As Others See Us: Fanfic in the Media

The ref of the week comes from TIME, which included Archive of Our Own among the “50 Best Websites 2013”. Lev Grossman wrote Fan fiction is one of the great unsung popular literary movements of the past 50 years, but finding what you’re looking for online can involve sorting through mountains of inadequately tagged and frequently dodgy text. Archive of Our Own makes it easy: it’s the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web, and it serves all fandoms equally, from The A-Team to Zachary Quinto and beyond. Observed Daily Dot’s Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Fifty Shades of Grey may be the mainstream face of fanfiction, but it hasn’t done much to dispel the image of fanfic as being “mommy porn”, or just poorly-written in general. Which isn’t to say that lots of fanfiction isn’t erotica -- just that you could easily do a lot better than the strangely banal antics of Anastasia Steele and her amoral sugar-daddy. And that’s where Archive of our Own comes in. (Thanks go to tehomet for first giving me the initial heads-up!)

Dr. Brooke Magnanti, writing on women and erotica for The Telegraph: Who writes the slashfic (slash fiction) and fanfic (fan fiction) online that takes sexually fantasising about well-known television and film characters to a whole new level? Women do. Early studies even suggested as many as 90 per cent of fanfic writers were female.

In the Orlando Sentinel, Patrick C. Fleming, who teaches composition at Rollins College, observed that today’s Frosh haven't gone to book-release parties, or written fan fiction, or had Wizard-themed birthday parties. They are quite ready to abandon their attachment to Rowling's books, unwilling to follow that attachment into new arenas.

( True Blood, Lawrence Leung, Iron Man 3, Kirk/Spock, Buffy )

On The Atlantic Wire, Richard Lawson wrote TNT has just ordered to series a Bay-produced action drama show called The Last Ship. It's about the Internet collectively deciding to no longer write slash fiction. No, no, of course not. Would that it were. Well, hrumph.

On Huffington Post, Faith Erin Hicks wrote I was a pretty repressed geek during my younger years. I probably would have been a full blown Star Trek: The Next Generation obsessed, X-Files fanfic writing, comic consuming geek if I'd actually felt like that was something appropriate to be, but I was kind of snobby as a teenager, viewing myself as someone who read Serious Books and had Serious Thoughts, when I secretly just wanted to moon over Data on TNG.

( Harry Potter, audio erotica, Glee, Marvel, Calgary politics, Bronies, Community, Julian Sands )

Author Ridley Pearson told St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Jane Henderson I post chapters and plot outlines on kingdomkeepersinsider.com and they vote on things and send fan fiction. I might ask, “In this scene do you want it to be this Kingdom Keeper or that one?”

Gothamist’s Jen Chung wrote Last year, former City Council member Melinda Katz announced that she was marrying Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. She also added that he was the sperm donor for her two sons. While some felt it was like "nyc fan fiction," Sliwa's second ex-wife thought otherwise and is now suing Sliwa and Katz for $1.4 million, claiming that the couple scammed her out of $400,000.

Finally, writing in Salon, Aja Romano presented a run-down of Orson Scott Card’s views on fanfic (and other topics – oh, OSC, why are you so difficult?) and in honor of Card’s recent asserting that “Every piece of fan fiction is an ad for my book. What kind of idiot would I be to want that to disappear?”, invited readers to Enjoy the gay, gay [Ender’s Game] slash fanfiction—or write some of your own.

In the Los Angeles Times, Steven Zeitchik reported on the process surrounding the creation of “Tricked”, a new Dutch film by director Paul Verhoeven. The Dutch-born filmmaker wanted fans in his native Holland to contribute chapters to a script for a short feature. Then he would fashion a movie out of the results. It was fan fiction that could be transformed, with a little help from the experts, into pro fiction.

It didn't exactly work out as he expected. […]Instead, what they received was a hodgepodge. New stories veered sharply from what came before. The tone was off. Genres landed further afield than a Mark Sanchez pass. Verhoeven quickly realized he had little to play with. […]When the suggestions poured in and they again found themselves with a mess (one writer might drop in aliens, another would dial in characters more at home in “50 Shades of Gray"), Verhoeven kept fiddling, working on the episode for several weeks, shooting it and repeating the process.

