TECHNOLOGY
ENABLED THE
EXPLOSION OF
FAN CULTURE AND
TORE DOWN THE
FENCES BETWEEN
“CANON”
AND FORMER
SERFS IN THE
FIELD OF THE
IMAGINATION.
sal” stories anymore, because every show or series can
find its audience—and its audience can engage on fan
sites, forums, and various social media behemoths, in
breathless real time.
Fan culture is febrile, volatile, and entirely unchill.
That’s not always a gift to creators, who often sim-
ply want to delight their audience, but the barriers
between the two are breaking down. What fanfic gave
the new generation of creators was the understand-
ing that there can be many stories at once. All-female
reboots, black superheroes, Asian rom-coms, queer
comedy: Culture is beginning to look the way fan fic-
tion always has, a cascading plurality of possibilities.
But it wasn’t fan fiction itself, or even fanfic in gen-
eral, that enacted the change—it was technology that
enabled the explosion of fan culture and tore down
the fences between traditional “canon” creators and
former serfs in the field of the imagination. The inter-
net destroyed the cultural center, ushering those on
the margins into a new mainstream. Of the original
members of our Oxford Fan Fiction and Folklore soci-
ety, by the way, two are now published authors, one is
a cultural critic, and one is a major editor at a science
fiction/fantasy publishing house.
You can still detect a patina of embarrassment when-
ever you ask another writer if they ever dabbled in
fanfic. But a surprising number of them did and do—
editors, novelists, journalists, film and TV writers, those
like me who do a bit of everything, all of us with our
secret shared history. One of them, a senior colleague
in my writers’ room, has a particular refrain when-
ever she wants to pitch a plot twist. “Is there a world,”
she asks, “where it doesn’t happen like this?” When
you’re a woman of color in an industry built by white
men, you develop novel ways of pitching your point
of view. You don’t tell them how it should be. You ask
them how it could be. Is there a world where it doesn’t
have to happen like that?
I think there is. There’s a world where boys and girls
and everyone else get more than a single story about
how the future shakes out. There’s a world where epic
mass-culture storytelling can be nimble and liberat-
ing, can inform and inspire and delight all at the same
time. There’s a world where we don’t have to wrap up
the whole thing, à la Game of Thrones, by insisting that
the women were crazy all along and burning the world
down with everyone inside.
If this were the hero’s journey, this is where my part
of it would end. Shy, nerdy girl overcomes a standard
set of obstacles to make it in Hollywood. Pull back on
the palm trees and roll the credits. But this isn’t a sim-
ple, single story. I’m bored of that sort of story, and—
admit it—so are you. I’m interested in the collective head.
I’m interested in bigger, stranger stories about who we
are and how we survive this slow-motion, 10-car, flam-
ing freeway pileup of a century, and why we might
deserve to do so. Because survival is insufficient.
ple to leave their houses, find a place to park, and buy a
ticket on opening weekend, or else be considered a flop.
This means mainstream cinema still needs to appeal to
what the industry considers its broadest possible audi-
ence. So it’s superhero blockbusters, endless remakes
and reboots, and sequels to sequels that dominate the
box office. Safe bets.
Episodic narrative television, meanwhile, allows
for many stories being possible at once. Intimate and
intricate, it may be the novel form of our age—but to
reach its true potential, it took the advent of stream-
ing platforms. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO. Streaming
technology changed one simple thing about the way
we tell collective stories today: It made any show the-
oretically accessible to anyone, at any time. A TV writer
is no longer obliged to appeal to a very large number
of people at a specific time every week and hold their
attention through ad breaks. Suddenly, TV became a
medium that could find its audience wherever they
were in the world, so long as they had broadband and
someone’s login details. Nobody has to write “univer-
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