The next worst word you can couple with the word "fan" is, you guessed it, the word "fiction"...
"I have looked terror square in its single, milky eye...There was "fan fiction"!"
Fan Fiction. Supplemental stories written by fans of a pop culture franchise (or, alternatively,
a celebrity's "real life"), using the show's pre-established characters and story arcs. Can be used to fill in plot holes, or
have characters get into randy, nasty sex and lots of it.
In what are often extremely bad cases, some fanfic
inserts the author into the middle of his favorite action, usually in the form of a
Mary Sue or
Marty Stu.
It is also often used to explore
Crossovers, combining characters and plot threads from different stories and attempting to create a unified whole from the mix. The classic debate of "Could the
Enterprise defeat a Star Destroyer?" is thus open to creative energies, as are many other such what-ifs, most of which take the form of "Wouldn't it be cool if X and Y teamed up to take on Z?".
Fan Fic is the place where
Epileptic Trees are planted and cultivated. Expect many, many,
many more fics to star the
Ensemble Darkhorse rather than
The Hero.
Fan fiction provides a clear and compelling example of
Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crud"). All but the remaining 10% of it is ghastly stuff studded with
misspellings, poor grammar, and
horrid malapropisms; 5% of
that is usually
Dead Fic. For shows pointed at the demographic, melodramatic teenagers,
most likely girls, are the authors, which doesn't help. On the other hand, the best
Fanfic can be as good as, and sometimes much better than, the source material.
Saying "It was a
Fanfic episode," though, is not usually a compliment.
Some franchises -- such as
Star Trek -- have actually turned fan fiction into a profit center by creating
lines of books based on the show. These books are usually penned by young and upcoming authors, often former
Fanfic writers, and represent an intermediate step between fan fiction and completely original fiction.
Although
Fanfic exploded along with the Internet, it existed
well before the Net did. One notable example: In
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Khan and Chekov recognize each other upon meeting. However, "Space Seed", the episode of
Star Trek The Original Series in which Khan appears, is a first season episode, and Chekov did not join the cast of the show until the second season. The semi-official
Ret Con (not explained in any of the shows or movies, but widely propagated by producers and actors in convention appearances) is that Chekov was on the
Enterprise at that time, he just wasn't part of the bridge crew yet and thus didn't appear on screen. A very funny fanfic distributed in print ('zines, photocopies, etc.) not long after the movie came out expands on that, envisioning Khan and Chekov bumping into each other in the bathroom. Sillier versions have Khan vowing revenge on Chekov for making him wait for the cubicle.
However, it's even older than that. Two actual paperbacks of
Trek fan fiction --
Star Trek: The New Voyages and
New Voyages 2 -- were published by Bantam Books in the late 1970s, with Paramount's approval. Each featured ten or fifteen of the best fan stories from the previous ten years. And just to push it back even further, there have been reliable reports of
Sherlock Holmes Fanfic written at the same time that Conan Doyle was still publishing -- by J.M. Barrie, in fact, who is far better known as the author of
Peter Pan.
Predating all of this, of course, was John Stuart Mill's
continuation of
The Iliad, written in 1816, when he was ten. Composed in Ancient Greek, even.
The distinction between
Fanfic and original fiction, as we know it today, is largely created by modern copyright law; much of classical writing is actually "fanfiction" based on older sources. The major distinction between fanfic and a story inspired by another story is that the story a fanfic is based on has one or more "official" versions, usually owned by a company, a creator, or both. Thus, things like
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas
, a piece of biblical apocrypha featuring Angry!Uber!Baby Jesus, or variations on Arthurian legend where there is no Holy Grail and Lancelot's affair with Guenivere never happens, would not "count" by this definition.
Not all
Fanfic is written, though that's the most common form. It can be in any
format that can tell a story. In Japan,
doujinshi (fan-made "comic books") is a common vehicle; and with the increasing ease of their production on personal computers,
fan videos (ranging from
anime series, to
Star Wars) have already appeared.
No statement on the legality of
Fanfic has ever been given in American formal law or in its courts. Some argue that it's a form of copyright infringement; however, see
"Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law", and note the above precedents.
Some fanfiction becomes well-known enough to influence other fanfics, which themselves influence more fanfics, and so on in a domino effect. This can and does result in the creation and perpetuation of
fanon, when one author comes up with a "cool detail" and others blindly copy it without realizing it was his invention. Furthermore, characters can become
Flanderized by the feedback loops of fanfiction, sometimes
changing dramatically from their original form.
Eventually, this accretion of fan-born details and mutations turns into things that "everybody knows" about the series. Those new to or unfamiliar with the original material are frequently confused into believing that it
obviously must be
canon if so many people mention it, even 'facts' of the
Epileptic Trees variety. This is especially the case with series that have long runs and which gloss over details which are unimportant to the plot but are of interest to the fans and the fan writers.
One famous example of this is the anime
Ranma 1/2, released well before the Internet became ubiquitous and when many fans had no easy access to the original source material. All manner of details (including the explanation of Akane's mallet as either a
ki attack or as residing in a
hyperdimensional pocket, her
Flanderization into a "psychobitch", her
lethal cooking, and the names and fates of the many
missing mothers) were never touched on in the show but became standardized in
Ranma fan fiction over the course of approximately a decade. The process was accelerated and exacerbated by the appearance of fanfiction written by people who had never actually
seen the show itself and whose only exposure to
Ranma was other fanfiction.
It's not surprising that fans of some shows occasionally pen FAQs solely to reduce the accumulation of
fanon in this way.
See also
Memetic Mutation and
Shipping. Compare with other
Fan Work forms, such as
Fanart and
Fanvid.
For fanfic specific tropes see
Fanfic Tropes. Of course,
the hive mind have a few favorites. And a few unfavourites.
Categories of Fanfics
By formats:
By genres:
By relationship with canon:
Others:
