The End of Fan Fiction?

The question of whether “fan fiction” is in decline has at this stage of things been debated for decades.

It has long seemed to me quite logical that it should be in decline.

One reason is that fan fiction thrives on fans being able to sink their teeth into an exciting world — and for many, many years now we have seen the media, instead of offering new worlds, serve up the same old thing again and again, to diminishing returns. (Consider how at FanFiction.net Harry Potter is far and away the biggest fandom. When was the last time we had a really new thing become a hit on that scale?)

There has also been the extreme fragmentation of pop culture — which means that fewer and fewer people are all likely to be looking at any one thing at the same time, about which only a very limited percentage is likely to be sufficiently moved to write stories (which, again, works against any Harry Potter-like phenomenon ever occurring), with all that means for the proportions the fandom is likely to achieve.

Let us also acknowledge that the base of fan fiction has always been the young — and that almost two decades into the age of the smart phone the young are probably less likely to read and write recreationally than their predecessors, with all that implies for their writing fan fiction. (It probably matters that the Internet was just taking off when Harry Potter arrived, that through many of the early years of the fandom when people did experience the Internet it was through a desktop — which left more time for books, for example, as compared with the life of someone young enough to not be able to remember not having had a smart phone in their hand.)

Apart from affecting the inclination to write fan fiction, all this also affects the inclination to read it — translating to the lack of an audience for those who do get something out there, which is no encouragement to keep writing and sharing such stories. Indeed, considering all this I find myself thinking of the reality that so many of those who write fan fiction are responding not to books, but to movies and TV shows. Even when employing the written word they have audiovisual media on their minds — and I suspect that for them a fan fiction story is a poor and distant second to what they would really like to produce, fan movies and shows of the kind only a few can make for lack of the financial and technical resources, which may well dampen their enthusiasm. In fact, it may well be that, just as the vlogger probably does their part in drawing attention away from the old-fashioned blog, the fan works that those who can produce them do generate are likely claiming the attention of the audience that would once have whiled away its time in the old fan fiction repositories.

Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.