fan fiction

fan fiction
For the term below, please answer:
1. fan fiction

Proper formatting = listing out the different parts of each answer as a., b., c., d.

a) The author who wrote about the term.

b) The meaning of the term, as it pertains to the topics covered in this course. (You should plan on writing at least a few sentences to adequately explain the
definition of the term.)

c) A television example that exemplifies the term. (You only need to write about one example: a television show OR episode, OR character, OR plotline from a TV
show, OR a block of shows, OR an entire network. You may give more than one example if you wish but only one is required. Please note that you must write about a
television example, not a film example .)

d) How the television example relates to, and illustrates, the term. (You should plan on writing 1 to 2 paragraphs—6 to 12 sentences at least—to explain how your
example relates to the term.)
Fan Fiction and
Fan Communities in
the Age of the Internet
New Essays
EDITED BY KAREN HELLEKSON
AND KRISTINA BUSSE
McFarland &. Company, Inc., Publishers
Jeff ersun, North Carolina, and London
224 PART Ill-READERS AND WRITERS
in cyherspace. In Commu11ities in cyberspace, ed. Mark Smith and Peter Kollock, 29-59.
London: Routledge.
Doty, Alexander. 1995. There’s something queer here. In Out in culture: Gay, lesl1ia11,
and queer essaJ’S 011 popular culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty,
71-90. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
Dyer, Richard. 1998. Stars. London: British Film Institute.
Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the love of men: Romantic friends/rip and love between
women from tire Re11t1issa11ce to tire present. New York,: William Morrow.
Halperin, David. 1990. One /111ndred years of lromosexuality mid otlrer essays 011 Greek
iol’e. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. A cyhorg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism
in the late twentieth century. In Simians, cyborgs and women: The rei111•f!11tio11 of nature,
149-81. New York: Routledge.
Henderson, Samatha, and Michael Gilding. 2004. “I’ve never clicked this much with anyone
in my life”: Trust and hyperpersonal communication in online friendships. New
Media a11d Society 6:487-506.
Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan cultures. London: Routledge.
Isilya. 2004. Not based on a true story. Available at: http://www.juppy.org/santa/
stories.php?ForAuthorlD=IOl&Year=2004 (accessed June I, 2006)
Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual poaclrers: Tele1•isio11 fans and participatory culture. New
York: Routledge.
Lamb, Patricia Frazer, and Diane Veith. 1986. Romantic myth, transcendence, and Star
Trek zines. In Erotic 1111il•erse: Sexuality and fantastic literature, ed. Donald Palumbo,
236-55. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ludlow, Peter, ed. 1996. High 110011 011 the electronic frontier: Conceptual issues in cyberspace.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Penley, Constance. 1992. Feminism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture.
In Cultural studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler,
479-500. New York: Routledge.
Rheingold, Howard. 1993/2000. Tire virtual comm1111ity: Homesteading 011 the electronic
frontier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rojek, Chris. 2001. Celebrity. London: Reaktion.
Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance theory. New York: Routledge.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between men: E11glislr itemture and male lromosocial desire.
New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carol. 1985. The female world of love and ritual: Relations between
women in nineteenth-century America. In Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in
Victorian America, 53-76. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Smol, Anna. 2004. “Oh … oh … Frodo!” Readings of male intimacy in Tire Lord of tire
Rings. Modern Fiction Studies 50:949-79.
Stacey, Jackie. 1991. Feminine fascinations: Forms of identification in star-audience relations.
In Stardom: Industry of desire, ed. Christine Gledhill, 141-63. London: Routledge.

Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life 011 the screen: Identity i11 tire age of the Internet. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Turner, Graeme. 2004. Umlerstmrding celebrity. London: Sage.
PART IV
MEDIUM AND MESSAGE:
FAN FICTION AND BEYOND
10. Writing Bodies in Space
Media Fan Fiction
as Theatrical Performance
Francesca Coppa
ABS:RACT.-_ I argue that that fan fiction develops in response to dramatic,
not literary, modes of storytelling and therefore can be seen to
~ulfill performative rather than literary criteria. By recognizing drama
‘.n~tead of pr~se as the antecedent medium for fan fiction, and by exammmg
fan ~ctton through th~ lens of performance studies, three highly
debated thmgs about fan fiction become explicable: (I) fan fiction’s focus
o~ b~dies; (2) fan fiction’s repetition; and (3) fan fiction’s production
w1thm the context of media fandom. Fan fiction, whether written in
te!eplay form or not, directs bodies in space: readers come to fan fiction
with extratextual knowledge, mostly of characters’ bodies and voices, and
the writer uses this to direct her work. In theatre, there’s a value to revisit!ng
the same text in order to explore different aspects and play out
different scenarios; in television, we don’t mind tuning in week after
week to see the same characters in entirely different stories. Similarly
fan fiction retells stories, but also changes them. If traditional theatr~
takes a script and makes it three-dimensional in a potentially infinite
n~mbe: of productions, modern fandom takes something thrce-
?1m_ens1onal and then produces an infinite number of scripts. This activity
IS not authoring texts, but making productions- relying on the
audience’s shared extratextual knowledge of sets and wardrobes, of the
actors’ bodies, smiles, and movements to direct a living theatre in the
mind.
225
226 PART IV-MEDIUM ANO MESSAGE
Introduction
I explore a relatively simple proposition: that fan fiction develops in
response to dramatic rather than literary modes of storytelling and can
therefore be seen to fulfill performative rather than literary criteria. This
may seem obvious, as the writing of fan fiction is most strongly and
specifically associated with the nearly forty-yea’r-old phenomenon of media
fandom, 1 which is to say, the organized subculture that celebrates, analyzes,
and negotiates with stories told through the mass ( mainly televisual) media,
and whose crossroads has long been the annual Media West convention held
since 1981 in Lansing, Michigan. But the importance of media fan fiction
being written in response to dramatic rather than literary storytelling has
been overlooked for at least two reasons: first, that fan fiction is itself a textual
enterprise, made of letters and words and sentences written on a page
(or, more likely these days, a screen), and it therefore seems sensible to
treat it as a literary rather than an essentially dramatic form; and second,
that media fandom has its origins in science fiction fandom, which is a
heavily textual genre. Media fandom spun off from science fiction fandom
as a direct result of the original Stnr Trek television series (1966-1969),2
and although fans and scholars have catalogued many similarities (in fannish
organization, jargon, and interests; even today, most media fans maintain
a strong interest in science fiction and fantasy) and differences (most
strikingly in terms of gender, but also in attitudes toward profit and professionalization)
between the two fannish cultures, the impact of the switch
in genre from prose to drama is rarely discussed or even noticed. But
whereas fans of literary science fiction often take to writing “original” science
fiction themselves, fans of mass media write fan fiction – which, I submit,
is more a kind of theatre than a kind of prose.
