50 Shades of Morally Grey: An Exploration into the World of Fan-Fiction

The Lovesick World of Fan-Fiction

The story that comes to mind when thinking about fan fiction is one I'm sure many women growing up in the 2000s could relate to. The sleepless school nights spent in a teenage bedroom desperately scrolling through the pages on the dim light of a phone littered with grammatical errors and descriptions of rude men who hate everyone but her. Reading, studying, absorbing every word like nothing else exists. Falling in love as the characters do, living as they live, crawling into the book, putting on the mask of the main character and making a home for yourself amongst the line breaks until -

To be continued...

The author hasn't posted the next chapter. You are drawn from the world they have created for you, forced back into your reality. You have to wait patiently, pliantly, for the notification that they have updated your escapism. Until then, it was back to real life.

Growing up, I felt isolated in my love for words, none of my friends seemed to share my interest. In the world of binge-watching and the ever-developing short-form content, words fell in last place. So, I did what most children in the world of newly developing technology do, I turned to the Internet. I searched for a place where my love felt at home, and at the age of 12, that's exactly what I thought I had found in the form of the online writing forum, Wattpad.

Wattpad showed me that I was not alone. It showed me that reading and writing was more than just an interest, it was an art form. It allowed me to join a community, a corner of the internet where young girls who turned to writing to express their feelings, sexuality, identity and whatever else, could share their work and create a subculture. It was transformative. It turned me from a reader into a writer. Gone was this barrier between me and 'proper writers', the ones who had to meet with rich older men to get their work published. Immediately at my fingertips was the ability to write and publish whatever I wanted, and read millions of other pieces of work from other writers. Soon I found similar places; Ao3, Tumblr and FanFiction.Net. It was endless, unlimited and ultimately, frighteningly unregulated.

Online writing forums are a host for creative freedom, for better or for worse. However, to analyse them, first, we must understand them. 

These forums very quickly became synonymous with 'fan-fiction' (Brennan 2020). Traditionally, a fan-fiction is a piece of writing that takes inspiration from a pre-existing work, for example, Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil G. Brinton (1913) is a fan-ficiton based on a Jane Austen novel. In recent years, the culture surrounding fan-fiction has changed significantly. Modern interpretations have shifted to placing celebrities or characters as the subject of the writing and is a phenomenon that largely crosses cultural and linguistic borders (Geraghty et al 2022). This can be either as the character or celebrity they already are or as a new character placed into a new narrative while maintaining their name/physicality. These can be differentiated as fandom fan-fiction, i.e. a Harry Potter fan-fiction, or a celebrity fan-fiction, i.e. a Harry Styles fan-fiction. These are usually, though not necessarily, written in an amateur capacity, also usually without the authorisation of the creators of the inspiration text or the celebrities included. While fan-fictions are not a new phenomenon, this cultural shift has been remarkable for a multitude of reasons.

A lot of fan-fiction writing and consumption is done anonymously. Anna Todd, who wrote After, originally a fan-fiction, wrote it under the name Imaginator1D on Wattpad. Similarly, E.L. James wrote Twilight fan-ficition Master of The Universe, which eventually became 50 Shades of Grey, under the name SnowQueens IceDragon. There seems to be comfort in anonymity within this culture, which is aided by online writing forums. One can create a profile that has no indication of who they actually are, as well as read and publish work entirely anonymously. There are a few reasons why this may be an attractive feature.