Theorizing Fanfiction: The Importance of Remixed Social Genres Composed on the Internet

Erick Valverde

Bibliography:  Magnifico, A. M., & Jones, K. (2025). Theorizing Fanfiction: The Importance of Remixed Social Genres Composed on the Internet. Computers and Composition, 75, 102916. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S8755461525000039

Transcript

00:00If you've ever gone down an internet rabbit hole, you've probably seen it.

00:03A place where your favorite characters are living entirely new lives.

00:07It's this huge, sprawling, and honestly, unbelievably creative world.

00:12Welcome to the world of online fan communities.

00:15And right at the heart of this universe is fan fiction.

00:18Yeah, we're talking about millions upon millions of stories,

00:21all created in this massive, collaborative literary movement

00:25that exists completely outside of the normal publishing world.

00:28It's a gift culture, you know?

00:30The only payment is passion and creativity.

00:33But here's the thing.

00:34It is so much more than just a hobby.

00:36It's this really complex cultural phenomenon.

00:39A space that's pushing back on our old ideas about who gets to be an author,

00:43what it means to be a reader, and what a story can even be.

00:46So that leads us right to the big question of this whole explainer,

00:50which is based on an amazing academic paper called

00:52Theorizing Fan Fiction by Magnifico and Jones.

00:55What can this world of fan-written stories actually teach us

00:59about how we create and connect with each other in this digital age?

01:03To really get what's happening now, we've got to look back.

01:06Because fan fiction is definitely not some new internet fad.

01:10Nope.

01:11It has a long, and often kind of secret, history.

01:15I mean, just look at this timeline.

01:17People have been remixing stories for centuries.

01:20You could even argue that Dante's Inferno was basically fan fiction

01:23for his favorite poet, Virgil.

01:24We saw it with Sherlock Holmes fans,

01:26and then in the 60s, Star Trek fans were creating these things called zines,

01:30homemade magazines they'd literally trade through the mail.

01:33Fans have always been the first to jump on new tech,

01:35all in the name of sharing their stories.

01:37And it all leads up to Archive of Our Own,

01:39a library built by fans for fans, winning a Hugo Award.

01:43That's like the Oscars for science fiction.

01:45And what's so critical about this history is

01:47who was doing all this writing?

01:50For decades, this space was shaped and led by women and queer authors.

01:54They were often dismissed, even faced legal threats,

01:57but they used fan fiction to re-story the pop culture they loved.

02:01They were literally rewriting these huge narratives to write themselves in,

02:06to see their own experiences in worlds where they were totally invisible.

02:10So how does this whole universe even work?

02:13Well, these fan communities have built up their own incredible language,

02:16their own structure for organizing millions of stories.

02:19It is truly the art of the remix.

02:22Okay, first thing you've got to know is The Ship.

02:25It's short for Relationship.

02:27And it's all about pairing up two characters romantically.

02:30The Ship is the engine that drives so much of this creativity.

02:34It can be a straight pairing, which fans call het,

02:37or an LGBTQIA plus pairing, which is known as slash.

02:41Then you have my personal favorite, the Alternate Universe, or AU.

02:45This is where writers take characters we love and just drop them into a completely new world.

02:52Think coffee shop AU or high school AU.

02:54A really cool one from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fandom is the Swanatello AU,

02:59where Donatello is reimagined in a story inspired by the ballet Swan Lake.

03:04I mean, the possibilities are absolutely endless.

03:06Now, let's talk about a super popular genre, hurt slash comfort.

03:12It is exactly what it sounds like.

03:14One character gets hurt, physically or emotionally, and another character takes care of them.

03:18It's a really powerful way to explore deep emotional connections,

03:22and you'll find it in pretty much every fandom out there.

03:24And on the total opposite end of that spectrum, we have fluff.

03:30These are stories with zero drama, zero angst.

03:33It's all about pure happiness.

03:35Just cute, cozy, romantic moments.

