Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Fanfiction :: Show TV Television Buffy Fans Essays

Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Fanfiction Buffy The Vampire Slayer has broken many barriers in its seven-year stint, creating new genres and enabling innovation in a previously barren area of television. The largest leap the show has taken though, has been in the way it has embraced its fandom, creating a symbiotic relationship between Buffy the show and Buffy the fanfiction. Not only does Buffy fanfiction seize upon unexplored areas and inconsistencies inherent in the text, these forays are often paid homage to by the show, and in some cases, even made part of the canon itself. Ideas and fantasies created by the fans can impact upon the show in a way that has never been seen before. For those who are not familiar with what fanfiction is, it essentially refers to fan-authored texts written around characters, scenarios or elements from pre-existing sources, usually television shows or films, although the list can include such varied sources as bands, cartoon, books, poems or games. It used to be the exclusive preserve of zines or mailing lists, but with the advent of the internet, fanfiction has become easy to find and easy to publish. The internet has essentially brought a show like Buffy to a point that it took Star Trek years to build up to. For example, if you were to type in the words 'Buffy' and 'Fanfiction' in the Google search engine, you would come up with about 77,000 hits. With the advent of internet access to fan-authored works, it has become much easier for fanfiction authors and readers to conceal their identities. However, it still functions as a community, complete with mailing lists, fanfiction challenges and internet zines. There is no longer a n eat divide between the producers and consumers from years ago. Now fans can be both. Fanfiction has been regarded in the past by theorists like Henry Jenkins as a scribbling in the margins, a form of textual poaching. This often created an antagonistic relationship between the owners of the text and the fans that consumed them. Rather than simply reading the text and producing meanings in the way that the author had intended, fans not only scribble their ideas in the margin, they rewrite large slabs of the original to articulate their own meanings. These practices either resulted in the outrage of Lucasfilm or the tolerance of other shows. Buffy has reversed this process, turning the fans into authors and allowing them to not only play with any aspect of the show, but also to influence the direction of the narrative itself.