In making this claim, I should note that I am definingfn11 fiction narrowly
as creative material featuring characters that have previously appeared in works
whose copyright is held by others . Although the creative expansion of extant
fictional worlds is an age-old practice, by restricting the term fn11 fictio11
to reworkings of currently copyrighted material, I effectively limit the definition
not just to the modern era of copyright, but to the even more recent era
of active intellectual property rights enforcement. Although fans themselves
often seek continuities between their art-making practices and those with
a much longer history (Laura M. Hale starts her History of Fan Fie timeline
with “0220 The Chinese invent paper”), 3 this conflation of folk and fan cultures
may blur important distinctions between them, not least of which is the
relatively recent legal idea that stories can be owned. It is only when storytelling
becomes industrialized-or, to draw upon Richard Ohmann’s definition of
10. Writing Bodies in Space (Coppa) 227
mass culture, produced at a distance b I .
ists- that fan fiction begin t k ya re at1vely small number of special-
“”- ,, . . s O ma e sense as a categorv b I ians d1stmguished fron1 Ohn1a ‘ d’ ” ,, ecause on y then are nn s 1stant spe · )’ ” · differentiated from professionals
(1996 14· d c1aG1sts, Just as amateurs are Th · , , an see arber 2001).
e hne between amateur and professional writing is both sharply
de~ne~ an~ frequently crossed in science fiction fandom, because science
fiction 1s a literature itself written by fans of the genre· to be an a t · . . . , ma eur sc1-
enc~ fiction ~nter 1s t~erefore merely a step on the way to becoming a profess1ona_l
science fict10n writer, and professional writers still go to
conventions to hobn_ob. Fr?m thi_s perspective, the professional is superior
to the ai~ate~r, who 1s servmg a kmd of apprenticeship. Conversely, MediaWest
~ndes Itself on being a convention run by fans and for fans, without
any paid guests (professional authors, actors, or producers), and fan fiction
writers tend to be defiantly amateur in the sense of writing precisely what
they want for love alone. In this schema, to be a professional is to write at
the command of others for money. There are exceptions to this in creators
like Joss Whedon or Aaron Sorkin, who are seen as relatively fannish auteurs
trying to make personal shows within the confines of the industry. However,
fans mostly shake their heads in bemusement at television shows that
can’t keep track of basic continuity, or films that miss obvio~s dramatic
opportunities; it’s understood that this is the by-product of creating a dramatic
universe for profit and by committee. Bemusement can give way to
an angrier sort of frustration when creators visibly command the resources
and power necessary for good mass media storytelling and are judged to
have botched it anyway (George Lucas and Chris Carter come to mind).
In the infamous “Get a Life” (1986) sketch on Snt11rdn)’ Night Live,
William Shatner framed his involvement with Star Trek as purely professional:
“You’ve turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few
years, into a colossal waste of time!” Shatner’s professionalism is tied to his
refusal to take mass media storytelling seriously. But what of the fan who
does take mass media storytelling seriously? What response is available to
her? The science fiction fan may challenge her literary forerunners by
becoming a professional writer, but the media fan is less likely to become
a producer, screenwriter, or director. Science fiction is produced from
among “us,” but the mass media is still produced at a distance by “them.”
Few fan fiction writers will ever have access to the means of production for
mass media storytelling . The bar is much higher; the funds needed are enormous;
one still has to move to Los Angeles or Vancouver; the odds of writing
a show you like, as opposed to one you’re assigned to, are small; until
relatively recently, the gender bias in Hollywood was astounding. There is,
in short, a very small chance of a fan fiction writer becoming a professional
228 PART IV-MEDIUM ANO MESSAGE
mass media storyteller, even if she was inclined to do so. Defiant amateurism
in this case is both realistic and structurally smart, but that doesn’t
stop some science fiction fans from scoffing at the media fan’s refusal to write
something potentially salable . . . . .
Not only has “derivative” fiction been scoffed at w1th111 science fict1?n
fandom but drama has historically been a belittled category as well. 4 Despite
the pop~tlar sense of science fiction as a genre wi°th space battles, laser guns,
and voyages to the moon, these dramas have been traditionally_ scoffe? at
by science fiction writers, whose allegiance is to idea-based narrative fiction.
Magazines and novels are at the heart of science fiction fandom, not stage,
film, or television (Ohmann 1996; Zimmerman 2003). In January 1976, an
essay by Harlan Ellison appeared in the Science Fiction Writers of.America
newsletter urging the membership to take drama, and the SFWA s Nebula
Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, more seriously:
We haven’t been quite as concerned with the Drama Nebulas as with the_more
familiar categories, chiefly because a small percentage o~ our membership (1as
been employed in the areas that Nebula touches, and so 1t has been sometl~mg
of an illegitimate offspring. But sf films and tv shows and stage product10ns
and sf-affiliated record albums reach a much wider audience than even our
most popular novels and stories. And to a larg~ degree !he public image of sf
is conditioned by these mass-market presentations I Ellison 1984, 82].
Ellison pointed out the historic “snobbishness on the part of our older,
more print-oriented members toward film and tv” and noted that “everyone
else seems to understand the power of film/tv. SFWA doesn’t” (84).
However, when the group chose not to award a Nebula for drama in 197′.,
Ellison resigned from SWFA and gave a speech in which he berated his
audience for “worrying about a lousy 5 cents a word” while ignoring the
much more lucrative fields of stage, television, film, and audio recordings
(87-98). But Ellison’s concern was for the strategic and financial importan~e
of drama, not for drama’s artistic value. In fact, Ellison is blatant about his
allegiance to prose: “Tragically, the illiterates keep m~lti~lying, and the
audience for books 11111st be kept alive! … Books are my first tnterest, books
should be your first interest. They count. But the way to support the writing
of books is to get some of that film and TV money” (:3 ). .
