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
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:
-
Works of fanfiction, or "fics", are labeled and sorted according to tone
(angst, romance, dark, fluff, humor), length, rating (G to NC-17), degree
to which they spoil the plots of J. K. Rowling's books, and which of the
characters pair up (if any). Although mechanistic, this does allow readers
who don't like to see any characters die, and want to see Harry and Hermione
(or Ron and Hermione, or Hermione and Draco, or Harry and Draco, to name
four
popular pairings) go on dates that don't involve explicit sex, to find
exactly what they want to read. There are also mechanisms by which readers
recommend their favorite fics to other readers and cause popular or better
pieces (not always the same) to emerge from the mass.
-
The larger fanfiction archive sites provide an easy (almost automatic)
mechanism for readers to review each work as soon as they've read it. In
the case of two large fanfiction archive sites, fanfiction.net
(not exclusively HP, but hosting a lot of it) and fictionalley.org
(exclusively HP), the review links are right at the bottom of each HTML
page that contains a fic. Fanfiction.net has a button, "Click here to submit
review", followed closely by a link, "Click here to report possible abuse
to staff". FictionAlley.org has a link labelled "Read? Review!" in huge
colourful letters at the bottom of each fic. Meanwhile, individual writers'
sites that do not have specifically programmed pages often use either QuickTopics
or e-mail links to similarly solicit reviews.
-
Writers who analyze their log files confirm that the number of reviews
is still far lower than the number of hits, so reviewing is not automatic.
But reviewing is a common fandom activity, as opposed to unusual behavior
that only specialists engage in. (I am not aware of whether this culture
or the reviewing tools came first.)
-
Fanfiction authors value reviews highly (possibly because these psychic
rewards are some of the only rewards available for their activity), and
do much to encourage reviewers. Encouragement often includes either personal
notes or public thanks (either on mailing lists or by listing all reviewers
by name in a subsequent posting). At least one author, "Wood's
Keeper", offers the first reviewer of each chapter a cameo in the next.
-
Most reviews are short but to the point, covering everything from, "That
seemed OOC [out of character] for Hermione", to "There were so many typos
that I couldn't read this". But some reviews are extremely detailed reading
reactions, and a few offer academic-style literary analyses. My only significant
complaint about the tools is that the review forms predispose reviewers
to creating short reviews with a comparatively fine granularity (per chapter
as opposed to per fic). There is no formal support for longer detailed
essays that track trends in the fandom (in a fic as a whole or across multiple
fics) and complement the short snippets-of-reaction, so reviewers who want
to create these are currently not supported by formal tools.
-
Fanfiction review culture tends to put readers and writers on a relatively
equal footing (compared to a superstore customer buying the latest blockbuster
novel and the author of same). Writers react strongly to their readers;
in the case of authors working on pieces released serially, sometimes writers
feel besieged or stalked by readers, and set up yahoogroups where readers
can discuss their works in progress, and agonize in livejournals and chat
sessions about every aspect of the process.
-
There is ongoing public discussion (on these same yahoogroups and livejournals)
about what a good review includes. In the course of such discussion some
reviewers even review each other's reviews. Although the discussion of
what makes a good review has not come to a definitive conclusion, there
is more general agreement about what constitutes a useless or "plebe review"
(also written as one word).
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