suzylbooks - Tumblr blog

suzylbooks · 1 month

Text

Who Owns a Fanfic?

Throughout the past four years, one online community has gone from niche to power-player. Booktok has transformed from a hashtag with simple book recommendations, memes, and reviews to a cultural phenomenon that has publishers scrambling to monetize. The previous success of BookTube in the mid 2010’s laid the groundwork for BookTok’s current state—filled with hauls, wrap-ups, and homogeneity about what books become and stay popular.

This is where Manacled enters the conversation. For the uninitiated, Manacled is a mega-viral fanfiction based on Harry Potter by author SenLinYu. It’s dark in nature, with the quick, catchy premise of Harry Potter meets the Handmaid’s Tale, with Dramione (the fan-favorite pairing of Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy) at the core. At the time of writing, it has nearly eigh million hits on Archive of Our Own and sits at over 370,000 words. It has cemented itself in fanfiction history alongside Cassandra Clare’s Draco Trilogy and Tara Gilesbe’s My Immortal as fanfiction that has taken on a life and fandom of its own. A quick search on Tiktok and Instagram reveals that Manacled is treated like any other book, with the Manacled tag having over 470 million collective TikTok views in February 2024. There’s fanart, dramatic edits to favorite quotes, people recording themselves crying over the ending—and, most importantly, there are videos of people learning bookbind so that they can make themselves a hardcover copy of Manacled.

Printing fanfiction is hardly new. In the early days of fandom, before mobile phones could let you bring your fanfiction anywhere you wanted, people would print out their fics, put them into three ring binders, and carry them to school. This stands in a shocking contrast to the Manacled hardcover copies. These look professional—they’re often printed on specialty paper, with gold-foil cover designs and decorative formatting. And, most shockingly, they sell on Etsy for over $100—though, as I was checking this story before hitting publish, I noticed that many of the Etsy listings had been removed. This cannot be said for the dozens of listings for other Dramione fanfics.

In February, author SenLinYu announced that she had signed a book deal to see the traditional publication of Manacled, reimagined in a different, non-Harry Potter universe and retitled to Alchemised. In their post announcing the deal, they stated that her primary reason for publication was not monetary—the sale of bound versions of her books was both a violation of her intellectual property and copyright infringement on the Harry Potter franchise, and this move would protect her fanfic and fanfiction as a whole. Fanfiction has long held the defense that authors do not make any profits off of the work they create, since their existence has been a hotly contested legal issue (hello, Anne Rice) and protected by Fair Use. Those Etsy listings were putting the Organization for Transformative Works in danger, because they meant someone was profiting off of fanfiction, as well as stealing from SenLinYu. They have, as far as I am aware, never made a cent off of Manacled. Her FAQ page on Tumblr states clearly that she does not allow sales or commissions of bound Manacled copies, and that anyone who wants to create fanart, fanfic, or remixes of her work is allowed to do it so long as they do not make any money off of this.

Clearly, Booktok didn’t get the memo. In her post, SenLinYu laments how she has been unable to protect her own works from ‘exploitation,’ and she states that she cannot take the fanfiction down yet as the sudden disappearance might only make the issue of bootleg copies worse.

While explaining this phenomena, SenLinYu’s decision suddenly appeared as a checkmate—by making Manacled into Alchemised, it alchemizes itself into copywritten material, and with the help of a major publishing house’s legal team, Senlinyu will actually be able to take back ownership of their work.

This poses a question—who owns a fanfic, and why does the modern state of fandom seem to encourage fans to think of a fic as public property?

To be clear, the writer of a fanfic is the owner of a fanfic. Just because it is transformative work doesn’t mean it is somehow less than original work. Someone took the time to write it—it is their writing, and it is their work. Whether or not they’re able to make money off of it doesn’t make it a public good for someone else to make money off of.

In the last decade, fanfiction has turned from a small hobby to a mainstream activity—with fanfictions being published, albeit with character names changed and typically set in alternate universes. When Fifty Shades of Grey exploded into the mainstream, E.L. James denied that her book was originally fanfiction and lied about its origins. Now, Reylo fanfictions are hitting the New York Times bestsellers lists, and Harry Styles fanfictions are seeing movie adaptations. This change in cultural awareness also comes with a change in cultural interaction.

WIRED noted in their recent piece on the SenLinYu story that the increase in fanfiction has turned it from a tight knit community into a traditional author/reader relationship, or worse—a creator/fan relationship. Fandoms as they existed in the early 2000’s on forums or even in the early 2010’s on Tumblr are dead, and the pressure to monetize our art and creations has compounded with changing cultural awarenesses over fanfiction. It’s no longer seen as a fun thing that people put online for other fans to read—there are pressures to update and keep churning out chapters. I’ve noticed it in my own fics over the years—I’ve written fanfiction for fourteen years across several platforms, and there’s something different now.

Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get From You details the evolution of fandom from its beginnings in the infancy of pop culture to its modern-day form. Teenage girls would share their paper zines for the Beatles and Star Trek, and it was decidedly counterculture. Once the internet became popular, fangirls used it to create blogs and forums dedicated to their favorite characters and ships. Over time, fanfiction became easier to access with centralized sites like Fanfiction dot net—and, later, AO3—and this made fanfiction more commonplace to general fandom members.

During this time, writers would often put disclaimers at the start of their fics that they did not own the characters they were writing in an attempt to avoid legal action (even Manacled, originally published between 2018 and 2019, contains one of these disclaimers). Archive of Our Own, the current king of fanfiction, is run by a non-profit (the Organization for Transformative Works), and, as such, its formation acted as a more explicit step toward legal protection for fans. There was an awareness that fanfiction was not something to use for monetary gain and that there could be major consequences if someone were to monetize their fics, since a creator would then absolutely be able to sue an author or website for copyright infringement. In this sense, there was an awareness that fanfictions were the creation and property of the author—it was theirs, because no one could own it in a legal sense, but there was an honor rule. After all, you were enjoying something for free—why would you want more?

With the explosion of Booktok and the traditional publication of fanfiction with books such as The Love Hypothesis and You, Again, fanfiction has hit its next stage: consumption and promotion by influencers. Manacled is promoted organically, just like any other book, and someone unfamiliar with the fic could be forgiven for thinking that people are discussing a book that had already seen traditional publication. It has spawned a fandom of its own—where it might have once been elevated as the most popular fic among Dramione shippers, such as Isolation by Bexchan a decade ago, it has instead found success with readers who have never read fanfiction before. And those readers might not be aware of this unspoken rule. It’s online, and you can download the complete PDF from AO3—so, why wouldn’t you be able to make it your own? Why wouldn’t you be able to bind it and sell it? After all, you’re putting in the work of binding it, who cares if the author won’t see any money? Why shouldn’t you buy it—your money is going to the binder, and didn’t they work hard? Aren’t you just showing your appreciation for the fic?

As I wrote this, I asked myself why people were so determined to have a ‘nice’ binding of this fic. After all, printer paper and a three-ring binder seemed to work before. Was it to get clout online? Was it for the aesthetics of displaying it on a shelf? Was it because it was your favorite fic of all time and you never wanted to risk it being taken down, like it will in 2025? Or was it because you wanted to make yourself feel more elevated, like you weren’t reading fanfiction anymore?

I considered the option that Booktok itself had created and promoted a culture where it wasn’t enough to read 370,000 words, you had to also show it off in a physical and aesthetic way. Last year, the rushed release of romantasy sequel Iron Flame came with an explosion of think pieces asking if Booktok had an overconsumption problem. Time and time again, we’ve seen Tiktok and similar platforms encouraging overconsumption through everything from Shein hauls to Stanley cup shrines. While I feel that this culture of owning for the sake of showing off plays a major factor in seeking out physical copies of Manacled despite the author's requests to not, I can’t say for sure that it is the root cause.

I might not know why, but I can speak to the effect it has had. With the rise of bound fanfiction being sold online, the rights that transformative authors—a fancy term for fanfiction writers—have has been violated. While there might not be a moral wrong in pirating the works of a famous, rich author, there is a moral wrong in profiting off of work that has been put online for free. SenLinYu isn’t the only author pulling their fics, either, and I worry that this could signal the death of a free, fun fandom—or online fandom as we know it.

Just last year, Hbomberguy detailed how a single Youtuber had made a silly amount of dollars by stealing the words of queer writers and filmmakers, many of whom were never paid for their work in the first place. The video itself saw massive views and started a discussion about plagiarism across the internet. The success of the video was rooted in the fundamental understanding that stealing someone else’s work is wrong, and that people who plagiarize should not be able to make money off of it because they are, plainly, jerks.

Publishing Alchemised will allow SenLinYu to finally be paid for her work—any other author who had sold over seven-million books would be able to live off of royalties for a long time and be offered countless opportunities—but it will also allow for her to use the laws in place for protecting authors from having bootleg versions of their works sold without seeing any money. While she was previously unable to stop people from profiting off of her work, she now has a way forward. And, perhaps most important, her two-book deal will allow her to publish more through Del Rey at Penguin Random House.