This is hardly an enthusiastic defense of performat1ve storytellmg;
Ellison merely argued that SFWA members should profit from the current
boom in dramatic science fiction -1977 being, of course, the year Star Wars
was released. Ellison not only wrote the hands-down most popular episode
of Star Trek, “City On the Edge of Forever,” but is now also famous as a
fierce defender of writers’ intellectual property. However, the snobbishness
against drama Ellison was fighting in the 1970s is still alive and well in the new
JO. Writi11g Bodies i11 Space (Coppa) 229
millennium. Orson Scott Card (2005) celebrated the recent (and surely temporary)
death of the Star Trek franchise by attacking the original series as mere
visual “spectacle” for.people ‘,;ho weren’t readers of science fiction, although
he does end by grantmg that screen sci-fi has finally caught up with written
science fiction.” This is offensive to the female sf fans who created Star Trek
fandom in the late 1960s; as Justine Larbalestier (2002) has shown, women
“‘.ere always present as readers of sf, though they weren’t always visible on the
zme letter pages that were the public face of the sf fandom (23-27). In fact,
the ~ubset of female sf fans who founded Star Trek fandom had multiple literacies
and competencies: like many readers (and writers) of science fiction
~hey were likel_y not only to be avid readers but also to have advanced degree~
111 the hard sciences at a time when this was much less common for women
(Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” this volume).
Most media fans still maintain at least a (ritual) allegiance to print over
film; the two most recent large-scale media fandoms-Harry Potter and Tl,e
Lord of the Rings- are listed at the multifandom archive site Fan fiction.net
und~r “Books” rather than “Movies” even though both fandoms grew exponentially
only after film versions appeared. Ask a fan, and she’ll generally
express a preference for the book over the “movieverse,” but over and over,
dramatic, not literary, material generates fan fiction. Although creative fannish
practices have become familiar enough to be applied to practically every
genre of art-fanfic exists about books, movies, television, comics, cartoons,
anime, bands, celebrity culture, and political culture – it’s only when stories
get embodied that they seem to generate truly massive waves of fiction.
It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that fan fiction is an inferior
art form and worthy of derision – oh, for kid~, maybe, sure, to get them
reading and writing, but writing fan fiction is nothing that any respectable adult
should be doing. Fan fiction, from this point of view, is neither art nor commerce.
Instead,_ it is charged with being derivative and repetitive, too narrowly
~ocuse? on bodies and ~harac~er at the expense of plot or idea. That may sound
hke failure by conventional literary standards, but if we examine fan fiction
as a species of performance, the picture changes. Fan fiction’s concern with
bodies is often perceived as a problem or flaw, but performance is predicated
on the idea of bodies, rather than words, as the storytelling medium.
Scholars of performance studies often refer to their object of study as
“the movement of bodies in space,” and the behavior of those bodies is never
unique or “original”; all behavior, as Richard Schechner (2002) explains, “consists
of recombining bits of previously behaved behaviors” (28). For this reason,
Schechner defines performance as “twice behaved” or “restored” behavior
(22), so a focus on the importance of repetition and combination as well as a
focus on bodies is intrinsic to performance as a genre. As Schechner explains:
230 PART JV-MEDIUM AND MESSAGE
Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of
film. These strips of behavior can be rearrange~ or rec_o~structed; the~ are
independent of the casual systems (personal, s~_,al, poh~1Cal, technolo~1~al)
that brought them into existence. They have a hte .of their own. The _origmal
“truth” or “source” of the behavior may not be known, or may be lost, ignored,
contradicted-even while that truth or source is being honored [28].
This decontextualizing of behavior echoes the appropriation and use of
existing characters in most fan fiction; in fact, one could define fan fiction
as a textual attempt to make certain characters “perform” according to
different behavioral strips. Or perhaps the characters who populate fan
fiction are themselves the behavioral strips, able to walk out of one story
and into another, acting independently of the works of art that brought
them into existence. The existence of fan fiction postulates that characters
are able to “walk” not only from one artwork into another, but from one
genre into another; fan fiction articulates that characters are neither constructed
or owned, but have, to use Schechner’s phrase, a life of their own
not dependent on any original “truth” or “source.” . . . .
What better tool to apply to studying Star Trek and its derivative artistic
productions than a form of criticism dedicated to explaining the semiotic
value of bodies in space? By recognizing drama and not prose as the
antecedent medium for fan fiction, and by examining fan fiction through
the lens of performance studies, we are able to begin explaining three highly
debated things about fan fiction: (I) Why does fan fiction seem to focus on
bodies? (2) Why does fan fiction seem so repetitious? and (3) Why is fan
fiction produced within the context of media fandom? What is the relationship
between a fanfic writer and her audience?
Embodying the Geek Hierarchy
I begin a more detailed argument about the conflict between textual
and embodied meanings with a quick close reading of the Brunching Shuttlecock’s
“Geek Hierarchy” (Figure IO.I). The Brunching Shuttlecocks are
an online comedy troupe popular among a broad spectrum of geeks, nerds,
fans, programmers, and hackers. The “Geek Hierarchy” is one of their most
circulated jokes, but a revealing joke, one that gets at something true about
fannish hierarchies and social structure .
The Shuttlecocks place “Published Science Fiction Authors” at the
very top of the chart, to be followed by “Science Fiction Literature
Fans,” “Science Fiction Television Fans,” “Fanfic Writers,” “Erotic Fanfic
10. Writi11g Bodies i11 Space (Coppa) 231
Writ.erst and “Erotic Fanfic Writers Who Put Themselves in the Story”
(all italics are my emphasis). To frame it another way, the Shuttlecocks
rank the dramatic below the literary and the erotic below the dramatic .
