The Fic and the Source Material
Do you need to know the canon to read the fic? Breaking down the preferences of the 6,744 people who responded to our most recent mini-survey
by Elizabeth Minkel and Flourish Klink
This article is a companion to Episode 145, “The Fic and the Source Material.” They both analyze the results of the Fanfic & Source Material Mini-Survey. You can also take a look at the raw data from the survey, released under a CC BY 4.0 license.
A few years back, we received an extremely memorable letter from a listener named Amy. In response to an episode about alternate-universe fic, she wrote:
The vast majority of what I read on AO3—canon universe or AU—is based on source material that I’m either mostly or entirely unfamiliar with. This is because I search for stories by tag, rather than by fandom or character. When I pull up AO3 to find a new fic, my motivation is hardly ever ‘I want to read a Drarry fic’ or ‘I’m in the mood for some 1D today.’ It’s more, ‘I could really go for a fake dating AU’ or ‘I need a cathartic hurt/comfort scene with found family, please and thank you.’
“I’m probably doing fandom backwards,” Amy continued towards the end of her letter. “If I can even properly identify as someone ‘in fandom,’ when fandom particulars matter so little to my fic selection and enjoyment.”
We didn’t, for the record, think Amy was “doing fandom backwards”—and we were pretty sure she wasn’t the only one approaching fic this way. Our subsequent discussion mostly focused on the search and tagging functionality of the AO3, which we suspect played a large role in the rise of this kind of fic reading over the past decade. Earlier multifandom archives—most notably the largest, fanfiction.net—didn’t allow for easy cross-fandom searching by subject, and while there were cross-fandom trope challenges like the “Canadian shack,” two decades ago, being able to find fic by trope across fandoms usually required intentional rec lists, fests, or communities, not just clicking a tag.
Anecdotally, we’ve heard from plenty of people who read fic without knowing the source material over the years, whether they search by tag like Amy, or follow a favorite writer no matter what fandom they write in, or were intrigued by fanart or gifs on their dash. Elizabeth runs a multi-fandom fic rec newsletter where readers (including her own newsletter partner!) have said that they’ll click on any story that sounds interesting to them. And while Flourish doesn’t do this regularly, they have read in a fandom they didn’t really know the source material for in the past. (It was Merlin, in case you were wondering, and in the end, Flourish decidedly preferred the fic to the show.)
We referenced Amy, abstractly, a fair bit over the past few years, when we discussed fic-reading and fic-seeking habits. “Remember that letter we got from the person who searches by trope and doesn’t need to know the source material?” It felt like a lot of weight to put on one reader, when we knew that there were a lot of Amys out there. But how many?
Enter a brand-new letter on this subject: a fantastic one that we received a few weeks back, from a listener named Lilith. Lilith described coming at fic from the opposite angle—discussing their feelings about the relationship between fic and the source material, they wrote:
I’ve had a lot of friends and fannish acquaintances, over the years, who enjoy reading fanfiction for totally unfamiliar fandoms; shows they haven’t watched, books they haven’t read, etc., and I’ve always found it kind of mystifying. Multifannish or not, my primary reason for reading fic at all is the transformative aspect, the way it elaborates on, critiques or explores existing characters and fictional settings and societies. I mean, I’ve enjoyed the odd extremely well-written but totally OOC AU before, but if I don’t know the fandom I’d just as soon go read a book in the relevant genre.
In my MFA program years back, some of my classmates and I were having a post-crit-session discussion, and I remember someone referring to ‘fanfic for something that doesn’t exist.’ While the out-of-context misuse of the term ‘fanfic’ bugs the hell out of me, in this case what my friend meant was that the story seemed to want to rely on character development that didn’t actually exist, for emotional impact. One of the fun things about writing fanfic, at least for me, is the opportunity to build on an existing framework rather than creating one from scratch; they’re each challenging in their own way, but I think they’re pretty distinct processes. Which again, means that reading fic built on a framework I’m unfamiliar with seems like kind of a hollow experience, however good the writing.
The summary questions at the end of the letter were: “What are your thoughts on the importance of fanfic’s intrinsic relationship with its source material, and—do you ever enjoy reading fic for fandoms you’re not only not ‘in,’ but just don’t really know?”
We’d been citing Amy’s letter for years, and we certainly knew our own personal answers to these questions—which, for reference, are much more similar to Lilith’s preferences. But this seemed like a prime opportunity to actually get some data on the subject from a broader pool of fic readers. It was time for a survey.
