Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World

Lessons From the Megafandoms: Harry Potter and Twilight

Lesson one. Size matters. 

Harry Potter. Its author, J. K. Rowling, the first billionaire from books. A movie franchise that kept several generations of British actors employed for the better part of a decade. An entire imaginative world for the generation of children that grew up reading and writing in it. FanFiction.Net alone hosts over 500,000 Harry Potter stories, and there are many more on other archives, some still active, some gone and never coming back. In addition to the large multi-fandom archives like FanFiction.Net, Fanlore lists thirty general Harry Potter fanfic websites (including some sites with more varied purposes, such as the influential MuggleNet, which include substantial fanfiction sections) and at least three times that many smaller archives devoted to particular relationships, themes, or characters. The influence of these fansites and the networks, systems, and cultures they help put in place has been enormous--and it isn't likely to fade any time soon.  

Twilight. Like Harry Potter, marketed as a children's book series--in the Young Adult (YA) category Harry Potter helped establish. It came home from elementary school via my daughter's book-order form, and I didn't think twice about it. Like Harry Potter, Twilight is a global book and movie franchise that inspired hundreds of thousands of fics and also like Harry Potter, it gathered a fanbase big and passionate enough to transform mass culture and the industries that help produce it in unprecedented ways. But on the question of what kind of transformations--the two mass franchises part ways.

Lesson two. Sex matters.  

Harry Potter was in great part responsible for the explosion of YA as a book marketing category. Twilight also helped establish a highly lucrative publishing category (after more firmly entrenching YA literature and paranormal romance in particular as lucrative markets)--but books in the publishing category Twilight helped launch were not going to come home in my daughter's gradeschool backpack. These were adult books. Really, really adult. Unlike any other fanfiction fandom, and certainly unlike any children's franchise, Twilight not only inspired an underground erotic romance revolution but took it mainstream. But long before Fifty Shades of Grey and other forays into the world of commercial publishing, Twilight fanfiction had become the virtual site for an enormous and sometimes astonishingly frank conversation about sex, stories, and how to go about integrating the two in writing. Such conversations had been going on for a long time in fanfiction circles, as we've seen in the Star Trek, X-Files, and Buffy fandoms, but when it comes to conversations about sex (as opposed to the actual act, where your mileage may vary), size, as it turns out, does matter.  

Harry Potter spawned no Fifty Shades-style commercial boom in YA-inspired erotica, but make no mistake: its shipper wars--the conflicts about romantic relationships between imaginary magical teenagers--were epic. The cultural importance of Harry Potter slash in particular--of which there was plenty--should not be discounted, because in an enormous global fandom, even subcultures are giant. Although the sexual life some fanfiction imagines for Harry Potter's underage characters has long been a source of discomfort for their creator (and for a different set of fans), J. K. Rowling's post-series announcement that beloved wizard Dumbledore was gay fixed in canon the kind of possibility in which fanfiction had long been dwelling. Harry Potter slash helped shape and challenge attitudes toward sexual diversity among the generation that grew up reading it and arguing about it (a lot) online.  

Even today, when YA novels and television shows frequently thematize and represent sex between underage characters, much more often than not these stories present cautionary tales. They are stories of What Goes Wrong when you drink at a party, trust a boy, don't use protection, go too far before you're ready. These stories do not represent frank conversations about tastes and preferences and protection, gradations of gender and sexual orientation, or the mechanics of orgasm. Unsurprisingly, teens are eager for that information, and have never really needed adults to tell them that sex exists and that they may find it interesting. Where previous generations may have looked to parental porn stashes and the pages of Cosmopolitan, today's teens increasingly find such information in fanfiction. They write it in fanfiction--and in some version or another, they always have. They used to write it in notebooks, and now they write it and share it online. Like it or not, this has become normal and public, a part of growing up for millions. If Twilight and Harry Potter have taught us anything, it's that authorial intent has nothing to do with the afterlives of their characters.