The hierarchy supports traditional values that privilege the written word
over the spoken one and mind over body. The move down the hierarchy
therefore represents a shift from literary values (the mind, the word,
the “original statement”) to what I would claim are theatrical ones
(repetition, performance, embodied action). As we descend, we move
further away from “text” and more toward “body,” and, at least on
the media fandom side of the diagram, toward the female body (because
fan writers are likely to be women). At the very bottom of the hierarchy
are the “furries,” or fans who enjoy media involving anthropomorphic
animals. These fans indulge a fantasy of pure body that asserts a connection
between our human bodies and animal bodies. The mainstream
discomfort with that idea is straight out of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

Even the Geek Hierarchy’s comparison between “Science Fiction
Authors” and “Fanfic Writers” makes its distinction in terms of embodied
action – because writing is a visible physical activity, a verb, while
“authoring” (derived from the Latin auctor, “creator”) is something
more complex. To author a text is to have power over it, to take public
responsibility for it, regardless of whether or not one did the actual
work of selecting words and putting them in order. Authorship is a sign
of control rather than creation. This distinction is gendered, because
there is a larger tradition of seeing the female writer in terms of body
rather than mind. Consider, for instance, Hawthorne’s famous denigration
of female authors as “scribbling women”; the slur conjures a picture
of these women as engaged in frenetic activity, as if women’s
writing must be more physical than mental. Scribbling women are like
skiing women, clen11ing women, da11ci11g women -not minds, but bodies
in space.
Moreover, Henry Jenkins, in Textual Poachers (2002), explains that
one of the earliest uses of the word fan was in reference to “women theatregoers,
‘Matinee Girls,’ who male critics claimed had come to admire the
actors rather than the plays” ( 12 )- or, to gloss the idea another way, bodies
rather than texts, or to have given a somehow wrongful emphasis to the
body in space. Similarly, Joan Marie Verba, in her 1996 history of Star Trek
zine culture , Boldly Writi11g, notes that by 1975, ever-increasing numbers
of fans saw Star Trek not as science fiction but “as a ‘buddy’ show, or as
a heroic/romantic saga, in which Kirk and Spock were the focus.” She
continues, “Many of these stories reminded me of the ancient Greek
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JO. IVriting Bodies in Space (Coppa) 233
legend of Damon and Pythias, with Kirk and Spock subsiituted” (23). This
allusion is interesting, because practically speaking, the legendary characters
aren’t so much “characters” as a set of actions, a behavioral script;
to offer to exchange places with a comrade who is facing death is to
be Damon and Pythias, and so this sort of fan fiction “casts” Kirk and Spock
as the legendary friends in a performance of the myth. From this viewpoint,
Kirk and Spock aren’t characters firmly enmeshed in a narrative, but
performers whose twice-behaved behaviors might (like Schechner’s behavioral
strips) be rearranged or otherwise reconstructed. The result of
this reconstruction wouldn’t be “original” behavior, however, because
according to Schechner, there’s no such thing. Rather, Kirk and Spock
are well cast to perform Damon and Pythias. One set of twice-behaved
behaviors is exchanged for another. This emphasis on character, behavior,
and relationships is often framed as a female value; it’s certainly a theatrical
one.
We can see these theatrical and performative values in the very earliest
creative contributions to Stnr Trek zines. The first Star Trek fanzine,
Spocknnalia (1967, edited by Devra Langsam and Sherna Comerford),
included the creative artwork “The Territory of Rigel,” by Dorothy Jones
(Figure 10.2). In Bo/dly’Writing, Verba describes this as a “poem,” but it is,
in fact, a song with an explicit stage direction that tells us it’s a ni Mr to be
performed by two voices and a Vulcan harp, no doubt influenced by the
scene in the Star Trek episode “Charlie X” where Uhura sings while accompanied
by Spock. Perhaps some readers actually sang the song with their
friends, or perhaps the reader was merely supposed to direct the performance
of the song in her head – but the key thing is that the reader of this
song can do these things because she has an image of Leonard Nimoy as
Spock with a Vulcan harp accompanying a singer. The performance of this
song has already been cast; we know the behaviors of both singers and
harpist. To read this song is therefore to supplement the written words with
the mental image of the appropriate bodies. This “text” is overtly performative
and relational; two voices, ni var, two people singing; as the songwriter
explains, 11i Mr means “two form,” comparing and contrasting two
aspects of the same thing (Verba 1996, II). This ni var features two people
singing, a third if the Vulcan harpist isn’t one of the singers, and a fourth
if you, the reader/director, isn’t part of the performance. It’s not a poem,
it’s a party; it’s an artwork that implies a community.
Opposite Fig. IO.I. Brunching Shuttlecock’s “Geek llierachy.” Availahl~ at http.://
www.hrunching.com/geekhicrarchy.html (accessed June I, 2006). Used wrth pcnms- sion.
The Territory of Rigel
(A ; 11 var to be performed by two voices and Vulcan harp)
Second Voice First Voice
Dark and silent
Rigel in the scanner, . is the field of space. blue-white and crystalline,
shining. Light
horn in the corona The bridge is empty. pours into space. The time, three hundred .
The instruments whisper, The instruments tell little. the panel lights flicker. The computer absorbs in silence The stars are still and dear. trivial patterns meaning
nothing .
Their song is deliberate,
long years to a cadence .
Dust in their paths Three -twenty. moves in their wake like water.
The night is very long.
and Rigel shines . In the dark gulf is the ship.
in the sleeping ship is the bridge The stars like ancient trees. on the bridge am I, heavy with planets, blazing with life. silence upon silence ,
as quiet as memory,
and JJrk JS deJth.
I wander the bright roads I am far whom no planet claims: from my beginning and my end . live in the open Galaxy
Four hundred and the watch is changed. I have clarity before me, I leave the bridge and go and Rigel full of light. from darkness into darkness.
F “The Territory of Rigel “by Dorothy tones, from Spocka11alia I© 1967, 10 2
by. s·herm, Comerford and D~vra Michele Langsam. Available in Verba ( 1996,
2). Used with permission.
~~1~;;
234 PART JV-MEDIUM AND MESSAGE
Similarly, some fan fiction has been written in script or teleplay fo~m,
often by fans who aspired to write for the produced show_ (and ~h.ere 1s a
perception among fans that a greater proportion of these scnpt-wn~111g. fans
have been men [ Cynthia Walker and Laura Hale, personal communicatt0ns,
June 8, 2005 j ). An actual theatrical play base_d on St11T Trek was put ~n at
the Denham Springs Community Theatre .111 1971; _the fact \~~s widely
reported in zines, as was Gene Roddenberry s approvmg letter: I have no
JO. Writi11g Bodies i11 Spt1ce (Coppa) 235
objection to plays similar to Stnr Trek or even identical to Stnr Trek if done
by students or community groups on a non profit basis as long as the appropriate
credit is given to the source material and individuals . Or as long as
a production remains a community theatre venture” {Verba 1996, 6). Roddenberry’s
coda insists on the play’s nonprofit status; then as now, to write
in script form would be a sign of a writer’s aspiring professionalism.
