Two Articles From The Feminist Librarian About Fanfic

[cuddyclothes]

These are two fascinating articles that are worth discussing here. These are from a blog called The Feminist Librarian. The first article mentions not writing for canons the author really loves. I find this interesting because I often don't write fic for things I love. For "Supernatural" I basically had nothing to say. I wrote crack, mostly for exchanges. One of my current obsessions, "Prodigal Son", I not only don't want to write fic for, I don't want to read fic for. I want it all contained in the the show.


Reading and Writing Fanfic As A Non-Fan

Excerpt: I was introduced to fanfiction as a genre — a genre that resonated with my own “homegrown” approach to fictional narratives (more below) — rather than coming to it through a particular fannish community. My now-wife was the one who introduced me to the language and conventions of fic, specifically slash, because she thought I would be interested in slash fiction as a form or cultural critique and also countercultural / queer erotica. I mean, it was also a wildly successful form of nerd-flirting. But I think my introduction to the activity of fanfiction as an idea rather than as a form of participation in a specific fandom continues to shape my relationship to the practice — and to fandom culture more generally.

P.S. In Fanfic Are Characters The Defining Source?

Excerpt: This is an addendum to last night’s post fueled by the conversation I had with Hanna on our walk to work (which, more often than not, constitutes gossip about fanfic).

One of the defining features of fanfic as a genre, for me, is that it is character-driven. Fic, the way I read and write it, is primarily about individual characters and their relationships (erotic or platonic) with other characters. It’s not about establishing the rules of the universe or about the suspense of the plot. It’s about asking “What would these individuals do if they were presented with X situation?” either in canon, in the canon ‘verse, or in a completely different setting (an alternate universe or AU).

Comments

[tei]

I was really interested by this from the first article:

The more I love a thing the more private I am likely to be about the pleasure I take in it. In the podcast transcript, Elizabeth and Flourish talk about the communal aspect of many iterations of fandom, and whether one can be a fan in isolation. Elizabeth describes these people as, “the books they loved as children, they never wanted to share them.” THIS WAS ME. I mean, I would recommend books I liked to friends and all that, but I was disinclined to talk about them much outside of an extremely small group of people basically constituted by my siblings and a couple of intimate, trusted friends. This is still my pattern today. The more deeply something touches me, the less likely (in general) I am to wish that pleasure could be a collective one.

I identify really heavily with that urge— that my fannish impulse is, for better or for worse, “this is mine and you can’t have it, like it or ideally even think about it” and not “I love this so much I need to share it/talk about it with other people.” But that has driven me in a completely different direction from that author— for me, fanfiction feels like kind of a response to the fact that, well, you can’t hoard your favourite stuff like that, other people are going to like it whether you want them to or not— so what do I do? I impose my vision of the thing on other people by writing fanfic. This is obviously a pretty uncharitable-sounding explanation of the motivation behind my writing, and I don’t really mean it in a bad way, but— fiction is a very sneaky way of pulling people around to your point of view. There’s no direct way of refuting a piece of fiction, you can say you think it’s OOC, but you can’t really say it’s wrong, so writing (if you can do it well enough that people want to read your stuff and voluntarily adopt your point of view for the purposes of extracting enjoyment from the story) can be a kind of power play, a statement of ownership.

I think this is also why, as both a reader and writer, I enjoy fanfiction so much more than meta. I actually actively avoid fan-produced meta about stuff I care about, because my reaction to the vast majority of it is “fuck you, don’t tell me what to think!” Whereas if the same person had produced a piece of fanfiction advancing exactly the same opinions as were contained in the meta, but through the lens of a character study… it would feel OK to adopt their point of view and agree with it.

IDK if this necessarily reflects WELL on me, but hey 🤷🏻‍♀️

[yourlibrarian]

stuff I’m in love with it usually feels like it has too strong a presence of its own for me to transform through my own voice

This seems borne out by what I've seen, which is that well written canons generally don't have much fanfic written about them -- they may get other works such as fanart or meta or videos, but much less fanfic than might be expected for their level of popularity. Besides the difficulty of matching the canon level, these works also tend to have fewer gaps which fan writers can build out or derail the canon by going in another direction.

[kittywhite]

Agree on the character focus for writing fic, especially for fandoms where the source material tends not to get very introspective. I’ve been in a lot of male dominated fandoms over the years (UC Gundam, Initial D, Street Fighter etc) and the canon focus is always on plot progression or just to give a reason for characters to be in the same place to interact. This then for me tends to gloss over some serious issues e.g what is it like to be raised as a child soldier or to have your immediate family wiped out in quick succession? So I’m then more motivated to seek out fanfics that address these issues.