How Fandom Saved Me
Returning to stories and creative community is an act of healing
Stories have always sustained me, and since I was a child I have dived headfirst into book series, shows, comics, and films in ways so immersive that I have openly cried in public (at a baseball game no less) when my favorite character died while reading the Master Harper of Pern from the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. I waited in line in costume with my friends for the fifth, sixth, and seventh Harry Potter books to come out at our local Borders Books (RIP) and read them all night long, waking up in an emotional book hangover the next day, especially after the Half-Blood Prince, which I spent most of the night sobbing through. I can remember being so horrified at reading how the orcs in the Return of the King lobbed the severed heads of Gondor’s fallen soldiers over the walls of Minas Tirith that I came into the kitchen looking stricken, only for my family to wonder how I could get so emotional over fictional characters. I must have watched the 10th Kingdom, a mini-series that aired in 2000, so many times on the VHS my mom bought me that I wore down the tape.
When I joined LiveJournal and Fanfiction.net, that is when I learned that not only did fans congregate to share in community, but they write tributes to their favorite stories in fanfiction. Most of the fanfiction that I read centered on Harry Potter (loved a Harry/Draco pairing). Before she was known for her series, The Mortal Instruments, I read the entirety of Cassandra Claire’s The Draco Trilogy. I even started writing some fanfiction of my own (only for my friends of course). We had a notebook that we wrote a collective Lord of the Rings self-insert fanfiction of ourselves as hobbits. One person would write in the story and then pass it to another friend between classes. It was not my first foray into writing, but it was my first collective writing experience, and I looked forward to sitting down in class to read what my friend had written and brainstorm how I would continue the story, feeling the words flow and laughing at the wonderful scenes that I was able to create unabashedly because I knew that our work was a loving thing that we were building with each other.
Francesca Coppa explains in Fanfiction Reader: Folktales for the Digital Age, “The fiction that is written in and for fandom is not only written to community specifications; it is also typically written as a gift.”
That battered red spiral notebook contained love plots and inside jokes that were our gifts to each other.
Since high school, I found myself returning to fandoms, online comics, and fanfics during periods of stress and periods in which I was bursting to talk about whatever new art I was consuming at the time. I added Avatar: The Last Airbender, X-Men, and eventually the rest of the MCU, Steven Universe, The Office, Hannibal, and many others to my most loved and re-watched or re-read works. There is always excitement in joining a new fandom. Engaging with fandoms is usually not casual. You are not someone who discovers it, you are simply experiencing it for the first time, and there is almost always a community of other fans who want to share in your love for this art that can be so welcome. Of course, there are problems in every fandom, and there will always be instances of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and problematic fans who want to police who can enjoy art and how they can engage with it. Even still, fans have found ways time and again to challenge hegemonic systems and make space for themselves where they can bask in the enthusiasm of loving the art they love, while also loving it enough to critique it and make it better.
After I graduated college and became a full-time teacher and writer, doing themed trivia about my favorite fandoms, complete with cosplay, was one way for me to celebrate the characters and stories that I loved. I started listening to podcasts about my favorite shows or book series, such as Bingemode, where I rediscovered my love of the Harry Potter series after nearly leaving it forever because of JK Rowling’s continued transphobia and her revision of the book canon to make herself seem better than she is. It is still a complicated series to love and will take time to understand if there is an ethical way to engage with this book series that shaped my childhood. Stories have long been touchpoints through which I am reminded of who I was when I first experienced them and who I am as a fan now.
In January 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, I was pregnant for the first time. During my first ultrasound, my husband and I received news that the pregnancy was not progressing, that our not yet baby was no longer alive. I had to induce a miscarriage with two rounds of medication and undergo surgery to remove the pregnancy from my body. For months I withdrew from everyone, falling into a deep depression that felt impossible to extricate myself from as I attempted to recover physically and mentally from the loss. This was made more complicated because I also struggle with a chronic headache condition and my body was slow to heal from the trauma of the miscarriage. Despite the love and support I received, I was expected to move on, to try again to get pregnant, to mourn alone, tucked into my own body. There were so many days in which I wished to crawl into a sleep chamber and rest for a hundred years.
