I’m done explaining why fanfic is okay.

E this post. (Or maybe this one.) Okay, rant is go.

Dear Author of the Week,

You think fanfic is a personal affront to the many hours you’ve spent carefully crafting your characters. You think fanfic is “immoral and illegal.” You think fanfic is just plagiarism. You think fanfic is illegal. You think fanfic is cheating. You think fanfic is for people who are too stupid/lazy/unimaginative to write stories of their own. You think there are exceptions for people who write published derivative works as part of a brand or franchise, because they’re clearly only doing it because they have to. You’re personally traumatized by the idea that someone else could look at your characters and decide that you did it wrong and they need to fix it/add original characters to your universe/send your characters to the moon/Japan/their hometown. You think all fanfic is basically porn. You’re revolted by the very idea that fanfic writers think what they do is legitimate.

We get it.

Congratulations! You’ve just summarily dismissed as criminal, immoral, and unimaginative each of the following Pulitzer Prize-winning works:

• Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, a modernized AU (Alternate Universe) retelling of King Lear and winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. King Lear is itself a hybrid of multiple folk and fairy tales
• Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Tony-Award-winning South Pacific, which was based on James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific and is the only musical to win the Pulitzer Prize that is based on *another* work that also won a Pulitzer.
• Geraldine Brooks’ March, a parallel retelling of Little Women and winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for literature
• Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In the Park with George, which is half-original fic, half-RPF (real person fiction) based on the artist Georges Seurat, and winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
• Jonathan Larsen’s Rent, which is an AU fanfic of La Boheme (much like the movie Moulin Rouge, an AU hybrid crossover fanfic of La Boheme and La Traviata) and winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
• John Corigliano, 2001 Pulitzer-Prize winner for Music, who wrote the opera Ghosts of Versailles, a postmodern fantasy RPF/fanfic crossover AU about Pierre Beaumarchais and the characters from his play La Mère coupable.. Those characters were previously fanficced twice over, in two separate operatic masterpieces: Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, both based on the other 2 Figaro plays by Beaumarchais.

Well, but those are just rare exceptions, you say.

Oh, hey, here, have some more!

• Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a fanfic parallel narrative of Jane Eyre
• John Guare’s decorated play Six Degrees of Separation, RPF of real-life con artist David Hampton and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
• Tony Award-winning My Fair Lady, a fanfic of Shaw’s Pygmalion (itself a fanfic of Greek mythology) which changed the ending. In the joint published scripts of Pygmalion and that great musical, Alan Jay Lerner wrote, “I have omitted the sequel [to the play] because in it Shaw explains how Eliza ends not with Higgins but with Freddy and–Shaw and Heaven forgive me!–I am not certain he is right.”
• Cultural monument West Side Story, an AU retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, itself fanfic of an Italian poem. More Romeo & Juliet fanfic? The Phantom Lover, a modernized Hong Kong film adaptation of R&J and The Phantom of the Opera.
• The American Western classic The Magnificent Seven, an Americanized retelling of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo was fanfic based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest, and was in turn adapted into the Italian film Fistful of Dollars, which was later remixed into an AU remake by Robert Rodriguez in his classic Desperado. Kurosawa also created Shakespearean fanfic, in the classic films Ran and Throne of Blood, AU retellings of King Lear and Macbeth set in Japan.
• The silent film masterpiece Greed, based on Frank Norris’s McTeague, which was later turned into an opera by William Bolcom and Robert Altman, which was later morphed into the movie A Simple Plan
• Literally hundreds of published Jane Austen fan fiction, including the classic 90′s satire Clueless, a film modernization of Emma, Bridget Jones Diary, the modern Pride & Prejudice fic that single-handedly invented “chick lit,” and the 2009 Hugo-Award Winner for Best Novelette, “Pride and Prometheus,” John Kessel’s AU Pride & Prejudice/Frankenstein crossover fanfic. Yes, seriously.
• Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, a fantasy RPF of Jack the Ripper. See also: Time After Time (film), From Hell (the comic and film), “A Toy for Juliette” (the short story by Oscar-Winner Robert Bloch) and its fanfic tag by sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” among so many others.
• Stephen Marlowe’s acclaimed The Lighthouse at the End of the World, an AU RPF/fanfic crossover of Edger Allen Poe and Auguste Dupin.
• John Gardner’s classic novel Grendel, a retelling of Beowolf.
• Other drastically varying fanfictions of the Phantom of the Opera: the blockbuster Andrew Lloyd Webber musical; Phantom, another musical by Frank Wildhorn; the novel Phantom by Susan Kay, which builds on the original to create a complicated backstory; the dubious novel Phantom of Manhattan; the classic Lon Chaney silent film; and of course, the equally dubious sequel to the aforementioned ALW musical.
• Want some Arthurian Legend with your fanfiction? “Gawain & the Green Knight.” Le Morte D’arthur. The Canterbury Tales. T.H. White’s The Once & Future King. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. Tennyson’s masterpiece, Idylls of the King. Waterhouse’s Arthurian Legend fanart. Or BBC/NBC’s “Merlin.”
• How about some Homerian fanfic! James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. W.H. Auden’s poem, “The Shield of Achilles.” Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Christopher Logue’s poetic retelling of the Iliad, War Music. Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Inside the Walls of Troy, a YA novel by Clemence MacLaren. Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad fanfics the Odyssey from Penelope’s POV, and the brilliant Coen Brothers film O, Brother, Where Art Thou transports Ulysses to America, turns him into a convict, and turns the Odyssey into a trip across the Depression-Era South. But, as charamel says, “Why stick to the present day? I seem to recall Aeschylus writing a ‘missing scene’ from the Iliad, Euripides writing fix-fic of Helen’s entire backstory, Virgil turning a minor character into a massive Gary-Stu, and don’t get me started on Ovid’s Heroides…”
• As multiple commenters have pointed out, the Aeneid is a fanfic of the Iliad by the original Homerian fanboy Virgil, starring Aeneas as a Gary Stu who founds Rome. The Aeneid itself has been fanficced in Black Ships by Jo Graham and Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin, as well as David Gemmell’s Troy trilogy, based on the Iliad and drawing from the Aeneid. gehayi adds, “This particular piece of fanfic was written over a period of ten years–from 29 to 19 B.C.E. It has been around for more than two thousand years. People have studied it, read it and considered it a work of genius for almost that entire length of time. Do NOT underestimate the staying power of fanfic.”
• the novel & film Ben-Hur, the film Last Temptation of Christ, and the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, all RPF about the life of Jesus Christ and the people in his life. Want Disney!fic with your Gospels? Try The Small One. Or take the absurdist version: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by acclaimed writer Christopher Moore, in which Christ has a lifelong best friend named Biff who has a crush on Mary Magdalene, aka “Maggie.” Prefer modern AU New Testament fanfic? The musical Godspell–Jesus appears in modern-day New York City. Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi–Christ and his disciples are all gay men living in the 90′s. The Messiah of Morris Avenue bt Tony Hendra–Christ comes back as an Irish-Hispanic Catholic living in the U.S.
• Or how about the Old Testament! The original God fanboy, Milton, wrote Paradise Lost “to justify the ways of God to man.” (and made Satan the original Bad Boy in the process.) Glen Duncan followed suit with I, Lucifer. Anita Daimant’s The Red Tent is fanfic of Dinah from the Old Testament.
• Pulitzer-nominee Lee Blessing’s play Fortinbras, about the events that happen immediately after Hamlet. Pure fanfic.
• The BBC’s “Shakespeare Retold” series, including a retelling of Much Ado About Nothing set in modern-day broadcasting, and a revamp of Macbeth where the three witches appear to Macbeth in the form of “supernatural binmen.” Then there’s A Tempest by Aime Cesaire, a post-colonialist response to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Teen-comedy films Ten Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man, satirical riffs on Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, respectively. Another Shrew remix is Cole Porter’s operetta, Kiss Me Kate. Then there’s Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, a postmodern fanfic of Hamlet, and that other Tom Stoppard work, the Oscar winner for Best Picture and RPF fanfic Shakespeare in Love.
