“Fifty Shades of Grey” is quite possibly one of the most disrespected novels of the modern era. A former Twilight fanfiction, it’s also perhaps the most infamous works to make the jump from fanfic to book to its eventual film adaptation. In all honesty, I have yet to either read the books or watch the movies. I think the rampant controversy has successfully scared me away from ever doing so.
However, Fifty Shades of Grey is far from the only fanfic to leave fanfiction websites for bookshelves and the screen. In recent years, publishers and literary agents have begun using fanfiction to help find up-and-coming writers with much greater frequency. Novels like “After” (originally a One Direction fanfic), “The Love Hypothesis” (“Star Wars”) and “Point Pleasant”, (c’mon, we can’t not reference “Supernatural”) all started as the product of creative, determined fans given access to the internet and a blank text document. “After” even advertises its origins on the cover, boasting over a billion views on Wattpad.
It’s understandable, when Fifty Shades of Grey is so notorious, that someone would be hesitant to pick up a book of similar origins. However, treating Fifty Shades of Grey as the standard skews perception of what fanfiction actually is.
The “About Us” page for Ao3, one of the largest websites for sharing and reading fanfics, calls fanfiction a kind of “transformative work.” Their parent company, the Organization for Transformative Works, defines the term as any work that “takes something extant and turns it into something with a new purpose, sensibility or mode of expression.”
Fanfiction, therefore, can be defined as any written transformative work. I had to write about fanfiction for my last literature exam, which is to say, I had to write about the ancient Roman epic “The Aeneid.” Based on the works of Homer, the story features events central to “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” as well as a minor character from “The Iliad” as the protagonist. However, it takes place mostly outside the original narratives and completely invents new characters and plotlines. Essentially, the author, Virgil, wrote a fanfiction about a minor character from a book he read.
In a similar matter, Wicked, the book that inspired the musical that inspired the movie that broke the internet for a short while when it released last year, is a fanfic of The Wizard of Oz. “The Lord of the Flies” was a fanfiction mocking a then-popular children’s book “The Coral Island.” “Paradise Lost” is fanfiction of Genesis. “The Divine Comedy” is a blatant self-insert crossover fanfiction, drawing from Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History”, the Christian Bible and “The Aeneid.”
Fanfiction is a broad category. Though modern fanfics are often romantic or sexual, assuming all fanfics are nothing but sex and romance isn’t a fair categorization for the genre as a whole.
Fanfics can be poems, prose or short stories. They can be shorter than this article, or longer than full novels. They can be styled as rom-coms, horror stories, mysteries, sci-fi adventures or anything else you can think of. Some are romance heavy, others more character focused or plot driven. Plenty are all three.
Sure, I’ve seen some fics that made me want to bleach my eyes and throw my computer out the window. But I’ve also read some that were just as good professionally published novels, written and posted online for free.
Roast the heck out of Fifty Shades of Grey if you want. Just don’t assume that every former fanfiction is the same way.