Although some fan teleplays were probably written as spec scripts for the
industry, others ended up published in zines, and when online fan fiction
archives became popular in the mid-1990s, the fiction was categorized not
only as “gen,” “het,” or “slash,” but by such categories as “romance,”
“drama,” “humor,” “poetry,” “filk,” or “teleplay.” But the script form has
always been unpopular among readers, so a fan whose primary audience
was other fans rather than the television industry was more likely to tell her
dramatic story in prose. Arguably, the teleplay form declined as media fandom
broke away from science fiction fandom, becoming more defiantly
amateur as television writing grew more professionalized, but the current
fracturing of the television market due to competition from cable, satellite,
DVD, video games, and the Internet seems to be reversing this trend once
again. Newer shows (and older shows that have had time to evaluate the
creative and economic value of their fan base) increasingly invite the creative
participation of fans, and many seem to want to blur the lines between
amateur and professional, fan and specialist. As an example, the Web site
for the television series The Dend Zone, a show helmed by longtime Stnr
Trek writer and producer Michael Piller, offers to fans not only free copies
of the aired scripts, but a writer’s guide for the show and explicit instructions
on how to send in your teleplay for professional consideration. In this
climate, fans may become professional movie or teleplay writers while still
maintaining their identities as fans and while writing fan fiction.
The existence of the teleplay and other performative forms helps to
demonstrate fan fiction’s roots as an essentially dramatic literature, but the
larger part of my argument is that fan fiction directs bodies in space even
when it’s not overtly written in theatrical form . Readers come to fan fiction
with extratextual knowledge, mostly of characters’ bodies and voices. Jane
Mailander (2005) argues that fan fiction is an ideal medium for erotica
because “the audience knows the characters; they’ve walked that mile in
their shoes, they are primed . The dynamic between these two people is clear
to the audience.” A fan fiction writer has “the challenge of expressing that
dynamic, of taking it to a place that would make the producers blush – but
a place that must follow logically from that baseline development.” Mailander
is talking about character, but she might as well be talking about bodies;
we know who these characters are because we know the actors who play
236 PART IV-MEDIUM AND MESSAGE
them, and we bring our memories of their physicality to the text, so the
reader is precharged, preeroticized. But the actor’~ body, _as much as. the
words on the page, is the medium of even nonerot1c fanntsh storytellmg.
Jn making her point that we come to fan fiction “primed,” Mailander also
identifies something we might correlate with Schechner’s twice-behaved
behavior. We’re primed because we’ve met these characters already, and now
we’re seeing them again. In theatre, we call that a production, and it isn’t a
problem.
Repetition and the Derridean Supplement
From a literary perspective, fan fiction’s unusual emphasis on the body
seems like a thematic obsession or a stylistic tic, but in theatre, bodies are
the storytelling medium, the carriers of symbolic action. Similarly, in literary
terms, fan fiction’s repetition is strange; in theatre, stories are ret_old all
the time. Theatre artists think it’s fine to tell to tell the same story agam, but
differently: not only was Shakespeare’s Hnmlet a relatively late version of the
tale (previous versions include the “Amleth” of Saxo Grammaticus, its translation
by Francois de Belleforest, and the Ur-Hamlet attributed to Thomas
Kyd), but we’re happy to see differently inflecte~ versi_ons of the_ t~le. _Moreover,
there’s no assumption that the first production will be definitive; 111 theatre,
we want to see your Hamlet and /iis Hamlet and lrer Hamlet; to embody
the role is to reinvent it. We also want to see new generations of directors
and designers recast the play without regard for authorial intent or historicity,
putting Hamlet into infinite alternative universes: Wl~at if Han:ilet was a
graduate student? What if Hamlet had an ( entirely ah1stoncal)_ Oedipal complex?
What if Hamlet was a street kid in the Bronx? Hamlet has been portrayed
as an action hero/medieval warrior (Mel Gibson, dir. Franco Zeffere_lli,
1990), the avenging son of a Japanese CEO (T/,e Bnd Sleep Well; ~osh1ro
Mifune, dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1960), an angry young man (Peter O Toole,
dir. Laurence Olivier, Old Vic, 1963), and a university student home on break
(Alex Jennings, dir. Matthew Warchus at the RSC, 1997).
In theatre, there’s a value to revising the same text in order to explore
different aspects and play out different behavioral strips; similarly, in television,
we don’t mind tuning in week after week to see the same characters
in entirely different stories. We don’t mind new versions of Hnmlet the way
we don’t mind new episodes of Stnr Trek. We don’t say, “Oh, Stnr Trek
again? We had Star Trek last week!” We don’t mind if Kirk and ~pock visitas
they did on the aired series- a planet based on Roman gladiator culture,
or Native American culture, or America during the Great Depression. Most
10. Writing Bodies i11 Space (Coppa) 237
pe~ple happily watch televised repeats- identical replayings of dramatic
action. How much more interesting would different performances of the
same scripts be if the actors and directors explored the limitations of the
text and tried to _elici~ different readings, different embodied meanings? And
because fan fiction 1s an amateur production accountable to no market
forces, it allows for radical reimaginings: plots, themes, and endings that
would never.be permitted on network television. One could imagine Star
Trek by David Lynch, Star Trek by Stanley Kubrick, Star Trek by Woody
Allen – and what I’m getting at here is that that’s what fan fiction is.
But you don’t even have to attend multiple productions to understand
dou~ling and repetition in theatre. Most productions were scripts first: theat~e
IS an art form where we read something with the goal of making somethmg
else out of it. The script isn’t the final product in theatre; in fact, one
of the questions that theatre theorists have had to debate is the location of
~he wor_k of art. Is it in the author’s original script? Probably not; the origmal
sen~~~ goes t_hrough innumerable changes in performance and is rarely
seen outside of library archives. The published script of a theatrical or teleplay
is usually a postproduction draft that takes into account changes that
w~re ma?e during production by actors, director, and designers; far from
bemg evidence of a single authorial vision, a published play is one of the
most collaborative genres in existence. And most theatre works never result
in a published script at all, so it’s difficult to argue for text as the central
object in a theatrical art experience.
