RPS is an Internet variant of a folkloric form mankind has practiced since the beginning of time — gossiping or spreading rumors. The real people on whom RPS is based don’t protest too much. It’s never been clever to cut off the branch on which you’re sitting, and gossip, of whatever nature, is the most effective form of publicity. Also interesting to note is that slash fiction has attracted a lot of attention from academics who are interested in feminist, gay, and queer studies.
The most entertaining part of the fanfic phenomenon is the new coinages, which supports the theory that fans are more interested in communication and interaction with other fans than the actual subject matter. Fanon is a story or situation that deviates from the canon. Fluff is prose to warm the heart, while Kleenex warning is an early signal that things are soon going to get sad. Gen (general fiction) denotes the absence of sexual content, although this doesn’t exclude the protagonists getting together or pairing. A hot bunny is a story idea, and a round robin a story with which the author seeks help from other fans. WAFF stands for warm and fluffing feelings (a feel-good story), Het denotes a heterosexual relationship, and AU (alternative universe) stories modify a particular aspect of the canon. Denial fic is a good example of AU. Ficers intervene in the canon to either prevent a tragedy, or simply “put things right” afterwards.
A crossover work appeals to two or more fandoms, usually those that belong to the same literary “class.” PWP stands for porn without plot. In bodyswap and genderswap protagonists temporarily enter someone else’s body or change gender. Darkfic deals with death, torture, and molestation. A Mary Sue is a female character that’s eager to please in every respect, the male equivalent a Gary Stu. For ficers, James Bond is a Gary Stu.
Fans have developed their “activity” with the help of the powerful and multi-faceted mass media industry. Fan fiction sites house archives with millions of “interventions.” Whether short stories or novels, the texts are hard to follow for fandom outsiders. I had a go at a hundred or so pages of WhiteMidnightKitsune’s “adaption” of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and although it’s a book I adore, I couldn’t make head or tail of the adaption. The publishing industry has swung into action in attempts to satisfy the enormous interventionist appetites of the potential reading masses, and the latest fashion — the production of “quirk books”—is in full bloom. The publisher Quirk Classics features novels such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Little Vampire Women, Jane Slayre, and Android Karenina, the authors of which use “mash-up” techniques, inserting elements of popular culture (zombies, vampires, parallel worlds, science fiction, etc.) into classic canonical works. The spawn of such “mash-ups” also include Vampire Darcy’s Desire, Mansfield Park and Mummies, Emma and the Werewolves, Alice in Zombieland, and Romeo and Juliet and Zombies. Their authors call them “adaptions,” although the term is rather meaningless, as Internet forums confirm that readers haven’t read the original — in the best-case scenario they’ve seen the film. Such a bizarre literary “mash-up” ensures it’s own autonomy, and its readers treat it as an autonomous work: they haven’t read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, they haven’t seen the film adaption, and the world of androids — which they know inside out — is, to their delight, given a new lease of life by the inclusion of “bizarre” details such as the names Karenina and Vronsky, not to mention “exotic” geographical and historical settings.[1]
Fearing its own disappearance, “high literature” has today hooked its oxygen mask to the face of “trivial literature” and its derivatives (fan fiction being one of them), in the hope it might provide the breath of life. However much people have tried to explain the poetics of today’s “rock star” writers and declare them “innovative,” “experimental,” or “Nabokov-like,” the critical unanimity points to the very opposite: that the “literary novel” is returning to its roots, back to the place from where “popular literature” never budged. Aimed at a wide audience, the novel was originally considered a lower literary species. Any novelty in the contemporary novel lies in its regression, in the primitivization of narrative structure, characterization, and description — all in all, in its de-modernization (if we agree that the novel had its peak in the epoch of modernism). On the international market, geography is the only thing that gives the contemporary novel the illusion of dynamism, vitality, and richness. First a novel from Turkey turns up, then one from Pakistan, then France has a turn, after that Japan. .
The borders between “high” and “low” literary production are either non-existent or extremely porous. Author, Work, and Reader are the three elements that create a literary work. Author and Work have had their time, and now it’s the Reader’s turn. Thanks to the Internet today’s reader is passive no more. He reads and writes blogs, joins fandoms, contributes to Internet forums, recommends books, exchanges tips, issues challenges, has the chance to follow the author, intervene in his work, correct him, plagiarize him, ridicule him, “delete” him, or praise him to the high heavens. Novelists no longer write for their readers, they write for their fans.[2]
In this respect the institution of the author has been permanently displaced from its traditional position and is today located at two diametrically opposite poles. Writers are either totally marginalized, or (if one belongs to the privileged few) institutionalized like rock stars. The Internet and the new communicative ecstasy have given birth to the collective author, his work “collaborative fiction.” With audacious ambition, and trying to piggyback on the success of Wikipedia, in 2007 Penguin Books initiated the wiki-novel project A Million Penguins. The project quickly tanked because the collective authorship couldn’t agree on a thing. In spite of this failure, the specter of the collective novel, a communist idea, still haunts the Internet. The site The Autobiography of Pain invites the people of the world to help write “a community driven novel.” The project initiators assure the artistically disenfranchised masses that The Autobiography of Pain project “belongs to everyone!” Although anyone can change whatever he or she wants, it hasn’t yet occurred to someone to change the novel’s title.
Keitai Shosetsu and Other Stuff
In recent years the cell-phone-novel (keitai shosetsu in Japanese) has rocked the powerful Japanese multimedia industry.[3] The cell-phone-novel is a new genre that has grown out of the mass usage of mobile phones, the Japanese site Maho-i-land (Magic Island), the largest of its kind, contains more than a million titles. Access to the site is free, and visitor hits run into the billions; anyone who owns a mobile phone is both potential reader and potential writer. Cell-phone-novels are amateur and unfiltered, the language simplified, the plot primitive, the forms traditional. The heroine is usually a girl from the provinces who endures an ordeal of one kind or another (she is raped, gets pregnant, her boyfriend leaves her, and so forth). The novels are written by barely educated high school dropouts, most of them girls, who hide behind fabricated identities and sign their work with short pseudonyms such as Mone (who apparently took her name “from some French painter”), Mei, Mika, and Kika. Their novels sell in print-runs of two or three million. In 2007 four of the top five books on the Japanese bestseller list were ketai shosetsu.