The Fan, the Pro, and the Spaces In Between
Writing for Star Wars challenges me to interrogate fandom power dynamics—and figure out where I fall in a rapidly shifting landscape.
by Tessa Gratton
Tessa takes the stage at the Star Wars Celebration Live! stage at Star Wars Celebration Japan, alongside Alyssa Wong and Lydia Kang.
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Star Wars is my oldest fandom. I was born into it, thanks to parents who absolutely loved it; one of my earliest memories is watching The Return of the Jedi at a drive-in in southern California when I was four years old. For a year afterwards, I wore a teddy-bear onesie and a plastic Ewok mask, and apparently only answered to the name Wicket. Eventually I changed my loyalty to Princess Leia, and then to Carrie Fisher herself. I read all the tie-in books from the ’90s. My high-school graduation party in 1999 was Star Wars-themed.
As an adult, I’ve been more of a casual fan, enjoying the movies and some TV shows enough to write meta on Tumblr. I only dipped into fanfiction to seek out a few Stormpilot fics as a balm in the wake of the sequel trilogy’s no-homo; I’ve never written a Star Wars fic myself.
But in 2021, twelve years into my professional writing career, I was approached to write for Star Wars: The High Republic, an ongoing initiative including novels, comics, manga, audio dramas, and eventually a TV show. As a fan, I was excited, and as a writer, I was intrigued. But as both, I was trepidatious: I’d be jumping into a massive fandom with a reputation for occasionally awful behavior, not because I fell for a blorbo, but because I’d be a creator of blorbos.
For most of my life—and all of my career as a professional writer—it’s been relatively easy to navigate between the me that writes original novels for traditional publication and the me that writes fanfiction. Sometimes the pro writer/fan writer roles have been in greater opposition to each other, while other times, they’ve fallen very much in line.
When it comes to creating Star Wars, almost everybody involved is a fan. That line between fan and pro is often blurry, occasionally non-existent. Writing for Star Wars challenges me to interrogate the power dynamics between writer and reader: as a pro writer engaging with readers, as a fan engaging with other fans, and as the creator of the actual canon. It’s asking me to be everything at once.
To hold it all at the same time, the kind of questions I ask myself aren’t just about where I find joy in fandom, or who I want to be as a professional. They involve integrity and the nature of complicity, especially in this changing landscape—fanscape?—where the lines between fan work and professional work are being forcibly changed by power players with the resources to assign and reassign value.
I haven’t found a lot of answers yet, but my most successful moments have come when I acknowledge not only the shifting dynamics between fan and pro writing, but how that shift relates to my queerness—and to fandom as queer space in opposition to power.
When I was twelve, I wrote my first fanfic, an emotional opus about a teen girl with rainbow eyes who found herself on the bridge of the USS Enterprise captained by Jean-Luc Picard. Over the next decade, I wrote plenty of original fiction, but I also co-created a Babylon 5 fanzine and reinvented the Gorn for a Star Trek online RPG. I was Jadzia Dax one Halloween to fulfill my immortal genderqueer dreams. I kissed a few girls.
In 2003, I went to graduate school and stopped doing anything fun—but at least I discovered queer theory! I devoured theorists and poets like Gloria Anzaldúa and Judith Butler, who helped clarify my thinking about my own identities, and how they function within systems of power.
These theorists taught me that power is centralized within the structures of society, made visible through the story “truths” that society tells itself. These “truths” are created and recreated through traditions, rituals, laws, argument, and discussion—through stories we tell ourselves and each other as individuals, as communities, and as peoples.
Within a society, there’s always a dominant story and a counter-story (or stories). That doesn’t mean most individuals believe in the dominant story; it just means the most societal power is behind that dominant story. In our capitalist society, power is centered around money and white imperialism—but there are plenty of counter-stories. It’s in the friction and shifting between dominant and counter-stories that we find the creation, recreation, upholding, and tearing down of societal power dynamics.
So wait, isn’t this supposed to be about fanfiction?