That WIRED article mentioned that years ago, the act of pulling fanwork for publication was seen as a betrayal, but now it’s seen by many as an accomplishment. Taylor Lorenz notes in her book Extremely Online that when Instagram began disclosing brand partnerships, both the app and influencers feared that they would be abandoned for ‘selling out’ and running ads, but fans instead saw them as a sign of ‘making it.’ The publication of Alchemised hasn’t been without criticism, though—a quick search through social media turns up comments calling the removal of the original fanfiction (a move that must be done for legal reasons) a ‘slap in the face.’And beyond that, there are countless, and I mean countless, posts where people say that they are actively downloading the fic before its removal. SenLinYu is aware of the downloading rush, and is giving people plenty of time to do so in order to preserve something that means so much to them—not to think ahead so that they might sell a hardcover copy of a ‘rare’ fanfic.

This isn’t the piece to rehash tired discourse about the trend of fanfiction being edited and published. This isn’t the piece to ask why the publishing industry is beginning to look toward fan spaces for manuscripts or why agents and editors now seek manuscripts that read like fanfiction—or just are fanfiction.

This is a piece to acknowledge that while fandom has always been a public, collaborative experiment, the work being produced does not belong to the public. Fanfiction is not ownerless in nature simply because the writer doesn’t own the original characters or world. The state of writing and intellectual integrity has never been more fraught with the rise of AI and the rapid shift away from new authors, and SenLinYu’s move to protect her work signals a massive change.

No one, not even fanfiction writers, should be okay with people making money off of their words.

Works Cited

Alter, Rebecca. “Hbomberguy Didn’t Want to Make That 4-Hour Plagiarism Video.” Vulture, Vulture, 22 Dec. 2023, www.vulture.com/2023/12/hbomberguy-interview-james-somerton-plagiarism.html.

Bosker, Bianca. “How a Crowdsourced Novel Became a Young-Adult Obsession.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 18 Dec. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/crowdsourcing-the-novel/573907/.

CarefreeDreamer. “R/Dramione on Reddit: Mancled Is Getting Published!!! And More Works by Senliyu🖤.” Reddit, 5 Feb. 2024, www.reddit.com/r/Dramione/comments/1ajl17r/mancled_is_getting_published_and_more_works_by/.

Ellis, Maddie. “Harry Potter Fan Fic ‘manacled’ Has the Internet under Its Spell. How the Author Turned It into a Book Deal.” TODAY.Com, 26 Feb. 2024, www.today.com/popculture/books/manacled-senlinyu-alchemised-interview-rcna138822.

Grindell, Samantha. “A ‘Harry Potter’ Fan Fiction That Imagines Harry Died in the Wizarding War Has Taken over the Book Community.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 25 Sept. 2023, www.businessinsider.com/manacled-harry-potter-fan-fiction-explained-2023-9.

Held, Elizabeth. “From Friends to Lovers: The Fanfic-to-Romance Pipeline Goes Mainstream.” Vulture, Vulture, 29 Aug. 2023, www.vulture.com/article/fanfic-romance-reylo-publishing-trend.html.

Jackson, Gita. “Anne Rice Really Hated When People Made Her Characters Bone.” VICE, 13 Dec. 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/88gqjz/anne-rice-really-hated-when-people-made-her-characters-bone.

Karl, Jessica. “Fourth Wing and Iron Flame Author Rebecca Yarros Needs a Reality Check.” Bloomberg.Com, Bloomberg, 8 Nov. 2023, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-08/fourth-wing-and-iron-flame-author-rebecca-yarros-needs-a-reality-check.

Lorenz, Taylor. Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet. WH Allen, 2023.

Minkel, Elizabeth. “Lots of People Make Money on Fanfic. Just Not the Authors.” Wired, Conde Nast, 28 Feb. 2024, www.wired.com/story/pull-to-publish-fanfic-senlinyu-manacled-fanbinding/.

“PMJ Spellbound by Senlinyu’s Standalone Dark Fantasy.” The Bookseller, 5 Feb. 2024, www.thebookseller.com/rights/pmj-spellbound-by-senlinyus-standalone-dark-fantasy#:~:text=Alchemised%20is%20a%20standalone%20dark,all%2Dconsuming%22%20PMJ%20said.

Rizer, Addison. “Is Booktok Changing the Way We Talk about Books?” BOOK RIOT, 20 May 2022, bookriot.com/is-booktok-changing-the-way-we-talk-about-books/.

SenLinYu. “Announcing SenLinYu’s Debut Novel ‘Alchemised’ .” Tumblr, 5 Feb. 2024, senlinyu.tumblr.com/post/741499573811445761/im-excited-to-announce-that-i-have-signed-a-book.

SenLinYu. “FAQ.” Tumblr, senlinyu.tumblr.com/faq. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

SenLinYu. “Manacled.” Archive of Our Own, 27 Apr. 2018, archiveofourown.org/works/14454174/chapters/33390198.

Tiffany, Kaitlyn. Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2022.

#essay #fandom #fanfiction #fandom studies #internet studies #manacled #i guess i'm publishing essays on tumblr now?

1 note · View note