It's a Fanmade World: From One Direction to Soderbergh

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News Media Commentary
Title: It’s a Fanmade World: From One Direction to Soderbergh
Commentator: various
Date(s): March 9, 2015 (print), March 11, 2015 (online)
Venue: print, online
Fandom: multifandom with emphasis on One Direction and western media fandom
External Links: It’s a Fanmade World: From One Direction to Soderbergh; current version, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

It’s a Fanmade World: From One Direction to Soderbergh is a 2015 collection of nine essays and posts published by Vulture.com, the entertainment news website of New York Magazine, and published in the magazine's March 9, 2015 edition.

The main essays, "You Belong to Me", and "A Fanfiction Syllabus" generated the most fan comments. The collection was praised for its attention to fanworks other than fanfiction, with its sections on fan film trailers, fan translations of video games, and Grateful Dead envelope fanart. However, fan comments faulted "A Fanfiction Syllabus" in particular for being too focused on dudeslash, on slash in general, and for its choice of "classic examples" of fanfiction.

Contents

Many of the images included in the article are no longer viewable, but can be seen in their original form on the Wayback Machine.

Parts

  • You Belong to Me: The fanfiction boom is reshaping the power dynamic between creators and consumers by Laura Miller
  • Harry Styles Rules the World: Fanfiction by the numbers by David Marchese
  • “There’s a Big Difference Between After and Jane Austen”: How Anna Todd turned herself into a fanfiction star by David Marchese
  • A Fanfiction Syllabus: Ten classics that cover the history, breadth, and depth of the form, with original custom-designed covers by Abraham Riesman
  • Steven Soderbergh, Auteur of Other People’s Films: Making new art out of old movies by Jeremy Smith
  • Making Hollywood at Home: Two Fresno film geeks are ingeniously replicating their favorite blockbuster trailers by Alex Yablon
  • This Indie-Comics Hit Is a Blatant DC Rip-off. It’s Also Better: The parallel universe of Copra by Bryan Hood
  • Bootlegging Nintendo, the American Way by Bryan Hood
  • Getting the Dead’s Attention by David Marchese

You Belong to Me

...Once exiled to obscure corners of the internet, fanfiction — amateur fiction based on characters from preexisting works or real-life celebrities — has lately become a force driving popular culture. As Proulx realized, fans these days aren’t satisfied to just sit back and consume. They want to participate. They want to create. And they don’t want to wait for anyone else’s permission to do it. Millions of fanfiction stories have been uploaded onto vast online archives where other fans read, rate, and comment on them. Romances, often torrid, between ostensibly straight male characters like Harry Potter and his onetime nemesis Draco Malfoy are especially popular, and there’s an entire category of fanfiction, called mpreg, in which beloved male characters and celebrities (e.g., One Direction singer Harry Styles) are able, bizarrely, to get pregnant. Fandom’s untrammeled imagination is also colonizing the wider world. E L James’s Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fic. And what are J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek and Star Wars reboots — which take the original source materials (called “canon” in fic circles) and shape them to new ends — if not examples of the fanfiction spirit when enabled by hundreds of millions of dollars?

Harry Styles Rules the World

Fanfiction’s great allure is its lack of boundaries. If you can think it, you can share it. But this stuff doesn’t bubble up out of nowhere, and what’s popular on the screens of fanfiction readers is a pretty accurate mirror of what’s popular in real life, too. Here, with data supplied by online fic clearinghouse Wattpad, is what fans are reading and writing about.

