Fansplaining: Defining Fanfiction: The Survey

Podcast Episode
Fansplaining
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Episode Title:	Fansplaining: Defining Fanfiction: The Survey
Length:	1:23:12
Featured:
Date:	April 19, 2017
Fandom:	pan-fandom
External Links:	Episode on Fansplaining.com
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Fansplaining: Defining Fanfiction: The Survey is a podcast by Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel.

For others in the series, see Fansplaining

Introduction

Flourish and Elizabeth discuss Fansplaining’s newest survey, which asks respondents to define what fanfiction is—and what it isn’t. They discuss the genesis of the survey and the thinking behind its questions before launching into a wide-ranging discussion about intent, authorship, context, and more. They also tackle the survey’s specific examples, from Lev Grossman’s The Magicians to the Aeneid to Fifty Shades of Grey to the “Riker Googling” Twitter account, and Flourish coins the term “Schrödinger’s fanfic.”

Links

• Episode, show notes, and transcript: 46: Defining Fanfiction: The Survey, ^{Archived version}
• Tumblr Promotional Post, ^{Archived version}

Topics Discussed

• Why they chose to run a survey
• What questions were on the survey and their personal responses to each, in particular the questions phrased as "Is X fanfiction?"
• Whether fanfiction should be spelled as "fan fiction" or "fanfiction"

Excerpts

FK: So yeah! We have a survey. Neither of us have taken it as part of the official results, because we thought that we shouldn’t.

ELM: Tell me about the genesis. I wanna know. Because you were supposed to do a survey about defining “fan” and “fandom” and all of a sudden it turned into a “defining fanfiction,” and I was like “what are you doing” and then I was like “I don’t care, I’m really busy, never mind.”

FK: So the answer to that is it’s really hard to define “fan” and “fandom.” We had a lot of information from people about how they defined “fanfiction” already because people talk to us about that a lot. And people don’t talk to us as much about how they define the words “fan” and “fandom,” maybe because it's hard. So I started to make a survey about how to define the term “fandom” and then I was like, “this is for the birds.” And then I was like, “Well, what if we got a little more information about ‘fandom’ and the way people define it within another survey that was easier.” And so because I am lazy I wrote a survey about fanfiction with a couple of questions about fandom within it. So there probably will be ultimately a survey about fans and fandom, I think it just is going to take a little bit longer to try and distill and the format might not be asking people what their definition of “fandom” is. I’m not sure that’s the right format for it.

ELM: Maybe defining it by what fandom is not is an interesting way to do it.s

ELM: [laughs] When I first started writing about fanfiction as a journalist, this was in 2012 and it was during the Fifty Shades of Grey media storm. There was a lot of really, really bad writing. You may remember this. I’m sure you remember it, you were a fan reading journalism at the time…she’s making a, I would say that that's the human equivalent of the emoji who’s like, gritting his teeth. You know that one?...

So the Fifty Shades of Grey media coverage was on the whole poor, and there seemed to be, I described it in my first piece about it as “anthropogists uncover this sexy tribe on the internet.” I think that was basically the tone of a lot of the coverage. ...

And they were like, there was one line in one article where he was like “this sexy Pandora’s box has been opened!” and I was like, for fuck’s sake. ... I’m moving on from the vagina talk. Anyway I was annoyed about all this, partly because I think that the stereotype that all fanfiction is shitty erotica is a damaging one. I guess I will cop to, the instinct of being like, “A lot of it is really serious and has nothing to do with sex and romance!” which I think is a bad “I’m not like the other girls” response that I’m glad I’ve moved past, so I will admit to a little bit of that, but that’s only a portion of the community.

So then I wrote this piece that basically was like, “Here are all the serious literary things that are fanfiction too.” It was a big list, and we’ll put the link in the show notes. I went around and did a lot of research and looked for books, novels, all literary fiction, because this is for a literary website. And obviously the famous examples are Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys which is about Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre’s first wife. I read that as a post-colonial lit person in college, because it’s also a post-colonial refashioning of the story, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, those are two characters in Hamlet, and it kind of retells Hamlet from their perspective. They’re bumbling fools trapped in an existential nightmare, basically. Is that a good description of that play?

