Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  Nothing sums up the collaborative and communal nature of fanfiction better than the SPN J2 Big Bang challenge.117 This challenge has become a much-anticipated annual fandom event, pairing artists with writers and involving many other fans as sounding boards, betas, and of course readers. From 2007 to 2012, it has seen over 1,000 stories, each averaging 40,000 words in length, with accompanying artwork produced. That’s over 40 million words written in one challenge in one fandom. There are now fifteen other Supernatural-centric Big Bang challenges in existence, each focusing on specific characters or genres.118

  Two events that had a huge impact on fandom and fanfic occurred during Supernatural’s fourth season. As the season started in September 2008, we saw the arrival of the character Castiel the angel, who was embraced by fandom. Fans adored his “profound bond” with Dean, and the pairing (known in true mashup form as “Destiel”) become hugely popular; it now outranks Wincest as the most popular slash pairing.

  The other significant event in season four was that slash fanfic became canon.

  Back in 2005, the prohibition against sharing fanworks with those involved in the show was much stronger than it is today—especially when said works involved incestuous gay porn. Despite this, and despite fandom’s first rule, fanfic has never been a secret from the people involved in making Supernatural. In May 2007 in England, at the first convention where Jensen Ackles appeared, he was asked whether he knew about fanfiction. He had:

  One of my favorites is, uh, Wincest . . . I only hope that my grandmother never reads those. Jared [Padalecki, who plays Sam] and I had a good laugh about that one. It was only brought to our attention because [Supernatural producer] Kim Manners posted it.

  Fans have raised the topic of fanfiction at nearly every Supernatural convention. When asked about what he thought of Wincest at the EyeCon convention in Florida in April 2008, Jared Padalecki managed to validate transformative works while avoiding the tricky incest issue:

  With fanfiction and RPGs, . . . everyone’s taking a part in Supernatural and they’re not just watching it . . . and they’re really passionate about the show, and especially the fans of Supernatural. It’s a great learning tool, and exploring tool, to explore this world. So I’m supportive.

  Jim Beaver (who plays Bobby Singer) was the first actor to tease fans with his knowledge of fan culture when he wore a T-shirt proclaiming “I read John/Bobby” (referring to slash fanfic featuring his character and Sam and Dean’s father) to the 2008 EyeCon. He even once sent a complimentary email to the author of a fanfic piece that created a backstory for Bobby (note: it didn’t contain any Bobby/John slash).

  Misha Collins in particular has shown a great curiosity and willingness to talk about fanfic, which still discomforts some fans, as Misha noted in an interview in 2009:

  You can sense the whole audience tensing up, like they don’t want you to talk about this slash fiction weird pervy stuff that they get into. So I do like to bring it up for that reason.119

  Even the media asks Misha about fanfic. In a 2012 interview by Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan, she commented that his character Castiel and Dean Winchester were “a continual source of speculation, fanfiction, pornography . . .” In response Misha said: “Yep. I’m just always gratified that I’m in some small way contributing to any kind of pornography. It warms the cockles of my heart. Words chosen carefully.”120

  From the beginning, our fanfic was clearly no secret, and yet that still didn’t prepare us for the aptly named season four episode, “The Monster at the End of This Book.” In this episode, Sam and Dean discover a series of novels called Supernatural by author Chuck Shurley, which appear to be based on the Winchesters’ lives. The episode also introduces Sam and

  Dean to fandom, and fandom into the canon of the show, when the brothers discover a message board about the books:

  DEAN: There’s Sam girls and Dean girls and . . . What’s a slash fan?

  SAM: As in “Sam slash Dean,” together.

  DEAN: Like together, together? They do know we’re brothers, right?

  SAM: Doesn’t seem to matter.

  DEAN: Well, that’s just sick!

  Some of us were delighted to be included in the meta commentary alongside the show’s own writers. Other fans were uncomfortable about the (literal) airing of what they saw as “fandom business.” Some fans saw it as the writers’ support of Wincest, others as their condemnation.

