This dialogue continues from Part I: Myth & Narrative Media. On Wednesday, March 6, 2024, HASTAC Scholars Stella Fritzell and Hannah Mendro met to discuss some exciting intersections between their work in the fields of Classics and Fan Studies. What arose was a fruitful discussion about engagement in myth and narrative media, questions of narrative potentiality and positionality, and the promise of storytelling and story-interpretation as liberatory acts. Stella was periodically joined by her two cats, Hermes and Maui, whose interruptions have been noted accordingly in the transcript. The HASTAC Scholars Dialogues Program is intended to forment discussion not only between individual scholars, but among the community at large. We hope that the content shared from this dialogue will inspire further conversations with friends, family, and colleagues. If any part of this discussion resonated with you, we encourage you to comment on this blog post to share your own scholarly thoughts and impressions. All comments should be civil in tone and refrain from using profanity or intentionally incendiary speech. Due to the length of Stella and Hannah's discussion, this dialogue is shared in three parts: Part I: Myth & Narrative Media Part II: Narrative Potentials & Positions Part III: Liberatory Potentials of Storytelling
Part II: Narrative Potentials & Positions
Hannah Mendro: The way you’re talking about myth in relation to fanfiction makes me think about Theo Joy Campbell’s presentation at the Fan Studies Network of North America Conference in October.[1] They made a really compelling argument for fanfiction to be read as lyric poetry in a mythic tradition because of the emotive content of it—sometimes it's about the plot, but it's not necessarily about changing the source or building the canon, but it is about the emotive elements of the story. I just thought that was fascinating and wanted to throw it in for a more explicit example of someone whose work directly compares the two forms of storytelling. Stella Fritzell: That’s absolutely relevant! I want to push you on fanfiction a little more. It's something that I am tangentially aware of, because of the friends that I've had, but it's not something that I've personally engaged with myself. So I was really struck by the point you made about fanfiction almost being an oral tradition, particularly when we start to consider the use of the internet, how communities engage with that, and how it becomes to a certain degree its own medium of storytelling. And though the internet isn’t new for us, it is still very new when we consider it as a serious medium of transmission for discussion and dialogue. No one is going to cite an internet forum in an academic paper. We're very tied to our physical archives and traditional publications. So I have the impression that fanfiction is often seen as fringe, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree with that, both in terms of contemporary dialogue and also in scholarly discussion. Since you are looking at fanfiction as something worthy of scholarly discourse and discussion, and have been referencing others who share this opinion, how do you navigate this sense of “fringeness”? Does this in some way affect how your research is perceived and what audiences you are able to reach? Hannah Mendro: Yeah, this is a great question. The glib answer is just—letting go of a lot of shame? I’ve had to acknowledge in academic and professional spaces that, “yes, this is the thing I do in my spare time,” especially because that embeddedness is so important to how I study this topic. More seriously, this is an interesting question, because the field of fan studies is small and relatively recent—especially compared to a field like classics, which goes back forever—but in that short time has undergone a huge amount of transformation, in large part because of the nature of the internet and the way that it's studied. But fanfiction existed before the internet, and I think a lot of histories of fan studies trace it back to Star Trek and the time when that show was coming out. And at that time fan engagement was physical zines and people going to each other's houses! One interesting thing is that a lot of what was being written and shared was queer, and at that time it was a lot harder to talk about that sort of thing than it is now. I am, relatively speaking, both a young fan and a young scholar. I wasn't around for a lot of the period when fandom as a practice and as a discipline of study was much more marginalized than it is now. Which has led to some really controversial conversations within the field about, you know, can you compare being a fan to being queer? Can you compare this status in the world to other kinds of marginalizations that have, or have had, much more explicit consequences?[2] I’m not setting out to resolve those debates in this discussion, but the point of this digression is that early study of fandom didn't really include the internet at all. It included groups of mostly women meeting up at each other's houses, taking pictures of their TVs so that they could print out those pictures and then put them in their zines along with the fanfic that they were writing.[3] So it's also interesting to think about that practice in the context of orality, because we have some archive of some of those zines, but a lot of them have disappeared over time. And there were also, in those earlier days, a lot more legal threats towards people who were creating zines that might challenge authors’ copyright or or just the way that they wanted their work to be seen. They were like, “how dare you do this to my characters?” Which we still see some of today; there is a much derided and somewhat famous open letter by Diana Gabaldon from several years ago in which she describes fanfiction as “immoral,” “illegal,” and “abusing or offending the original author.”