A Culture of Our Own
If you think fan culture is leading us into artistic poverty, you don’t know fan culture.
by Lis Coburn
NOTE: This piece is a response to Colin Broadmoor’s article arguing that fandom is failing us in our January issue.
‘Tis apparently the season for lockdowns, anxiety about American politics, and aggressively negative takes on fanfiction. Is something in the air? I was particularly struck by Colin Broadmoor’s claim here in Blood Knife magazine that “the original functions of fanfic […] are now meaningless and have been completely subsumed within a corporate media framework.” He describes fans as happy enablers of lazy content factories, saying, “[w]here once fandom served the needs of fans (telling new stories, letting people see themselves, offering alternative possibilities for how we understand heroes), today it serves only the needs of media conglomerates.” And, well.

“Fandom” is a funny word, like “society” or “everyone” or “us”. Writers can use it for all sorts of rhetorical purposes and it mostly coasts along on the strength of collective experience—or at least it does until you come upon a universal declaration so absolutely foreign that you have to slam on the brakes and demand: Who the fuck is this “we” you speak of?
My first instinct is to ask: Have you been in fandom? Have you read any fanfic? How are our experiences so diametrically opposed? Here I’ve been, stuck in the middle of some of the smartest and most talented creators I’ve seen anywhere, whose time in fandom pushed them to ever-increasing levels of originality and innovation. I’ve been surrounded by progressives who have worked to create sustainable open-source web architecture, while actively campaigning for better mass-media offerings, more diverse stories, fairer working conditions for creators, along with copyright, obscenity, and telecommunications laws that favor ordinary people, small creators, and sex workers. Where the fuck have you been?
I got it, once my wrath subsided. I’ve seen shitty parts of fandom: fans who pile harassment on actors of color for existing, who throw tantrums when a game launch gets pushed back because the devs can only work so fast, who sexually harass celebs online and write the skeeviest fanfic you’ve ever seen about children’s TV shows. They, alas, are also “us”, in that we are all collectively “fandom”. I’d gotten so secure in my worldview that I was like the old-school skiffy fans who complained a dozen years ago when Fanlore launched and documented a fanfic-focused, slash-oriented history of “fandom” that didn’t mention Worldcon or the Hugos once (how dare we!).
If you think fanfiction sucks, you quite simply don’t know fandom well enough.
Fandom as I experience it isn’t perfect, but let me tell you this: If you think fanfiction sucks, that fans are sycophantic consumers, that fandom has forgotten its soul, you quite simply don’t know fandom well enough.
People who namecheck Archive of Our Own (AO3) probably don’t realize that it originated with fans on LiveJournal who were angry at media companies like Fandom, Inc. and FanLib, which sought to profit off the fanfiction they found acceptable while suppressing and marginalizing creators they disliked with the threat of legal action for copyright infringement. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) — which advocates for the legal rights of fans to own and manipulate copyrighted media and to create transformative works — was created through the collective effort of thousands of fans who were determined not to rely on corporate largesse for either web hosting or legal permission. The AO3 was built by scratch by fans, many of whom were trained on computer coding completely in-house by other OTW volunteers; it is one of the web’s first open-source projects staffed primarily by women and nonbinary people. It is completely funded by fan donations.

Far from being sycophantic and complacent, one of the OTW’s victories was when its lawyers successfully argued before the USA’s Library of Congress that it should be legally permissible to bypass DRM technology and rip a DVD for the purpose of non-commercial critique, using the example of a Firefly vid about Joss Whedon’s racist appropriation of Asian culture; without a high-quality rip, there’s no way the vidder could have gotten such a clear shot of that Good dogs! sign over the barbeque.
Fan anger over inequality and the lack of diverse storytelling has had growing influence in today’s culture. Terms like “queerbaiting,” “whitewashing,” and “bury your gays” are now standard parts of media criticism, but they’ve only gotten there recently—and the reason they got there at all is because of a solid decade of organized fan campaigns to protest the deaths of characters of color and LGBTQ+ characters; to save diverse shows; to cast and keep actors of color, trans actors, and disabled actors; and to give their characters meaningful storylines. As Gabrielle Zilkha’s documentary Queering the Script explores, diverse creators have been able to convince their conservative producers to air groundbreaking representation because of astute and organized fans who are clamoring en masse for a break from the status quo.
READ THIS: Fandom is leading us into artistic poverty.
By Colin Broadmoor
For marginalized creators, fandom is often a creative hothouse that offers them support and shelter as they develop. Traditional entry points for creators—like writing workshops, art classes, and film school—are practically, physically, or financially out of reach for many people. Fandom offers not just a platform, but an audience; fan creators can learn in real time what drives audience engagement, what bores people, what pleases, and what annoys. The structure of transformative works offers a scaffold that lets creators hone their technical skills: If you’re drawing a known character, you can focus on pen control and composition. If you’re editing movie footage that’s already been through post-production, you can focus entirely on splicing your clips together to create a story arc. This isn’t, in my experience, lazy; the fannish market is flooded with unskilled, simplistic work. If you want attention and feedback, which is the true coin of the realm in fandom, you have to push yourself and innovate.
