Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  Social media? For fans, media was always social; it was something to be discussed, dissected, analyzed, and talked through. In fandom, culture was always read/write: fans are not passive consumers of media, whether textual, analog, or digital. Before the internet, fans organized literary pilgrimages, went to conventions, planned viewing parties, contributed analysis to letter pages, and wrote fanfiction—lots and lots of fanfiction—for zines. But fans have also always been early adopters of technology, and so have communicated with each other via every conceivable platform: Usenet, Internet Relay Chat, forums, BBS (bulletin board systems), mailing lists, web rings, blogs, archives, wikis, Twitter, Tumblr, you name it. The rise of Web 2.0–style social media software certainly made it easier to participate in fandom: now anyone could create a web page just by signing up on a network, whereas before this had required skill, as well as server space. On the other hand, fans were understandably wary of being exploited by internet entrepreneurs, many of whom seemed to want to capitalize on our productivity and vast creativity without having any particular understanding of, or sympathy with, fans or fan culture.

  If Web 2.0 was about platforms in search of content—well, we fans had us some content! Fans are prolific authors and always have been, whether writing Sherlock Holmes pastiches 100 years ago or BBC Sherlock episode tags today. Moreover, fans had already built “social networking sites” for sharing “user-generated content”—only we called them “fanfiction archives.” In the days before Web 2.0 made creating web pages easy, fans worked together to build communal sites, using people power to compensate for technological limitations. So for instance, most fanfiction archives of the early to mid-1990s were run by archive “elves”: fans who would personally format and upload your story to the web. You would email your story to one of these elves, who would hand-code it into.txt or .html format, upload it to a website (that someone—typically another fan who was a professional sysadmin or technical person—was paying for), and create a link to it. Fan labor substituted for a technologically advanced web interface, and fan generosity substituted for a business model.

  Despite the labor-intensive nature of the process, thousands upon thousands of fanfiction stories were archived on the web during the 1990s, on sites like Gossamer (The X-Files), the Due South Archive (Due South), and Seventh Heaven (Highlander). Once fans developed automated archiving software (X-Files fans wrote scripts to move stories directly from alt.tv.x-files.creative into the Gossamer archive; Naomi Novik’s Automated Archive software was first deployed in 1998; Rebecca Smallwood developed “efiction” software in 2003), the number of archived fanfiction stories climbed into the hundreds of thousands. After the Harry Potter fandom exploded, the number of fanfiction stories online soared into the millions and then the tens of millions. FanFiction. Net, a site developed by programmer Xing Li while he was a student at UCLA, rapidly grew beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

  You can see how this sort of productivity would attract attention. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs were eager to develop platforms and networks that would attract users (whom they saw as eyeballs for advertisers), and fanfiction sites attracted vast number of fans, both as readers and writers. So perhaps it was no surprise that people were registering domains like fandom.com and fans.com, forming companies like Fandom, Inc. and Fandom Entertainment LLC, but the trend was unnerving to long-term fans.

  There were strangers in town, setting up shop.

  The defining event was the debut of FanLib.com in 2007. Fanlib was a for-profit, multifandom fanfiction archive that billed itself as providing “the world’s greatest fan fiction by popular demand.” An employee of the company emailed many of the more visible fanfiction writers of the time, praising their stories and asking them to consider using the new site. When fans investigated, they didn’t like what they saw. Fanlib’s press release asserted that the “launch of FanLib.com represents the coming of age of fan fiction” (a claim that made longtime fans twitch) and that the site would give fans “a space to share what they’ve created” (fans had been making such spaces for themselves for years). Worse yet were the materials that the company provided to its investors and sponsors, which made clear that FanLib was not putting fans first; rather, the site would be “managed and moderated to the max” with fan activity taking place “in a customized environment that YOU”—the corporate sponsor—“control.” These materials made clear that FanLib. com was “a great marketing idea!” that would “create remarkable value for business” by establishing “one-to-one customer relationships with a massive database” and “extensive sponsor integration opportunities,” whatever those were.

  FanLib wasn’t trying to help fans create and share fanworks. It was packaging fans for corporations.

  Companies like FanLib were threatening to us because they were highly visible and well funded. What was to stop FanLib from becoming the public face of fanfic-writing fandom to the outside world, or worse yet, to newbie fans? Would companies like FanLib stand up for fans if copyright holders (read: their real customers) issued unfair takedowns or cease-and-desist letters? Or what if worse came to worst and fanfiction writers got involved in an actual legal battle? Copyright holders—often referred to by fans as The Powers That Be—were by and large uninterested in fanfiction because there was no money involved, but FanLib.com was a for-profit venture. It was designed to make money. Would FanLib’s desire to profit from fanfiction put fans at risk, and if so, would it defend them? Would it stand up and argue that fanfiction was fair use and a legitimate and valuable form of culture?

  It was in this context that the blueprints were drawn for the Archive of Our Own (AO3). In the midst of the FanLib debacle, a number of fans (I was one of them) began to have a conversation on LiveJournal about not just resisting the commercialization of fan culture, but about creating a positive alternative: a large, visible, nonprofit fanfiction archive run by and for fans.

