Fanfiction’s Total Cultural Victory

In 2012, a self-published author of erotic Twilight fanfiction, whose books had gained a large fan base online, was offered a seven-figure contract by a major American publisher. E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy would become the three bestselling titles of the 2010s in the U.S. (even Fifty Shades Freed, the now mostly forgotten end to the trilogy, outsold The Hunger Games). They would also sell over 150 million copies worldwide across 52 languages.

The impact was immediate: Op-eds were written. Bad prose was excerpted. Stock photos of fluffy handcuffs appeared everywhere. And, amidst all the endless discussions about ethical BDSM and "mommy porn" and what, exactly, women might want, fanfiction had suddenly become highly lucrative. Instead of asking what Fifty Shades meant for women, people should have been asking what it meant for publishing. 

Some fanfiction authors and readers have always been deeply opposed to monetizing fanworks, seeing it as a fundamental betrayal of fanfiction itself. But the eruption of a subterranean erotic world into mainstream publishing has had more seismic effects than just irritating fanfiction purists. Fanfiction-originated romances, erotic and not, have an eye-catching presence in most bookshops now; this has fuelled ongoing culture war content about the feminization of contemporary fiction, the degradation of literary standards, and whether men can even sell books anymore. Plus, the spectacular example of Fifty Shades has given fanfiction adaptations a reliably pejorative connotation. Adapting fanfictions can attract a very invested fanbase, but it has also always been freighted with accusation: of bad, melodramatic, cheap writing, and even of plagiarism, or a more nebulous kind of cheating.