Kristina Busse

Historical Memory, Affective Imagination: Fan Representation in Media Fan Fiction

PCA (April 2009)

[1 INTRODUCTION] Fan fiction regularly includes critical analysis of its source texts, often focusing on specific interpretive concerns or debates within fan communities. In fact, one role of fan fiction is the analysis and interpretation of the source text—albeit via fiction rather than theoretical discourses. As such, the fan author may offer the psychological motivations to an act that remains unclear or ambiguous in the show or film or present an argument or conversation that is alluded to yet never shown in the text. Thus, a Dark Knight fan story might give us a potential background story for the Joker to explain his mad chaotic drive or a conversation between Two-Face and Batman to foreground their parallels and play out their opposing responses to tragedy and the loss of loved ones.

Few fans, however, exist in a vacuum. In fact, one of the more unusual and appealing aspects of fan fiction is its extensive intertextuality: not only is every story by definition intertextual with the source text, but also most of the fiction circulating within fan communities is intertextual with its debates, both surrounding the source and the fan texts. No story exists in a vacuum or even in intertext with the source alone; instead, stories respond to, comment on, mimic or criticize fannish conventions and other texts. One fan describes how “you can read a fandom’s history in some stories, in some groups of stories, in the trends they follow, from narration to characterization and style” (Seperis). In effect, negotiating with her community’s surrounding interpretations can become as central to any fanfic writer as negotiating with the source text. Whether she is appropriating or rejecting certain fandom clichés, she needs to be aware of them on some level in order to fully engage with her community. Likewise, traces of other contextual cultural experiences—whether intensely personal or collective—find their way into stories.

To offer examples for both types of intertextuality: (1) In the Supernatural fandom the role of the main characters’ father, John Winchester, has long been a point of contention: whereas some fans regard him as a tragic figure who raised his sons to be ready for a fight they will not be able to avoid, others blame him for his sons’ emotional disconnectedness and especially Dean’s feeling of inadequacy. Stories featuring John thus both respond to and perpetuate the ongoing discussions. (2) Furthermore, fan stories may move beyond the internal debates of fandom, referencing external events external events. Recent examples for this include placing characters within the recent US presidential election or having them comment on California’s Proposition 8, the elimination of the state’s previous right for same sex marriage. Accordingly, a Real People Slash writer may have her Hollywood actor characters debate the pros and cons of getting married before the November decision, commenting on real events through the fictionalized characters who nevertheless would be affected in their fictional same sex relation and living in California.

Fan fiction thus thematizes fans’ experiences of reading and engaging with texts—particularly via stories that trace and commemorate specific events, debates, interpretations, and approaches. Media fan texts thus become an archival memory of fandom, of the conversations surrounding the source texts, and of fannish affective responses to these conversations. As an archival tool, fan fiction is problematic, of course. Creative processes barely reveal all their influences, and often ideas circulate in discussion, show meta, stories, and story reviews in turn. Moreover, the ephemeral quality of fan fiction, coupled with the difficulties of establishing accurate dates, let alone clear context, for many stories, makes them important documents—if at times hard to interpret and rely on. Archives in particular often decontextualize stories, especially when removing author’s note but often simply by taking them out of the context of the mailing list or LJ conversations.

In fact, I contend elsewhere that we should read reader comments, rec posts, and story meta as a form of collaborative paratext that surrounds the story and our interpretations of it. In so doing, the collective text (comprised of stories, commentaries, feedback, and even links and tags) offers an account of the way fandom creates and responds to particular issues and points of contention. It is in this collaboratively created text that fandom history can be traced, sadly most easily in contentious debates and fights. At the same time, much of the conversation can be retroactively deleted and hidden, other parts may never see the light of day and, finally, often more acceptable topics of criticism can cover more personal resentments. As Alexis argues, fandom wank, for example, attempts to create an account of these insider debates, which not only has the advantage of remaining somewhat more permanent but also of often trying to unravel the layers of conversations and feuds that the text itself may not provide.

