Rachel Kersey

As soon as I began to read fanfiction, I realized how much it is in the ether of so much of pop culture and the book industry and film and television.

And I think that we've seen fanfiction really reach... I don't want to say it's reached the zenith, because who knows?

It could keep going higher.

But...

There is a kind of mass understanding of an interest in fan fiction that I don't think was there before.

And I think that because of that, people just want to talk about it more and more.

This is such a fun question because there are a couple of different strains of thought here.

So let's start with the Big Ten philosophy, which is fan fiction is anything that is really derived from or inspired by pre-existing works.

But if we think about this broadly, basically everything that we know, including many of the classics, are fan fiction, right?

Like we could think recently about Percival Everett's James.

That's Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right?

Does that really count as... Well, so let's talk about it.

Because, you know, in speaking with a lot of fandom experts, one person that I spoke with told me...

She used to want to define fanfic really broadly because it gave it a kind of legitimacy, right?

Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon, that are winning awards.

And so fanfic is that too, don't you see?

But she came around to the idea that...

If you define everything that way, then that's such a broad category that it kind of loses meaning.

And so a more narrow version of understanding fanfic would be these transformative works that are based on pre-existing property that exist in the gift economy.

And this is key, the idea that this is something that people are doing not to make money and in fact ought not make money doing this, that it's just they're doing it because it is fun or exciting or community building to do.