The Fan Fiction.
Who's telling this story anyway?
If the term “fan fiction” has any meaning at all then for most people it’s simply as a euphemism for “embarrassingly bad”. Same as how “genre” is a euphemism for “dumb” or “most people” is a euphemism for “me”. Were this not the case we would have no need for the patronising and equally euphemistic use of the word “elevated”, as in “Sandra Newman’s feminist retelling of 1984 is a work of elevated fan fiction” or “production company A24 are masters of elevated horror”.
“Elevated” still gets a good work out amongst reviewers, publishers and anyone else coaxing decent folk to part with their money. However it is no longer fashionable to allow the prejudice against fan fiction to derisively sweep away the entire catalogue. This is in no small part because of who is writing it. Fanfic skews female, skews gay. It is the reclaiming and repurposing of a mainstream culture that still skews straight and male. It is ironic but unsurprising that vast swathes of fanfic authors write about Harry Potter whilst hating JK Rowling, had the Queen of the Transphobes given them the literature they wanted they wouldn’t need to write it. In this fan fiction expresses the tension in mainstream culture created by its continued repression of otherness.
It’s all a question of money. Within fanfic the dividing line between the two cultures is not a quality but commerciality. True fan fiction is written from love, from a need to reshape a beloved culture that excludes you, it is not written for profit. For many authors this is an article of faith, a source of pride but for all it’s a legal necessity as the sharing of work that demonstrably infringes copyright hangs on a loophole in US law surrounding non-commercial “fair use”. Fan fiction then is a mirror which shows the opposing tensions working in commercial culture. Why are kids uneasy with the boundaries of their gender, drawn to stories about a boy written by a woman who initially masked the femininity of her name in order not to scare away sales by boy readers? Fan fiction fills a hole but why had that hole been left in the first place?
No censorship works better than self-censorship and nothing enforces this more efficiently than the invisible hand of the market. When the Lord Chamberlain banned a play for fear of its religious, political or social content the matter openly rested on his judgement. Little in our culture now is officially censored but there is work that can’t find commercial backing or that to do so gets softened or reframed. This rarely happens as a matter of personal taste, rather as a neutral reading of the opinion of the market. Those of us trying to make a living from our creativity must write what can be made, which is always what it is imagined the audience will want. This is the repression, the tension that fuels fan fiction. It’s invisible censorship, though not actually by market forces but by the perception of what they might be.
All counter cultures get co-opted in the end. If fanfic is no longer an onanistic shame to be kept in the privacy of your own room, that is only because successive artists have shown the shortcomings of second guessing the market. Most people (see earlier note) disparage “50 Shades of Grey” as poor literature but generally then forgive it because it made such a lot of money. At the time this was as a big surprise as the success of Harry Potter with “grown-up” covers, but 50 Shades, which began life as kink-positive Twilight fan fiction, merely opens up the repressed sexual tension that was already the main selling point of the source material. That millions of women wanted to read about being tied up and spanked by a millionaire wasn’t a surprise about women, it was a surprise about how narrowly the publishing industry had viewed them. Similarly, that black people would connect to a horror movie that laid out in simple terms how black people live in a horror movie is not a surprise about the audience of “Get Out”, just an inditement of a film industry that previously conceived horror movies as mainly being about the punishment of white women. The shock is not that people who aren’t white men also like to see themselves reflected in art, the shock is that those who claimed knowledge of the market so rarely saw the economic potential of the majority of the population of the planet. Squint and you’ll see that the invisible hand shares a problem with the Emperor’s new clothes.
There is a simpler argument against fan fiction though. I think for most people (see earlier note) it’s less that a story about Harry rimming Ron challenges their socially conditioned sexual boundaries, more that the author didn’t get there first. The very essence of fanfic is that it is based on something pre-existing, not just based on but a regurgitation of. Of course, in this, it is increasingly the only fiction we have.
This is the root of the snobbery towards “genre”. That horror stories or sci-fi stories or romance stories are lesser because they rely on rearranging existing tropes and clichés. However, faced with a cultural landscape waterlogged with over franchised IP, creators able to reinvigorate genres by juxtaposing old ideas in new ways stand as the innovators of the age. The same but different is wild when everything else is the same but the same.
Taking to my sick bed recently I turned to Paramount’s adaptation of the sci-fi shooting things game “Halo”. Much to my surprise the first season was unexpectedly compelling, philosophical and paranoid like “Infernal Affairs” if all the characters were Robocop. Fans of the game hated it and the original creative team were duly dispatched. Master Chief doesn’t belong to Paramount, he belongs to the gamers Paramount want paying them a monthly subscription fee. If fan fiction is the loving subversion of our cultural behemoths then the reinforcement of their rigidity for commercial gain is what is usually and more simply termed fan service.
The argument over whether an artist should write for the audience or for themselves is always reductive. The answer is always “both but to a constantly varying ratio”. In truth this is the wrong binary. The choice is actually whether fans stay as customers, turning rich imaginative worlds into expensive museums or whether the fans take authorship of the work and tell their own story. As the artist, it’s never actually about you at all.
After writing this piece I saw the brilliant new play “A Mirror” which also has ideas around censorship at its core. It’s a stunning piece of theatre powered by an amazing performance from Jonny Lee Miller and I urge you to catch it while you can.
The play’s author, Sam Holcroft, now faces a very real tragedy as her partner, Ali Muriel has stage 4 cancer. Ali is himself a uniquely gifted writer, in a play many years ago he described the sound of a single piano note as being “like a bruise”, a metaphor that haunts me every time I try and play. Sam and Ali have two young children and if their story touches you in anyway then I’d urge you to donate whatever you can to the GoFundMe that has been set up to support them by their friends. You can find it here. Thank you for whatever help you can offer.