Book 10: The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes

I will probably use my dying breath to defend fanfiction.

That’s hyperbolic, but I do feel very strongly about fanfiction as a subversive space and as a legitimate literary genre.

For one, it’s been around in our literary history longer than it’s had a name. Much, if not all, of what we read and celebrate in Western canon is fanfiction. Paradise Lost is fanfiction. Dante’s Divine Comedy is fanfiction that references yet another fanfiction: Virgil’s Aeneid, which was fanfiction of The Iliad. Shakespeare’s plays are fanfiction—even RPF, in some cases.

Even Disney movies are fanfiction, in that they are retellings of fairy tales that are basically AUs in some cases. The Emmy Award-winning web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a Pride and Prejudice modern AU. Fanfiction is everywhere.

Secondly, modern fanfiction culture—fanfic that is written by fans and posted on the internet or in zines for other people’s free-of-cost consumption—is representative of how we’ve always shared and altered stories, and the genre has its own tropes and traditions, like every literary genre.

What makes fanfiction extra special is that it’s also subversive—it challenges capitalism and publishing norms and is a space where people can write themselves into stories produced by a culture whose mass media largely ignores marginalized identities. Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT, once said, “Fan fiction [sic] is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk.”

I read somewhere that, way back at the beginning of the internet, fanfiction was called “speculative fiction.”^[1] Whether or not that’s true, it is what fanfiction is all about: People speculating about familiar stories. “What would it be like if…?” “What if this character was…?” “What if instead they did…?” “What if they were FIREFIGHTERS IN SPACE?” “What if these characters, who are actually firefighters in space, were kindergarten teachers who fall in love?”

Books like The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes are kind of where those spaces—the historical appropriation of familiar stories in literary fiction and subversive reimaginings of the text in “fanfiction”—meet, to grand results.