Page 6 - Fandom: Fic Writers, Vidders, Gamers, Artists, and Cosplayers

tradition of participatory storytelling. Professor Henry Jenkins says, “If you
go back, the key stories we told ourselves were stories that were important
to everyone and belonged to everyone.” An ancient stew of tropes, or
common storytelling devices and themes, inspired and continues to inspire
retellings. Among the longstanding stock characters are vampires (Dracula
and Twilight’s Edward Cullen), tricksters (Robin Hood, DC Comics’s Joker,
and Harley Quinn), and orphans (Jane Eyre and Harry Potter). Fic writers
re-present magicians (Morgan Le Fay and Gandalf the Grey) and logicians
(Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek’s Mr. Spock). Today, blockbuster media
entertainment is the source of most fic. The fantasy role-playing video
game Dragon Age and the TV show Supernatural have dominated fic in
the 2010s. But there’s room for tiny, rare, and seemingly outdated fandom
sources too. Does the Trix Rabbit, who has been denied a bowl of cereal in
advertisements since 1959, ever get to taste any? There’s fic about that.
The desire of readers and viewers to enter into, expand upon, or change
a story from the official version fuels fanwork. Teenage fan Julia Osmon
explained, “Fans take a storyline they really like and they tweak and change
it to be the way they want it to be.” She usually reads fic from the site
FanFiction.net on her smartphone, especially stories about characters in
the Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series. Fans write fanfiction for
love, for other fans, and (due to personal preference as well as copyright
restrictions) for free. According to the New York Times, “As long as fan
fiction writers don’t try to sell stories based on copyrighted works, they can
write and post them legally.”
Fanfiction was once a small, self-published expression of love for a
story world. But during the 1990s, the tidal wave of Harry Potter fandom,
combined with the rise of the Internet, pushed fic into mainstream culture.
Since then fan stories have appeared by the millions on online fic-sharing
platforms, fan sites, and forums. They can be as short as one-hundred-word
“drabble” or as long as a multivolume series. Fic is considered a literary
genre of its own, like science fiction, Western, or romance, though it can
draw from and even mash up other genres.

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