  In “Sympathy for the Devil,” season five’s premiere episode, written by Eric Kripke, we were introduced to ourselves, in the form of fangirl Becky Rosen. An avid fan of the Supernatural books, Becky runs a website called morethanbrothers.net. We first meet her as she works on her latest fanfic, which reads in part:

  The brothers huddled together in the dark as the sound of the rain drumming on the roof eased their fears of pursuit. Despite the cold outside and the demons who, even now, must be approaching, the warmth of their embrace comforted them.

  And then Sam caressed Dean’s clavicle.

  “This is wrong,” said Dean.

  “Then I don’t want to be right,” replied Sam, in a husky voice.

  Thus the creator of the show that inspired Wincest wrote Wincest. Of course, Kripke left this “fanfiction” unfinished, but on September 13, 2009, only three days after the episode’s airing, a LiveJournal member using Becky’s online handle—Samlicker81—posted a completed version of the story called “Burning Desires” to a Wincest fanfic community.121 This is so postmodern it almost hurts.

  “Sympathy for the Devil” was actually not the first time Kripke had written fanfic. In November 2008, the last issue of “Rising Son,” the second series of Supernatural comics, included a six-page standalone story called “The Beast with Two Backs,” written by Eric Kripke and producer Peter Johnston.

  The beast of the title is revealed to be a chimera of Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, a beautiful two-headed creature who kills fangirls because it cannot bear to let anyone prettier than itself live. The title is a reference to the phrase “to make the beast with two backs,” which is a slang term for having sex, most famously used in Shakespeare’s Othello and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Kripke, it seems, ships his stars—or at least is well aware that we do.

  The integration of fandom and the stories we make into the text of Supernatural fits with a show that has always been interested in the role of storytelling in the world. On an individual level it has looked at the stories we use to construct our own identities, and it has explored modern morality tales (in the form of urban legends) and ancient ones (from folklore), and the epic stories of society—the ones we call religion.

  The storytelling of pop culture has been examined in episodes featuring movies (“Hollywood Babylon”), TV (“Changing Channels”), and celebrity culture (“Fallen Idols” and “Season Seven, Time for a Wedding”). “The French Mistake” is a notable episode in that it portrays the making of a TV show called Supernatural, and many of the behind-the-scenes crew and the actors are portrayed as parody versions of themselves.

  The episode “The Monster at the End of the Book” uses the metafictional device of the Winchester novels to comment on the process of writing in general and on Supernatural and its writers in particular. The character of author Chuck Shurley stands in for show creator Eric Kripke and is used to explore the role of the author.122 By the end of season five, the viewer is left with the impression that the author may, in Chuck’s case literally, be God.

  In season eight, an angel called Metratron is revealed as Heaven’s scribe. He is an ardent collector of stories and can be seen to represent both the show’s and fandom’s writers when he says, “When you create stories, you become gods, of tiny, intricate dimensions unto themselves.” Notably, he is later revealed to be a twisted, vengeful character.

  Geek and fan culture in particular have been represented by a number of Supernatural characters and in episodes such as “The Real Ghostbusters,” “The Girl with the Dungeon and Dragon Tatto
o,” and “LARP and the Real Girl.” In addition to fanfic-writing fangirl Becky, other fannish characters include roleplaying fanboys Demian and Barnes and lesbian fangirl hacker Charlie Bradbury.

  The show itself has always been overtly fannish. Dean Winchester was established from the beginning as a fan of horror and sci-fi movies and classic rock, and we find out he has a big fanboy crush on the eponymous star of a TV drama called Dr. Sexy, M.D. Sam Winchester was revealed to be a Harry Potter fan, and even crusty old Bobby Singer revealed himself as a fan of Deep Space Nine (a shout-out to actor Jim Beaver’s late wife, who appeared in the series). It is left to the angel Castiel to represent the nonfan, as he comments more than once, “I do not understand that reference.”

