In 2012, readers, media outlets, and literary critics were alarmed, appalled, and perhaps a little intrigued to find that E.L James’s erotic trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey had sold over 100 million copies worldwide and become a New York Times best-seller. Equally shocking to its mainstream audience was news of the novels’ scandalous origins: Fifty Shades of Grey began as fanfiction of Stephanie Meyer’s popular fantasy-romance YA series, Twilight (Bertrand). For their part, fanfiction authors had a different—albeit largely unified—response to the commercial success of Fifty Shades, which was to argue that the novels are neither radical nor well-written, and that an abundance of superior fan-generated erotica exists on the internet for free. Scores of articles like Aja Romano and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw’s “Where to Find the Good Fanfiction Porn” sprung up on blogs and digital news sources in an attempt to lead curious readers to popular repositories of high-quality fanfic. One such repository is Archive of Our Own (AO3), an open access database where users can read and post fanfiction. Unlike much academic research on the subject, this probe does not seek to answer whether fanfiction and other transformative works can or should be considered legal under the purview of fair dealing within copyright, but rather embraces the legal shades of grey that fanfiction inhabits in order to explore how repositories like AO3 provide a model for a productive, constructive open access archive.^[1]

Fanfiction: What is it and where does it come from?

Fanfiction, often abbreviated as fanfic or fic, refers to narratives written by individual fans or fan communities based on the characters, settings, or plots of a canonical source text or transmedia franchise. Digital technologies scholar Bronwen Thomas posits that fanfiction “has long been the most popular way of concretizing and disseminating [fans’] passion for a particular fictional universe” (1). Far from simply rewriting the source text, authors of fanfic critique and transform of the canon, often by queering beloved characters or by giving voice to the women who are marginalized as little more than love interests in popular media.

The origins of fanfic as we understand it now can be traced back to the science fiction fanzines of the late 1960s (Tosenberger 186). Yet one can argue—and indeed many have—that fanfiction has existed as long as stories have been told, and that numerous foundational authors of the English literary canon, such as Milton and Shakespeare, were in effect authors of fanfiction themselves.

The advent of the Internet radically refigured the production and dissemination of fanfiction. In the 1980s, Usenet provided an early public platform permitting fans to connect and share their creative labour without the need for geographical proximity. The digitization of a formerly underground genre made it unprecedentedly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, but this accessibility came at the cost of a reliable archive. Whereas printed zines had been physically circulated within small communities, posts on Usenet were often lost within days of creation until DejaNews provided the ability to access newsgroup content in 1995. While fanfiction expanded outward into the world, it also entered an age of ephemerality.

It was not until the introduction of the World Wide Web that fanfiction began to develop a system of digital archiving that lended works some measure of permanence. Single-fandom archives, hosted and managed by volunteers, collected, shared, and preserved stories as long as they remained online. Shannon Fay Johnson notes that the “more easily accessed and faster-paced virtual communities […] allowed for not only increased consumption, but also creation” (Johnson), and the downside to this wealth of creation was the organizational problem it posed for volunteer archivists. Fast forward to the late 1990s and early 2000s: the influx of creation produced a demand for massive multi-genre archives out of which were born, among others, FanFiction.net, the largest fanfiction repository in the world, and Archive of Our Own.

Building the Archive

Run by the non-profit Organization for Transformative Works, Archive of Our Own boasts more than 22,720 fandoms, 972, 600 users, and 2,549,000 works. Their goal, as listed in their mission statement, is to “maximize inclusiveness of content.” In order to do so, they grant open access to the works they host.

In “Open Access Overview,” Peter Subar quotes the PLoS definition of open access as “free availability and unrestricted use,” that is to say, content free of price and permission barriers. Both elements of open access are present in and the foundation upon which AO3 is built. Anyone with an Internet connection can read and leave kudos (similar to Facebook’s ‘like’) on stories in the archive. Although users do need an account to post, comment on, bookmark, and review fic, becoming a member is a free and non-discriminatory process. In terms of permission, guests and users alike are invited to download and save fanfics to their various devices as EPUB, MOBI, PDF, or HTML files, making them accessible both on- and offline. Moreover, fandom encourages authors and artists to excerpt each other’s work, translate it from one medium to another, or otherwise engage in reworkings of each other’s creations.

Screencap of the AO3 homepage.

In their FAQ, the OTW describes the ethos of AO3 as the following:

In the Archive of Our Own, we hope to create a multi-fandom archive with great features and fan-friendly policies, which is customizable and scalable, and will last for a very long time. We’d like to be fandom’s deposit library, a place where people can back up existing work or projects and have stable links, not the only place where anyone ever posts their work. It’s not either/or; it’s more/more!

Like open access journals, the OTW recognizes digital archives as a legitimate method of building a cultural history that is—if not accessible to all—at least accessible to most. Fans nevertheless have a right to be concerned by this intangible method of preservation. In 2002 and again in 2012, FanFiction.net’s owner, Xing Li, banned and remove all works rated NC-17 from the archive, effectively erasing them from fandom history if they had not been cross-posted elsewhere. The immaterial form of the open access archive is both its greatest asset and its greatest liability: the increased accessibility of fanworks only exists insofar as the archive remains free and online. While AO3’s blanket permission to download stories in various formats assuages some of the larger concerns about impermanence, it does not promise an eternal resting place for fanworks despite the creators’ hopes. Even if some works are preserved on hard drives and smartphones around the world, the comments, kudos, bookmarks, and links between fans and fandom would be erased from history.

