Kristina Busse

Will the Real Ending Please Stand Up? Experimental Multimedia Narratives and Fan Fiction

Console-ing Passions (May 2006)

Thesis

In this paper, I argue that even as fan texts exist as creative artifacts in their own right, we must also read them against the entirely of critical and creative writings within their community context. Only when seeing fan fiction as both single and collective text, as artistic product and social artifact, can we begin to interpret its literary characteristics. Beyond the artistic creation within a discrete text, we must look at the way texts comment on and interact with one another. Fan fiction thus does not consist only of individual works of art but must be approached as a collectively written, highly intertextual, internally contradictory text which is continually being written through the use of various modes of interface. Such a reading then suggests a more natural use of multimedia and hypertext theories, one that is not premeditated as much as organic. In fact, looking at the body of fan production as a form of metaphorical hypertext allows us to revisit a field of study that has been readily dismissed as too utopian and ultimately not useful or implementable. Traditional hypertext theory mostly focuses on individual hypertexts, often quite consciously created within a postmodern theoretical framework. Instead, a focus on the fan-created textual network presents fan fiction as an almost accidental but nevertheless ideal hypertext. In turn, hypertext theory offers a framework that speaks directly to the way fan texts function. After all, one of the most important and defining aspects of fan texts is its ceaseless intertextuality, its constant engagement with not only the source text but different genres and medias of fannish production.

Given this context, I want to look specifically at fantext as new media text in order to suggest that the strong collaborative nature of fandom encourages experimental forms that make use of multiple authorships and question clear boundaries between writers and readers. Whereas the single story may not necessarily employ new media technology to its fullest potential, its creation, dissemination, and reception often does. In particular, fan texts comment on not only the source text but also its surrounding communities, thus responding to creative and analytical debates as well as to layers of personal interaction.

Story Space as AUs

I want to start with a brief excerpt. In James Walkswithwind’s “The Many Faces of Radek Zelenka,” Stargate Atlantis’s physicist Radek Zelenka accidentally ends up in an alternate reality after a technological mishap. Parallel universes being what they are, in this story a number of Radeks have ended up in the wrong universe. Most of them easily recognize their own respective universes and gladly return to their appropriate places. Finally, only two Radeks remain, clearly suggesting that their timelines are so close as to be virtually indistinguishable. Comparing their backgrounds step by step shows no difference. Finally, one Radek has an idea.

He … stood there, holding [a] glass of water until he was sure he had everyone's attention. Then he threw it on himself and turned into a penguin. One of the other Rodney's grabbed a beaker and splashed himself, and there was another penguin. Everyone else stared, until one Rodney wrote the note they were all thinking. "You thought that was *universal*?"
I begin with this story, because it exemplifies one of the central arguments of my paper. Not only does the story play with the classic science fiction Alternate Universe trope, it does so by referencing actual stories and story tropes within the Stargate Atlantis fandom. In fact, the alternate universes which comprise the story might as well be a collection of the many universes in which fans have placed their various stories. More specifically, the alternate universes this story references actually include a variety of the author’s own stories. Thus, in a way, this story creates a diegetic story space that encompasses all of the writer’s stories within it.

Moreover, the conclusion is particularly funny within a fan community that has all but cathected penguins as alternate versions of the characters. Spawned by one story, several other writers picked up the idea, which quickly became a fandom-wide trope, probably in varying parts encouraged by the fact that the series begins in Antarctica, last year’s success of March of the Penguins, and the recurring mention of same-sex penguin couple in debates on homosexuality. Thus, including a penguinverse acknowledges the actual stories that transform SGA characters into penguins and the general discourse surrounding penguins in the fandom.