[4] So there's a lot of lore about that sort of thing that's passed down. I feel like I have inherited many of the stories, but not as much of the stigma - particularly as the internet and what people are doing on it become more and more mainstream and intertwined with our lives. It becomes a lot easier to say, “yes, I do fandom; I write and read fanfiction,” et cetera. So I feel lucky to be able to engage openly in that conversation in a way that I think a lot of people who came before me in the field didn't and couldn't. But there are still some places where that “fringeness” makes itself visible - for instance, the discipline itself as a field of study. I would like to do more studying (I have a master’s degree and am between programs now), but I am struggling to find a program where I can study this in the ways I want to. There are communications programs, but I want to focus on the textual and storytelling elements, not just the social science-y, ethnographic approach. And then there are literature programs. I’d be interested in learning those theories to apply to these readings, but I don’t know that I would be able to get into a literature program to study fanfiction. And then programs that deal specifically with new media are pretty few and far between or physically far away from me. So that is an interesting way in which the discipline is still small and somewhat academically marginalized, even if it's become more acceptable to talk about and more acceptable to study within.[5] And then, coming back to the social science-y elements of this: I’m not really interested in being a fandom ethnographer in the sense that I come in and study a thing that other people are doing. I'm studying it from squarely within the context, and I want to be clear and open about that. So there's always an element of: yeah, this is a practice that I do, and I'm drawing on this experience. But that also means coming back to the sort of glib answer from before that I have to say to everyone that I'm working with academically: “yes, this is what I spend a lot of my spare time doing. This is what I spend a lot of my time thinking about, and it makes me understand the perspective of people who are coming to it.” But it's also a little embarrassing sometimes, yes. Stella Fritzell: I am a bit jealous of the personal experience that you get to bring to what you study, because I am obviously so distant from anything that’s considered part of the Classical Period. Even more so if we're talking about the Iron Age or Bronze Age, or if we're talking about Homer, who belongs to the 8th century BCE. It’s really difficult to bring a truly emic perspective to what we are studying as Classicists. In some ways I am trying to near this emic perspective with my research because I am working with local stories and questioning how they engage with these local identities, groups, and histories. But our material really limits our ability to answer certain questions. So I think it's really valuable that you can come to the table as someone who's engaged with narrative and storytelling to be able to say, “Yeah, I am actually someone who is actively engaged in the fanfiction community. And I can come to this with that personal perspective and understand why people are engaging with this at that level.” So, from a scholarly perspective, I'm envious, because this is something that I strive to do as much as possible when I can. But the limits are definitely there in what I'm studying. But, as someone who not only studies fanfiction, but is also engaged in reading and creating, and then further disseminating fanfiction, can you speak more to how the fanfiction community sees its engagement with the primary text, if that’s the correct term? For example, you mentioned that some authors really have a negative or adverse reaction towards fanfiction, and see it as an appropriation or breach of copyright, even if fanfiction isn't trying to profit off of what it's doing. How do people who are engaged in fanfiction view their connection to the author of the text, and vice versa. To what degrees do we see authorship coming into play? Because, of course, fanfiction writers are authors in their own right, even if they are engaging with an idea, or a character, or a thread that may have originated from a primary text, or even from other edges of the fanfiction community itself. I'm also very curious about some of these angry author anecdotes because they make me chuckle a bit. Hannah Mendro: It makes me chuckle, too. No, this is a really good question that I can also only provide partial answers to. But actually, authorship in fan communities is something that fascinates me. There’s a whole linguistic hierarchy of association with the—I would call it source text—a hierarchy of how true or accurate or “canon” a fanwork is. (The word in fan communities is canon, to describe something that is explicitly codified within that source text.) This matters to some people to varying levels. There’s this wider notion in fanfiction of affirmational versus transformational approaches:[6] affirmational being that you want to uphold what the original author or text says and transformational being that you want to change it. This is a vast oversimplification, but for our purposes I’ll go with that. Most of my past work on fan studies (and fan creation) has taken place in the Tolkien fandom, and there’s a scholar, Dawn Walls-Thumma, who points out that Tolkien fanfiction often tends towards the affirmational even if people are changing what happens in the story.[7] I mean, even in a completely different discipline, you mentioned him early on in thinking about landscape and fantasy worlds. There’s so much worldbuilding, so much linguistic and geographical thought that went into the creation of the world, so many other texts and notes and letters, that people feel the need to stick with that or honor it. As if he's delineated the boundaries of a world and they want their work to be believably within that world as opposed to throwing everything out. But there are plenty of people who do want to throw everything out, or who want to read against the grain of Tolkien, which is also a really important thing that is happening in fanfiction. So there's that struggle, that question: if the author said it, how closely do we want to hew towards it? Or maybe we want to change the details of an event, but we want to keep the world as close and consistent as possible. Then there’s what is called fanon, which becomes widely accepted and shared among people in fandom—a belief that something happened because it's not