In terms of accessibility, Archive of Our Own is attempting to move towards a model of universal access. Although most stories are in English, AO3 welcomes works in a variety of languages, and entire fan communities dedicate their time to translating and re-posting fanfics. Many fics are also transformed into podfic, the fan equivalent to the audiobook. Although only a fraction of the works on AO3 have been translated or recorded, the growing practice seeks to render fanfiction increasingly accessible to international fans, as well as to people for whom reading is not a viable mode of cultural consumption.

Framing Constructive Practice

As Peter Subar states of open access with respect to scholarly journals:

The purpose of the campaign for OA is the constructive one of providing OA to a larger and larger body of literature, not the destructive one of putting non‐OA journals or publishers out of business. […] Open‐access and toll‐access literature can coexist. We know that because they coexist now.

It is here that fanfiction’s legal ambiguity as derivative or transformative work comes into play. While an argument can be made that fanfiction is legally unpublishable because it borrows so much from source texts that are still in copyright, the case of Fifty Shades proves that fanfiction can be hugely profitable with the right modifications. Yet most fanfiction authors do not seek financial gain from their labour. When Peter Subar notes “the campaign for OA focuses on literature that authors give to the world without expectation of payment,” arguing that “they write for impact, not for money,” he could just as well be discussing fanfiction authors rather than academics.

Archive of Our Own therefore provides a clear example of the constructive nature of OA. Fanfiction and other derivative works do not replace or supplant commercial culture, nor do they attempt to. By its very nature, fanfiction requires original novels, films, television shows, and/or other cultural products to engage with. Rather than competing with publishers and producers, fanfiction operates in conversation with cultural objects in a way that is arguably comparable to academic scholarship. In order to enjoy a fic the way an author intended it to be enjoyed, the reader must have a measure of familiarity with the canonical work being addressed. Fanfiction ultimately demands the consumption of commercial culture, and its open access encourage synchronous creation and consumption.

The Gendered Archive

In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig notes that “[l]urking in the background of our collective thought is a hunch that free resources are somehow inferior” (27), and we see this rhetoric circulating in the discourse surrounding fanfiction. One aspect of fanfiction and fan communities that I have yet to explore in this probe is the question of gender. Unlike content found in open access academic journals, the content found on AO3 is largely generated, read, and validated by women and girls. It is therefore difficult to untangle whether fanfiction is disparaged because it is free, because it is not “original” work (is there even such a thing anymore?) or because of its demographics.

Furthermore, women have historically been the volunteer curators of fanworks. The open access archive therefore raises legitimate concerns about the long history of free labour undertaken by women—be it intellectual or affective. On the one hand, women and girls are building a shared community based on creative practice, and to lock such a community behind a paywall would be to silence those voices. On the other hand, if fanfiction acts as a promotional device directing consumers to a given franchise, open access archives to fanworks may be yet another instance of unpaid women’s work that goes unnoticed and undervalued while corporations and the (often male) guardians of the canon profit from free advertising. It might then be a productive enterprise to examine who benefits from the open access archive, and whether this kind of access ultimately devalues the artistic labour inherent in its creation.

[1] For a comprehensive insight into fanfiction’s fraught relationship with copyright law, see Kate Romanenkova’s article, “The Fandom Problem: A Precarious Intersection of Fanfiction and Copyright.” (Note that Romanenkova’s text engages with U.S. copyright.)

Works Cited

Archive of Our Own. Organization for Transformative Works. 15 Nov. 2009 (beta) archiveofourown.org/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2016.

Bertrand, Natasha. “‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ started out as ‘Twilight’ fan fiction before becoming an international phenomenon.” Business Insider, 17 Feb. 2015,www.businessinsider.com/fifty-shades-of-grey-started-out-as-twilight-fan-fiction-2015-2. Accessed 24 Sept. 2016.

Johnson, Shannon Fay. “Fan fiction metadata creation and utilization within fan fiction archives: Three primary models.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 17, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0578.

“Frequently Asked Questions.” Organization for Transformative Works. http://www.transformativeworks.org/faq/ Accessed 24 Sept. 2016.

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. Random House, 2001.

Li, Xing. FanFiction.net. 15 October 1998, www.fanfiction.net. Accessed 23 Sept. 2016.

Romanenkova, Kate. “The Fandom Problem: A Precarious Intersection of Fanfiction and Copyright.” Intellectual Property Law Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 2, 20 May 2014, pp.183-312. Social Science Research Network, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2490788.

Romano, Aja and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. “Where to find the good fanfiction porn.” The Daily Dot. 17 Aug. 2012, www.dailydot.com/parsec/where-to-find-good-fanfic-porn/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2016.

Suber, Peter. “Open Access Overview.” Earlham College. 21 June 2004, legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. Accessed 21 Sept. 2016.

Thomas, Bronwen. “What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things about It?” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-24. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/432689.

Tosenberger, Catherine. “Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction.” Children’s Literature, vol. 36 no. 1, 2008, pp. 185-207. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/chl.0.0017.