Fanfiction as AUs

Fanfiction interpolates and extrapolates a TV show’s characters and plots, in the process often analyzing and interpreting the source text as well as creating new story lines or presenting different versions of the characters. As such, any fan story spawns an—often only marginally differing—universe that is alternate to the source text, i.e., the actual show. The more centrally an event figures in the actual show, the more likely it often is to being addressed in fanfiction. Frequently, central events are the ones that spawn off multiple what if alternates among fans and thus evoke numbers of fan stories. At times, the show itself offers not only a means to create alternate universes but also envisions particularly compelling ones. A good example for this is the AU encountered in the Buffy episodes “The Wish” and “Doppelgangland.” These episodes present a world in which Buffy Summers never came to Sunnydale. Drawing from this source text, fans continue to explore and expand this darker version of the Buffyverse. In all fandoms, fans likewise write their own scenarios of what ifs: What if a given character didn’t die? What if a cataclysmic event wasn’t avoided or occurred differently? What if an event prior to the show didn’t occur? In a way, then, every fan story forms a kind of an alternate universe. [And I mean AU here in an abstract sense rather than as a proper generic science fiction term or even a fanfiction categorization.] Even the stories that clearly set themselves into the show’s universe and stay close to the original story line itself will have to do something that moves them beyond that story line. Moreover, when looking at any two such scenes, they tend to be alternate to one another if not to the show. In effect, if we look at all of fan fiction as a collection of multiple universes, then every story is yet another what if, not always alternate to the source text but usually to one another. To return to my initial example, this story of the multiple Radeks—and many like it—mimic fanfiction in its collectivity as they play out the very multiple worlds that fanfiction affords its readers.

Fantext

In fact, we can argue that the body of fan stories written in a given fandom universe creates a metaphoric hypertext in its own right. Such a fantext offers us a way to discuss fanfiction while acknowledging its intertextuality and social context. Looking at the collected artistic and theoretical writings within a given fandom, we can see how a literary analysis of only a single fan story may be flawed in its restrictedness, how the text when seen as part of a larger whole partakes in creating an artifact whose sum is more than its parts insofar as it illuminates the centrality of intertextuality that suffuses all of fanfiction.

For example, a very recent Stargate Atlantis story transplanted the main characters into the music industry. The original story was already accompanied by illustrations, but shortly thereafter, the author presented a matching music mix, offering specific songs to download with liner notes and short ficlets offering background info. The following day another fan created a photo manipulation of a magazine spread advertising the fictional band, thus, in turn, influencing the original writer. Meanwhile, several fans discussed the story and its similarities to band fiction [i.e., stories about members of rock or pop bands], trying to look for archetypal features these stories shared. Effectively then, if we were to collect the various artistic and theoretical texts together, we would have a multi-authored, multi-threaded, multimedia and multi-generic artifact.

While all of these texts clearly exist within the same story universe, I want to suggest that the fantext does something quite similar yet includes all story spaces that one way or another connect to the original source text. Such a text is clearly multi-authored, since every creating fan contributes; it is clearly multi-generic and multimedia insofar as it contains stories, poems, fanvids, fanart, fan manipulations, even audioposts and fannish blogs. Finally, the fantext is a multi-threaded narrative, literally, as readers decide on their own which story recommendation or announcement they might follow, which critical analysis they might read, and metaphorically, since any number of stories return to the same moment in the source text, narrating alternate versions that coexist. As such, the fantext is internally contradictory with parts that at times complement, at others clearly contradict themselves.

Given these internal contradictions, one might ask why we should read all of a fandom’s fan creations as one text. After all, we rarely do so with even one author’s entire work [leaving aside such unusual cases like Faulkner whose works purposefully inhabit the same fictional universe]? Unlike most non-fanfiction writing, every single piece of fanfiction, fan commentary, or fanart relies—however loosely—on the same central source text; indeed, fanvids, fan manipulations, icons, or audio pieces tend to actually use parts of the source text itself. As such, the texts inhabit one shared ontological story space, albeit one that encompasses multiple universes.

The term fantext implies more than just a joint central text, however. As I’ve suggested before, beyond their obvious intertextuality with the source text, most fan stories are also intertextual with one another. Every fan story is in conversation not only with the source text but usually also with other stories in the fandom and the discussions that permetate the community. As such, it seems useful to not look at a story as if it were a distinct and isolated piece of art but acknowledge its social and communicative aspects. No writing occurs in a vacuum, instead drawing from and responding to previous texts and the writer’s cultural context. Fan stories, however, tend to do so to a much greater degree: they are always a response to the source text, often are produced in communication with several other fans, and likely to be part of a conversation with other stories and discussions. In fact, while some stories are written to last and can be read by anyone unfamiliar with the source text, a large (if not larger) number of stories rely on an audience that is familiar not only with the source text but also with the fantext, or with a specific permutation thereof.

