Girls Go Slash/Boys Go Bang
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things in a certain way, the way they grew up with it”. The potential fear of
negative feedback from beta-readers and the broader W40K fanfiction
community was also highlighted as a particularly salient factor by ‘Paul’:
. . . if someone has a way out idea that conflicts with the
canon, they will get negative feedback over it (should they ask
for opinions). I think this constrains some people more than
the canon itself, as there’s no shortage of opinions on the
n e t. . . Many writers may not feel comfortable doing
something outside the norm.
On one level, then, even where there are not explicit rules regarding the types of
stories that can be published, the W40K fanfiction community nevertheless
operates for many fan-authors as, to use Mead’s term (1934), a form of
‘generalised other’, determining for them both what types of stories can be
written and the respect that should be accorded to the canon (c/. Stein & Busse,
2009: 196-8 on fan author/reader communities as ‘interpretive communities’).
Another implicit pressure felt by some fan-authors was the desire to
produce content that could potentially be published by the Black Library.
Several, for example, speculated on whether the emphasis on producing
innovative work that did not challenge parameters of the canon or push it in a
different direction was, to some extent, motivated by authors’ desire to have
their work eventually published and become, itself, part of the canon. The Black
Library has, over the last few years, organised four competitions where the
winner’s was work published in an anthology with established authors and they
received a modest sum of money for their efforts. Indeed, 2009 saw the
publication of Emperor’s Mercy, the first book by Henry Zou, who had come to
the Black Library’s attention when he had a story published in one of its fananthologies. As ‘Richard’, who had himself had a story published in the same
anthology as Zou, observed
. . . there’s loads of Star Wars fanfic but that doesn’t really go
anywhere because you’ve got really established writers like
Timothy Zahn and Karen Traviss who are already writing the
books . .. Whereas you get someone like the Black Library,
they’re coming to us, they’re coming to the fans and saying
‘you write fanfic, here’s a competition, here’s an open
submissions window. Send us your best stuff, maybe we’ll
publish it. If we publish it, maybe you’l get to become a
proper author—more than just a fanfic writer’. I don’t think
anyone else offers that offers that kind of opportunity.13
From this perspective, fan-fiction operated on one, instrumental, level as a form
of ‘calling card’; demonstrating (potentially) to the Black Library that one not
only had a clear grasp of the canon, but could tell original stories within its
parameters.