Why fan fiction is everywhere

53.46 - 55.303 Noel King

Fan fiction breaks containment.

97.744 - 125.467 Rachel Kersey

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?

125.508 - 130.099 Rachel Kersey

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

130.52 - 140.063 Unknown

Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or a prey, but certainly their toy.

140.183 - 165.611 Rachel Kersey

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.

165.631 - 190.401 Rachel Kersey

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.

352.007 - 361.097 Rachel Kersey

Fifty Shades of Grey completely changed the game. It was a bestseller as a book. It became an absolute bestseller as a movie series.

361.437 - 361.497

Oh!

363.248 - 387.02 Rachel Kersey

And it got publishers thinking. I spoke with romance duo Christina Lauren, who actually met writing Twilight fanfic. And they said that when they first spoke to people about going... into the traditional publishing world, and this is more than a decade ago, they were told, don't say a thing about fan fiction. That's a scarlet letter.

387.24 - 411.098 Unknown

I think publishing for a long time had seen fan fiction as kind of like, for lack of a better idiom, like the redheaded stepchild a little bit of writing. I think it was seen as... reductive and, you know, derivative. And, you know, if you were writing fan fiction, it was because you couldn't come up with your own characters or your own stories.

411.539 - 422.632 Rachel Kersey

Well, that is not true anymore. These days, particularly last summer, you saw three works in particular that either had been Draco Hermione fan fiction.