2.2 Brief historical overview

In order to be able to define the subject of this thesis’ attention even more clearly, the “what” from the previous subchapter has to be accompanied with the “when.” As has been explained, fanfiction can be considered a literary practice with a very long history, depending on the chosen point of view. Among frequently cited examples of fanfiction under one of the above mentioned broader definitions are Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, Wide Sargasso Sea or Shakespeare’s work, but the list, which isn’t as much a list as it is a certain perspective, is much larger (Derecho 2006).

In order to escape the risk of not being able to tell fanfiction from literature as a whole, Derecho reiterates the point expressed by several other scholars or fans that fanfiction is a product of people who self-identify as fans (p. 62). Adopting this angle, Derecho continues, takes us to the fan groups dedicated to Jane Austen and Sherlock Holmes at the beginning of the 20^th century and to the first significant media fandom of the Star Trek television series in the 60’.

The label “media fandom” is central. Coppa (2017) observes that the largest fanfiction fandoms develop around movies and television series, thus changing the media of the original work¹², and argues that even in the case of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, which were originally books, the biggest influx of fanfiction writers came after the first movies were released. There’s now an almost universal consensus about the origins of fanfiction in its “modern” sense (as, in simple terms, stories written predominantly by female fans, based mostly on media fandoms and focused on characters and their relationships) being linked to the Star Trek series (1966–1969). Other, in this sense influential series’ include several shows of the buddy cop genre, notably The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–1968) and The Professionals (1977–1983), together with also frequently cited sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster Star Wars (the first movie was released in 1977).

The Star Trek fandom became prototypical in many respects going forward – as Coppa (2006) summarizes it, although men were “making visual art, writing articles, organizing conventions – Star Trek stories are written almost entirely by women” (p. 47). The Start Trek fanfiction stories were distributed in numerous fanzines. A specific segment of the Star Trek fanzines focusing on the romantic relationship between the two main protagonists had almost 100% female “editorship, authorship, and readership” (Lamb & Veith, 2014).

In the years leading up to the next key milestones in the form of the exponential growth of internet users towards the end of the millennium and the beginnings of the massive Harry Potter fandom (the first book was published in 1997 in the United Kingdom and in 2000 both in the Czech Republic and Slovakia), there were large quantities of fandoms of all sizes producing content in the form of fanzines and fanfiction, and also the first rapidly growing online communities (Coppa, 2006), where the importance of anonymity started playing an essential role (for example Evans, 2006). Today’s largest fanfiction online archive Fanfiction.net was founded in 1998.

Here, attention must be shifted to Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic and Slovakia¹³). Due to historical reasons, which resulted in the country being culturally isolated from the West, the history of fan and media culture in Czechoslovakia (and the Czech Republic or Slovakia) differed significantly from that in the West. The effects of this isolation were numerous, and not just practical, i.e. difficult access to the media production from the West and the resulting delayed contact with the latest developments on the media and fan scene, but also ideological, resulting for example in a significantly different role of the fanzines (Macek, 2000; Kudláč, 2006) and different driving and motivational forces in the fandom (Macek, 2000, p. 36–38). Details on this subject, together with any analysis of the content of Czech fanzines of the early periods would, however, be beyond the scope of this thesis, with some exceptions that will be examined later.

Kudláč (2016) suggests that fanfiction as a phenomenon was practically non-existent in Czechoslovakia before 1989¹⁴. However, a more detailed analysis about the very beginnings of fanfiction in the slightly blurry period running from 1989 up until the emergence of the aforementioned massive media fandoms of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies shortly after 2000 is largely missing. In this decade, the situation in the Czech/Slovak Republic wasn’t that different from the West in that it was characterized, in terms of different means of fan content production, by coexistence of printed fanzines, first online message boards, email groups, first webpages and also fan conventions and gatherings (Macek, 2006). For example the Czech Tolkien fandom, one of the dominant Czech fandoms with one of the largest number of organized, or “registered” fans (Kudláč, 2006), was producing a lot of fan works inspired by the books of J. R. R. Tolkien and publishing them in specialized printed fanzines throughout the 90’s and onwards. What appears to have been missing, however, as pointed out by an article on the history of the Czech Harry Potter fandom on the Czech fan Wikia site Fanpolis¹⁵, was a wider fanfiction community dedicated not to just individual fandoms (books, authors), but to fanfiction as a genre, which ties back to the idea of the community factor being one of the defining aspects of fanfiction, as mentioned in one of the aforementioned definitions. This is what Hellekson and Busse mean when they talk about fanfiction establishing “its own fandom” (2014, p.7). This community factor, which could take on various forms such as large story archives, multi-fandom discussion boards or online activities, emerged later and will be examined in a more detailed way in the next chapters.

Even though they do not specifically mention fanfiction creators, both Kudláč and Macek talk about a new emerging generation of fans who joined the fandom after 2000. Given the timing, it seems it was largely this new online generation that embarked on a gradual synchronization with the English speaking fanfiction scene. The conditions were also favourable for this process to start. The internet boom in the Czech Republic started between the years 1995 and 2000 (Krčmářová, 2012). Responding to the sudden popularity of the Harry Potter books, the time gap between each book’s release in English and the respective translation was down to a year and a half around the time of the fourth book¹⁶. In the case of the Lord of the Rings, the Czech translations have been available since the beginning of the 90’ and as Kudláč points out, the release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies (2001–2003) could already be celebrated by Czech, Slovak and English speaking fans simultaneously.

Switching from the regional back to the global view, in Coppa’s (2006) historical outline the year 2000 is listed just as one of many media fandom milestones, which reflects the much longer history of media and fanfiction fandom in the English speaking countries. In the Czechoslovakian context, the turn of the millennium however represents a key milestone and will be also used as such in the context of this thesis.