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The Wired World and Fan Fiction: An Introduction
We learn that in the wired world, the rules are no longer clear. As in a dense jungle or on uncharted waters of the sea, we take what we know from the world we are accustomed to living in, but must improvise for the rest in order to forge ahead. Observing and analyzing the ever-growing accumulation of useful data, insightful rhetoric, and disarming fluff on the Internet is a daunting prospect when undertaken without direction, as Nicholas Carr warns in his piece about the dangerous effects of hypermediacy and power browsing on our cognitive abilities. But with the help of the more optimistic, like Robert Coover when he wrote about the early days of hypertext fiction, we can take a focused look at how literature is surviving and thriving in the wired world, numerous avenues of exploration open up.

The Internet these days has become almost synonymous with hypermediacy - we are bombarded constantly with “hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws” and pandemic reblogging leads us on a long trail to nowhere and everywhere. But there are pockets of activity on the Internet as well, where this sort of mass sharing ignites a work of literature and takes it far beyond itself - for better and for worse.

This is what has happened with fan fiction, which has its own long history in a sense , but has exploded in the age of the Internet. Hubs like Fanfiction.net making it obscenely easy for any fanboy or fangirl to whip up a story with some beloved characters and post it onto the world wide web, merely with one uninhibited click. But fan fiction is generally seen as an extension of the larger fandom itself, a kind of collective creative discourse going on alongside the canon. Another good example of a book fandom is Harry Potter, for as each new release in the series bookended long years of anticipation, fan fiction for some was the only way to satisfy the craving for new adventures with Hogwarts’s inhabitants. But what is fascinating about the corpus of Twilight fan fiction is that these writers, their stories and their readership form an altogether different sort of beast.

Twilight: You Love It Or You Hate It
One would be hard pressed to find a person with any sort of access to media that has never heard of Twilight. In fact it polarizes most people on the Internet into two distinct camps, which could best be named the ZOMG-Team-Edward-Bite-Me-Please-I-Love-Vamps-That-SPARKLE-drool-Rpattz Twihards (or something) and Dear-God-What-Complete-Crap-You’re-Killing-My-Brain-Cells-Just-By-Mentioning-It-Steph-Meyer-Is-Ruining-The-Name-Of-Literature Twi-haters (or something). (There is very possibly a third camp of closet Twihards who obsess in absolute secrecy, but proving their existence is necessarily quite difficult.) The two groups are quite vocal about their love or hate for all things Twilight, but the point here is that these exist as very separate camps. Even if you love Twilight then later disown it after wising up to how bad it is, you still commit yourself to one group at a time. But there is another facet of online fandom that once again forges its own path away from the Great Love-It or Hate-It Divide: the vast and immensely intriguing world of fan fiction.

Interpretive Disputes
Within the Twilight fan fiction community, there seems to be a rather unique approach to interpreting the original works in order to write derivative stories. Counterintuitively, a majority of the “fics” classify themselves as AH (All Human), which, more than just nixing the vamp factor, basically allows fan fiction writers unbelievable amounts of license to veer from the canon. In fact, for them this is the best part about this particular kind of fic: take everything about the canon that sucked (and boy, do these writers have plenty to say about that) and re-write it the way they would have liked to see the characters act. In much (though not all) Twilight fan fiction, emulating the style of the original author is often scorned rather than encouraged, and so new writers try out their abilities without the need to first establish a totally new cast and universe.

That said, there are undoubtedly certain features of the canon that are tacitly required to ensure any kind of readership. One fan fiction writer points out that “FF characters come with built in assumptions,” that is, with an already well-established cast of characters, a fan fiction writer is free to work within these to write new situations as they please. Typically these include any combination of the following: identifying traits and habits of the main characters; setting; canon plot parallels; and inclusion of minor characters from the canon.

Identifying traits and habits are by far the most prevalent feature of the canon found in fan fiction, at the same time that these are the features most tweaked, stretched, and embellished to suit the writer’s aims in their fanfic. For instance, the Edward character in a fanfic usually possesses at least several of the canon character’s attributes (devastatingly handsome, angst-ridden by a dark past, violent tendencies, emotionally stunted, possessive in relationships, etc.), but also might intentionally draw attention to these traits by turning them on their heads or adding new features that are absurd or humorous. To that end, there is a way to categorize this various Edward types, which are referred to as the “-Ward”s: Agentward, Artistward, CEOward, Disabledward, Geekward, Politicianward, and Sportsward are just a few examples. The Edward traits are the ones that are accepted by the fandom in the most general sense, with adjustments according to the writer’s preference; these adjustments may or may not spark disagreement or criticism, depending on the inclination of readers to give feedback in reviews or other messages to the author. (Usually forums outside of the work of fan fiction itself are used to discuss both the canon and the fanfic .)

