Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 31
(2017)– [tijdschrift] Literatuur zonder leeftijd–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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Fan fiction as speculative life writing
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contributes to identity construction and, more specifically, how fan fiction functions as a form of speculative life writing. Not all fan fiction stories are speculative life writing. Speculative life writing falls under a very specific type of fan fiction - self-insertion fanfic narratives - that are, in fact, much rarer and less popular than many other types of fan fiction, e.g. romance narratives pairing characters who are not necessarily in a romantic relationship in the published original work.Ga naar voetnoot1 Most fan fiction is based on writing about what fan fiction writers call the ‘canonical’ characters, that is, characters created by the author of the published work. ‘Canonical’ thus refers to faithfulness to the source text (e.g. writing about Harry and Hermione in a Harry Potter fanfic). In contrast, self-insertion fanfic narratives belong to the larger category of fanfics including original characters, OCs in the fanfic jargon. These are original creations of fanfic writers and do not exist in the published source texts at all. Those stories where the original characters are functioning as avatars of the fan writers are called self-insertion fanfics (or self-inserts) because a version of a writer's persona is inserted in the text. The setting of the story may be a fictional universe or the world in which the writer actually lives and into which fictional elements are introduced. Self-insertion fan fiction is not life writing in the narrow definition where life writing consists of narratives outlining (f)actual events from one's past. The stories that we tell about our pasts are central to our understanding of our identities and selves. Yet, the stories that we tell about our futures and alternative or possible identities are also important for how we imagine ourselves, our desires and hopes, our fears, and the limits of our existence. In an earlier paper (Lehtonen, 2015), I briefly defined speculative life writing and examined how fan fiction can offer possibilities for writers' gendered identity work by providing a safe venue where young women writers reflect upon their life events and identities by partly fictionalizing their real-life experiences (see also Black, 2008; Leppänen, 2007; Warburton, 2010). The | |||||||||||||||
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aim of this contribution is to extend the theoretical discussion of fan fiction as speculative life writing with the help of one case study to illustrate my argument. The example in this contribution is a self-insertion narrative based on the fantasy role-playing video game series Dragon Age (Bioware, 2009-2014), written by a young adult male. This example will serve, first, as a basis for a further exploration of the notion of speculative life writing. Self-insertion fan fiction in effect broadens the scope of life writing. Second, although a significant amount of fan fiction is dedicated to romance scenarios, this example illustrates that speculative life writing can - like all kinds of life writing - take many forms. Moreover, the example continues to illustrate the ways in which fantasy worlds allow us to make sense of our actual lived realities. In the following, I will start by conceptualizing speculative life writing as a discursive practice of identity construction that allows for experimenting with possible selves. | |||||||||||||||
Speculative life writing and possible selvesClassic definitions of life writing describe it as retrospective documentation of past events and experiences that are constructed from the point of view of the present experience of the writer (see e.g. Lejeune, 1989, p. 4; Smith & Watson, 2010, p. 22). There has been less consideration for what could be life writing oriented towards the future, or towards the possibilities that one's life and selves could develop into - even though sociolinguistic studies of narrative suggest that stories about the future may be in some contexts, as in conversational talk among adolescents, much more common than stories about the past (Georgakopoulou, 2007, pp. 47-48). Indeed, the kind of ‘what if this happened to me’ or ‘what if I was x’ story-telling is extremely significant for people not only in terms of practicing for future scenarios but also more broadly for their cognitive-affective sense of self. While a lot has been written about the relationship between memory and life writing about the past, memory is also crucial for us to imagine the future. Indeed, current neuropsychology uses the term ‘prospective brain’ to characterize the way we use the stored information in our brains to simulate possible future events (see e.g. Schachter et al., 2007, p. 657). As Bruner (2002, p. 67) writes, we ‘constantly construct and reconstruct our selves to meet the | |||||||||||||||