Far from being a sacred text, a play’s script is more like a blueprint for
a production – a thing used to make another thing. Like any architectural
b~uepri~t, a script_ provid~s the directions for building something threed1m~ns1onal
and situated 111 space. But one can’t point to theatrical production
as the center of dramatic art either, because the question then
become_s: “‘.hich production? A script isn’t simply directions for building
somethmg 111 space, but also in time-not just a single production, but a
potentially infinite series of productions. Marvin Carlson (1985) theorizes
the complicated relationship between all the multiple and vastly different
works of art that can be associated with a single dramatic story in terms of
the Derridean supplement, and the supplement also serves as an excellent
model for fan fiction as well ( see Derecho I this volume I, who uses the Derridean
term arc/1011tic to describe this same supplementarity).
The best way to explain a supplement is by pointing to a concrete
example of one; Roger Laport used a French dictionary, but let me substitute
for that the more familiar example of an encyclopedia. When you buy
an encyc~opedia, you buy a complete set, volumes A-Z. But the world keeps
progressmg, and knowledge keeps expanding, and so this “complete” set
238 PART IV-MEDIUM AND MESSAGE
of encyclopedias is outdated the second you buy it; it doesn’t include today’s
news and discoveries. So when you buy an encyclopedia, they generally also
include a yearly supplement- 2005, 2006, and so on – that you can slot into
your bookcase after “Z.” So with that image in mind, consider what the
supplement does: it reveals the original thing, the encyclopedia, in this case,
as incomplete, but also prophesies future supplements. In fact, a supplement
suggests that completeness is actually impossible, as the presence of
a 2005 supplement suggests the need for one in 2006, 2007, 2008, and on
into the future, indefinitely.
We can apply this concept to theatrical performance, and then to fan
fiction as performance. In theatre, a working script becomes a staged performance,
but as Carlson explains, “A play on stage will inevitably display
material lacking in the written text, quite likely not apparent as lacking
until the performance takes place, but then revealed as significant and necessary.
At the same time, the performance, by revealing this lack, reveals
also a potentially infinite series of future performances providing further
supplementation” (1985, IO). Fan fiction works much the same way. Once
a story supplements canon – giving us something the original source did
not by filling in a missing scene, getting inside a character’s head, interpreting
or clarifying or departing from the story as originally told -future
supplements become inevitable, and they aren’t any more redundant than
multiple productions of Hamlet.
A conservative critic might argue that Shakespeare can support that
level of interpretation and invention, whereas your average-or even better
than average – television show simply can’t. We tell certain stories over
and over because they’re brilliant and continue to be relevant. I don’t share
that point of view. I agree with Alan Sinfield when he argues that Shakespeare
seems relevant because he is constantly interfered with (1994, 4-5).
It is Shakespeare’s endlessly creative fans- be they theatre practitioners carrying
the stories on their bodies or literary critics teasing out new textual
interpretations-who keep Shakespeare going. An endless number of
Shakespearean productions supplement the texts, adding meanings that
Shakespeare never intended and making them meaningful to twenty-firstcentury
audiences. There’s no reason not to see this as a perfectly valid
artistic activity; and if it is so for theatre, why is it not for television?
Before a Live Audience
The third theatrical quality I want to discuss in terms of fan fiction is the
need for a live audience. A live audience has always been a precondition for
JO. \Vriti11g Bodies i11 Space (Coppa) 239
fandom. Longtime fanzine editor and archivist Arnie Katz (n.d.) explains
t~1at science fiction magazines- particularly their letter pages-were essential
to the genesis of science fiction fandom. As Katz notes, “Science fiction
and fantasy were widely available for many years before fandom erupted ….
Those who wanted to be more than readers couldn’t do much while books
remained the main delivery vehicle for science fiction. It’s hard to interact
with a book, other than to write a letter to the author in care of the publisher.”
Science fiction fans have a saying: “fandom is a way of life” -which
is to say, science fiction literature fandom is more than a celebration of
texts; it’s a series of practices. This may be why most academic works on
fandom are ethnographies, or analyses of social organizations and cultural
performances. As Katz points out, fandom is essentially interactive in a way
beyond the traditional reader-writer relationship.
Fan fiction, too, is a cultural performance that requires a live audience;
fan fiction is not merely a text, it’s an event. Whether published in a zine,
on a mailing list, to an archive, or to a blog like LiveJournal.com, there’s a
kind of simultaneity to the reception of fan fiction, a story everyone is reading,
more or less at the same time, more or less together. Over the years,
technology has allowed television viewers to reconstitute themselves as an
audience; now, you can watch television while you post to the boards at
TelevisionWithoutPity.com, or sit in an !RC channel, or send updates to
your mailing list; you don’t have to wait for the next issue of a zine to be
mailed. Similarly, fandom gathers together a live, communal audience for
stories, and fans have adopted and adapted every mode of communication
in an effort to ensure that fan fiction quickly reaches its target audience.
Compare this to John Ruskin’s definition of a “true” book:
A book is essentially not a talked thing, but a written thing; and written,
not with the view of mere communication, but of permanence. The book
of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people
at once; if he could, he would- the volume is mere multiplication of
his voice …. But a book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to
carry it merely, but to perpetuate it [1985, 259-60].
Most books- including most mass market fiction – are not “true books”
by this standard. Most books merely convey the storytelling voice to an
audience that cannot be gathered together to listen simultaneously, as they
do in theatre. A book’s audience is generally dispersed over both space and
time; people in different places read a book at different times, and reading
is- at least in the last hundred or so years- a pretty solitary activity. This
didn’t used to be so; the line between reading and theatre was thinner in
the days when a family patriarch might read aloud to his family after dinner,
or a group of middle-class women might stage a tableau based on a
240 PART JV-MEDIUM AND MESSAGE
favorite text. Ironically, the rise of literacy and the greater availability of
printed matter are largely responsible for fracturing the communal reading
audience and encouraging the solitary consumption of stories. Consider
Isaac Asimov’s prophetic description of”the perfect entertainment cassette”:
A cassette as ordinarily viewed makes sound and casts light. That is its purpose,
of course, but must sound and light obtrude on others who are not
involved or interested? The ideal cassette would be visible and audible only
to the person using it.. .. We could imagine a cassette that is always in perfect
adjustment; that starts automatically when you look at it; that stops automatically
when you cease to look at it; that can play forward or backward,
quickly or slowly, by skips or with repetitions, entirely at ypur pleasure ….
