What if Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy kissed? How fan fiction is picking up steam
More publishers are turning to fan fiction sites to find their next hit
Audiences love a fan fiction, from a romance between the Hermoine Granger and Draco Malfoy — a pairing that never happened in the Harry Potter books or films — to expanding on Bella and Edward's relationship from Twilight.
Basically, readers want some spin-off romances. And publishers, along with Hollywood, have taken notice.
"Traditional publishing is looking at fanfic sites more than they ever have before," Duncan Stewart, director of research at Deloitte Canada, told Cost of Living.
Fan fiction — stories written by fans using preexisting characters or settings to tell new adventures — is no longer restricted to corners of the internet where a series' most dedicated fans congregate. It's become big bucks.
Fifty Shades of Grey is argubaly the most famous example. It was originally a fan fiction written by E.L. James using characters in the Twilight novels who were renamed for the published book. Now, it has sold over a million copies, and the subsequent movie has earned over a billion dollars.
The messy, briefly-passionate relationship between Kylo Ren and Rey in the latest Star Wars trilogy has been the subject of many a fan fiction, and some have been turned into books such as The Hurricane Wars and We'd Know by changing the character's names and taking them out of the Star Wars universe.
That has more publishers watching fan fiction sites such as Wattpad, An Archive of Our Own, and FanFiction.net.
"On most of these sites, you can see reviews and comments. You can see the number of positive stars, positive reviews, people referring to it. It is a way of helping a publisher identify potential talents in a fairly structured way," said Stewart.
The love of fan fictions
The idea of a fan fiction is simple. A fan will take a story or character they like, and add their own twist to it.
What if, for example, Ross and Rachel from Friends had to survive a zombie apocalypse together?
This isn't as recent a trend as you might think, either. Anne Jamison, author of Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World and a professor at the University of Utah, says it started with people writing their own stories about Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes as early as the 1900s. At the time, it was known as pastiche.
But it was Trekkies, handing out their fan-made stories at Star Trek conventions, that launched the modern term "fan fiction" into hyperspace.
"People began taking characters from Star Trek and saying, well, what if we put them in Star Wars? Or, you know, what if we took the Harry Potter characters and sent them to the Enterprise?" said Jamison.
With the evolution of the internet, those stories got more reach. It then exploded with Harry Potter and Twilight.
"Then in Fifty Shades of Grey, it becomes business. And then suddenly everybody is paying attention," said Jamison.
Fans may also write fiction about a real-life celebrity, instead of a fictional character or setting.
Aruna Dutta's fan fiction fixation is English singer Harry Styles. One of her stories imagined Styles as a member of a spy group.
She shares those stories with the fan fiction club at the University of Toronto.
"I knew that using Harry Styles's name and basing a character off of them would gain a lot of traction," said Dutta, who is in her third year of university.
"I could have replaced him with any other character and it still would have worked. But it was purely his fame that I used."
Taking a fanfic to market
Writing fan fiction is not without its pitfalls. If creators try to make money off of their work based on characters they don't own, they could bump into some challenges.
Giuseppina D'Agostino, a professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School for York University in Toronto, says there has yet to be a test case in Canada.
"The law might be seen as ambiguous because copyright law is there to protect the exclusive rights of authors of original works. But there are exceptions in the Copyright Act also to enable a vibrant culture to create and use work," said D'Agostino.
She says that so far in Canada, there hasn't been an appetite to go after fan fiction authors.
"They're not really doing any damage to the initial original work. If anything, they're paying homage to it and they might even increase sales of the original book," said D'Agostino.
And she says the further a character or setting gets away from the original work, the more safe it becomes.
So if you take Twilight, change Bella's name to Anastasia Steele and Edward's to Christian Grey, leave out the vampires and werewolves, then amp up the romance's kink factor, and you've got Fifty Shades of Grey. That's called, in the biz, filing off the serial numbers.
And there are other risks. Jamison believes Twilight author Stephanie Meyer may have an awkward time trying to prove Fifty Shades of Grey is too similar to her own work.
"To go to court and say, 'This kinky billionaire man that likes to tie up and beat this innocent girl is way too much like my pre-teen chastity porn.' That would be way more damaging to her than the existence of the book," said Jamison.
Jamison says you can't expect every, or really most, fan fictions to become blockbusters. But she says it's still an important part of modern literature. For one thing, she says it inspired an explosion in the romantasy genre, which is a combo of romance and fantasy.
And it has inspired a new generation of writers.
"Most writers who are coming up now will have started writing by writing fan fiction and sharing it online. So it has a huge impact on who writes, and that's especially true of queer writers and women writers. And so that's going to have a big impact," said Jamison.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Produced by Jennifer Dorozio
