Kyla Gorman

1) Fanfiction as interpretation - "the way I see it..."
First of all, and the category I feel most closely ties to what I write (although admittedly my own work falls at least a little into all three), fanfiction is used as a way for fans to express their interpretation of a series. Fanfiction allows fans to present their explanations for events or character actions, as they themselves see it. Fanfiction lets us write a story that says, "Here, this is why he did this. This is what kind of person he is. This is what was going through his head when he did it. This is who he is, really, when you get right down to it."

Fanfiction as interpretation lets fans share with each other what they see to be the internal, consistent world of the fiction, sometimes as they feel the author intended, but more often as they themselves interpret. If all media is experienced as a partnership between the author's intent and the reader's interpretation, then fanfiction is that partnership written down, the literal result of the audience experience of the author's fiction or universe.

2) Fanfiction as exploration - "what if?"
Rather than interpreting what a series is, a lot of fanfiction is an interpretation of what the fanfiction writer thinks a series could be. This category is often tied in closely with the previous one, in a way that closely resembles the traditional use of sci-fi: changing one element, or taking something out of its element, in order to more closely examine the original. Therefore, a fanfiction writer might do something like take the characters from a historical series and place them in the present, in order to say, "Here's what I believe these characters would do in a modern setting."

But this category does not have to have an interpretive element. Sometimes it can be simply an exercise in fantasy. "What if this character died? How would the other characters react? How would it change the dynamics of the series? What would be broken? What might develop that would be new and interesting?" Fanfiction writers see this exercise as a way to explore what could be in a series, as well as an additional way of exploring what is already there.

3) Fanfiction as masturbation - emotional intensity as a form of pleasure (not to mention the sex)
Fanfiction can also be a way for women to experience and explore heightened emotional or physical states. Women (presumably people? This is the question I'm getting at a bit here, and I'd appreciate some male input) can experience serious pleasure from the experience of an intense emotion - positive or negative - in a fictional context. The cresting intensity of an emotion, particularly without real-world consequences, is a visceral experience that many women seek out. Fanfiction allows a woman to take an experience that already exists in a fiction and ratchet up the emotional peak, mostly through use of "what if" scenarios as in the previous point.

As an example, given a situation of two characters getting married in a fiction, a fanfiction author might say, "well, what if character A was secretly in love with the bride, but had to sit and watch in silence (since the character did not make a scene in the fiction canon)?" The heightened poignancy of this situation adds an emotional depth to the original scene that is pleasurable, even though the emotion itself is negative. In this way, fanfiction allows us to feel additional pleasure from our media consumption experience, by allowing us to feel heightened emotion that we would (hopefully, in most cases) not experience in real life.

Of course, we also can't discount fanfiction as regular ol' physical pornography, rather than purely emotional masturbation. A lot of fanfiction is pornographic, and allows the writer and readers to experience physical pleasure with characters that they already care about, that have a background and a relationship and a context which already exist. It's like porn - but deeper. It speaks to a sexual need of women that is not satisfied by ordinary pornography: an emotional context. In this case, much of the series' canon is immaterial - it is only important in that it gives the sexual content a context.

It's not particularly surprising that sexuality finds expression in this format. It finds expression in every medium in which you can transmit ideas. I would find it surprising if you didn't find porn/erotica in the medium somewhere.

Slash fanfiction, most notorious of the fanfictions, can belong to any of these categories, and often belongs to all three. It has elements of interpretation - what the writer feels is implicit in the characters' relationship, whether intentional or unintentional on the part of the author. It has elements of "what if" exploration - "What if this relationship was sexual? What would that mean for the characters and the fiction?" And of course, often it has elements particularly of emotional masturbation, given that most sequences have a great deal more emotional richness when the (admittedly cliche) "forbidden romance" comes in. Plus, as many female fanfiction writers will tell you - "it's just hot."

So there you have it, for better or for worse. This is what I interpret the main driving factors behind fanfiction-writing to be. If there are any fanfiction writers among us who would like to correct me or add to my list, please do. But actually, I am more interested in responses from males to this question. I can see how the sexuality/emotional aspect might not be as palatable to men as it is to women, but surely men have the desire to interpret as much as women do? Surely men want to explore these fictions and their worlds? So why don't they write fanfiction? What makes the difference?

One of the explanations that my boyfriend and I came up with in the course of the discussion was that men are more interested in maintaining the integrity of a canon, as opposed to women, who are more interested in exploring potential changes/differences in it. I feel this to be somewhat instinctively true based on my own experiences, but I'm at a loss as to explain it. Anyone want to venture a guess?