There’s a Big Difference Between After and Jane Austen

Fanfiction (just one word, or you betray yourself as a noob) is the real Cinderella in this story, raised from the scullery by a fairy godmother named E L James. James’s erotica, originally titled “Master of the Universe,” reimagined Twilight’s Bella Swan and her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen, as, respectively, a gawky ingénue and the handsome, bondage-loving billionaire who seduces her. Such stories, in which the characters are essentially the same despite significant changes in their circumstances, are called AU, or “alternate universe” scenarios. James isn’t the only fic writer to make the leap from fan to pro: Others include the historical-fantasy author Naomi Novik and YA star Cassandra Clare, creator of the Mortal Instruments series. But James proved that fic could become an entertainment juggernaut to rival the original properties that inspired it. The movie version of James’s fic raked in more than $400 million internationally in less than two weeks, so literary agents and movie producers are looking for more of the same. Last April, a military wife named Anna Todd signed a lucrative contract with a Simon & Schuster imprint to publish, in multiple volumes, an epic erotic romance about a demure college freshman’s relationship with a tattooed bad boy named Hardin Scott. When Todd’s After was first posted in installments on the online reading-and-writing community Wattpad in 2013, however, the hero’s name was Harry Styles. In the author’s original AU, the puckish singer is just another foreign student at Washington State University, albeit a fetchingly dimpled and brooding one. After, although clearly patterned on Twilight, is an example of “real-person fiction” (RPF), in which celebrities are cast as characters in concocted scenarios. Todd’s work garnered more than a billion views on Wattpad, and Paramount Pictures recently bought the screen rights.

The article included a short Q&A with Todd:

Two years ago, Anna Todd was a bored, underemployed wife of a serviceman in Austin, Texas, whose main outlet was writing fanfiction about the relationship between a randy Harry Styles and a virginal college student named Tessa. Now, after some legally necessary character-name changes, the 25-year-old has a six-book deal with Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, one worth a reported six figures, for her After series of erotic novels. Here’s how she did it, and what happened … after.

Why did you start writing Harry Styles fan fiction?

Well, I always loved reading and writing, and before I started writing After, I loved One Direction’s music. My cousin had sent me a screenshot of One Direction, and the caption was a little story, and she didn’t even notice it, but I did. I went to Instagram and found Imagines, which are fanfiction stories written as captions. But the person who wrote those stories would take like a week, which is long online. So instead of waiting, I just wrote my own. I chose Harry because he was my favorite at the time. I love them all.

Is there anything you did that could serve as a model to other fanfiction writers? Or are you and E L James total outliers?

No one could model exactly after me. I was very lucky. It was the right timing, the right subject, the right everything. But there are bits and pieces of what I’ve done, like using social media, that people could take from. Make an Instagram account for your book. Respond to people if they post a picture of your work. You don’t want to just be the lady who wrote a book someone likes. You want to have a relationship with them, and they want one with you.

The big criticism of fanfiction is that it’s not good literature. Should it be judged by the standards of “regular” fiction?

There are obviously different skill levels with amateur fiction writers, but I don’t think that people should go, “Oh, that’s good for fanfiction.” At the same time, there’s a big difference between After and Jane Austen.

Is fanfiction still waiting for its Jane Austen, its undeniably talented, transformative figure?

Not to compare Fifty Shades of Grey to Jane Austen, but E L James opened up a lot of doors. Whether people hate fanfiction or not, it just keeps growing.

The "Fanfiction Syllabus"

Main article: A Fanfiction Syllabus

Described as: "Ten classics that cover the history, breadth, and depth of the form, with original custom-designed covers." The section was written by Abraham Riesman, with "consultation help" from Cyndy Aleo, Emily Asher-Perrin, Charlotte Geater, Anne Jamison, Aja Romano, and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw.

The Syllabus:

Making Hollywood at Home

Two Fresno film geeks are ingeniously replicating their favorite blockbuster trailers.

It’s a truism these days that Hollywood trailers are typically better than the movies they advertise, which makes things easy for Dumb Drum. That’s the name adopted by Bryan Harley, 30, and Roque Rodriguez, 35, two friends and movie fanatics from California who spend their free time painstakingly and cheaply re-creating megamovie trailers (before having seen the full-length films), and who regularly earn hundreds of thousands of YouTube views for their efforts. They’re the internet’s premier practitioners of “swedings,” the name given to the homemade film homages made by the characters played by Jack Black and Mos Def in Michel Gondry’s 2008 film Be Kind Rewind. Dumb Drum’s gift for clever no-budget imitation—their latest sweding is of the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron — has delighted the likes of director Guillermo del Toro, who invited Harley and Rodriguez to the premiere of his Pacific Rim after seeing their work.