In Laylah’s story “Serpents in Winter,” for example, the writer responds to a fandom-wide debate in Harry Potter fandom. Before the release of the most recent Harry Potter book, the gender of minor character, Blaise Zabini, was left undetermined. As a result, fan writers would randomly choose to write him as male or female. Commenting on that behavior, Rivetcat purposefully leaves Blaise’s gender open—even in the most intimate sex scenes—and tellingly entitled her pairing Severus/Schrödinger’s Blaise. More generally, any story that engages and plays with fannish tropes relies on an informed audience. As such, writers negotiate between different interpretations of the characters, their dynamics, and general canon events. Any new implementation is influenced to varying degrees by the show itself, the writers’ personal relationship with the characters and also by fandom’s response in discussions and stories. In fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of the fan community is the way people share ideas, brainstorm together, co-write, beta one another’s stories, the way ideas travel and get picked up in different venues and forms by different fans.

[On a final level, fan stories are not only intertextual with the source text and the fantext but also with general cultural and literary context as a whole. In fact, some of the generic categories fanfiction cherishes often are clearly drawn from common media tropes, often from science fiction. [This makes sense given fanfiction’s heritage and close ties to sf/f fandom.] Some of these tropes span most fandoms, including the non-fantasic ones, and are large enough to often deserve their own generic categories in archives. Examples include male pregnancy, animal transfiguration, time travel, and amnesia stories. Some are more fandom specific but nevertheless clearly linked to more general tropes. In Stargate Atlantis, for example, such tropes include the sentient city, often with an intense mind melding between machine and human; several fandoms have canonical situations that offer potential for post-apocalyptic dystopias, such as X-Files’s post-colonization or X-Men’s post-Mutant Registration Act stories.]

Interactivity

I want to be really careful, though, not to suggest that every reader has access to and knowledge of the same fantext. Some writers may work from the source text alone, never interacting with other fans while others work from nothing but so-called fanon with no knowledge of the source text whatsoever. Most readers/writers are situated somewhere in between, affecting and being affected by stories, analyses, discussion, and debates. As a result, the text that is created by the fans forms a sort of hypertext as its various paths tell different stories. [By hypertext I mean stories in electronic format where parts of the text link to other parts, which results in offering a reader multiple concurrent narratives.] Moreover, since much of the interaction occurs on the World Wide Web, they interconnect as hypertext, literally when one text (discussion or story or screencaps or fanart) links to another, but also metaphorically in the sense that many of the stories are connected in the reader’s (and writer’s) minds.

In fact, we could conceive of the fantext as an ideal hypertext insofar as no two reading experiences are ever alike, in the way every fan reads a different selection of stories in different permutation, thus creating a very personal and idiosyncratic text. One may not even have to read certain stories to make them part of one’s personal fantext; extensive debates and general awareness may be completely sufficient because as others talk about it, we pick up certain ideas and interpretations and controversies. Every reading is ultimately affected by what the reader brings to the text, the individual interpretation of the source text, general knowledge of cultural facts, as well as other stories in the fandom and fannish discussions. At the same time, the fact that no two fans can ever read the same version of a fantext, that no two fans will have read the exact same stories in the same order, will have participated in the same debate at the same time, indicates an intrinsic interactive aspect of the fantext. Every fan decides which part of the larger fantext she will read or not read, which discussion she will engage in, which stories she’ll reread. If we think of the reader of a traditional hypertext as being able to choose which link to click next, fantext readers have a near infinite number of possibilities as well as the ability to add onto the text, to co-write the fantext.

In that respect, the fantext exceeds classic hypertext as well as virtual reality scenarios, the other narrative environment often studied in terms of interactivity. The fantext is not only interactive but everchanging and expanding. The infrastructure of fandom contains archives that collect stories or newsletters and rec lists that link to them, its personal journals and mailing lists that may mix stories, analyses, and personal anecdotes. The fact that the stories are often interspersed with commentary, criticism, and personal random information makes the fantext both more open and dispersed but also more interactive and encompassing. Considering a reader who navigates these various spaces which all add to the overall fantext, we can see the multi-threaded character of the reading process. However, while the fantext’s plots are multithreaded and, at times, mutually exclusive, they all circle back to the same source text and thus exist within the vicinity of one another. [If we were to visualize it, we could think of fan stories as multidimensional clusters around a central source text, where some fan stories may even be situated closer to the center of another source text, picking up tropes and characterizations from elsewhere.]

