elanya | Reading Fanfiction

marthawells linked to a tumblr post today by Sarah Reese Brennan, published author, about how she has been stigmatized for being an author who came out of writing fanfiction.

I haven't read any of her stuff, pro or fan, so I can't really comment on the quality either way, but the post made me think about how reading fanfiction is differen that reading original work, in terms what the reader brings to the table here. And while I don't want to over look her point that this is a case of womens' traditions being dismissed, I think there is some other stuff going on that informs the reaction she has gotten from readers *inside* of fandom. I suepect her points about readers outside of fandom are pretty spot on.

This relates to some thoughts I have about writing fanfiction, that I have seen expressed elsewhere as well (honestly I think I can pretty reliably fall back to Jenkins' Textual Poachers here, but I don't have it at hand to give direct references) - fandom lets us use a sort of character shorthand in writing. I can tell you that this person is Harold Finch, or Harry Potter or Edward Cullen and that tell you, the reader, what you need to bring to this story. You can project into that text things you already know. You bring a context to the table that helps you see the characters as you are told they are - "yes, these two characters snarking at each other are definitely Kirk and Bones, not Tony and Steve, or any two other male friends with a hefty helping of UST."

This ability extends when we take the characters out of their original contexts and place them into an Alternate Universe. Context creates character, and changing that context changes the character - that's what makes AU's attractive, I think. You can explore what-if scenarios, you can map character progressions onto different even and see what changes, knowing that your readers have the same starting point that you do. They know what you're starting with, so when you explore how things have changed when Kirk is a barista instead of a starship captain, or how the characters in Game of Thrones would faction in a High School setting, or how Hamlet would be different if it was set in space instead of Denmark, they can follow along, they have a basis of comparison for understanding how, despite the changes in context, the characters are still 'essentially' the same.

We don't get that kind of roadmap with original characters. It's all unexplored territory. But I think that, knowing that an author was into fandom, there might be a tendency to *look*, to bring those projections to the text, to identify the familiar where it was not intended, to make connections and assumptions, because we've seen how extremely we can transform a character and have them retain their essential qualities. Transformation is what we do in fandom, and I think this reaction to fic-authors-turned-pro is (at least in part) a product of how we learn to read transformed texts. If we can see Edward Cullen in Christopher Gray, where else might he turn up? I think it is easy to see why outsiders would believe the people who are considered to be more familiar with an author's work if they're told that it is derivative in this way. And I think that Brennan is very correct in her observation that this *kind* of transformative project gets dismissed and derided, for all the same (wrong, imho) reasons that fanfiction does, and that there is an aspect of sexism involved. It just compounds the issue of these authors not being taken seriously as producers of original work.

[Brennan also brings up Cassandra Claire, and of course that's a biiiig complicated can of worms that she doens't get into or address, the short version of which is that CC was villified by parts of fandom well before she ever succeeded professionally. Bringing her into the conversation certainly complicates the issue, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of it.]

ETA:
Jennifer Lynn Barnes" also wrote a response piece, looking at the idea of parasocial relationships, and how we project emotions and motives onto people that we feel like we have relationships with, but which are really one-sided. In this case, although she is looking at people projecting motives and actions onto authors, I think it does relate to what I was talking about above - we have these relationships with these characters, we see them, we project them where they may not really be, because we are projecting authorial intent as well.

ETA2: Talking about this some with

naryrising, and she mentioned a couple things worth noting, the first of which is that she was surprised that none of the articles (including mine) mentioned good old jealousy as a reason that authors who go pro after writing fic get backlash from inside fandom - I'm sure that is part of it as well. She also noted that in her post, Brennan compares her work to Supernatural, rightly noting the differences. But she doesn't compare it to supernatural *fandom*, where there are authors who may have more similar projects with their own work - giving more agency and prominence to female and queer characters, changing the setting, etc. This just goes along with the projections that fic readers bring to a text, let alone how they read the author's motives (or their own), though I think all of these things are in play.