FK: I think so. I think that’s a good description of that play.

ELM: Perfect. So then time went on, and I wrote more and more about fanfiction, and I was like “OK, so that’s the big tent definition.” Fanfiction is as old as time, as long as people have been refashioning stories and you shouldn’t make fun of it because it's as serious as Shakespeare. Aren’t the historical plays just RPF? Aren’t all of his comedies and tragedies refashionings of stories that already existed in the commons?

As time went on I started to write in more detail and by a couple years ago I had migrated to a smaller tent definition, on the way also saying, “Who cares if there’s erotic fanfiction, who cares if teenage girls write it, that’s awesome too.” So this is my journey, this is my growth as I’m illustrating. By the time Stephenie Meyer’s Life and Death and Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On came out, both of which were complicated intertextual transformative works being called fanfiction, I lost it and I was like, “These are not works of fanfiction. Fanfiction is something intentional; it means something when you’re doing it. You’re saying, ‘I’m writing fanfiction.’” That’s a smaller tent definition, and you can say that people are doing the same things, but they’re not all writing fanfiction. So that’s my journey. Go ahead, tell me your journey.

FK: OK, so my journey, I too…I think the big tent and the small tent definition of fanfiction, I have held at different points in time, I too am part of this journey where at some times I’m like “It’s all fanfiction! Everything is fanfiction!” And at other points I’m like “Fanfiction is a construction of the modern capitalist state in which we currently have copyright law and these particular communities of people interacting with each other!”

ELM: Oh wow, that’s not a part of my journey. Obviously it’s a part of it, but I think that constructs fanfiction in the negative. I don’t think that’s necessarily what you mean but it’s like, fanfiction is only happening because copyright exists, and when I started writing fanfiction before I knew it was a thing, I wasn’t thinking about who owned Sweet Valley High, I was thinking about my love of the characters and how I wanted to spend more time with them.

FK: I’ve never put very much, this is a difference I think between you and me, I’ve never put very much emphasis on the internal feelings that a person has about the characters or their internal motivations about something as a way of determining if something is fanfiction or not, because I have seen a lot of people writing outside of a fanfiction community who furthermore I don’t think people in the fanfiction community would be very excited to embrace in certain ways, who are writing fanfiction out of their love of a particular character. Who are writing stories that come out of their love of the character, they genuinely feel love of this character, and yet they’re not necessarily writing for the community of fanfiction authors as we’ve constructed them.

ELM: Sure, OK.

FK: I also think that it’s hard to know internally, was Virgil a deep fan of the Odyssey and the Iliad? I don’t know. I have no idea how Virgil felt about the Odyssey and the Iliad. He definitely read them and when he was composing the Aeneid he was referring to them. But was he like a fanboy? Did he have the Catalogue of Ships memorized? I don’t know, he might have! There’s absolutely no way for me to reconstruct that. What I can say is that he was operating at a time period where ideas of authorship were very different. So what I would say is fanfiction has more to do with the ideas of authorship that somebody espouses and that the community they’re writing for reflects back on them, which fundamentally means things like writing for a community of people who are also fans is really important in that space. And writing outside of a corporate context where you’re an officially sanctioned work, and not being the original author of the work is important.

You can also say that’s fine and well, but if you want to do the legitimizing argument for fanfiction, and say that transformative work is valid whatever context it’s in, sometimes I find myself still going back and using that big tent definition and being like “Of course the Aeneid is fanfic, of course Ulysses is fanfic,” not because I really think they’re part of this small tent definition but because I don’t have confidence that my listener, this person who’s trying to say transformative works are no good, will have any…it’s a way of puncturing their ego about what transformative works are good and which are bad, do you see what I’m saying?

