'If you exist on the internet, odds are you've heard of fanfiction. For those of you who have been hiding under an electronic rock: fanfiction, or fanfic, uses the characters, sets and plotlines from other people's professional works to create new stories and artworks. While it's been around since the dawn of time - Shakespeare lifted Hamlet and King Lear from literary and historical sources - the birth of the internet has seen fanfiction flourish. Fans can now engage one another with ease, can talk and be heard, and there are hundreds of millions of words of fanfiction on the internet. There's fanfiction about books, movies, television shows, comic books, video games, rock bands, and even the Old Spice Guy. Online archives, such as fanfiction.net, archiveofourown.org and Livejournal.com, are home to millions of stories. Some of the most popular 'fandoms' (the fan culture organised around any given media) contain hundreds of thousands of stories: on fanfiction.net there are over 660,000 Harry Potter stories, more than 15,000 about One Direction, and even 778 about the Bible. Writing fanfiction can be a celebration, with fans unwilling to relinquish their favourite characters and settings. It can also be a critique, with writers modifying the original text in a form of protest, most notably through the dismantling of heterosexual norms. They aren't produced for profit: they are written because, as Lev Grossman wrote, fanfiction writers are 'fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.'' (Publication abstract)
