What is fanfic?

[melannen]

It seems like I've seen people trying to define fanfic way more than I expected in the last couple weeks, so I put the question to you folks: How do you define "fanfiction"?

I am going to set some constraints on what must be included in your definition, though, because a lot of the working definitions I see people use silently exclude things that are definitely fanfic.

• It must include RPF. Not necessarily all fiction about real people, but while I've seen lots of people arguing about the ethics of LotRPS or Taskmaster RPF, I've never seen anyone claim it's not fanfic. So you can't exclude the RPF that's definitely part of the fanfic community.
• It must include public domain fandoms. Les Miserables fanfic is still fanfic, Dracula fanfic is still fanfic, P&P fanfic is still fanfic, Sherlock Holmes fanfic is fanfic even if it's only about the first few stories.
• It must include fanfic that isn't publicly shared. We could argue about pure drawerfic I guess, but stuff only ever shared with a few friends can still be fanfic, or you're excluding my generation's hundreds of millions of words of preteen fic written in school notebooks and only shared around the lunch table.
• (Relatedly, it can't require the existence of the internet, or participation in a larger fanfic "community" - see all that lunch table fic.)
• It must include fanfic that is only available for money. It doesn't have to include all work done for money, but zines that cost money (even if it's a little over the price of shipping and printing, as a treat), patreon fic, and commissions are still often fanfic whether you personally like it or not.
• It must include stuff done with the rights owner's/creator's explicit approval. Young Wizards fic isn't suddenly not fic just because Diane Duane likes it and got some of her copyrights back.
• It's got to include stuff that isn't shippy (and definitely isn't porn). That's a minority of all fic ever written. It also can't say anything about quality (obviously) or the presence or absence of redeeming social importance.
• It must include fanfic that doesn't use any canon characters, or you're invalidating a generation of Pern fans with their carefully separate original weyrs. It must include fanfic that doesn't use any canon settings or plot points, because setting-swap AUs exists (so do atg pwps.)
• It can't rely on legal definitions because there are no laws that unambiguously define fanfic (also stuff doesn't suddenly stop being fanfic if you cross a national border.)

Somewhat more questionable but I think yes:

• Stuff that doesn't include canon characters OR plot OR settings. This does often get the "you might as well be writing original fic!" comments but it seems like your sequel to your massive AU epic about what your OCs were doing is probably still fic.
• Stuff written for a fandom of one. There's lots of fic on AO3 where nobody else has ever made fanwork for the canon and I think it's still fanfic.
• Audio-first podfic. Surely this is still fanfic right?

So come up with a definition that includes all of that. (What else you include or exclude is I guess up to you. Or arguments in the comments.)

Comments

[silveradept]

I'm okay with basically everything being considered fanfic if that idea is being used to destigmatize the idea and otherwise normalize the idea that everyone does it (some of us just get paid to do it instead). The history of publishing and stories suggests that people were borrowing from each other all the time, and that law is really where you have to make an effort to make your borrowing distinct enough that someone might believe that Arsène Lupin's rival, Herlock Sholmes, is a different character than the consulting detective at 221B Baker Street currently starring in a different serial by another author. That science fiction and fantasy borrow more heavily and obviously from each other is a feature of the genre, and while it might make the authors bristle at their work being considered fanfic, it often is, especially if you count reaction works and takes in the fanfic category. So, if the word "fanfic" didn't have so many negative connotations, I think more creators of the genre would embrace it as a descriptor, rather than trying to hide behind "pastiche," "reaction," "commentary," and the like.

I also think that definition includes RPF, but that's because I think most of the entities that are in RPF are based on a person's public persona, as it were, or the picture a creator makes of them based on their outward actions. (Or from reading a biography of the person, which itself is telling a story and crafting characters, even if the worldbuilding in this case is supposed to be fact-checkable.) RPF is unique in that instead of the character being created by one person (or a small group of people), RPF characters are much more communally created, to the point where the community may insist on using an RPF character long after the person the character was based on has changed sufficiently that the RPF characterization no longer makes sense.

[melannen]

True, but I don't think creating a public image of yourself is unique to RPF - everybody does that to some extent. Is autobiography fanfiction, since the author is writing based on the images they perceived of other people in their lives? Is Les Miserables fanfiction because Bahorel is based on Hugo's friend Petrus Borel?

(Maybe! I'm open to an argument that all fiction is fanfiction.)

[silveradept]

Autobiographies are fanfic, like biographies are, because they have a narrative and characters and make choices about what parts of a character to include and what parts to exclude. Les Mis would be, too, since it's borrowing from the story of Boreal, although there's probably some other elements of the story that you could find antecedents of in earlier works that Hugo incorporated, consciously or otherwise.

All fiction is fanfiction, because all fiction borrows from somewhere. All non-fiction is fanfiction, too, but we hold non-fiction to a higher standard and demand they document where their ideas come from and what they're borrowing to build their stories.