We Don’t Publish And Adapt Fanfiction Like We Used To
I know this is going to be a soapbox-y one exclusively filled with opinions already, but I saw Wicked in theaters today and it was outstanding. A faithful and beautiful adaptation of a musical I’ve loved since I was a kid, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo performed their hearts out and were possibly perfectly cast. The liberties of film allow the story to move slower, giving the audience more time to become attached to Glinda and Elphaba, their struggles, their motives, and their morals.
When I sat and thought about it for a while, I really realized that something like Wicked — book, musical or movie adaptation — is fanfiction. It transforms upon an existing piece of media or franchise, giving it background and nuance. It was written by someone who had nothing to do with the original IP.
But that’s just it: it only really occurred to me when I thought about it. Well written, published fanfiction of this nature feels like fiction. It’s natural. It breathes new life into an existing and well-loved franchise and leaves you asking questions, wanting even more backstory behind a character, instead of going, “which young male celebrity is the love interest based on?” It doesn’t feel like fanfiction — an overtly self-indulgent plot that makes you wonder if this was meant to fulfill a personal fantasy rather than tell a meaningful, relatable story.
We don’t publish fanfiction like we used to. We’ve traded genuine stories that have been made with love for short-lived and laughed-at adaptations with nothing of substance to say. Writing something transformative for a franchise you love is an unapologetically, self-indulgently fun hobby, but when you trade archiveofourown.org for a table read with real actors, there’s a lot more involved than just changing some proper names in your writing. Good adaptations go by unnoticed; bad adaptations are obvious the moment even one person draws a comparison.
Some People Do Not Need To Be Given A Multi-Million Dollar Book/Movie Deal
When I use the word “fanfiction” here, I’m referring to any piece of media that takes an existing franchise/story and builds upon it, written by a modern-day someone with no relationship or rights to the franchise/story’s original creator or publisher. This includes folk and fairytales, I suppose. The word adaptation implies some sense of decorum to me; where an adaptation is the real deal, officially authorized and engineered to be faithful yet popular, fanfiction is from a lawless land where nothing matters except what story you want to tell. Fanfiction often becomes official and becomes an adaptation, I suppose, but the issue is simply that: some people are very bad writers and want to tell very bad stories.
Let me be the first to say I am generally against licensing and publishing fanfiction in its original form. It feels very strange to me to market your work, whether on Barnes & Noble shelves or just made-to-order on Etsy, as original and novel. It can also get you in some hot water if what you’re writing about is owned by someone like Disney ; The Mouse does not mess around with their IP.
After (2019) is the most notoriously recent (and bad) fanfiction adaptation. Following a college freshman who meets a brooding and occasionally alcoholic bad-boy, the two fall in love despite family and personal drama between them.
It’s based on a novel of the same name, which is actually based on One Direction fanfiction (which was — and still is — publicly available on Wattpad). The aforementioned bad boy, Hardin Scott, is based on Harry Styles and even bears his same initials. Aside from the general questions raised when writing fanfiction about real human beings, the original version (available to view here in German because the original with the band member’s names has been revised), has many questionable plot choices. Coercion into drinking, drunk and unsafe sex, cheating, glorification of domestic abuse — it’s not the ideal image of a story you’d want to put on the silver screen. Not to mention, protagonist Tessa is blonde, eighteen, charming, minimally flawed, thin, beautiful, and off on her own for the first time. She is idealized in every way. A hollow image for girls to inject themselves into.
The Netflix-exclusive film bears a dismal 5.3/10 on IMDB and 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. The first film is actually rated PG-13, removing much of the sex that I unfortunately no longer have to imagine happens in the fanfic. The rating was updated to R in the following two movies. (I don’t know what they were smoking to authorize a trilogy deal for something like this.)
The Love Hypothesis isn’t even subtle about its fanfiction status. Published officially in 2021 (and unofficially online in 2018), the illustration on the cover clearly resembles Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley as they appeared when playing Kylo Ren and Rey Skywalker in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. The male love interest is literally named Adam. This novel makes the interesting choice to make the story about a student-professor relationship, which historically has worked out well both in real life and in fiction and not caused any problems.
I think these types of stories easily get sold off as film rights because fandom is a powerful thing. These movies, whether through hate-watching or people who are hopelessly devoted to fandom, will always gross more than they cost to produce. But ultimately, they are bad.
The next million dollar idea — the one that will be remembered as a cultural touchstone or a cult classic or a family favorite — will not be born out of a Harry Styles fanfiction. It will not be cut from the same cloth as a highly argued OTP in a blockbuster movie. It will be derived from someone’s lived experiences and their understanding of the world. It will be easy to see oneself in it, truly and honestly, instead of seeing some fictional and distorted image of You Except Perfect And Your Boyfriend Is Literally Just Harry Styles. Not all fanfiction is bad — far from it — but most of it is not good enough to be turned into a movie.