But even if it may be coded and incomplete, fan fiction does record fannish life and identity, and a number of stories indeed directly address this very ability. I want to look at two aspects of fan fiction that comment directly on that possibility. (1) The first type addresses fannish engagement with the source text and the myriad character interpretations and plot variations fandom provides. Such stories show a certain self awareness and thematize the varied possible fan interpretations. (2) The second type focuses on fannish emotional engagement and affective investment in these characters and the version we co-create in discussions and fan works. It is here that we see fans work through both desire and identification with the characters.

[2 MULTIPLE NARRATIVES] Textual engagements occur when stories incorporate the contentious nature of fandom by enacting multiple points of view. Many fan stories create a counter narrative to the seemingly intended narrative the show itself offers. In fact, one important function of fan fiction has always been to read against the grain and tell the stories not voiced in the source text. Speranza’s Written By the Victors offers multiple approaches and points of view in her historical tour de force. The conceit of this SGA story that traces the rebellion of the Atlantis colony and its final battle for independence against Earth forces is a collection of historical documents. The story thus merges biographies, academic articles, historical monographs, mixed in with eyewitness testimonies and a seemingly neutral narrator, who nevertheless cannot maintain authoritative stance, especially given that the final parts of the story are artistic fragments of a seemingly oral Atlantian culture in the future.

Written By the Victors is a novel-length Stargate Atlantis story that describes an intergalactic revolutionary war of the Atlantis colony (the setting of the show) against Earth. The events are related mostly chronologically, but consist of multiple accounts, often mutually contradictory, ranging from diverse academic analyses to eyewitness testimonies and varied other documents. In so doing, Victors mirrors fannish and academic disputes in analysis and interpretation by asking the reader to weigh against one another different historical accounts and documents. The story’s multiple contradictory accounts with their different stylistic and generic documents ask the reader to understand that any true account, any attempt to know what “really” happened, is foreclosed and can only be circumscribed and approximated. The comparison between academic and fannish discourses often has been repeated (and successfully challenged by Matt Hills); however, by presenting proper academic debates over the very subjects fans tend to argue, Speranza offers a fictional text that allows us to see the similarities without collapsing the differences.

This pars-pro-toto status of Victors goes further, however, when considering reader responses, which have created an amazing array of multi-media artifacts that accompany, comment on, analyze, and illustrate various aspects of this particular universe. With it the story doubly mirrors fannish behaviors as its reception performs the very fannish aspect Speranza is describing in the first place: illustrations, vids, missing scenes, post-scripts, missing documents and academic analyses thereof, podcasts, and various artifacts sung and recited, all add to and expand this fictional universe. In a metonymic mise-en-abyme, fandom, SGA fandom, the story’s fandom, and the story itself all reflect one another in their postmodern inability to ascertain one truth or even desire one interpretation.

Victors relies on the readers’ abilities to recognize its references, which adds another layer of meaning onto the story at the same time as it comments on the state of the fandom at the moment the story’s written. Employing multiple points of view mirrors the way fans actually experience fandom most of the time, reading stories and analyses and commentary side by side, often on the same page when using LJ’s flist aggregate. This complementary if not mutually contradictory account, created collectively and often collaboratively, is the fannish archive par excellence, merely mimicked in these stories, of course.

[3 REPRESENTING FANS] Other fan stories likewise complicate the way fans engage with the television characters and the bodies that play them on screen by thematizing the fans’ fannish imaginary. I want to finish by focusing on two very different readings of the fan/star relationship in Speranza’s SGA OK Computer and Rivka T.’s SPN Filthy Minds, I suggest that these stories archive traces of the ways fans theorize themselves positively as well as negatively; fans cast themselves as idealizing creators who give the characters backgrounds, complexity, and life, and as aggressive manipulators who force the characters to fulfill their own desires.