explicitly in the text, but it's also not contrary to what's in the text. And then there's AU, which is an alternate universe, totally different from the world of the original text. So there's that hierarchy, and then there's also the notion of authorship, as you mentioned, within fandom itself. Fan studies and fanfiction are largely intertwined with this notion of community; that is true. It's also sometimes not true, because people might continue to write and create regardless of if there are other people reading their work. This is something I’ve been wanting to tease out more in my studies, so I’m thinking it through as I say it. A lot of past fan scholarship has sort of taken for granted that fandom is a community, but there are plenty of people whose work doesn't get read, or people who aren't engaging in these conversations, who are still reading other people’s work and writing their own. So it's a sort of asynchronous community that comes from people putting things into the same place, but may or may not be engaging with each other's work. In the earlier days of fandom, I think it had to be more communal, because otherwise the work would just vanish. You know, if someone wrote their own piece of Kirk/Spock fanfiction, and it just lived in their home and they didn't share it with anyone, eventually that would just get lost or tossed away. So earlier fan studies is biased towards people who were doing things in community, because that's what makes its way to the stories. That's what gets preserved and talked about, and that's also what current fan platforms are based on. Archive of Our Own, AO3, which is where a lot of fanfiction is posted and shared, is based on a lot of earlier archives with specific threaded comment sections where you can talk to the author and the author can talk back. And so there is this element of engagement with one another's work that's all taking place kind of in the orbit of the source text, but in different levels of compliance or defiance with it. I don't know if that addressed the question—it’s a really good question, but there’s so much to think through. Stella Fritzell: No, that was really helpful. I have also thought of fanfiction as solely a group exercise. When I think of what fanfiction is, and the conversations I’ve had with people who engage with fanfiction, I default to talking about the fanfiction community. So I have tended to think about it in that way. Hannah Mendro: And it's not wrong. I’m just beginning to think about it—there’s been a lot of pushback in recent years towards depictions of fandom within fan studies that portray it as this intrinsically liberatory marginalized space, with people pointing out that no, it's still often structured along lines of race. There are still hierarchies and biases that persist in these groups, and there are people who might be doing alternative readings or playing with race, but then their work doesn't get read as much and doesn't get promoted as much, so then that falls by the wayside. So there's a lot of pushback against what's jokingly called the “fandom is beautiful” school of thought.[8] I think it's important to keep the notion of community when thinking about it, because it is something that people do together, and people who choose to post their work are doing it in the hopes that it will be read. From the personal perspective: “I read this thing, it lit my brain on fire, and I’m obsessed with it now. I need to talk to people about it, I need to create for it, I need to read other people's creations for it, and I need to engage in conversation.” For me, and I think for a lot of people, that's the drive towards fandom and transformative fandom as opposed to just reading a thing and really liking it. So it's not wrong, definitely, to engage with the idea of fandom as community. It's just also so hard to keep that top of mind at the same time as asking who is left out of that community, and what are the ways it's not functioning as a community. Stella Fritzell: That's a great reminder. So thank you for that. That's a really helpful way of thinking around things, because when I think of what would drive people to create fanfiction—to do something beyond imagining themselves in the world of a book—is the need to somehow express and then share something. So the issue then comes down to who is at the receiving end of that sharing. And that leads me to another question that I have been thinking of, and that I have been trying to think around in my own work. And I don't know if I have an answer for it myself. [Interruption by cat.]
This dialogue is continued in Part III: Liberatory Potentials of Storytelling.
Notes: [1] The 2023 conference program referencing Campbell's work may be located at: https://fsn-northamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/FSNNA23-Program_singles.pdf [2] De Kosnik, A. 2016. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. The MIT Press. [3] Jenkins, H. 2013. Textual Poachers : Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 20th anniversary ed. Routledge. [4] A repost of the original letter may be located at: https://kate-nepveu.livejournal.com/483239.html . Note that Gabaldon does somewhat revise her position after a lot of conversation with fanfic authors, but I, Hannah, think her knee-jerk reaction is representative of what a lot of authors used to (and perhaps still do) think about fanfiction. [5] Stella has indicated that Comparative Literature programs may intersect with or even welcome work in Fan Studies. If you have specific suggestions or recommendations for Hannah, please contact her through her hcommons profile (@hsmendro). [6] These categories were originally proposed in a LiveJournal post by obsession_inc and have been carried forward by many other fan scholars. [7] Walls-Thumma, D. 2020. "Affirmational and Transformational Values and Practices in the Tolkien Fanfiction Community." Journal of Tolkien Research, 8.1. [8] Scholars doing work on this topic include Rukmini Pande, Rebecca Wanzo, and Stitch.
As a reminder, you are encouraged to comment on this blog post to share your own scholarly thoughts and impressions. All comments should be civil in tone and refrain from using profanity or intentionally incendiary speech.