Comparison

[Chloe Wu]

I have learned many things about fanfiction in this class so far, including how to classify them, close/distant read them, and even create them. Before this class, I would not classify some older works as fanfictions, like “The Secret/Sexual life of Robinson Crusoe” and the Frankenstein movie we’ve talked about in class. And I certainly wouldn’t notice that even some works from Shakespeare are too, like Romeo and Juliet can be categorized as a fanfiction of The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, a narrative poem first published in 1562 by Arthur Brooke.

If I were to compare these older fanfics to the newer ones we read, I would say that the older works tend to stand on their own more than the newer ones do. For example, not many people know that Romeo and Juliet is a fanfiction and the Frankenstein movie even has the palimpsest effect that overrided the original novel to some extent. And if we look at the more recent works, Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther is a “fanfiction” (although I would say that it’s not) that requires the audience to have knowledge on some Marvel settings and plots, and the HP fanfiction Isolation that we read today also needs people to have seen JK’s Harry Potter series before to fully understand things like Horcrux, basic chracter settings and their relationships.

I think most older fanfiction tends to stand on its own more but newer works don’t need to, because most newer works rely on the advance of technology, like social media or a website that gathers fans, so they are targeting at more specific audience with certain knowledge of their source text already; whereas older works did not have that, so they had a much broader intended audience and had to make their fanfics consumable on its own.

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