When I was in sixth grade and beginning my writer's education, I produced silly tales with titles like "Steve Garvey Versus the Vikings" and "Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Monkey People." In my media-overexposed mind, it seemed perfectly normal that Julius Caesar would battle Darth Vader and that the Wright brothers would invent a machine that would allow them to travel to another dimension, where they would find a race of advanced but lazy lizard people. I didn't know it then, but I was trafficking in fan fiction.
The genre's formal roots date back to the late '60s, when Star Trek enthusiasts, dismayed by the TV series' impending cancellation, began writing their own stories about the crew of the starship Enterprise. The tales were published in limited-run zines and given out at sci-fi conventions. It was a fringe movement, and it stayed that way for years.
But fan fiction has exploded online. The Internet, with its easily accessible archive of media, provides people with almost infinite universes to draw upon. So it doesn't surprise me when I find a story that implies, not very subtly, that Fagin and the Artful Dodger had a sexual relationship; or one that projects the cast of Pride and Prejudice onto the socialite scene of present-day New York City; or several separate fanfics about the flying motorcycle owned by Sirius Black, a minor character in the Harry Potter saga. A lot of popular yarns are floating in the ether. People have to digest them somehow.
As befits its beginnings, the genre is planted firmly in pop culture's nerd division. The films most often given the fanfic treatment – The Matrix, X-Men, and Pirates of the Caribbean – wing straight out of dork central. There are thousands of fanfics online for each popular anime TV series, and many hundreds for sci-fi shows you might think no one even watches. When my wife was a teen in the early '80s, she secretly filled a notebook with a story about Superman leaving Lois Lane to take up with the heroine of Ice Castles. Contemporary fanfics have Roswell characters meeting the cast of Smallville. But since they're posted online, those fantasies aren't private anymore. Today's preteen girl will never be able to hide her embarrassing fantasy about taking the guy from Stargate: Atlantis to prom.
In fan fiction, even the most incidental story line and character can take on almost mythical properties. I mean, how else do you explain this 15,000-word thing I found on fanfiction.net that imagines what the movie Chicken Run would have been like if Ginger, Mac, Fowler, and the rest of the gang had been humans? I want to say to the writer, you're completely missing the point of Chicken Run. But hey, it's her fairy tale.
Sure, a lot of this stuff is just bad bits cobbled together by misfiring pop-culture memory neurons. But its popularity also represents the broad roots of a new literary trend. Witness Wicked, Gregory Maguire's magnificent retelling of The Wizard of Oz. Similarly, authors Francesca Lia Block and Donna Jo Napoli have turned tweaked takes on classic tales into hit books. The kids coming up with today's fan fiction were born using the Web; for them, mixing and matching media is second nature. They'll go on, if they choose to tell great stories. Even if they're all based on Xena: Warrior Princess.
Neal Pollack is the author of Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel.
Remix Planet
| Intro
| Making of a Remix: Robot Chicken
| Making of a Remix: The Avalanches
| Making of a Remix: MTV2’s Video Mods
| iMods