Bootlegging Nintendo, the American Way

What would you do if the sequel to your favorite video game came out, but only in a language you didn’t speak? If you were part of the online fan community for cult-favorite role-playing game Mother 2, the answer would be simple: translate the game yourself. Abetted by some legally dubious emulation software, a collective of American gamers called the Fan Translation Team produced a patch that would allow players to play the Japan-only release of Mother 3 in English. (It was eventually downloaded 100,000 times.) Fan Translation’s Clyde “Tomato” ­Mandelin talked us through how his group of gamers got to play.

History of "Mother" fandom

Getting the Dead’s Attention

Long before StubHub, the only way to get a ticket to a Grateful Dead show was to mail in a request. Dead Heads turned an act of commerce into an opportunity for creativity, decorating their envelopes with visual riffs on the band’s iconography, history, and catalogue. When the surviving members of the group announced a series of 50th-anniversary reunion shows in Chicago this summer, the practice was enthusiastically — and lysergically — brought back to life.

Fan Comments

From Fail-Fandomanon

Below are comments from fans at fail-fandomanon; The Vulture's article on fan fiction, March 11, 2015.

That's actually a pretty good article on fanfiction, even if they're using Wattpad for their stats.

The mainstream media - forever trying to make cash out of fandom and failing.

I looked at Wattpad out of curiosity and suddenly I feel old, out of touch, and weirded out.

I'm thrilled this article highlights a variety of fan creativity and not just fic. It would've been cool to have some more focus on fanart and maybe a short look at 8tracks, but still, I really appreciate they didn't just focus on one aspect of fandom. Also I learned that Wattpad fic features covers, that's cool. Also while I don't go there myself I think the focus on Wattpad is completely justified, it's just really huge.

From Tumblr

One thing that really struck me (amongst several things with NYMag’s feature, I actually want to write a detailed response to the coverage) is the fact that they used Wattpad as a metric here, and that in this context, I think it’s a wise choice. I remember there was an article (in…the Guardian?) a few months ago talking about how the next big battle in fan writing was between Wattpad and Kindle Worlds and I scoffed and said “stupid journalists” and then said…they’re possibly right. We in AO3 land can get such a skewed perspective on the broader fanfic landscape, and there’s no denying that Wattpad’s numbers are massive in comparison — or that the community dynamics are different, many of the users are coming from very different perspectives, etc. It’s easy to get myopic with fandom because even just your little corner can feel all-consuming.[1]

Some of this info seems wrong to me (how is it possible for the divergant series to have more fanfiction than Marvel as a whole) and I am SO sick of fanfiction being all about gay characters. It’s not. [2]

I am unhappy that after is here, it is just as bad as 50 shades at displaying an abusive relationship and romanticising it. No. [3]

On one hand, good to know that “respected” mainstream magazines or newspapers are taking fanfiction seriously. On the other, my instinctive knee-jerk reaction, like, please leave us alone! [4]

After should /not/ be on this list, after shouldn’t be fucking anywhere at all because it promotes abuse and makes the one direction fandom seem like psychos who write their idols as disgusting douchebags and then publish it. It has ruined Harry’s reputation with the media even more (especially because they already consider him a womanizer) and Anna Todd has no respect for the one direction fandom after publishing that disgusting abusive book. So I (like many other one direction fans) don’t appreciate even more publicity going into this horrible book. [5]

uh, when did Wattpad become a measure of what was going on in fic circles? I haven’t ventured in there a lot, because the few times I did, it was distinctly subpar, quality wise? Or have things changed a lot in the past year or so? [6]

Oh, yeah, my question wasn’t, “How could you know that fic authors were published?” I witnessed the Twific P2P epidemic up close and personally. Ugh. I was trying to say, how do the authors know it’s *rare* for a fic author to score a book deal? Just because a writer isn’t opening up her LJ and using her fandom moniker as her professional nom de plume doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them in her past, yk? (Or, for that matter, just because she’s not totally ripping off her fic for her OF doesn’t mean that she never wrote fic.) I just think the list of traditionally published authors who have fanfiction in their past is probably longer than that description of Clare implies. [7]

