Corporate Fiction is not Fan Fiction
The new culture industry and the fan service trap.
One of my biggest pet peeves is seeing officially produced media described as “fan fiction.” By definition, as official releases and market commodities restricted by real world logistics and budgets, they cannot be fan fiction.
But I know that it's not meant literally. “Fan fiction” has just become the go-to term for media that screams fan service and wish fulfillment. It's perceived as fulfilling a demand, a hackneyed wink to the crowd, overindulgent for the purpose of pleasing specific fans. If anything, I consider this type of content farming to be antithetical to fandom and fan fiction.
The proliferation of this approach has been on the horizon for quite some time. Jon Favreau told Vanity Fair that before Iron Man (2008) studios would, “ignore the core fans because they only represent a small fraction of the potential audience and focus on the mainstream audience.”
But the shift was noticeable earlier. We can look at the mainstreaming of ComiCon, which transformed from a geek haven to a blockbuster launchpad. In 2006, after attending that year’s con, media analyst Ivan Askwith concluded that, “culture producers have finally started to grasp the vital role of fans as a central engine in the new entertainment economy.”
At that point, television had already caught on. In 2002, Television Without Pity was already shaping the way showrunners and networks were responding to fan chatter. Marshall Sella astutely observed that the increased catering to fans might result in,
“a hyperactively numbed consumer culture, resulting not in art but in a ‘culture industry’ that demeans and deceives rather than enlightens, even if the message boards' input is ‘active’ and has an impact on the narratives of shows.”
I think we're at the point where this culture industry has matured into the norm.
This includes cinematic universes of the Marvel, Mattel, Harry Potter and Star Wars variety, but also general IP extension products such as spin-offs, revivals, reboots, sequels, and prequels. Transmedia storytelling is the default for big productions.
I'm not saying that all these formats are inherently terrible or worthless or brain numbing; I have plenty of favourites of my own. Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, NBC's Hannibal, HBO's High Fidelity, the televised Buffyverse, these all fit the bill by my broad definition.
Another recent example would be the BBC's Boiling Point series, which is a continuation of the film of the same name. Both were good, but there was no need for a series. It left me wondering if the film was always meant to be a proof-of-concept, like short films used to be. Or was the series a cynical attempt at capitalizing on the success of The Bear? Both shows cover professional kitchens, after all.
The feature film being treated as a proof-of-concept has been increasingly prevalent in our cultural menu. Just from the past couple of years we've been served the following series based on films: The Gentlemen, Fatal Attraction, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Presumed Innocent, Dead Ringers, Willow, Ted, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, A League of Their Own, Sexy Beast, American Gigolo, The Purge, Hanna, What We Do In The Shadows, True Lies, Heartstopper…
Are there really more stories to tell, or is it part of the nostalgia industry banking on the past, refusing to move onto something new? Is there a purpose to these endeavours outside pure profiteering? Is there any point at which name recognition is seen as a hurdle, or is the existence of fandoms seen as money left on the table?
The answer to the last question seems to be yes, and I am not just being cynical when I say so. In an interview with Consequence in 2011, game designer Andrea Philips, who was working with Thomas Dolby at the time, said,
AP: Well, you know, there’s a sort of drive that people have to create fan fiction, right? And fan-fic is an indication to a creator that you haven’t made enough story yet, and that people still want more, which in crass business terms is also a way of saying you’re leaving money on the table. […] in crass business terms, it’s also a way to make a little more money off the same story.
This was around the same time that fan fiction itself became corporately backed content, with mainstream publishing getting into reskinned Twilight and One Direction fan fiction, but also with Wattpad capitalizing on the craze and teaming up with Sony Music Canada to release official “fan” fiction (something I've covered before).
To think that the existence of transformational works means fans should be served more content is a misunderstanding of how transformational fandom, specifically, operates. I have a problem with the idea that watching film and television kills imagination, because if you engage with media on a fannish level, you can expand on those worlds, think deeply about the lore, the characters and the world that has been presented.
If we’re being served everything, there’s no room for exploration, and content piles up like homework. The ideal viewer is invested, but does not talk back and should be affirmational1 and reverent of the text they are presented with, rather than transformational and playing with the text, exploring different narratives, perspectives, situations.
When I wrote a note trying to differentiate the two types of fandom,
made an excellent point: the existence of fan fiction does not mean fans want the work to be written like fan fiction.But that seems to be what we’re getting in a lot of cases. Going so far as to intentional holes being left in narratives for fans to fill in. Chloé Zhao apparently intended with The Eternals, then what is the purpose of the film in the first place? That doesn’t just deliver a subpar product to fandom, it intentionally leaves audiences wanting.
Leaving audiences wanting might seem like a perfect way to queue up continuations to the stories, except most people who encounter a piece of media will by default not be fans, so conflating audiences at large with fans is a risk.
Jonathan Gray, whose work on paratexts I’ve discussed before, predicted today’s problem in 2010, saying, “the risk has developed that fans stand in for audiences in general, when many audiences aren’t fans, or define their fandom in very different terms.”
