Fannish Folklore

It is of course not just children who like to link situations together for a sensible progression of events. Everyone is a storyteller. This does not mean that everyone is a skilled storyteller, able to enchant audiences and weave monumental epics, but rather that everyone tells stories, even if it is something as seemingly inconsequential as describing one’s day. Storytelling helps us define ourselves and make sense of the world. Storytelling is such a part of us as humans, that human experience and storytelling are inextricable. John D. Niles describes the importance of storytelling in the role of human development:

Through storytelling, an otherwise unexceptional biological species has become a much more interesting thing, Homo narrans: that hominid who not only has succeeded in negotiating the world of nature, finding enough food and shelter to survive, but also has learned to inhabit mental worlds that pertain to times that are not present and places that are the stuff of dreams. It is through such symbolic mental activities that people have gained the ability to create themselves as human beings and thereby transform the world of nature into shapes not known before. (3)

Folklore and folk practices, in the colloquial use of the term, are often associated with times long since passed: the “old-timey stuff” of vanishing cultures and traditions (Blank, “Introduction: Towards a Conceptual” 4). The broad term “folklore” encompasses folk expression such as material culture, belief, and ritual, among others, though throughout this book I will focus specifically on one type of folklore: folk stories. In the West one often thinks, for example, of folk stories which were written and collected in now-famous anthologies largely during nineteenth-century Europe such as the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Tales] (1812–1857) or Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale publications (1835–1852). Yet Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner note that there is “no inherent rule that folk expression must consist of ‘old stuff.’” What is of more importance is that folklore expresses consistencies which allow a group to perceive their folklore as “traditional, locally derived, or community generated”—everyday expressions by everyday people (23–24). Folklorists study folklore to “understand the nature of human cultural history and expression” (Toelken 31) and that certainly includes contemporary, everyday expression. The evolution of folk stories is often characterized as a “multifaceted process involving the production, institutionalization, definition, acceptance, rejection, transformation, revision, and interpretation” of traditional versions of tales (Haase, “Introduction” The Reception 12). These stories which evolve and shape as they are retold and refashioned allow participants to personalize stories while still maintaining ties to the traditional versions of tales. Put quite simply, then, folklore is “the study of the living performance of tradition—for better and worse and for everything in between” (Phillips and Milner 25).

In my investigation, I focus on one of the largest strictly German-language sites FanFiktion.de and its stories classified under the category of “Grimms Märchen” or “Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” This collection is also of particular interest in relation to studying the evolution of folk stories in German-speaking cultures, since fans directly engage with the Grimms’ tales, treating them as central to an established fairy-tale canon. These fans acknowledge this canon while simultaneously rewriting and critiquing the tales, often engaging in metadiscussions of the genre. Fans at times discuss not just the Grimms’ role in defining the genre, but their own active engagement in redefining the fairy-tale tradition. I likewise narrow my focus to discuss this specific treatment of the genre because, as Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson note, it is impossible, even perhaps dangerous, to speak of all fan fiction as a single genre; fan fiction revolving around different media are often part of online communities which have strikingly different rules and expectations (“Introduction: Why a Fan Fiction” 6). Below I introduce the genre of fan fiction, though for the sake of clarity I first define terms key to the discussion of online fan fiction as well as provide a description of the site FanFiktion.de.