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Popular Culture Review
Millennium Falcon, or producing wikis that seek to catalogue characters, events
and locations found within the canon (cf. Penley, 1997:117-8: see, for example,
Toten 2008 on the Battlestar Galactica wiki).
A great deal, if not all, studies of fanfiction have focused on the ways in
which female fans seek to re-read the canon of various films, TV shows, or
novels, refocusing it to better serve or represent their own interests and concerns
(Busse & Hellekson, 2006:17). This may take a variety of forms. In some
instances, fan-authors have sought to shift the focus of attention away from the
main (typically male) characters towards other, less-developed (typically
female) characters, such as Nurse Chapel or Lieutenant Uhura in the original
Star Trek series. In other cases, they have sought to ‘slow the action down’ and
focus more on the often-neglected, emotional relationships between lead
characters (Jenkins, 1992; 1995; 2006; Pugh, 2005). This has, in many cases,
found expression in forms of ‘slash’ literature in which these notionally
heterosexual male characters are depicted together in romantic/homosexual
relationships. Perhaps not surprisingly, this latter form of fanfiction has
generated the most controversy and received the lion’s share of academic
discussion (see, for example, Russ, 1985; Lamb & Veith, 1986; Jenkins, 1992:
chapter 6; Penley, 1997; Cicioni, 1998; Gwenllian Jones 2002; Busse &
Hellekson, eds. 2006; Kustritz, 2003; Scordari, 2003).
My aim in this article is to contribute to this growing debate around gender
and fan creativity by examining the largely unexplored area of male fanfiction.
Drawing on interviews with male authors of fanfiction based on the Warhammer
40,000 miniature wargame (Games Workshop, 1987-; hereafter W40K), I will
explore the different ways in which their work interacts with the W40K canon.
In doing so, I will show how for the majority of them the originality of their
work lies not so much in the ways that it transforms the canon, but rather
through the ways in which it enriches it, by, for example, adding either depth to
the W40K universe or by shading in areas of the universe that have not been
explored within the canonical literature. Linked with this, I will also explore
some reasons for why this is the case, suggesting a confluence of different
factors ranging from desire for publication, the wish to avoid social disapproval
and gain readers, through to the heavily gendered nature of the W40K universe.
To this end, my analysis will be structured in three main sections. In the first, I
will briefly introduce readers to W40K fandom, highlighting the nature of the
W40K canon and the role that it plays within fan creativity. Following on from
this, in the next two sections, I will draw on my interviews with W40K fanauthors to explore a variety of issues around the areas of canonicity, gender and
originality.1
Warhammer 40,000
W40K is a tabletop miniature war-game produced by the UK company
Games Workshop (www.gamesworkshop.com) and set in a dystopian Gothic
future 38,000 years hence where humanity, represented by the Imperium of
Man, stands on the brink of extinction, threatened on all sides by a multitude of