30 Days of HP Meme -- Day 8

( Ghost of Questions Past )

Day 8. Thoughts on fanfic.

I have so many thoughts on fanfic that I can't corral them into anything coherent. I've spent so much time talking with fandom friends and reading the scholarship on fanfic and on fandom in general (which has just exploded in the last few years, omg) -- anyway, it all makes my brain ache and I can't sort out all my ideas. (I'd love someday to have an on-line discussion of the major fanfic scholarship. I argue with the critics as I read; it would be fun to argue with all of you, too /g/).

But the short version: obviously I adore it. Like many of you, I've always had a tendency to fall in love with fictional characters, to obsess about them; I don't want to let them and their world go once I've read that last page or watched that last frame. I've been writing fanfic since childhood -- I just didn't know that's what I was doing when I made up stories about the Wizard of Oz film and told them to my sister. And when I wrote my own Nancy Drew book (well, started it, anyway).

We all think we're the only ones who do these odd things, but then we find out that it's almost a universal impulse, at least among people who feel the need to tell stories. What is Ulysses anyway, except a long and often infuriating piece of fanfic? We want to rewrite the common narratives, recast them in our own images, give ourselves control over the vagaries of fate and other authors' imaginations. I like that I can make my favorite characters evil in one fic, or kill them off in another, or subject them to misery in a third, but then they can bounce back good as new in the next story, like the Coyote after the Roadrunner leads him off a cliff. (Sure, I could do this with OCs, too, but fanfic lets me be lazy in a good way: I don't have to set the stage, build the initial world; I can just go straight for the action / character / sex.)

I also like that fanfic is subversive in its own way and yet very traditional. I love the communal atmosphere of fandom, the way all our writing shapes each other's, the way we're engaged in a sort of constant creative conversation. Yet I'm also fascinated by how our communities replicate larger social and cultural paradigms: we police each other, we establish boundaries and limits and hierarchies, we create our own hegemonies that then have to be subverted in their own turns. It's all so much more complicated than it seems, and there's so much more interesting work to do in understanding it.

My own fanfic journey started in 1999. I was in the throes of an obsession with Captain Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager when I put "Kathryn Janeway" into an on-line search engine, looking for -- oh, I don't know, anything -- and stumbled onto a Janeway/Chakotay fanfic site. I vividly remember reading my first NC-17 story. I thought, "huh? I can't read this -- it's like peering through my neighbor's bedroom window." I actually closed the browser.

Then I opened it again. Within two months of that fateful day, I had read hundreds of stories, discovered hot kinks I hadn't known existed, and written -- and posted -- smut of my own.

The browser hasn't really been closed since.

( The Ghost of Questions Yet to Come )