From Fan Fiction To Feudal Media: What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
Feudal Media at its core is all about fan communities. They may not think of themselves as such, but for all intents and purposes that is exactly what the bubbles that have sprung up around various creators are.
It got me thinking how, in many ways, it’s an outgrowth of the fan communities that existed around certain TV shows back in the late 00s and early 10s that I wrote about in my 2015 book, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry.
The following excerpt, from a larger chapter on fandoms, is all about fan fiction and it’s surprisingly relevant today, as it is a harbinger of what was to come.
Some key themes worth highlighting:
Participatory storytelling: Fans weren’t just consuming media; they were remixing, expanding, and reinterpreting it. That same instinct drives creators today on platforms like YouTube, Wattpad and, especially, TikTok.
Decentralized creativity: Like modern creators, fanfic writers didn’t wait for industry permission. They created their own platforms, built their own audiences, and created subcultures that were far more active and engaged than any official ones.
Peer feedback loops: Comment threads and beta readers in fanfic spaces foreshadowed likes, comments, and algorithmic feedback loops that power creator platforms today.
Community as currency: Fandom taught that loyalty, identity, and belonging could be more valuable than reach. It’s the forerunner to the Creator Economy and its reliance on attention as the currency of the realm. And while most fanfic writers weren’t in it for the money, the paths they blazed opened the door for future creators to cash in.
FAN FICTION
No chapter on fan communities would be complete without a look into the phenomenon of fan fiction, which is a much, much larger phenomenon than most non-participants realize. It’s a growing and multi-faceted world, with its own lingo, rules, and superstars. There are tens of thousands of people writing fan fiction and hundreds if not thousands of websites devoted to it. There are even success stories: the best-selling series Fifty Shades of Grey started out as a Twilight fan fiction and was reworked so that the characters were independent creations, not characters from the series. Amazon even has an entire section—Kindle Worlds—devoted to fan fiction stories.
Since Queer As Folk was the rabbit hole I first stumbled down when two friends who had been lead actors on the show opened my eyes to the existence of the show’s thriving fan communities, communities that were still active ten years after the last episode had aired, that’s the fan fic world I first explored.
Where I learned terms like “slash fic” which means that the story involves a homosexual relationship between two characters who may or may not have been involved in canon (the actual show that aired) and who may or may not even have been interested in members of the same sex (homosexual relationships between characters who were portrayed as heterosexual in canon are a major theme of slash fiction, which is mostly written by heterosexual women. Some of the original slash fic involved Kirk and Spock from Star Trek).
There’s also “mpreg,” which stands for “male pregnancy” and involves a male character getting impregnated by another male character via a homosexual encounter and carrying the baby to term (e.g., Kirk knocks up Spock. And if you think I’m making that one up, just google “mpreg”).
The “fan girls” and “fan boys” (many more of the former than the latter) who write and comment on these fanfics are also known as “shippers” (short for “worshippers”) of specific characters/couples on the show. “AU” stands for “alternate universe,” which means the author has introduced new characters or plot lines that deviate from canon.
AUs may put the characters in different eras and locations, even play with their ages. The key is that the characters continue to have the personalities they have in canon. (Unless, of course, the author offers a reason why the character is acting differently—e.g., Spock gets hit on the head by a meteor and becomes illogical.)
But here’s what really amazed me about the fan fics I read: many of them were pretty good. A few, very good. Not as in giving Alice Walker a run for her money good, but they were well-written and well-paced, with believable dialogue and plot lines—certainly on par with many of the romance and detective stories you see crowding the best seller lists. What’s more, many of the readers left thoughtful and insightful criticism for the authors, no worse than feedback I’d gotten in upper-level creative writing workshops in college.
The genre has even evolved to the point where there are satires of typical fan fiction tropes and meta-stories where the characters are actually commenting on their fan-fictional selves. (For a brilliant scholarly view of the world of fan fiction, check out Henry Jenkins’ work, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.)
So what’s the takeaway here?
Fandom is a huge untapped market. Hardcore fans aren’t just hitting “Like” on Facebook or tweeting out that they’re watching this week’s episode. They’re creating things: stories, gifs, memes, Tumblr blogs.
Which means that every show with a hardcore fan base has a built-in audience of evangelists available to extend the story for years after the show goes off the air. They just need to be treated with respect: these fans are creating their work for themselves and for other fans. Not for the world at large. Which makes them different than the fans on Twitter. But different in a good way: they’re far more loyal and committed. Engaging them starts with the show’s creators, writers, and actors acknowledging their commitment and their passion and the fact that they’ve often created something more substantial than a 140-character check-in and goes from there.
“The ability to identify and harness fan communities with digital efficiency has forever changed the media landscape,” adds David Williams, who was at Endemol Beyond at that time and is now a founding executive at Pocketwatch. “For a producer, the big trick with fan communities is figuring out how to motivate that 1% of the audience to create content that will be compelling to the remaining 99%. Most fan creations come and go like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear.”
Fandom, and the degree to which (if handled correctly) fans are financially invested in the show’s success, points to the viability of models other than the traditional advertising-based models, which rely on mass audiences. Niche content can be financially viable when there is a strong fan base that is willing to pay for it. And it’s time that the industry realized that there are many shows that can generate this type of enthusiasm. And that these fans are happy to contribute. Or as the meme inspired by the Futurama character Fry succinctly puts it, “Shut up and take my money!”
That means it may be possible for shows with passionate fan bases to live on online, rather than on linear television. For while they may not draw the audiences that entice national advertisers, they do have the ability to draw in enough fans who’ll pay to finance production costs and that in turn may be enough to attract sponsors who’ll enjoy those fans’ increased loyalty.
That also frees up the shows creatively. One of the most interesting things Ivan Askwith, who led the fan-funded drive to make a Veronica Mars movie, told me was that he was unconcerned that the movie had received mixed reviews from critics. “It was a hit with the fans, with the people who helped finance the movie,” he said. “That’s who we made it for and that’s whose opinion we cared about.”
