Chapter Text
Jim wrinkles his nose as a playful blow of wind makes a rogue lock of hair fall across his forehead, tickling the skin. Spock can’t help himself – he reaches out and pushes the rebellious strands out of the way. Jim looks at him and smiles, slow and soft. Gentle. Spock looks away.
“You’re in love with me,” Jim states quietly.
“Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” by kianspo
It starts with a simple question: what if?
What if Captain James T. Kirk hadn’t joined Starfleet?
What if Commander Spock was the only human aboard a Vulcan ship?
What if Kirk and Spock were in love?
To answer these questions, fans create fanfiction—fiction written by fans of a particular TV series, movie, or book that features characters from the source media. Fanfiction is only one facet of the fan experience. The community of fans has intrigued scholars who have formed an academic specialization known as fan studies.
The development of fan studies is often attributed to the work of Henry Jenkins, an American media scholar and Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, with a joint appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Jenkins’ 1992 book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, has been cited as the field’s founding work. Another founder is Camille Bacon-Smith, an American scholar and novelist with a doctorate in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Her 1992 ethnography, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, introduced fan studies to the anthropological field. Additionally, her research shed light on the activities of female science fiction fans, especially aspects of slash fiction,[1] hurt/comfort stories,[2] and the Mary Sue archetype.[3]
As foundational texts, both Jenkins’ Textual Poachers and Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women provide a first step toward understanding the complex activities and interactions of media fans. I would like to expand on their work and the research of other scholars investigating fan studies by focusing specifically on fanfiction in the online Star Trek community. As it is defined today, fanfiction (or fanfic) is a genre made up of “stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet.”[4] The practice did not start out this way, as I will examine, but fanfiction as it is seen today has flourished and spread to every corner of the globe, with an innumerable amount of individuals participating.
Fans and fandom spaces are sometimes misrepresented and misunderstood by the greater population. These stereotypes are perhaps best exemplified in a 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch in which the real Willian Shatner interacts with fictional Star Trek fans. Henry Jenkins summarizes the portrayal of these fans, stating that the sketch presents people who are “brainless consumers . . . devoting their life to the cultivation of worthless knowledge . . . [and] are unable to separate fantasy from reality,” among other negative qualities.[5] Fans are burdened by this juvenile portrayal of the average fan and the ridicule for media fans has only grown as individuals engage in more and more layers of fandom activities. Perhaps most unique is the misrepresentation of fanfiction.
Often understood solely as an infringement of copyright laws, fanfiction has been looked down upon by popular culture and has thus led those who create or consume it to separate their public lives from the lives or personae they undertake while online and writing or reading fanfiction. As a result, a vast online community has emerged around fanfiction practices. Engaging with this media requires an understanding of unstated rules and an acquisition of vocabulary unique to the fanfiction community.
Often identified as the beginning of modern fandom and fanfiction, the Star Trek fandom and its history offer an intriguing insight into fandom formation and practices.
Before I present the history of fanfiction and the results of my research, it is important to contextualize my personal relationship with fanfiction. I feel it is essential for the reader to be aware of my pre-existing connection with fanfiction and my position as a member of the fanfiction community. My journey with fanfiction began in 2013 when I was twelve. I was in middle school and had been reading Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Heroes of Olympus series. Enthralled and excited by the world Riordan had created, I used my parents' computer to search for more material between the release of the novels.
What I found online was a never-ending wellspring of content created by and for fans. I had stumbled across fanart, fan videos on YouTube, and—best of all—fanfiction. At the time, the most popular site to read fanfiction was fanfiction.net. I was on the site every chance I got, reading fanfic and feeling the same joy I had felt when I read Riordan’s series. As I consumed more media, I would go onto the site and find fanfiction for those shows and books as well. By age 13 I had started writing fanfiction and posting it on the site, following the genre’s unwritten rules I had learned through reading fanfiction. Fanfiction followed me through my years in middle and high school. Then, in the spring of 2018, I began watching Star Trek: The Original Series. I was enamored and began reading and writing fanfiction for the show almost immediately. As of 2022, I am still an avid reader and writer of Star Trek fanfiction.
Nearly ten years after I discovered fanfiction, I am hoping to create a better understanding of the genre and its community. However, since Star Trek fans almost exclusively interact online, I have faced the need to modify traditional ethnographic methods of collecting data to suit the reality of this community. Due to ridicule from outsiders, many who read or write fanfiction keep their activity in the community very private, relishing in the anonymity that online spaces provide. These circumstances made it clear to me that if I were to conduct a study on fanfiction communities, I would need to seek interlocutors from the online community. As a result, I have worked online with eleven individuals from around the world who read and/or write fanfiction for the Star Trek community.
What follows is a selected presentation of the history of fanfiction, the methods used in this study, an introduction to the individuals who participated, and a discussion of what I have discovered about the culture of fanfiction in the Star Trek community.
[1] Slash fiction is a genre of fanfiction that focuses on the romantic relationship between characters of the same gender.
[2] Hurt/comfort is a genre of fanfiction that involves physical or emotional pain to one character who is then cared for by another
[3] The Mary Sue trope describes a fictional character, usual a woman, who is seen as too perfect and almost boring due to their lack of flaws. Most commonly, this character is an idealized version of the author that has been included in the story.
[4] “Fan fiction,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, accessed November 30, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fan%20fiction.
[5] Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Studies in Culture and Communication). (Routledge, 1992), 10