The discourse of genre authors, almost perennially, falls to the validity of fanfiction as an artistic category. This debate is never, of course, resolved and it flares up again each time some detractor of the category has their voice amplified sufficiently for those who see themselves as friends of the category to feel threatened.

Considering the sensitivity of artists, this does not generally require much in the way of a threat.

Fanfiction, as a category, exists because artists need to find ways of circumventing the barriers put up by capitalism. The idea of copyright is a modern, and capitalist, one. The first copyright law was formed in England in the early 1700s.

This pernicious concept, that ideas could be made commodities to be bought and sold, rather than representing the intellectual commons upon which creation occurred, allows for parties, individuals and companies, to claim ownership of works of fiction, of characters and situations. Only fiction doesn’t work that way. And it’s good that it doesn’t.

The only reason we have a record of most of Shakespeare’s plays is because some theatre nerds with fast fingers would come to his plays, take notes on the script and then sell copies for a side hustle.

Art, including fiction, is iterative. It’s a form of communication and as such it can’t help but be iterative; an answer contains within it the premise of the question. Copying, mutating and iterating are essential creative tools, and they’re tools that are increasingly restricted as the bounds of copyright tighten, terms lengthen, and laws like DMCA move power toward those who want to enclose the creative commons. As a result these components of fiction become walled off.

I want to be clear here that this is far from the only way that capital distorts art, or encloses upon the tools of artistry. For another example please see my essay on how the franchise as a marketing structure makes the artistic use of ambiguity untenable and undermines finitude. Capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with creative ventures; the generation of the fanfiction / original work dichotomy is merely a good example of this forced limitation.

That said, the dichotomy exists in the minds of people trapped within the bounds of what Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism. And since it exists, it’s necessary for us to grapple with its contours.

It’s fine if you want to iterate based off work so old there’s no clear thread of ownership; but if you want to engage in communication with living artists, you must pay for the privilege, or else you must create fic. Fanfiction is an artificial category. Literally no writer is not also a creator of fanfiction. We can’t help but respond to what we read. It is in the nature of art. What separates “fanfiction” from “original” fiction is only whether one can claim ownership over the fiction in order to sell it. This is a useless distinction for artists to argue over.

Why do you care whether another artist wants to sell work or enjoy creative expression as an amateur? The categories of professional and amateur are, in themselves, problematic enough without assessing each work of art an artist creates along the axis of marketability.

This is, of course, the secondary reason that so many “fanfiction” writers who “file off the serial numbers” are reviled. The first is because they’re frequently women as a result of complex social movements. But there’s a sense of fanfiction crossover as having cheated its way into a market it should not own. This is “business ontology,” as Fisher would have put it, creeping into art appreciation.

One of the things that reinforces my communism is the brutal ways capital deforms art. And I get it, artists need to eat. I mean, I maintain a day job explicitly because my art is not profitable. If I could make a living as an author, a critic or a painter I’d do that instead of being a project manager.

My ideological side wants art to be the hard stone that is spit out by capital; for art to be deliberately and aggressively counter to the demands of business ontology. I would make a criminal of every artist. And as such, I am something of a friend to the amateur, including the fanfiction writer. After all, fewer things are more criminal within capitalism than to remove productive action from the bounds of the marketable.

But it’s kind of ridiculous to see professional artists, people who have nomadically sampled the intellectual commons and made their compromises with capital to be allowed the privilege of making art a career, dunking on an artist of no particular notoriety just because they don’t enjoy the fodder in the former part of the commons now within the fanfiction enclosure and loudly say so.

Don’t play the game of categories with them. Find lines of escape instead. The search for new weapons continues.