[Note: This is the second of a three-part series highlighting some of Hannibal‘s unique contributions to the television world, in commemoration of its final week on NBC. See Part 1 here, and tune in tomorrow for the third installment. Finally, please note that this post contains spoilers through episode 3.9]

Throughout the series’ three-season run, Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller has asserted that he regards the show as fanfiction: an affectionate remix of elements from Thomas Harris’ novels Red Dragon and Hannibal Rising, as well as from previous adaptations of those works. Hannibal, then, is transparent about being one of many “proliferations of shared sources” that comprise the “metaphorical archive” of the fandom’s fiction (De Kosnik 119). In positioning the series as fanfiction, and he and his team as fanfiction writers, Fuller claims the identity and ethos of not just a fan, but a feminine-gendered fan, those most maligned and oft-mocked in many media depictions of fandom. With that ethos in hand, Hannibal-as-fanfic has chosen to intertextually and ardently acknowledge both the practices and the affect of its primarily female fandom—allowing Fannibals to see some part of themselves, of their fannish identity, reflected back with love from within the series itself.

Hannibal treats the repetitive nature of fanfic—stories that “play out” a multiplicity of variations of the same basic story—as a source of narrative strength: because in repetition, the series suggests, there is possibility (ibid). Within a fandom’s archive, as Will puts it: “Everything that can happen, happens. It has to end well and it has to end badly. It has to end every way that it can” (Hannibal, “Primavera” 3.2). The archive is always in the act of Becoming, and, as Abigail De Kosnik argues in “Fifty Shades and the Archive of Women’s Culture,” that ongoing evolution asks fans to repeatedly engage with the archive’s contents, old and new, and to determine for themselves which stories “satisfy, which . . . liberate, and which . . . alienate” (De Kosnik 120). In this way, fans perform a careful cultivation of their preferred variations of the narrative and sketch out their own corner of the archive—their “fanon”—which captures the story elements they most enjoy (ibid).

As fanfic—as a fan-authored text, albeit a network televised one—Hannibal openly acknowledges that it’s both a product of fannish cultivation and a participant in a wider ecology of fannish production. The events of episode 3.9, “…and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,” for example, underscore Fuller and company’s awareness of—and affection for—contributions that fans themselves have made to this shared archive during the series’ run.

In this scene, a reluctantly un-retired Will Graham is prowling the scene of the Tooth Fairy’s latest murder when he’s confronted by tabloid journalist Freddie Lounds. Will hasn’t seen Freddie years—since he pretended to kill her in order to impress Hannibal at the end of season two—but he’s clearly been keeping up with her work at Tattle Crime.

Will: I’m not talking to you.
Freddie: We’re co-conspirators, Will. I died for you and your cause.
Will: You didn’t die enough. You came into my hospital room while I was sleeping, flipped back the covers, and snapped a photo of my temporary colostomy bag.
Freddie: I covered your junk with a black box. A big black box. You’re welcome.
Will: You called us ‘murder husbands’!
Freddie: You did run off to Europe together.

GIF credit: http://televisiongif.tumblr.com/post/125603956066

What’s important here—aside from actor Hugh Dancy’s delicious facial expression—is that “murder husbands” is a fan-generated term, one that some Fannibals use to describe the gorgeous, gory relationship between Hannibal and Will. Specifically, describing the men as “murder husbands” underscores the deadly potential of their pairing, something explored with particular aplomb at the end of season 2, when Will not only pretended to kill Freddie but actually did murder one of Hannibal’s former patients—whom Hannibal had sent to kill Will. With Hannibal’s lethal cunning and Will’s own capacity for violence combined, some Fannibals believe that “Hannigram” could form a deadly power couple and wreak beautiful, terrible havoc.

While other TV series like the CW’s Supernatural have invoked fan-created names for slash ships within their diegesis, what makes Hannibal‘s move distinctive is that the way in which “murder husbands” was incorporated points to a canonization of not only fans’ terminology but also of the slashy interpretive practices from which it arose. That is, Freddie’s breezy response to Will’s frustration—”Well, you did run off to Europe together”—suggests that Fuller and his writers anticipated one way in which fans might interpret the pair’s adventures abroad during the first half of season three. Of course, the men didn’t really run off together—Hannibal fled and Will chased after—but Freddie, like many fans, reads that pursuit and their eventual reunion as romantic in nature.

