Essay: why did fanfic only become lame when girls started doing it?
Essay by Lily Hayman
It’s a frustrating truth that things women enjoy are often discarded as frivolous, while the tenth instalment of the Fast and Furious franchise (infuriatingly not titled fasTEN your seatbelts) is just “popular entertainment”. While fandom and fanfiction aren’t communities exclusive to women, and all things are more intersectional than one can unpack in an article on the internet, the perception of fanfic as being for “silly young girls” is widespread.
Over the process of directing [YOUR NAME], a play that lovingly brings three of these silly young girls to life, I have been constantly reminded of the power of women’s joy. As Petra, Nadine, and Kris - the gorgeous fourteen-year-old fanfic writers of our story - find their joy despite the judgement of those around them, the world rights itself from deep chaos.
It’s a privilege to step into that space and remind myself of that feeling from when I was younger. When the real world felt unsteady, and my online world had solid ground. A place of safety where I could get to know myself better outside of the cruel judging eyes of high school. I am the creative woman I am, because of the shaping of my online community. It takes a village they say… well these days it takes the right group chat. And I’m glad I found mine.
So, with all this love and community, why do we still scoff at silly young girls and their fanfiction?
I’m not here to suggest that all fanfiction is good, but it at least has the same potential range in quality that all media does. I’ve shed tears over incredible, moving, well-written fanfictions that are the quality of a published novel. I have also read a deranged fanfiction about a giant squid having sex with the Hogwarts castle until the castle's walls shook in ecstasy and the toilets flooded as it “came”.
Fanfiction is a curious and multifaceted beast. This is because it operates through a different mechanism than the media we are most exposed to. It’s very anti-capitalist – to take these characters away from their original, money-making contexts and return them to the communities who love them. In a monopolised media landscape, fanfiction is resistance. It doesn’t follow the rules of publication that mass media does. It is truly open access, and that results in two different things.
First, it allows for a genuine diversification of stories and characters that are otherwise constrained by the rules of whatever network/publisher/author/copyright owner they belong to. Fanfiction encourages imagination within an otherwise closed creative space, giving audiences stories they otherwise couldn’t access.
Second, it cuts new writers' teeth. Countless writers started in fanfic and have now moved over into the “literary” publishing space. EK Johnstone, Meg Cabot, Cassandra Clare, Claudia Gray, and Lindsay Ellis all started in fanfic. Stephanie Meyer has spoken about how Twilight started as fanfiction before she shifted it to a novel. E.L. James then wrote a Twilight fanfiction, which was re-written as 50 Shades of Grey, which has now been adapted into a multi-million dollar film franchise. How many people were employed to work on those films, because both Stepanie Meyer and then E.L. James sat down and wrote some fanfic?
Fanfiction also has its own language, rules and categories. If you’ve never spent time on one of the key websites (fanfic.net, Ao3 or Wattpad) you wouldn’t be familiar with the rigorous terms and tagging systems that have been developed by the hosts of the online libraries. It’s like a Dewey Decimal system for fandom. You can search by genre, language, length, completion status, popularity and character. You can filter for the best work, and you can have the freedom to stumble across hidden gems.
There are AU’s (Alternative Universes) where characters are lifted out of their story and given a new world to play in. There is crack fic that is just a deranged good time (like the castle and squid fic I told you about earlier). There are networks of dedicated blogs that recommend the best fics for any given request. An ecosystem of curation, archiving and reviewing has popped up to allow fanfic to thrive in the way it has - and so the perceived poor quality of fanfic is no obstacle to a native of the fandom space.
Fandoms and fanfiction are the contemporary manifestations of the very human desire to tell stories in groups. The first fanfiction (as we have come to understand the word) was published in the 1960s in a Star Trek fan magazine called Spockanalia (hilarious). Edited and distributed by two women, it was a service to the huge community of fans that Star Trek had.
Now, in an internet age - communities of fans can come together online. These communities are diverse, unique and passionate, unbound by geographical barriers and able to rally around the stories they love. Because people like stories. And they like to talk about those stories with other people. It builds community. Fans creating a community out of their shared interest then build a canon of new stories that serve their community. It’s basic society-building stuff.
Despite all of this quasi-anthropology I’ve just thrown at you, fanfiction remains one of the lamest things anyone can do. It is a much-derided and “embarrassing” pastime. It’s associated with people who inhabit the online world more than the physical. It’s not a badge of honour to tell people how many kudos your Glee AU story got at a dinner party. Most people imagine fanfic writers as people who need to “go outside and touch grass”.
I can’t be certain, but my instinct tells me that much of that attitude is rooted in the trope of the crazed fangirl. A silly, naive, young girl who can’t appreciate real art. Who likes stupid things like rom-coms and Gossip Girl. Girls who don’t understand sex and shouldn’t try to because they’re more interesting to men when they are innocent and naive.
[YOUR NAME] is set in 2013, the year I was in year 10. So, I probably would have been friends with the three girls in our play. Even if we didn’t go to the same school - we would have found each other on Tumblr. I know that for a fact because I’m still friends with my own Petra (Emily), Kris (Lily J) and Nadine (Maddy) who I found online in a Darren Criss fan group while we were all in high school. I am constantly and lovingly reminded of my girlhood by these characters and they make me yearn for my time as a deeply committed teenage fangirl.
Our show celebrates the “silly young girls” when they are so often ridiculed. It calls out the men who dismiss and deride the things women enjoy. It’s the rewriting of our adolescence, a historical fanfic about ourselves set in an AU where we let our freak flags fly well into our twenties.
I think that much of the reason that women inhabit these online fan spaces, and write fanfiction is because many of the stories that are sold to us are often not entirely for us. For a long time, women were dismissed as an audience. After that, we were handed Fabio and Ken and left to our own devices. Fanfiction isn’t about writing ourselves into the story. It’s about writing stories we want to read. Especially a decade ago in 2013 - when on-screen queer kisses caused floods of angry letters to the studio, and older white men largely wrote young female characters, fanfiction became a place to right the wrongs in the “real” story. To take control of the narratives that were for and about us, and to be joyfully expressive while doing so.
We write fanfiction because we have found a character we love. A character who feels like our friend, and we want to spend more time with them. No studio in the world could afford to pay for the amount of production required to delve into the lives of every character in every show that has a fandom. We would likely hate it if they did because it would take away our place in the story. The gaps in any story are where we can step in. Where we can influence our new, fictional friends. Where the real magic happens.
[YOUR NAME] plays at KXT on Broadway until 29 June. Find tickets here.
Lily Hayman is one of those people who hang around in theatres in any capacity she is allowed to. She is currently working on various projects with Purple Tape Productions and Shopfront Arts, and developing a new concept for Operated Coin. When she's not doing all that, she's usually found watching football with her Dad.
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