VII. We are you (I) – Investigating the intersection between fan spaces and artists of all disciplines

Artists from all disciplines emerge from fan fiction and geek spaces – and it informs their practice and audiences as well as it shapes their personalities. In this chapter, I consider a few creative professionals from different disciplines and how they interact and engage with those spaces. The information here has been gathered from interviews with these artists during the last two years. Whilst the road from fan fiction space to professional career is a little more straightforward for writers and directors, and they often find the audience of their fan fiction work reflected in the audience of their professional work later, it is a little different for composers. Due to there not being a peer review group or an audience for this art form already built into these spaces, we often separate our artistic practice from our participation in these spaces. However, there are a few of us who are beginning to connect the two, understanding that what shapes us as people also shapes us as artists. Through this line of inquiry, we can gain insight into how this practice is also reflected in the audience for these composers and how they see themselves in relation to their audience. I have referenced the interviews with date linked to the names, and they are available to be read in full in the bibliography. All quotes are taken from those interviews.

Directors

In the summer of 2024, just before Serenoid premiered, US-American director and playwright Nadiya Atkinson premiered her most recent work Cringe at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to critical acclaim. Cringe is a take on different characters growing up in fanfiction culture in the 1960s and 2010s by a woman who has been part of it her entire teenage and adult life. When I meet Nadiya for an interview in Seven Dials in London, we immediately speak the same language. 

She describes growing up with Harry Potter, Doctor Who and Sherlock, and getting into Star Trek later on, developing a fascination for exploratory Sci-fi as inspiration to work towards a better future. Cringe is a play about how people find themselves and each other in the fandom, it’s – as one of the ensemble members puts it – “a show about healing the queer inner child”. 

Nadiya confirms, that despite being titled Cringe, “The show is not written to make fun of that. It's written to celebrate it. And also hopefully elicit a sense of, oh my god, I was exactly like that (...)” The likeminded people that she found back then online are the people she hopes and expects to come as her audience and see themselves, see their own teenage years flash by and embrace themselves all over again. And she has been successful, stating “(…) we had some people come and they were like, thank you so much for putting this up, this was so meaningful to me, I saw myself in this (…).” And “(…) we had this group of women who came from Worldcon in Glasgow (footnote) (…), and they almost made me cry. They were saying that (...) being able to see themselves on stage was so meaningful, and especially not in a demeaning way, but in a way that the work was actually celebrating that kind of community.” 

When asked how participation in these communities influenced her practice, Nadiya says “I think that there has to be a space in your life for really unabashed exploration and deep, deep investigation and love for something, and an acceptance of that, because that's the place from which you can make your most earnest and vulnerable and true work.” And that the fan fiction community in its non-commercialised, non-hierarchical nature “(…) really just all runs on people's love for the thing, which is so pure and wonderful to touch and be a part of.”

British-Pakistani playwright and director Leo Doulton’ s work is in the business of “immersion”. Immersive theatre is – in his own words “a theatre form designed for a lonely 21st century. If you come to sit in the theatre by yourself in silence, you can do that and it'd be the most thoroughly fucking lonely experience in the history of the world.”

He, too, believes that theatre or any art form should bring people together in a mediated space over a common interest and strives to recreate these safe spaces of self-experience in his immersive theatre work. (“you can come here and in a mediated space, spend time with other people who have a common interest with you. (…) And genuinely, you see these wonderful, tender connections between people because it's always very small scale and they care about this imagined community. But more particularly, they can become friends during it or at least passing for friends. And particularly (...) for certain members of marginalised groups, people with neurodiversities, that can be really fucking valuable.”)

Although also an opera director in a more traditional sense, a large part of Leo’s heart seems to belong to his background in geek spaces. “In terms of online nerd communities, I have always been a lurker rather than an active participant”, he says, “But in terms of general nerdery, yes, absolutely, both in my own creative factors,

but also in my tastes in media. (...) I particularly like sci-fi and fantasy that is made, (…) with genuine heart and also with a clear sense of “how is the world we're constructing” - building a world that somehow tells a story that we want to tell.” 