Further, putting the term in Freddie’s hands seems utterly in character; after all, “murder husbands” makes for great copy. But she’s also spent a lot of time writing about Will and Hannibal: dissecting their relationship, giving their stories her own special twist, and even contemplating Will’s, uh, “junk”—in essence, Freddie makes a living doing female fannish work. Thus, in calling out the “murder husbands,” she acts as a savvy avatar for the series’ female fans.

Ultimately, the invocation of “murder husbands” doesn’t read as either a mocking of fandom or as red meat tossed to keep the Fannibals at bay, but rather as a meaningful incorporation of fannish practice into the diegetic narrative. The canonization of “murder husbands” reflects Fuller and company’s awareness that the shared archive of Hannibal fandom, of which the series is part, continues to evolve. By employing both fan terminology and interpretative practice within its narrative, Hannibal firmly positions both its own story and those of the Fannibals as co-equal parts of that archive’s transformative ecology.

In the context of the series’ cancellation, Hannibal‘s intertextual alliance with its fans is a source of hope a reminder that within the fandom’s archive, no matter what choices NBC makes, “Everything that can happens, happens . . . This is [just] the way it ended for us” (Hannibal, “Primavera” 3.2).

Beyond aca-fandom, what do fan practices and academic labor contribute to our understanding of one another? Can these labors of love lead to coalition building across industries?

I have been engaged in a lot of discussions about participatory labor and new media lately (both in official and unofficial realms). Repeatedly, I am struck by how rarely those of us that study fans, resistance, and the free labor of online produsers (to use Axel Bruns’ neologism) see ourselves in our research participants outside of the realm of aca-fans. Recognizing the contestations surrounding the term “aca-fan,” I would argue that all scholars are fans of our research objects. If not, why would we bother? Film scholars have to be fans of film to subject themselves to hours upon hours of watching. Rare is the political communication scholar who is not, deep inside, a politics junky (the enactment of addiction language being common in many a fandom). As Jonathan Gray has pointed out, people can be fans of news though media audience studies rarely discuss the phenomena.

Certainly not all scholars are fans in the traditional sense, but they are expected to be media consumers if they want to speak with authority. This expectation, true of fan cultures as well, can be exclusionary. Studying industries or audiences do not necessarily have to consume the media at the center of their analysis (/tip o’ the hat to T.L. Taylor on that point). Analysis of texts requires familiarity with form, genre conventions, and acknowledging medium specificity, true. That is a far cry from assuming every game scholar owns the latest release or that every television scholar has watched (and liked) every acclaimed series on the air.

Even when scholars don’t claim to be fans of a medium, we are fans of research, theories, subjects, and fields. Fan, moreover, need not imply the uncritical love-fest of pure celebration. Critique,  at it’s most productive, involves the hope that that which we love could be so much better. Many digital production practices, from slash fiction to fan sites to hate watching, are acts of pleasure. As Lisa Henderson discusses in talks on her new book Love and Money, what would our research look like if it looked more like our acknowledgement sections? Can we love our research more?

When analyzing “fan practices,” by treating these as objects of study, researchers sometimes lose sight of how our experiences as scholars overlap with fandom. Beyond the love and pleasure connection, can we think about the struggles we share with the fans/audiences/industries that we study. I have heard many scholars rightly critique the exploitative if simultaneously resistive nature of “participatory culture.” Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, for example, argue that the contemporary games industry has been built upon the “playbor” of its audiences.

Research, in the best of situations, is a labor of love. We produce a massive amount of unpaid labor in pursuit of the ecstasy of the research breakthrough. So do fans. As I watched the new SyFy series Heroes of Cosplay, I was struck by the massive financial investment the cast undertook, from making their costumes to traveling around the country, for the chance to win awards that may or may not have big payouts. This was largely justified by claims that cosplay could lead to career advancement. It seems odd at first… until you consider how many of us pay to attend conferences (with or without institutional support) with the promise that it will advance our careers. We give talks, write articles, edit anthologies, advise students (in and out of our institutions), all in the hopes of “making it” and/or contributing to the field. At least that is what we tell ourselves. When we wonder why fans do similar labor, can we gain insights from why we engage in projects that many of us have trouble defending to friends and relative outside of academia?

