fan fiction is closer than you think
January 19th, 2010 • posts i've written
When I’ve worked with brands in the past and have brought up examples of fan fiction (studied intensively by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and the like) as perfect vehicles to understand fan motivations, and in turn, to demonstrate how to create an environment ripe for more progressive consumer engagement, the typical reaction is that squeamish face – you know the one.
The one that says, “Ew, those fans are weird.”
Sure, we all had a friend in college that wrote erotic Harry Potter fan-fic. Who didn’t?
I think we often forget that when people operate at the extremes, especially in the creation of art, they’re trying to demonstrate an advanced ability or understanding of the original thing itself. It’s creation as performance (and vice-versa).
But we don’t have to go running to the extremes to be face to face with fan fiction. Hell, it’s in our grocery stores.
Look at those celebrity gossip mags. Just take a look, buy one, and give it a thorough read. It’s commercial fan-fiction… an industry built on the principle.
As far as I know, Michelle Obama didn’t pull an Elin Nordegren on President Obama over the weekend, but I can read about it happening in the Inquirer.
These mags realize a simple truth: there are some characters in the world that we’re all fans of in some way or another (fans or anti-fans, really). We know a good deal about their lives, their tribulations, and the cast of characters floating around them. So why invest costly amounts of ink, paper, and capital creating new characters for us to get to know, when we’ve got the really popular ones we can play with? Characters that we can paint into new situations (that might be extended from previous ones) over and over again.
Honestly, these mags realize a truth that even most brands still don’t comprehend – start with people, places, and things that are already cared about and extend their stories to new heights. It’s a simple, effective, and proven way to begin an engagement with groups of people. This doesn’t mean you should hire Will.i.am to do yet another cameo, you should play with the unexpected – that’s what people are likely to talk about.
And it’s the act of conversation than gets to the heart of fan-fiction itself. Fans come to believe that they know a character; they know their habits, their attributes, their motives, and even their actions. Some fans take this to a performative place and cast their character in new situations to demonstrate just how well they know them (this is how Harry would act if Voldemort killed Ron… or if Ron showed up nude.).
(I realize for my friends out there that study fan-fic, there are hundreds of glaring examples in every day of fan-fiction; and gossip mags must seem an arbitrary place to start – So I hope they’ll leave some examples in the comments for readers to follow.)
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2 Responses (add your comment)
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I’d say that based on your scope and definition, most of us engage in the creation of fan fiction every time we pontificate about something we care about.
Consider the massive amount of blog posts (both commercial and private) generated daily that are devoted to political and religious figures, celebrities, athletes, writers, etc.
Taking you at your word, every critique or observation ever written is fan fic. Much like this comment…we’re having an online conversation about something we care about (at least, care enough to write about).
Let me know if I’ve stretched your definition too far!
As a side note, the Transformative Works Organization has some interesting observations on motivations behind fannish works (as well a lot of other great fan-related topics): http://transformativeworks.org/
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Interesting take Bud. I wonder if fantasy sports couldn’t also be looked at as a form of fan-fiction. “What if LeBron, KG and CP3 were all on the same team?” Fantasy sports allows the sports most die hard fans to ‘play God’ with their favorite players, mixing and matching players to create a brand new, season-long narrative.