In 2012, when Fifty Shades of Grey catapulted the existence of fanfiction and transformative fandom into the limelight, it generated public confusion and debate around the notions of authority, legality, and Death of the Author. Who were these presumptuous fans stealing and plagiarizing the creative properties of established authors—and now daring to claim legitimacy for their “writing?”

Although the word “fandom” has been around since the 1930s, popularly deployed in science fiction circles, its modern iteration is credited to the Star Trek fandom in the late ‘60s: especially its “transformative fan activities.” The term “transformative” here is germane, because the gender politics of fandom share the same origins. Transformative fandom is the fanworks-oriented, female-dominated faction of fandom that writes fanfiction and participates in shipping, remixing, and revising the Canon. Historically, however, these practices and these “minority” fans have been frowned upon by the “majority” fans who made up the more visible (and, correlated, male) version of fandom, differentiated with the term affirmational, or curatorial, fandom.

Curatorial fandom holds the source material—the Canon—as the Holy Text. Its fans prize familiarity with the source text, centering their fannishness around knowledge and authority. This rift between curatorial and transformative fandoms is often punctuated by the existence of the Fake Geek Girl myth. The belief that geeky women are not “true fans” unless they display proper “knowledge” of the Canon extends to the overall disdain of fanfiction and participatory engagement. By its premise, transformative fans “disrespect” the Canon by engaging with it not as a text with authority, but as a text with creative and further story potential.

︎The first published Star Trek fanfic, depitcting the Kirk/Spock pairing. // PHOTO: Fanlore

In the eyes of “fanboys,” fanfiction goes too far: fanfiction writers are presumptuous and disrespectful to take the creative property of the copyright holder, manipulating it to suit “their own foibles.” This conversation is age-old, as teenage girls and their fannish behavior have long been denigrated by male authorities for merely existing in its abundance. But in the 2010s, the discourse took on a particular fervor as, due to the internet, the world grappled with the increasing visibility of fandom—and fanfiction.

Fanfiction was suddenly becoming profitable. Not directly, of course; although technically illegal, the right for fans to write and enjoy fanworks of any kind is legally protected under its classification as “transformative work,” so as long as the work is not commercial, i.e. does not make money.

But from the late 2000s, with Cassandra Clare (The Mortal Instruments) and E. L. James, the world saw famous writers no longer hiding the fact that they’re editing their fanfiction into original work. From secretly sharing fic via private email chains, underground web communities who hid in fear of litigation from the powers that be, to creators now loudly claiming fanfiction as their writing playgrounds—Rebecca Sugar used to write Invader Zim fic and has attributed inspiration for Steven Universe to her early fanfiction. ND Stevenson posted She-Ra fic after the series finale and tweeted about it—it is clear that the zeitgeist is shifting towards pro-fanfiction despite continued derogation of fanfiction’s merit.

But with this growing generation of Creators, with creative backgrounds founded in fandom communities, entering an era of studios and publishers choosing reboots and remakes over original IP, the shifting paradigms beg us to interrogate the boundaries of original, derivative, and transformative fiction.

Conversing with Canon

“Derivative works” are licensed works based on, or adapted from, an existing copyrighted work, i.e. sequels, prequels, translations, stage productions, and so on. These are produced with the legal permission of the copyright owner, and accordingly, one may make commercial use of this IP.

Narratively, derivative works remain largely loyal to the original work, while adaptations tend to take creative liberties. Some notable examples would be the 2017 TV series Anne with an E and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019). Where the novel Anne of Green Gables (1908) was a white family-centered story about a provincial town in Canada, Moira Walley-Beckett’s TV adaptation expands and modernizes the world with inclusions of black, indigenous, and queer characters. At the same time, Walley-Beckett’s explorations stay loyal to the style, genre, and tone of the original IP and in this way, merely expands the scope of the Canon.

Meanwhile, 2019’s Little Women reframes the original story by drastically modernizing the character arcs of Jo and Amy. With the film introducing Jo as a female writer striving to sell a novel about her sisters and their lives to a white, male editor, who cannot fathom the importance of female stories, Gerwig immediately positions her adaptation as one in meta-conversation with both the original work and the life of author Louisa May Alcott. Gerwig’s Jo is more emotionally mature, experiences her gender in more textured ways, and is more visibly feminist in the modern sense. And Gerwig’s Amy is an excellent foil to this Jo: she has a real-world vision of what it actually means to embrace her femininity in a heavily patriarchal society. While Jo’s fury at the world contrasts with Amy’s cynical realism, both characters’ arcs are expressions of female rage, something the original Little Women (1869) did not have. It could be argued that Gerwig’s Jo and Amy are “out of character” in terms of canonicity: they are reinterpretations and commentaries, rather than a faithful translation.

