It’s funny. The more I read ‘original’ romance fiction, the more I realize that I’ve been terribly, horribly, brutally spoiled by fanfiction.
Why is that? How does it happen? How do these things get published…
Just to add – there was a time when I obsessively devoured commercial romance fiction. For years. And then I discovered fanfiction, and I haven’t bought a commercial romance novel since. Every now and then, I get a bit of nostalgia for my very favorite commercial romance novels – the best of the best, honestly – and I’ll reread them. And today, I find them virtually unreadable, because fanfic quality is so much higher.
I would love it if you would expound (here or on DW/LJ) about the ways in which fanfic does what commercial romance does, only better. I can’t do it because I never was a fan of commercial romance.
Well, totally off the top of my head:
1. Quality of writing – this isn’t just true of commercial romances, I’ve seen it a lot in popular general fiction. Decent fanfic has more sophisticated writing. I mean, decent to great fanfic writes on a higher reading level than most popular fiction. The sentence structure, the vocabulary – it’s more sophisticated. I really can’t overstate this: Fanfic – if it’s decent to great – is more sophisticated in terms of writing technique than popular romance, and much (in my experience) general popular fiction.
2. Gender – I stopped reading romance novels maybe 10-15 years ago, so I can’t comment on the most recent ones. As of the time I stopped reading, though, sexist gender roles were still quite rampant. Certainly it had improved – seriously, if no one’s done it yet, there’s so much to be mined just comparing the gender roles in romance fiction from the 70s as compared to the 2000s – but still, even with the most “modern” heroines, it was still expected that the hero would be stronger, more aggressive, more protective in a way that really grates when I compare to fanfic.
3. Woobies and reader identification – Fanfic is filled with “woobie” characters – the abused character who is clearly supposed to be the reader-identifier. The partner then swoops in as a savior, who expresses the appropriate level of sympathy for the woobie’s plight. In profic, for a heterosexual romance marketed at women, the woman was meant to be the reader-identified character – but the man was the woobie. Not in any way fanfic writers would identify, but very often (not always, but often) the man would be the one who had suffered trauma and the woman would be in the role of healer. She often had trauma of her own – Cinderella style, maybe she was poor and unpopular – but still, she was cast as the only one who could heal the man’s wounds. This is fundamentally different from fanfic. Though I don’t want to overstate – especially in the more modern romances, someone got a clue and started giving more of a tragic backstory to the woman.
4. More complex stories/characterization. To be fair, fanfic has a leg up – it has all that canon to draw on. Still, for the best fanfic, this was routinely the case, even for AUs, that drew minimally from canon.
5. Point of view – the earliest romances (again, has anyone written a thesis on this?) are entirely from the woman’s point of view. The man is a domineering mystery, and all of his seemingly-abusive actions are revealed to come from love/jealousy at the very end. Only in more recent romances has the male POV – and in particular, his love for the heroine – been revealed as the story goes. Fanfic is much more free in terms of who’s POV is displayed, including the ongoing affection of the non-reader-identifier.
6. Competence. In the best fics, the main characters are both very competent – and the reader-identifier often has many occasions to demonstrate his/her competence to the partner. In romances, the woman character was rarely (when I was reading) allowed to be that competent. Sometimes she had a particular sphere of expertise that kicked off the story – the hero needed someone to identify a forged painting, for example – but other than the specific task assigned, her competence didn’t usually advance the plot. (Most of the romances that I can remember where she had more of a role were historical romances – so she could be put back in her place in other aspects of the narrative). In fic, by contrast, the reader-identified character will discover and cast the critical spell, or write the crucial computer program, evade the security system, or otherwise display a competence that particularly is important to the plot, as well as saving the partner. Often while surviving torture.
Anyhoo, that’s off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s more…
When I first discovered fanfic and how damn good it was (and it’s better now than it was then), and that it was by women for women, I naively thought that given enough time the mainstream would recognise it as a serious literary movement and value it.
Then I lost some of my naivete and learned more about intersectional feminism, and realised that as with so many things, the entrenched kiriarchy benefits in denigrating particular works by particular communities: Young Adult literature (unless by exceptional men), Romance (unless by exceptional men), fan works (unless by exceptional men). It even explains the scorn of the genres, like SF, in the Literary Reputation Stakes – the more useful and popular a genre of literature has the potential to be for the common reader, the less respectable it is. SF/F/H all really kicked off in the pulps, which was the internet of its day.
Basically, literary reputation is all about elevating the rarified (male) Educated Man. Fanfiction will never achieve respectability with them as long as our current power structures are in place, and neither will any of those other genres.
But the big take away for me is that I no longer care. To get that kind of respectability, I’d have to endorse that power structure, and as an intersectional feminist, I don’t.