Just like Nadiya and her take on exploratory science fiction, Leo hopes that people find in themselves the directions for a positive possible future rather than have his work shock them out of their comfort zone. The space to explore your own humanity and create your own happy ending, regardless of who you are, is important for both artists and for both, it is something they have experienced in geek communities and online fan spaces. 

Writers

Maybe the shortest route from fan fiction space to professional career is that of a writer. As mentioned before, many fan fiction communities function as training spaces in creative writing. Maybe one of the most notable examples is Dr. Una McCormack, a successful author of mostly Star Trek and Doctor Who novels, and lecturer for creative writing at Cambridge University. 

She recounts her career path as follows:

“(…) when I was about 16, I discovered fandom, but this was the 1980s. So fandom meant, you know, buying zines and meeting up with a group of people once every six weeks or something like that.

(…) I got online pretty early. (…) So it's sort of the mid 90s. And mailing lists were really kind of taking off then in academic environments. And I thought, I bet there's a Blake's Seven mailing list. And I found one. And it was mostly for fan fiction. So we were posting short stories and doing that kind of thing. And then I got into (Star Trek) Deep Space Nine, which was sort of near the end of its run. And you know, Deep Space Nine.

So obviously, once again, there's a traumatic end for anyone who's interested in Cardassians (an alien race in Star Trek). Yeah. What do you do if you’re traumatized? (By the outcome of a show, in this case, the homeworld of the Cardassians being completely devastated by a war) You immediately run up. You go and write fan fiction. Right? You fix it. (this refers to the practice of writing alternative endings to an unwanted outcome of the original material, or a more satisfying sequel)

(…) I was posting stories there (on Usenet). (…) they started to get very nice comments. I was getting better as a writer. I got an email out of the blue from Marco Palmieri, who was the editor at the time of the Range Pocket. And he invited me to pitch and I said, Yes, please, that would be lovely. “

Una never really lost touch with this community that she came out of as a writer, and never denies having emerged from this space. She had several appearances on Sid City Social Club, an online community that formed during COVID around actor Siddig El-Fadil who portrayed Dr. Julian Bashir in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and still writes fanfiction today, under a pseudonym, on AO3 (although she has withdrawn from them a little because she doesn’t want people to feel like they ought to be fussing over her status). She has experienced the kind of disdain that many of us who are not white cisgender men have experienced when they do anything, being criticised that her books read like fan fiction. But she takes it in a stride when she says: “Well, no, what you're saying is that it's got girls in it and feelings. Fan fiction has a lot of that, but you know, life has girls and feelings. So you tend to see that that kind of snooted, it just pops up periodically, but people just look like idiots when they say it, I think.” 

Her audience is definitely the same people that read her fan fictions, even read her fan fictions now because she is a celebrated author. Her audience has maybe grown, but it hasn’t changed. 

Composers

Composers – those of us who understand ourselves as classical composers - are maybe the least straightforward breed of creators coming out of these spaces – but this doesn’t mean we don’t engage in them. Our reasons for engaging may not be for artistic development, but some of us definitely find connection in them and are shaped by them. For many of us, our engagement with any pop culture is often separate from our practice, however, a lot of us are also increasingly attempting to bring these separate lives together. 

Lydia Gardiner, a current Master Student in Composition at KC Den Haag from Australia, is working on a secular Passion project telling the historical queer story of the Zeewijk, a Dutch ship that was wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos, Australia. Despite her not being religious, her musical career started out as a chorister in an Anglican church in Perth, where she grew up, and she proceeded to set many religious texts – such as the Ceremony of Carols. Her audience in this sacred context is definitely not “people like her”. Initially, she explains it with her church being very open, her understanding of it as a “job” she simply went and did, and many people in the choir not being religious. She didn’t have the same relationship with the bible texts she set that a religious person might have, but her context and her surroundings inspired the engagement with them. 

