Fanfiction: An Ally to Queer Fans

Fanfiction itself is a medium that does not restrict nor censor pre-existing works. Indeed, it has been perceived as a disrespect to the original creators or a source of questionable morals. However, it is important to recognize the foundation of fanfiction and its importance to a fandom – especially to the LGBT+ minority. For them, it provides an ease of entering a community and culture that welcomes the different and the unique. Fanfiction being innately participative can be a platform that represents the queer than condemns, and introduces awareness of the dimensions of sexuality that is often inhibited by the mainstream media. This article tackles how fanfiction validates breaking canon media to allow self expression that encourages discovery of one’s sexual identity.

A Response to Canon

According to Koehm ¹, “fanfiction as an artform is fundamentally rooted in [the] act of ‘re-vision’” which Rich ² defines as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.”. As a derivative of “the old text” or known in fan culture as canon, fanfiction maintains the elements that are familiar and well-loved with the freedom to present a “new critical direction” by introducing the world, characters, and themes filtered through the interpretation of the fanfiction writer. Canon and fanfiction are both driven by its fandom, but what makes the latter truly effective is its compounded variety. Every fan has the power to “re-vision” canon to their preferences, thus making it personal, and when shared to the fandom, collective.

Every community of fans include a wide variety of people. In a census ³ conducted on the demographic of Archive of our Own (Ao3), a major non-profit fanfiction archive that recently won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work, 53.7% of users surveyed identified belonging to a gender, sexual, or romantic minority. In a different study ⁴, heterosexuality resulted only as the third percentage after bisexuality and asexuality from its participants of fanfiction readers. While these statistics do not comprehensively depict fandoms, it does illustrate the significant participation of LGBT+ individuals within the space of fanfiction, and by extension, their presence as fans of canon.

This diversity of audiences incited the rise of queer visibility and themes in various works of fiction through the years, such as Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe and Adventure Time that are targeted to younger audiences. Nonetheless, majority of the mainstream media continues to under represent and misrepresent the LGBT+ community. There remains a stigma and prejudice that either constrains these characters into normative packages (“the gay best friend”) or limits their identity to a one-dimensional label (“bury your gays”).

Queerbaiting is one of the complex issues that often negatively derail the connection between canon and its fandom. Fans use this terminology to describe the “pattern of suggestions incorporated” within canon implying a romantic intention between characters that producers never follow through “into fruition” ⁵. Queerbaiting is less of an institutional practice but a phenomena that fans notice and question. The fandom of the long-running action-fantasy show, Supernatural, did notice the heavily intimate subtext between characters, Dean and Castiel (or Destiel), and even brought the question to the showrunners and cast. It’s the blatant disregard of possible queer characters even after so many seasons, and the objectification of sexualities ⁶ that broke hard-earned trust by discovering how its creators do not share the same ideals with its fandom ⁷.

There is a clear invalidation of the existence of queer identities the invites heteronormativity in both fiction and reality. As the world becomes more accepting of diversity, the importance of representation in media deepens. Caravaca ⁸ states, “visibility equals power, and one could not exist without the other.”. Negating queer identities equates to stripping them of capacity and rights and effectively diminishing their place in society.

Queerbaiting is merely a “symptom” ⁹ of a bigger problem. This is where fanfiction offers the fandom an aid to alleviate the broken trust towards mainstream media. Koehm ¹⁰ attributes the manifestation of slash fics and femslash, a subgenre ¹¹ of fanfiction that features pairings of the same gender (M/M and F/F, respectively), as the fandom’s response to “representation being denied through queerbaiting.”

Fanfiction writers “re-vision” canon characters to supply what has been missed. These slash relationships, however, are not strictly romantic. They are not always about sex. They also explore themes of platonic and filial connections and settings of undisturbed domesticity that provide fanfiction readers with fresh perspectives on the characters and a different level of entertainment. As slash and femslash fics are character-centric in narrative, fanfiction writers imbue themselves and their experiences into the openly queer context it provides. Fanfiction serves as an extension of their identity, granting LGBT+ fans the visibility, the power, and the appropriate treatment they deserve.

A Playground to Imagine

But why stop there? Fanfiction writers are as much creators as published authors, and it is an artform that developed and flourished overtime. There are multiple websites that host fanfiction works, whether exclusively (Ao3, fanfiction.net and the like) or inclusively (Tumblr, social networking sites, etc.). An increasing number of fandoms entails a doubling amount of fanfiction; however, without queerbaiting by canon, what else do these works contain?

In its integration of freedom and creativity, Mixer ¹²describes fanfiction as a “psychosocial moratorium” that acts as “essential to adolescent identity development” through “[falling] in and out of love with people and ideas” without the consequences of adulthood and social norms. As a “psychosocial moratorium”, fanfiction becomes a playground that bends to no authority but imagination. Canon becomes the gateway but not the keeper.