  The show has also deployed a number of tropes popular in fanfiction, many of which had been explored in Supernatural fanfiction long before they appeared on the show. Acafan Henry Jenkins, upon viewing the show back in season one, also noticed its fanfic similarity, calling it “one long hurt/comfort story.”123 General fanfic tropes that have appeared include alternate universes, time travel, time loops, body swaps, evil doppelgängers, and post-apocalypse scenarios. Some have been specific to the Supernatural-verse—fandom was exploring the possibility of evil Sam and vampire Dean long before the show did. Fandom even has a term for when a fanfic story is validated or replicated in canon—“Kripked.”

  TV writing, of all artistic pursuits, can be seen as most analogous to fanfic. From script to screen it’s a collaborative effort, in which writers, artists, crew, and actors work within a shared universe to produce a story each week. Perhaps those involved in making TV are best able to understand what we do, because it is a version of what they do themselves. It came as no surprise to fans when Supernatural writers Robbie Thompson and Adam Glass joined Twitter and immediately started to encourage fans to write fanfic about them, even inventing the mashup pairing name Robdam for themselves.124

  While Supernatural is not the first show to mention fanfiction, it is certainly the first to specifically reference its own fandom and have incestuous gay fanfic discussed by the characters about whom it is written. It is a sign of a broader, changed relationship that goes beyond breaking the fourth wall, to an open acknowledgment of the epic love affair between fans and creators.

  Coeditor of the groundbreaking volume Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, Kristina Busse is an important voice in the field of fan studies. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, and she coedits the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Her essay here considers one legacy of the Star Trek slash fandom, showing how some of its edgier tropes now boldly go where, well, no one ever even thought of going before—and then maybe go a little bit further. Much of this book has focused on the development of fic communities within specific fandoms, but this essay illustrates how in internet fandom, tropes and storylines can cross-pollinate faster than sex spores, generating multifandom universes. Even more than your average pop song mashup, these multiverses remix species and cross biological boundaries—and they’re very popular.

  Pon Farr, Mpreg, Bonds, and the Rise of the Omegaverse

  Kristina Busse

  When I started reading fanfiction nearly fifteen years ago, I was immediately fascinated by the huge amounts of sex and, more interestingly, the huge amounts of kinky sex. Every sex act I’d ever imagined—and some I hadn’t—were easily accessible and, even better, labeled. Thanks to headers and the then still-rudimentary search engines on fandom-specific archives, I could search and read all the stories of a particular scenario, whether it was driven by sex, plot, or character. Angel turning human and getting back together with Buffy in all its hundreds of variations; Mulder as Krycek’s hostage, and vice versa; Kirk, Spock, and Bones threesomes—it was there for me to search and read. “Infinite diversity in infinite combinations” might be the central Vulcan philosophical statement, but it is also the motto of media fans.

  Your Kink Is OK; It’s Just Not My Kink

  One of the things I like best about fanfiction is that there is a clear sense of writing to specific kinks. Ellen Fremedon describes this as the Id Vortex: “In fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame . . . We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all.” Branding and bestiality, water sports and mind control, tentacles and voyeurism, but also domesticity and telepathy, amnesia and hurt/comfort, slavery and time travel—all of these are tropes that may get us to read a story; they may even turn us on and get us off.

  Favorite tropes, of course, are different for everyone. But fandom is big enough that we can find someone who wants to read what we write and, if we’re really lucky, who writes what we want to read. More than that, fanfic gives us that specific story many times over with exactly the characters and the scenarios we want to see. Heck, if we participate in a challenge or have good friends, they might write one to our detailed specifications! Also, fandom as a community is open-minded enough that most fans tend to accept tropes that don’t appeal to them personally as Just Not My Kink, rather than as bad or wrong.