• Tom Stoppard writes fanfiction frequently: Travesties is an RPF-crossover parody of The Importance of Being Ernest; and The Real Inspector Hound parodies murder mysteries in general and The Mousetrap specifically. Stoppard’s drama The Invention of Love is literally Historical AU RPF–A. E. Housman/Moses Jackson slash.
• Greg Maguire’s entire literary career; or, if Wicked is too commercial for you — for Wizard of Oz fanfic, look no further than Geoff Ryman’s acclaimed retelling Was, of which the wiki article reports, “Teresa Nielsen Hayden has compared the novel to fanfic, saying that the only difference is that Brooks, Alcott, and publisher Viking Press are “dreadfully respectable.”
• Or take Charlie Smalls’ classic musical theatre celebration of black urban life, The Wiz. Is it really illegal and immoral if Diana Ross, Lena Horne, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Quincy Jones are all involved?
• How about Alice in Wonderland? SyFy’s recent AU feminist modernization in which Alice is a judo instructor, and Tim Burton’s recent follow-up film in which Alice returns to Underland–both of these are unequivocally fan fiction in all but name.
• Or the hundreds of times and ways Richard Connell’s classic short story “The Most Dangerous Game” has been Remixed, revamped, parodied, and remade by popular culture, in everything from radio plays to the Onion.
• Or the thousands of retellings and reimaginings of the Faust Legend.
• Or the Robin Hood legend.
• Or the legend of Monkey / Journey to the West.
• Dorian, Will Self’s 20th C. AU riff on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. smallbeer points out, ‘It is graphic, violent, and was also widely praised. It particularly pleases me in this instance because of Wilde’s line from his own preface, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.” ‘
• The wonderful Disney films The Great Mouse Detective, a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes based on the Basil of Baker St. children’s book series, and Oliver and Company, a retelling of Oliver Twist. See also The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island. Turning the characters into lovable animals? Fanfic.
• In fact, nearly all Disney animated films are fanfic: The Jungle Book, a retelling of Rudyard Kipling; Robin Hood, where the animals sing and dance to folk songs penned by Roger Miller and Johnny Mercer; the films Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Black Cauldron are both significant departures from their literary sources; Pocohontas is historical RPF; and, as later mentioned, all the classic Disney fairy tales are fanfiction, most recently The Princess & the Frog, a modernized historical AU fanfic adding all-new characters and themes and relocating the setting to America.
• Philip Jose Farmer’s Hugo-winning Riverworld series, Time-travelling AU Historical RPF fanfic.
• Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, virtually published fanfiction of the original series, reworked and remastered. Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – published fantasy AU crossover fanfiction and RPF. See also Alan Moore’s Watchmen, in which a character is reading a book based on a song from Bertold Brecht/Kurt Weill’s Three Penny Opera, itself an AU modernized retelling of The Beggar’s Opera. Or take the highly acclaimed graphic novel It’s a Bird, autobiographical Superman fanfic.
• The classic F.W. Murnau film Nosferatu, which was later re-envisioned in a completely unauthorized remake by Werner Herzog, and even later, made into an RPF fanfic AU in the Oscar-winning Shadow of the Vampire, a fic *about* the making of Nosferatu.
• the musical Cats, a fanfic of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
• Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a modernized reworking of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
• Numerous adaptations of Huckleberry Finn, including Nancy Rawles’ My Jim, fanfic told from the perspective of Jim’s enslaved wife Sadie, Finn by John Clinch, fic about Huck’s father; several anime adaptations, and my personal favorite, Big River, the Tony-winning Best Musical of 1984, with a folk score by Roger Miller.
• Boris Akunin’s postmodern AU hybrid of Crime and Punishment, F.M.
• Pat Barker’s Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy, which is largely RPF about WWI soliders, poets, and doctors, including Wilfred Owen and others.
• Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking and devastating musical Assassins, historical RPF about U.S. presidential assassins.
• Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which starts with Jane Eyre and moves on to fanfic of various great works of literature in turn
• Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring and Susan Vreeland’s novel The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and the 2 Vermeer paintings they are fictions about, real and imaginary.
• Neil Gaiman’s 2004 Hugo-Award-winning Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover fanfic, “A Study in Emerald,” his Lovecraft fanfic, “I, Cthulhu,” and his Chronicles of Narnia fanfic, “The Problem of Susan.”
• the Weezer album Pinkerton and the Tony Award-winning D.H. Hwang play M Butterfly, both fanfictions of the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly
• hundreds upon hundreds of Sherlock Holmes riffs, continuations, crossovers, spinoffs, and remixes, most recently the Guy Ritchie film where Sherlock is portrayed as having some form of social disorder; but also notably, the tale of Arsène Lupin, the gentlemen thief created by Maurice Leblanc as a character for Sherlock Holmes to do battle with in “Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes” and many other books. 50 years later, Boileau-Narcejac would publish five more books based on the Lupin IP, official fanfic of what was already fanfic. The Lupin mythos has spawned countless movies, the most recent in 2004. In 1967 Kazuhiko Kato, a Japanese manga writer, began Lupin III, the story of Lupin’s grandson and his gang of thieves: i.e. fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. It was also hugely popular, with the original series running for 5 years and spawning three cartoon series, six movies. and twenty video games. (Thanks to flidgetjerome for this info.)
• The sections of RPF in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, with fictional conversations between Alan Turing and fellow 20th-century scientists, and the even broader RPF in The Baroque Trilogy, in which slashes multiple scientists with each other.
• Literally thousands upon thousands of modern reworkings of fairy tales and folk tales, including Jean Cocteau’s film masterpiece La Belle & La Bete, Sondheim’s postmodern musical theatre classic Into the Woods, nearly every animated Disney film ever, and all of Angela Carter’s feminist fantasy anthology The Bloody Chamber. And when you expand the folklore into the realm of mythology, the reworkings are endless.
• All of the works mentioned here.

