Fan fiction, sometimes spelt fanfiction, is the sort of stuff afficionados write about the characters in their favourite books. Not surprisingly, there is a huge volume of fan fiction written about the Harry Potter characters and the author, JK Rowling, is said not to mind – so long as the writers do not try to sell their work.
Fan fiction is rarely authorised and is technically illegal as the writer uses copyrighted characters and settings, and encroaches upon the intellectual property rights of the original author. Copyright law grants the holder the exclusive right to control how their work is used and identified. Many authors, like JK Rowling, are aware of the fan fiction their work inspires but see it as largely harmless, maybe even of benefit to any young person trying their hand at it as it develops their imagination. Established authors will rarely, if ever, read any of it though; partly because they have better things to do with their free time, partly through fear of being accused of ‘stealing’ an idea from a fan for a future book.
One of the worst examples of Fan fic, I am told, is My Immortal, which is based on Harry Potter books, but shows scant regard for the actual characters and is riddled with typos and grammar mistakes. Many other works aren’t much better, and some developments in fan fiction are increasingly giving the genre a bad name.
Slash fiction is a sub group of fan fiction. It focuses on same sex romantic/sexual relationships between characters that was neither intended nor implied by the original author. It is so called because the slash (/) is used to indicate that the relationship is sexual (e.g. Noddy / Big Ears). Friendship is indicated by ‘&’ (Noddy & Big Ears). The sexual relationship is usually between 2 male characters (m/m). If it is between two females (f/f) it is called femslash or femme slash.
This is still pretty harmless, you may think. But some writers of fan fiction go further – Angst fic, or even Dark fic where the plot lines become increasingly violent and sexual – rape, incest, murder, torture, suicide ….
The journalist and women’s rights campaigner, Dr Helen Joyce, first wrote about fan fiction in The Economist in 2016 when her editor asked her to look into the potential impact of pornography on young people. She had not paid any attention to fan fiction before, and had never heard of slash fiction, but in her initial research she found a link between them and porn. She included in her article her concern about the impression this could be making on the many young female readers who like reading fan fiction.
Subsequently she was contacted by a number of parents who agreed with her, but also felt that slash fiction was creating, or compounding, their daughters’ feelings of gender dysphoria – initially starting with the girl identifying as one of the gay boys in a fan fictional relationship, rather than a female character from the original book. However, in most of the slash fiction of that era (remember, this is less than 8 years ago) the relationships were not explicit, and the romance element virtually sexless. Ostensibly, many storylines seemed relatively tame – for some girls a temporary haven away from the anxious realities of first periods, developing breasts, and boyfriends in real life.
Helen Joyce has recently gone back to research the topic, and found, in keeping with modern angsts, a plethora of fan fiction characters were now in therapy of some form or another. She has been shocked, too, to find that the fan/slash genre has become much more pornified, violent and explicit than even a few years ago, with anal sex, choking, spitting and slapping seen as ‘normal,’ even on a first date (and a million miles away from the behaviour of the characters in the original books). These degrading porn storylines however do correlate with recent research done with young people about the impact of porn on their lives. It appears that many have had access to explicit and violent porn from a young age, and that girls understand this behaviour to be what they could expect from boys in real-life sexual relationships, or be seen as prudes. Certain strands of fan fiction, that to the uninitiated sounds like an innocent, adolescent, vehicle for fandom in regard to a favourite author, seem to have become very dark indeed.
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