FK: Right. I think this is fundamentally the problem, and it’s not purely a gendered problem, although it is often a gendered problem, which is that I get a little defensive having spent a long time defending my work and having to work through my own hangups about just writing fanfic, right? Realizing I only want to write things that are…actually as a writer I only want to write things that are highly intertextual and transformative and a lot of that has been, whether I sell it as “literary work” or not, that has been fostered only in the fanfiction community for me. People outside the fanfiction community have not been…at least not for most of my childhood, not for most of my formative years, no one was supportive of that.

I mean, not no one. You know what I mean. Of course I had a teacher be like “Go! Go on, write!” But it’s very different to have your fourth grade teacher say “Go ahead, write that thing” and feel as though it’s blessed by…

ELM: I like that that’s the literary establishment, is your fourth grade teacher telling you to write a short story.

FK: That’s what I’m saying, that’s far from the literary establishment. I’m not saying there’s no one in the world who’s supportive, but…

ELM: Not to derail you, please continue after this, but to say as an aside: I think there’s such a conversation, and I can speak to this in a direct way in the literary criticism space, there’s such anxiety about…the anxiety of influence, right? There’s such anxiety about originality, and I see it especially coming from men, especially coming from white men, writing certain kinds of books that are clearly influenced by certain other kinds of books, being super worried about whether their writing is original. And it’s like, “Sorry bro, it’s not usually, and if you just embrace that and play with it as opposed to being worried that your boring novel about walking around in Brooklyn isn’t a special snowflake coming out of nowhere…” You know what I mean?

FK: Exactly! Exactly what you’re saying. So then having none of that being represented by people outside of the fanfiction…people outside of the fanfiction community having all of that anxiety and only being able to find that comfort within…

ELM: Which is a shame because this is a type that exists, within the book space, but there are plenty of other people who are doing fantastical things. And plenty of white men do it too, you know.

FK: All right, so we’re back. The first section of the survey was a multiple choice section where the questions were all “Must fanfiction be…” and then there was sort of a blank to be filled in per question.

ELM: And that’s where you’ll wind up like me, in a weird trap where you’re like, “Fanfiction is on purpose! But sometimes it’s not!” Right? And then you’re like, “I don’t know what I know anymore! And then you’ll cry.”

FK: The truth is this segment was more intended to be a warmup section before people do the written segment.

ELM: Where you expose your own contradictory ideas.

FK: Yeah so you have to think through it a little bit, because then the next section asks you to write out your definition of what fanfiction is. So I figured, the hope was anyway, that people would warm up with the multiple choice and then write a nuanced and thought through definition of what they really believed to be a good definition of fanfic. We’ll see in the results whether that worked, but that was idea. OK. So must fanfiction be based on another work of fiction?

ELM: What about RPF?

FK: Yeah, so “Sometimes yes and sometimes no” is the answer.

(After discussing at length various examples of questions which survey respondents were asked. Most included specific titles + authors and "is X fanfiction?")

ELM: Yeah. Well, we went through all the examples! And the rest is more just asking, for self-definitions, if you say you’re a fan, if you’re not a fan, what your relationship to fanfiction is, I think that you hit a lot of, a huge variety of different…have you ever published fanfiction? Do you do this? Do you, you know, all this stuff. I think you hit a lot of different angles which is nice, and I like that they were all presented not in opposition to each other. I think it was nice that you got to select what describes you.

FK: Thank you!

ELM: Yeah, good job.

FK: So obviously there were 10 billion other examples we could have used and the way that I went about picking examples was I came up with the types of things, and then I picked an example from each of the types of things that I thought a lot of people would have encountered, or alternately the one that I was self-indulgent about was Di and I. The other ones were actually all picked because I thought people would have encountered them more. And so, you know, I think we might consider releasing a list of edge-case books, or something like that, which would be interesting for people to discuss, possibly. There was a very, very long list. Including probably most but not all of the things on your shelf, and I’m sure there are more things.