Fan Fiction: Origins and Cultural Impact (Since the 18th Century) (#132)

This is another topic that has been on my ideas list for months now, and right now, I currently feel like I’ve retreated back to my teen fangirl phase with my current and unexpected love for Stranger Things. It was a show I started years ago, watched half of season 3, got distracted, and didn’t go back to for now reason at all. Then, when I rewatched it in the wake of season 4 and then was obsessed with the mastery of this newest season, something ignited in me and I now find myself in this nostalgic place of feeling like a teen fangirl again — and I love it.

All of this to say that one of my favourite things to do as a teenager, and even when I was past the teen phase and at university, was to read and write fan fiction. My thing was Torchwood, and it still has a special place in my heart.

One of things I’ve wanted to research for ages is when fan fiction actually began, its origins, and how it became such a cultural phenomenon that it is today, with millions of pieces of work published online for every conceivable fandom. So that’s what I’m doing in this episode - we’re going to take a look at where fan fiction began, and I was very surprised to learn that we’re going way back to as early as the 18th century.

In 2019, Archive of Our Own (more commonly shortened to AO3), a website run and curated by fans themselves, celebrated 10 years and contained more than 5 million stories and other works of art in every conceivable fandom. (That number now stands at more than 51k fandoms, nearly 5m registered users, and approaching 10m published works.) 

Then, in November 2019, AO3 earned a Hugo Award for its contributions to science fiction and fantasy. It won the award for Best Related Work, a category that has traditionally included books or essays that involve critical commentary, tie-in works, or other works adjacent to speculative fiction. While this award category can include some experimental entries, it’s very rare for it to include an entire website — and Hugo members have never nominated unpublished fanfiction before. But by voting for AO3, Hugo Award voters sent the message that fan fiction writers are worthy of standing alongside some of the most renowned sci-fi/fantasy authors around. 

An article on the Atlantic (which was great for my research for this episode) says: “Fan fiction’s role as a collective project … was ultimately what the 2019 Hugo Award acknowledged: AO3 may have officially earned the honour, but so did every writer who had ever been bold, brave, or foolhardy enough to share their work with the internet.”

But how did the cultural impact of fan fiction get so big, and when did the idea of fan fiction begin?

An article on the Guardian says that if we look at fanfic as "the work of amateurs retelling existing stories", then we could conclude that the Bible was a work of fanfic, as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were non-professionals retelling the same story about the same character. However, such a definition of fanfic is skewed historically. There were no fans in the middle ages, and there were also no authors.

So if we change the definition of fan fiction as “the reworking of another author's characters” then this form really only appears for the first time in history with the invention of legal authorship in the 18th century through copyright and intellectual property laws, after the invention of the printing press. After all, you can't have derivative works or copies if there are no regulations over what constitutes original works.

Predating this, people mostly experienced stories only through the aural folklore tradition, where tales were retellings and remakings of the same stories over generations – but these weren’t fan fiction. (It makes me laugh thinking that Grimm stories, for example, are just fanfic of folk tales they’d already heard and decided to add their own spice to them.)

Nobody owned them and they were based on stock characters. Even Shakespeare didn’t own the stories in his plays — often, a patron would commission him to retell a story and he was paid in royalties. All stories within the medieval period were re-workings of stories about the same characters, but we couldn’t call them fan fiction as copyright law and the printing press hadn’t yet sectioned off the professional, paid, copyright owner of original texts from the consumers, creating a subclass of fans.

18th Century

Though fan fiction might seem like a relatively modern invention, the practice has actually been around for centuries. Some of the greatest literary classics are technically expansions of earlier characters and narratives.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, marked the beginning of this movement. Not long after its publication, readers started to imagine its hero, Lemuel Gulliver, in circumstances that either were only briefly alluded to in the text, or that they themselves invented, and the more shocking the revisions, the better. Many stories took the form of what was essentially “fan art.” 