Entertainment Weekly PopWatch’s Geoff Boucher spoke with Rod Roddenberry (son of Gene) about Trek Initiative: “There’s tons of information out there. We don’t need to provide content, we just need to unite them. Whether it’s fan films, fan fiction, just people connecting to talk about the future … we wanted to provide a place where people from all walks of life can connect over a passion for Star Trek or a passion for the future.”

( Gamers are awesome, St. Albert has its own writer-in-residence?, Sydney sounds awesome too )

( A bunch of authors mention fic: Hugh Howey, Rainbow Rowell, Beverly Nickelson, Dana Fredsti )

On Comic Book Resources, Anna Pinkert explained Why Embracing Slash 
is Good for Everybody.

( Doctor Who, The Good Wife, fandom, NYU )

msilverstar alerted me to a Anna von Veh piece in Publishing Persectives, What Can Trade Publishers Learn from Fanfiction?

And, finally, (Nottingham) Impact’s Sarah Dear wrote, of fanfic, you either love it, or you just don’t get it.

It looks like some Utah authors are trying to grow themselves a fandom, writing shared-world novellas that others can produce fic for, reported Desert News’s Christine Rappleye. Fan fiction is technically illegal if it uses copyrighted or licensed characters and ideas. With the license those with the Massive Fiction project are planning to use, the ideas, characters, setting and stories will be open for anyone to use, [contributing author Marion] Jensen wrote. “The setting, plot, and characters are already there (in fan fiction), and students can focus on smaller tasks such as dialogue or character arc,” Jensen wrote.

In Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory wrote Since [the 90s] we’ve seen the growth of explicit fan fiction — and with it, a greater cultural awareness of female desire for sexual explicitness — which has culminated in the global “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon.

( Game of Thrones, The Mindy Project, Indiana Jones 4, more 50 Shades )

( Pride and Prejudice and Kitties, Harry Potter & Doctor Who, Laura Kaye, Kevin Bridges )

Christian Today’s Bridget Brenton is distressed that This is the new generation that we’re moulding with porn, 50 Shades of Grey and “lemon” fanfiction.

On Fast Company, Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield wrote when fan-fiction writer E.L. James grafted pornography onto the romance novel and came up with the Fifty Shades trilogy, she not only created a new genre but put the publishing industry on steroids.

In a USA Today overview of recent Doctor Who-related books, Whitney Matheson wrote Doctor Who is no different from most wildly popular sci-fi properties in that it has spawned its own merchandise, conventions, fan fiction, you name it.

Finally, on Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch, Darren Franich shared that Late-blooming fan-fiction auteur Sylvester Stallone, on the verge of finishing his latest mash-up crossovers Tango & Terminator and Rocky vs. Raging Bull, is finally getting back to his crossover mega-franchise The Expendables (which is itself sort of the Crisis on Infinite Earths of old things).

Lots of Game of Thrones this week! On Huffington Post, Daniel D’Addario shared Nine over-the-top pieces of “Game of Thrones” fan fiction; in The Guardian, Graeme Virtue wrote, Whenever the Hound edged towards heroism – like saving young Sansa Stark from sexual assault – it sparked off a new round of breathless fan fiction; and, on Wired’s Underwire, Angela Watercutter suggested the reader take advantage of Game of Thrones action figures to prepare to get busted Lord-Helmet-in-Spaceballs-style while reenacting some fanfic.

The Host also prompted several refs. In Tulsa World, Michael Smith wrote that "The Host" is a science-fiction film based on Stephenie (sic) Meyer's follow-up to her "Twilight" series of books, and yes, there is a love triangle, plenty of handsome young men and a plot that plays like something out of a 13-year-old's frivolous fan fiction. And, for USA Today’s Happy Ever After, Justine Browning presented interviews with Stephanie Meyer and the cast of the film [in which they] discuss strong female characters, fan fiction and why the aliens in The Host are unlike any other extraterrestrials.

In the University of Toronto The Varsity, Alex Ross wrote about Fan Fiction and its vibrant community.

( Steampunks, JRRT, The Walking Dead, Harry Potter, God of War )

On Den of Geek, Rachel Bowles interviewed Jonathan Creek star Alan Davies, who said I don’t know if it still happens as much now, but certainly in the nineties, fan fiction was a big thing. What, there was fanfic before Twilight and Harry Potter?