  Longtime fan Astolat declared in a post on May 17, 2007, “We need a central archive of our own . . . Something that would NOT hide from [G]oogle or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front.” She further elaborated:

  I think the necessary features would include:

  •run BY fanfic readers FOR fanfic readers

  •with no ads and solely donation-supported

  •with a simple and highly searchable interface and browsable quick-search pages

  •allowing ANYTHING—het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult—with a registration process for reading adult-rated stories where once you register, you don’t have to keep clicking through warnings every time you want to read

  •allowing the poster to control her stories (ie, upload, delete, edit, tagging)

  •allowing users to leave comments with the poster able to delete and ban particular users/IPs but not edit comment content (ie, lj [LiveJournal] style)

  •code-wise able to support a huge archive of possibly millions of stories

  •giving explicit credit to the original creators while clearly disclaiming any official status

  The idea caught fire. Hundreds of fans commented on Astolat’s post, brainstorming and offering to help. It became clear almost immediately that an archive on the scale we were imagining (not just for multifandom fanfiction, but designed to eventually host fanart and video) could not be run by elves on a donated server. We would have to found a nonprofit corporation, both to raise funds and to have a legal entity that was capable of doing business and signing contracts.

  Thus was born the idea of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), an all-volunteer nonprofit dedicated to providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture. The name was chosen to signal our stance on the legitimacy and legality of fanworks, broadly conceived. People who thought that fanworks like fanfiction infringed on copyright had argued that fanworks were derivative works, and therefore under the control of the author or rightsholder. But it’s the OTW’s position that fanficti
on is transformative—an important legal distinction—and therefore not only legitimate but also legally protected by fair use, at least in the United States. Transformative works say new things, often in ways that wouldn’t be acceptable or desirable in the marketplace (which is sadly unlikely to publish your epic Harry/Draco slashfic, at least at the moment). Much as literary criticism does, fanfiction analyzes characters (as with the queer reading of Harry and Draco in your epic slashfic) and constructs explanations of fictional universes. Fanfiction is one of the ways that fans share their ideas about and interpretations of a story. While some fans might write an essay to explain, say, how wand magic works, or how indispensable Hermione Granger is to the war against the Dark Lord, others might write a fanfiction story to show how wand magic works or how awesome Hermione is. Fanfiction, like fanart, vids, and other fanworks, is a form of creative conversation.

  The OTW immediately began to work on creating the Archive of Our Own. That name was chosen carefully, too, as an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, “A Room of One’s Own” in which she notes that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The “Archive of Our Own” therefore evokes the importance of owning space—albeit virtual space today, server space—for women writers in particular, and also serves as a reminder that fanfiction was (and still is) written overwhelmingly by women.

  The OTW worked fast; by June 2007 a board of directors had been assembled. I was one of them, as were longtime fans like fantasy author Naomi Novik and Georgetown law professor and intellectual property specialist Rebecca Tushnet. Committees were being formed to work on various projects, not only the AO3, but also a legal assistance and advocacy team, an academic journal devoted to fan culture (Transformative Works and Cultures), and a fan culture wiki (Fanlore). The OTW also needed people to organize membership drives, recruit volunteers, develop policies, and manage our finances. We got all that help and more: FanLib might have had $3 million, but fandom has a strong network of people with all sorts of skills. Fandom is positively overflowing with talent: we have lawyers, accountants, public relations people, development officers, coders, sysadmins, webmasters, professors, librarians, HR and management specialists, and writers—lots and lots of writers. All these and more joined the OTW in its early days; now, six years on, the OTW has more than 400 active volunteers and volunteer-staff running eighteen committees and seven workgroups.

  The Archive of Our Own, the dream of fanfiction writers yearning to stay free, has as of this writing over 172,000 registered members, while others are still waiting for an invitation. (Because the site is still in beta, with its software still under development and features continually being added, the AO3 is currently controlling its growth by means of an invite system so that it doesn’t get overwhelmed.) These registered members, however, are only a fraction of the number of people who actually use the site. While you need to have an AO3 account to post fanfiction to the archive (or to embed art or vids; the site will eventually expand to hosting other kinds of fanworks), you don’t need one to read fanfiction or to comment on it, as millions of fans already have: in November 2012, the AO3 had visits from 2.3 million unique IP addresses. And the Archive of Our Own, like all the OTW’s other projects, is free for anyone to use: like National Public Radio or PBS, we are member supported (please donate!).

  So that is the story of how a few fans (a few hundred, a few thousand, a few hundred thousand, and someday millions!) came together to resist being commodified by the culture of Web 2.0. Even as I write this, Amazon has debuted a program called Kindle Worlds: yet another attempt to commercialize fanfiction that shows no particular understanding of fans or fan culture. But I’m not worried: we’ve been here before. The story of the OTW and the AO3 is the history of a community, and of the triumph of fannish organization over the power of venture capital. It is also an argument in favor of fanfiction as an important grassroots cultural activity, because it’s probably no accident that so many of the OTW’s founders were fanfiction writers. It may be that writing fanfiction gave us the courage to tell our own, nonmainstream version of the story and to write our own happy ending. Or as the OTW’s first annual report put it:

  •What if the hundreds of thousands of fan-created stories, videos and images were celebrated, instead of half-hidden?