Worse yet, audiences are not monoliths, and neither are fandoms.
One of the most obvious ways that fans’ perspectives are divided is on the topic of romantic couplings, also known as “ships.” What is most popular among fans is often not canonical. In Teen Wolf fandom, the non-canon ship of Derek/Stiles is overwhelmingly the most popular. Creator Jeff Davis told E! Online in 2012 that he was surprised that some fans actually wanted the couple to be made official.
“I initially thought that these pairings were just in the realm of fan fiction. I understood it as a way for fans to do their own interpretation of a story. Write the characters in the way they envisioned them. Kind of like a ‘what if’ universe. […] I had no idea that my Twitter account would be pummeled by pleas and requests to actually make Stiles and Derek a pair in the show itself, to become ‘canon.’”
If the show was on the air today (revival, anyone?) I wouldn’t be surprised if the shippers got their way. Not just because of potential harassment campaigns, but because there will be data analysts crunching the numbers on fan fiction statistics, hashtags and social listening tools, determining that if one pairing has a devoted following, the rest of the audience must agree with it.
As I mentioned, the most popular ships are not established in the text itself. Despite the three Harry Potter leads being paired off in the source text, two of the most persistent sub-fandoms are those of Harry/Draco and Draco/Hermione fans. In Suits, Mike/Harvey reigns supreme. In Stranger Things, two of the top ships are Steve/Eddie and Nancy/Robin.
Sometimes, loved ships are made canon, but in dissatisfying ways. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike/Buffy fell into the classic enemies-to-lovers trope and was a favourite among fans, but when the show actually went there, it leaned into a mutually abusive relationship culminating in an attempted rape. This wasn’t the romantic redemption story arc that many fans wanted, leaving it up to fan fiction to “do it right.”
Do fans want their ships to be canon, when the risk is it will be done poorly, and the narrative might suffer? Or do they prefer to have their playground untainted by the limitations of production?2
I don’t have an answer, because fandom opinion runs the gamut. There does seem to have been a shift in which more fans demand their preferred canon is represented, as if non-canon ships are lesser than, but is it actually what most fans want, or just the loud ones? And even if most fans do want it, does it serve the story?
Therein, once again, lies the problem of trying to appease fans. When you do that, you start to see backlashes bubbling up among the most invested, all the while the audience at large might simply tune out.
If you’re going to rile up the fandom regardless of what you do, it better be in service of the narrative, rather than a poorly executed attempt at mind-reading.
While this post is mostly about transformational fandom, the fans that fall under the affirmational category will not necessarily blindly swallow everything canon serves them; they are also capable of denouncing what doesn’t line up with their expectations, and simply stick to the parts they like. See, Gilmore Girls fans who pretend the revival doesn’t exist, or Veronica Mars fans who ignore the final season, or Avengers fans who don’t acknowledge anything past 2013, or Buffy fans who ignore the comics (myself included.)
This is a seriously underexplored aspect of why fan fiction can be superior to official content: there are no limits. There is no budget. There are no cast and crew schedules to organize and availability to account for, no interpersonal conflicts to navigate, no behind the scenes politics, no rights disputes, no logistics, no executives meddling with the greater vision. There are no showrunners trying to punish the audience or make a point. Plenty of bad fan fiction exists, but when it’s good? It’s really good.
Fanfic works best when it grows on its own, I love when fanfic ends up being a little time capsule because it uses theories that ended up being incorrect or something causes the previously faithful characterization to be notably out of date due to later backstory reveals. Trying to cater to fanfic just makes the fanfic experience worse as well.
One related thing I feel you could have touched on is when long running franchises end up having fans work on them, which gets described as 'the inmates running the asylum' for a good reason. And how that 'fan cred' gets used in marketing and discourse. Marvel and DC are the classic examples.
What really annoys me is when the fan pandering is to a completely different part of the fandom that actively hates me and I'm supposed to eat it up, like being a Pokémon fan too young to have started with gen one, which has ended up making me despise everything around the original Pokémon games because I am sick of the heavy nostalgia pandering to it.
Also it's just one example of the many you listed, but I don't think Scott Pilgrim really fits since it was a comic first and there was a notable gap between the movie and new cartoon, which are both adapting the series and covering the same events.
> Sometimes, loved ships are made canon, but in dissatisfying ways.
My favorite take on this comes from a parable I once read. (Almost positive it's from Fanfic Symposium, but I haven't yet managed to track down the actual post.) Writing canon-compliant fanfic was compared to a constrained dance: canon events limit your storytelling possibilities, making parts of the dancefloor off-limits, so the writer's challenge is both negative (to avoid trampling on the canon) and positive (to do a graceful dance).
In this scenario, non-canon ships are the easiest and most fun to write, because there's plenty of space to bust your best moves. When ships become canon, they limit how you can dance. And ships that become canon *badly* are like a turd in the middle of the floor.
Edited 10/28: Found it! "Why Subtext is Better Than Text" by Janis Cortese: https://www.trickster.org/symposium/symp141.html