Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Jamison Anne

Author:Jamison, Anne [Jamison, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781939529206
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2013-11-25T23:00:00+00:00

As anyone who knows anything about fandom generally could tell you, fans have a long tradition of raising money for charity. But as we’ve seen, the Twilight fandom by and large didn’t know anything about fandom generally. d0tpark3r (as she explained in her essay here) and others like her would express their frustration with Twilight fandom reinventing the wheel and calling it new. This lack of familiarity with general fandom history and tradition, however, meant they could do things their own way. They did it huge.

The Fandom Gives Back auction, the focus here, was by far the biggest charity undertaking, but even smaller scale, in Twilight terms, meant big numbers. The Twifans for Haiti drive, organized quickly in response to the devastating 2010 earthquake, raised over $85,000 in the space of just two weeks. The drive organizer, Ms Kathy, explains that immediately following the January 12 disaster, stories were solicited, donated, compiled in a PDF collection (labor donated by manyafandom), and emailed to donors, all between January 13 and January 25. The collection is sitting on my hard drive, 1,800-plus pages by 260 authors. A huge amount of work—and a huge amount of money raised in very little time.

The Fandom Gives Back was much more complicated. Authors auctioned off story chapters, alternative POVs, and made-to-order fics. But it wasn’t all fic; artists, crafters, and web designers got involved, as did celebrity fansites and bloggers. It was a fandom-wide effort. Some of the most popular Big Name Authors were intensely involved not just as contributors but as organizers. tby789 and LolaShoes (Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, aka Christina Lauren), both of whom we’ve heard from individually about their experiences as fandom authors, were instrumental in this enormous campaign, with the fandom writer Ninapolitan being the other major organizer. AngstGoddess did the website. Each of these women donated hundreds and hundreds of hours to the cause.

Since the Fandom Gives Back: Eclipse auction was going on during my 2010 course, I joined “teams”—collective bids to receive outtakes—for fics we were reading in class, including “Master of the Universe” (now the Fifty Shades trilogy), “The University of Edward Masen” (now Gabriel’s Inferno), and “An Introduction to Swirl and Daisy” (PG-rated, middle-school Harry Potter fan Bella v. Lord of the Rings fan Edward). My students followed along with the auction as part of our look at the nonprofit economics of Twilight. It’s my recollection that these three teams alone raised over $50,000 for childhood cancer research.

Fandom Gives Back was created as a charity and inspired an enormous collective outpouring of fandom pride and generosity that far surpassed the expectations of the organizers, as we learn below. But this auction also played a leading role in the story of unintended consequences in the Twilight fandom. The creation of teams and the large sums of money they were able to raise also had the result of translating the economics of online fandom (e.g., review counts, hits) into actual financial numbers that people outside the fandom could understand.

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