a deep dive into published fanfiction
Several months ago, I told my cousin that Fifty Shades of Grey was Twilight fanfiction. She was surprised by the information, and I was surprised by her surprise. Was that not common knowledge? Odder still was when she told me several months later that she still couldn’t believe it. That’s nothing, I wanted to say. That’s only the tip of the iceberg.
In my attempt to understand the complete iceberg, to create a full list of fanfiction-turned-fiction, I began to question what counted as fanfiction at all. Fifty Shades was obvious, it had been posted online as Twilight fanfiction before it ever became a novel. But what about Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which was certainly a response to Harry Potter but had never truly existed in fanfiction form? What about books like Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which took from classics rather than contemporary stories and could therefore be called retellings? What about the sudden surge in novels about Alexander Hamilton at the height of the musical’s fame—were they simply historical fiction, or did their connection to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s version of history make them something else?
In the strictest possible sense, published fanfiction is books like Fifty Shades, After, The Love Hypothesis, and City of Bones. Books confirmed to have began as something else, books where you can find the original version online if you look hard enough. Books that had to be changed upon publication, character names erased to avoid trouble. The existence of these books is a relatively recent phenomenon. But the practice of writing stories about other people’s characters has been going on for much longer.
Take, for example, the existence of “sequels” to classic novels published by different authors. I first discovered these as a teenager deeply invested in Les Misérables, through a Tumblr post about Cosette, Laura Kalpakian’s 1995 sequel following Cosette’s life after the events of Victor Hugo’s original novel. Clearly something we could call fanfiction, but it was traditionally published. And it was far from the only case. Wide Sargasso Sea, Return to Wuthering Heights, Death Comes to Pemberley, Scarlett, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, the list goes on. Examples of people in the past who read books and longed for more, longed for something different, and decided to give the world their version of the story.
Which might lead us to wonder: is the only thing that defines fanfiction its relationship to copyright? The fact that it cannot be published, because the story is owned by someone else? Is that why a story about Patroclus and Achilles is a retelling, but one about Bella Swan and Edward Cullen is a fanfiction? It’s a reasonable assumption to make, but I don’t think it’s entirely accurate.
To understand the complexities of this, I must return once again to Les Misérables. A story that is now in the public domain, that can be and has been retold. And yet, Les Misérables fanfiction still exists, even though one could easily publish their version of Jean Valjean’s story.
But here’s the thing. Most Les Mis fanfiction isn’t about Jean Valjean. It doesn’t discuss the social issues of 1830s France, or take the universal themes of justice and revolution and update them for a modern audience. The most popular Les Mis fic on Archive of Our Own, and the one I was the most deeply obsessed with as a teenager, is called World Ain’t Ready, and it’s about Enjolras and Grantaire pretending to date.
If you don’t know who Grantaire is, I’ll forgive you. He’s easy to miss, especially if you’ve only seen the movie or the musical. One of the students who fights and dies at the barricade alongside the more plot-relevant Marius and the leader Enjolras, he’s characterized in the novel by a skepticism about the cause. And he and the other students have become favorites of the modern day Les Mis fandom.
The fact that Les Mis fans latched onto a group of minor characters rather than the novel’s central protagonist gives us a rather interesting lens to consider fanfiction through. The truth is, something like World Ain’t Ready actually has very little to do with Les Misérables. It removes the plot of the original, changes the time period and setting, and focuses on a set of characters that are such a small part of the original work, more of their commonly understand personality traits came from fandom consensus than Victor Hugo himself. It could never be marketed as a Les Mis retelling, because casual fans wouldn’t even know who Grantaire is. But fanfiction isn’t for the casual fans.
