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Jessica Gibson
Alissa Wilkinson
Principles of Cultural Interpretation
6 November 2013
Potential and Imagination: A Cultural Exegesis of Fanfiction
I have always wanted to make stories. From the moment I could speak, everything I said was a
narrative demanding an audience. Needless to say, I drove my parents crazy until I found that I
could experience other peoples stories. I still drove my parents crazy, but it was from badgering
them for one more book from the library, one more episode over lunch, one more scene before bed.
I grew up immersed in stories that I didnt create but loved as my own. When I decided to craft my
own narratives, I used my favorite stories as inspiration, but felt guilty if I ever tried writing about
characters, places, or events that I didnt create. They werent mine, therefore I had no right to
them. Despite the potential of unexplored character backstories, looming plot holes, and endless
unwritten mythologies, I never thought that expanding the scope of a preexisting story could still be
original, inventive, and constructive. That misconception was banished and all those opportunities
miraculously regained when I discovered fanfiction.
Fanfiction is a creative experience founded in potential, achieved in community, and driven by
imagination. Though I unconsciously knew these aspects after engaging in the world of fanfiction
for a time, I couldnt express them in concrete terms until I conducted an explicit examination of
fanfictions assumptions and practices.
Definitions And History
The world of fanfiction is complex, specialized, and impossible to discuss without knowing its
language. Fanfiction is self-explanatory: it is fiction written by fans of a story using elements of
that story in ways not already explored by the original story. A storys original plot, setting,
characters, etc. are called a storys canon, and though fanfiction (often abbreviated fanfic or fic) can

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operate within the limits of a storys canon, fics are most often set in an alternate universe, or AU.
In an AU, absolutely anything goes as the author asks What if? along the lines of: What if
Holmes and Watson were high school students? (a normal life fic), What if the crew of the
Enterprise went to Hogwarts? (a crossover fic, meaning two stories were blended), What if Han
got together with Luke instead of Leia? (a slash fic, meaning a romantic relationship between two
members of the same gender; relationships are often abbreviated ships). Out of courtesy to readers
seeking or avoiding a specific type of story, most fanfic writers will categorize their work based on
its content, including setting, characters involved, explicitness, violence, and other potentially offputting aspects. To list every categorization of fanfiction would be a monumental feat especially
since more genres are constantly produced by fic writers with limitless imaginations.
Along with the soft rules of genre and terminology, fanfiction is defined by its development as
a social platform. Fanfic writers generally agree that Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes
stories inspired the first fics since the detectives original devotees would invent their own cases for
Holmes to solve. However, fanfiction as it operates today developed out of the networking
opportunities the internets advent provided to fans. Fans of the original Star Trek series produced
the first collaborative fanfiction publication, Spockanalia, in 1967 to publish stories the canon
producers wouldnt and couldnt create. By romantically shipping Kirk and Spock in Spockanalias
fics, 1960s fanfiction writers made acceptable in their culture what otherwise would have been
outrageously inappropriate in society as a whole at the time. This specific pairing defined the
fanfiction world as a place for writers who would otherwise be mocked or ignored to comment
upon, debate, and promote real world social issues through their stories.
Assumptions About How The World Is And How It Should Be
The heart of fanfiction is the concession that in stories as in life, we dont always get what we
want, but that because were dealing with stories instead of life, we should be able to get what we
want. Fanfictions network-oriented development has given us the means to do so: we have

