A Product of Poaching

If you were to type in the title of a television show, novel, comic book, or movie into the Google search box, chances are that somewhere in the results, you would see a link for a “fan fiction archive”. And furthermore, if you were to type in just the term “fan fiction” into Google, the results would be incredible—millions of websites, all devoted to this phenomena. On these websites, devoted fans write their own stories using the characters and settings from their favorite shows, movies, and books—think of it as writing an episode of your favorite television show or adding your own chapter to your favorite book. And these stories are posted for any interested person to read. Though fan fiction has been around for quite some time, it has exploded right along with the Internet boom, garnering a lot of attention due to the fact that now anyone can publish their own writings to these fan fiction archives, creating their own “original stories”. Only the stories are not completely original—perhaps the storylines are, but everything else is taken from the source, from the actual original mediated text.

I think that fan fiction ties in perfectly with the concept of textual poaching, which is described in Sturken and Cartwright as “inhabiting a text ‘like a rented apartment’”. Fan fiction authors do not actually have the rights to these shows and books and characters, but they interpret them and seem to make them their own by creating their own original stories. They are “creating new cultural products” (76) by writing out their own desires and hopes for the original media text and its characters. In other words, they are taking what they think the show is lacking or what they wish to see happen, and they are creating those scenarios themselves. I think this also ties nicely into cultural appropriation because fan fiction authors are temporarily using already existing characters and settings and encoding them with different meanings than those originally intended in the actual media text.

I also thought that, in a way, these fan fiction authors are practicing negotiated and oppositional readings of the texts on which they base their fan fiction. Fan fiction can be seen as an expression of negotiated reading because writers may be simply building upon actual storylines that already exist in the real show or book. In this way, they are accepting it, but extending or tweaking it to fit their desires. I think it can also be seen as an example of oppositional reading because fan fiction authors are often “disagreeing with the ideological position” (Sturken and Cartwright 73) in the original text. They do this by taking characters completely out of context and putting them in another, or ignoring existing storylines altogether to make their own stories, thus manipulating the characters and situations so that the new story fulfills whatever the author wished to have seen on the real show or read in the actual book.

Here is a link to an article about the surge of fan fiction, and a link to one of the archives that it describes.

http://reason.com/archives/2007/01/30/the-fan-fiction-phenomena

http://www.fanfiction.net/