But those are all different, you say. Those authors are dead, or their copyright claims were satisfied, their royalties were paid, or the proper homages given to the original writers. Fanfic is different, because fanfic operates outside of the consent of the original authors or original subjects, if they are alive. Professional creative works never do that.

Ahem. ALLOW ME TO CONTINUE.

• Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live RPF sketches of Sarah Palin.
• The Oscar-nominated film Being John Malkovich, postmodern RPF of John Malkovich that wound up starring John Malkovich as himself
• Poppy Z Brite’s published novelette Plastic Jesus, a barely-concealed RPF slashfic about John Lennon & Paul McCartney
• Cleolinda Jones’ published books, Movies in 15 Minutes and More Movies in 15 Minutes, parody summaries of movies under current copyright.
• Mark Danielewski’s fictitious interviews with multiple real celebrities in the hypertext experimental masterpiece House of Leaves
• Harold & Kumar‘s character of Neil Patrick Harris–which was scripted without any actual connection to the actual NPH, who came onto the project only after he heard about the part.
• Naomi Novik’s fictional crossover of her character Temeraire with Jaime from Song of Ice & Fire
• Eric Flint’s 1632 series, which he has opened up to fanfic authors in continuances that “involve hundreds of contributors and dozens of authors.”
• The Star Trek Strange New Worlds anthologies, which are explicitly fanfic contests restricted to amateur authors.
• The 2008 Oscar Winner for Best Picture, The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s liberal remixing of the movies Infernal Affairs & Infernal Affairs II.
• . Period.
• The new Firefly movie, Browncoats: Redemption, a completely not-for-profit film created without authorization from the franchise (though Joss Whedon has endorsed it)
• Sara Donati’s (approved) use of Diana Gabaldon’s characters in her published book Into the Wilderness. Quotes Donati in this interview, “I said, “Well, I’ve got this injured boy over here and Nathaniel is looking for a doctor. Can I have Claire?” I was completely joking. And Diana said, “Sure. I’ll send her over.” So her characters show up briefly in my storyline.”