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computers, internet, websites to store fics, stories to use as source material, and the most crucial
aspect of fanfiction: fans. Fanfiction is evidence that there are people who love stories who want to
expand the worlds of those stories by reading and writing their own additions. These fans want to
express their passion for the story and hone their personal creativity. Fanfictions characteristics
push its audience to be open to new, often wild, takes on standard stories, and assumes that above
all, fans should be allowed to freely express themselves using the foundation these stories provide.
Like in Spokanalias role as social commentary, fanfiction is and should be a safe, open platform
from which to judge how society is and present how society ought to be. Fanfiction is uniquely
suited to further social agendas because it demonstrates how those agendas can operate in a
preexisting context. Further, fanfiction assumes that fans of the same story should be in community
with each other and makes it possible to connect them to that end.
What Is Made Possible And Impossible
Before the advent of fanfiction, although fans could gather at conventions and talk over blogs
and message boards, there wasnt a way for them to contribute as a unit to the story they loved
beyond talking about it to each other. As Lev Grossman wrote in his TIME Magazine 2007 article,
The Boy Who Lived Forever, The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its
own language. This talking back is the most fundamental and galvanizing act fanfiction makes
possible. Additionally, fanfiction makes it possible for fans to not just socialize, but to engage,
debate, discuss, analyze, and collaborate. Fanfiction is a medium through which people who had
before only been consumers can become legitimate content creators. Though they may not be paid
to write, fic authors, by the simple act of creation, take a larger piece of ownership of a story than
mere consumers. From a creative standpoint, fanfiction makes it possible to make another creators
characters and worlds yours by putting them under the constraints of your vision.
The whole point of fanfiction is making the impossible possible, but this transference of
creative ownership is one of the two things fanfiction can make very difficult. First, fanfictions

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scope has in some ways made too much possible, making it difficult sometimes for readers to find
what they want. The most popular fanfiction website, FanFiction.net, has over 2.5 million works;
the most elite, Archive of Our Own, has nearly 900,000. Though works are organized on the sites
into subject, genre, length, popularity, and other criteria, tracking down a specific story in a soup of
unwanted hundreds of thousands is a monumental task. Second, controversy over copyright and the
original authors wishes can make writing and publishing fanfiction impossible. While many
original content creators, including J.K. Rowling, Joss Whedon, and Star Treks current owners,
Paramount Pictures, appreciate the publicity and loyalty fanfiction provides, a disappointingly large
number of creators, like George R. R. Martin, Anne Rice, and Stephanie Meyer prohibit and even
vehemently denounce fanfiction based on their works. Ill explore the legal and creative debates
over fanfiction later on. For now, I conclude that this opposition affirms fanfiction as more than a
passing fascination, but rather a phenomenon with significant cultural implications.
Cultural Influence
In the context of the real world, fanfiction is hardly mainstream. Its a subculture of a
subculture, and is constantly under attack from both mainstream and fan culture critics. Despite
this opposition, fanfiction has an increasing influence on fan culture and over time, will have a
noticeable influence on mainstream popular culture. A few instances of fanfictions influence on
fan culture were cited above as fanfiction-inspired artifacts become more popular in fan culture.
Beyond those examples, fanfiction has heavy sway in fan cultures perceptions of stories; most
prevalently, fanfiction has brought many fans to support the gay rights movement. To demonstrate,
nine of the top ten most-read fanfictions on Archive of Our Own are focused on slash pairings from
various TV shows. Though the fics did not originate these non-canon ships, the fics became so
prevalent that they have introduced new fans to the shows, convinced preexisting fans to support
the ships, and sometimes popularized the ships enough that they define the show to many nonviewers. This unrelenting and widespread backing of homosexuality across fan culture has spread