Slash and femslash fics evolve into tropes that test gender normativity, tap into the nuances of alternate universes, and try out the possibilities within the taboo. This “re-vision” widens the scope of fanfiction towards themes and topics that are censored such as sex and sexuality, and arcs that are seemingly monotonous in narrative such as the practicalities of a relationship. Fanfiction writers and readers are exposed to “wide ranges of genders and sexualities”, restricted and erased by the mainstream, that offers them the opportunity to “learn about themselves in an equally wide range of ways” ¹³. Cristina Orlando ¹⁴, a 31-year-old nonbinary writer from New York, shares how it was fanfiction that introduced them to the “mechanics of queer sex” and understanding themself. Of course, fanfiction is not the perfect source of sexual education but for unsure LGBT+ adolescents, it confirms the existence and validity of queer identities and sexuality that mainstream erases.

Mixer ¹⁵concludes, in a qualitative study, the correlation of fanfiction and the sexual growth and development of its readers. She cites how “the freedom given to participants of reading or writing any gender identity, sexual orientation, or sexual act that they wish, without worrying about the real-world consequences of such actions, is a powerful draw.”. Participants who found their identities represented showed more interest and willingness in learning through fanfiction, “whether in regard to sexual acts or scripts.”. Fanfiction creates an avenue that is educational to the fandom in its introspection of individual identity – sexual or otherwise – and its relation to canon society with its own restrictive norms, that is as much a reflection of the real world.

As a “psychosocial moratorium”, fanfiction grants queer visibility that allows for identity formation. This is made possible through a fandom that utilizes its participatory culture ¹⁶, especially where “members […] feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, they care what other people think about what they have created)” ¹⁷. Fanfiction, a limitless and imaginative translation of canon, becomes a bridge that collects and connects global fans, especially the LGBT+ minority, through the accessibility of technology. Mainstream media has a distinct separation between producers and consumers, but fanfiction is created by fans for the enjoyment of fans with respect to personal preferences. This bridge enables queer fans to identify with other members of the community, in identity and creative perspectives.

A Critic of Media

Given that fanfiction is a cycle of fandom participation, how does it affect mainstream media, if at all? It is good to be reminded that the gap between producer and consumer may not be as deep of a chasm as initially presented.

Fanfiction benefits with the reader-response criticism ¹⁸, a school of criticism that began in the 1970’s, that focuses on how the consumer (reader) accompanies the producer (author) in adding meaning to canon (text). Canon is not treated as a “self-contained [entity]” which coincides with the fundamental act of reconstruction and the freedom of imagination that defines fanfiction. The fandom and its fanfiction writers have their own creative rights over canon as “a text can exist only as activated by the mind of the reader”. Therefore, fans’ interpretation of canon matters. Fanfiction then becomes “a form of literary criticism” that acts “as a secondary work of fiction derived from and built on the primary one.”. ¹⁹ The transformation invoked by fanfiction writers is a testament to the impact and quality of canon.

As a criticism, fanfiction highlights what canon is lacking, may that be a well-fitting ending or respect and visibility for the LGBT+ community. Its plethora showcases how “the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality” ²⁰ within conservative mainstream media for queer and other minorities.

Fanfiction brings the presence of choice for all members of the fandom. There is an option for the LGBT+ community to rightfully represent themselves; there is an opportunity to discover the important dimensions of sexuality and identity. There is a choice to push, question, and criticize mainstream media for both its growth and shortcomings.

The collective behind fanfictions – the fandom and its writers – are people living today, experiencing today. Within them is an assortment of stories and identities that have the choice to leap and create their own canon, “[bringing] the sensibilities of fanfiction to the mainstream” ²¹. Neil Gaiman, author of Stardust, Coraline, Good Omens, and more, has his own history in fanfiction, understands its presence in the fandom ²², and even won a Hugo Award for his Sherlock Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft fanfiction ²³. Fanfiction is not a rite of passage to enter mainstream media, but it is a path worth exploring.

After all, the growing diversity of fictional entertainment overtime resulted from mass reimagination of media “until the media itself delivered” ²⁴. Rebecca Sugar ²⁵, the nonbinary creator of the openly queer animated show, Steven Universe, shares her determination in releasing the first same-sex wedding in a cartoon for children. She notes the importance of creating a “space for gender-expansive kids” especially in the mainstream, remembering her own childhood frustration of having interests that were not considered “for her”. This goes to show that to affect the mainstream is not as impossible. At this time of accessibility, fanfiction is a tool of constructive criticism, wielded by the fandom, that can transform popular media according to the receptivity of its generation.

Fanfiction is known for many reasons. It is a reconstruction of canon that for some is a sign of disrespect to the creator. It is a playground without consequences that for some is a cause for the problematic. After all, fanfiction remains a public platform that, while without set rules, requires responsibility from writers and readers. For the LGBT+ fans, however, fanfiction can become a friend in alienation, answers to curiosity, and hopefully, eventually, open the door to redefining mainstream media.

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