When Harry Potter met Sally
Fanfiction’s the new craze, but is that good?
Are you a fan of Downton Abbey ?Then you might enjoy As Time Goes By, by “Willa Dedalus,” which imagines what might happen if the first kiss between Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary had continued. “He moved the silk up her legs then gasped in astonishment at what he found … ‘You’re not wearing panties.’”
Maybe you also love Doctor Who. Perhaps you’d like to read The Madman and the Rebel, about what could have happened if the Doctor visited Downton and met the rebellious Lady Sibyl (“Sibyl Persephone Crawley, I’m the doctor.”
“Pardon me, sir, but doctor who?”).
But then you also might enjoy The Lion, the Doctor and the Cybermen when the Timelord visits Narnia. C.S. Lewis devotees can discover 11,000-plus other Narnia stories on fanfiction. net, such as Heir Apparent by “Queen of Old,” where “Susan is brought back to Narnia because Caspian’s throne is on the line unless he finds an appropriate queen and sires an heir. Boinking [sic] ensues.”
Welcome to the world of fan-fiction — fanfic to the initiated — where characters from favourite books, films and television programs — not to mention real celebrities — embark on (frequently X-rated) adventures their creators likely never imagined.
Fanfic has existed in some form virtually ever since creative writing began: take Virgil’s use of a minor character from the Iliad as the Aeneid’s protagonist. But in the past 20 years, since the inception of the World Wide Web, it’s become a phenomenon, with millions of stories.
Most fanfic takes its inspiration from the most enduring (regardless of literary or critical merit) canons: Harry Potter (fanfiction.net boasts 686,000 Potter stories alone), Twilight (of which much more later), Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, The X-Files and Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But there’s fanfic for virtually anything — Emmerdale, The Sound of Music and Katie Price’s Perfect Ponies.
Then there’s the burgeoning, but highly controversial area of real-people fiction (RPF), in which actual people like Stephen Fry and Brian Cox are portrayed as lovers, while the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev becomes a misunderstood outsider.
Despite its vastness, the subculture remained below most people’s radars until two years ago when it spawned the bestselling book of all time, Fifty Shades of Grey. A sado-masochistic homage to the already bestselling (but chaste) Twilight series, this trilogy by west London mother E.L. James had been available to read free online for a couple of years, under the title Masters of the Universe by “Snowqueens Icedragon.”
In print, having “filed off the serial numbers” — fanfic parlance for removing traces of the original inspiration — they went on to sell 100 million copies and counting; a film is in production.
Publishers and agents began scanning the fanfic boards for the next megahits. Several other Twilight-inspired erotic novels, like Gabriel’s Inferno and Beautiful B––, were quickly snapped up for figure sums and republished as “original fiction.”
Recently, 25-year-old Anna Todd from Texas sold the rights to her trilogy After for six figures to Simon and Schuster. It’s the story of Tessa, an innocent teenager who falls in with a crowd of college boys who — in their original “free-to-read” incarnation on the increasingly popular fanfic app Wattpad — are called Niall (character: carefree), Liam (serious), Zayn (shy) and Louis (joker). But it’s “rude boy” Harry, the handsome outsider, who somewhat unconvincingly also loves Jane Austen, whom she falls for. Parents of teenage girls will immediately recognize the boys as the world’s biggest boy band One Direction.
To date, Todd’s 293 chapters chronicling Tessa and Harry’s on/off courtship, introduced with a warning of “detailed sexual scenes,” “tons of explicit language” and “loads and loads of typos” (not to mention a heavy debt to Twilight again), has attracted 800 million hits and an estimated one million regular readers — 85 per cent of whom read via mobile devices like phones.
Publishers are rubbing their hands at the prospect of a seemingly guaranteed bestseller. But far from everyone is happy.
“Profiting from fanfic is a divisive area,” says Anne Jamison, author of Fic: Why FanFiction is Taking Over the World. “Some in the community think it’s great fanfic is coming into its own. But to many it’s absolute anathema to profit from what’s supposed to be an act of love.”