Fanfiction: Where Everyone is Gay and Nothing Hurts

After playing an endless game of cat and mouse involving a body count as high as the sexual tension, a security services officer and an assassin finally fall into each other’s arms signifying the long awaited Lesbian Happily Ever After. Fans rejoice till the denouement culminates into an unexpected ending of where for once, the Girl does get the Girl, but is not able to escape the curse of queer characters being killed in popular media. Vexed at the inconsistency of the ending with the build-up of the story, fans were up in arms, ready to fix what the author had gotten ‘wrong’. With the rise of LGBTQ representation in popular media, a perennial question has been of ‘When does the queer character manage to survive the plotline?’. When does the queer character get the Happy Ending that’s been easily awarded to cis-heterosexual couples? Moreover, when does the queer character get a queered Happy Ending?

“We’ve learned to take pretty much...any media project and adjust it, come out on the other end where everyone is gay and nothing hurts.”

Ready with their metaphorical pens, the crusaders against the unnecessary death of the lesbian protagonist began to write the story they wished to see and turned to ‘Archive Of Our Own’, a non-profit open source repository for fanfiction. Deserving better has been demand of the LGBTQ community on ground and on the screen. With daily life being marked by violence, the LGBTQ community continually opposes the lousy storytelling of the likeable queer side character facing a brutal death for furthering the plot. The loopholes in popular media representation can easily be accorded to the lack of queer creators. The inability to see ourselves reflected in our culture as living happy, fulfilling lives and having meaningful agency in the world has an impact on how one sees themselves generally. It limits one’s options and choices in life, signposting that there is no space for us. The cry for positive representation has materialised itself through fanfiction, written by queers for queers. Archive Of Our Own, also known as AO3, becomes the site where the protagonist gets to complete their hero journey and get their love interest. 

Fanfiction often gets a bad reputation, judged by the yardstick of originality and authenticity and thus denied space as a respectable artform. When not being targeted by copyright laws, fanfiction writers are deemed to be ‘unoriginal’ at best, and ‘mindless teenage fangirls’ at worst. A close look at fanfiction as an online field of inquiry reveals how the fandom space is more queer than it is imagined to be. The derision extended to fanfiction also deserves close attention. Against a long history of fiction being built upon one another and the entire music industry being built upon sampling, that is to say, in a world where everything is a remix, why is it that fanfiction becomes low for being derivative? 

Perhaps, it is the transformative potential of fanfiction in queering stories that makes it so vulnerable to criticism.  Fanfiction writing can be seen as a cultural practice of queering stories. Sick of being told that we didn’t exist, queer individuals write themselves onto the stories. Here, queering narratives does not just follow the logic of writing new queer stories, but expanding the queer possibilities of existing stories. Catching onto the loophole of how cis-heterosexual characters rarely ever ‘come out’ as straight, authors refuse to conform to the assumption of the default and disperse stories through a prism.

The online field of fanfiction creates a new language of its own, shipping, One True Pairing (OTP), headcanons, fanon (fan canon: alternative understanding accepted by the fandom) tropes and more, that creates a sense of being an insider or outsider with reference to the fanfic culture. Moreover, the intertextuality of fanfiction, by referencing other texts, being in dialogue with each other with tropes, genre conventions, our lived experiences and real life, is what makes it unique. Fanfiction is shaped by the authorial choice of what stays true to the original and what differs from it. 

Fanfiction holds the potential to bring out starkly different aspects of the characters, lending a plurality to the original source of media. This plurality when expressed in queer terms creates a safe space for creators and readers alike, allowing for exploration of queer meanings. This represents a reorientation of cis-heterosexual media to create queer information worlds. The mediational processes involved in being a queer digital citizen become more feasible through positive LGBTQ representations by queers and for queers, helping in making sense of varied ways of living. Fanfiction thus comes to represent a dialogue between works, representations, narratives and culture itself. 

Online creative communities have increasingly become a space for marginalized groups experiencing intersecting forms of oppression to build solidarity and indulge in self-expression through processes of creative production. The practice of queering stories through fanfiction embodies an activism of care. Making use of the community’s existing skills, to bring light to the intersectional everyday experience of the community caters to the specific needs of the queer individuals and the community. As we bring our favourite characters to life to share our struggles, such as mental health issues, homophobia, existing within rape culture, or to reimagine them existing in spaces where the hostility of society is non-existent, we experience a therapeutic form of escape. 

The ‘gay side’ of the internet deep dives into stories to reimagine utopia which doesn’t have to place itself as utopia to begin with. The sheer normalcy accorded to the queer experience is what marks the gaiety of the gay side.