As a teenager, Lydia lived the life that a lot of us only find in the fan fiction community. A common ground connection growing into engagement with a culture, orientation or aspects foreign to her. She describes the life of a social butterfly, of being engaged with a lot of different groups in high school, of being popular but not the queen bee. Her popularity was informed by being able to make connections to the differing crystallised groups formed in her school. Her engagement with online fandom was one of many things she was involved in, and it stopped when she felt that her life offline was becoming fuller and she no longer found the time for it. 

But it was also a space that opened her world beyond her direct surroundings: “it caused me to engage with people that I wouldn't otherwise have engaged with. (...) it opens up your world to you because then you're engaging with people outside of like your social circle in your life. (…) I think that the idea of connection is something that I am very preoccupied with. And the idea of connecting with people of very different values from you.”

She, too, notes a fascination with the creative dedication in these spaces.

“(…) there's so much identity seeking and creating in those spaces. I think about these fan fics - They're huge. (…) They're so complicated. Some of them are so well written. And you think this is for free on the internet, and this is better than a lot of printed stuff that I've read. And people do it because they love it and they find it fulfilling. (…) artistically, it's very similar (to what composers do, because we often don’t get paid enough).”

But she also describes how her parents and her immediate environment were always entirely supportive of her choice of profession and her queerness. She describes an environment of freedom, in which she was accepted enough to engage with different social groups because there was no need for her to isolate herself for the sake of self-protection. And so the engagement in those spaces wasn’t as vital for her as it would have been to the rest of us. But she does admit that she becomes obsessive about these spaces when she feels she has to withdraw and work some things out internally. It’s like a safe space to withdraw to and she wouldn’t want to deny her engagement in it (“I think dismissing these things about you dismisses the way that it shapes you. (…) (In regards to) my engagement with fandom and impacting my compositional process: I think it probably definitely did. And I think it probably has to do with this desire for connection with people that seem different from me.”)

She also acknowledges, that for some people, these spaces are a life line: “I come from a well-off family. I have good parents who love me. I have never wanted for anything. And to acknowledge that is to say, okay, if you’re having an intense experience (of being bullied or not accepted at home etc.), it’s more intense in times of (self-) protection or danger. You feel like your body is in survival mode. They're (These safe spaces) going to have a much deeper impact on you.”

Telling a queer story based on a historical event between Australia and the Netherlands, where she is now based, seems more authentic to her as a queer person, than setting yet another Bible text. Choosing the Passion as a form makes sense to her in the context of her lifelong engagement in sacred choral music. Like me, she is bringing together worlds that she moves in, openly choosing a queer narrative instead of the religious themes common in the Passion genre. Lydia uses the accusatory tone of the Passion to call out homophobia and maybe make the space feel a little bit more accessible and safer for those watching and listening who are used to having offences against them on grounds of their sexual orientation go unnoticed or ignored. She, too, creates a safer space exactly by letting people know she is one of them and therefore cares about them because their concerns are her concerns. 

There is a take on the Greek myth, that can be understood as fan fiction. In 2023, Greek transgender composer Phoenix Rousamanis presented Songs of Descent, a concertante, queer re-telling of the legend of Hades and Persephone. Whilst there probably are a good many retellings that focus on romanticising the problematic abduction-romance in a Stockholm-Syndrome-fuelled male fantasy, Rousamanis, like a fan fiction writer, uses the material but focusses on a side character, Hekate, as well as making up her own creatures that are encountered along the way. Her engagement with the material isn’t informed by a tendency to base classical music on classicist literature, she is Greek and therefore engages with the past of her own culture. 

Zygmund de Somogyi puts it like this, when they note how people default to mainstream narratives when putting on their “composer hat”: “(…) it really bugs me that in certain compositional circuits you're always setting the Bible, look, I'm inspired by this piece of mythology, (...). Like, sorry, how many settings of Jabberwocky are there in our compositional circles? There's already at least five, and that's without looking to people I don't know personally.” 

