Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2019: Week 38

Responsefic (another term is "creative response") is a fanwork created in part as a method of conversation, or argumentation, sparked from the creation of someone else's fanwork, or an entire trend of fanwork. Sometimes the line is very blurry between casually sharing someone's universe, a trend in fandom where a number of stories seem to share traits (see: fanon), and a story that is specially responding to another fanwork.

The odds that a fanwork would be given the label responsefic seem to be higher if the response appears to be negative. Sometimes those stories are also called rebuttals.

A 2008 conversation about the term responsefic showed that while some fans could think of examples of it, most weren't familiar with the specific term.

Responsefic created in response to a specific fanwork could be considered a type of recursive fic, which is the name given to fanfic of fanfic.