Hando: A brief history of Star Wars fanfic and a universe’s beloved, queer ’ship
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Hando: A brief history of Star Wars fanfic and a universe’s beloved, queer ’ship |
| Commentator: | Julia Alexander |
| Date(s): | May 24, 2018 |
| Venue: | online |
| Fandom: | Star Wars |
| External Links: | Hando: A brief history of Star Wars fanfic and a universe’s beloved, queer ’ship, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Hando: A brief history of Star Wars fanfic and a universe’s beloved, queer ’ship is a 2018 article by Julia Alexander for "Polygon."
It was published hours before the new Han Solo movie premiered.
Some Topics Discussed
- Open Letters to Star Wars Zine Publishers (1981) and early attempts by George Lucas and Lucasfilm to control fanworks
- the Han/Lando story What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor? and extensive comments by its authors, Halrloprillalar and Laura Shapiro, one of the earliest published stories chronicling the duo’s ‘ship
- Star Wars fanworks
- the purges of content from Fanfiction.net
- Tumblr fandom: balkanization, making like-minded people easier to find, the interpersonal challenges, the difficulty in archiving or finding things, and the fan-policing of content and purity control
- Tumblr, Fanfiction.net, Usenet, mailing lists, other platforms fans use/used and how they affected communication and content
- the characters Lando Calrissian and Han Solo
- some quotes by acafan, Anne Jamison
- the Huffington Post article The Book Burning That Wasn't: Thousands of Works of Fiction Destroyed and No One Pays Attention
- Archive of Our Own and how many fans now need to market their fic using a "SEO for fanworks"
- shipping and ship wars
- Harry Potter fandom
- The Ray Wars
- the zine series Elusive Lover
Excerpts
Laura Shapiro started writing fan fiction at the age of 14. Her first work was a Rocky Horror Picture Show prequel, though she says her fan fiction career only really began in the mid-1990s with the emergence of a an essential show: The X-Files. Shapiro told Polygon that her rediscovery of fan fiction “on the nascent web in 1994” helped to remind her why she was interested in the community to begin with all those years ago.
“What I loved was finding a community of women who were as invested in the erotic and romantic lives of fictional characters as I was, and especially how eroticism could be a prism through which you could view a character, to reveal all their different colors in a new way,” Shapiro said.
Hal shares a similar story. They began writing fan fiction in 1997 thanks to The X-Files, too, and always felt a strong desire to write about the “rarer pairs,” their way of describing ‘ships that are less intended by the creators or obvious to the viewer. Hal said part of the reason they got involved writing fan fiction in the first place is because they “wanted to participate in the community and that’s what people did.”
“I’ve almost always been focused on rarer pairs; they’re just more interesting to explore. I’ve been writing since then,” they said, “so over 20 years now.”
Twenty years also allow for big changes. The fan fiction community is still active, and while Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction.net are still important, there’s more instantaneous fic spreading through Tumblr and Twitter than ever before. Communities moved from AIM and Usenet to Discord and Slack. The internet progressed and, with it, communities evolved. They found new websites to flock to, new characters to obsess over and new ways to communicate.
Suddenly the email lists of yesterday seemed archaic, and Tumblr followings became the only metric that mattered.
“There are aspects that will always be the same but in my experience, the move towards a central archive like AO3 and social platforms where it’s harder to have an in-depth conversation (Tumblr, Twitter), as well as generational changes and social media generally have caused a shift to a more consumer culture for fanworks,” Hal said. “On Usenet, mailing lists, and LiveJournal, the conversations and the fanworks happened in the same space and, for me, fanwork was about interacting with the community. Now, my fanwork is more about interacting with the canon — although I still interact with the community in social spaces.”
Essentially, the more popular fan fiction becomes, the more competitive the sphere gets.
The fan fiction community is intimidating. Authors who made their mark on a community years ago understand the lay of the land, but new authors are coming to sites like FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own every single day. Anne Jamison, an English professor at the University of Utah and the foremost expert on fan fiction, credits Harry Potter for fan fiction’s mainstream appeal.
“There were so many people growing up reading and writing fanfic, and so many of those people grew up to become writers,” Jamison told Polygon. “It just became this critical mass. They didn’t see it as this shameful thing.”
Harry Potter helped usher in a new generation of fan fiction writers, and were given more freedom than earlier communities, like Star Wars fans, who were trying to publish their work under the constant threat of Lucasfilm dropping a guillotine on their head. It was Tumblr, however, that Jamison credits-in-part to fan fiction’s newfound culture.
“Tumblr has changed fan fiction culture so much,” Jamison said. “It’s all together, it’s not just on an archive. If you’re not there when it happens, it’s not easy to just find stuff on Tumblr from the past. And because Tumblr has so much personal history attached to these authors, who are really putting themselves out there and being vulnerable, it’s difficult to write or talk about. The sort of interpersonal attacks have gotten really bad.”
“You’re talking to someone who survived the Ray Wars in Due South fandom,” Shapiro said. “I could tell you stories that would curl your hair! I think it’s hilarious and also rather sad that people can’t just let people enjoy what they enjoy. I am all for critiques and for social justice advocacy within fandom, and have gotten my rage on in that context from time to time, but arguing about who’s fucking whom? Why?”
Jamison, who spoke to people about Harry Potter ‘shipping, and the wars between different communities, admits it’s difficult to hear anecdotes about facing harassment from fans just because of stories they want to read or write.
“I literally went into a depression and I can’t believe people are so awful to each other,” Jamison said.
Sometimes, the best way to avoid the wars that spring from fan fiction — especially as Solo’s release dawns and people find inspiration for new stories — is to avoid those conversations and arguments altogether. That’s what Hal does.
“These days, especially, I don’t venture out much into Tumblr or Twitter tags (I’ve almost stopped using tumblr completely),” Hal said. “I just chat with people already in my circle or people who have actually engaged with me. I honestly don’t understand the shipwar mindset; why would I care who you ship? If I ship a pairing, it means I want to think about and write about them being together, that’s what makes me happy. I can’t pick who I’m going to ship, it’s like a crush, it just happens. But ‘ship’ also gets used to mean ‘support and/or find realistic.’
“People say, ‘Why don’t you ship the canon pairing?’ and I feel like there’s more negativity there; this assumption that if you ship a pairing, you’re implicitly approving it as desirable and healthy.”