Make Believe: Why Fanfic is taking over the world

29 July 2014 - 02:00 By Julia Llewellyn Smith, ©The Sunday Telegraph
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RECAST: 'Free-to-read' based on One Direction boys has tweens going nuts
RECAST: 'Free-to-read' based on One Direction boys has tweens going nuts
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Are you a fan of Downton Abbey? Then you might enjoy As Time Goes By, by "Willa Dedalus", which imagines what might happen if the first kiss between Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary had continued.

"He moved the silk up her legs, then gasped in astonishment at what he found. 'You're not wearing panties'."

Maybe you also love Doctor Who. Maybe you'd like to read The Madman and the Rebel about what could have happened if the Doctor visited Downton and met the rebellious Lady Sibyl ("Sibyl Persephone Crawley, I'm the doctor." "Pardon me, sir, but doctor who?").

Welcome to the world of fan-fiction - fanfic to the initiated - where characters from favourite books, films and television programmes, not to mention real celebrities, embark on (frequently X-rated) adventures their creators almost certainly never imagined.

Fanfic has existed in some form virtually since creative writing began: take Virgil's use of a minor character from the Iliad as the Aeneid's protagonist. But in the past 20 years, since the inception of the internet, it has become a phenomenon, with millions of stories in dozens of languages posted on umpteen sites.

Most fanfic takes its inspiration from the most enduring canons (regardless of literary or critical merit). Fanfiction.net has 686000 Harry Potter stories alone. Twilight, Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, The X-Files and Tolkien's Middle Earth are also well- represented. There's fanfic for virtually anything.

Then there's the burgeoning but highly controversial area of real people fiction (RPF), in which actors such as Stephen Fry and Brian Cox are portrayed as lovers, and Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev becomes a misunderstood outsider.

The subculture remained below most people's radars until two years ago, when it spawned the bestselling book of all time, Fifty Shades of Grey . A sadomasochistic homage to the already bestselling (but chaste) Twilight series, this trilogy by EL James has sold 100million copies and counting, and the film will be out next year.

Last month 25-year-old Anna Todd from Texas sold the rights to her trilogy After for six figures to Simon and Schuster. It's the story of Tessa, an innocent teen who falls in with a crowd of college boys who - in their original "free-to-read" incarnation on the increasingly popular fanfic app Wattpad - are called Niall, Liam, Zayn and Louis. But it is "rude boy" Harry, the handsome outsider, who - somewhat unconvincingly - also loves Jane Austen, whom she falls for. Parents of tweenage girls will immediately recognise the boys from One Direction.

To date, Todd's 293 chapters chronicling Tessa and Harry's on/off courtship, introduced with a warning of "detailed sexual scenes", has attracted 800 million hits and an estimated one million regular readers - 85% of whom read the serialisation on mobile devices.

Publishers are rubbing their hands at the prospect of a seemingly guaranteed bestseller. But not everyone is happy about such developments.

"Profiting from fanfic is a divisive area," says Professor Anne Jamison, author of Fic: Why FanFiction is Taking Over the World.

The rift is largely generational," she says. "Older" readers (23- to 25-year-olds in online parlance), who tend to congregate on sites like Archive Of Our Own, hate the commercialisation. But teen readers who tend to use the more blatantly commercial Wattpad have no problem with it .

"Anna Todd's received far less flak than EL James," says Jamison. Indeed, James was savaged by the fanfic community and many mainstream authors, with critics including bestselling author Jodi Picoult, who tweeted "don't steal a fan base another author's worked hard for".

Generally, however, corporations are realising that fanfic leads to greater involvement in their products - be it books, CDs, films or television shows, with many now sponsoring official fanfic partners.

On that basis, it seems unlikely Harry Styles will be complaining about his fictional alter-ego.

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