Call Me By Your AO3 Username

The wealth of free, queer transformative work hiding in plain sight on the internet.

So, let’s talk about fanfiction. It’s one of those things that’s been my security blanket since I was about eight years old. I would honestly rate a good piece of fanfiction even higher than chowing down on ramen at three am- and believe me I swear by my three am ramen. But hold up. Record scratch, freeze frame. What, I hear you ask, is a fanfiction? Well,  Merriam-Webster will tell you that fanfiction is essentially “stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet” and while that’s a perfectly perfunctory description, I do believe it does this written tradition a disservice. 

As long as stories have been told someone has looked it and thought- maybe I want to tell that my way.  

aaleya

Because you see, Fanfiction has a tradition, and history that dates back several decades. While the word as we now know it was first used in 1939 (according to my good friend Merriam-Webster), and works of Star Trek fanfiction featuring Spock and Kirk as the primary romantic pairing really took off in the 1970s, the concept of taking from a pre-existing work and adding, transforming, or extrapolating new ideas from the original context has been in practice since antiquity. One might argue that Paradise Lost, John Milton’s magnum opus if you will, would not exist if it were not for The Bible and therefore one might argue the paradise lost is a work of fanfiction. Of course one might argue this and then get clobbered on the head by their professors (apologies in advance but the truth must be set free) so one must refrain. Technically, however, since the Bible has no definitive author and the Bible is not the intellectual property of one entity, Milton’s work is not “fanfiction” in the strictest sense but the spirit of transformative work well exists within it. But moving forward in history, Shakespeare, the bard himself, based his plays on existing works and Jane Austen’s works found their way into fanfiction by 1913 (Old Friends and New Fancies, by Sybil Brinton). In 1946, we witnessed the birth of The Baker Street Journal, a quarterly publication dedicated to not only semi-scholarly articles but also to transformative works based on Conan Doyle’s intellectual property, Sherlock Holmes. My point in giving you this long winded description is that fanfiction is not a modern creation. As long as stories have been told someone has looked it and thought- maybe I want to tell that my way.  

Hey, remember Star Trek and that Spock and Kirk fanfiction? In a 1986 article in the New York Times Sunday Book Review about female writers of fiction, “Spock Among the Women” (November 16, 1986),  Camille Bacon-Smith talks about slash fiction— a term that arises out of the use of a “/” between the names of Kirk and Spock to indicate a romantic pairing (i.e. Kirk/Spock). In the ye olde days of the mysterious pre-internet world, pamphlets and zines made up the bulk of distribution by primarily female authors writing about the romantic and/or sexual relationship of the protagonists of a visibly male franchise and for a primarily female audience. In the early days of the internet, and especially of literature hosting sites like Dreamwidth and Livejournal, the focus was primarily on same sex relationships. We’ve come a long way since 1970 and with the growth of people’s understanding of their own and other queer identities, fanfiction has grown too to encompass a broader queer experience.

As of May 2020, Archive of Our Own hosted 6 million works in over 36,700 fandoms.

aaleya

Cut to 2020, our very modern world of centralized air conditioning and home delivered biriyani, there’s nowhere I have spent more time on the internet in the last few months of lockdown than on AO3. In the three am ramen analogy, AO3 is simply the best cup of Shin Ramyun that might occasionally make you shed a tear or twenty but you’ll never stop going back. Archive of Our Own (hence the AO3 nickname), which describes itself as “a project of the Organization for Transformative Works” is a repository for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users, that continues to be crowd-funded and open sourced to this day. Why crowd-funded? Simply so that corporate internet, which either discriminates against queer content (hello YouTube) or seeks to censor content (hello FanFiction.net) to appease advertisers, cannot suddenly purge content as they please. Remember Dreamwidth and Livejournal from earlier? AO3 was created as a response to the widespread content purges of queer works from their sites overnight. Created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works (an organisation that deserves its own essay for the incredible work they do), the site went into open beta in 2009 and is usually moderated by a host of volunteers. As of May 2020, Archive of Our Own hosted 6 million works in over 36,700 fandoms. For reference, Project Gutenberg which seeks to archive culturally significant literature has 60,000 works but is still considered to be a massive website. And AO3 is growing as you read this.