^{︎Little Women // Columbia Pictures © 2019}

It is notable that derivative works are considered to have Creators, the same way original works do, defined in their legitimacy due to copyright. As derivative works, these ventures are considered to “add” to the Canon of the classics.

What then do we make of Fanon and of transformative works? Curatorial fandom’s assumption that transformative fandom “disrespects” Canon is not terribly far from its mark. A subgenre called crackfic quite literally exists to distort Canon—to the point that it can be universally agreed that the fanwork is fundamentally ridiculous. One of my personal favorites is a post-apocalyptic fic about a romantic pairing where one of the characters is a planet explorer and the other a toaster. A toaster with wheels and an AI chip. To quote the author, “there have been weirder love stories, probably,” and they’re quite right.

Fanon’s existence is a multifaceted, dynamic narrative discourse made up of “a million headcanons,” forming shared fandom knowledge, writes Katharine McCain in her thesis, “Canon vs. Fanon.” It is a constructive phenomenon, born from the deconstruction of Canon and its reconstruction refracted through a community of creators. It is also only possible for Fanon to exist in the world of transformative fandom, perpetuated by its unique traditions and literacies.

But what will happen when Fanon and fandom breach containment?

Infiltrating the Center of Canon

When viewers watched the ending of Game of Thrones and criticized Benioff & Weiss for “ruining” all of the characters and writing them “out of character,” going so far as to petition HBO for a remake of the last season—was this “disrespecting” the authority of Canon? When, inevitably, HBO rejected the calls, did this establish the supremacy and authority of Canon being the realm of copyrighted Creators?

The fan backlash and subsequent corporate response illustrate how audience engagement has drastically changed in the age of the internet and how consumption of entertainment media and popular culture now is no longer passive, but participatory.

Over the previous decades, Tumblr and LiveJournal provided hubs for massive fannish activity, and Twitter gave fans direct access to Creators and the companies who funded what we love. Fans became emboldened to make demands of and loudly criticize the creative decisions of producers of Canon; and at times, producers have indulged fans and sometimes even kowtowed to the cultural force of fandom. In the publishing industry, where the lines between transformative fans and creators are even thinner, publishers have signed fannish creators to appeal specifically to that demographic.

And while this new relationship is the consequence of social media’s access, it is also the consequence of fanfiction and internet fandom. It is easy to open a blog and simply begin writing, and this increase in fannish engagement with media has changed fans into a new kind of media consumer. Cultural anthropologist Fabienne Silberstein-Bamford dubs it the “fanfic lens:” literacy competencies informed by fanfiction and fan text, that are then carried over for public consumption as a distinct mode of reception.

A fan is reader, critic, and author all at once—and the consumer-producer roles are inhabited in a feedback loop. Fans read a work, consume a story, and concurrently are thinking about what potential Canon is offering them for further storytelling. This hybrid identity allows fans to learn and engage in their new media literacy.

The focal point of fanfiction and fanon are characters, their relationships and inner lives, and more often than not, fanfiction writers will prefer the malleability of side characters over main characters. Narrative events and plot only serve fanfiction writers to explore character dynamics and backstory. Fanon, thus, thrives not from dedication to Canon but from playing truancy. The fanfic lens expands the myopic gaze of Canon.

Assuming the active hybrid mode of reception, fans experience canon as stories they have authority to criticize and creatively engage with—fill whatever gaps they need filling, by themselves, for themselves. Canon storyworlds need not be ephemeral and end with the finale or the conclusion the Creator provided; it can keep going and going, and it can mutate in accordance to a fan’s reaction to the canon.

The significance of this lens and the spaces that it arose from is both cultural and political. Transformative fandom, predominantly female and gender-diverse, converses with canon as a text and often holds it secondary to its fannish practices. The reason for this is simple: Canon is, for the most part, patriarchal, normative, and hegemonic. Canon is capitalist. The center of Canon is held by the socially and politically dominant—i.e. straight, white, cis men—because Canon is authorized by copyright law, so only those who manage to get accepted among the ranks of Creators are able to participate in its production.

