Fanfiction is fiction written by fans of a TV series, movie, or book, often posted on the internet. Copyright claims are rarely pursued unless the writer is profiting. Fanfiction has been around for centuries, but emerged as a shared experience in the 1960s with the rise of TV series like Star Trek. The internet has brought new growth to fanfiction, but it can violate copyright laws. Fan reaction to fanfiction is mixed, with some enjoying it as a fun pastime and others disliking it. Erotic fanfiction is a striking form of fan-created fiction.
Fanfiction, also called fanfic, is fiction written by people who are fans of a particular television series, movie, or book. The text may be printed or written on paper, but modern examples are often posted on the Internet. This material may infringe copyright laws, but copyright claims are rarely pursued by the original authors or creators unless the fanfic writer is attempting to profit from the material. Fans who choose to create their own works based on copyrighted material do so at their own risk.
History
Fan written fiction is believed to have been around for several centuries, ever since published fiction books became widely available. Early examples may be the writings of girls in the late 1800s who wrote their own endings to Louisa May Alcott’s classic book, Little Women. For example, some girls may have written an ending where Beth survives and Jo marries Laurie. These writings were likely for personal consumption and probably not shared with more than a few friends and family.
Fanfiction emerged as a shared experience in the 1960s, with the rise of TV series that gained large followings. One of the major shows that helped boost the popularity of this type of writing was Star Trek. At fan reunions for the show, people who had written their own stories based on the show began sharing them with other fans. These early examples of fanfic stories were often mimeographed and hand-stapled texts referred to as zines. Newer fanzines, also called zines, often have a more professional feel because they were computer-printed and might include artwork.
Internet publication
The rise of the Internet has brought new growth to fanfiction, with fans discovering one another across the globe, forming websites, groups and mailing lists for sharing fan-written fiction and created art by the fans. Virtually every fictional TV series that appeals to a young audience has a fanfiction community associated with it. Books that gain large followings, such as JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series or Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, are known for their popularity with amateur authors who create new stories with characters from those books.
Legal issues
Any material that uses characters, places, and other fictitious names from copyrighted artwork is a violation of copyright laws. Many authors, producers and publishers who own the copyright will go to great lengths to protect their work, especially if they consider alternative uses of their material to be harmful in any way. Others, however, choose not to pursue claims against fanfiction creators as long as they are not seeking to profit from them. This is likely an appreciation that fanfiction can be a powerful form of free publicity as well as an acknowledgment that negative publicity could result from a legal attack on the most devoted members of a work’s fan base. Some copyright holders have even embraced fanfiction, holding contests for fans to submit their writing, and sometimes publishing collections of these materials.
In most cases, copyright protection expires after a number of years. After a work of art’s copyright expires, the characters and places it contains become public domain for others to use freely. Characters like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have all fallen into the public domain, so it’s legally permissible for another to profit from their use. Many new works using public domain characters have been very successful, perhaps because many fans enjoy seeing familiar characters reworked into new stories or seen from a fresh perspective.
Forms for adults
One of the more striking forms of fan-created fiction is the erotic variety. For example, viewers who thought that two characters in a television show or movie should be in a sexual relationship could express that view by writing a piece of erotic fiction. When these relationships are between two male characters or two female characters who are not homosexual in the original works, this type of fiction is often called slash. The name comes from how these writings might be labeled, with a slash between the names of the two characters involved. Some people consider slash to only include works involving sexual relationships between two male characters.
Opinions
Fan reaction to other people’s fanfiction pieces is mixed. Some people dislike seeing characters that have become dear to them played by others and behave in ways that may not be consistent with their own concepts of those characters. Other fans enjoy reading alternative histories and find this form of fiction a fun pastime and a new way to indulge their interest in characters who have become important to them. People who want to read fanfiction stories online are likely to find plenty of examples by typing the term “fanfiction” along with the title of a book, TV show, or movie into a search engine.
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