Well, canon holds power, right? It’s the widely accepted “truth.” When a story is traditionally published, you usually need money to access it—and money is the most important symbol in capitalism. So the structural power lies with traditional publishers who sell works, and the pro writers who produce them. Readers have little individual access to that power, but in great enough numbers, their money contributes to power by proving the value of trad-published work. In this way, trad publishers define what is canon—what is a cultural “truth”—by giving it value through capitalism.
Fandom draws power away from the canon center, through the transformation part of transformative works. The fan writer doesn’t create canon: they’re taking that canon work and reshaping it into a fic, a meta, a character study. If enough fandom readers appreciate that fic or meta or character study and share it, add to it, or rework it in new stories, canon starts to slip, or even vanish. Hello, fanon!
Tessa—or rather, Wicket—in 1984.
Most importantly, fandom readers don’t use money to get more of the fanfiction they’re looking for. Fanfic readers create “value” by loudly appreciating work, by sharing, by engaging with creators, by collaborating and further transforming a work, by writing their own versions in turn. In this way fan work (for the most part) divorces value from money, causing power to move away from the traditional/canonical center.
Fan work blurs lines of power, slipping between and through the traditional structures, and even sometimes sneaking closer to the center. Because of this slippage between locations and power structures, fanfiction exists in inherently queered space.
(This is not an invitation to say all fanfic is queer, or even at all marginalized. There’s a difference between something being queer and something existing in queer space. Maybe graduate school was a little bit fun after all.)
I sold my first novel to Random House Children’s Books in 2009. At that time, publicly admitting to writing fanfiction was looked down upon outside of fandom circles. In the pro-writing world, it was overtly framed as bad for the career.
Some people were brave enough to admit they might have written it at one point in the past, but of course no they would never do it now. The implication was that you grew beyond fanfic: you reached a level of writing prowess where you no longer needed it, because you could be published! That’s the ultimate goal of writing, right? To have your art valued via money.
(The original version of my debut novel wouldn’t sell. I stripped out all the gender trouble and queer sexuality, and my agent sold it at auction for enough money for me to quit my job. I stayed in the closet, professionally. I saw what was valued by trad publishing.)
This was the era of scandalous whispering in back channels: Oh you’re reading The Mortal Instruments, have you heard about that author’s…fan…fiction? And what do you mean Fifty Shades of Grey has something to do with Twilight???
But those properties were lucrative, to say the least. I was still being published by Random House when everyone who worked there (not authors, ha ha) got a Christmas bonus of a few thousand dollars due to how much money Fifty Shades brought to the company. Suddenly, we were hearing about Wattpad as a scouting ground for potential blockbusters, and there were terrible articles in Publisher’s Weekly about what exactly fanfiction was.
Most pro writers, though, kept fandom connections on the down-low, because if you’d written fic, you certainly hadn’t written anything of value to trad publishing. Fanfiction would mark you as illegitimate, unserious, and bad at prose.
For a lot of us, it was easy to separate fan writing from pro writing: fan writing had always been kind of a secret, and we liked it that way. It was the most exciting and most fun—and the most weird and boundary pushing—when nobody had to worry about power paying attention. (Just like it was less dangerous to keep my gender identity and sexuality offline, sharing queerness only with IRL friends, found family, and fandom spaces, where nobody in public could hurt me about it, career-wise or personally.)
I had my pro-writer name and my fan-writer name. Those streams did not cross, on pain of career death at worst, or ridicule at best. It made me a little sad to talk openly about how much I was enjoying this new horror show Hannibal and its use of fairytale tropes, meanwhile carefully hoarding weird and gruesome and amazing queer fic recs to share only with select friends. “Tessa Gratton” had nothing to do with [redacted fan name].
In fact, it was years after our debut novels came out that one of my best writer friends was at my house for a long weekend when she mentioned something something Stucky and I was like oh but something something Stony and we became the Spiderman pointing at himself meme, huddled together hissing about fanfiction like angry geese.
Tessa posing with Han and Vader at the family The Force Awakens party.
Slowly, it got easier to slide between pro and fan. On mid-2010s Tumblr, for example, you were expected to be a fan of things, even if you were there professionally. More and more pro writers were admitting they wrote fanfic, or rather they had written fanfic—and missed it because they left it behind (with the subtext that they had to do so in order to be considered “serious” pro writers).