Finally, in New Indian Express, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy wrote This summer, if reading a lot of books seems too passive for you, how about writing a book? Or at least a short story? If that sounds exciting, but you’re not sure you can come up with enough ideas to base your story on, a great way get started is by writing fan fiction.

In the Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the upcoming Veronica Mars movie, Robert Lloyd wrote There is a sense of communal ownership when it comes to television, a kind of silent partnership forged over time. You see it expressed in the fan fiction that extends the life of a series beyond its cancellation and in YouTube videos where kids stage their own supplementary "Doctor Who" adventures. For the true believers, too much is never enough, and the only time to cancel a beloved series is never.

In a story for The Atlantic about Stephanie Meyer’s terming herself a feminist, and the surrounding skepticism, Noah Berlatsky wrote Twilight and The Host are pretty much entirely devoted to exploring women's feelings and women's relationships in the context of genres—romance, soap opera, fan fic—overwhelmingly associated with and consumed by women.

Huffington Post’s John Kinnear has a two-year-old daughter. So, before she starts quoting Faulkner and writes a fan-fiction sequel to The Sound and the Fury, I decided now would be a good time to write down some of the toddlerisms that are slowly fading away from her mind.

( Marissa Meyer, Jon Cozart (Disney Princesses), Harry Potter, Mass Effect 3, Tara Sue Me (more Twilight-inspired BDSM), Robert Jeffress )

In a kind-of-right, kind-of-wrong summary of who hangs out where on the interwebz, Herald Sun’s Alice Clarke wrote Lovers of fanfiction live on LiveJournal (when it's not being hit by denial of service attacks by the Russians) and DreamWidth.

Finally, Smash, the makers of a Fifty Shades porn ‘parody,’ and Universal, have settled; in case you weren’t paying attention, Smash had argued that Fifty Shades of Grey was in the "public domain" because the author originally published it online on fan fiction websites (Eriq Gardner,The Hollywood Reporter).

Katherine Arcement wrote a personal account of the appeal of fanfic for London Review of Books: I became an addict when I was 14. But it wasn’t drugs, or booze. I didn’t drop out of school or run away from home; in fact I stayed in. When you are addicted to fan fiction, you don’t need to leave the house to escape. Her piece got a shout-out on NPR’s Book News, compiled by Annalisa Quinn.

Reviewing Rosa Montero’s Tears in Rain for Wired, Ariane Coffin wrote Tears in Rain is based on the movie Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Some reviews have labeled Tears in Rain as glorified fan fiction, while others have called it a rich complement. Either way, I’m the living proof that you don’t need to have watched the movie or read the classic sci-fi novel to enjoy Tears in Rain, so don’t let that deter you. (She’s never had to sit through Blade Runner? How’d she manage that???)

On USA Today’s Happy Ever After, Joyce Lamb interviewed author Ashlyn Macnamara, who talked quite a bit about fanfic, concluding Stephen King says an author needs to write a million practice words before he or she becomes proficient. I wrote some of my million words in the form of Harry Potter fan fiction. But if it hadn't been for my love of that series, I'm not sure I'd ever have given writing a shot. She also interviewed Beautiful Bastard authors Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, who started writing together in 2009, while we were still deeply in love with writing fan fiction. The collaboration we worked on was a lot of fun — it was just a short, sweet, smutty chapter, but it made us want to work together again. And, in Books, Jocelyn McClurg reviewed Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller, including Then there's the bizarre knockoff Twilight fan fiction (with a hunky Polish vampire!) sprinkled throughout the book — which turns out to have been written by the young Minka as a kind of Holocaust parable.

( More Beautiful Bastard, Bob Woodward, Betty Crocker, National Day of Unplugging, The Missing Queen )

A notice in the local edition of the Daily Herald (Utah) about the winner of the Poetry Out Loud (POL) Sanpete Regional competition included that she enjoys the literary arts and singing and spends most of her spare time reading, writing fan fiction, working on her own fiction novel, discovering new music and of course, preparing for the POL competition.

( Tom Felton, porn, the Oscars, Lauren Oliver, Sherlock Holmes, K-Pop )

Over on Daily Dot, Aja Romano wrote (among other things) There is now an iPhone app just for One Direction fanfiction; Why we (still) love The WB, the network that runs fandom; and A beginner's guide to bandom (which I need to read closely RIGHT NOW).

