None Of This Is New: An Oral History Of Fanfiction
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | None Of This Is New: An Oral History Of Fanfiction |
| Commentator: | Jordan West for The Mary Sue |
| Date(s): | November 2, 2014 |
| Venue: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| External Links: | None Of This Is New: An Oral History Of Fanfiction |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
None Of This Is New: An Oral History Of Fanfiction is a 2014 article by Jordan West for The Mary Sue.
Some Topics Discussed
- Shakespeare, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes
- the relatively new concept of copyright
- storytelling
- creativity
- Diana Gabaldon, Anne Rice, Cassandra Clare, Naomi Novik
Excerpts
There’s a card in Cards Against Humanity that says “Harry Potter erotica,” and every time I’ve seen that card played there’s inevitably someone in the group that says, “Wait. Is that a real thing?” To be fair, in a deck that includes things like “German dungeon porn,” it’s a reasonable question, but it always throws me a little bit.
Like, how do you not know about fanfiction? How do you not know about Rule 34? How do you not know that there are millions of people producing trillions of words all over the world because just consuming stories isn’t enough? How do you not know about this practice that is literally as old as storytelling itself?
From the inside, fandom looks like a complex series of interlocking sandboxes filled with interesting and innovative people; we see discourse, creativity, the occasional clique, and the kind of talent that makes us want to punch something. From the outside, though, I imagine it looks more like a bunch of weirdos stealing shit and playing in abandoned buildings.
Honestly, it’s probably a little of both.
To the fan-adjacent outsiders who are at least aware that fanfiction exists, it’s often associated with high-profile examples like the bad-fic-turned-bad-novel Fifty Shades of Grey and, well, Harry Potter erotica. Those more in-the-know might mention Cassandra Clare or Naomi Novik, both of whom were fan writers before publishing original work; or they might bring up Diana Gabaldon or Anne Rice, both notoriously opposed to fic based on their work. At some point in this hypothetical conversation, someone will probably mention Star Trek.
The shape of fandom as it is today owes a lot to the communities that formed around Harry Potter and anime in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, and to the increasing accessibility of the internet over the past decade or so. The shape of those fandoms, in turn, was due to those that migrated out of meatspace onto the brand new baby internet, which of course owed their structure to the zine-based fandoms of the ‘70s and ‘80s. All of which can be traced back to – you guessed it – Star Trek.
See, even though Star Trek fandom has been extremely influential in fan culture, and even though it’s one of the earlier examples of how contemporary fandom works, it’s nowhere near the first or the most influential. For that, we need to go back… pretty extremely far, actually; but for now, we’ll just take one step back to Star Trek fandom’s direct predecessor: Sherlock Holmes.
How about this: myths are stories that we tell to explain how the world works. Legends are stories that we tell to make sense of the past. Histories are stories we tell to explain how we go to where we are. However much these stories might be rooted in fact, they are, for all intents and purposes, fiction, and written works that draw on their specific elements in order to create new stories are, according to our definition, fanfiction.
Okay? Okay.
So Shakespeare wrote fic, but that’s just one example. The thing is, the whole idea of “original fiction” and intellectual property wasn’t even a thing until the 18th century. That might seem like a long time ago, but, given the span of human history and how long we’ve been telling stories, it really isn’t.
The truth is, the idea of taking someone else’s story and doing something new with it didn’t start with Star Trek fans, or the Baker Street Irregulars, or even Shakespeare. It started when the first storyteller sat beside a fire on the bank of an ancient river and spoke; and, the next night, one of her listeners sat beside a different fire and told the same story in a different way. The tradition continued when early Rabbis recorded the stories of their people and added just a little bit of commentary. It influenced history when Augustus was like, “Dude, write a story about Aeneas where he’s all patriotic and shit,” and Virgil was like, “OMG I totally will.” It was canonized in literature when a Christian scribe decided that the legend of Beowulf would make more sense with a few lines about God. It appears in every history book, every retelling, every interpretation.
Ironically, even Anne Rice has had her hand in the fanfiction game with a trilogy of BDsM novellas involving the fairy tale figure Sleeping Beauty and another on-going novel series about Jesus. For all her righteous ire over intellectual property, the biggest material difference between Rice’s fairy tale porn and the Lestat fic I wrote ten years ago is a price tag.