(I was more worried about how to slip queerness back into my pro books, using side characters and fantasy tropes to invite queer readers like me to see and appreciate the safe space without making it too dangerous—without losing my place in pro publishing.)
All of this shifting would not have led to our current situation without a third player bursting onto the scene between fanfiction and pro-writing: indie publishing. Not only was there a huge boom in indie romance, more and more pro writers were attempting to “hybridize” because it’s almost impossible to make a living through traditional publishing, especially if you’re in any way marginalized. Hybridizing meant you’d keep trad publishing, but also branch out into indie to supplement your income—and usually far surpass the trad money if you were good at it.
More and more trad-publishing circles were abuzz with how much money was in indie romance—and thanks to that money, the Eye of Sauron found a new focus. And initially, power was shifting away from traditional publishing, into the margins.
Despite several career setbacks and personal tragedy, 2017-2023 saw my fandom self and pro-writer self sliding closer and closer to being the same person in public. My first boldly queer books came out in 2018, to quiet acclaim and slow sales, but strong reader feedback from people who needed them. I was finally legally married, and my wife was a pro writer, too—and she also incorporated queerness into her books. We were very open about it, despite the personal attacks and rape threats that are unfortunately to be expected if you’re marginalized and loud about it on the internet.
More and more often, fandom was a topic of conversation in pro circles, alongside rapidly increasing mainstream media attention. A lot of pro writers came out as fan readers and writers—and I finally did, too, though I kept my fan names secret and my fandoms generalized. It was fun, even if sometimes embarrassing, and it brought people together.
But it was the start of pandemic lockdown that really helped me let go of all my previous inhibitions around the fan-pro divide.
I fell into the deep end of the Mo Dao Zu Shi fandom after The Untamed, a 50-episode C-Drama based on the book by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, aired on Netflix. It was canonically gay, with so much subtext and world to explore, so many tragedies to fix-it and AU, not to mention Chinese literature as a whole was a big gap in my education, so I could dive into translations and dig up academic articles on the history of BL and webnovels or the relationship between wuxia and revolution and political history (my favorite!).
Wangxian and 3zun and Xiyao became my personality. I joined a Xiyao discord community! I wrote nearly 70,000 words of fanfiction when I should have been working on paying gigs! I joined an AO3 collaboration to work against a troll who was especially nasty in the comments of fics with a certain tag. I wrote a story for a print zine—and I told my pro-Twitter account followers about it, effectively outing my AO3 name. I started talking about fanworks in my author newsletter.
It. Was. Great.
That year, some pro writers were being grossly and violently outed as fan writers—but these attacks were more about homophobia and less about condemning fanfiction itself. Because of the political climate (which has only gotten worse since), the idea of having that dangerous attention turned on me was scary, but I decided to continue being as open as possible.
This was to wrestle a little bit of control to my side, but also because I owed it to my readers—and myself. Being a queer public figure had given me a lot of grief, but I wanted to be vocal about the things that gave me joy as a gender/queer writer. Fandom is a huge part of my queer joy! Like everything else on planet Earth, publishing was a mess, and I was having trouble connecting to my pro work, but not with fandom. It turned out I still had a creative well, and it was bursting. I just had to rethink my relationship with what I was writing—and why.
When a reader of my pro work tells me they loved something I wrote, I keep things relatively formal. I say something along the lines of, “Oh thank you! I’m so glad. I worked hard on it, and I’m happy it resonated with you.”
I don’t engage as a fan—of course not, I’m the creator! I’m not a fan of my own work. How uncouth, and how arrogant! My work doesn’t sell enough for me to act like it’s the greatest thing. Maybe if it sold more, I’d be “allowed” to admit that I think said work has value.
There are other reasons to keep interactions with my pro-work readers formal, including preserving safe spaces for fans (and for me), parasocial issues, and the temptation authors often face to react badly to critiques. But at the heart it, it’s about the power differential: who paid for something, and who created the valued commodity.
