic. The gender difference between the two X-Files leads offered the added wrinkle of male-female dynamics.

  One might imagine that opposite-sex partners would make shipping the leads less controversial, as there was no taboo of homosexuality to over-come. One should guess again. In the X-Files fandom, the intensity of the NoRomo position—sanctioned by Chris Carter and other show creators—could make Mulder/Scully romance seem as taboo, and as belittled and frowned upon, as slash was in other areas of fandom. Perhaps even more so. A NoRomo writer, for example, might embrace Skinner/Scully (boss-subordinate), Skinner/Mulder (boss-subordinate slash), or even Mulder/Cancer Man (enemyslash) as long as the central Mulder-Scully relationship remained nonsexual. For NoRomos, the greatest taboo of all was to sexualize the show’s central, driving heterosexual—or rather, heterosocial—relationship. For these viewers, messing with that partnership and its nonsexual nature threatened the very heart of the series. Reasons given for resisting Mulder/Scully were many—fear of the “Moonlighting syndrome” (killing a show by resolving the tension that made it tick); fear of the soap opera (a focus on relationship signals decline in quality or complexity); fear of refocusing (away from critique of government, or from mythological exploration); fear of political dilution (diminishing the plot line of a professional relationship of equals between a man and a woman).

  And as for the Shippers . . . well, they felt excluded from canon, irritated that pearls dropped for them by the show’s writers were never developed. They raised their own questions. Why should a sustained romantic or sexual relationship between equals be so devalued? They felt teased, irked, and, as Jacqueline Lichtenberg explains earlier in this book, “irked fans produce fanfic like irritated oysters produce pearls.” And then, of course, there were the preferences within the shipping community. Did you want Mulder and Scully together only at the end of the show? Did you want them to finally have their baby? Or did you want to banish the baby as a giant turn-off . . . or perhaps have them engage in a threesome with Skinner? Even within a central pairing—and this is one of the great insights of fanfiction everywhere—the possibilities and permutations are endless.

  On the internet, these pairings and preferences could get their own acronyms, contests, and dedicated archives. In the early days of The X-Files, some of this transpired in zines, but again, the internet increased access, speed, and specialization. Before the mega archives and FanFiction.Net (which was started by X-Files fans), smaller message boards, email lists, and basic archives began to proliferate. Archives sprung up for ships within ships, kinks within kinks. The work of fic publishing became email list creation, site building and maintenance, award administration, and discussion board moderating. X-Files fans were laying the groundwork for the real-time, near-simultaneous writing, editing, curating, reviewing, and discussing activity that has today become the hallmark of fanfiction. “The Jedi Shipper,” who joined X-Files fandom as a teen after the 1998 movie, described fandom life like this:

  In terms of similarity [with her current fandom], the sense of unity is incredible. Everyone in the fandom has a “job.” [In the X-Philes], we had the image makers, the site runners (because, again, back then without the Twitter, it was all about message boards and chat rooms), the fanfic writers and the readers. We were this community that needed each other, and we all participated. Since I was a shipper . . . my crew picked apart every episode for all the intimate touches, the reading between the lines to find the love story. It was a little insane . . . and awesome.42

  The Jedi Shipper—still an active writer in other fandoms under the name LyricalKris—is typical of a generation of writers and readers who grew up seeing all these activities as equally valid and necessary to the reading/writing experience. Rather than seeing writing as an isolated activity, she saw it as a part of a collection of related and reciprocal tasks.

  Similarly, watching television—long derided as a passive activity despite already being highly participatory for niche groups such as the Star Trek fandom—was on its way to becoming more active, collaborative, and discursive for wider and wider segments of the viewing public. Very active fandoms were still small groups—by today’s standards—but they were laying the social, procedural, and cultural groundwork that has influenced every fanwriting fandom since. It became more and more usual to watch something and then jump online to see what everyone was writing about it—or against it, or in it, or around it. Shippers wrote the scenes they felt they should have gotten, feminists wrote the scenes they felt they should have gotten, conspiracy theorists wrote the plots they felt the show might be blocked from writing, and on and on. Archives helped readers find these stories, and the boards helped everyone everywhere argue about it all.