Unchangingly over the last few years the top pairings that people have written for on AO3 have been queer (it’s no wonder when AO3 revealed an informal survey in which a majority of it’s creators identified as queer). The current forerunners for the most written pair are Dean and Castiel from the show Supernatural, John Watson and Sherlock Holmes from BBC’s Sherlock and Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers from the Marvel film franchise. If you know anything about these shows and the showrunners’ blatant disregard (I would argue disrespect) for their queer fans, then suddenly people’s drive to create fanfiction for these works, imagining it as their own, makes a lot of sense.  Yes, there is definitely need to talk about how they are all cis, white men but there’s also need to talk about how the majority of large, English-speaking television/film franchises are overwhelmingly cisgendered, white and male. 

AO3’s 2019 victory in the Best Related Work category of The Hugo Awards was arguably of monumental significance in ways of mainstream literary recognition for the archive of a majority queer, amateur transformative work. Vox has an article on the importance and significance of this award on the community as a whole that I would absolutely recommend. While it doesn’t wash away the mainstream imposed shame/stigma of creating or engaging with fanfiction, especially queer fanfiction, it does take a step in the acknowledgement that fanfiction is an important, innovative and valid outlet— that belongs in the sphere of mainstream writing. 

AO3’s existence is the reason I have a bone to pick with Merriam-Webster’s definition of “popular fictional characters” because while popularity does indicate a greater number of works produced, there’s no dearth of niche fandoms. Did you know there is a stash of work derived from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables that is specifically centered around Les Amis de l’ABC? You might remember them as the student revolutionaries from the award winning 2012 film. By no means would they qualify as popular characters (I’m going to go out on a limb and say you probably don’t even remember all their names) but there exists a wealth of fiction about them, set in times both canonical and modern, with reimagined modern queer identities. 

While stories that explore queer identities and struggles have a definite, needed place, sometimes it’s important to see queer characters whose queer identities just… exist. 

Aaleya

All of these dates and statistics and figures brings me to the eternal question— why is it so easy to be queer in fanfiction? Why does the wealth of queer fanfiction exist as it does? To begin to understand why, you must first understand that unlike in a lot of popular film and television, their fanfiction counterparts have queer individuals whose identity is not the point of their existence in the text. There is a greater story— a romance, an adventure, or even a simple stroll down the park— that drives the narrative while their queer identities are just a part of them. It’s so easy for characters to just be queer in fanfiction partly because there is a need for us to just be queer. When you walk in to watch a straight romance or a straight superhero film (I categorically refuse to think of Marvel or DC flagship films as anything but), the straightness of the character is never what’s under examination. Fanfiction is a space where the looming destruction of the world, or a stolen ship or a murder mystery is all the conflict the plot needs to drive itself forward and queer individuals are worth more to the plot than the sum of their identity. Because writing, sometimes, is an act of wish fulfilment, it’s no wonder, so much queer writing exists within fanfiction, painting pictures of a world where characters are so casually queer that you forget to think of it as “queer romance” or “queer fantasy”. While stories that explore queer identities and struggles have a definite, needed place, sometimes it’s important to see queer characters whose queer identities just… exist. 

I don’t know if there’s an all encompassing, one size fits all (the biggest commercial lie to ever breathe) answer to my question. I honestly don’t think there is one, because fanfiction serves as such a personal outlet for each individual, that it’s difficult to roll all of their personal “why”s into one. But I think the crux of it all lies in the age old desire— I want to tell this my way. 

-Aaleya

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Hi, I’m Aaleya. You can usually find me hidden under my blanket writing/reading fanfiction or crying over my rotational obsessions (which span the length and breadth of the internet— except Maths, I will never obsess over Maths). I’m multilingual, trying to learn my sixth language right now, (it is //not// going well) and I use all of my dabbling writing to play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends weekly.