  •What if fans had access to an online archive that wouldn’t back down at the merest hint of a lawsuit or change policies at the whim of an advertiser?

  •What if there were no advertisers?

  •What if, instead of letting false assumptions about copyright go unchallenged, there was a group that spoke up for the legality of transformative works?

  •And what if, instead of letting four decades of cultural history be rewritten, fannish creators and consumers celebrated their past and shared it with the wider community?

  Fanfiction writers, more than most people, know how to tell a story that begins, “What if . . . ?”

  Jules Wilkinson is an epic fangirl, best known for running the Supernatural Wiki, which documents both the show’s canon and fandom. She writes fanfic and has also contributed to several books about Supernatural and its fans. In this essay, Jules discusses how Supernatural’s relationship to its highly active fandom is a testament to the ways that boundaries between creators and fans—and between canon and fanon—are increasingly porous, up-ending the traditional relationship between a TV show and its viewers.

  The Epic Love Story of Supernatural and Fanfic

  Jules Wilkinson (missyjack)

  The first rule of fandom is: You do not talk about fanfic.

  The second rule of fandom—or of Supernatural fandom, at least—is that fandom has no rules.

  Supernatural first aired on September 13, 2005, and was a show made for fanfic. It had two attractive leads, drawn into an intense codependent relationship in the confines of a ’67 Impala, spiced up with childhood trauma and liberally sprinkled with daddy issues. Toss in a rich mythology that drew on everything from urban legends to religion, and fandom needed no encouragement to hop on board.

  What we had no inkling of at the time was that this show we loved and wrote about with such passion would see what we were doing and love us right back.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever there are two hot men in a TV show they must be slashed, and such was the case with Supernatural. There was one little kink, so to speak, in the arrangement this time: the two main characters—Sam and Dean Winchester—were brothers.

  The Supernatural fandom wasn’t going to let a little thing like incest get in the way of our creative (and other) urges, and in fact the first fanfic appeared online for the fandom was a slash story featuring Sam and Dean, posted the day after the pilot episode aired.109 In true fandom form, the pairing had a mashup name—Wincest—within a few weeks.

  Fanfic in any fandom is strongly shaped not only by the subject matter on which it’s based, but also by its more popular writers and those who run fanfic communities in the fandom’s early life. While some Supernatural fan websites made it clear from the start that slash featuring the brothers was unwelcome, on LiveJournal—the early creative heart of Supernatural fandom—the popular writers wrote across a variety of genres, including slash, Gen, and even stories featuring heterosexual pairings.

  Slash fiction written during the first three seasons of Supernatural was almost exclusively stories featuring the brothers Sam and Dean. Of course some fans were not comfortable writing or reading stories that centered on an incestuous relationship, and so they turned to Real Person Slash, or RPS.

  Ironically, at that time RPS, which features characters based on the actors, was considered rather ethically dubious by many fans, which led to the coining of the sarcastic phrase “Supernatural—where RPF is the moral high ground.”

  RPS grew to be a large part of the fandom’s fic for this reason, as well as the fact that there was already a well-established fandom around fanfic based on actors from The WB Netwo
rk (and later The CW Network), particularly Buffy and Angel, and later Smallville, on which Jensen Ackles, the actor playing Dean in Supernatural, had also appeared.

  Other fans were happy to explore Sam and Dean’s relationship without sex, in Gen fic. Supernatural fandom has a high proportion of Gen fic—it has been consistently around 20 to 25 percent of stories posted on LiveJournal.110 It is notable that Gen fic and slash in Supernatural fandom often share the same focus on the intense emotional relationship between the main characters, which is of course at the core of the show. Back in 2007, Supernatural scriptwriter and later showrunner Sera Gamble jokingly called the show “The Epic Love Story of Sam and Dean.” In fact, aside from the sex, Gen and Wincest fics can be almost indistinguishable, leading to the coining of the terms “Gencest” and also “hard Gen.”

  It’s difficult to estimate how many tens of thousands of Supernatural fanfic stories have been written. There are over 80,000 Supernatural stories on FanFiction.Net,111 and over 43,000 on the Archive of Our Own.112 The number of stories posted on LiveJournal is impossible to estimate, but a project that catalogued all the stories posted on the “Supernatural Newsletter” on LiveJournal between October 2006 and March 2010 found links to nearly 40,000 fics.113

  Supernatural fandom has been hugely productive and creative in its writing and other fanworks over the more than eight years of the show, from niche communities featuring stories around a single minor character such as angel Anna Milton,114 or stories where one of the Winchester men is pregnant,115 through to multigenre communities and challenges. You would be hard pressed to find a topic or genre or sexual kink not covered by our writing, and when we run out of established tropes we invent our own. Supernatural fandom is credited, for example, with popularizing “knotting” fanfics, in which people take on the social and sexual characteristics of dogs.116