Fanfiction

Genre of writing, often published and shared in online communities, where fans create new stories based on characters, settings, or plots from existing works
Sarah Schnitzler 2025-11-04

Explication

Fanfiction writing is commonly considered an expression of transformative fandom as opposed to “affirmative” fandom (Hills). While affirmative fandom activities only seek to confirm and echo the world as laid out by the author, fans may also choose to transform the source material through making art, reproducing and adjusting costumes, creating fake social media channels for individual characters, or in a myriad of other ways (see Busse “Geek Hierarchies”, Zygutis, Correa-Chávez).

Historically, the beginning of fanfiction as a practice is thought to have evolved from the formation of media fandoms, which in turn were heavily influenced by and closely connected to US American science fiction fandoms in the 1960s (Coppa). Often centred on or fuelled by relationships between characters, both platonic and not (Coppa, Jenkins Textual Poachers), transformative engagement with a source may include, but is not limited to, reworkings of characters, settings, elements or the entirety of the original plot, or genre. Through its transformative approach to a source text, fanfiction by definition interacts with and reworks concepts of authorship, creative hierarchies, and authorial intent, thus reflecting and playing out conflicting aspects of authorship inherent in all sorts of creative endeavours (Busse 20).

As a result, the academic study of fanfiction has given rise to new avenues of thinking about creative writing, such as Derecho’s understanding of fanfiction as not only antihierarchical, but more specifically archontic. Leaning on “Derrida’s understanding of archives as ever expanding and never completely closed” (61), she proposes an approach to fanfiction which understands any new story as a contribution to an archive with a constant “tendency toward enlargement and accretion” (64). Unlike the concept of intertextuality, she defines archontic literature as a form free from notions of hierarchy and property rights and comparative merits, “works which generate variations that explicitly announce themselves as variations” (65).

Partially by necessity, fanfiction cannot exist within a conventional capitalist system for fear of legal consequences over the ownership of creative rights. From this unique positioning result, not only elements of the landscape such as disclaimers (Busse and Hellekson), a rejection of the monetisation of fanfiction-adjacent creative efforts (Jones, Buchsbaum), and a general tendency of fanzines (where fanfiction as a fan activity began) to be sold at a loss (Jones), but also a general understanding of fanfiction to be functioning on a gift economy (Hellekson). Positioned as a female-coded opposition to a capitalist system centred around monetary value, the gift economy frames the exchange of creative fan labour in all its forms as constitutive of the social networks and larger metatext of fan communities (Hellekson). Consequently, while fannish meaning-making doubtlessly stands in connection with the individual involved in its construction (Jenkins 34), the contexts in which it is shared, received, and reacted to are inherently social, communal, and collaborative. In other words, fanfiction, while without specific value outside of a fannish system, is created, shared, gifted and exchanged as part of a networked community creatively engaging with one or multiple source(s). Since such collaborations have, in general, become easier in the digital age, this key characteristic of fanfiction as a social medium has been additionally facilitated by its transformation into a predominantly digital narrative format.

In conjunction with the predominance of female fans in transformative fan spaces (centreoftheselights, Rouse and Stanfill, Hellekson), fanfiction’s non-commercial, antihierarchical, transformative nature has been argued to make the medium uniquely suitable to the exploration of topics of inclusivity and diversity, as well as to the development of democratic modes of engagement (Jenkins “Rethinking”, Derecho, Stanfill). Media fandom, and with it, the writing, receiving and exchanging of fanfiction, is thus viewed not only a female, but specifically a feminist activity (Busse 34–36; Hellekson). Values considered to be inherent to fannish activities – such as the centering of marginalised voices and themes – thus play a notable role in how both scholarship and fans themselves view transformative fandom.

With the introduction of the internet, media fandom, alongside fan fiction spaces, has moved to and across different online platforms (Coppa). One dominant factor in such platform migrations has always been a search for safety from censorship and discriminatory content moderation practices, a desideratum which the founding of the fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own aimed to address (astolat, Lothian, Fiesler and Dym). The archive, conceptualised as a fan-run non-profit and situated in the broader context of the Organization for Transformative Works, is both manifestation and continuous (re-)creation of common fanfiction principles, such as gift giving, exchanges and paratexts, but also more abstract values like tolerance and diversity (Lothian and Stanfill). As part of this paratext, the archive allows readers to filter stories through a variety of tags. Not only may a reader thus look for or avoid specific plots, tropes or themes, authors may comment on and situate their stories within an extensive metatext (Leavenworth). On the flip side, the Archive of Our Own lacks a filter for racist content, whereas erotic content featuring underage characters, rape or graphic descriptions of violence may be filtered out via the platform’s standardised warning categories. Despite the understanding of fandoms to be inherently predisposed to progressive ideologies, racism and discrimination may be found in many of its community structures (Lothian and Stanfill; for further reading see Pande).