  That, my dear Ms. Author of the Week, is what is known as Crossover fanfic.

_____________

Dear AotW. Fanfic is not about you. Fanfic is not about you. Fanfic is not about you.

I know you hate to hear it, dear AotW, but the story is not defined by the barriers you place around it. The moment you gave it to us, those walls broke. You may hate the fact people are imagining more to your story than what you put there. But if I were you, I’d be grateful that I got the chance to create a story that has a culture around it, a story that people want to keep talking about, reworking, remixing, living in, fantasizing about, thinking about, writing about. To quote Originalaudience on the post in question, “Nobody is forgetting that you created the characters. The existence of fanfiction really means that nobody is forgetting the characters you created.”

We get that you think fanfic is illegal. It’s not; it’s currently non-explicitly protected by the fair use clause of the U.S. copyright law ¹; we’ve been over this. Ad nauseum. For about thirty years now. That argument is old, and in the meantime people are moving into their fourth decade of writing Star Trek fiction. Or new, revolutionary, earth-shattering novels with fanfic at their root.

We get that you think fanfic is a stepping stone to being published. You’re wrong. Fanfiction is not a set of training wheels, not some shameful awkward thing you do before you grow up and learn the ~true meaning~ of being a ~real writer.~ Fanfic is brilliant, beautiful, faithful to canon, critical & powerful, hysterically funny, exploratory, full of love, subtle, diverse, poetic, adorable, painstakingly crafted, subversive, heartbreaking, progressive, self-aware, political, sharp, inventive, smart, satirical, incredibly complex, feminist, read by thousands of people, redemptive, and transformative on a scale that’s hard to describe. And it is written by some of the most incredibly talented people on the internet. Fanfic writers are bestselling and acclaimed professional authors. They are agents and editors. They are network television executive producers. They are New York Times journalists. They are Supreme Court clerks. They are PHDs and experts in their fields.

All of us are still writing fanfic. None of us need training wheels or stepping stones.

We get it. You hate fanfic. We don’t care. We don’t have to. Fanfic belongs to the tradition of reinvention and reinterpretation that each of the creators listed above has freely, fully participated in. ^{2; 3}

And as of this moment, I’m one author who is too busy participating to stop and explain it to you one more time.

Sincerely,

Aja Romano

________________

1. For breakdowns of the legal status of fanfiction in the U.S, please see the legal section of The Organization for Transformative Works; Kate Nepveu’s brief summary of case law concerning fanfiction; and this listing of legal articles on the subject of fanfiction.

2. For more defenses and explications of fanfiction and fan culture, see: Fanfiction is Not thought Crime; an open letter to Salon; The Anti-Fanfic Bingo Card #1 and Anti-FF Bingo discussion; Fandom & charity work; Cory Doctorow: In Praise of Fanfic; The Ecstasy of Influence; Rebecca Tushnet’s take on Transformativeness.

3. If you’re looking for a list of pro authors who’ve come out in favor of fanfic and support their own fans writing it, please see This fantastic list as a starting point, and feel free to update it with your own information about authors who support fanfiction. Also, I would like to ask that you please consider supporting the authors on this list by buying their works and letting them know how much you appreciate their support of and participation in fannish spaces and endeavours.

ETA, 5/7/10: AotW has issued follow-up posts here, which prompted a response from me (permalinked here) and here.

You do not have to ask to link to this post, cite it, or include it in any of your own discussions of fanfiction. It is designed to be used as a resource. Please feel free to contribute updates to it at any time. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this post and shared suggestions and corrections. Thank you all, and thanks everyone for reading!
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