Fan fiction (fanfic, for short) occurs among really die-hard fans of a particular television show, book, game or other media venture. Some people might call them nerds, but you’re free to decide that for yourself. Basically, fanfic is what happens when people like a fictional universe so much that they want to add to it themselves. Usually this takes the form of short stories, but it could probably be applied to other formats as well.

Fanfic writers will take characters, settings and styles from a particular media franchise and recombine them in whatever way they choose. Legally, fanfic is sort of a gray area, as it straddles the prohibited usage of derivative works and the protected usage of parody. As parody, some of it can get really weird. There are many subgenres and styles of fanfic (wikipedia has a good entry on it), one good example of which is called slash or slashfic wherein two characters of the same sex are put into a (usually romantic/sexual) relationship with one another. The classic one you’ll always hear about are the Captain Kirk/Doctor Spock matches.

I guess part of the appeal of fanfic is that it gives you room to act out your own fantasies using characters which are very psychologically potent for you and that you have a special connection with. I’m not going to try to tie this into religion, even though I think it’s essentially a religious act. But I will try to tie it into conspiracy theory, because I think there are such enormous similarities between it and fanfic that are really worth exploring.

There’s actually a subgenre of fanfic called Real Person Fiction, where instead of using imaginary characters from media, they write fictional stories based on the lives of actors and celebrities. Wikipedia offers some introductory info on RPF:

In general, the authors seem to adopt the public personas of the celebrities in question as their own characters, building a fictional universe based on the real-life histories of their idols. Information from interviews, documentaries, music videos and more are hungrily assimilated into the “canon” on which the stories are based. Communities of writers can reinforce each other, building collective archetypes based on those public personas. Communities also develop their own ethics on what sort of stories are acceptable — some are uncomfortable with slash fiction, or with mention of the celebrity’s real-life families, or with so-called darkfic (stories involving suicide, murder, rape). Like most fan fiction, the RPF genre has stories ranging from innocent to adult.

In other words, we see here all the hallmarks of conspiracy theory. To my eyes, the main difference lies in the amount of reality which people invest in the stories. It’s also remarkably similar to tabloid journalism and celebrity gossip, for that matter. In fact, I’m really hard-pressed to figure out where to draw the line between what separates these largely overlapping genres.

One other interesting aspect of fanfic is that when a fact or character detail reaches a certain level of popularity, other writers will use it as a starting point for their own stories. It becomes accepted as what’s called “fanon” which is a play on the word “canon” meaning the original “authorized” version of the story.

Fanon is a fact or ongoing situation in fan fiction stories related to a television program, book, movie, or video game that has been used so much by fan writers or among the fandom that it has been more or less established as having happened in the fictional world, but it has not actually been established as having happened on the show, book or movie itself.

I see this same phenomenon occuring in conspiracy circles all the time. An idea gets presented by one author or researcher, and without ever having been proven “officially” gets adopted and taken up by the others and quickly reaches a place where it’s an unassailable fact.

So what’s the upshot of all this? I’m not here to trash conspiracy theory. But I do think it’s worth looking at in the larger context of how people use stories. It seems there’s some major element in us that comes out in many diverse areas which causes us to want to take a story and it’s characters and cast them in a new light which makes more sense to us or somehow works out a fantasy that we have. Is it a positive or negative thing? Well, it seems like it can be both. But in order to figure out how you’re using it, it seems like you need to take that first step and actually become aware that you are using it. And then you can go from there.