In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

188 Fan Fiction Karen Hellekson It is safe to say that the idea behind fan fiction, a literature based on or fi derived from another text, has been around as long as texts have: no sooner has a text been created than someone riffs on it, be it Chaucer borrowing from Italian poems, Shakespeare ff ff rewriting historical stories, Alice Randall paralleling the events of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) from another point of view in d The Wind Done Gone (2001), or e a teenager crafting fan comics about the Star Trek rebooted film to release online. Al- fi though plenty of professional writers have published derivative literature, the term fan fiction connotes amateur text creation, usually performed within the context of a community formed around a media property, one that need not be narrative. In addition to writing stories and novels, fans may write and perform new fandom-specific lyrics to fi well-known songs (a practice known as filking fi ); they may create web comics, avatars, or manipulated images; they may role-play; they may craft collaborative narratives via blogs or microblogging sites such as Twitter, perhaps writing from the point of view of a character ; they may record their stories as podfic; and they may create videos, with montages fi from a source text set to music, telling a new story (see avatars, blogs, collaborative narrative, role-playing games, Twitter, Tumblr, and microblogging, web comics). Often these activities occur within the context of a community, creating dense interassociations of text and response. Sometimes these associations are solicited, rather than unfolding organically. Fans may enjoy writing under constraint, where they write to a prompt or a challenge (see writing under constraint). Henry Jenkins famously related fan texts to poaching. Following the work of Michel de Certeau, Jenkins “proposes an alternative conception of fans as readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests. . . . Fans ff ff construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass cul- fl ture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media” (1992, 23). This places fans in opposition to the producers, whom fans call “The Powers That Be”—the creators of the media texts, particularly television and film, that fan works fi are written around, in part because fans are usually powerless to alter the trajectory of the media text. Rather than passively consume, however, fans engage with the text in ways that create meaning for them as individuals and as a collective. By creating and disseminating texts, fans generate complex readings of the source text which reflect con- fl cerns often not dealt with by the media source. F 189 Fan Fiction These fan concerns vary widely. Marginalized characters are one such concern: in fan fiction, Uhura in the classic fi Star Trek can star in her own stories, perhaps exploring her backstory, gender, and race in an active, rather than passive, mode. Minor characters may also be used to provide a different and parallel perspective on canonical events. Fans ff ff may want to fill in perceived gaps in the source text, resulting in story fi fi xes and episode fi tags, where insufficient narratives are completed. Crossover stories may link together ffi two separate fandoms, with the characters of both media sources interacting. Alternate universe stories, or AUs, throw characters into a totally different milieu: they may be ff ff tossed into the Wild West or into the world of the X-Men. Crossovers and AUs fundamentally address the nature of the characters. The author transcends the original source’s setting by placing a character in an unfamiliar environment and deciding how he or she reacts, thus illuminating some aspect of the character that the author posits as essential. Some genres revolve around the body: genderswaps and bodyswaps are just what the names describe, and in mpreg stories, a man gets pregnant. These stories address the embodied nature of subjectivity, and they often deal with concerns such as sex, pregnancy, motherhood, and constructions of gender identity. The genre of the Mary Sue similarly deals with subjectivity: in this often-derided genre, an impossibly beautiful original character , an avatar of the author herself, inserts herself into the narrative and saves the day. Finally, two genres deal with cause and effect: futurefi ff ff c pushes the characters forward fi into the future, and in deathfic a major character dies, leading to repercussions on the fi part of those left behind. Fans write much fiction about romantic pairings—indeed, the presence...

Share