An example of this was a play on the fact that in the book, Gulliver is delighted with the size of his own excrement in contrast to the miniature world of the Lilliputian people. (I have not read this book, so without context, I have no idea what’s going on there.) In response to this, famous engraver William Hogarth created a piece of fan art by etching and engraving a graphic representation of Gulliver getting a Lilliputian enema. The British Museum describes this piece as: “An exterior scene set among ruins; to the left, the naked buttocks of Gulliver to whom an enema is being administered by a crowd of Lilliputians.”

Though outrageous, Hogarth’s rendering was consistent with Gulliver’s character. From then on, fan artists were using art forms to explore social taboos and sexuality, and using their favourite characters was a good way to do so.

Hundreds more fan-authored works followed, including a series of poems by Alexander Pope in which Gulliver’s wife—barely mentioned in the original—complains that her husband is never at home to have sex with her, basically. When Gulliver returns from his final adventure, he has become so disgusted with the human race that he hides from his family. The fan-written Mary Gulliver was, understandably, put out by her husband’s newfound abstinence.

In the 18th century, as now, fan fiction was usually more explicitly sexual than its source material. As literary scholar David Brewer points out, an essential part of most expanded 18th-century universes was the unwieldy, enthusiastic, and self-selecting community of readers that they created throughout Europe. Although instantly sharing and commenting on fan work weren’t quite as easy then as they are now, the 1900s did see a rise in literacy among the middle class, thanks in part to the Industrial Revolution making printing cheaper and postal-delivery systems more reliable.

Most of the earliest novels were epistolary (meaning composed of letters), which gave readers a more direct sense of communicating with their favourite characters. Some of these stories even went mainstream. Particular fan writers were like E. L. James of their day, with their breakout successes supported by thousands of readers.

In time, the original creators started trying to elbow in on these communities to exploit their commercial potential. Some would even sometimes incorporate their commentary into future volumes of their work. Authors tried to use public shaming and the law to prevent others from profiting off what they regarded as their sole intellectual property—with very little success.

Most 18th-century authors made their peace with fan fiction, as long as the creators shared it freely and didn’t attempt to make money from it. It was argued that no publicity is bad publicity, and fan works only increase interest in the original books and characters.

One of the potential reasons why the 18th century ignited this love of fan-created works is that there was something specifically about 18th-century novel characters that seemed to particularly invite an abundance of reinterpretations. Until recently, academics thought that what the 18th-century novel invented was “realism”: writing about the lives of common, everyday people, rather than nobility or royalty, in great detail.

But more scholars are concluding that the real innovation is something more complicated: it’s still that idea of realism, but on a deeper level, it’s that the books are about characters who the reader knows aren’t real, but who seem like they could be. Their plausibility makes it easy to write about them and expand on what could happen to them. And this is still relevant today, too — characters we love often feel real to us, and it makes them very tempting to write about, to continue their stories as if they really do exist.

One of the biggest purposes of fan fiction, right back to when it first began, has been its role in playing with the boundaries of relationships within the original work. Fans commonly write about their favourite pairings — whether they’re canonical or not — and so they’ll rewrite the ending they wanted to see. In short, people just want to see better conclusions for their favourite characters, so instead of waiting in hope for the ending they want, they’ll write it themselves.

20th & 21st Century

Jane Austen

In the 20th century with developments in cheap printing techniques and distribution, fanzines became a thing, and many of them were inspired by Jane Austen. Dedicated literary fans called themselves the Janeites. A novel called Old Friends and New Fancies – an Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen by Sybil Brinton was published in 1913, and became the first published work of Austen fan fiction.

This is an example of continuation fic – the creation of storylines that use the same characters but elaborate on unresolved threads within the originals to create new episodes. A century later, the Jane Austen Fanfiction Index now catalogues over two hundred thousand works of Austen fanfic, while Goodreads lists hundreds of published books of fanfic derived from Austen. Titles include Vanity and Vexation and Dating Mr Darcy. 

Arthur Conan Doyle

In the 1920s, fans of Arthur Conan Doyle started Sherlock Holmes societies in London and New York, at which they debated issues such as the question of whether Holmes's addiction to cocaine was beneficial to his perception or a sign of moral weakness. They also produced the Baker Street Journal, a hybrid zine, halfway between scholarly research and pure fandom, and at gatherings read their own versions of stories they'd written themselves.

