Fandom

Fan fiction that subverts the canon and gives agency to the viewer / reader over the franchise, owners, author, etc. is a deconstructive (maybe deformance) art. While I have never delved into the self-made archives of fanfic writers (apart from the infamous My Immortal,) I find fanfiction all around us.

What worries me about some fanfiction is how it is often bent to the will of the market, becoming itself a piece of promotional material rather than a unique disjuncture from the original story or intent of the author. Hollywood's refurbishing of itself à la the reboot folds in on this powerful ability to alter canon and generate a "speculative" fanfiction that feeds into the franchise. In a way, the movie market has engineered a way for fans to do their thinking for them, as screen-writers are aware of the endless speculation of fans creating theories for where the franchise will go next – all they have to do is take their pick.

There's another dark kind of "speculative" fanfiction that appears to contain all the horrors of our neoliberal, broken system. It is the Alt-World, Earth 2 twitters that try to imagine the world where Trump is not the President of the United States [1]. I remember I once tuned into a radio station on the radio garden, when I heard a woman speaking about the death of her mother. She spoke on the trauma of this experience, and how she began to grieve. She eventually began to recede into her imagination, imagining her mother's death and the moments leading up to it. She said she imagined in such great detail all the events leading up to her death that she was able to pinpoint the exact moment that would cause her mother to die, and that if she focused on this moment with enough energy and attention, she may be able to reverse it from being, to bring her mother back from the dead.

I was quite astonished to hear this. It is clear that there is great trauma surrounding the installation of an administration that is so willing to display the barbarism we fear we are capable of as a society. But the imagination spent on Earth 2 is imagination wasted. I like the kind of imagination that pushes towards a new possibility unforeseen by Earth 1 and 2.

Subreddits like r/nosleep create their own "speculative" fanfictions, where elements of stories trade between authors, as meta-references within stories discount any sort of canonical objectivity to stories. I'm interested in how fanficiton could exist more concretely in the literary world, without defaulting to the clear case of 50 Shades.