Must this remain only a dream? Can we expect to have such a cassette some
day? We not only have it now, we have had it for many centuries. The ideal I
have described is the printed word, the book, the object you now hold …. Does
it seem to you that the book, unlike the cassette I have been describing, does
not produce sound and images? It certainly does …. You cannot read without
hearing the words in your mind and seeing the images to which they give rise.
In fact, they are your sounds and images, not those invented for you by others,
and are therefore better [quoted in Ellison 1984, 51-52].
Asimov, writing years before VHS, let alone DVD, frames the book as an
improvement over other forms of dramatic storytelling (“sounds and
images”) precisely because it’s more individualized (“visible and audible
only to the person using it”). Asimov’s prophetic description illustrates how
the book, taken as a technology, anticipates the virtual reality so feared by
those who worry about the effects of video games and the Internet on children;
it’s interesting that those same parents are often keen to encourage
immersive reading of the kind Asimov is valorizing. But immersive reading
is generally not the kind encouraged by literature departments, which teaches
students to attend to language. To read critically is to see a text not as “sounds
and images” but as specific words placed on a page in a particular order; to
closely read a text is to make meaning out of those particular words and no
others. To look at, rather than through, the specifically defined words on the
page is to see a story as a written rather than a “talked” thing.
Fan fiction is Ruskin’s “talked” thing, or Asimov’s “perfect entertainment
cassette.” Fan fiction writers generally use a relatively transparent
style of prose conducive to an immersive reading experience. There are
marvelous exceptions: many fan fiction writers are great prose stylists or
even poets. But historically the fan fiction writer has tried not to get in the
way of the reader’s view of the characters, and in this, fan fiction writers
are part of a more general literary trend. In an article in the Washington
Post, Linton Weeks (2001) complains about the “No-Style style” of many
best-selling authors and quotes book reviewer Pat Holt as noticing that “the
10. Writi11g Bodies in Space (Coppa) 241
style of commercial fiction has shifted over to a television mentality,” with
“short paragraphs, a lot of switching of locations and lots of dialogue,” without
ever questioning to what extent this might make it not simply “inferior”
prose but prose put to a different and nonliterary purpose. In her introduction
to the forthcoming Reco11structi11g Harry: “Harry Potter” Fa11 Fictio11 011
the World Wide Wei,, Jane Glaubman observes J. K. Rowling’s “transparent”
prose style without judgment, concluding that “the impression of transparency
must stem in part from continuities with visual culture” and these
continuities “call on devices ubiquitous in commercial media that themselves
aspire to transparency.” Certainly, Rowling’s visual style may explain
why the Harry Potter books were adopted by media fandom; they share fan
fiction’s theatrical values. For instance, Glaubman notes the unusual extent
to which Har~y was embodied in Rowling’s text: “An awareness of the body
is everywhere in these books …. Rowling expresses I Harry’s! feelings somatically,
‘his heart twanging like a giant elastic band,’ ‘as though he’d just been
walloped in the stomach.’ … By giving us immediate access to his sensations,
she contributes … to the effect of transparency.”
Harry Potter comes to us as the embodied protagonist of a series of
stories that retell Harry’s adventures during a series of school years. By the
time of the fourth installment, Harry Potter a11d the Goblet of Fire, the simultaneous,
worldwide release of the book was the occasion for something very
like a public festival, with people coming out at midnight, sometimes in
costume, not simply to purchase the book but also to formally constitute
themselves as an audience. The ongoing series of novels was then made into
an ongoing series of films. In all of these ways, the Harry Potter books resist
the status of “finished literary text” made up of particular words in a particular
order, and instead construct themselves as the open-ended inspiration
for future performative supplements that will allow its audience to
reconstitute itself on a regular basis. Harry Potter has already resulted
numerous translations, four sequels, three films, and, as of June 13, 2005,
at least 190,994 fan fiction stories- so far.
Why stop there? Ca11 it be stopped there? This is no longer a phenomenon
within a single author’s control; “Harry Potter” is now an entire creative
universe within which millions of people are writing, reading,
drawing, reporting, discussing, analyzing, criticizing, celebrating, marketing,
filming, translating, teaching, theorizing, playacting. Although Rowling
may be responsible for putting together a initial series of words in a
particular order, only in the legal sense is she the “author” of all of these
other creative productions. Or, to put it another way, she’s the author in
the sense of taking responsibility for these productions, but she’s not the
writer of those specific other expressions of the idea of a boy wizard at
242 PART IV-MEDIUM AND MESSAGE
school. There are other creative players involved, some paid (the artists
who illustrated the text; the scholars who are writing the critical studies of
the series) and some unpaid (the fans who participate in heated analytical
discussions on Harry Potter Web sites or mailing lists, fan fiction writers).
Similarly, a film like Star Wars or a television show like Buffy tlze Vampire
Slayer have become rich art worlds quite apart from the authorial or auteurial
efforts of George Lucas or Joss Whedon. ·
One last word about the complex relationship between the author, these
other creative writers, and the audience: in traditional literary studies, the
author is dead, and has been for some time. The phrase alludes to Roland
Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author” and to Barthes’s argument that
“as soon as a fact is narrated … the voice loses its origin, the author enters
into his own death, writing begins” (1977, 142). From this perspective, language
always means more than an author intends, and we cannot evaluate
writing as an expression of a “person’s” ideas or thoughts. Rather, we should
look at writing as a separately existing linguistic performance that does/says
more than any one person ever could. Barthes concludes by saying that what
meaning there is to a text is made by the reader, and “the birth of the reader
must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (148).
