Fan Fiction-TV Viewers Have It Their Way

▪ 2002

       Television shows had long captivated audiences and provided a temporary escape from reality for viewers who could vicariously live another life. Some devoted viewers would often discuss their favourite dramas and begin to play out “what-if” scenarios: What if Agent Mulder never returned to The X-Files and Agent Scully began having an affair with Assistant Director Walter Skinner? What if Captain Kirk of Star Trek had never met Spock? What if the title character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer found true love in a demon?

      When surfing on the Internet became popular in the 1990s, fans began taking their fantasies on-line and publishing “fan fiction” or “fanfic,” a practice that had started with “fanzines” (magazines or books created by fans). The year 2001 saw a burgeoning of Web sites devoted to tale-tellers who spun their imaginations and transported TV characters into a different universe. The Internet had become their vanity press.

      Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (1992), had kept a watchful eye on the fan community for a number of years. He found that though there was initial anxiety and resistance to digital media, “even those who were actively . . . resistant to moving on-line five years ago are now not only putting new stuff on-line, but are archiving stories going back 20 years.”

      The Internet was a powerful tool; a fan could instantly enter fandom with a couple of clicks. Those looking for Star Trek stories could surf to trekiverse.org; prose focusing on Star Wars could be found at FanfiX.com. The free site Fanfiction.net was a clearinghouse for all fan-based fiction, and monthly it boasted 1.2 million authors and readers, all digesting or sharing stories—both short stories and novel-length works—based on preexisting characters.

      Though many purists believed that “real” fiction came completely from the imagination, Jenkins disagreed: “What would Shakespeare have done without dealing with preexisting characters? All of his stories were based on characters that already existed.” Jenkins believed that fan fiction was another way of continuing the folk process that dominated the storytelling tradition long before “we began to think of stories as legal property of individuals or companies rather than the shared property of a culture.”

      For producers, fan fiction was viewed as a compliment, not a threat. The X-Files executive producer Frank Spotnitz remarked, “Somebody said to [creator Chris Carter] early on…when he first started to see fan fiction about Mulder and Scully on the Internet, ‘You know you've got a hit because the characters have taken hold in the imagination of the audience.'”

Nancy Schulz

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