They are also someone who came out of online spaces and observes themself gradually returning to them as a source of inspiration for their work, mainly because participating taught them to question the cultural default settings in their life and artistic practice, that people just repeat for the sake of it. Their roots are not just in classical music but also in punk rock (“this is what was available to me at the time”) but they found these spaces mainly in order to be in a culturally more diverse place and escape the White-European-dominated narratives around them. We met at the Cheltenham Music Festival in 2022, where they presented Pixelhead, a piece for harpsichord and violin that was inspired by a narrative of Online Folklore (“Creepypasta”) titled The Backrooms. These Backrooms are endless labyrinths of floors, walls and corridors that could be accessed, were one to “glitch” out of reality. They are deserted liminal spaces that are hard to find – but like a classic horror narrative – even harder to escape and extend into infinity. The stories around The Backrooms have been adapted many times in the worlds of amateur film and independent gaming – most notably in the short film The Backrooms (Found Footage) by teenage director Kane Parsons, who operates under the moniker Kane Pixels – hence the title of Zygmund’s piece. Zygmund openly explains “I very much consider that (the piece) fan fiction. It’s (…) contributing to the sound or the sonic world and the textures in that piece are based around existing kind of conceptual palettes, essentially. And that's basically what fan fiction is.It's work that's inspired by existing conceptual palettes.”

They confirm my own experience, when they recount “(…) a lot of people gravitate to these online spaces, to find that sense of belonging that maybe they don't have in that offline kind of space, essentially. And that's how I saw it. I found a lot of like-minded people up there. (…) I'm not a great visual artist. (…) I did a bit of fan fiction. (…) Some of the composition work I do is more like fan fiction, I'd say.(…) Because it draws from the same place.”

Zygmund’s isolation stemmed from being mixed race and from not feeling a sense of belonging to either the culture of the country they grew up in or the country of their origin. The online space they felt drawn to was the world of the SCP Foundation, a collaborative writing project surrounding a Scientific Research Foundation or paramilitary organisation for the study of supernatural and paranormal phenomena that is set in a fictional world they describe as an amalgamate of different cultures without the cultural baggage.

They participated in the SCP fan lore with a piece of classical music: “I wrote a solo cello piece. I wonder how successful this was on a musical aesthetic level, but on a conceptual level, it works really well. It actually is on the fandom Wiki for, I think, fairies, as described by the SCP Foundation, which is its own set of cultural benchmarks. (…) And that works in getting people kind of engaged. Even if not everyone can understand it, there's a couple of people who think this is really interesting how this is being adapted in this art form they haven’t really seen as much of.” 

Bringing fan fiction-based instrumental music into classical spaces, they do recount facing some criticism, but

in terms of the relationship with their audience, they can’t make much sense of the traditional classical music audience anyway. They came to classical composition through the experimental rock scene but “classical music itself was something that was kind of like, oh, that happens over there. It's not for me.” 

 “(…) artistically, like, I'm not really sure if it's going to be fans of classical music that get the most from my work. I think it's going to be much more people from outside of that sphere of influence. That's kind of what I'm hoping at least.”

As musicians, we have less opportunity to develop our actual practice in those spaces. But as people, for many of us it was the space where our identity was developed. Where we found out who we were, found people like us. More and more, music accompanies writing online on AO3 or comic art, like on the WebToon app, that lets you listen to music specially produced for the comic whilst scroll reading. 

With more and more explicit representation for the LGBTQIA+ community, people of colour and people with disabilities, the stories that were once banned to these corners of the internet are slowly creeping out into the light of day. And with theatre shows and novels coming out of this space, why not also opera or other forms of contemporary classical music? And if this happens, taking the participants in these former niche spaces with us into offline life, I am convinced that a lot of them will make for an enthusiastic audience, and the feedback to Serenoid proves that. In this way, composers and performers coming out of fan spaces could benefit from the same “test audience” that writers and visual artists do and classical music could become something that people are in touch with in their daily lives, rather than a thing perceived as antiquated that “other people” do in concert halls and opera houses.