Finally, in The Florida Times-Union, Charlie Patton wrote about a University of North Florida creative writing class on Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. [A student] said he’s enjoying the two writing projects [teacher Will] Pewitt has assigned: one, a fantasy story or beginning of a fantasy novel done individually; the other, a work of fan fiction, set in the world of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” to be done in groups. Fan fiction is “something that George R.R. Martin doesn’t approve of,” Pewitt said. “But he’s not here.”

The publication of former Twilight fic Beautiful Bastard sparked a few refs this past week. Utah-based co-author Christina Hobbs spoke with Salt Lake Tribune’s Ben Fulton about hitting it big in fan fiction. ( More! )

In other twific news, Publishers Weekly announced Penguin's New American Library imprint has acquired a fan fiction hit by Tara Sue Me known as the Submissive Trilogy. In USA Today, Lindsay Deutsch echoed an imprint of Penguin has acquired a fan fiction trilogy called the Submissive Trilogy by Tara Sue Me. The first book, The Submissive, will be released June 4, and The Dominant and The Training will follow.

( Prison Break, Alien vs. Predator in dance, sex in YA vic, Community )

( Buffy, Adventure Time, Jane Austen, Jay-Z vs. Justin Timberlake, 50SoG at AU )

( Honest Abe, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Walking Dead, Homestuck, Star Trek )

Comedian Chris Hardwick, on Star Wars, for Wired: it didn’t matter if a creature was onscreen for four seconds—it had an action figure and was therefore in my ­Yoo-hoo-stained fingers. Having that tan­gible thing in my mitts inspired me to ask questions and fill in blanks. I learned to expand my own universe. It was personal fanfic, and it turned the stories in my head into Star Wars stories. The open world was now my sandbox, and I wanted to keep playing in it. If that meant buying every toy, well, so be it, because guess what? More stories.

Also for Wired, Ryan Tate wrote In its early days, the web helped bring together scientists in Switzerland and California. Later, it united photographers, fanfic authors, foodies, political activists, amateur filmmakers, college alumni, and other groups spread out within cities, countries, and indeed the entire world. Now the web is at last evolving to connect one of the trickiest groups of all: people who live right next door to one another.

( Harry Potter, Bieberology )

In The Rock River Times, Paula Hendrickson wrote, regarding choosing whether to watch Downton Abbey or Walking Dead in realtime, Given the success of horror-literary mash-ups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I’m sure somewhere in the world of fan fiction, Downton’s Dowager Countess is aiming her verbal daggers at zombies as we speak.

Finally, this week’s The Stream (produced by Aljazeera), on ‘The power of pulp culture: Can online fandoms drive civic participation?,’ contained numerous references to fanfic and other forms of fannish creativity.

On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, The Rocky Mountain Collegian’s Bayley Enright wrote It has spawned entire networks of fan-fiction, everything from badly written dreams of Elizabeth and Darcy’s future to published novels that re-imagine Elizabeth as a zombie slayer. And, on New Yorker’s Page-Turner, William Deresiewicz wrote The public soon forgot [Austen], but her memory was kept alive, like Bach’s, among the cognoscenti. George Eliot reread all six of her novels aloud with her lover George Henry Lewes before setting sail on “Middlemarch.” Mark Twain and Charlotte Brontë hated her; Rudyard Kipling adored her; Henry James learned more from her than he was ever willing to admit. Virginia Woolf installed her at the head of the canon of English women novelists (“the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal”). F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling certified her academic prestige. Then came the movies, and feminist criticism, and more movies, and Colin Firth, and the fan fiction, and now the ever-growing, ever-changing multi-platform media phenomenon and global icon.

tehomet clued me into an Observer piece by Leverage star Gina Bellman in which fanfic was mentioned.

( David Brin (maybe), go to bed already, Warm Bodies, Yes Minister, creative writing )

Entertainment Weekly’s Hillary Busis observed that even if a recently-announced plot development ends up causing bronies to abandon My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, they’ll have no reason to stop making fan videos, writing fan fiction, and composing MLP-inspired music.