There’s been several publicly known fic authors who got book deals — two I’ve shared fandoms with and know directly through fandom. Then there’s the fans whose fic were purchased for publishing like E. L. James (I saw saw a list last year with a dozen on it, tho no one I knew or shared fandoms with.) I listened to a panel at SDCC last year where a rep from Wattpad went into great detail about the amount of fic on their site. I was impressed witb his knowledge, particularly about bandom and younger massive fandoms. I made an account for them but I’m not much into their site design or posting capabilities. [8]

…except Aja/bookshop is a dishonest, selfish brat who’d do anything for attention, including write an article about fandom-famous abuser Andy Blake that throws a bunch of his former victims under the bus. And there’s at least one of the recommended authors I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole either. Granted, Cassandra Clare/Claire doesn’t seem to have plagiarized everything she wrote when it came to the VSD, but the rest of her fandom career has been rip-offs and backstabs galore. [9]

Wow, where’s that “you didn’t even try” star. It’s like these self styled “face of fandom types” just get more and more famous and less and less interested in pretending an parts of fandom outside of Western Media slash even exist. Including the MASSIVELY POPULAR tradition of het fanfic 50 Shades grew from. And afaict Aja used to even be in anime fandom, so I know she knows that exists, but I guess popslash is deeper or something. And of course the more mainstream the AO3 gets, the more it supports it’s own narrative through articles like this. Look at the numbers, Western Media slash (and slashy gen about dudes) is all that fandom cares about. [10]

Well, who fills their Instagram with boring ol’ vegetables when they could have French silk pie there instead, amirite?

…oh geez, wait, it gets even better. Let us enjoy this quote from the article itself:

"Aja Romano, who writes on the topic for the Daily Dot, argues that “fandom is subversive. If a canonical worldview is entirely straight-white-male, then fans will actively resist it.”

Yes, fans will “actively resist” the “entirely straight-white-male” worldview by…writing a lot of stuff about white men. Excellent showing rather than telling there, Ms. Romano, so glad to have you speaking for us. [11]

This has nothing to do with AO3? This is about the Daily Dot enabling Aja to say shit that is wildly inaccurate. AO3 is not a curated archive; what’s there is what people put there. Does that mean it covers every kind of fanfic ever, or represents every fan? Unfortunately, no, but that’s not because AO3 is trying to turn people or fanfics away. Ironically I was just thinking about what kind of “History of Fan Fiction” syllabus I would try to write, and I gave it up as impossible. Good thing Aja isn’t limited by any sense of the form’s breadth and diversity. [12]

I fell down a “history of people in fandom being terrible” rabbit hole tonight thanks to you & this post. So…uh…thanks [13]

what it does is a bad idea, and I wish the media would stop. [14]

I suddenly feel the urge to really get back to writing my Star Trek story I tried to do for NaNoWriMo 2009 but my computer died about 10m days in. [15]

From If You Want to Talk About Something Weird, Let's Talk About Geoducks, Not Fanfiction:

Speaking of condescending: That’s the problem with the entire tone of that Vulture article and of most discussions about fanfiction. They are just so incredibly condescending. “Look at these cute little people creating things!” these articles seem to say. “People outside of the traditional establishment have *thoughts* in their *heads* and create things! Can you believe it?” [16]

From MetaFilter

This article keeps talking about how open, creative, and without boundaries fanfiction is, but it's always seemed exactly the opposite: it's all about playing in premade, set boxes, boxes usually made by giant companies. The numbers the Vulture article gives seem to underscore this: endless iterations of established properties and media personalities. Fanfiction seems like the corporate colonization of the last frontier, imagination. Channeling talent and energy away from actual originality and creativity and into free marketing material. [17]

Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Holmes stories, Hobbit/LoTR, Arthurian mythology -- these are big in fanfiction and made by individual writers. But even if we use, for example, Disney films (which are of course fanfiction themselves, mostly), you get Disney characters in other universes, other people in Disney universes, characters meeting each other who never did -- these aren't particularly limited boxes. And I don't think it's fair to call reusing old stories and/or characters necessarily limited in originality or creativity (though of course much fanfiction is -- but then so is much fiction). It's a well-worn example, but Shakespeare wasn't exactly known for his entirely new plots. [18]

Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Holmes stories, Hobbit/LoTR, Arthurian mythology -- these are big in fanfiction and made by individual writers.

