Fan fiction as world-building: transformative reception in crossover writing

Abstract

This article contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms and functions of imaginary world-building in contemporary popular culture, introducing the perspective of active transformative reception, which is the perspective of fan fiction writers and readers. The author argues that contemporary fan fiction as a postmodern literary field and ‘fictional anthropology’ is much broader in its transformative capabilities than it is believed even in fan studies, in particular in relation to world-building. She takes as an example Russian Harry Potter fan fiction and pays special attention to the production and reception of such fan fiction genre as crossover. Analysis of texts of this genre and a survey conducted in the Russian Harry Potter online community let her come to the conclusion that this transformative activity of contemporary fandoms in virtual worlds blurs all the lines between different types of sub-creators and undermines the traditional preconceptions of how imaginary worlds can be built, inhabited and developed.

Funding

This research carried out in 2014–2015 was supported by ‘The National Research University “Higher School of Economics” Academic Fund Program’, individual research [grant number 14-01-0065].

Notes

1. ‘Like fan producers, postmodern theorists and artists emphasize pastiche, appropriation, and intertextuality, often challenging themselves to create within firmly established boundaries’ (Stein and Busse 2009, 193).

2. ‘Letters pages in fiction magazines became public forums for debates about imaginary characters and worlds, which often elided into discussions about the real world. Similarly, associations, publications, and conventions devoted to imaginary characters and worlds were also sites for the collective discussion of fictions and their relations with the real’ (Saler 2012, 17).

3. ‘Many of the best fan stories (as well as many of the mediocre and the worst) are completely unpublishable for reasons that have nothing to do with nebulous assessments of literary quality, and everything to do with the fact that fanfiction is often so deeply embedded within a specific community that it is practically incomprehensible to those who don’t share exactly the same set of references’ (Tosenberger 2014, 4–5).

4. ‘Expansion extends the scope of the original storyworld by adding more existents to it, by turning secondary characters into the heroes of the story they experience … Modification “constructs essentially different versions of the protoworld, redesigning its structure and reinventing its story” (Dolezel 1998: 207). … Most literary examples of modification follow a counterfactual sequence of events by giving a different destiny to the characters, one that in effect answers the question What if? … Transposition ‘preserves the design and the main story of the protoworld but locates it in a different temporal or spatial setting’ (Dolezel 1998, 206) … To the three relations described by Dolezel I would like to add quotation. Examples of quotation would be a character in one of the Lord of the Rings movies using a light saber borrowed from Star Wars’ (Ryan 2013, 366).