64
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
Harry Potter, spur the largest amount of fanfiction that appears online.
Smaller fandoms cover everything from prominent popular culture to such
literary classics as the Jane Austen novels and even wrestling personas or
so-called “Real Person Fiction” about politicians or boy bands. Often, through
gaps and elisions in the text, fanfiction points beyond itself and cannot
be understood completely without in-depth knowledge of the pre-text or
fanfiction conventions. It evades closure through the possibility of ever more
fans becoming writers, who can continuously add more fanfiction, more
commentary, and reviews to the narrative and the fantext without being
organized by an authority like the original author or copyright holders, the
canon, or an official timeline. Abigail de Kosnik has discussed at length
the importance of digital rogue archives for fan communities. The current
state of fan fiction and its involved practices are tied to the affordances of
the internet. Online archives, run often by volunteers, allow free access
and downloads of texts. Here, fans can evade copyright restrictions; works
are preserved and made visible as a part of popular culture (de Kosnik 77).
The uncontrollable sprawling amounts of texts, which leave much
creative freedom to their authors, are at the same time structured by
conventionalized practices and subgenre distinctions. The texts remain
distinctively related to their pre-texts and an understanding of these
texts as adaptations helps to understand their meaning and the involved
practices. In her book, Linda Hutcheon explains that adaptation must be
understood in a threefold manner. First, “as a formal entity or product, an
adaptation is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular
work or works,” which can materialize in the same medium as the pre-text
or involve a reincarnation in another medium, genre, and context. 17 Like
Master of the Universe and The Draco Trilogy, all fanf ictions announce
themselves as adaptations implicitly through the identification as fanfiction, often quite obviously by being published in a fan archive, or linked
to tags that allow readers to f ind these texts as derivative f ictions of
existing media narratives. They can be short (drabbles, for example, are
pieces of exactly 100 words), but there are hundreds of fanfictions in the
Harry Potter fandom alone that extend the length of the already extensive
pre-text. Individual fanfictions, but even more so the total fantext in a
fandom, remain extensively engaged with the pre-text, using the means
of the genre.
Fanfictions’ engagement with pre-texts is substantially different from a
mere quote, reference, or allusion that can be felt as an intertextual influence.
17 Hutcheon and O’Flynn, 7–8.
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
Harry Potter, spur the largest amount of fanfiction that appears online.
Smaller fandoms cover everything from prominent popular culture to such
literary classics as the Jane Austen novels and even wrestling personas or
so-called “Real Person Fiction” about politicians or boy bands. Often, through
gaps and elisions in the text, fanfiction points beyond itself and cannot
be understood completely without in-depth knowledge of the pre-text or
fanfiction conventions. It evades closure through the possibility of ever more
fans becoming writers, who can continuously add more fanfiction, more
commentary, and reviews to the narrative and the fantext without being
organized by an authority like the original author or copyright holders, the
canon, or an official timeline. Abigail de Kosnik has discussed at length
the importance of digital rogue archives for fan communities. The current
state of fan fiction and its involved practices are tied to the affordances of
the internet. Online archives, run often by volunteers, allow free access
and downloads of texts. Here, fans can evade copyright restrictions; works
are preserved and made visible as a part of popular culture (de Kosnik 77).
The uncontrollable sprawling amounts of texts, which leave much
creative freedom to their authors, are at the same time structured by
conventionalized practices and subgenre distinctions. The texts remain
distinctively related to their pre-texts and an understanding of these
texts as adaptations helps to understand their meaning and the involved
practices. In her book, Linda Hutcheon explains that adaptation must be
understood in a threefold manner. First, “as a formal entity or product, an
adaptation is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular
work or works,” which can materialize in the same medium as the pre-text
or involve a reincarnation in another medium, genre, and context. 17 Like
Master of the Universe and The Draco Trilogy, all fanf ictions announce
themselves as adaptations implicitly through the identification as fanfiction, often quite obviously by being published in a fan archive, or linked
to tags that allow readers to f ind these texts as derivative f ictions of
existing media narratives. They can be short (drabbles, for example, are
pieces of exactly 100 words), but there are hundreds of fanfictions in the
Harry Potter fandom alone that extend the length of the already extensive
pre-text. Individual fanfictions, but even more so the total fantext in a
fandom, remain extensively engaged with the pre-text, using the means
of the genre.
Fanfictions’ engagement with pre-texts is substantially different from a
mere quote, reference, or allusion that can be felt as an intertextual influence.
17 Hutcheon and O’Flynn, 7–8.