Actually those were precisely the corporate properties I was thinking of. They're big in fanfiction due to being media juggernauts. Fanfiction swirls around the big movie or book du jour, and the numbers the Vulture gives proves it.

Disney films (which are of course fanfiction themselves, mostly), you get Disney characters in other universes, other people in Disney universes, characters meeting each other who never did -- these aren't particularly limited boxes.

Of course they are. They're just corporate properties meeting other corporate properties. Mickey meets Harry Potter is playing in the same old sandboxes.

It just seems so limited and constrained and kind of sad. It seems like in the past people took in their influences and were inspired to make something new that's cool like that, but fanfiction is just wanting to make the same thing again. [19]

They're big in fanfiction due to being media juggernauts. Fanfiction swirls around the big movie or book du jour I've only done a little poking around on fanfic boards, and only recently, so my impression may be off...but it certainly seems like the movie versions of superheroes, for instance, get a hell of a lot more attention than the much longer-standing original comic book versions. There's less lore/canon to absorb that way, and that almost certainly increases their appeal for the fanfic writer, but still...that difference has been pretty jarring for me. [20]

If anything it's about breaking out of those boxes. See the poor showing of Amazon's attempt to monetize fanfics due in part to the original authors being allowed to set constraints, or the freedom Michel Fiffe found he had with his alternate Suicide Squad not having to follow DC's conventions. [21]

the movie versions of superheroes, for instance, get a hell of a lot more attention than the much longer-standing original comic book versions a lot of that can be explained by network dynamic in combination with the fact that the movies are more accessible, partly because they're new, and insofar of its own textual canon, a lot more manageable (with the option to tie it to the extant canon existing in the other mediums such as the comics). So, a movie comes out, and to write about it requires not as much research than having to write a fic based on the older, longer, more convoluted comic/book series*. But of course, to see if the movie gets a critical mass of fics depends on the network dynamic I mentioned earlier, which is basically a fancier way of saying word of mouth, and some mouths are more influential than others... [22]

Sangermain - You seem to be saying a lot about the quality and derivation of fanfic, in a way that appears intended to devalue the enterprise entirely.

What value does this opinion provide you? Does it improve your understanding of the world? Does it foster better relationships between yourself and other people? Does it add to your income?

I've generally found a lot of fanfic to be terribly written. And I don't really enjoy much of the playing around with characters and settings. But it's quite clear that it's a valuable writing exercise for a lot of people, and as a method of self-expression that is empowering to the authors. So, overall, even though I personally don't appreciate the result of this, it's hard for me to say that there's anything bad about it. [23]

the other thing that bears mentioning, is that fandom exists as its own culture (capital F fandom?), while at the same time different fandoms have different social behaviours, but on the whole, fans engage just as much with the idea and community of fandom itself as with the respective pieces of canon they've staked an emotional claim on. So quite a lot of the fanfic itself isn't just in response to canon, but also to fandom, which makes trying to parse it on one axis without the other would probably result in a handicapped analysis. So that to me, is one major reason why fanficcers continue to happily produce fanworks - I don't agree they're in a constrained sandbox, and aside from tht assessment, that sandbox is just another arena where the community continues to engage with itself. [24]

Fanfiction seems like the corporate colonization of the last frontier, imagination... it's all about playing in premade, set boxes...

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I rather think it's the opposite; it's the imagination colonizing the world of corporate media. People aren't so much being channeled into these corporate boxes as they are saying "I'm going to play with these toyboxes however I want, whether or not the media giants allow it." Many of the authors of fanfic are people who may not feel comfortable making their own boxes yet, or who may simply want to feel the joy of writing without (for the time being) necessarily needing to create their own (going to drop the box metaphor now) settings and characters... not every time, at least. And some (such as Naomi Novik) will go on to quite successfully create their own original works.