Another aspect that drives this unceasing interactivity is the fact that most members of the fannish community are both producers and consumers of the fantext. A large number of readers are writers and an even larger number will comment on stories or source texts. Reading a random collection of fan stories thus creates a complicated, often internally contradictory view. Nevertheless, it affords a conceptual experience similar to that of hypertextual and virtual reality experiments insofar as it is the reader rather than the text who adds the next piece to the text.

Immersion

Every fan story is both an artifact in its own right and, simultaneously, one whose ultimate meaning and interpretation is highly dependent on its intertextuality with the source text and the fannish context. Intertextuality thus is central, especially in an artistic arena where reader and writer, editor and critic all intersperse and blur. Moreover, fandom is already in intertextual dialog with a source text in which fans (by definition) are immersed and strongly invested. Effectively, immersion in fan fiction occurs on three levels. On a first level, there’s the initial immersion into the source text, the starting point of the fannish response. This level is the only one that fans and casual readers of a text share. When watching an episode, both fans and casual viewers of the show may immerse themselves into the world of Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or any other specific fictional universe.

Fans, however, interact and immerse on a secondary level, namely the immersion in the fannish universe itself. This fannish universe includes both the expansion of the world (i.e., discussions of characters as if they were real people) as well as the fannish space itself where fans engage, interpret, create multiple competing and complementing versions of the original universe. Here fans create alternate collective worlds or simply solidify a particular interpretation of the original world. An example of fans solidifying a particular interpretation of the original world would be most slash readings. Few texts that get slashed present the protagonists as gay or bisexual in the text, yet large groups of fans agree that their slash pairing is attracted to one another. Fans of fanfiction in particular can experience a final immersion, filtered through the previous two, which is the reading of a particular fan story. The writer offers a particular interpretation of the source text, and though it may be influenced by fannish discussions and other fan texts, the reader may engage immersively, while reading, with that specific text [with all the other contexts at play in the background]. Reading fanfiction, the reader thus immerses both in the source textual world, the multiple co-existing ones fan culture has produced, as well as the particular instantiation offered in this story.

Looking at the body of fannish productions as a text in its own right, we see how such a fantext creates an immersive, interactive text that provides agency and is open to transformation. This is true not only in the sense in which all literature is interactive and immersive to a degree, but rather in the way in which fantext is particularly categorized and specifically defined by its very immersive and interactive characteristics. By its very definition fanfiction is the product of fans who immerse themselves into the source text’s universe at the same time as they themselves create and share with other fans, interactively expanding the fictional universe. In other words, the very fact of wanting to expand the characters’ universe, of wanting to learn more about their lives, worlds, psyches, depends on an original immersive as well as interactive impulse.

Conclusion

Considering its intertextual, interactive, and immerse aspects, fanfiction demands a theoretical framework that moves beyond general concepts of intertextuality and looks at the very real multiple immersive reading contexts of fans reading fan texts; more specifically, it demands a theory that includes the social and contextual aspects of any reading. The narrative theory growing out of the hypertext and cyberspace theories of the nineties such as Marie-Louise Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality, for example, provides some help even as it fails to fully account for the multiplicity and complexity the fantext offers.

Ryan draws on reader response and psychological theories of reading in order to emphasize the role of world building and the readers’ immersion within it. Rejecting structuralist and poststructuralist emphases on the text alone, she looks toward the text at the same time as she acknowledges the actual reading process. Such a focus on the actual process of reading offers fanfiction theory a way to address the particular technologies and infrastructures of online fannish creations. More specifically, it allows us to include the medium of production, dissemination, and reception into text-based analysis. I suggest that fantext functions as a huge hypertext, somewhere between the small-scale version of literary hypertext and the whole of the World Wide Web, which is obviously a huge, evergrowing hypertext in its own right.

Moreover, focusing on the interactive and immersive qualities of narrative allows us to build upon Ryan’s model of narrative; defining the fantext with interactivity and immersion as central aspects allows us to focus on the textual layer of fan creations without completely dismissing their social ones. Whereas most literary criticism likes to look at the text at the expense of reader and writer, any theory of fanfiction must include the awareness of how readers and writers, how the specific fannish and general cultural context are crucial to any potential understanding of the texts. Meanwhile, much of fanfiction studies has been driven by sociological and anthropological frameworks, studying the fans rather than the texts. In its stead, conceiving of the productions of the fans as a text in its own right, defining the fantext as we have done here, allows us to focus on the text and use literary and narratological tools without losing the social dimension so central to fanfiction.