Gaitan’s urge to change the narrative is a familiar one among a subset of fans who write fan fiction, or fanfic, original stories that borrow characters, plots and settings from established media properties and are published mostly online, on sites like AO3, Tumblr and FanFiction.net.
Increasingly, these fans are taking matters into their own hands by writing “fix-it fics,” or simply “fix-its,” which attempt to right the perceived wrongs of a beloved work — and often provide some measure of emotional succor.
“The Last of Us,” which killed off its male lead surprisingly early in a hotly anticipated second season — a lead played, no less, by “the internet’s daddy,” Pedro Pascal — has proved to be particularly generative. Real numbers can be hard to track because of inconsistent labeling, but more than 50 “The Last of Us” stories tagged “Fix-It” were uploaded to AO3 in the week after Joel’s death, ranging from about 300 words to almost 80,000.
But if a TV writer can dream of it, a fan can feel betrayed by it: Fix-its have appeared in recent months for series like “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance” and “The White Lotus,” all of which contained whiplash-inducing plot twists.
“When something happens to a character that doesn’t resonate with how you see them, and you can’t let it go, you want to get out there and tell the story differently,” said Larisa Garski, a licensed therapist in Chicago who co-wrote a book with her fellow therapist Justine Mastin titled “Starship Therapise: Using Therapeutic Fanfiction to Rewrite Your Life.” And when that something is death, fix-it writing can resemble the bargaining stage of grief.
“We’re going to fanfic to mourn,” Garski said. “We’re going to fanfic to try and take back agency because this beloved character has been taken from us.”
Fan fiction has existed arguably for centuries, but its modern incarnation traces back at least as far as the “Star Trek” fandoms of the late 1960s, whose members published fanzines with stories by fans for fans. By the 2000s, the popularity of fanfic exploded with widespread internet access.
Written often under pseudonyms, fanfic can be wildly experimental, playing with storytelling conventions, timelines, identity and unabashed eroticism. (Such elements have long made it a safe haven, Mastin observed, for people “on the fringes: geeks, nerds, punks, L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. folks.”) Occasionally, fanfic evolves a life of its own. The “Fifty Shades” series began as “Twilight” fanfic.