One of the most maligned characters in fandom is the author self insertion, the so-called Mary Sue, who is more fabulous than any of the actual characters and often gains confidence if not love of the main characters. Fans thus tend to be torn between not wanting to self insert while also not wanting to be completely left out. One way to put ourselves into the text, of course, is to make the characters us, i.e., to alter and shape them, to place them in situations that allow us to have them play out our own needs, desires, and situations. Poorly done, the characters retain little recognizability to other fans: after all, it seems somewhat unlikely that 40-year old astrophysicists will serenade their boyfriends with “My Immortal Beloved” nor that bubblegum pop stars read Finnegans Wake in their off time.

At times, however, stories can actually mirror the writing process and the situation of the reader/writer in relation to the show and its characters. I want to look at two stories that present the relation of fans to their fannish objects in quite opposing (though I’d argue complementary) terms. In Speranza’s OK Computer, John dies and Rodney uses a VR to recreate him, improving him along the way, making him smarter and a tad gayer than the original may have been. Just like fans often improve on the on screen version in their fan stories, Rodney’s version of John is a replica—only better. Rodney repeatedly escapes the real world into this better virtual world, where he builds a life with an ever growing and changing John. While that is an extreme version, the addictive threat of living in a more ideal and more appealing world may indeed be familiar to many fans. Most importantly, however, when Rodney gets the chance to have a more accurate version of John he vehemently refuses--after all, it is the virtual John whom he's gotten to known and whom he loves. The connection between us, the fanfic readers, and the story is all but spelled out in one of the concluding sentences: "As everybody knows, and as the internet has definitively proven, sex is in the brain. Which is why I'm the all-time sexiest—" Rodney’s virtual sexuality this mirrors that of online fan fiction readers and writers, who use their creative abilities to share erotic stories. The story thus clearly argues as well as performs the fact that sex is in and in the brain.

OK Computer is a more subtle mirroring of the way we create virtual world, populate them with our beloved characters and love them as they're deviating from the real thing. In fact, the story poses John in a virtual world watching virtual lesbians make out. In that, it resonates with a subset of stories that literalize the characters as slashers, both normalizing our engagement with fandom and valorizing us through the eyes of the celebrity. Here’s a quote that describes the celebrity’s thoughts on fan girls, which clearly projects how fans would like to be seen:

Whatever their beliefs or fantasies or whathaveyou about his personal life, he likes these girls, who are articulate and unabashedly enthusiastic. Jared's favorite people have always been the ones that get involved with and excited about their favorite things, who aren't afraid to be called dorks or geeks because they're having too much fun to worry about what strangers might think of them. People who know how to care about something. (elucreh Common Knowledge)

Whereas these stories document a positive fan role, RivkaT’s story Filthy Mind presents the dark underbelly of fannish passion, so to speak. Moreover, she foregrounds fannish preoccupation with sexualizing relationships, with using sex as metaphor for not only emotional intimacy but any type of emotional relationship. In the story, Dean falls victim to a curse seemingly cast upon him in revenge for his aggressive sexuality. The curse manifests itself in nightly rape scenarios by unseen forces, invisible multiple assailants, men and women, who sexually molest him. Only later do Sam and Dean learn that the curse physically embodies all lustful thoughts anyone has had about Dean during the day. Canonically even, Dean is characterized as an object of desire. Moreover, in fandom, the hypermasculine and sexually aggressive canonical character of Dean often gets turned into a more sexually passive and somewhat vulnerable variation of himself.

Filthy Mind forces us to address the psychological aspect of reading and writing sexualized fan fiction, the power and role of fantasy, especially as it concerns more problematic sexual acts, such as rape, incest, and underage sexuality. Fan fiction frequently fetishizes noncon situations, making them pleasurable for the reader if not the protagonists. Filthy Mind in contrast forces us to not only face the violations the character (in the figure of Dean) suffers but also the ambiguous roles we as readers have via the character of Sam: we are complicit in ways quite similar to him, reading as he's watching, enjoying even as we watch Dean be miserable. Sam, just like we the readers, is both complicit and guilty but within the story at least, a victim himself (insofar as he doesn’t know that his thoughts and desires are causing Dean pain).

