Meet Ted. He’s a 34-year-old Lord of the Rings super-fan. He’s read all the books and seen all the movies. He’s gone as Gandalf for Halloween the past fourteen years running, and last month he paid a jeweler over $900 to forge him his very own ‘Ring of Power,” which he wears on a chain around his neck.
But what are super-fans to do when all that’s just not enough anymore? They roll up their wizard sleeves, sit down at the computer and proceed to take the characters and settings that they didn’t create and in no way owns any of the rights to, and write their own mediocre tale of Middle Earth. Soon it will be posted along with millions of other stories written in dozens of different languages on sites like FanFiction.net to be shared with the world.
Fan fiction was born of, and still revolves largely around the genres of science fiction and fantasy writing. In fact, the first recorded examples of modern-day fan fiction can be traced back to the 1960s Star Trek: The Original Series and the fanzine it spawned called Spockanalia. Now, based on that knowledge, if you were asked to imagine what the average writer of fan fiction looked like, what kind of person would you visualize? Probably someone who looks a lot like Ted, right?
That’s where the twist comes in. Fan fiction writing is a female-dominated subculture, and has been ever since it began. Sorry, Ted.
When a Princeton grad was doing research into the nature of Star Trek fanatics, she discovered that a whopping 83% of the people writing fan fiction were female. When the research was done again in 1970, it had climbed to a cool 90%. Fan fiction is now divided into two main sections, general fan fiction and erotic fan fiction. While men’s numbers have grown in the general fan fiction department, the erotic side of fan fiction is and has always been largely monopolized by women.
Erotic fan fiction has three categories: Slash (gay), Het (hetero) and Femmeslash (lesbian). The ‘slash’ refers to stories in which two otherwise heterosexual male characters decide to throw caution to the wind and get it on with one another. It’s derived from the / between the two character names after the first piece of slash fiction titled Spock/Kirk.
Once again, you’d probably figure a story that sees Spock and Captain Kirk setting their phasers to “curious” and having some sweaty Man-on-Vulcan sex would’ve been written by a gay Star Trek fan that had always wanted to see that sort of thing go down, right? Wrong. The majority of slash fiction is written by women, and boy do they get creative with it.
In a single day of looking through fan fiction we found stories that saw everything from Marty McFly (Back to the Future) using his Delorean to travel through time to bone Jerry Maguire, Michael Jordan finding himself on a steamship with Obi Wan Kenobi (they bone), or Indiana Jones accidentally stumbling into a strange portal in one of the temples he’s exploring that carries him into the past where he meets – and bones – a younger version of himself.
Based on these examples and others, many have come to consider erotic fan fiction to be the female equivalent of men watching porn. When it comes to sexual arousal, if men are more visually stimulated, and women more psychologically stimulated, wouldn’t it then sort of makes sense that women would get turned on by visualizing characters they already care about and feel a strong emotional bond to in hyper-sexualized situations?
This is most likely why so many genres of general and erotic fan fiction exist. “Shipping” is a term used to describe stories where the author alters the relationships of established characters that were never meant to have romantic involvement, but now do in the new version that emerges. At last glance, there were over 100,000 pieces based in the Harry Potter universe that saw Harry and Hermione shacking up.
AU, or Alternate Universe fiction deals with taking characters and putting them in different, often bizarre settings, or “what if” type situations. This is a great way to work in the beloved ‘crossover storyline’, because in AU fiction, anything’s possible, even if that ‘anything’ is Barack Obama fighting crime as the honorary fifth member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Finally, one of the most interesting genres—and usually the one most telling of the person writing it—is called Mary Sue fan fiction. This is where a new character representing the author is inserted into the story and gets to tag along and interact with the other characters. It’s called Mary Sue because that was the name of the author character in the first piece of it’s kind; also a Star Trek story. Mary Sue, (or Marty Stu if it’s a guy writing) stories are really just a way for the author to live out their fantasies, sexually depraved or otherwise. These characters are always the coolest of the cool. They’re bizarrely fantastic at everything they do, and often upstage every other character in the story. The other characters all love, admire and respect Mary Sues.
The thing about fan fiction is that while there are some real gems of creativity scattered throughout the hoards of online text, a lot of it is just plain bad, and badly written. With anyone able to post, just think about the sheer number of teenage (and often much older) female Twilight fans who have finally discovered a way to find themselves alone with a sweaty Robert Pattinson in a room with no windows.
Nonetheless, the Internet was essentially invented for this reason: to give anyone who wants it the chance to jump up on a virtual soapbox and start shouting their ideas to the world, while the rest of us pass large steaming piles of judgment on them. Mostly when we’re bored at work. Still, if you have a favorite fictional character, it’s worth your while to visit one of these sites and have a laugh as you see what the twisted and sometimes brilliant minds of random strangers have put them through.
-Justin Fragapane