so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. <3
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture’s attic, but the attic won’t contain it forever. Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be.
Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fan Fiction is Taking Over the World.
when you think about it fanfiction is actually amazing
there are thousands of brilliantly written novel-length stories kids wrote from their own brains about characters and shows/books/movies they love all twined into the internet and other kids read these 50k+ stories in their own time and invest themselves in it
nobody’s being paid to write it and nobody’s being told to read it, people do it because they legitimately enjoy it
You know what story I’d like to see from the Harry Potter universe? A story where the Wizarding World and the non-magic world actually finally collide and work together and it’s… fine. Like, not perfect, obviously, but better than before because christ look at how much each world is keeping from each other! Well-trained magic-users could well be able to end diseases of the non-magic world; non-magic scientists could work out a way to banish Dementors, to restore souls even – science can already quite literally bring people back from the dead –
Natural disasters? Powerful magic users could potentially divert hurricanes and earthquakes, or at least minimize their damage. Your fantastic beasts have escaped? Well, we can use these satellites to pinpoint and track their locations. You wanna explore space, visit Mars maybe? The combination of cutting-edge science and cutting-edge magic can help with that. There’s so much potential there!
(There would be horrible things as well of course. A magic user gone rogue would probably be able to do a lot more damage than a non-magic user, for example. Things would probably be really tricky and terrible in the early days of this alliance. But ultimately, I really do think the positive would outweigh the negative.)
I don’t think this is a story JKR is ever going to write. I’d like to write it.
DAY 9 OF THE ALLIANCE
“I’ve got tomorrow’s Muggle papers here,” Ron said. “The non-magic papers,” he corrected himself.
“Right,” said Hermione. She hadn’t slept properly in several days, and it showed. “Just put them anywhere on the desk, Ron.”
Ron added them to the pile of stuff. Hermione took a drink of something Ron didn’t recognise – was it a Muggle concoction? It looked disgusting – and sighed. The curtains were still drawn, because there were still cameras and photographers lined up on the lawn.
“Please get some sleep,” he told his wife.
“Let’s look at the papers first,” said Hermione.
She placed a copy of The Times next to a copy of The Daily Prophet. One of them was in colour, and the other one was in movement.
“Gifs,” said Rose. She still hadn’t gone to bed.
“What?” said her mother.
“That’s what the Muggles call moving pictures. Gifs. Did you know that? I didn’t know that.”
“Another bit of bloody lingo,” grumbled Ron.
“Prime Minister seeks list of wizard ‘undesirables’“ Hermione read from the front page of The Times.
“No-one’s been referred to as ‘undesirable’ in years!” Ron said. Hermione shushed him.
“Wizarding Pinkstone Accords meet with protests….What happens next?…Worldwide fears over magic grow…The Quibbler is full of nothing but praise, though, and suggestions for combining magic and Muggle technology…”
“Werewolves could soon be claiming YOUR benefits,” Rose read from the Daily Mail.
“And oh! The Daily Star has just uncovered the sex tape of a D-list celebrity, so nothing from them. But this isn’t looking good.” With a sudden sweep of her wand, Hermione sent all the newspapers, including the wizarding world ones, into the waste paper basket. “Rose, your brother’s been asleep for ages. You should follow suit.”
Rose nodded and made as if to get up when Ron stopped her.
“Rose, what do you think of this? This alliance? It’ll affect your generation most of all.”
“I…” Rose stared down at the piles of papers on her mother’s desk. They were magically increasing by the minute. “They don’t teach you much about Muggles at school. Not unless you take Muggle studies. And Granny Granger was dead by the time I went to Hogwarts, and Grandad was in that nursing home…”
Hermione’s lips pursed in a strange way.
“They just tell you Muggles are stupid at school,” Rose finished helplessly. “When I did Muggle Studies, none of the pureblood kids in the class believed for one second that Muggles had created a rocket and flown to the moon…” She pointed one finger at the ceiling, where the moon wasn’t. “Or that they had, like…tracking machines in space. Or organ transplants, or an Internet, or any of that stuff.”
“I didn’t believe it either when you told me,” Ron said to Hermione cheerfully. But Hermione did not look remotely cheerful. An owl was flapping at the window and the people outside were shouting at each other to take pictures of it.
“Okay. Okay. To bed now, please, Rose,” Hermione said, and Rose went. The stairs creaked as she hurried up them to the relative safety or her bedroom. As Ron let in the owl a hundred cameras seemed to go off at once. It was like being in a middle of a lightening storm.
Fanfiction as a byproduct of one art form (a TV show, a book, a film, and so on) is perhaps one of the purest “consequences” in pop culture: While Star Trek fanfic is the modern jump-off point for modern analyses (and Kirk/Spock remains the gold standard of slashfic, i.e. fanfiction with characters of the same sex), it existed in decades prior. Its purpose is simple: If you love it, write (more of) it. Necessarily derivative, it is nevertheless a distinct art form in its own right, and interestingly, it is a movement overwhelmingly crewed by women.
