For the love of...

News Media Commentary
Title:	For the love of...
Commentator:	Jon Casimir
Date(s):	01 November 2002
Venue:	Sydney Morning Herald (online)
Fandom:
External Links:	For the love of..., Archived version
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For the love of... is a typical primer fanfiction 2002 article that takes a lot of information about the history of fanfic from the Writers University website.

It uses Harry Potter as a hook, quoting the fanfic Dragonweed by Penguin, and then looks at some FanFiction.Net numbers. It discusses filk.

The article links to the Bald Heaven Archive, which the journalist calls "Bald Heaven."

It is reprinted in full in DIAL #24, a Pros letterzine.

Excerpts from the Article

Potions class. Young Harry Potter can feel someone staring at him. Cautiously, the Hogwarts pupil lifts his head, praying that it's not the malevolent Professor Snape. But the eyes that meet his belong to, gasp, Draco Malfoy ...

"He holds my gaze almost fiercely and I half expect a crackling ray of blue light to appear between us. He's telling me something, but I can't read it. The next moment I realise that even if my mind can't read his message, there is no doubt that my body can. The heat of it hits the pit of my stomach and melts down to my crotch. Oh, no. Not now. I avert my eyes, desperate to break the connection."

Yes, you read that right. Harry and Draco. Sworn enemies. Getting it on. [...] And it's one of more than 44,000 Harry Potter stories that can be found at FanFiction.Net. [...]

Young Harry may inspire the most scribes, but he is by no means alone in attracting attention. FanFiction.Net has more than 10,000 additions to Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings series. Two hundred fans have written new stories with Shakespearean characters. Five hundred have come up with new Bible verses. Oh yes, and three people have added their own chapters to Anne Frank's diary.

Seven thousand Star Wars yarns can be found in the site's archive, next to 1300 X-Men plots, a hundred musings about Gladiator and half a dozen extensions of Schindler's List. There are nearly 4000 X-Files offerings. Thirteen hundred people have come up with West Wing storylines, 1800 have taken a stab at ER and 36 think they're funny enough to match skills with the writers of Blackadder.

Fan Fiction (let's just call it fanfic from now on) predates the net, but has piggybacked the technology to blossom into a subculture much larger and more widespread. Before the net, it was an obscure fan pastime, so far underground it was almost fossilised. Now, it takes its place with hoax sites, blogs, hypertext fiction, PhotoShop manipulation and certain types of viruses as a legitimate form of contemporary culture.

Some believe fanfic sits in the folk tradition of participatory storytelling, a process responsible for The Iliad and the Arthurian legends, among others. Professor Henry Jenkins, director of media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The New York Times that "if you go back, the key stories we told ourselves were stories that were important to everyone and belonged to everyone. Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk."

Others, the more commercially minded among us, see it as a straightforward copyright abuse. But the major entertainment conglomerates have not leant as heavily on fanfic as they have on fan sites that use copyrighted images of characters. If you're writing Simpsons stories you're far less likely to receive a lawyer's letter than if you're drawing Simpsons pictures, or using their images to enhance your site. A picture is apparently worth 1000 words, in dollar terms at least.

Interestingly, most fanfic writers are female. Most Slash stories are about male relationships. Perhaps it's because such relationships seem more transgressive, and offer the writer a greater feeling of control over the characters. Perhaps women are just curious about homosexuality. There's a thesis just waiting to happen in that question.

There's also pornographic fanfic out there but, surprisingly, it's much less common than Slash. Shows from Gilligan's Island to Xena to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are well represented in this category (you can find it yourselves, naughty children - I'm not giving out these URLs). In October, FanFiction.Net stopped hosting R-rated fiction. Presumably other Web hosts will make room for it.

So why, bottom line, do all these people do it? What's in it for them? My guess is that fanfic offers a way of sifting through the online world for others with similar interests or worldviews. Feedback, after all, is an integral part of fanfic - most authors only just stop short of begging for it. Yes, they want recognition and adulation for their work, but there's also the very strong sense that they want to share, to be part of something bigger than themselves. There's a simple, human urge to belong.

What is filk?

Filk is a musical form of fanfic. It involves taking the tune from a well-known song, then rewriting the lyrics along science fiction or fantasy themes. Remember when "Weird Al" Yankovic borrowed the Kinks nugget Lola and turned it into Yoda, with an opening line that went: "I met him in a swamp down in Dagobar ..."?

Well, that would have been filk if Al weren't a professional parodist. Filk is an avowedly amateur form. The word "filk" allegedly comes from a typo in the heading of an article written in the 1950s entitled "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music." You can find out more about filk at sites such as Filk and Interfilk.

Let me just add here, before you dismiss the whole thing as a joke, that there are nine filk conventions held regularly in the US, Canada, Britain and Germany. Get yourself along to one and you may be able to hear acts such as the Los Angeles Filkharmonic Orchestra. The Ohio Valley Filk Fest is being held over the next couple of days. If you can't make it, don't worry. You can always order one of the CDs online.