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into pop culture as gay rights activists cite fans desire to see homosexuality in more stories. A
unanimous movement between pop culture and fan culture to support gay rights will cause a
monumental shift in societys overall attitude towards this issue.
New Forms Of Culture
As it grows in popularity, fanfiction in turn produces new cultural artifacts. For example, the
web of social media that documents the fics, to fan-made art, music, videos, and further stories
based on a fic. For example, one of the most popular works on Archive of Our Own, Twist and
Shout, a Supernatural AU which depicts the shows characters in a 1960s college environment,
has inspired works of art, song mash-ups, and videos of scenes from the TV show manipulated into
the context of the fic. Another example is the AU crossover genre SuperWhoLock, a combination
of Supernatural and the BBCs Doctor Who and Sherlock, that, though it began as a small series of
surprising fics, has amassed its own passionately devoted following that produces art, music, and of
course, more fanfiction in the genre. These cultural expressions are all new artifacts in the
fanfiction world. But these artifacts lose their legitimacy if fanfiction itself cannot be defended as
new culture.
According to the definition given earlier, fanfiction is an addition to an existing story and in
that sense the fic is new to the story. However, both the legal and creative debates over fanfictions
legitimacy hinge upon its status as new content. Legally, if it is new and original content, it cannot
be prosecuted by copyright law; if it is not, then the law stands against fanfiction writers. No fanfic
author has ever won a lawsuit from a storys original creator. The legislation cited most often
regarding fanfiction is fair use law. Originally, fair use combated severe copyright infringements,
like plagiarism, but has come to include fanfiction as the genre has become increasingly popular
and perceived as increasingly harmful to original content creators. There are four conditions for a
work to be considered fair use: whether or not the work is used for profit, what kind of work the
copyrighted material is being used in, the amount of copyrighted material used in a work, and the

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effect on the market for the copyrighted material. To summarize what kinds of works fall under fair
use, in a 1994 lawsuit between a music production company and a band accused of plagiarizing
lyrics, Justice David Souter crafted a statement that has transcended its original application to
include all potentially copyright-violating works:
whether the new work merely supersedes the objects of the original creation, or whether and
to what extent it is "transformative," altering the original with new expression, meaning, or
message. The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other
factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use. (Emphasis added.)
Transformative work has become the rallying cry for all fanfiction writers; the non-profit sponsors
of the Archive of Our Own network dubbed themselves the Organization for Transformative Works
in homage to the ruling. By this definition, fanfiction is inherently transformative. At its best, it is
not copying, but expanding the scope, depth, and meaning of the original story; even at its worst, it
is not theft of, but tribute to the original. It is new culture, produced because of something else but
valuable in and of itself. If theologian Andy Crouchs definition of culture is what humans make of
the world, then fanfiction is simply what fans make of the worlds they love.
Liturgical Practices And Social Imaginary
The practice of writing fanfiction for many writers is a deeply formational act of love that
shapes their identity as writers and their image of the real world. Thus, fanfiction writing becomes
a liturgical practice that subconsciously constructs writers social imaginaries, or how they imagine
the world before they enter it. The core of fic writers liturgies and social imaginaries is the love of
creative potential. The practice of writing builds fic writers own potential as content creators and
they base their works on the potential in other stories. As a fic writer, I catch myself habitually
searching for cracks in a storys canon that I can fill with my own imagination. Fanfiction provides
a paradoxical combination of freedom and control that fic writers love. Though were bound by
some basic expectations and premises found in the original story, within those we are free to take

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control of the story. The results are often so different from the inceptive work that they reflect more
of the fic author than the original creator. That is the primary liturgical practice of writing
fanfiction: adjusting stories as we see fit to express our own visions of the world of the story and
the real world. It is a liturgy of imagination, of envisioning and capturing the potential of stories,
that forms a social imaginary of the potential in the real world.
In Conclusion: The Vision Of The Good Life
Fanfiction forms a social imaginary that operates with a hopeful vision: a fanfic writers good
life would be one in which the real world had as much potential to be changed as fictional worlds.
At its heart, fanfiction instills in its audience a vision that though there are boundaries and
preexisting stories in the world that we cannot control, within our own version of the story we have
the skill and freedom to change what we experience. Fic writers fill whats missing in stories and
change what they dont like; this liturgy inculcates the belief that they can do the same in the real
world. It is a hopeful, empowering vision that I have seen inspire struggling writers of my
generation to be dauntless and determined in their creative efforts. The fanfiction world is a
communal outlet unconstrained by assumptions of quality or judgments of content where writers
are encouraged to and can establish themselves. Though practically most fanfiction writers may not
affect changes in the real world as drastic as the ones they make in their fics, the empowered good
life and attitude towards the world that fanfictions social imaginary forms is a potent, much-needed
encouragement in this corner of my generation.