Fans are still using the basic functions of fanfiction to explore the themes—diverse representation, new stories, and alternate paradigms—Broadmoor claims they aren’t. Racebending and fancasting are still vibrant traditions that let fans of color reflect on how people like them might fit into the stories they love; alternate universes let fans imagine what kinds of societal change might have prevented a canonical tragedy. We’re questioning the definition of heroism all the time; Marvel Cinematic Universe fans, dissatisfied with Marvel’s limited and militaristic vision of heroism, ran with Captain America’s Depression-era origins to create a socialist Steve Rogers whose activism in the modern world went far beyond punching Nazis (and whose life expanded beyond the solitary masculine stoicism that seems to define him in the movies). One of the fundamental traits of fanfiction is to encourage creators to find corners and crevices in which an alternative narrative might take root. It allows consumers a voice to powerfully externalize the lifelong call-and-answer of the individual and the society around them.
Sometimes that call-and-answer reaches back into the mainstream. Fanfiction is an underground river that feeds all of culture, though fans who make it into the pros are often quiet about their origins. If you didn’t see Zen Cho advertise her Tor.Com novella The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water on Tumblr as published Chirrut/Baze fanfiction from Rogue One, you might simply think it’s a sprightly and inventive queer wuxia story that echoes the Malaysian fight against British imperialism. (You’d probably catch on that Emily Skrutskie’s Del Rey novel Bonds of Brass is a serial-numbers-filed-off Finn/Poe space royalty alternate universe (AU) fic, though. Its cover art seems to consider “Everything Star Wars neglected to include!” a selling point.)
There are also an incredible number of creators who have achieved great things after being nurtured in fan communities.
There are also an incredible number of creators who have achieved great things after being nurtured in fan communities. Brandon Taylor, whose first novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has said, “Writing fanfiction and reading romance novels taught me more about writing than my MFA program.” N.K. Jemisin, who recently won four Hugo Awards in five years, wrote and still writes fanfic. Showrunners Rebecca Sugar and Noelle Stevenson, who brought stories foregrounding overt LGBT representation to children’s television, started out in fandom. Comic artist Ngozi Ukazu self-published Check Please! on Tumblr and crowdfunded print editions until being formally published by First Second Books, at which point it won multiple awards.
That said, progressive and transformative fans have experienced many difficulties that point to the work that still needs to be done. The sometimes precarious space fans occupy legally and financially is like a canary in the coal mine of late capitalism.
A lot of websites, especially young ones, accept NSFW content in their early days: it attracts an audience and drives content. But as those websites get larger and better-established, their desire for legitimacy in the public market leads them to push out the content networks that got them going in the first place. Tumblr’s “porn ban” of 2018 has inspired many LGBTQ+ fans to look beyond their own concerns (“noooo, our fanaaaaart!”) and talk about how laws like the USA’s SESTA/FOSTA claim to stop “sex trafficking” while effectively pushing sex workers to ever-more-dangerous and exploited forms of work by denying them safe places to advertise their work and pre-screen clients. Dreamwidth, a fan-friendly site with an unusually permissive attitude towards sexual content, has struggled to find a payment processor that will work with them because they’re considered “adult content.” These are issues that new projects like Pillowfort and FanNexus also have to wrestle with.
When fans produce original content they’re allowed to profit from, they’re discouraged from being too diverse by mainstream publishing’s gatekeepers. A small press or e-publisher might accept them instead, but there’s always a risk that such outfits will shut down, like Ellora’s Cave, or, like Dreamspinner Press, neglect to hand over their royalties. Self-publishing is an option, but only if you’re willing to play nice with the corporations. Many authors choose not to accept the lucrative deal of Amazon-exclusive publishing, but “if you leave Amazon altogether,” a fanwriter-turned-pro told me, “you will never make more than pocket change.” The alienation fans—especially slash fans—feel towards traditional markets makes them, in my experience, a lot less deferential to publishing’s prejudices, and much more in favor of organizing to demand systemic change from the corporations that profit off them.
I know that life is hard right now. If you’re not actually listening to the people who are succeeding at making positive change, then all you know is that society is broken and the world sucks. Yes, Disney and Amazon own practically everything. Yes, capitalism is terrible and we’re all going to die someday. Yes, it’s an uphill climb for creators to earn a living and for diverse creators to get their work out. But that’s only half the picture and if that’s all you care about, you’ll never figure out how anything can get better.
So all I can say to the naysayers is: Expand your horizons already. Leave your comfort zone and check out The Mary Sue, Geeks of Color, Transformative Works and Culture, or Fansplaining. There are a lot of smart, informed, progressive fans out there who are already working to give us a better culture.
Lis Coburn (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and psychotherapist from Edmonton, Canada. She can also be found on Patreon and Tumblr.