Fanfiction’s function as a creative outlet – as pleasure for pleasure’s sake – is the one unchanging feature of the art form. Modern fanfic writers do it because they are among the savviest of pop culture consumers out there: They understand the tropes, the constraints, and even the industry process. These writers exist to broaden and further furnish the universes of their fandoms.
This moment feels like a feverish high point of expanded diversity on screen: People of colour (and black women in particular) have been enjoying an increase in both visibility and variety on television. It makes sense that the explosion of (Richonne) joy that catapulted me back into the waters of fanfiction coincides with an explosion in fanfiction starring black female characters and written by black women. But we are still dealing in partially built worlds – even the likes of Shonda, Issa, and Michaela Coel (in the UK) can only do so much – so it is still up to black fangirls to build up the remaining parts of their missing worlds (and the characters who inhabit them) in fanfiction.
In these stories, black women get to be more than just platonic friends and trusted advisers. They are more than just cogs in the wheel to keep the story moving, and they get to sin and come back from it, with rich and complex redemption arcs. They also get to be playful and fun, and flawed. Importantly, they also get to self-define their sexiness, and are uncomplicatedly desired without harking to either hyper- or de-sexualisation. In these small ways, fanfiction (especially as written by black women and girls) is the perfect vessel to advance the much-needed view that black women’s lives are more complex than films and television would have us believe. In the larger picture, these fics are acts of radical self-love and self-determination.
1) Recontextualization – the production of vignettes, short stories, and novels that seek to fill in the gaps in broadcast narratives and suggest additional explanations for particular actions.
2) Expanding the series timeline – the production of vignettes, short stories, novels that provide background history of characters, etc., not explored in broadcast narratives or suggestions for future developments beyond the period covered by the broadcast narrative.
3) Refocalization – this occurs when fan writers move the focus of attention from the main protagonists to secondary figures. For example, female or black characters are taken from the margins of a text and given centre stage.
4) Moral realignment – a version of refocalization in which the moral order of the broadcast narrative is inverted (the villains become the good guys). In some versions the moral order remains the same but the story is now told from the point of view of the villains.
5) Genre shifting – characters from broadcast science fiction narratives, say, are relocated in the realms of romance or the Western, for example.
6) Cross-Overs – characters from one television programme are introduced into another. For example, characters from Doctor Who may appear in the same narrative as characters from Star Wars.
7) Character dislocation – characters are relocated in new narrative situations, with new names and new identities.
8) Personalization – the inserted of the writer into a version of their favourite television programme. For example, I could write a short story in which I am recruited by the Doctor to travel with him in the TARDIS on a mission to explore what has become of the Manchester United in the twenty-fourth century. (However, as Jenkins points out, many in the fan culture discourage this subgenre of fan writing.)
9) Emotional intensification – the production of what are called “hurt-comfort” stories in which favourite characters, for example, experience emotional crisis.
10) Eroticization – stories that explore the erotic side of a character’s life. Perhaps the best known of this subgenre of fan writing is “slash” fiction, so called because it depicts same-sex relationships (as in Kirk/Spock,etc.)
“I am guessing it did not go well, dear?” her mother asked as she tutted about, setting up the table for dinner.
Beverly’s lip tightened. “We invited him weeks ago, no answer. I call the day before, and he refuses. He acts like he’s the only one affected by Emily’s death.”
Beverly’s mom, Elisabeth, merely shook her head. “Being married does odd things to you, dear. You feel like they are the other half of your soul. You will understand one day.”
Folding her arms, Beverly privately thought that she wouldn’t. She never understood why sloppy kisses at the end of dates sounded appealing. Being with friends or family had so much more warmth.
“I just wish I could at least see little Harry. He was the light of Emily’s life!”
Elisabeth paused. “I would like to see my grandson as well. Maybe at Christmas.”
The kind of literature that fan fiction is did not spring fully formed into being in the 1960s and 70s, though some journalists still seem to think so. Throughout this book I have been stressing the link, in literary terms, between fan fiction and any other fiction based on a shared canon […]. It is clear from the comments of fan fiction writers like Ika and Belatrix Carter that one major attraction of this genre for writers is the sense of a complicit audience who already share much information with the writer and can be relied on to pick up ironies or allusions without having them spelled out. Writing based on the canons of myth and folklore can do this too, though as Belatrix Carter pointed out in chapter 7, these canons have been so extensively used for so long it is becoming harder to do anything with them that feels original.
But there is another point, implied in Ika’s remark in chapter 2 – “What I like about fan fiction is that you can still get that very highly trained audience that can understand very, very complex and allusive things.” The use of “still” alludes to the undoubted fact that for the traditional canons of myth, Bible, history, and folklore, this “very highly trained” audience is not as reliable as it once was, because the canon information is not as widely shared as it used to be. […] a writer can no longer allude to Lazarus, Circe or Alexander and be reasonably sure that most of his readers have in their heads the thoughts, stories or images for which he was aiming. The human need for heroes and archetypes does not go away, but their faces change with time, and one avatar takes the place of another. Ika’s point is a shrewd one: in an age of fragmented rather than shared cultures the fan fiction audience is unusual in having as thorough a knowledge of its particularly shared canon as a Bible-reading or classically educated audience once did.
Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, p. 219 (via nihilistelektra)