The “Fanfiction & Source Material Mini-Survey” was just twelve questions long, ten multiple choice and two short-answer. We didn’t ask for demographic information, and we opened it directly to the public without running any kind of pilot test, as we often do for our big surveys. We shared the link on Twitter and Tumblr and in “The Rec Center,” and we accepted answers for a week in late February 2021. In the end, 6,744 respondents took the mini-survey—and they gave us definitive proof that when it comes to fic reading and the source material, there is a very wide range of preferences and practices.
To get things started, we asked a few situating questions, starting with the classic “in a fandom” versus “in fandom” generally (or not in fandom at all):
We both know people who aren’t particularly fannish but have read fanfiction, though the vast majority of respondents did fall into one of the two in-fandom buckets.
But “in fandom” obviously does not equal “fic reader,” so we wanted to break that down, too:
“No, I’ve never engaged with fanfiction,” FYI, triggered the end of the survey. While the vast majority of respondents considered themselves fannish—note, slightly more than the previous question—close to a third were not primarily fic readers when it came to fandom.
Situating out of the way, we started to dig into fic-related behavior. First up was the actual things folks did with fic: reading, writing, and more.
Unsurprisingly, nearly everyone said they read fic, and a large portion of respondents said they write it, too. But one of the most interesting things these results reveal is just how collaborative this practice is: about half of respondents have betaed for someone—the fic word for editing that encompasses a lot of different editorial practices—and about half have recommended fic to others. A good portion have created new works in response to other works, from visual art to audio or translated versions of a story. And substantial numbers of people also help manage communities and archives, keeping the structures where fic is shared up and running.
Next, we wanted to see how respondents broke down regarding multifannishness:
Flourish’s personal preference—”I usually read fic for the fandom I’m in or the fandoms I’ve been active in in the past”—was the most popular response; Elizabeth, with a hardline “fandom serial monogamy” stance, was pleased to see about a fifth of respondents were also in that category (“I usually read in only one fandom at a time, for the fandom I’m active in”).
So we knew a majority of our respondents mostly read fic for things they are or have been fans of. But we wondered how they engaged with things they weren’t fans of:
We should note that this is one of the many times when “a fan of” is a hopelessly broad construction—in the context of this survey, we were describing a fannish relationship (one of fascination, but not necessarily admiration), but obviously out in the real world, “I’m a fan of X” is also a casual way of expressing that you like something.
However our respondents were interpreting this question, about half were not fans (heh) of reading fic for things they didn’t feel fannish about. We were particularly intrigued by the 4% who said they always did this: likely some of these respondents just aren’t in fandom, though we heard from some people in the short-answer section who just didn’t like engaging with fic for things they felt fannish about.
Now we were ready for the main event: the question that prompted this entire survey.
We weren’t surprised to see a higher portion of “never” and “rarely” than the previous question, but the other side of the pie is the interesting one: nearly a third of respondents at least sometimes read fic when they don’t know the source material.
But “don’t know” is in the eye of the beholder—we had to get a little more granular.
The full range of responses on this question are a delight: we’d always assumed that this was a spectrum, but it was great to see it broken down. And notably, nearly half of respondents don’t have to have watched a single second of a show or read a page of a book to read the related fic; on the flipside, a very dedicated 3% must know the source material like the back of their hand.
Next we asked about franchises: in an entertainment landscape where much of media is or is destined to be part of a larger franchise, we wanted to get at how people felt about broader story worlds. (“Franchise,” we should note, could be very broadly interpreted—do sports RPF fans, for example, read fic about players they know little to nothing about, if they know the rules of the given game and broader details about the league?)
The close-to-even split here is interesting, especially when thinking about how many franchises are getting even franchise-ier (see, for example, Kevin Feige’s recent comments about how you’ll need a Disney+ account—to watch Marvel TV shows—if you want to understand future films in the MCU). But while some fans need to know plot points to enjoy fic, others might not need that if they know the characters, or the feel of the world.
The next question was aimed at respondents who don’t need to know the source material to read the fic: How do they usually find that fic? We let people check all that applied, and in this one, we also included a free response option in case there were any routes we were missing.
It’s worth noting that Amy’s method is one of the most popular: about a third of all survey respondents find fic for unfamiliar source material by trope or tag. Many of the more popular answers weren’t particularly surprising, since they’re the ways that people find fic when they do know the source material—recs, bookmarks, or written by authors you know and/or trust. And in the write-in section, the most common answer was via a crossover or a fusion—you might know only half the characters, but placing them in a familiar world gives you a route into that fandom.
Our final multiple choice question asked whether reading fic before consuming the source material ever led to actually consuming the source material:
These results reflect something we see in a lot of research: that other fans are one of the biggest ways that fans get into new things. Whether the source material holds up when you’ve already read the fic? That’s a whole other question—and one that many people touched on in the free-response section.