In a Salon article about the asexuality of some of literature’s favorite sleuths, Christopher Wallace opined Above all, Holmes and Poirot were immune to the allure of sex — so powerfully repelled, in fact, that in their company we are made to view carnality as a weakness, even a sickness, leading only to blackmail, syphilis and adoptions. “[Holmes] had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women,” writes Watson, who looked on his companion’s misogyny and violin playing with equal bemusement. “He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent.” This dislike and distrust has led, over the years, to speculation that Holmes favored other players, perhaps even ol’ Watson if we are to take recent spirals of fan fiction, or Guy Ritchie’s pinhole adaptations, at all seriously.

Finally, Melissa Fich concluded a piece for the Columbia Spectator Fan fiction’s forays into the worlds of publishing and academia […] show that it is a broader cultural phenomenon that appeals to more than the fans alone.

Oakland Tribune’s Angela Hill put forth a pretty decent Fanfic 101, Fan fiction: A world where Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes could meet, and followed up with Top five most popular fan fiction genres (by which she means fandoms).

Regarding the final season of Spartacus, Boston Herald’s Mark Perigard wrote The popularity of the pairing of Agron (Daniel Feuerriegel) and Nasir (Pana Hema-Taylor) has surprised everyone associated with the show. Dedicated fans have crafted YouTube tribute videos, fan fiction and art. [Quoting executive producer and writer Steven S. DeKnight,] “We’ve had same-sex relationships before on this show, but with Agron and Nasir, I wanted to show the relationship from the very beginning to the blossoming of feelings to being together. I’m overjoyed they are not only accepted as a couple but that they have a huge fan base. I get inundated with pleas not to kill them.”

( Fangirling, College football, Rome Sweet Rome, John Green, Ask Polly )

An article by Nick McCrea for Bangor Daily News about a woman who is the subject of “an in-the-works documentary film exploring what it means to find beauty without vision” begins Michelle Smith hunches over, nose nearly touching the glowing laptop screen in front of her. With the text blown up and her eyes inches from the screen, she can make out letters well enough to catch up on her favorite online fan fiction forum, which is based on a former MTV show, “Daria.”

Over on Daily Dot, Aja Romano argued that fandom shouldn’t hide anymore and wrote about When celebrities discover fanficion… about themselves. She’s also been reviewing fanfic, including electrumqueen's I am the hero of this story (Inception), projectcyborg's Habeas Corpus (West Wing/BSG), and trinityofone’s DADT, Damyata, Dayadhvam (SGA).

Also on Daily Dot, Mike Fenn wrote about leadership changes at the Organization for Transformative Works.

Finally, Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Jensen, on an American Horror Story plot development (or lack thereof): You’ll always have fan fiction, AHS watchers.

Newcastle Herald’s Susan Wyndham wrote that self-published author Hugh Howey joins Britain's E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy went from a free fan-fiction website to become the fastest-selling book in history.

In another piece about self-publishing, this for Globe and Mail, Russell Smith wrote The Joy of Cooking, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Celestine Prophecy, Fifty Shades of Grey … these are the great flashing beacons of hope for every net-forum fan-fiction writer in the world. Of course those cases are so rare as to be statistically negligible, but hope in art is a kind of religion; it survives through irrational faith alone.

( Twilight and video games are both good for us )

From an article on CBC Books: There's also quite a buzz surrounding a Canadian author writing under the pseudonym Sylvain Reynard, whose series Gabriel's Inferno also began as Twilight-inspired fan fiction, much like Fifty Shades of Grey. The story is more distinctly Canadian, however, based around a brilliant but mysterious professor at the University of Toronto who has a passionate affair with an intelligent but conflicted grad student.

In a piece about why the internet is great, The Guardian’s Bim Adewunmi wrote 12) Fan and slash fiction. Sure we have Fifty Shades of Grey still (somehow) selling like hot cakes, but that's just one trilogy in a galaxy of fanfic stars.

KUT (Austin, Texas) reported ( If Boston ever closes down, here's why we'd move to Austin )

Finally, for the International Business Tribune, Charles Poladian wrote The idea that [William] Shatner would reach out to an astronaut currently in space is something out of fan fiction, but the Internet is full of surprises, and on Wednesday, Shatner boldly reached out on Twitter to Chris Hadfield.