Don't write the stuff myself, but I see it as a net plus for writers, and I try to be "fanfic positive" with my students when the subject comes up. [25]

Sangermaine, I understand why you'd see fanfic that way, because that's how I used to think about it. After a while, I guess my interest was piqued by all the intelligent people I knew who liked fanfic, so I tried to immerse myself in it, followed their recommendations, and tried to see what they liked about it. (I'm not saying you have to do this. It's obviously totally fine to not like or get fanfic.)

I found that there are a lot of reasons for reading and writing fic -- as well as the more obvious ones, it can be a very useful technical exercise for a writer; a way of working through psychological issues, political ideas or really anything else, within a defined framework; even (yes, really!) a way of subverting the big corporate properties you're worried about. Robin Kenealy's American Captain, which is highlighted in the Vulture fanfic "syllabus" and has been on MeFi previously, is arguably an example of all of those motivations.

I've seen fanfiction described in several places as a continuation of age-old collaborative storytelling traditions: people passing around tales of the mythic figures of their culture, putting their own spin on them, combining plots and inventing things over time. The folk tales and legends of a society are common property; anyone can tell them. Nowadays lots of the stories we all know are "owned" and copyrighted by media companies, but fanfiction (and other forms of fanart) resist that ownership, basically saying that the stories belong to anyone for whom they're meaningful. [26]

I'm no expert on fanfic, but to me it's more like mythology than corporate colonization, wherein you have a widely familiar set of established characters and conditions, and then all sorts of people (not just authorized "speakers," scholars, translators, historians, priests, etc.) create and share all sorts of stories about them for all sorts of purposes ‐ political, emotional, moralistic, analytical, subversive, erotic, iconoclastic, comedic, provocative, and simply entertaining... and of course many of these tales are instantly forgettable, while some are folded into the canon or consciousness, and some resonate particularly well for their time and place (Joyce's "Ulysses" for a modernish example?). [27]

To me, fandom and fanfiction is really about the community as much as the content, in the same way that I come to metafilter not just for the posts but also for the people. One of the things I like most about being able to post stories is interacting with the people who read my stories and who share my love for the characters and the canon.

I love writing, and I started writing my own original fiction years before I ever started dabbling in fanfiction, and I don't think my involvement in fandom has diminished any of my other literary pursuits. In fact, I stopped writing for awhile, and fanfiction was what really brought me back into that groove.

In a lot of ways, writing and reading fanfiction seems analogous to plenty of other hobbies. I think most people wouldn't dismiss someone who enjoys playing basketball for fun without any intention of going beyond backyard pick up games.

I know that this doesn't address the whole concern about it being derivative, but as long as the original authors are okay with fanworks, and considering how much joy it brings people, I guess I have to wonder why it would matter even if it doesn't reach some arbitrary measure of being "creative" enough. (Although I also take issue with that underlying assumption, but I think a lot has been said on that topic already.) [28]

I find the opinion that passively consuming media is somehow better for creativity than reworking and expanding it with your own writing to be very confusing.

Unless you're advocating avoiding corporate media altogether, those stories are already there, and people are already imagining alternative scenarios involving the characters or settings, whether they write them down or not. Our imaginations have already been "colonized" by corporations because our narrative culture has been.

And it's simply not the case that the choice is "write fanfiction" or "write original fiction." Many people aren't interested in writing original fiction, for various reasons, and simply wouldn't be writing at all. Many people begin writing with fanfiction, and then move on to original fiction. Many people write both.

(Another thing I find confusing: The way that fanfiction is so stigmatized, when it gets so many kids into writing for fun. Like, seriously -- there are thousands of teenagers out there who are writing, editing, and reviewing fiction they or their peers wrote. Of course a lot of it will be shit, because they're kids, but does that matter? They're writing!) [29]

I want to write an enormous comment about how the Tumblr-ization of fandom has lead to a shift away from (fanfic)creator-lead communities to consumer-lead communities, and the various arguments about whether or not the invention of "I like this" buttons have contributed to the death of comment culture, and how the move away from Livejournal has destroyed the old feelings of fandom existing in a finite space where you generally knew who your audience was..... Except that would all just boil down to "I'm old and I'm sad that I no longer feel welcome in fannish spaces" and that's....not actually all that interesting. [30]

The only difference between modern-day fanfic and classical literature is endurance.