For our last two questions, we wanted to give people a chance to talk through some of their answers. These were optional, but as always, people had a lot to say! You can read all their answers in the raw dataset, but we’ll include some highlights here.
First, we asked: “If you’ve ever read fic without knowing the source material, do you ever feel like you’re missing some context? How?” The short answer is many respondents who don’t know the source material do feel like they’re missing something in the fic—but they don’t mind. “It's like channel flicking and watching a random episode of a TV show,” one respondent wrote. “You’re getting that story sure, but you don’t know why they got to that point.”
For others, only getting part of the story is even part of the pleasure:
Mostly what I’m missing is context from the characters’ environment. For example they’re on a space station when I didn’t expect them to be, or a form of magic shows up, or I don’t realise that a specific phrasing or reference indicates another layer to an interaction until I’ve consumed the source material and can then recognise it. But I personally enjoy this mystery of discovering a world that is so obvious to the characters and the author of a fic. I genuinely enjoy not knowing everything and piecing together the elements of a story like a puzzle, and later coming back with more information.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many people said that when they eventually did consume the source material, they realized the fic had painted a fairly different picture of what it was like:
One thing I’ve noticed a lot is that some events which take on major significance in a lot of fics are actually much less emphasized or differently framed in the source material (the MDZS fandom really comes to mind here—watching the show after reading a lot of fic was almost disappointing in how differently things were framed). Realizing that characters who interact a lot in fic have much more marginal interactions in canon is also pretty common for me (e.g., I rewatched Inception after reading a ton of fic, not having seen the movie in a few years and wow do Arthur and Eames barely even look at each other).
But for some, those differences are the intriguing part—especially what they say about a fandom and its fic writers:
I go with the philosophy that fic is written to fill the gaps in source material. If I read enough fic in a fandom without consuming the source material, I usually get a sense of a) what drew people to this fandom and b) what the fandom thinks that the source material lacks. It’s really interesting.
The final question was for people on the other end of the spectrum: “If you NEVER read fic without knowing the source material, why?” Most respondents cited the relationship with the source as an integral part of fic, but they came at it from different angles. One respondent put it bluntly:
Fanfiction is a supplement for the original stuff, not a replacement. Reading fic when you’re not familiar with the actual content is like peeling an orange, throwing the orange away, and then eating the peel.
Others cited the ease of getting into the story already having a base. “If I wanted to read a universe that will take work to learn, I’d read an original novel,” one person wrote. Another expressed a similar sentiment: “I’m not in AO3 for new stories. I’m on AO3 because I need something that gives me serotonin and my brain is too tired for new stories.”
Some people felt that fanfic was mainly interesting as a commentary or lens on the original source, and therefore they’d be missing the entire point if they were unfamiliar with it:
To me, fic is almost always driven by a response to a particular work. It’s not just generic (i.e., one genre responding in general to another), it’s a text-specific thing that (for me) often renders the greater aims of the work illegible if I don’t have the context assumed by the author. (Fan context can also be required as well, though that is decentralized and thus usually harder to seek out in entirety than canon).
And some felt it was inherently an extension of the source—impossible to appreciate without, as one reader put it, a “reciprocal relationship” between the texts:
I typically read fic when I run out of canon material to consume but I don’t feel “done” with the media. I also read fic as a way to study/examine parts of the source material that don’t get addressed as much as I would like to inspect them, but I can’t know if/how the source material will address those things unless I’ve consumed all the source material. Fic informs my understanding of the source material and vice-versa; it’s not very interesting to me intellectually or emotionally without that reciprocal relationship.
One of our biggest takeaways from the survey was our collective experiences of fic-reading vary wildly: the results show a huge range of approaches to source material, and very different relationships with the fandoms we’re reading in. But in the free responses, much like in daily fandom conversation, respondents often assumed the way they approached these questions was the default position: “who would ever do that??” sitting side by side with “doing that is the only way to do it!”
Above all, as is the case with a lot of our surveys, these results don’t offer any “correct way” to be a fan—if anything, they show that there is no such thing as a “correct way.” And in the places we diverge, it’s a helpful reminder that even when we’re using the same terms, we may not mean the same thing—even when we’re reading the same fic.
This article is brought to you by Fansplaining’s patrons. If you’d like to help us publish more writing like this in the future, please consider pledging as little as $1 a month.
Elizabeth Minkel is the editor and host of Fansplaining. She’s written about fan culture for WIRED, Atlas Obscura, The New Yorker, the New Statesman, and more. She co-curates “The Rec Center,” a weekly fandom newsletter, with fellow journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw.
Flourish Klink co-created and co-hosted Fansplaining from 2015-2024. Formerly, they worked in fan culture and audience research for major media franchises; now, they are pursuing the priesthood in the Episcopal Church.