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needs of the situations we encounter [...] with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopes and fears for the future’. That is, while remembering and organizing our pasts into our life stories that inform our sense of self, we also habitually imagine and write our lives and selves speculatively towards the future. Psychologists and educational scientists have for a long time been examining the ways in which our hopes and fears for the future affect our present sense of self. Our ability to imagine positive future selves can, for instance, bring greater clarity to one's values, increase positive emotion, and boost one's performance (see Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006, p. 75), or affect students' agency and motivation to learn and be integrated in society as future professionals (Huhtala, 2014; Virtanen, 2013). Markus and Nurius (1986, p. 954) employ the concept of possible selves to discuss people's views of what they ‘would very much like to become’, ‘could become’ or ‘are afraid of becoming’. According to them, possible selves are important for identity work since ‘they function as incentives for future behavior (i.e. they are selves to be approached or avoided), and, second, because they provide an evaluative and interpretive context for the current view of self’ (Markus & Nurius, 1986, p. 955). While the concept of possible selves does not necessarily suggest that people produce any kind of writing about their potential identities, it provides a framework that may explain the motivation for speculative life writing: to gain a greater understanding of oneself, potentials and limitations included. Thus, in the definition used here, all kinds of life writing featuring possible selves and with an orientation towards the future and the potential rather than the past and the actualized fall under the category of speculative life writing. Examples of this category would include blog posts about hopes for the coming year, student portfolios outlining career plans, or fan fiction pieces where writers test how they might react in fictional situations. In self-insertion fan fiction stories, the authors construct their possible selves through speculative life writing in a fictional context, framed by the online fan culture where fans' activities circulate around specific published works. According to Leppänen (2007, p. 160), ‘despite the fact that these constructions are essentially fictional [...] fan fiction forums provide [the writers] with virtual rooms of their own where they can investigate the | |||||||||||||||
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questions, challenges and troubles they face in their real lives’ (see also Warburton, 2010, p. 134). On a conceptual level, this is not very different from authors producing (semi)autobiographical works, as Cho's (2015, n.p.) comparison of his own literary and fan fiction texts shows - for him, self-insertion, or ‘making texts literally accommodate [himself]’ is ‘the best way to write [his] identity into being’. However, when writing self-insertion stories, most online fan fiction writers are not writing their full lives in fictional form but, often in rather short narratives, explore certain aspects of their lives and identities. Taking my cue from sociolinguistic study of ‘small stories’ by Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008) who depart from those linguistic studies of life narratives where the emphasis has been - as with life writing studies in general - on elaborated stories about personal pasts, I maintain that studying all kinds of life stories is important for understanding how people make sense of their identities and lives through narratives. According to Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (p. 381), small stories are various ‘under-represented narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, and shared (known) events, but it also captures allusions to (previous) tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell’. Of these narrative activities, the focus here will be on the tellings of hypothetical events, very broadly understood: I argue that even fictional stories about ourselves can be a form of life writing where we speculate about our possible selves. Here I am interested in fanfics in which writers deliberately and explicitly mix events and people from their actual everyday realities with clearly fictional elements. How do we know, then, whether the fanfic narratives are ‘purely’ fictional or whether they include elements of life writing through self-insertion? As with all kinds of life writing, as Kokkola (2003, pp. 57-58, 85) argues, nothing on the textual level necessarily separates fact from fiction. Instead, paratextual information about the work signals the genre and sets the horizon of expectations for readers. Paratextual elements are attached to a narrative but are not part of it, such as book covers and blurbs, prefaces, or notes (see Genette, 1997, pp. 1-2). Or, in the case of fan fiction, the brief synopses and the so-called Author's notes that the writers may attach to their fanfics. All paratextual items function as framing devices that, like prologues in literary texts, ‘establish a context for evaluating subsequent | |||||||||||||||