But not the writer. In fandom, the author may be dead, but the writerthat
actively scribbling, embodied woman – is very much alive. 5 You can
talk to her; you can write to her and ask her questions about her work, and
she will probably write back to you and answer them. She might enjoy discussing
larger plot, style, and characterization points with you if you engage
her in critical conversation. You can tell her that her story is bad and hurt
her feelings, or you can flame her as someone who shouldn’t be writing at
all. Moreover, the writer may well have worked with a team of editors or
beta readers; the fiction might well be not only derivative of an author, but
written collaboratively by a group, or crafted as a birthday present for a
fellow fan – in short, the writer is part of an interactive community, and
in this way, the production of fan fiction is closer to the collaborative making
of a theatre piece then to the fabled solitary act of writing.
I believe that fandom is community theatre in a mass media world;
fandom is what happened to the culture of amateur dramatics. In the days
before television, people often made theatre in their homes, for fun, and in
fandom, we still make theatre together, for fun, except we cast the play from
our televisions sets. Theatre – actual, three-dimensional theatre that moves
bodies in space- is expensive and requires tremendous social capital; you’ve
got to have the power to make those bodies move under your direction and
at your command. We discover women’s poetry in attic trunks and women’s
novels written under male pseudonyms, but we still find that women are
10. Writi11g Bodies ;11 Space (Coppa) 243
underrepresented in the rol th h
(male) bodie . c es at ~re estrate and dictate the actions of s 111 periormance Cons1d th · of women playwrights com . . er e ongomg underrepresentation
traditional theatre take~ a sc;;o;ersd direto~s, and sy~1pho~y conductors. If
tially infinite number of p pd an. ma es it three-d1mens1onal in a poten-
~hree-cHmensional and thei;;r~~::~;t~~~ndf~~~ef:ndom takes s?methi~g
is not authoring texts but mak1’n d . u~ber of scripts. Tl11S ‘ g pro uct1ons- relymg th d’ , shared extratextual knowledg f d on e au 1ence s
and their smiles and e o sets a~ wardrobes, of the actors’ bodies
movements- to direct a living theatre in the mind.
Notes
I. Media fandom, although probably best the k
of the popularity of the ma~s me<l,·a .t . L . d no~vn and most studied as a result . . 1 1s 1ase around is n t th I k’ d C _omics, a111me, and gaming each have well-
est l. , . o e on_y ·1~ of fandom.
nes. However, the Internet has eoc) d . al lished fandoms with different histo- 1 . 1 urage aossover am 0 ., the. – · r possibly as a result of the I I I 011 o se
groups . U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) ·111otl1er tele ‘. ~u le w_hamlmy of Stnr Trek and The Ma11 from . ‘ ‘ v1swn senes t 1at wa. t I • fi ct1on fJns; see Walker (2001) and
my ow “A . . . 5 rnge Y pop~ 1 ar with science 13 volume). n ne 1 History of Mecha Fandoni” (this
. 3: When possible, I have chosen to cite the I’ .. lustnnans rather than the published scholar! o~ rne wnr_k o_f fan-critics and fanfan,
I am wary of “d’istance p . . Y works of proless1onal academics As a l I ro 1ess1ona 1 ex f u •
media fan is one of defiant amateurism I trer IS~ •. even Ill~ own; the position of the
always done an excellent J’ob of ex•· I … n _iatlsfpm~, I tl!erelore note that fandom has . ,, a111111g 1tse to Hselt <l · · t I 1eoret1cal literature its mun roster
f c . I I I ‘ pro uc111g its own canon of . ‘ • o ,ann1s 1 sc 10 ars d · · . for reviewing, anJlyzing and recon d. c fi . ‘an Its own critical apparatus , imen mg ,an
ct1on
4. Although the sociJI vJlue of live theatre h I . . . of mass media dramatic forn1s botl1 I . b as. llst_oncally been greater than that · ‘ 1ave een marg111ahzed J ‘t
I
otten grouped together as “high art” a ainst fit . : _:’ eratur~ an, theatre are
tual values are often opposed to pe , g . m and television, hut 111 practice, tex- r,ormat1ve ones Drama h· . h . to the working classes, women, children, and illi . .
. . . as e_en seen as appeal111g
no way to record and distribute it I ti . terates, also, u_nt1I recently, there was
Karel Capek’s RUR (1920) h” h .’ n die specific context of science fiction, plays like , Iv 1c intro uced the wo d I · I , are often left out of the sf canon eve ti I
h r re> 10t 11110 tie worlds languages, fiction. ‘ 11 1 1 JOug ey antedate the rise of prose magazine
5. I am indebted to my conversations with Georgina Paterson for these insights.
References
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,or :
Card, Orson S~ott. 2005. Strange new world: No Star Trek LA T’ M· 3
Carlson M· 1985 Tl . · 1111es, ay .
suppl~m:~~-‘~l,eatr; Jo:~:,:~t;~;s:t~rmance: Illustration, translation, fulfillment, or
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Ellison, Harlan . 1984. Sleepless nigl,ts in rl,c procmstenn bed: Essays /1y Harlan Ellison.
Ed. Marty Clark . San Bernardino, CA : Borgo Press.
Garber, Majorie. 2001. Arndemic instincts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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fstuff/theory/phill.html (accessed June I, 2006).
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centur)’. London : Verso.
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11. “This Dratted Thing”
Fannish Storytelling
Through New Media
Louisa Ellen Stein
ABSTRACT.- I link together three avenues of thought relating to on line
fon texts: (I) new media theory’s focus on technology, specifically understandings
of interface- that is, the point of interaction between a user
and a computer at the level of the software with which we engage with
new media; (2) genre theory’s conception of genre discourse as shared,
shifting, cultural category; and (3) fan studies’ focus on fans as users
and authors of media texts, who engage with and build on already existing
media texts in various ways. I propose that, through the merging of
these three avenues of inquiry, we can find a new, more tangible, way to
understand fan engagement with new media and popular media texts.
From the interplay among fan culture, genre discourse, and new media
interfaces, fan-created fiction and art are born. The histories and traditions
of fan fiction intersect with broader cultural (generic) discourses
as fandom moves on line. In turn, as fans use the tools of new media to
write and share fannish narratives, new forms of fan creative expression
come into being . I look at how this trifold process is exemplified in two
fannish uses of interface to create new modes of storytelling: diarybased
fan fictions that use interactive blogging sites such as
LiveJournal.com to create daily diaries kept by fictional characters; and
fictional narratives created by fans out of images from Tire Sims, a computer
game where players create characters and control various aspects
of their lives.
245