Edited by: Kavya Gupta
What do you picture when you think of fan fiction?
Did you palpably recoil? Shift uncomfortably in your seat? Were you bombarded with brazen images of acne-ridden 13 year olds shamelessly grinding against their long-suffering stuffed animals, foaming at the mouths, bubbles spilling out between glinting metal braces, as they obsessively devour the latest instalment of Two Wands, One Night: A Drarry Fanfic, in the throes of their nascent sexual awakening?
If so, you certainly wouldn’t be alone. Fan fiction is regarded as the crude, awkward black sheep of the literary world. While legitimate romance novels are written by white men in their 40s, sporting a tawny tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, smiling up at you with an easy grace from their portrait in the About the Author section of their latest bestseller, fan fiction is the perverted brainchild of sex-obsessed teenaged girls.
Perhaps you rolled your eyes? Did it bring to mind an outrageous butchering of language and paragraphs riddled with grammatical atrocities? Did it conjure endless images of cringe-inducing scenes, awkward dialogue, a mysterious, misunderstood, misogynistic male romantic lead and a nonsensical plot to boot?
It is a universally acknowledged truth that there is a lot of very bad fan fiction out there.
Or did you find yourself gearing up to spiritedly defend your favourite adolescent past-time?
“It’s not all bad,” you reason, leaping to your feet.
“It’s not all smut!” you cry exasperatedly.
“You know, fan fiction has a long and rich history, the Victorians wrote Shakespeare fan fiction…” you go on, hoping its past would grant it some modicum of legitimacy and respectability.
You turn to your most reliable defence, “It helps budding writers hone their craft!”
And, while you wouldn’t be wrong, these lines of defence reveal how misunderstood fan fiction is even by its most devout advocaters, and how it betrays society’s palpable discomfort with female and queer sexuality.
Many have asserted the role of fan fiction as an unserious, low-stakes training ground for aspiring writers, like paddling in a kiddie-pool before plunging head-first into the deep-end. Countless writers have outlined how fan fiction was an important stepping stone in becoming a bona-fide author. This assumes the inferiority of fan fiction in relation to so-called legitimate, conventional literature. Fan fiction is anything but an insignificant quirk of the social internet, like singing goats or the cinnamon challenge. Popular fan fictions have amassed a dedicated audience to rival, and often surpass, the canonical texts they were based on. The most notorious, oft-cited example of fan fiction, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy (or, as it was originally titled, Master of the Universe) sold 100 million copies, joining the ranks of the Harry Potter series, the Hunger Games books, and even the Twilight trilogy it was based on.
Fan fiction is also socially significant as a hub of cultural activism. ‘Taboo’ topics such as consent, sexuality and gender find their place in fan fiction. It was, for a long time, one of the few spaces that accepted and encouraged diverse representations of queer relationships. Women and queer people make up the majority of fan fiction writers and readers, offering them a platform for creative expression in literature, a practise these groups have been traditionally excluded from.
Now, don’t get me wrong, fan fiction is not all powerful and compelling culturally significant expressions of queer and female representations. Some of it is just really bad.
When I was 11, I was religiously devoted to a truly God-awful Harry Potter fan fiction. It was irredeemable. It had no discernible plot and the language barely passed for English. It was, to put it crudely, smut. Not even particularly good smut either. The sex scenes were unimaginative and there was a criminal overusage of the world “gushing.” But that didn’t matter to me.
I would strategically map-out my day, plotting spare moments to whip out my phone and greedily tear through a couple chapters. I relished these moments, on the bus ride to and from school, break time, when I could finally steal away to my room, burrow into bed and cocoon myself in my duvet. It was inexplicably enjoyable.
For a long time, I was ashamed of how much pleasure I derived from something so terrible and crassly pornographic, a sentiment shared by many other readers. Fervent fan fiction apologists fight tooth-and-nail against the notion that all fan fiction is smut. This is true, but you can’t deny that smut (and its various iterations) is a significant and immensely popular genre of fan fiction. This attempt to distance fan fiction from smut in order to make it more palatable to the mainstream betrays a broader societal discomfort with female and queer sexuality. The misconceptions about female masturbation and pornography underline this fact.
Fanficiton is written (predominantly) for females and members of the LGTBQIA+ community, by females and members of the LGTBQIA+ community. It’s sexual pleasure and titilation that belongs entirely to us, that exists completely separate from men, and therefore, society has a difficult time accepting it.
Fan fiction is not entirely crass pornography masquerading as literature, nor is it just the minor leagues, so budding authors can hone their craft before they attempt to write “real” literature. It can be a significant social and cultural phenomenon, which allows a radical democratising of literature, a site for activism, diverse representation and the hub for important questions of consent and sexuality.
And I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it and the role it plays in our culture and society, whether it’s really terrible, low-brow smut or not.