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events’ (Dittmar, 1983, p. 192). In some fan fiction forums, brief synopses of the narrative are required - these make it easier for readers to browse the stories. Author's notes, on the other hand, are not obligatory; they usually occur at the beginning of the whole text or each chapter, but can also be found elsewhere. They often include contextual information about the origins and motivations for the story and the process of writing. In the example discussed here, they provide an explicit statement that the story involves a self-insertion character and comparisons between the author and the character in the story. Even though fan fiction writing is a communal activity and examining the interaction between the author and reviewers can be fruitful for mapping both the collaborative and normative aspects of fan fiction, I will here only focus on the fanfic narrative and the Author's notes to illustrate how the story allows for the author's speculative life writing about his possible selves. In the following, I will discuss a fanfic by a young adult male writer: a story of an IT student falling into the fantasy world of Thedas, written by JamieXYZ.Ga naar voetnoot2 I will first introduce the online context of the fanfic and, again taking my cue from Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008, pp. 382, 385), move on to examine how the writer constructs his possible selves in his fanfic narrative and his Author's notes by three levels of identity positioning. | |||||||||||||||
Waking up in a different world: speculating about one's fears and limitationsOn many fan fiction sites users can create community pages where they can collect, for instance, their favourite stories or stories of a certain genre. One such page on FanFiction.net focuses on self-insertion narratives based on | |||||||||||||||
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the Dragon Age fantasy role-playing video game series and, more specifically, on self-inserts where a person from the real world enters the fictional world of the game. Role-playing (video) games (RPGs) themselves are, potentially, a form of speculative life writing in cases where the player has the possibility to create their own character based on themselves. Nevertheless, playing a role-playing game does not equal life writing - player-created characters can also be based on something completely different from players themselves. Moreover, to be speculative life writing, the gaming experience would have to be documented in some way, be it in a written narrative or, say, in a narrated gameplay video. On FanFiction.net, the life stories integrated into game narratives do take written forms. Since for RPGs such as the Dragon Age part of playing the game itself involves creating an original player-character, game-based fan fiction is probably more open to including original characters, including self-insertions. The story discussed here, published between 2014 and 2015, is a completed English-language narrative of almost 100,000 words. The author, JamieXYZ, explicitly states both in the story synopsis and in his Author's notes at the beginning of the first chapter that the narrative involves self-insertion. On his profile page on FanFiction.net, he explains that he is a guy who studies IT, reveals his age, country of origin, and lists his favourite video games, most of which belong to the genre of fantasy RPGs. In the fanfic narrative, an 18-year-old young adult guy studying IT leaves for a walk after a frustrating programming session, loses consciousness, and wakes up in the fantasy world of Thedas. Apart from a couple of brief sections told from other characters' points of view, the story is a first-person narrative told by the author-narrator-protagonist. The register in the first-person narrative is colloquial, involving some crude language and plenty of sarcasm and self-irony - this is in contrast with the epic register in the original fantasy game, although the game itself also involves sarcastic dialogue and parody in portraying some of the typical fantasy tropes. Most of the humour in the fanfic results from the fact that even though the protagonist is aware of the game contents, this information is only partially helpful for the nerdy ‘city boy’ trying to survive in a medieval world. In the following, I will discuss three levels of identity positioning in the narrative to illustrate how the speculative elements merge with the author's actual life experiences: 1) how | |||||||||||||||
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characters are positioned within the story, 2) how the author-narrator positions himself in relation to societal identity discourses, and 3) how the author-narrator-positions himself in the interactive situation. The last level of positioning is essential for the reading of his text as speculative life writing. | |||||||||||||||