As it literalizes the onlookers’ desire, the story draws up the parallels between the plot, in which Dean’s nebulous assailants enact everyone’s fantasies, and readers’ libidinal engagement with this story and others like it. After all, these nightly assaults replicate innumerable rape and non con scenarios as well as the entire subcategory of stories that are shorthanded in fandom as aliens/monsters/curses-made-them-do-it, a familiar trope in which an external source forces the protagonists to have sex. Very rarely do those stories reflect the realities of forced sex but instead are used both for readers’ voyeuristic pleasure and often as a plot element to get the pairing together. And yet the frequency of these tropes suggests that they are satisfying for the readers, and it is this interplay of rape fantasy and rape realities that Filthy Mind enacts and thematizes.

By creating a scenario in which any bystander’s Filthy Mind translates into an actual sexual assault, the story not only performs but also comments on the way fans sexualize these characters. After all, large numbers of fan stories are sexual in nature, to the point where all fan fiction sometimes gets characterized by its subset. All too often any friendship or emotional closeness gets translated into sexual tension and sexual desire. Moreover, fans themselves use the characters (and often the actors playing them) as sexual objects of desire, manipulating their virtual bodies in stories and visual representations of their bodies in photo manipulations, drawings, or icons. Thus while there is something empowering about this attempt to wrest control from TPTB as OK Computer illustrates, Filthy Mind suggests a more ambiguous reading that invokes questions of complicity and consent. In other words, where OK Computer illustrates the positive and creative aspects of creative sexual fantasies, Filthy Mind’s focus on the object of such fantasies complicates an exclusively positive view of sexually aggressive and controlling fan fiction. In fact, it questions our own implication in a culture of celebrity worship and commercialization that fans easily want to ignore in their self definition of both marginal and subversive.

Both stories make their readers party to these idealizing creations as well as aggressive sexualized objectifications. This duality makes them all the more powerful as archival interventions. Fans are not ignorant of the problems raised by enjoying sexualized violence and the objectification of male characters and their bodies. Arguments within fandom in fact address these issues frequently. Such conversations situate themselves between issues of free speech and the questions of self censorship. They address the separation of fiction and reality and the awareness that writing is nevertheless not innocent and has effects on our minds if not anyone’s actual bodies. They juxtapose the empowering aspects of female sexual fantasies with the colonization of gay male bodies. While Filthy Mind does not directly invoke any of these conversations, it does remind us that to enjoy the story’s erotic aspects also implicates the reader in its more violent aspects.

If OK Computer represents the best of media fandom, its ideal and idealized representation in fiction, Filthy Mind presents a less pleasant version, in which fans use the bodies of men for their own masturbatory pleasure.: one celebrates the way women write their sexual fantasies into virtual space and create characters that are better—smarter, nicer, more interesting—than the real thing; The other reminds us that part of these fantasies may be aggressively using (and possibly dehumanizing) the characters/actors around whose shows fandoms spring up. While this is an empowering feminist inversion of the more traditional objectification of women by men, it nevertheless raises a variety of concerns.

The question remains, of course, whether any actual actors are harmed in the creation and sharing of sexual fantasies involving them. However, the fact that fans do ask these questions, the fact that ethical debates occur about what gets written and what impact that might have upon the objects of desire as well as the writing and reading desiring subjects, even the question of whether these stories facilitated the actual assault of a female fan on the actor playing Dean at a fan convention—those conversations are mirrored and, in a way, archived in these particular stories. Thus, while we can and must read fan fiction as literary artifacts in their own right, they also, additionally, provide insight into the culture that creates, disseminates, reads, and discusses them. Eminently embedded in its subcultural context, stories provide one layer of the many (often ephemeral) traces that archive media fandom’s online history.