And maybe that’s what defines fanfiction, more than any copyright laws or relationships to original texts: who it’s written for. The community around it, the fact that does not attempt to appeal to a broad audience but instead a small niche of people passionate to seek out more and more of their favorite stories. These people know said stories intimately, they have likely read tweets or Tumblr posts analyzing their favorite characters, other works of fanfiction exploring their relationships. Together, as a community, they have agreed on common ideas that will feature in almost all fanfiction, defined the personalities of lesser known characters. They are not informed simply by the original work itself, but by the works and ideas of many other fans. A work of fanfiction could just as influenced by World Ain’t Ready as by Les Misérables.
What makes people write fanfiction? So many works combine a seemingly contradictory mix of love and desire for transformation. I developed a theory, during the phase of my life when I was intensely obsessed with the not especially good television show The Untamed, that people are more likely to write fanfiction for stories that are at least a little bit bad. Or if not bad, disappointing, missing something. Take a look at the top pairings on Archive of Our Own. The vast majority of them aren’t canon. Fanfiction is written out of passion for the original work, yes, but it is also written by people who want things to be different. And oftentimes, thousands of people want a story to be different in the exact same way.
Another similarity between the top ships on AO3: they’re all between two men. Explaining this to a person who is entirely disconnected from fandom is difficult. Suddenly, the fact that Draco/Harry is the most popular Harry Potter ship, something that has been an obvious piece of background knowledge for as long as I can remember, feels bizarre. Why are fans so obsessed with making Draco Malfoy sexy and gay? Why the fixation on this particular character? Similarly, why did Les Mis fans like Grantaire so much, despite his minor role in the actual story? And why is every male main character, regardless of canon heterosexual relationships, most often paired with another man?
It all comes back to the community. Why is most fanfiction about gay couples? Because a large portion of the people reading or writing it are gay. Because for a long time, complex gay characters and relationships were difficult to find in media, so they had to create their own. Straight people could already see themselves in Ron and Hermione, in Marius and Cosette. They didn’t need alternatives.
To me, and to many others, fandom has always been, deep down, about self discovery. So many gay teenagers saw themselves for the first time in fanfiction, turned to it to explore the thoughts and feelings they couldn’t in their real lives. Why the focus on side characters, on pairings that weren’t canon? Because they were something fans could relate to. And because, by being less defined by canon, we were able to project onto them aspects of ourselves.
The interesting thing about the most successful examples of published fanfiction, works like Fifty Shades of Grey or After, is that they don’t fit into these common trends. They feel more like what an outsider would expect fanfiction to be, love stories between central characters like Edward and Bella, or self-insert fantasies with boy band stars like Harry Styles. They may allow readers to project onto their characters, imagine themselves in romantic situations, but self insertion is not the same as self exploration. One is a blank slate, free for anyone to add themselves to, and the other requires certain similarities—the reader must be, in some way, similar to the author to see themself in the story.
Considering this, it’s no surprise the fanfiction that succeeds as published novels isn’t the same as the fanfiction that succeeds on AO3. After all, the audience is different. When it comes to fanfiction, there are often assumptions of who will be seeking it out. Young people, mostly. Nerds, obsessive fans, those with qualities considered uncool. Gay people. And each piece of media comes with its own additional assumptions. What draws one person to Les Mis and another to Star Wars? All of these details inform how fanfiction is written.
When it comes to published books, the audience is different. Many people who read Fifty Shades of Grey had likely never touched a piece of fanfiction in their life. They may not have read Twilight either. These works are no longer meant for a community, a group of people with a shared understanding of something they love. It becomes much more difficult for stories created with that community in mind to succeed.
Does a work stop being fanfiction when it moves beyond its fandom? When the names are changed and the book is marketed to the general public with no assumption that they already know or care for the characters involved? Or does the nature of its creation remain a part of it forever, informing how readers look at it and helping them understand it? I don’t have an answer to that. Either way, I think there is still value to fanfiction in the traditional sense. Published online, known only to those who look for it, obscure enough that if you do meet someone else who’s read the same things as you, you’re suddenly struck with a revealing sort of understanding. A knowledge that this person gets it, this person is like you.