Sci-Fi in the 1930s–50s

From the 1930s to 50s fanfic existed almost exclusively within sci-fi communities. Many fans from such groups went on to become published authors, blurring the distinction between amateur fan and professional writer.

In 1952, the world's first book of fanfic about fans appeared. The Enchanted Duplicator by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw was a metafiction which described a world populated with sci-fi fans. It chronicles the adventures of the story’s hero in "the land of Mundane". All of the characters in the book are renamed versions of real fans from the London sci-fi circle of the 50s and the book was created entirely for their pleasure. The book contains the line, “now the song of the trumpets filled the air, ringing across Trufandom to the far mountains,” thus possibly introducing the word “fandom” to people’s lexicon.

Slash Fiction

With the growth of TV in the 50s fanfic spread globally. A new subgenre was beginning to emerge: slash fiction, a genre in which buddies from classic TV become gay lovers. The first slash fic novel to be published was The Ring of Soshern by Jennifer Guttridge (1968) featuring Kirk and Spock. They find themselves stranded on a remote, deserted planet. Spock goes into the state of "Pon Far": the violent "on heat" fever that comes to Vulcans, during which they must "have sex or die". To save Spock's life Kirk allows Spock to have sex with him, and the two then fall in love and "spend all their remaining days on the planet exploiting both the planet and each other's bodies".

The word "slash" in “slash fiction” is so called because of the "/" separating the names of the two characters involved in the pairing, for example Holmes/Watson, Harry/Draco, etc. Other subgenres in slash include femslash in which formerly hetereosexual female characters have lesbian experiences (Buffy is a popular example).

Crossover Fic

The most postmodern of all fanfic is when two well-known franchises from the same genre are "crossed over". One example is BattleStar Galactica crossed with Star Trek, which resulted in the story Star Trek: Way of the Battlestar by Carson Napier.

One of the problems with this sub-genre is that narratives and character motivations have to be warped to fit these mergings. This is taken to absurd lengths with fan-made YouTube films like Battlestar Galactica Vs Star Wars Vs Star Trek Vs Babylon 5. Crossovers can also jump genres so Edward from Twilight ends up in Hogwarts, Bella ends up in ER and the characters of The X-Files clash with those of Breaking Dawn.

Fanfic sites also contain stories that have narratives of impossible meetings (usually sexual) between improbable characters – Captain Jean-Luc Picard has sex with Elrond from Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones has sex with Voldemort, etc, so slash and crossover fic merge into another new sub-genre.

AU Fic

Then in the 90s came AU fic, meaning alternative universe. AU features stories which are based on "what-ifs", which deviate from the original novels or films. So a couple of examples are "What if Darcy was blind" or "What if Bella Swan is engaged to Jasper, not Edward". The stories must deviate from the canon but still remain familiar.

Twilight is a big example of a fandom with loads of AU stories. There are seemingly endless Twilight AU stories published online, with just some examples including: Edward and Bella meeting in kindergarten; Edward as a teacher, Bella as a student; Jacob and Edward as gay lovers; Bella and Alice as gay lovers; Bella is the vampire and Edward is the human; Bella is a millionaire and Edward is a professional thief; Edward is a tattoo artist; Bella is on the Titanic; and so many more.

There is then, of course, the most famous of Twilight fan fiction, and one that has to be mentioned in an episode about the cultural impact of fanfic: Fifty Shades of Grey.

Fifty Shades of Grey

The Fifty Shades series grew out of a multi-part series of Twilight fanfic called Master of the Universe. It placed the Bella and Edward love affair in an alternative universe, in contemporary Seattle and changed their names to Anastasia and Christian Grey.

Although the author, E L James, then tried to erase evidence of its fanfic origins, it's clear that Fifty Shades is actually quite a generic work of Twilight fanfic from amongst tens of thousands already created. It is, in fact, a piece of "AU het slash Twilight fic", and as we've seen, in all slash fic, sex and sexual violence are the predictable components of the genre.