This is not news. Historically, every creative field has seen, and still sees, the gatekeeping of power. Women, people from non-white races and countries, gender diverse identities, sexually diverse identities, so on and so forth—those outside of hegemonic identities have had to force their way into the room. And while the late 2010s saw sociopolitical awareness rise and result in cultural movements for greater access, the seats of power are still straight and white and cis and male. Male fans are content to passively consume the stories they are fed, become guardians and gatekeepers of Canon, because it was made for them.

What transformative fandom does for our culture is take away the excuses for this lack of expansion and possibility. Because of fanfiction, fans get to see more representation and more kinds of stories—fans expand Canon for themselves and transform it to include and elevate the characters on the sidelines, stories and identities seeping into the background, and use Fanon to make subtext into text for them—and they begin to ask a pertinent question: why can’t we see those same stories in Canon? What is stopping us?

Not Democracy, but Deconstruction

The nucleus for this essay popped into my head while watching the latest installment of Spider-Verse. Particularly, the very meta questions the film is asking about canonicity, story, character, and the very meta references it made to comic fandom’s backlash against Miles Morales as the new Spider-Man. As embedded as my childhood was in internet fandom and fanfiction, to me, it was as if the film was asking questions that transformative fandom has forever been pondering, but been forbidden to ask. I’m not saying that fandom and fanon is becoming the mainstream language of storytelling, or that it should, but that the cultural significance of transformative fandom is beginning to be felt.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is proof and function of that. The 2023 box office hit launched the concept of fictional canon into pop culture consciousness and, even more, popularized the phrase “canon event” with a TikTok trend. Funnily enough, Kemp Powers, one of the trio that directed the movie, admitted that they weren’t even sure if people would understand the term “canon event” until after early screen testing. The plot of Across the Spider-Verse is incredibly meta and discursive, with the crux of the film asking the question: if you change the core elements of canon, does it remain part of the same canon or does it become a new unique storyworld or mythos? What happens if the events of the Spider-Man origin story, that tie all Spider stories together, change? What if canon is challenged? Why is it important that it is challenged?

Across has already seeded their possible answers—which will be so exciting to see develop in Beyond—but my attention falls on two specific plot details. The first being that Gwen Stacy spends the whole film convinced that being a Spiderperson, being her true self, meant tragedy, isolation, and rejection by her loved ones—the most unsubtle subtextual trans allegory if there ever was one—and once she is banished back into her own canon, her forced revelation to her father subsequently undoes one of the tragic “canon events” she had accepted as a part of her story—an original element of canon.

The other detail is Miles Morales’ status as an anomaly. Diegetically, this refers to the fact that the Miles of Earth-1610 was never meant to be bitten by a spider—his origin story, Into the Spider-Verse (2018), was not his origin after all, but the would-be origin of Miles of Earth-42, his alternate universe self. This reveal reframes Into completely and retroactively—a fanfiction narrative structure.

Canon divergence describes fanfiction set in a canon universe that diverges relatively narrowly from canon; this divergent canon is known as a subset of Canon Alternate Universe. Into the Spider-Verse is a canon-divergent story set in the alternate canon where the “wrong” Miles becomes Spider-Man. The mission of Miguel O’Hara and the Spider Society, then, is to make sure each Spider-Verse stays canon-compliant as the creation of alternate canons presumably “destroys the universe,” i.e. destroys the Canon.

Miles being labeled an anomaly, and his refusal to accept the tragic canon events that make a Spider-Man, or to give up his Spider title, is also significant in another context. The introduction of Miles Morales to the Spider canon in 2011 was met with massive backlash from comic fans protesting the “multicultural agenda” and “social justice politics” encroaching on their territory; this same fury resurfaced when Into became a global phenomenon; and it resurfaced again in 2023, when Insomniac’s popular Spider-Man 2 videogame ended with Peter Parker retiring to let Miles become the main Spider-Man in their shared universe. In our universe too, the world keeps trying to tell Miles Morales that he cannot be Spider-Man: he is too black, too Hispanic, too political, too beyond the imagination of what Canon can allow. That Miles can look at the angry Miguel—and the angry audience—who holds Canon as sacred—and refuse to accept that his story must unfold the same way. It is inherently transformative.