On the other side, the character of Bella, though less of a draw to fan fiction, is a character that is more explicitly co-opted, modified, and above all improved. Most Twilight fan fiction writers are women, and some assume the personal responsibility to “correct” everything about the character that they disliked in the canon, namely her lack of agency and her placeholder position within the stories, standing in for the girl reading and vicariously experiencing everything in the story. These writers who create a new Bella Swan find even more freedom, and generally the more successful the writer is at re-creating her, the more positively readers respond (factoring in quality of writing, entertaining premise, etc.) One successful rewriting of the Bella character has been BellaFlan’s Becoming Bella Swan, in which Bella suffers a psychotic break, develops dissociative identity disorder, and becomes sexually assertive with both Edward and Jacob - barely a trace remains of the original cipher of a girl chastely pining over a sparkly vampire.

Remediation and the Legality of Fan Fiction
While fan fiction can be considered a form of remediation in itself, I’m more interested in the ethical and legal implications of acting on this kind of remediation, that is using another creator’s characters and universe to reapply to new situations, new dialogue, and in many ways an entirely new exigence.

Remediation of stock characters and tropes has long been a practice in English literature, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen, and today modern takes on these classics reappropriate their various elements to create new forms of literature. But in relatively recent years this practice has brought to question the implications of “borrowing” another author’s creation, owing no little responsibility to the rise of intellectual property rights and copyright. What this means for fan fiction is ever-evolving as cases crop up in the media spotlight.

Most recently there has been ample newsblog coverage of the Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, the first of three romance-erotica novels which had their start as a very popular, serially published Twilight fan fiction under the name Master of the Universe. Of course, to be published, all of the “Edward”s and “Bella”s had to be replaced with new names, and other telling similarities altered, but this new version has topped multiple bestseller lists. The media discussions about the book tend to exhaust discussion about the book’s steamy thematic contents (explicit sex scenes, BDSM elements, sexual abuse) and its christening as “mommy porn” rather than wear out thoughts about Twilight fan fiction.

But within the Twilight fan fiction community, high energy arguments and debates have gone down about publishing fics: should you do it? do you have the right? what does it mean to the fandom, that what was once offered for free is now spinning a profit? The author of Fifty Shades, pre-publication and under the username SnowQueens IceDragon, had a private conversation on the subject with another major Twilight fanfic writer, AngstGoddess003 (author of Wide Awake ), and the conversation was made public through a series of (melo)dramatic events. Loyalty to the fandom, a sense of “owing” success to fanfic readers, and the ethical implications of turning a profit on fan fiction: all of these concerns of those in the fan fiction community pose questions rather unlike those asked by those outside of the fandom. Sure, the legality is covered well enough, but these questions of community are altogether their own phenomenon, suggesting that the community of Twilight fan fiction is almost its own fandom distinct (but closely related to) the Twilight fandom in general. Further evidence for this are the many “trailers” (albeit very rough and amateurish) on youtube created by fans of various works of fan fiction.

Still, the fact is that Fifty Shades is merely the most popular fanfic-turned-published-book of the moment, and numerous other fanfics have been pulled from their original locations on the Internet to be prepped for publication. Despite all of the tension surrounding the issue within and without the fandom, it remains that the trendy format of using well-loved characters, often very loosely, to create a new narrative, predisposes such stories to be ready for revitalization as a unique published work.

Haters
There are varying levels of love for the Twilight stories in their original form, from those who loyally worship Stephenie Meyer for bringing Edward Cullen into their fantasies, to those that unapologetically assert that Stephenie Meyer does not deserve to have been successful for her stories because of how badly written they are and how she ruined the best parts about the story. All who write fan fiction, however, seem to share some level of entitlement to these characters, which allows them to write fics in the first place.

One case in particular that stands out is the previously (and briefly) mentioned drama between two major fan fiction authors. The author who did not believe it was right to publish fan fiction, AngstGoddess003, wrote her thoughts about this flame war and related events. In defense of her actions, she speaks of admitting the ridiculous elements of her own Twilight fanfic (which has been used as a class text in a course on theories of popular culture ), leaving the fandom “in a blaze of glory,” and basically gives an account of how much drama can go on in even a sub-fandom like that of Twilight fan fiction. It shows that such is the depth of involvement in one community that quite beyond the text itself, whole dynamics arise out of prolonged, intense communal efforts around that particular text. Here, Twilight and its characters, so essential in drawing the initial interest in a fan fiction community, becomes something of a pretext for disagreement and argument that spring up naturally in any community, on or off the Internet.

Another peculiar phenomenon is the establishment of sites dedicated to hating Twilight: members of these sites devote time and energy to disliking something, and in so doing very much resemble their counterparts. On one thread on the Twilight Sucks forum, the question asked was “What would Twilight be like if YOU wrote it?” and the answers offered resemble very closely what it is that Twilight fan fiction writers attempt to do - to take Twilight and fix it according to their own preferences.

Additional Resources
Official Website of Stephenie Meyer

Fanlore, an essential resource for decoding fandom lingo

Twilighted