See Also

• Intertextuality - Relationship between texts, where a text references, alludes to, or is influenced by another text, enriching the reader's understanding and interpretation
• Participatory Narrative - Form of storytelling that actively involves the audience in the creation or progression of the narrative, often facilitated by digital platforms that enable collaboration and interaction
• Platformization - Increasing influence of digital platforms in organizing social, economic, and cultural activities, shaping how digital narratives are created, distributed, and consumed

Works Referenced

astolat. “An Archive of One’s Own.” astolat’s livejournal, LiveJournal, 17 May 2007, astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html. Accessed 17 Feb. 2025.

Buchsbaum, Shira Belén. “Binding Fan Fiction and Reexamining Book Production Models.” Fandom Histories, edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby Waysdorf. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37, 2022, doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2129. Accessed 17 Feb. 2025.

Busse, Kristina. “Geek Hierarchies, Boundary Policing, and the Gendering of the Good Fan.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2013, pp. 73–91.

--- “The Return of the Author: Ethos and Identity Politics.” Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities, University of Iowa Press, 2017, pp. 19–38.

Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson. “Introduction: Work in Progress.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, McFarland, 2006, pp. 5–32.

centreoftheselights. “Survey Results: Demographics.” Archive of Our Own, Organization for Transformative Works, 2024, archiveofourown.org/works/54011047/chapters/137740564#workskin. Accessed 17 Feb. 2025.

Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, McFarland, 2006, pp. 41–59.

Correa-Chávez, Marviela, Danielle Kohlfeldt, and John Nguyen. “Women in Fandom: Participation Patterns and Perceived Authenticity.” Psychology in Popular Media, 2023, pp. 1–5.

Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, McFarland, 2006, pp. 61–78.

Fiesler, Casey, and Brianna Dym. “Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 4, no. CSCW1, 2020, article 42.

Hellekson, Karen. “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture.” Cinema Journal, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, pp. 113–18.

Hills, Matt. “From Dalek half balls to Daft Punk helmets: Mimetic Fandom and the Crafting of Replicas.” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 16, 2014, doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0531. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Jenkins, Henry. “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture.’” Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 2014, pp. 267–97.

---. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 1992.

Jones, Bethan. “Fifty Shades of Exploitation: Fan Labor and Fifty Shades of Grey.” Fandom and/as Labor, edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15, 2014, doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0501. Accessed 17 Feb. 2025.

Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren. “The Paratext of Fan Fiction.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 1, 2015, pp. 40–60.

Lothian, Alexis. “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 6, 2013, pp. 541–56.

Lothian, Alexis, and Mel Stanfill. “An Archive of Whose Own? White Feminism and Racial Justice in Fan Fiction’s Digital Infrastructure.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6, 2021, doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2119. Accessed 28 Jan. 2025.

Pande, Rukmini. “‘Get out of here you anti’: Historizing the Operation of Structural Racism in Media Fandom.” Feminist Media Histories, vol. 10, no. 1, 2024, pp. 107–30.

Rouse, Lauren, and Mel Stanfill. “Over_Flow: Fan Demographics on Archive of Our Own.” *FLOW: A Critical Forum of Media and Culture_, 22 Feb. 2023, flowjournal.org/2023/02/fan-demographics-on-ao3. Accessed 18 Feb. 2025.

Stanfill, Mel. “Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary.” Television & New Media, vol. 21, no. 2, 2020, pp. 123–34.

Zygutis, Linda. “Affirmational Canons and Transformative Literature: Notes on Teaching with Fandom.” Fan Studies Pedagogies, edited by Paul Booth and Regina Young Lee, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 35, 2021. https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1917/2693. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Further Reading

Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of the Popular Myth. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson, editors. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. McFarland, 2006.

Click, Melissa A., editor. Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age. Postmillenial Pop, vol. 24, New York University Press, 2019.

Coppa, Francesca. “Fuck Yeah, Fandom is Beautiful.” Journal of Fandom Studies, Intellect Limited, vol. 2, no. 1, 2014, pp. 73–82.

Hellekson, Karen. “Making Use Of: The Gift, Commerce, and Fans.” Cinema Journal, vol. 54, no. 3, 2015, pp. 125–31.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006.

Mueller, Hannah. The Politics of Fandom: Conflicts that Divide Communities. McFarland, 2022.

Pande, Rukmini, editor. Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices. University of Iowa Press, 2020.

TWC Editor. “What Is an Anti? Exploring a Key Term and Contemporary Debates.” Fandom History, special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37, edited by Philipp Dominik Kiel and Abby S. Waysdorf, 2022, doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2277. Accessed 18 Feb. 2025.

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