About book Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over The World (2013)
This was an emotional roller coaster ride... I laughed, I cried, I learned... I felt nostalgic about Harry Potter and the incredible fandom that surrounds it.I loved the essays that contained social commentary about fandom culture and the media’s total misinterpretation of it (perhaps even deliberately so). I loved them talking about slash pairings and the history, about how people wanted gay fics to be either banned or rated R – even if the male characters just kissed. I loved how they talked about the freedom and lack of restrictions that fanfiction writing encompasses: –“It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality.”I loved one contributor pointing out and discussing why fanfiction writers are predominantly female. The following two paragraphs connected with me on such a personal level I nearly stopped reading because I didn’t think I would read anything more accurate ever again.“The majority of this not-for-profit writing is written by women, or if not by women, then by people who are willing to be (mis)taken for women. It's important that in fanfiction, women are largely running the show. Where else is that true? Less than 30% of television writers are women; in film, that figure is below 20%. Oscar-nominated women directors? Four. “My study of fic communities has underscored how gender imbalance in literary and mass cultural production doesn't just affect venue, opportunity, and reception for active writers; it affects people even wanting to try. It affects people even /claiming/ to be trying. Fanfiction has given many writers permission and encouragement to do something they'd never imagined they could do--in part because they can do it in private, without seeming to arrogantly lay claim to the culturally valued and vaunted status of "writer." Furthermore, fanfiction communities can provide a supportive network for beginning writers in a way that no commercial enterprise possibly can. Today, hundreds of thousands of new writers--young people, children--are growing up writing not in isolation, but with a ready-made community of readers and commentators who already love the characters and worlds they're writing about. That's very different.”Yes it had it's faults and lacked different perspectives (whitewashing being a major criticism of the text). Individual pieces were brilliant. I would have loved to have more varied contributors though. I feel like a lot of voices were missing. This is a book that will be revisited often. It taps into the various levels of criticism around fanfiction, looking at the genre from inside, outside and through. The contributors bring multiple perspectives to discussions of not only genre and boundary crossing, but plagiarism, cultural appropriation, transmedia storytelling, fandom, genre policing and transformative works. Each essay and interview layers up a rich cultural history and commentary that not only demonstrates academic rigour but allows for participatory voices; an acknowledgment of first hand, insider knowledge without the self-congratulatory naval-gazing or tokenism that both criticism and ethnography can have. More importantly, it documents a particular set of histories and developments that are not only unique story lines of the fanfiction genre but also those which cross genres and even art forms. I recommend this at an academic level but even more, to those like me, who stumbled into fanfiction late and accidentally, having before or since encountered the furore about Ms James and Fifty Shades of Grey ( should she or shouldn't she have) and the emergence of a strong pull-to-publish/publisher-poaching-ground trend (that we know is nothing knew but still considered bad form), this volume will give you a more balanced understanding of the discussions than you might otherwise encounter from social media and fanfic or literary forums.
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Enjoyable history of fanfic, perhaps a bit heavy on the twilight fics.
—priankashah