I’ve also come to realise that fan fiction doesn’t stand alone. Fan works all go together as a metatext and inform each other, and the debates they have and the tropes they explore are not clear if you don’t know that wider history. And that is another thing the mainstream would resist, and not want to acknowledge, if it ever came to it. The mainstream is still wed to the idea of individual genius that is not influenced and educated by contemporaries, but rather inspired.
What I do think we could potentially do more of ourselves is to honour our stars, without waiting for external endorsement. It’s not a big part of fan culture to do that kind of thing, as we individually still bring a lot of baggage with us when we find fandom, related to our experiences of exclusion. That plays out in a lot of ways, but one of them is we’re not great at formalising our informal methods of showing appreciation. It’s one of the things that makes discovering our history difficult, because it tends to exist in individual rec lists rather than a… I hate the notion of a “canon” actually, but the thing is we do have one already, in a loose consensus kind of way. I think it would be awesome if we could formalise that sense of consensus, as opposed to having a panel of Learned Mainstream Experts labeling our works canon. They will get it wrong!
Because if the mainstream ever did deign to recognise fan fiction as a worthy new branch of literature, they’d isolate works and turn them into the Inspirational Story of the Writer Who Made Good, or else take the museum approach of the Interesting Native Artifact. That’s the first thing that would happen. And I’d much rather we’d already invented our own ways to honour our stars, and the works that have helped form us, and their influence on our shared history, and the networked patterns of our culture.
We’ve made a good start with things like Fanlore and the AO3, but we don’t have easy-to-access reading/watching lists for beginners – that’s what awards lists are for pro writers, along with things like library lists of “If you liked X, then try…”. I think we could do something like that, but better. Put it in place and establish it so well that when the mainstream finally wakes up (and it will be soon, because they see dollars now, when they look at us), it’s already so well established that they just go along with it.
I would really like to see us have that control over our own stuff. The mainstream don’t deserve to name us and rate us, and they can’t be trusted to.
I agree with all of this, and would add only that fanfiction is natural to humans across the board. I’ve never met anyone who fell in love with a story and didn’t remake it in a way they like better. If someone isn’t interacting with your story by mentally tinkering with it (“but what if she…?” “no, he should have known better than to go into the basement!”) then your reader is not engaged and that’s a sign your story stinks.
Reader interaction to the point of fanfiction is the sign of a roaringly healthy story. Readers are engaged so much that they want to play with the toys too. And that, my friends, is exactly what a writer wants.
This is literally how we make culture. I know this is not something people say much, but it’s true: Culture-making is not exclusive to those who are paid for their work; it is a natural human behaviour.
Speaking only for the Anglosphere (since that’s where my expertise lies), I can say with confidence that the great touchstones of my culture are often the result of what we would now call fanfic. Robin Hood, and King Arthur, to name a two, are colossal cultural touchstones built not by corporations or lone geniuses, but by groups of people. Some of these people synthesized threads of story into the canon that we have today (Parzifal, for example) but the fact that those are the canon texts makes exactly zero bearing on anything at all, except the study of those texts and the context in which they were written. To put it another way, the “true” King Arthur story isn’t “Death of Arthur” and more than it is “Once and Future King”. They are of equal weight in the culture.
Fanfiction has always existed. Once upon a time it was just story telling. Then something happened and frankly I’m not clear what (I suspect maybe the professionalization of story making might have been what did it, and certainly our copyright laws contribute to it) but I’ll tell you this for free: The way the literary landscape is organized right now in the Anglosphere is completely bonkers.
I think the difference between fanfic and commercial fic is that fanfic acknowledges its predecessors and because of that it cannot legally be sold. Meanwhile commercial fiction steals from a out-of-copyright sources (see for example 13th Warrior, or, as I like to call it, Beowulf with the Serial Numbers Filed Off) or from a large number of sources (see basically everything that came after Tolkienmania except Mervyn Peake) and then kicks leaves over the evidence. The latter can be legally is sold.
As far as I’m aware, in academia, plagiarism is using other people’s ideas without attribution. In fiction, as far as I’m aware, it’s using people’s words without attribution. I’m unclear on why there’s this distinction, and I suspect it’s because the literary world would collapse like a dying star under the weight of footnotes if we were obligated to source the things we use.
(Incidentally, I think it was Terry Pratchett who said something to the effect of, when you write you put all the things you’ve been reading into a blender and hope you’ve blended it long enough.)
What I’m saying in an incredibly long-winded way is, people who sneer about fanfiction boggle my mind. All fiction is fanfiction.
I love this. I love this so much.
I’m one of those people who is deeply closeted about fandom. Maybe 2-3 people in my life know that I’m involved in fandom, even though it’s been a big part of my life and hobbies for about 20 years now, even though I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about other people’s characters.
I can’t even imagine telling most of my friends that I write fan fiction. It’s terrifying. I’d feel like I was tarred by some awful, unfathomable nerd brush – and not the fun, trendy kind of nerd, but one of the ones that’s still a punchline. I like reading this kind of meta because it lets me feel otherwise about what I love to do.
Stardust and Sinew 