And then suddenly everyone was isolating, staying home and locked down because of the pandemic, and I felt that this fallow period of my life where I was simply existing was justified. In her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, author Katherine May describes these seasons of our lives:
“Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin.”
I rested and let go of expectations of what I should be working on or creating, and found new ways to re-engage with stories that I loved and with my creative self.
I decided to rewatch one of my favorite shows, Supernatural, as the series was ending in November 2020 and I wanted to experience all 15 seasons from the beginning. The show, and the fandom, are absurd in all the best ways. It is a show that, for all its many flaws, is aware of how much the fan community sustains. The writers have written several episodes over the years that are hilarious exercise in meta-fiction, even one episode entitled “Fan Fiction,” in which a book series that depicts the main characters Sam and Dean’s lives is adapted into a fan-created musical by high school students. I explored Supernatural Tumblr blogs and fanfics on Archive of our Own and Fanfiction.net. When “Destiel,” the slash pairing of Dean Winchester and Castiel, who the creators had been queerbaiting the audience with for a decade, became cannon in the final season, only to have Castiel die immediately after his confession of love, I dived headfirst back into fanfics that were attempting to remedy what felt like a betrayal of the fans.
Since then, I have been reading a fanfic that the author began writing right after the finale in November 2020, until now, almost a year later. Every few weeks I and others wait anxiously for new chapters to be posted. I think about why I have stuck around for this story for so long. It explores Dean and Castiel’s relationship, their past and current traumas, trauma bonding, consent, a developing sense of one’s sexuality, and how healing can come through love. While these characters’ lives and experiences are divergent from my own, I saw some of my own attempts to heal reflected in the imaginings of this author. It, and stories like it, are a multiverse of stories, homages and re-imaginings that can do more than the original source material can give to fans.
As Rebecca Epstein-Levi says in her essay, “To Fandom With Love: Fanfic Let’s Us Imagine a Better world together,” “fandom allows us to collectively imagine and participate in better, more just, and more satisfying stories than the ones presented to us as fait accompli.”
We can love the source material and still strive to challenge it, develop it and imagine all that is possible through crossover fics, AU’s (alternate universes) and much more.
In the wake of a loss so deep that I wondered whether I would be able to survive it while living through a pandemic in which I constantly worry for myself and my family, the shame of not meeting self-imposed writing goals and not working on “real” work evaporated. I had already faced one of the worst events of my life and survived, so what was stopping me from diving in, unencumbered by embarrassment or doubt, just as I had when I was a child? I began writing my own fanfics, following new fan art, and delving into comics and other mediums to explore how so many of these stories are connected. There are many criticisms that have been levied at fanfiction as a creative medium, but one that I never understood was the idea that fanfiction was limiting because the author could only work with the characters and world of an established story. What these critics fail to understand is that the established world is merely a framework where writers take all of the weight of the characters and what they mean to other fans and let them live out a million different lives across thousands of possibilities.
I recently re-watched all of the films and new series in the MCU with my younger sister, who was new to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and the Marvel comic universe in general), loving how she fell in love with certain characters and speculated about future storylines. When I watched the first two episodes of the Disney+ series, What if…?, it struck me how the multiverse represented was so similar to reimaginings that fanfiction writers have done, and continue to do to, following their creative whims and headcanons to ask not only “what if…?” but also, “why not?”
Anyone who studies trauma will tell you that healing is a recursive journey that requires many missteps and reminders of how far we have come. The pandemic continues, new health challenges affect me and I muddle through the processes of my own writing projects. But when I find a new fanfic to read, watch a new fan-created video compilation of my favorite characters, or laugh my way through the comments on people’s blogs and forums, I revel in how fandom connects and cares for so many of us, especially those of us afraid to engage with the world after being hurt. And so I text my friend about a new show I’m watching or follow a new fan artist and I think about all the stories we have loved that have made us feel more connected, more inspired, and more human.