  The Shippers, by the way, ultimately won the day. Mulder/Scully became canon. Fic—as it tends to—got there first.

  Many of those who study fanfiction also grew up writing and reading it. Bethan Jones is a PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University whose work focuses on how viewers engage with television fiction and its portrayal of gender. Winner of the 2009 X-Files Universe fanfic competition, Bethan has been writing in the fandom for many years. Her work has been published in Participations, Transformative Works and Cultures, and the edited collection, The Modern Vampire and Human Identity. She is currently coediting journal issues on crowdfunding and the transmedia relationship between board games and films, and is also on the board of the Fan Studies Network.

  Bethan’s essay takes us through the way some of these gender and sexual politics play out in both heterosexual and femslash X-Files fanfiction.

  Mulder/Scully versus the G-Woman and the Fowl One

  Hetfic and Femslash in The X-Files Fandom

  Bethan Jones

  When I woke up on the morning of August 9, 2012, the internet was awash with rumors that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, stars of the cult TV series The X-Files, were a couple. My Facebook feed was full of friends, most of whom I had no idea had even watched the show, talking about it; on Twitter, serious academics whose work I follow were tweeting in delight; even The Guardian had a piece about the realization of the “ultimate nerdy Gen-X dream.”43 For a program that went off the air in 2002, and whose 2008 feature film was met with less than enthusiastic reviews, the amount of media attention given to its stars was unusual. Of course, for fans of the show, Mulder and Scully had been together for a long, long time.

  I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Shipper (someone who wants Mulder and Scully in a relationship), but even I can see the desire to have these two attractive, intelligent lead characters in love. The chemistry between Mulder and Scully was one of the main reasons I watched the show (that and my childhood desire to become a cryptozoologist, inspired by my obsession with ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster), and it’s one of the themes that continues to populate fanfic about the series, including
my own. But the most lasting appeal for me was its depiction of a strong female character. Although television in the early ’90s wasn’t known for its portrayal of strong women, The X-Files had more than its fair share. As well as Scully the series features major female secondary characters Samantha and Teena Mulder, Monica Reyes, Cassandra Spender, Marita Covarrubias, and Diana Fowley (even if, in comparison to cool, rational Scully, Fowley appears to epitomize the cliché of “ball-busting bitch”).

  Chris Carter (The X-Files’ creator) has often talked about his deliberate reversal of gender in the series: Mulder is intuitive and empathic, the believer (all traditionally feminine characteristics), while Scully is the scientist, the skeptic, the rational one. Mulder and Scully are not your traditional romantic leads, and this allowed us fanfic writers to play with relationship expectations, even in the context of what appears to be traditional romantic stories or premises: Bad!fic Mulder and Scully attend the annual FBI masquerade ball and eventually leave together because the series never positioned them as characters who would attend such an event; Parent!fic Mulder is a stay-at-home dad while Scully works twelve-hour shifts at a hospital. (This inversion of gender, I’d argue, also got the ball rolling for other non-normative—and in some cases, non-heterosexual—romantic pairings in X-Files fandom.)

  Of course, fanfiction’s embrace of these nontraditional gender roles doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems with the depiction of gender and sexuality in the series. There are, and fic is one of the ways fans have challenged these problems. A lot of the Mulder/Scully fanfic I read deals with frustrations around the representation of Scully; although Scully has been lauded as a strong female character, the series includes, as academic Emily Regan Wills notes in her essay, “The Political Possibilities of Fandom,” “at least three different narratives in which Scully is feminized and rendered powerless: Scully as abductee, as sexually desirable, and as a (potential) mother.”44 Many fans were frustrated, if not downright angry, with Chris Carter when, in seasons eight and nine, the previously strong, capable Scully suddenly ran more often than she fought and spent more time crying over a missing Mulder than she did attempting to find him. But the biggest problem came when Scully gave the baby she had longed for through much of the series up for adoption. Like many others on my LiveJournal friend list, I’ve written fic in which Scully and Mulder watch their son from afar while on the run, or in which the family faces the alien invasion together. This type of fic has been one way that fan writers have challenged the depiction of Scully and the way she’d been differently gendered through motherhood.