Thinking more broadly of the implications of these similarities, I have been to several conferences in the past year that have brought together game scholars, industry representatives, and artists/designers. Talking across these industries sometimes feels difficult, because we are all (as humans) so invested in our point of view that we want others to understand what our side has to offer. Alternatively, we want others to tell us what to offer them. Building on decades of critiques of such colonizing approaches to political movements though, does coalition politics offer a better frame? For example, I think many of the problems of the mainstream AAA games industry, as it is often constructed, are the problems of academia as well. The mainstream games industry like mainstream academia is largely built upon exclusion and competition. Those of us who don’t fit comfortably with the class/gender/sexuality/race/embodiment/etc.,  norms acknowledged by our respective industries are often forced into a compromise if we stay within them or charged with an uphill battle if we want to change them. Both industries have to defend their own relevance, in a way that further promotes exclusivity and hard lines between insiders and outsiders. Both industries have been guilty of exploiting contingent labor, systematically excluding marginal voices, and fetishzing their own cannons. Both often have conferences that often price out contributors that could shake things up, and then complain that they don’t have anyone skilled in doing things differently. Both rely on certification systems that are tied into exclusionary and oppressive systems for access to employment.

When we are frustrated with another industry we sometimes simply dismiss it. I have heard scholars dismiss industry perspectives, industry representatives dismiss scholarship, indie designers dismiss both (in all cases sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly). When we are frustrated with our own industry, we try to figure out how to fix things, or leave. In acknowledging our similarities, however, perhaps the time has come to think more concretely about how we can help each other fix the systemic problems we all face.

And yet I would be very careful not to call any of these films fan fiction (an argument I discuss in more detail here). But even if Sherlock is not fan fiction, it still can be read and analyzed usefully within the AU conversations we repeatedly hold within the fan community. AUs are immensely popular in many fandoms and their respective qualities are often the subject of debate. The principal danger of writing AUs is writers relying too heavily on clichés so that their characters often retain little more than their names and looks. Since the aspects that make the character recognizable to the reader are often the very elements that the media uses to create an easy shorthand, these same characterizations also tend to become overused and clichéd when they are the only thing connecting the AU character to his original counterpart. In Sherlock Holmes fiction, such easy shorthands include Holmes’ hat, coat, and pipe, all three of which appear, for example, at the end of Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), thus both signaling an obvious—if simplistic—connection to adult Holmes and giving background for his owning these objects.

Moving a story in time (in the case of Sherlock from the 1880s to 2010) requires certain adjustments and complicates the easily recognizable shorthands. The show has interestingly chosen to keep certain aspects while updating others. And in general, it is the updated elements that make Sherlock the successful AU that it is, whereas those points that mimic the original too closely and those that strike the viewer as anachronistic are the weakest elements. Translating Holmes’ brilliant deductions about John Watson from the pocket watch in The Sign of Four to his smart phone works beautifully. Having Holmes whip dead bodies to understand bruising patterns doesn’t. In a review of the first episode, Thingswithwings imagines a Holmes who is a fully translated and contemporary version: “I want him playing Queen on the violin, I want him making the obvious Princess Bride reference when offered a choice between two pills” (source).

In the end, while individual plot points, objects, and places are important for fans to recognize, the most successful approach seems to come about when the writer extrapolates the character’s underlying identity, exploring those aspects that remain the same in the new setting, and how they will manifest. It might seem important to have Holmes look somewhat similar to the way we’ve always seen him, but given his disinterest in cultural expectations, his brilliant idiosyncrasy might just as easily (and more evocatively) have been translated into subcultural hobbies or interests. But I continue to hope that Sherlock can walk that line successfully between making empty alluding gestures and getting to the heart of who Sherlock and Watson are—by themselves and to one another.

Last week’s Supernatural, called “Swan Song,” was an amazing season finale. In fact, it could have easilystood in as the series finale it had been intended to be until the show got renewed. It closed off the fifth season’s arc of battling the apocalypse, and it brought to the fore all the things fans loved about the show: the brothers, their love, the importance of family, and the central role of humanity and free will. In the climactic scene we see archangels Lucifer and Michael inhabiting the vessels of the two brothers Sam and Adam. The third brother, Dean, stands in for the human element he has always represented. And as it should be, human free will and love win out over angelic destiny. It’s an epic story and the dramatic bang of Sam overtaking Lucifer by remembering the last five seasons (and their entire lives) and pulling Michael into hell with him would have made a grandiose ending indeed.