If I wrote a thing where I wanted to be a writer and a magic thing happened where I get to hang out with my favorite writer, and they're my guide through a whole magical landscape where we have adventures and meet all kinds of cool historical and semimythical figures and amazing people together, your first reaction might well be person's "oh come on now" from a few comments ago.

Except: that's Dante's Inferno in a nutshell, right there. [31]

I'm always surprised to see "corporate colonization" of creativity and variations thereof leveled as a criticism against fanfiction, because fanfiction as an act of reading against the "corporate" approved narrative, or of criticizing it, is fairly engrained in fandom. Whether that reading against is by queering an otherwise straight narrative with a same-sex pairing, or by expressing a more fundamental criticism of the source material, there's plenty of fanfiction that would make the corporate overlords in charge of the source IP blanch. Take a look at Written by the Victors, from Vulture's fanfiction syllabus. When the show itself took just about every opportunity to remove the dramatic stakes of a cut-off-from-Earth premise, and never substantively engaged with the inherent themes of colonialism and imperialism, Written by the Victors goes all in with them, and that's a direction the creators and producers of Stargate Atlantis would never have taken the show, even aside from the slash pairing. That whole fandom was an exercise in "Okay, this is an interesting premise which you have entirely squandered. We're gonna fix that." [32]

From Twitter

I hope people know there is more than just gay fan fiction. Article felt #skewed [33]

Wait, but why wasn't there a course on fanfiction when I was an undergrad?[34]

Why is this vulture article on fanfiction relying so hard on Wattpad? [35]

Cool section on fanfic from @vulture — Made me fondly remember all the early-to-mid '00s Buffy fanfic I used to read.[36]

Poorly researched & misrepresented "It’s a Fanmade World: Your Guide to the Fanfiction Explosion [37]

just a glorious patchwork of an article on many things fanfic.[38]

what most fic testifies to is that its authors are really, really interested in men." Yeah. Totally the point. -___- [39]

@vulture making it painfully obvious you've never read good fan fiction.... ao3 is where it's at.[40]

Even if it didn't include the incredible Copra, this fanfic infodump would be pretty amazing.[41]

As I was reading this article about fanfiction culture, i thot, "huh, US mainstream is getting hip to doujinshi"[42]

Inside the everflowing remixed world of fanfiction. “Fill the void, if ‘the real thing’ isn’t doing it for you.” [43]

Where I got my start...and still participate! It’s a Fanmade World: Your Guide to the Fanfiction Explosion[44]

I find this article about fanfic problematic, but I can't put my finger on why. Non-white non-male casting absence? [45]

One of my first jobs in Hollywood was to read Harry Potter/Twilight fanfiction looking for the next E.L. James[46]

References

  1. ^ destinationtoast-elizabethminkel, March 11, 2015
  2. ^ bluebirdsandink, March 11, 2015
  3. ^ amamiana, March 11, 2015
  4. ^ fairerhousethanprose, March 11, 2015
  5. ^ mynamesmargaretdirectioner, March 11, 2015
  6. ^ jaqofspades, March 11, 2015
  7. ^ partlygood, March 11, 2015
  8. ^ rashaka, March 11, 2015
  9. ^ doomhamster, March 12, 2015
  10. ^ [1] by sqbr, March 12, 2015
  11. ^ musicforsinglebeedad, March 12, 2015
  12. ^ starlady38, March 12, 2015
  13. ^ hmasfatty, March 12, 2015
  14. ^ ageofaquitaine, March 12, 2015
  15. ^ thehumanarkle, March 13, 2015
  16. ^ If You Want to Talk About Something Weird, Let's Talk About Geoducks, Not Fanfiction, Archived version, March 13, 2015
  17. ^ Sangermaine at "MetaFilter". Archived from the original on 2015-03-18., March 2015
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