The 2023 anime series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is another alternate canon story that bears uncanny resemblance to fanfiction’s remix genre. A remix is a fanwork re-envisioning an earlier fanwork, usually exploring another viewpoint of a character. The story of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a remix of the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which was a 2010 adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim comic book series. In the 2023 series, the story diverges early on from film canon when Scott loses his fight with Matthew Patel, the first of 7 ex-boyfriends to come. This canon divergence subverts all expectations and puts Ramona Flowers, previously just a manic-pixie dream-girl love interest, into the protagonist’s seat and explores more deeply the inner lives and idiosyncrasies of the side characters. This alternate canon also allows Ramona to achieve something she never did in the comic or the movie: closure. By removing Scott Pilgrim—the straight, white, cis, male protagonist—from the center of the canon, we get to explore character dynamics that weren’t possible before (Ramona, Kim, and Roxie hanging out in the DVD store lives in my head rent-free), even allows “crack pairings” to take mainstage (like Julie/Gideon). The only distinction that makes this anime not fanfiction is the fact that it was made by the Creators.

And fan practices have always drawn on cultural canon and, in so doing, have always been in conversation with it. That Fanon remains in the “illegitimate” realm of fandom doesn’t mean it is bound to stay there: the TV series Interview with the Vampire (2022) and Good Omens (2019) are two examples of how Fanon can penetrate into Canon if the Creators are aware of these conversations.

Rolin Jones’ Interview with the Vampire adapts Anne Rice’s 1976 novel of the same name and the Vampire Chronicles book series. His TV show, however, establishes a distinctive reframing in its premise: a canon-compliant retelling of the original fiction. The premise of this Interview acknowledges what came before it, but frames it as the subject Louis de Pointe du Lac having been an unreliable narrator, and the previous canon being a badly reported, poorly researched publication of that unreliable interview. In this new retelling, there are two massive departures from the canon: (a) Louis and Lestat’s homosexual subtext is now an explicit queer romance, and (b) Louis and his adopted vampire daughter are black.

Racebending is a fanfiction device used to rework and recontextualise characters previously imagined as white into people of color. With growing calls for racial representation in Hollywood, racebending has become more common—but the racebending of an explicitly white character from a period piece like Interview with the Vampire is unprecedented. It is a markedly different retelling of the canon, introducing racial dynamics into Louis and Lestat’s gothic romance and queer family, and in particular, bringing texture and agency into Louis as a queer black vampire in the 1900s. Jones has commented on the choices they made with confidence, asserting that, despite the changes, they refer to and study the book series diligently, and that fans will be surprised by how much of Rice’s “prose made it into our series.” But despite this assertion, the show feels intrinsically transformative in its retelling.

It would be hard to say how the original author would feel about the new Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice’s vitriolic and hostile relationship with fanfiction was well known, along with her history of suing fanfiction writers and forcibly removing it from the internet. Rice’s insistence on the sanctity of copyright may well have been the saving grace for Jones’ new Canon.

In the case of Good Omens (1990), co-authored by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, the book’s fandom have always held its protagonists, Aziraphale and Crowley, as a queer couple. Both Gaiman and Pratchett treated fandom gently, and with humor—but would maintain that canonically, neither of the angels are explicitly written as queer. With the announcement and release of the 2019 first season of Good Omens, Gaiman maintained that the canonicity of the book would not be affected by any confirmations in the TV series; confirmations which, astonishingly, came. Fanon’s interpretation of Aziraphale and Crowley’s subtextual queerness became romantic overtones in the first season; and then explicitly canon in the second.

Shock and joy reverberated through fandom, because while fanon is always dependent on and conversing with canon, never had canon responded to fanon. As Tor.com’s Asher-Perrin put it: “But they’ve never changed like this, not for me. And if that’s possible when I was so certain it would never be, then maybe there’s a little more possibility to go around.”

And truly, so much has changed in the last decade. The rapid development of technology, of online communities and internet culture, of sociopolitical movements, has caused such massive shifts in the zeitgeist. Though I don’t posit that the boundaries of Canon and Fanon are breaking down any time soon, it surely begets reconsidering what Canon constitutes.

Who is allowed to make canon? When certain identities remain at the center of canon forever, what are the ways we are limiting ourselves in storytelling, in narrative, in character? And when we dare to ask “why must this be the way things are for ever,” when we break the shackles of our own imagination, what will we be able to create? What new kinds of narratives, new forms of writing, new modes of authorship, and even new categories of storytelling must be brewing?

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