03:38And when it gets really, really sweet, fans have the perfect name for it.

03:42Tooth Rotting Fluff.

03:44Okay, so these tags and tropes, they aren't just quirky little labels.

03:48According to Magnifico and Jones,

03:49they actually show us a whole new way of thinking about writing.

03:52Fan fiction is like a living, breathing laboratory for how stories get made in the 21st century.

03:59So, the paper uses three big academic ideas to show us why this all matters.

04:04First, there's rhetorical genre studies.

04:06That just means that genres like fluff aren't just categories.

04:09They're social actions people take together.

04:12Then there's reader response theory,

04:14which says a story's meaning isn't just on the page.

04:16It's created when you, the reader, bring your own experiences to it.

04:20And finally, TransLiteracies helps us see how one little idea can spark on Tumblr,

04:25become a story on AO3, and then explode across the whole internet.

04:29And this is how it happens.

04:31It's like a wave.

04:32It starts with a spark, an idea that emerges in a conversation on a site like Tumblr.

04:36Then, a writer has an uptake moment.

04:39They grab that idea and write a story.

04:40If the community loves it, you get resonance, comments, fan art, memes, you name it.

04:46And finally, if it gets big enough, it achieves scale,

04:49spreading so far that it might even bubble up into the mainstream.

04:53But this whole creative playground exists in a constant state of tension with the traditional media world.

04:59It really sets up this fundamental clash, a gift culture going head-to-head with copyright law.

05:05And when you put them side-by-side like this, the difference is just stark.

05:10Fandom values sharing and transformation.

05:13The publishing industry values profit and ownership.

05:16Fandom thrives on collaboration and open discussion.

05:18The industry's all about control.

05:20They're basically playing two completely different games with totally different rules.

05:24The scholar Anne Jameson puts it perfectly.

05:27She says fandom can't be about money because, at its core, it's about a free exchange of ideas.

05:34It's a community-first philosophy, which is always going to be at odds with a market-first one.

05:39And this isn't just some abstract debate.

05:42This conflict got very real in the early 2000s.

05:45Media companies started sending cease and desist letters to Harry Potter fan sites,

05:49trying to shut down what they considered copyright infringement.

05:52It was a huge deal.

05:55But here's the wild part.

05:56Despite all that tension, the influence of fanfiction has only gotten bigger.

06:01It's not some hidden subculture anymore.

06:04It is actively shaping the future of storytelling,

06:06which means the next big thing probably won't come out of a boardroom.

06:10It'll come from a fan forum.

06:12Okay, let's talk about the most famous example of all time.

06:15It started with a writer in the Twilight fandom who wrote an alternate universe story,

06:19reimagining the main characters as adults in a, well, a very different kind of relationship.

06:25Well, that fanfic had its direct ties to Twilight removed, a process fans call filing off the serial numbers,

06:32and it got published as Fifty Shades of Grey.

06:35And yeah, it became a multi-million dollar global franchise.

06:38This was the moment everyone realized that fan-created ideas didn't just have an audience.

06:43They had massive, world-changing commercial potential.

06:47But its influence goes so much deeper than just one bestseller.

06:50Think about it.

06:51For decades, Slash Fan Friction was one of the only places you could find complex,

06:55well-developed stories about queer relationships.

06:58Fans were doing the work.

06:59And now, those very same dynamics, those same narrative beats that were perfected in fandom for years,

07:06are being celebrated in huge mainstream shows.

07:09The central relationship in Netflix's She-Ra is a perfect example of a fan-favorite enemies-to-lovers dynamic becoming canon.

07:16It proves that fans aren't just consuming culture anymore.

07:19They are teaching studios what we all actually want to see.

07:22Which leaves us with one last big idea to think about.

07:26fan-fiction is showing us that the old, clear line between the person who makes a story and the person who enjoys it,

07:34well, that line is getting blurrier every single day.

07:37So in this new age of remixing, sharing, and re-storying,

07:41what does it even mean to be an author anymore?

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