Twist tale: in the Pandemic-era fan fiction
Writers of fan fiction are responding to the pandemic by taking their best-loved characters and imagining how they would react to the crisis. Wizards start to hoard toilet paper at Hogwarts, vampires fret over immunity, superheroes kill time by discussing their new fitness regimens
The world’s best-loved heroes and superheroes have been busy in the pandemic, and it hasn’t been in trying to save the world. Instead, Harry Potter, holed up with Draco Malfoy, has been trying not to argue over toilet paper purchases. Marvel’s Avengers, all duly masked, have been meeting at a diner to chat, kill time and discuss their new fitness regimens. Edward Cullen, the ageless vampire from the Twilight series, has been fretting over whether his child is immune.
These aren’t official story lines. They’re fan fiction posts by @Jaygwen23, @cakeisnotpie and @Zydratenote respectively, posted on archiveofourown.org (Ao3). Ao3 is both lodestar and one of the world’s largest repositories of fan fiction, a place where people who have loved a story go to retell or reshape it in their own words.
Fan fiction has historically been fuelled by people desperate for a different ending. The genres reflect this most clearly.
Fix-it or Alternate Universe fan fiction pairs characters as fans think they should have been paired or raises from the dead someone they think should have lived — Hermione ends up with Harry Potter, and a new future is imagined for Han Solo’s son Anakin in the Star Wars universe. Missing Scenes imagines turns in the plot that fans think should have happened — Sherlock may finally tell Watson he fancies him.
In 2020, fan fiction was fuelled by people desperate to re-craft their reality too. And so, in the retelling of the Terry Pratchettneil Gaiman work Good Omens by @Lilithreisender, a pandemic-era Pestilence is welcomed back by the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Meg March and John Brooke of the Louisa May Alcott classic Little Women struggle, in fan fiction by @Mercurygray, to juggle work and childcare.
Traffic has surged on fan fiction platforms too, as it has on streaming platforms around the world. In March, Ao3’s weekly page views rose from 262 million to 298 million over just two weeks. “Most fan fiction writers are trying to cheer themselves up first, and then their group of fandom friends. And if anyone beyond that likes the story, that’s wonderful,” Francesca Coppa, co-founder of Ao3 and a fan fiction scholar, told Wknd.
Genesis
You have to be a bit of a fanatic to spend hours retelling or reading retellings of iconic works of fiction, and indeed modern fan fiction can perhaps be traced to the Star Trek mania of the 1960s.
The first Star Trek fan magazine or fanzine, Spockanalia, began to be published in 1967. When the iconic TV show, which ran from 1966 to 1969, was cancelled after 79 episodes, its fans — many of them women — responded by taking the plots forward themselves, writing impassioned stories of emotion and transgression in a growing number of Trekkie fanzines.
“Many women writers felt relatively unwelcome within literary science-fiction fandom and saw Star Trek with its stronger female characters as a space they could call their own,” said Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers, an early study of fandom’s impact on popular culture. “Because what they cared about in Star Trek was often pushed to the margins, they ended up rewriting it more actively and many of today’s fan fiction genres started to emerge.”
In recent years, 2011 marked a turning point. EL James’s 50 Shades of Grey ,an erotic trilogy that started out as Twilight fan fiction, was published and became an instant bestseller.
By 2013, Forbes named James the highestpaid author in the world that year, with an estimated $95 million in earnings. It was a success story that, incidentally, was also forced to shed its identity as fan fiction - in order to evade copyright issues and be published, James removed all references to Stephenie Meyer’s vampire novels.
Today, Hollywood studios routinely draw on fan fiction for plot lines. The shift from sidelines to mainstream for fan-writers began when producers realised that it actually increased engagement with the product, says Jenkins. Mainstream publishing too makes space for them but with permission from the estate and with the necessary disclaimers.
As for the significance of fan fiction platforms, in 2019, Ao3 won a prestigious Hugo award, the highest honour for a work of science fiction, for Best Related Work -- a category that traditionally included books or essays involving critical commentary, tie-in works, or other works adjacent to speculative fiction.
The India stories
The domestic boom in fan-fiction writing online began with JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, about 15 years ago. Then writers began
retelling our own stories — everything from Amish Tripathi’s myth-inspired Immortals of Meluha books, down to takes on the saasbahu serials churned out for Hindi television by studios like Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Telefilms.
Online, one can find fan fiction from India and around the world on platforms such as Ao3, fanfiction.net, Wattpad, Tumblr, Commaful. The more popular fan fiction writers online have tens of thousands of followers, earn feedback, criticism and fans of their own.
Fansites also announce their own awards, hold conventions. “Fan love is, above everything else, the expression of a sincere desire to belong,” said Nandini Chandra, an English professor at the University of Hawaii who teaches fan fiction as part of a course on popular culture.
Fan fiction remains a slow starter in the Indian publishing market. But does it have a future?
“Mythology is rife with potential for fan fiction,” said Keshava Guha, an editor at publishing house Juggernaut, and the author of Accidental Magic, a book set against the backdrop of
Harry Potter fandom. “You could argue that India is the true and original home of ‘fanfic’. So much of our literature
— whether prose, poetry, or drama — consists of adaptations, retellings, mash-ups and critiques of classic texts. The Mahabharata and Ramayana are the most obvious examples, but there are hundreds of others as well. This is a tradition that continues in every Indian language.”