How do fandoms use fanfiction writing to expand on a piece of media.
Many fandoms will use fanfiction to expand upon the world and story of the original story, occasionally changing or swapping things around to make them fit or work better together. Some fandoms will essentially ‘cast out’ the original author of the community, an example of this would be the Harry potter fandom when they ‘cast out’ JK Rowling for being transphobic and many other reasons. Sticking with Harry Potter as an example the community can and will break down and redo the worldbuilding ultimately improving and generally just fixing and problems and occasionally plot holes. Many authors enjoy expanding the original story to practise creative writing or because they love the characters and story, or they think they get make the story just that much better.
Fanfiction is defined as “stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet” (Merriam-Webster, 2022). Most fans feel the point of Fanfiction “The main impulse behind fanfiction has always been a playful desire to engage with original works.” (Pande, 2022). Fanfiction exists because people enjoy expanding and improving the already existing world the original author created, many also enjoy writing (or reading) fanfiction to learn more about or expand upon a character and just practise their own writing. Fan works often influence others in the community to create their own works whether it’s another fanfiction, artwork or life-like models of the buildings or characters or a cosplay of their favourite character.
Some writers will do something called ‘character bashing’, this is when a character’s personality either changes slightly or completely to make them worse, this usually means they are not a good person or betray the main character for whatever reason. “Fanfiction can be a safe space to explore how your favourite characters would fare in an alternate universe, or perhaps add in scenes that you believe would be important to their canon lives.” (Fagan, 2020)
Fandoms enjoy making AUs (Alternative Universe) of the original works and there are always many options to choose from. One example of an AU would be a character not existing. A simple My Hero Academia (MHA) AU would be if Izuku was born with a quirk. A Danny Phantom AU example would be if Danny didn’t tell anyone that he is a halfa (half ghost) or if his friends (Sam and Tucker) went into the ghost portal with him and also became halfas.
Archive of Our Own, (Ao3) is “A fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, non-commercial archive for transformative fan works, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic” (AO3 community). AO3 is a well-known website which many people use to post and read fan works as its tagging system is state of the art as there isn’t another one like it. Most people prefer this site because it is very easy to find the kind of writing they want whether its ‘fluff’ or ‘angst’.
“Dead dove: do not eat” is a tag most often found on archive of our own (AO3), this tag is a reference to a scene in arrested development where a character opens their fridge and finds a bag labelled ‘dead dove: do not eat’, when the character opens the bag, he is disgusted and claims “I don’t know what I expected”. This is used as a tag to warn people of dark and/or disturbing content most readers/watchers would not like or be comfortable with, it essentially means ‘if you look at this work and don’t like or feel uncomfortable with the content despite seeing the dead dove do not eat tag you did this to yourself’.
Many fandoms such as, Harry Potter, Danny Phantom, My Hero Academia (MHA) and Teen Wolf use time travel to explore how different characters would act and what they would do if they were sent to the past or future of their own world. For example, writers usually send Harry Potter characters into the past, whether it’s the main character or someone else, try to end the war early or stop it before it even starts and generally just make the future better.
Case studies
How character design expands a world.
Research sources.
My art
Written sources
Others art
Fagan, E. (26 September 2020). The Importance of Fanfiction. The Nerd Daily. https://thenerddaily.com/the-importance-of-fanfiction/
Merriam-Webster (2022) Fan fiction definition & meaning, Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster. Available at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fan%20fiction (Accessed: January 5, 2023).