…But Some People Do
I know it’s kind of a reach to refer to “twisted fairytale”-type stories as fanfiction, but I think it fits the general definition I mentioned earlier. It goes to show that we have been, as fans, transforming upon our favorite franchises for decades. Marissa Meyer’s YA “Lunar Chronicles” series is a great example of adapting a beloved story. As the first book in the franchise, Cinder follows Cinder Linh, a cyborg mechanic girl who winds up entangled with the Crown Prince of New Beijing. She’s looked down upon, both by her stepfamily and her community, due to her cyborg status. There’s political unrest across New Beijing due to their relationship with the Lunars — aristocratic and magical citizens living on the moon — and an incurable plague that ravages their people.
Protagonist who, due to reasons she cannot change, is treated as a second class citizen. Political unrest and strained alliances between forces that could easily destroy one another. Marriages of convenience. Pandemics and the scientific experiments to cure them. Sound familiar?
Stories like these are broadly relatable. They tell stories of struggle that, when stripped down, can be applied to many situations. I don’t think every single piece of YA fiction (or fanfiction) needs to be a deeply nuanced venture into intellectualism, but I do think you need to be able to say, “This is cool and fictional, but there’s some truth to it that I see reflected in my life.” After all, this book is self-indulgently teenager in many ways. Cinder’s not like other girls — she’s a cool girl. She’s dirty and grimy but charming and quirky. She doesn’t like to dress up — she likes pants and t-shirts. She’s not a regular girl. Her sheer irregularness is captivating, even to the Crown Prince. But that appeals to girls! They want to be cool! They want to be the hero who gets the guy who loves her as she is! I think that, if you’re truly putting love, time, and care into your story, the balance between a larger-than-life, enjoyable protagonist and a truthful, nuanced story is easy to find.
Meyer even mentioned that, due to some scholars believing that the original Cinderella story was “Ye Xian” from 9th century China, she decided that setting Cinder in a futuristic China would pay homage to the fairytale’s history and allow it to come full circle. This is what I mean by love, time, and care. Not only did she learn about a possible Chinese origin of the more popular tale, but she did the research to support placing her story there. I am hard-pressed to believe that the author of After researched the history of Redditch to further flesh out Harry Styles and his upbringing, morals, culture, and backstory. Instead, she just made him an alcoholic. For fun. What?
Wicked, of course, is one of the most highly praised examples. Published in 1995 by Gregory Maguire and adapted for the stage in the early 2000s, it tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West before she was, of course, wicked. She attends a private academy to learn sorcery and meets Galinda (who becomes Glinda the Good Witch), quarreling with her over their different upbringings, desires, and beliefs. The novel creates a lot of sympathy for Elphaba, despite knowing she’ll become the Wicked Witch, and invites a lot of questions regarding human nature and the constant battle between good and evil. A very crucial piece of the musical is the line, “Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”
Maguire even said, “If everyone was always calling you a bad name, how much of that would you internalize? How much of that would you say, all right, go ahead, I’ll be everything that you call me because I have no capacity to change your minds anyway so why bother. By whose standards should I live?”
Knowing that Gregory Maguire is a gay man makes a premise like this all the more meaningful. Elphaba blaming herself for the death of her mother in childbirth becomes much the same, too, knowing that Maguire’s own mother died during childbirth, too. We are our writing. Not just our self-indulgent desires and crushes on celebrities, but our pain. Our morals. Our culture and upbringing. Elphaba’s story pulls from several avenues of Maguire’s lived experiences as a gay man, a Baby Boomer growing up during the Vietnam War, a motherless child, and the infinitely many other details that afflict the human condition.
Good fanfiction like Wicked is relatable and wholly entangled with someone’s experience of life, because when done well, it just feels like fiction. The thought of “some guy wrote this based on an old book/movie just for fun” is in the back of your mind. I think that the aforementioned bad examples rely on desires — far off, impossible things, like dating an A-list celebrity — whereas the good ones rely on universal experiences that many (or all) of us can see ourselves in. Because again, when they’re good, they’re just fiction. And all good fiction is relatable.
On a less serious note, I’ve also been joking that the fanfiction capabilities of a young woman obsessed with Hot Young Celebrity PALE in comparison to a gay person obsessed with a decades-old franchise few people care about. You’d be wrong to underestimate the gays’ ability to become deeply entrenched in things like wizards and vampires and mythical creatures.
This all feels like kind of a ridiculous thing to get up on my soapbox about; I don’t even really read fanfiction. But for almost my entire life, I have been a fan. It’s human to transform upon existing media we enjoy. That’s why we draw pictures of our favorite characters and write alternate endings for our favorite stories. But when money, actors, and reputation get involved, most fanfiction like After and The Love Hypothesis do not have enough ground to stand on to be relatable, thoughtful stories. They’re not designed to be, and they’re often not redesigned enough to make them that way when the check goes through and production begins.
Fanfiction is an integral part of fandom and nobody should be writing it in the hopes that it’ll get picked up by Netflix. It should be written for fun. It should be ridiculous and self-indulgent. But when Hollywood steps in and expresses their interest, those stories do not translate over to blockbuster films without being seriously rewritten. The stories that do work are the ones that already feel like original fiction, and the integration of an existing IP feels secondary. Fiction that happens to be from a fan. We don’t need to be throwing Hollywood money at One Direction fanfiction for a number of reasons. More Wickeds and Cinders could open up a world of interesting adaptations for all ages because they are all one thing: irrevocably and unquestionably complex, human, and beautiful.