Fan Fiction

Geraldine Brooks’s March is a novel that retells Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women from the point of view of Alcott's protagonists' absent father. The novel won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," "Drood," "Grendel," franchise fiction--all of these are legitimate, creative efforts in the framework of previous works.

Fan fiction is very different.

 

 

The OED defines fan fiction as ‘fiction, usually fantasy or science fiction, written by a fan rather than a professional author, esp. that based on already existing characters from a television series, book, film etc.'  The genre boomed when better and cheaper printing made it possible for writers to distribute their work in small magazines that came to be known as fanzines.  While Sherlock Holmes fans started serious and high quality following, science fiction dominated.  Star Trek in the 1960s caused a noticeable increase. Now a fanfic version probably exists of any popular book or movie you can think of.

 

 

Fan fiction is huge. And concentrated on a few servers. FanFiction.Net, begun in 1998 by a programmer named Xing Li, is the most popular with more than three million users and an equal number of stories. Its biggest competition to comes from Archive of Our Own, which is more of a fan community. This is a complex database with a devout following. FFN Research noted that FanFiction.Net "is a site that challenges Facebook in the amount of time spent browsing within the domain." According to their research, the average user of FanFiction.Net in 2010 was a 15.8-year-old girl from the United States who didn’t write fan fiction herself. Much of the fiction is serial in type and usually fills a gap in the storyline. Some right the original story's perceived (by the fan writer) wrongs. Could Harry Potter have a better romantic match? (More than half a million stories are based on the Potter series.) A hole in a plot may need repaired. Was Neville Longbottom's metamorphosis the result of some earlier witchcraft?

 

Like so much in life, sincerity trumps quality. The main themes derive from Star Trek, Potter, Glee and the narrative of some songs. New terms have arisen: fan fic, fanfic, or simply fic. "Slash" refers to any kind of sex between two men or two woman (apparently from "Kirk/Spock") and has been refined with "femslash" and "het" meaning the obvious.
"Game of Thrones" will likely provide a broad foundation for future efforts.