Ewan Morrison, the writer of the Guardian article I mentioned earlier, said:

“We should not consider EL James an author in the conventional sense for the same reasons that we wouldn't call someone from before the invention of copyright an author. Rather, her books are like medieval lore – in a sense she doesn't own the content. This content was circulating in 60,000 variations among the fanfic of other Twilight fans for years before she even created the books. Like a gambling machine with a limited number of options for recombination, the story was going to eventually be spat out as a win for somebody. This isn't an example of plagiarism but a return to an earlier notion of collective creation. Fifty Shades is a book with 60,000 authors.”

Yet the unstoppable success of the Fifty Shades trilogy has left the publishing industry and the literary world reeling. E L James may now be among the wealthiest authors in the world, having made millions from sheer number of copies of her books sold worldwide. It was even turned into a series of major films, with a global cinema release distributed by Universal.

Authors’ Opinions on Fanfic

You might be wondering, isn’t fanfic ripping off other people’s work? What are the ethics of using someone else’s characters, settings, etc? This has been a debate for as long as fanfic has existed, and it still divides opinion, especially those of the authors themselves.

Douglas Adams claimed that fanfic expanded his understanding of the parallel universes he'd created in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and that they increased his sales. Others also encourage fanfic, but some stipulate one condition – that they did not try to make money from their creations. Fans now use disclaimers such as: "The author owns all recognisable characters/settings/etc in this fanfiction.”

However, others aren’t or weren’t so happy about it. Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire, vigorously defended her copyright, claiming that fanfic diluted the integrity of her characters and stories. In a letter to her fans she stated: "I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes." Fanfic authors then claimed that Rice had attacked them by email and even threatened their businesses. She also demanded that FanFic.net remove all fanfic stories. Since then, other authors have also come to adopt a zero-tolerance stance.

Some creators argue that it’s illegal and can compromise their rights. This backlash led to the creation of The Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW) in 2007, a nonprofit organisation by and for fanfic writers, with thousands of members and hundreds of volunteers devoted to protecting, preserving, and defending fanworks and their legal right to exist. It all came down to a group of fans — mostly women — deciding to take the fates of their fanworks into their own hands.

Archive of Our Own

The OTW, and subsequently Archive of Our Own or AO3, which I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, was founded in response to a single 2007 LiveJournal post written by an influential fanfic writer called astolat (it would much later become known that the person behind this pseudonym is successful speculative fiction author Naomi Novik, which blew my mind when I found this out yesterday).

Novik, who was already a well-known writer of slash fics with a large readership at the time, was responding to community uproar over the creation of a company called “FanLib,” which had, like many companies before it, attempted to disrupt the fanfiction community by commodifying fanfiction and exploiting fans for their work. Though FanLib garnered 25,000 members, it was the subject of intense criticism by many people who felt stung by having a group of perceived outsiders attempt to profit off work they had always provided freely.

As Novik noted in her post:

“The people behind fanlib don’t actually care about fanfic, the fanfic community, or anything except making money off content created entirely by other people and getting media attention. They don’t have a single fanfic reader or writer on their board; they don’t even have a single woman on their board. They’re creating a lawsuit-bait site while being bad potential defendants, and they deserve to be chased out being pelted with rocks.”

Unfortunately, in 2007, this was a big issue, with the big sites being either small and hard to grow on, or too big for their own boots and prone to commodifying their creators’ work. Novik’s big idea was straightforward but revolutionary: why not build an entirely self-sufficient, creator-funded archive to protect fanworks? She wrote:

“We are sitting quietly by the fireside, creating piles and piles of content around us, and other people are going to look at that and see an opportunity. And they are going to end up creating the front doors that new fanfic writers walk through, unless we stand up and build our OWN front door. We need a central archive of our own.”

That sense of urgency was amped up just a few days after Novik’s post. LiveJournal permanently — and without warning — suspended more than 500 accounts that had mentioned sexually explicit topics. The bans were poorly explained and affected many users who had not posted anything illegal or against LiveJournal’s terms of service. Fan communities were concerned about how they could sustain themselves when members or whole groups could be banned without warning or apparent reason. Other sites like fanfiction.net had similar problems, and many didn’t allow adult content at all.