Positioning of characters within the storyIn JamieXYZ's fanfic narrative, the protagonist is a kind of antihero - he fails at most things that require physical prowess and is dependent on other characters' help to survive. He, for instance, hurts himself all the time, whines about the cold and can, at first, only get a job as a bartender since his skills in professions such as woodwork and blacksmithing are lacking; his knowledge about programming, biology, or advanced mathematics is of no use. Throughout the narrative, the narrator-protagonist comments on his failures and less desirable personality features - including cowardice and hypocrisy - in a sarcastic tone. He explicitly describes himself as a skinny ‘city boy’ who has only ever gone camping for a few days, has never been to a seedy neighbourhood, and misses the modern gadgets and sounds. Instead of feeling excitement about the fantastic medieval world, his initial reaction to the harsh milieu is a frustrated outburst: ‘f**k simple lifestyle in general’. His two closest companions are females who are much more skilled at fighting and surviving than he - a female mage wizard of the fantasy world and another teenager who has been mysteriously brought from Earth to Thedas. The protagonist respects them and also learns from them. While the female characters both try to flirt with the protagonist no romance is involved, in contrast to many of the female-authored fanfics. In the end, both female characters get badly wounded or die. Although the protagonist does briefly ponder his emotional reactions to losing his companions - and his emotions towards them while they are still around - he does not dwell on these events as much as on his own personal development and changing understanding of his moral decisions in fatal situations. In this sense, the author maintains what is generally seen a typical (boys') adventure story structure in his text throughout. The classic adventure story structure is also evident in the development arc for the character: over the two years that he spends in the fantasy universe the terrified, clueless protagonist turns into a more savvy survivalist | |||||||||||||||
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who realizes that his literacy skills - or skills as a ‘book nerd’ - enable him to learn more about Thedas at the local libraries as well as to get him well-paid jobs. The protagonist also tries to learn sword-fighting, but mainly fails miserably and only gets into fights when he is attacked by someone else. While earlier in the narrative he feels great remorse about killing a person attacking him, later on he views killing as a necessary survival strategy; he also changes his views about the usefulness of a ‘simple’ lifestyle: It was during times like these that I was secretly happy for my change of lifestyle, a far cry from the kind of geeky lifestyle back home. The old me would have been totally exhausted by now. [...] I didn't regret it at all, since I only did what I had to do when in a tight spot like that. The development arc allows for extended speculation about a possible self: how would the geeky IT programmer change over time in specific circumstances? This speculation is by no means naïve or escapist but - despite the fantasy surroundings that could be viewed as an allegory for war - rather realistic. The protagonist is not, for instance, proud of his violent actions but views his survival as a result of lucky escapes rather than heroic victories. Part of this realism draws on the connections to the real-world discourses of identity that the author approaches somewhat critically. | |||||||||||||||
Positioning in relation to societal identity discoursesLarger societal discourses of three identity categories are central in characterizing the protagonist in the narrative: discourses of nerdiness/geekiness, discourses of ethnicity, and discourses of masculinity. Although these are listed as separate entities, the discourses are entangled and the identity categories intersect with each other in the representation of a geeky Asian young adult male. As we have already seen, the humorous portrayal of the geek in the medieval wilderness relies on readers' knowledge about discourses of geeks in our contemporary world. The author partly makes fun of his geekiness but partly sees it as an asset; thus the representation of the geeky character is multifaceted. Moreover, the author challenges stereotypes associated with ethnicity and masculinity. As regards ethnicity, the narrator-protagonist is at several moments irritated about the fact that other | |||||||||||||||
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characters make assumptions about his country of origin based on his skin colour. He also implicitly directs the criticism at the original game itself: there are no Asian characters in the game, so the ethnicity that he represents has no place there. The narrator's comment of ‘racist bastards’ could thus be directed both at the characters in his story and at the game developers in the real world. This is also an indication that when entering a fantasy world, the writer or the gamer does not necessarily leave their real-life identities behind - here the author constructs himself as a representative of nerdy Asian masculinity both in and outside his fanfic narrative. As regards gender, the narrator-protagonist clearly does not meet the stereotypical criteria for a masculine fighter - he is skinny, fairly short, and, at the beginning of the story, in fairly bad shape. He is also not able to fit in the fantasy world discourse of geeky guys - the discourse of magic users - since he has no magic abilities and he even fails at trying alchemy despite his studies in chemistry. However, the protagonist is not particularly disturbed by the fact that he does not fit in with the dominant discourses of masculinity - in fact, he explicitly refuses to fit in at points: For a while, I did picture myself