Learning From the Review Culture of Fan Fiction

Julianne Chatelain
Independent Toolmaker
Email: julianne@acm.org Web site: http://www.juliannechatelain.com/
Key features: Selected Links; Author Details

All the nodes in this issue:

Editorial
Bibliography of Hypertext Criticism

Mez Breeze

Julianne Chatelain Richard E. Higgason Deena Larsen Bill Marsh Adrian Miles Jenny Weight

The meaning of any beautiful thing is at least as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.

-- Oscar Wilde.

Online fanfiction has a culture of relentless reviewing that is frequently supported by customized code and tools. Writing from the perspective of a participant-observer, I will describe certain of its more useful practices, with the idea that the hypertext community might be able to learn from or borrow them. Examples are taken from one of the largest online fanfiction subcultures in English, Harry Potter fandom, which is comparatively well behaved in the matter of copyright, and perhaps for this reason quietly tolerated by the Harry Potter copyright holders.

Ivy Blossom's HP FanFic Glossary defines fanfiction as "fiction written about characters from a television show, book, or film". It's almost always written for no money (because fanwriters don't "own" the characters they write about) by people who hide their real names. In past years it was exchanged in self-stapled mimeographed booklets; at present it's chiefly written on the Web.

Harry Potter fanfiction fandom has the following characteristics:

Fanfiction and hypertext are sufficiently different from each other that it may not be possible for hypertext culture to borrow tools and practices wholesale; they would have to be modified. We do not need to borrow the rigid categorization of the fanfiction archives, firstly because the ELO Directory already provides a variety of searches by type of work, but also because hypertexts do not lend themselves to such easy categorization. In contrast, as one of this node's reviewers noted, in fanfiction "works are created by elaborating and variating characters and fictionary elements of pre-existing genre-works", and "naturally lend themselves to being labelled and sorted according to those parameters of elaboration and variation in a productive and non problematic way". Even in fanfiction, readers who use the categories to make sure they "read only R/Hr" (stories where Ron and Hermione are involved) are balanced by readers who feel that having such labels at the beginning of each fic removes too much suspense. (Fanfiction offers the pleasures of the familiar, yet many readers also long, within its parameters, to be surprised.)

Despite the ways in which works of fanfiction and hypertext have differing goals, creation of systematic mechanisms for reader feedback on hypertexts would be an interesting thing to try; the actual fanfiction reviewing tools (and the ways they are used) offer lessons the hypertext community could learn from. The presence of easy ways for readers to leave comments in regard to work, and the existence of forums specifically devoted to discussing works with their authors, would both be of great benefit to us. (The trAce/ELO chats have in the past offered this opportunity at a specific time and place; other online fora could allow asynchronous posting with comments saved over time.) At minimum it would be interesting to encourage readers or Web site visitors to talk back more frequently and in a greater variety of ways. In a small way I've added a quicktopic-for-feedback to my most recently published hypertext, Murmur of Water, but the experiment of most significant interest would be a more widespread feedback and recommendation system.

The other lesson from fanfiction culture is that the presence of easy mechanisms for reader feedback on a per-work basis doesn't in itself foster a culture where critical essays thrive. Encouraging a true critical culture for hypertext requires changes such as those described in my "Excessive Candour" node: changes to our attitudes more than to our reviewing tools.

Selected Links

Ivy Blossom's HP Fanfiction Glossary
Ivy Blossom's entry for "ships", short for "relationships"

FanFiction.net

Fiction Alley

QuickTopic

Story of a romance between Oliver Wood and Percy Weasley, by "Wood's Keeper"; extensive notes to reviewers are at the end of chapters 2 and following