‘The Crown’ Is Just Really Expensive Fan Fiction — But That’s Not a Bad Thing
The line between historical fiction and fan fiction can be confusing, especially as the Netflix drama inches closer to present day.
The Earl Charles Spencer, the brother of the late Princess Diana and inheritor of their father’s title and the family home Althorp, has spoken out about season four of the Netflix series The Crown. He doesn’t like it. The Crown is a fictionalized history of the British royal family from Queen Elizabeth’s first days as monarch. The current season, which Netflix released last week, spans the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, including then Lady Diana’s introduction to Prince Charles, their engagement and wedding, and the first seven years of their marriage. Both Diana (Emma Corrin) and Charles (Josh O’Connor) are portrayed as unhappy in spite of all the wealth, privilege, and fame that surrounds them — a point the queen, played by Olivia Colman, adroitly makes to Charles in the season finale.
Earl Spencer’s complaint is that it is easy for viewers to forget they are watching history. He notes that especially Americans, who may not have as much knowledge of the British royal family as viewers in the UK, watch “as if they have taken a history lesson.” Series creator Peter Morgan acknowledges that it is a fictionalized, if well-researched, version of history. None of the royal family or their staff consult for the series, which draws instead on publicly available news and archival documents — as well as Morgan’s own fantasy.
In previous years, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have allegedly admitted to watching, and Princess Eugenie, the queen’s granddaughter, openly said she was “very proud” to watch the lavishly produced series. Other more senior members of the family like Prince William firmly denied watching or refrained from commenting on what they thought of the series’ portrayal of the queen and her husband Prince Philip in their earlier years.
Since each season advances in time a decade, the fourth season is now precariously close to the present. Netflix, which remains the biggest streaming platform in the world, finds most of its audience in viewers aged 35–44. People in that age demographic were too young to remember the fairytale years of Charles and Diana, whose elaborate wedding at Saint Paul’s Cathedral took place in 1981; many of them were not yet born. Instead, this generation’s first conscious awareness of Diana, Princess of Wales, was perhaps news surrounding her separation from Charles in 1992 or their divorce in 1996. Most likely, though, their first earnest memories of Diana are the major news event that was her death in 1997.
While Diana was the “People’s Princess” that their mothers may have idolized, viewers in Netflix’s core age demographic are more likely to identify with or associate royalty with Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, as their generation’s royal fashion icons and inspirations. As someone in this demographic, I can say that I remember how beloved Princess Diana was, but I mostly remember the scandal of divorce and her sensational and tragic death. I was too young to watch the televised wedding, and while I vaguely remember Diana hailed as the “modern” and “approachable” royal the media portrayed her as prior to her separation from Charles, I mostly remember the fallout. And since I was roughly the same age as Prince William when she died, I remember thinking about how awful it would be to lose a mother at that age.
The Crown hasn’t yet advanced into the 1990s, but it will no doubt find itself in a field planted with landmines when it does. The series has always sought to tarnish the shine on the gold crown forged in the abstract opening credits. The characters speak venomously about Edward, Duke of Windsor, the man who famously abdicated the throne to marry an American divorcee; in turn, the fictional versions of Edward and his wife Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, call the rest of the family by insulting nicknames. The queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, isn’t allowed to marry the man she loves and, as a result, turns into an alcoholic with depression. Philip is depicted as wantonly unfaithful to the queen. And the queen herself is never really happy or fulfilled. It’s a series about how duty forces everyone to play a role, like it or not.
The Crown has thus far gotten away with this because it was set earlier in time. Is anyone today going to be angry about Winston Churchill being portrayed as an old man past his prime whose hero image had faded by the 1950s? Likely not. As the series approaches the present day, however, the events it depicts are fresher in our minds, experiences Netflix’s core audience has lived through and remembers, and it becomes harder to understand the line between fact and fiction.
In this season, Diana is first portrayed as young, immature, and naïve and then as petulant, narcissistic, and very, very sad. How much of this is true, and how much is an exaggeration? It’s unclear to the casual viewer who hasn’t seen any of the dozens of documentaries about the princess’s life (some of which are also on Netflix). Some episodes of The Crown end with historical facts about the situations depicted. But even among these, viewers have to assume that much of the dialogue is invented, as real transcripts of everyday conversations aren’t ordinarily made and preserved for history, and access to the royal family is limited, especially for media content creators.