That is to say it could have made a grandiose ending, except that the show has become notorious in what some would consider fan service and others might deem postmodern authorial intrusions. The acknowledgment of fans as they exist outside the series and the introduction of in-show interaction with fans has been cause for much debate this past year: some fans love these developments while others feel ridiculed and/or misrepresented, seeing Supernatural’s representation of fans as yet another indication of its quite problematic gender issues. The recent Transformative Works and Cultures’ special Supernatural issue addresses some of these conflicts. Given this context, the authorial in-show complaint that “the fans are always gonna bitch” is not too surprising.

Last season introduced author Chuck, who is both the writer of a Supernatural book series within the show and, it turns out, a prophet of the lord. The entire episode “Swan Song” is framed in his authorial voice over. Unlike film noir voice over, however, his is clearly external: we see him writing the story as he interprets it for us. Moreover, whereas in the beginning of the episode Chuck simply narrates the story (author, prophet, and possibly God of this world that he is), in the scenes after the apocalyptic battle he clearly moves in to explain the story to us. We move from Dean’s question “Are You God” to an image of Chuck in front of the computer screen, dressed in white and bearded. We’ve been told all season that God is on earth and doesn’t want to be found, and when Chuck finishes the story and types “The End,” he magically (God-like?) disappears.

Since the episode aired, fans have been debating whether Chuck (as Kripke’s stand-in) is meant to be God or not. I’m firmly in the camp that feels Kripke wrote Chuck as a stand-in and made himself author-as-God. Given that, it is the voice over explanation and interpretation that ultimately bother me most. We’ve questioned and undermined and complicated the concept of subversive readings and resistant audiences and yet, as a fan and as an academic, I do feel that much of my pleasure comes from interpreting and analyzing the text. I like active viewers/readers, and while I actually don’t think that authors are dead, I don’t think they should run after their texts telling us what they mean. A good text should show me its myriad meanings, and great texts tend to contain multitudes. I really wish Kripke—and many other creators who want to protect their texts from those fans that dare to read against the grain or, worse, go and take their “children” and create new stories (for an overview of the latest incarnation of this debate, see metafandom prowriting tag)—would give us, the viewers, the free will he so passionately proclaims and advocates in his swan song. But then fans may take that freedom anyway: Somewhere on the internet….

Of course, there is much to recommend a text-intrinsic definition, most of all that it’d be easier if we could create a taxonomy in which every text belonged to a given genre regardless of contextual information. The most obvious choice in defining fan fiction as a genre is to characterize it by its derivative/transformative character. After all, that is a generally accepted definition of fan fiction: fiction that expands/comments on/criticizes existing media texts. Creating a taxonomy that relies on the transformative process, however, expands the category to near uselessness. We suddenly need to include postmodern retellings, from Wide Sargasso Sea to The Hours, but also Biblical and mythological transformative works, from Paradise Lost to Ulysses. In short, given the intertextuality of literature generally and the central role of certain canonical Western texts specifically, much of the Western canon would suddenly fall under fan fiction.

While this problem could be circumvented by defining fan fiction as only those texts who are intertextual with commercial and copyrighted media texts, this definition is likewise flawed insofar as it relies on the fairly arbitrary copyright laws that often have more to do with protection of copyright owners than literary or genre categories. Moreover, such a definition would exclude large swaths of fan fiction that are, for the most part accepted as fan fiction by most, including historical Real People Fiction (RPF), Bible and mythological fan fiction, as well as fan fiction transforming Shakespeare and Austen and everyone who’s fallen out of copyright. In fact, one of the larger and more community building challenges in fandom has been the yearly Rare Fandom Yuletide Challenge, which includes all of these categories and others that might easily not fall under this more narrow definition.

Yuletide, however, indicates what for me is the central quality that distinguishes a fan-created Lizzie who runs off with Mr. Darcy against her parents’ will from Bridget Jones’ Diary or even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I’d suggest that fan fiction exists within a fan community for its creation, distribution, and reception. As such, the two commercial Austen transformations cannot be fan works insofar as they are not culturally situated within a fan community: while they are clearly in intertextual dialogue with the source text, they are not so with one another or a community of fans and their interpretations. Fan fiction, on the other hand, is both–though depending on text and writer to varying degrees. But in the end, it is the writers’ decision to situate their story within the complex network of other transformative works and thus making it fan fiction: by labeling it as fan fiction; by following the shared paratextual apparatus of headers; or by submitting it to a fan fiction archive. Fan is as fan does, and the cultural context of a fan work indeed ultimately determines whether we are reading a New York Times bestseller, a tie-in novel, or a fan work—even if they do not differ in contents, quality, or reliance on the source text.