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Fanfic: when fans take over

Thursday, October 07, 2004
By Melania Zaharopoulos


In the fall of 1995, Kathy Brown went online for the first time. She was convinced it was solely the domain of geeks, but at the prodding of her husband, the new mom typed the name of her favorite TV show - Lois & Clark - into a search field and was suddenly immersed in a fan’s dream. The Internet contained a plethora of episode guides, trivia, actor profiles and something else: fanfic.

Fanfic, or fan-generated fiction, was the tangible manifestation of Brown’s imagination. She’d been making up stories and alternate plots for her favorite TV shows since she was a small child, but the thought of writing them down had never occurred to the corporate consultant.

“I tried reading one and was absolutely stunned by how wonderful it was, so I tried another,” said Brown, now the stay-at-home mom of two children in Indiana. “Same deal! Holy cow! These people could not only write well, but they could also tell a story that was just as satisfying (if not more so) than watching an episode on TV.”

A couple of months later Brown decided to try writing a story herself, though she hadn’t written creatively since junior high. Since then, the 36-year-old has written everything from vignettes to pocket-novel-sized epics, along with an entire virtual season of the television series that ended its four year run in 1997.

In this corner of the information superhighway, she’s not so rare. Fandoms are dedicated to nearly every popular television show and movie, as well as video games and the more obscure anime, or Japanese cartoons. The basic idea is simple. Works of fiction are based on pre-existing fictional worlds whose rules and characters are pre-determined. Fledgling writers need only add their own story.

“Rather than having to start from scratch, it’s like having building blocks to work with,” said Matt, a graduate student at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia who goes by the pen name Grand Lord Magus and who didn’t want to give his last name. “You can just arrange them in a way that works for you.”

Thus, Lois and Clark are still going on new adventures. Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are lovers. CSI’s Grissom romances his on-screen protégé, Sara. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s carnal fascination with the sadistic Spike plays out in a thousand different ways each day.

While much of fanfic is geared toward adults and is often sexually explicit, some fandoms limit content to G-rated storytelling suitable for children.

Erica Friedman, 39, got her start in fanfic because of the sex. While browsing a Xena-fic Web site in 1997, the happily out-of-the-closet researcher for a large pharmaceutical company, who has shared her life with the same partner for 21 years, became frustrated with the lack of lesbian content on the site.

“What I found was a lot of stuff that seemed like it was written by 15-year-old boys who had never seen a woman naked, let alone had sex with one,” she said. “I figured I could do better just based on the fact that I had at least seen a woman naked and had sex with her.”

Brian Work, the Atlanta-based Webmaster of IcyBrian.com, feels that the inclusion of sexually explicit material should be taken on a case-by-case basis.

“I don’t accept stuff that’s just sex,” said Work, who also writes and produces his own independent films. “If it’s a good story that happens to have sex in it that’s different.”

Work’s Web site was originally designed to be a video game aide. It slowly transformed into a fanfic site as visitors began sending stories to the site’s creator, who posted them. Today IcyBrian.com features writers from the United States as well as Canada, Europe, England, Sweden and South America. There are even a couple of people who write in from Africa.

“A lot of people who won’t write normally will write fanfic,” said Work.

Friedman was able to write freely about the Xena characters because the show’s production company, MC Universal, was very open to the idea of fans creating their own forums on the show.

“They were very positive, very nice about it as long as you credited them,” said Friedman. “They just said, ‘Don’t give away whole scripts for free, and give us credit.’”

Other fandoms have not met with such lenient treatment. Paramount Studios has been known to go after fans under copyright laws, as has Star Wars director George Lucas. Sites, which are often maintained by one dedicated fan of the genre, routinely move or are shut down by Internet service providers or studios themselves. For this reason, Friedman has moved on to the world of Japanese anime.

“The Japanese companies are a lot less stranglehold in their policies,” said Friedman.

As to similarities with her peers, Friedman notes, “There is no more one

fanfic writer than there is one fandom.”

Mary M.C., a college professor from England who also declined to give her last name, felt that fanfic’s “training wheels” helped her to begin expressing herself creatively. And the community of fans she’d grown to know helped to make a major life transition a bit easier.

M.C. recently moved to the city of London in Ontario, Canada.

“It was so nice knowing that while we were looking, before we even moved to Canada, that I had a friend there,” said M.C. “My husband and I went on a trip through the United States, and we met a lot of people along the way from the group, one of whom we ended up staying with.”

North Carolina resident Pam Jernigan, who writes for the Web group Friends of Lois and Clark, also found friends and comfort in her online community. When her 3-year-old son Michael was diagnosed with autism in 2000, Jernigan found other parents in her Web group had similar experiences. And she met her best friend through a fan site nine years ago. The two took a road trip from Raleigh, N.C. to Scranton, Penn. last month.

Brown said she’s constantly surprised.

“You get to ‘meet’ people from all over the world,” she said, “and people are judged not on their age or location, but on how they conduct themselves online. I’ve known people who I considered the most intelligent, mature people only to find out that they were well-spoken high school students. And I’ve met people I was sure were 14-year-old immature brats only to find out they were 40 years old!”

Fanfic, like so many other online communities, defies easy definition. Like the society it mirrors, it is the constant intersection of varying ideas and beliefs. It is the home of instant gratification (no more waiting for a Ross and Rachel closer) and revisionist history (of the fantasy world, that is). It moves according to its own rules and is seldom regulated by an outside force more powerful than an individual Webmaster. And it’s more than what appears on the surface. Deep down, it’s a little piece of belonging, of a home whose door is always open and whose key can be found under the mat anywhere around the world.

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Melania Zaharopoulos is a writer for the Lifestyles section. She can be reached at melaniaz@svnewspapers.com.

It is the home of instant gratification (no more waiting for a Ross and Rachel closer) and revisionist history (of the fantasy world, that is).

quote:
It is the home of instant gratification (no more waiting for a Ross and Rachel closer) and revisionist history (of the fantasy world, that is).

Kathy...you have anything to do with that latter phrase?