For instance, in last season’s “Moondust,” Philip becomes obsessed with the moon landing as he faces as a mid-life crisis and is searching for meaning. He ultimately finds it through a religious and spiritual retreat. At the conclusion of the episode, we are told that the retreat, St. George’s House, has continued for fifty years and that Philip forged a long-lasting friendship Robin Woods, the dean of Windsor who started the retreat. What the episode doesn’t say is that St. George’s House was founded in 1966, while the moon landing was in 1969. The episode has the two events happening simultaneously because it makes for a better story with a clearer chain of cause and effect.
In this case, some quick googling can sort out fact from stylized fiction. But it’s not so easy in every episode. The extrapolation of what might have happened, what might have been said, pieced together from what we know as fact and what possibilities lie in the absence of things that aren’t known is what makes The Crown a very expensive form of historical fiction — and, I argue, fan fiction.
Fan fiction is fiction created about characters by fans. Once a secret, subversive practice done in fear of copyright infringement, fan fiction has become mainstream in the last decade. News stories in the last five or six years have discussed how publishers are now beginning to accept stories originally written as fan fiction, provided any copyright material is changed prior to publication. (The most famous example of this is probably still the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which originated as fan fiction about the vampire saga Twilight.) Publishers and media producers have also shifted their attitudes toward fan fiction about their work. Instead of prosecuting or sending cease-and-desist letters over copyright infringement, many content creators now either turn a blind eye or actively work with fans to encourage the production of fan fiction, videos, art, and other creative output that serves as free marketing.
There do remain subversive practices within fan fiction, many of them having to do with how sex is portrayed. Real-person fiction (RPF) remains somewhat more contentious than stories about fictional characters for the ways it might violate privacy and cross the boundaries of appropriateness because it is based on celebrities (i.e. “real people”). It’s an incredibly popular form of writing that spans all forms of celebrities across time.
Yes, there is even Jesus fan fiction.
Well-written RPF takes what is publicly known about a celebrity and fills in the gaps, offering stories that might shed light on the celebrity’s private world, connect them with other celebrities, reveal new insights into their “real” personality. It plays with the notion that the celebrities we know are always just personae, and not real, authentic selves, and because of this, there is room to expand what the persona does and says, to interpret what the persona is. The ethics of this practice are debated among fans and media ethics scholars. For some, writing RPF is downright creepy and violates consent, since the celebrity has not granted permission for and is often unaware of a particular story being told about them. This seems to especially (or maybe only?) be the case when the RPF contains sexual situations. On the other hand, if the RPF is about the celebrity persona, and not the real person, then RPF is just a very well-researched version of historical fiction that plays with the possibilities. Do we know where our favorite singer was on a particular day? Could they have coincidentally run into our favorite movie actor and had lunch together? Why not?
This sort of speculation is precisely what historical fiction does, and it’s precisely what series like The Crown do. Fan writers who engage in RPF are fans of celebrities, and as public figures, the royal family are a pedigreed version of celebrity. If the goal of historical fiction is to take what is known and embellish what is not, The Crown does this well. It sometimes plays fast and loose with the timeline, as the example of “Moondust” demonstrates, but it does so to tell a more structured narrative with clearer themes and meaning than real life often has.
Fan fiction fills an important role in society and has for hundreds of years. When people love a story, its characters, and its universe, they want more of it. Fan fiction has historically filled this gap by allowing an expansion to a textual universe that is not prohibited by the temporal and economic constraints of publishing or the limits of genre. A fan fiction story based on a sci-fi universe, for instance, could be a romance with a domestic setting or murder mystery. While People magazine may only give us stories about the Windsors that relate to palace gossip and scandal, good RPF might give us Anne, Princess Royal, going to the cinema or a 47,000-word history of the relationship between William and Kate Middleton from their time at St. Andrews to present day. The latter is “based on articles, books, and a little bit of imagination about what might’ve happened behind closed doors.” In other words, it’s the same kind of historical research mixed with What if? that makes The Crown such a compelling series.
Since its premiere in 2016, The Crown has offered viewers a chance to go inside Buckingham Palace to see what we don’t ordinarily get to see. It’s an expensively produced version of the Windsors with elaborate production design and careful storytelling, but this doesn’t detract from what the series truly is at its core. It’s fan fiction, and its success should help us understand that real-person fiction doesn’t have to be weird or scary. I want us to talk more about how The Crown is fan fiction not to diminish The Crown but to uplift we might understand about fan fiction, how truly mainstream it has become, and how glorious its possibilities are.
