The "I" in Fanfic
As any actor can tell you, you bring a little bit of yourself into every role you perform. Fanfiction is no different. This being said, the author can become visible in fanfiction in much more tangible ways than writing style or individual interpretation. In fanfiction, while grounded to varying degrees in the universe of the canon text, there is space for unimaginable exploration, modification, and expansion. In this section we explore two examples of this: the author’s note and the self-insert.
The Author's Note
As previously mentioned, the structure of most fanfiction archives allow for the interaction between authors and readers. Readers can leave comments or reviews and authors may, in turn, respond. The author’s note, if one is written, traditionally appears at the beginning or end of a chapter. Author’s notes can contain any number of things, lyrics to a song the author used as inspiration, responses to a string of criticisms or praises in comments or reviews, explanations of plot details, or even updates about the author’s personal life. The freedom provided by the author’s note allows fanfiction writers to perform not through the fanfiction story but as an author.
The author’s note can be labeled as “disclaimer” to acknowledge that the author is not attempting to pass off the canon text as their own and that the characters are not their own invention. These, although appearing to be used for protection against copyright suits, provide no legal protection. Despite the lack of substantive protection these disclaimers give, it is hard to find a story that doesn’t include one. Some sites even require that disclaimers are written for every story posted. Disclaimers, instead, function as a symbolic gesture, honoring the original author(s) of the work (mountainlily00).
The author’s note can also function in a tangible way of simple content warning, which have become more popular and even required by some websites. The content warning is not always a part of the author’s note, indeed, debates surrounding their place in the author's notes have taken place. Archive of Our Own includes content warnings and advisories within their tags to prevent users from opening possibly triggering stories.
Despite the tangible functions of content warnings or disclaimers, a majority of author’s notes are used for other purposes. Author’s notes can be (and often are) used to reaffirm the authority of the author. The space of the author’s note is one in which the author can speak directly to the audience, asserting that what they have to say is important. While the proper format of an author’s note is discussed in fanfiction forums and blog posts bemoaning how distracting they can be (Herzog), authors still have the choice to put whatever they want in these spaces.
Author’s notes function as a form of “paratext,” originally conceived of by Gérard Genette as “between the inside and the outside” of a text, giving examples such as, “an author’s name, a title, a preface, [or] illustrations,” (Genette, 2). There is an irony, however, to the author’s note that goes beyond other forms of paratext in a fanfiction story like a title or description. Most notes that are not about the writer’s personal life or the ownership of the material are used to “frame the text” and give clues as to how it should be interpreted. Despite the fact that the materials used to craft these stories are written by others, fans claim authority over their individual interpretations of these borrowed materials. “They [the fans]” writes Herzog, “attempt to actively direct the story’s audience into a certain, premeditated reader position and thus to curtail the very sort of interpretive and agentive practices they themselves are engaged in while writing fanfiction,” (Herzog).
As Herzog explains, Barthes’s notion of “the death of the author” doesn’t hold when Author’s Notes are taken into consideration, or, at the very least, it needs reevaluation (Herzog). Through both celebrating the original text and asserting their right to their own interpretations, fanfiction writers uplift their own authorial intent while dismissing that of the individual producer’s. Perhaps, then, a better way to conceptualize the relationship between fanfiction writers and original producers, is through the director-playwright dynamic. With directors approaching the source text as a script with various interpretive frameworks, each performance bringing in something different, with a recognition that playwrights, though important, aren’t the only authority on their text. In which case, the author’s note exhibits a similar function to a director’s note in a playbill, a way for directors to perform alongside their actors and assert their version of the story is one worth telling.
The Self-Insert
The fact that, in Hollywood, the norm still stands that directors generally don’t star in their own films leads us to the other “I” in fanfiction, the self-insert. In an art form devoted to re-using characters from popular media, there are still a large number of characters in fanfiction that are not featured in the original text, movie, or show. These are broadly labeled as Original Characters or OCs. It is important to highlight that not all OCs are self-inserts, but many are, and with that comes the debate about the author’s proper place in fanfiction.Part of the need for OC’s come from an insufficient number of characters in the original work. In Harry Potter, for example, while there are supposedly many students at Hogwarts, only a few are expanded upon in the novels. In the realm of the book series, this makes sense, not every student at Hogwarts has a direct impact on the protagonist’s life. In the realm of fanfiction, however, author’s may choose to focus on different aspects of the series that didn’t get as much coverage in the books. For example, a popular genre of Harry Potter fanfiction is called Marauders’ Era (named after the Marauder’s map) which focuses on the lives of Harry Potter’s parents and other characters that were students of Hogwarts at that time. As this era is not primarily focused on in the book series, there are few characters to write about in that time period, creating a need for OCs to fill the gaps (Blacksnowfalls06).
The impulse to create new characters is not purely a logistical one. Issues of race, sexuality, religion, and representation also affect writers’ reasons for adding OCs. Finally, some people simply want to experiment with creating their own characters to practice writing or to see themselves in a story they love. The latter, is the reasoning for most self-inserted characters. The self insert not only allows for the author to perform as an authority on the text, but as a character in their own story.