as a knight. I mean, come on, every other guy like me probably dreamed of being one in dashing shining armour when he was a small boy. Knights or Power Rangers. I quickly pushed that thought out of my head. Here the narrator is clearly referring to discourses circulating outside the Dragon Age universe in contemporary society and popular culture - evident in the juxtaposition of knights and Power Rangers. In the story, he does not want to become a knight, however, because it is too risky and, in the particular scene here, he prefers not to serve a corrupt lord. Elsewhere the narrator furthermore points out that he does not want to be a hero nor is able to be one - while his life has been saved by others, including his female companions, he is unable to save them. As a whole, the narrative builds up space for a complex geeky masculinity that is neither seen as something to be fully avoided nor as something to be only celebrated or proud of. | |||||||||||||||
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Furthermore, the narrative allows for ethical reflections and speculations about the choices and actions of the possible self. | |||||||||||||||
Positioning in the interactive situationBut is the protagonist a possible self of the author? So far we could have been examining a fictional story about a contemporary young adult guy struggling in a medieval world - written by someone who is clearly familiar with the Dragon Age universe, gaming, and popular culture in general but not necessarily by someone who has based the protagonist on himself. However, an examination of level-two identity positioning in Bamberg and Georgakopoulou's model provides us with the connections between the narrator-protagonist of the story and the author himself. That is, an examination of the ways in which the author-narrator positions himself in the interactive situation, which here involves the process of producing a fanfic on a public forum that allows for reader comments. Apart from stating in the story synopsis that the narrative is a self-insertion fanfic, in several Author's notes at the beginning and at the end of each chapter the author compares himself to the protagonist, as is the case at the end of chapter 2: ‘yes I'm a sissy so if I'd end up in this scenario I would probably wet my pants too.’ There are also several remarks in the narrative itself where the narrator talks about himself outside the Dragon Age fantasy universe - he, for instance, ‘really’ hates coding, is used to heat, likes fast food, and hates cakes. A point-by-point comparison between the narrator-protagonist and the person described on the author's profile page confirms the similarities between the two: both are skinny, short young adult Asians studying IT and fascinated by fantasy games and TV series. While I do not know for certain whether the author is actually revealing real-life facts about himself, I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the information either. Moreover, whether or not the facts are facts, this is the discursive mechanism that informs the genre of life writing: by framing the narrative with paratextual, supposedly factual information about the author. This is also why I interpret the story as speculative life writing: there is textual-discursive evidence of facts and fiction being mixed in an adventure narrative speculating about the writer's possible selves in scenarios that - however unlikely - reveal a lot about the | |||||||||||||||
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writer's fears and limitations but also about his imagined ways of overcoming those. | |||||||||||||||
Speculative lives, hopeful futures?Self-insertion fan fiction offers writers a discursive practice where they can experiment with their possible selves, their desires, hopes, and fears through speculative life writing, mixing real-life elements and fiction. This kind of imaginative play with identities is a significant part of understanding and constructing selfhood that happens by drawing on various shared, (popular) cultural discourses, making them creatively one's own through speculative narratives. While fan fiction writing is a communal activity where the texts are negotiated in relation to and often produced together with readers, I would suggest that whatever the reader responses, the self-insertion narratives are important for their authors. In terms of self-understanding all the small stories matter, whether they are well or badly written, surprising or unoriginal, radical or conventional. Is this life writing then? Certainly not, if life writing is only about past or present facts. On the other hand, people who are unable to speculate about their futures are more likely to be stuck with their present conditions, with their past and present notions of themselves. While readers may not always appreciate wish-fulfilment narratives, hopeful stories about fantastic or (anti-)heroic selves may be essential for the writers' self-understanding and ability to envision possible futures. If you ask me, anything that allows for imagining different futures, various scenarios, and possible selves and thus enables people to develop and go on in their lives is life writing of the most important kind. | |||||||||||||||
Secondary sources
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