Tessa on the “Stories from a Galaxy Far, Far Away” panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2024, pictured here alongside Cavan Scott and Justina Ireland, with Patton Oswalt moderating.
On the other hand, when a reader of one of my fics leaves a comment, I get to fan back at them, “omg!!!! <3 I’m so glad you noticed that detail! Have you read so and so’s meta about all the layers of generational insult in JGY’s dad renaming him like that???” Here, there’s essentially zero power differential because we’re both fans loving and reading and transforming. The reason I wrote a fic in the first place is because I’m a fan! And it’s likely I’m talking to not only another fan, but another creator of fanworks.
Moving my two roles closer helped me realize that it was kind of emotionally damaging to not allow myself to think of being a fan of my own work. I’ve begun to admit to readers of my pro work—and to myself—that actually…yeah, I love my pro work, too. I can see the flaws better than anybody, but I wrote this book because it’s something I want out in the world desperately. It’s what I need, and I hope telling this story will make the world a little bit better for others who need it, too.
It’s been nice and queer in the sense of blurring lines and taking power back from the status quo—by relearning to value what I do at least as much as the money I make. That reader connection and the engagement is the point.
Yes, I wish my pro-work sold more, obviously, but that’s not the only way to value it. Publicly being a fan of anything at all let me be a little more public about loving my pro work, too. And the way the relationship between trad publishing and fan writing has been evening out also makes blurring these lines feel safer—even when it isn’t.
By the time Twitter truly imploded and turned into a hellscape of fascists, I was one of the only pro writers in any of my circles left there, because I had effectively turned my whole feed into fandom. It was art and fic recs and basically no politics. If you’re reading this and were still talking to me about Scum Villain on Twitter into early 2024, bless you. I love you. I put Scum Villain jokes into a few Star Wars books just for you.
So, Star Wars.
When I’m actually writing the books, I’m obviously pro writer Tessa Gratton. It’s my job. Yes, I have had a few fannish freakouts when writing two Jedi kissing (!!!) or booking a plane ticket to visit Skywalker Ranch (!!!). But the experience of writing a Star War is very different from the experience of writing a fanfic. It’s different from writing a Tessa Gratton original novel, too.
In Tessa Gratton books, I can do whatever I want as long as a publisher is willing to publish it. If the books keep selling, I can challenge what I want, be weirdly queer or dense or meandering or whatever I think the story calls for. But if it doesn’t work and nobody buys it, it will be harder to sell the next book. I won’t be able to pay my mortgage. I won’t be able to feed my cat. I won’t have a voice in the conversation.
I have to compromise to keep that voice—to get the next book deal. I have to be complicit with traditional publishing because I need the value they bestow. It’s a messy line to walk, but discovering what I can get away with, what might take off, what might uplift my voice and voices like mine, what might reach a wider audience with its questions and maybe, hopefully nudge the arc of justice in the right direction? That’s part of my goal when traditionally publishing.
With fanfiction, I can do whatever I want, and all that matters is me having fun and hopefully other people sharing that fun. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be sad, but there are zero consequences to a fic nobody connects with. One of my favorite things I’ve ever written is a little 1,500-word character study that doesn’t mean much to anybody—but I love, love, love it because I think I did what I was trying to do. I answered a question that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Only like 12 people have read it, but it was already enough before I even hit publish.
Writing Star Wars, I cannot do whatever I want. Though there’s a lot of leeway in The High Republic for my agenda—including Jedi kissing and gender nonconforming characters and creating whole planets filled with sexually and culturally queer peoples—at the end of the day, I have to answer to power: the IP owners, the publisher, my fellow authors, and the readers, who need to like what we do enough to buy the next book. The ultimate value of my Star Wars writing remains with money.
But crucially, there’s a secondary value to Star Wars: while this value is controlled by the IP owners to the best of their ability, they didn’t create this value on their own. This secondary value was co-created by hundreds of professionals and millions of fans over the half-century since the very first film was released. That value is cultural relevance—a recognizable dominant story all on its own. I’m tempted to say Star Wars has become in itself a cultural “truth.” Everyone participating in it now, especially creators (pro and fan), has to engage with this truth, whether by upholding the dominant story or creating counter-stories within the galaxy and the fandom.