Novik’s original post stated that she wasn’t interested in creating a new archive herself — she was too busy. But as the comments flooded with people willing to help, she changed her mind. She knew she had to make a nonprofit, something that could not itself get sold when its founders wanted to move on. Sites changing hands and trying to make themselves more profitable were often perceived as the catalyst behind content purges and even shutdowns. For example, FanLib was bought by Disney and closed only a little over a year after leaving its beta stage.

Volunteers stepped forward with knowledge of the law, coding, server maintenance, design, accessibility, and more… and so, in 2009, Archive of Our Own was born. Francesca Coppa, one of AO3’s founders, said, “It turns out fans are everything. Fans are journalists, fans are librarians, fans are graphic designers, fans are lawyers, are accountants. Fangirls do absolutely every job there is.”

The creation of the AO3 happened parallel to the rise of social media, and both of them together had a huge impact on the growth of the fandom. Social media was giving marginalised people new, important public platforms. It was also making visible the importance of transformative fandom spaces, where historically marginalised fans could express the diversity of their experiences and identities. The “shame” often felt by people producing fanworks was beginning to fade when people could see there were in fact hundreds or thousands of people like them.

Fans were suddenly able to discuss their fandom activities in public alongside other fans. And those fans were becoming more vocal and open about writing fanfiction than at any previous point in cultural history. AO3’s founding in 2009 was still a couple of years before the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon would really open the floodgates on mainstream acceptance of fanfiction in 2011. But on Tumblr, which operated in synergy with AO3, was quietly making its own enormous cultural impact, AO3 was becoming a household name, synonymous with fangirls, queer fanfic, and fandom itself.

More recently, this increased acceptability has caused AO3’s numbers to boom, particularly during the pandemic. But they’re not the only fanfic site out there, either. Fanfiction.net still exists and is still the preferred platform for some, although many crosspost to both sites. Social writing platform Wattpad is also extremely popular for fanfiction, which is its third-largest category after romance and teen fiction. Where AO3 fics tend to focus on the relationships between characters, Wattpad has a reputation for reader-insert romance fic written by and targeted toward teens.

There’s a really great article on Vox, which has helped me a lot with all this research about AO3 and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested. The article states:

“For all of this to have grown out of a bunch of slash fangirls wanting a place to read their queer fanfiction is remarkable, especially given that those women planned, designed, and hand-coded the site from the ground up — a massive project undertaken during an era where women were still fighting to be taken seriously as designers and coders. … Also astonishing is that it remains supported fully by fans, who have kept the archive funded and the servers running purely through donations for the past decade.

What’s perhaps even more remarkable than all of this, given the legacy of cultural shame around fanfiction that the archive was formed in part to resist, is that AO3 has helped rehabilitate how fanfiction is perceived by the mainstream. In 2013, Time magazine named the Archive one of the best sites on the web. … AO3 has arguably boosted the average internet user’s understanding of fanfiction — and, crucially, this familiarity has come from a positive outgrowth of fandom community, rather than a corporatized promotion of it."

Then, going back to the Hugo Awards, the Vox article says:

“The Hugos themselves … have been undergoing a decade-long period of progressive reform to be more inclusive and diverse that neatly coincides with the rise of AO3. The Hugos have always represented innovation in genre and fandom, created by a lot of geeks and misfits, and AO3 represents the rise of a set of geeks and misfits who have long been invisible to Hugo voters.

The awards are a long-deserved acknowledgment of the tremendous driving force of creators working together to create a space for themselves — the strength of their talent, community, technology, literary skill, and sheer passion in making the world a little more their own.”

And I think that sentiment is a great place to finally leave this episode. This has been one of my favourite ones to research. As someone who has been a fanfic writer and consumer for at least 12 years now (I was publishing on Fanfiction.net as early as 2011), and as someone who has been ridiculed for it by people who were just “making a joke” but were actually kind of hurtful — seeing its growth mapped out like this almost feels a bit emotional, and kind of vindicating. I love that at the age we are, we can still be unapologetic fanfic writers or consumers, and feel absolutely no shame in that — because there are literally millions of us out there, and we’re not going anywhere.