  Alpha Males and the Fannish Hive Mind

  But even with the seeming loss of taboos and a general acceptance of all kinks, there are still some kinks that tend to be considered a bit kinkier than others. One particularly trendy trope at the moment is Alpha/Beta/Omega (A/B/O) stories, which are popular across various fandoms, including Supernatural, Sherlock, and Teen Wolf. Many A/B/O stories posit societies where biological imperatives divide people based on wolf pack hierarchies into sexual dominants (alphas), sexual submissives (omegas), and everyone else (betas). Beyond the biologically determined hierarchy, these wolf-like humans often have other wolf-like traits: they may scent their partners or imprint on first sight, and often mate for life.. Sometimes the alphas and omegas are rare, sometimes they are only males, sometimes they have altered sex organs. Often omegas go into heat and release pheromones that drive alphas wild.

  Animal terminology, such as heat, mating cycles, claiming, mounting, breeding, and the ever-popular knot (a swelling at the base of the penis found in canines after ejaculation that forces the penis to stay inside to ensure impregnation), tends to be popular in A/B/O stories. While fandom has always had its share of animal transformations and bestiality kinks, A/B/O stories also seem to draw from other tropes, including mating and heat cycles, breeding, and male pregnancy (mpreg), as well as imprinting and soul bonds. In fact, it is difficult to make any generalization about the collections of tropes shorthanded as A/B/O or “omegaverse” (while the two terms can be used interchangeably, the latter tends to be reserved for ideological world building rather than the simple sexual dynamics). Rather than attempting to define A/B/O and its multiple fandom-specific subvariants, I want to explore where the trope came from and how it has evolved, using that discussion to illustrate how tropes cross-pollinate, change, and mutate in and across fandoms.

  Pon Farr as Ur-Trope

  The biological imperative of mating cycles appears in Star Trek canon and subsequently has been embraced across many fandoms. The original Star Trek is viewed by many as the first modern media fandom: in the late sixties, fans started to meet up at fan cons and began writing, editing, mimeographing, and mailing the first fanzines. Fans who have never heard of the episode “Amok Time,” in which Spock goes into pon farr, may know the term pon farr. And even if they haven’t, they probably will have read stories where a character’s biology forces him to have sex—sometimes with their partner, other times with anyone willing and able.

  In Star Trek, pon farr describes the Vulcan mating cycle, during which Vulcans must have sex or suffer excruciating pain, insanity, and potential death. But fans are nothing if not creative! This particular moment in the original Star Trek series became the basis of a host of pon farr stories where Spock is slowly going insane—and Kirk is his only option. The same scenario also moved into other fandoms where there i
s no canonical support for pon farr: the justification can be magical, supernatural, or alien, but even in realistic cop shows like CSI or Bones, we still find myriad versions of this fuck-or-die scenario.

  The Animal in All of Us

  Animals and animal transformations feature in a lot of fanfiction. A lot of media that inspires fanfiction include animal transformation as canon: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Twilight, and Teen Wolf, for example, all feature werewolves. Other fandoms often create shapeshifter alternate universes to explore ideas of identity and transformation, of monstrosity and otherness. While bestiality seems not to be that prevalent in fandom, it does exist—whether as a subset of shapeshifter-verses or otherwise. In fact, Harry Potter popularized bestiality kinks, often pairing human characters sexually with Remus in his werewolf form or Sirius in his Padfoot dog form. But it was the Supernatural RPF fandom, J2 (named for the first names of show leads Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles) and its kink memes that large-scale introduced bestiality into non-magical fandoms.

  It thus may not be coincidental that Supernatural and J2 fandom more than likely originated A/B/O. In her primer, fan writer Nora Bombay describes A/B/O as “something that appears to have been spontaneously created when J2 mpreg and J2 werewolves combined, had a soul bond, and created an idea that was perfect to spread out across all fandom.” Nor may it be coincidental that Jensen Ackles’ first fannish show, Dark Angel, featured him as a genetically engineered soldier with feline DNA. While Dark Angel only features heat cycles in female characters, fandom—especially slash fandom—of course responded with males in heat as well.