Tessa at New York Comic-Con 2022 posing in front of the cover art from Path of Deceit, co-written with Justina Ireland. Art by Corey Brickley.
In a way, by writing Star Wars stories from my position—actively attempting to create counter-narratives to fascism, for example—I’m already blurring the line between fan and pro, even when what I’m writing is canon.
But when the time comes to market the books and go out into Star Wars fan spaces, the fan-pro line doesn’t just blur—it vanishes. The Star Wars readership is so enthusiastic, so good, almost nothing like the toxic shit in the film and TV fandom spaces. It’s hard to fall back on a pro-writer persona and calmly say, “Thank you, I worked hard on that, I’m glad it resonated,” when you’re being handed fanart of a Jedi you personally created, or you’re told your book changed the way someone thinks about Yoda, or you’re hearing that someone has been waiting all their life for a Star Wars character to casually refer to their binder. You’re being made to feel part of the transformative process of fandom.
I can wrap my head around it, but my heart is another matter.
I try to cling to the queer spaces I can create and recreate. If I think about adding queerness everywhere in Star Wars canon I can, it makes these pockets of queer space that allow me, the canon creator, to share fan enthusiasm—because yes, finally, there are queer people all over the galaxy far, far away. I can say, “Thank you! I’m glad it resonated because omg I needed it, too, and did you see what Alyssa Wong and Justina Ireland did with their queer characters? Aren’t they great?”
These days, fandom itself is out of the closet, ha ha. There’s a huge money spotlight on it, and I think one of the reasons fan spaces are breaking up and going back into the shadows is because fandom is supposed to transform canon/power by opposing it—by dragging story out of the center and into liminal, non-monetary-value queered space, and existing there.
That’s not what happens when trad publishers and fandoms work together in the enemies-to-lovers plot nobody asked for. In the era of Fifty Shades, it was a semi-open secret in the industry where that book originated, but today, publishers are out-and-out buying popular fanfiction—and putting it in the deal announcements not only with openness, but with pride.
We’re also seeing trad publishers co-opt fandom language to sell original books, and push books based on their direct connections to fandoms. Being consumed and co-opted by publishers is bad for fandoms. At the very least, it moves fandoms toward the center—where the things that matter are money, whiteness, imperialism, heteronormativity, and maintaining the status quo. And in the case of several recent and forthcoming trad published books openly connected to the Dramione fandom, it reasserts the value of canon created by a heinous TERF, directly funding an anti-trans agenda that gets real kids killed.
Power doesn’t care about joy. Ultimately, it only cares about value, which means money. Trad publishing loves fanfic right now because it sees dollar signs instead of kudos. I genuinely don’t know if fandoms can survive if they’re made complicit in capitalist power. Some of them don’t deserve to anymore.
We need to keep striving to find joy in fandom creativity and community, because everything in the world wants to take them away. If the work of fascism and white supremacy is to erase the marginalized, then it’s our work to be loud. To be joyful. To transform.
We need to consider how to keep creative power in the margins whenever we can. Even if we’re also complicit with the center. Even if it means shrinking into back channels again, into smaller pockets of new socials, private newsletters, email groups. Even if we have to rebuild different ways of queering space in order to shift power away from the structural center. We need to be self-sustaining through mutual appreciation, the cycle of fic to art to podfic to new art to sharing links to new fic to meta to headcanon and eventually fanon that eclipses canon truths. That’s the only way to keep this power moving toward the margins.
For all my critiquing, I’ve been given space to be loud in a hugely popular franchise where I’m allowed to be joyful and transformative. I’m sorry for when I’m messy about it, when I don’t post anything publicly for weeks at a time, or when I balk at a fan event because I can’t remember where my voice is in this shifting fanscape. But that voice is always in the work, I promise. And in my fandom joy.
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Tessa Gratton is the New York Times Bestselling author of adult and YA SFF novels and short stories that have been translated into twenty-two languages. Their current fannish fixation is satosugu. You can find them at tessagratton.com.