Lesson one. Size matters. 

Harry Potter. Its author, J. K. Rowling, the first billionaire from books. A movie franchise that kept several generations of British actors employed for the better part of a decade. An entire imaginative world for the generation of children that grew up reading and writing in it. FanFiction.Net alone hosts over 500,000 Harry Potter stories, and there are many more on other archives, some still active, some gone and never coming back. In addition to the large multi-fandom archives like FanFiction.Net, Fanlore lists thirty general Harry Potter fanfic websites (including some sites with more varied purposes, such as the influential MuggleNet, which include substantial fanfiction sections) and at least three times that many smaller archives devoted to particular relationships, themes, or characters. The influence of these fansites and the networks, systems, and cultures they help put in place has been enormous--and it isn't likely to fade any time soon.  

Twilight. Like Harry Potter, marketed as a children's book series--in the Young Adult (YA) category Harry Potter helped establish. It came home from elementary school via my daughter's book-order form, and I didn't think twice about it. Like Harry Potter, Twilight is a global book and movie franchise that inspired hundreds of thousands of fics and also like Harry Potter, it gathered a fanbase big and passionate enough to transform mass culture and the industries that help produce it in unprecedented ways. But on the question of what kind of transformations--the two mass franchises part ways.

Lesson two. Sex matters.  

Harry Potter was in great part responsible for the explosion of YA as a book marketing category. Twilight also helped establish a highly lucrative publishing category (after more firmly entrenching YA literature and paranormal romance in particular as lucrative markets)--but books in the publishing category Twilight helped launch were not going to come home in my daughter's gradeschool backpack. These were adult books. Really, really adult. Unlike any other fanfiction fandom, and certainly unlike any children's franchise, Twilight not only inspired an underground erotic romance revolution but took it mainstream. But long before Fifty Shades of Grey and other forays into the world of commercial publishing, Twilight fanfiction had become the virtual site for an enormous and sometimes astonishingly frank conversation about sex, stories, and how to go about integrating the two in writing. Such conversations had been going on for a long time in fanfiction circles, as we've seen in the Star Trek, X-Files, and Buffy fandoms, but when it comes to conversations about sex (as opposed to the actual act, where your mileage may vary), size, as it turns out, does matter.  

Harry Potter spawned no Fifty Shades-style commercial boom in YA-inspired erotica, but make no mistake: its shipper wars--the conflicts about romantic relationships between imaginary magical teenagers--were epic. The cultural importance of Harry Potter slash in particular--of which there was plenty--should not be discounted, because in an enormous global fandom, even subcultures are giant. Although the sexual life some fanfiction imagines for Harry Potter's underage characters has long been a source of discomfort for their creator (and for a different set of fans), J. K. Rowling's post-series announcement that beloved wizard Dumbledore was gay fixed in canon the kind of possibility in which fanfiction had long been dwelling. Harry Potter slash helped shape and challenge attitudes toward sexual diversity among the generation that grew up reading it and arguing about it (a lot) online.  

Even today, when YA novels and television shows frequently thematize and represent sex between underage characters, much more often than not these stories present cautionary tales. They are stories of What Goes Wrong when you drink at a party, trust a boy, don't use protection, go too far before you're ready. These stories do not represent frank conversations about tastes and preferences and protection, gradations of gender and sexual orientation, or the mechanics of orgasm. Unsurprisingly, teens are eager for that information, and have never really needed adults to tell them that sex exists and that they may find it interesting. Where previous generations may have looked to parental porn stashes and the pages of Cosmopolitan, today's teens increasingly find such information in fanfiction. They write it in fanfiction--and in some version or another, they always have. They used to write it in notebooks, and now they write it and share it online. Like it or not, this has become normal and public, a part of growing up for millions. If Twilight and Harry Potter have taught us anything, it's that authorial intent has nothing to do with the afterlives of their characters.  

 Lesson three: Age matters.  

Growing up reading and writing in online fanfiction communities has become widespread, and has helped shape the thinking, reading, and writing habits of a generation of future writers. Many professional writers working today began their careers in fic. Some of these writers are erotica writers, sure. But it would be a mistake to see the cultural or even the economic impact of fanfiction only in terms of the number of published books it has generated directly. This shift to writing as a social, communal activity is already having a profound impact on the economics and production of fiction as well as on the relationships this fiction represents and itself forges and relies on. 

When I say "age matters," I mean the age of the fans, the fic writers and readers, but also of the internet itself. Harry Potter helped create the conditions for the Twilight phenomenon, paving its way both in the world of traditional commercial publishing and entertainment and in the online world of fan-generated culture. Not that Twilight fans always acknowledged or even knew of this debt. Although there was some overlap between the two fandoms, and some Twilight fans had participated in other fic fandoms, most--according to my research--had not. This lack of collective knowledge (and acknowledgement) of fan history and custom did not go unnoticed by those who did possess it. The same arguments--"These fans don't know what they're doing!" "And they're doing it wrong!"--have been leveled by older fans against newer fans since literary science fiction fans belittled media fans, since zine producers belittled the internet. Certainly, the same criticisms were leveled against Harry Potter fans, too, but Harry Potter fans were on the front lines of establishing the mechanisms and traditions of online fandom on a massive scale, taking them outside of smaller subcultures to a much broader online audience. By the time Twilight fandom rolled around, internet fandom had set ways and patterns, and while Twilight fans by and large weren't steeped in them, these established online cultures still provided basic models for fanwriting traditions such as awards, beta readers, feedback, disclaimers, and so forth. Twilight fans took these elements even more mainstream. Twifans were not coming from subcultures, they were often not self-identified geeks, and importantly, they were also more likely to be older, professional women with professional-grade skills and resources. By contrast, the people who built Harry Potter fandom were largely older teens and young adults in an era when web skills were still largely new to everyone--because the web was still new. By the time the Twilight fandom got going, it really wasn't. In 1997, when Buffy premiered and the first Harry Potter book was released, household internet use in the US was at 18 percent, and all dial-up. By 2007, two years after Twilight's publication (but before the films that infused so much energy into the fic fandoms), home internet use was at 62 percent of households, and mostly broadband; by 2011, it was at 72 percent. Age matters.  

It wasn't just age, though, and it wasn't just the internet. In terms of fanfiction itself, there were key differences between the two fandoms that had to do with fan writers' attitudes toward their source material. Harry Potter inspired work that, however divergent in terms of the activities of the characters and the worlds they might visit, tended to stay closer to Rowling's characterizations--emphasizing some, deemphasizing others, but remaining largely recognizable. Twilight fanfiction, however, evolved to maintain only the slightest structural connections to its originals and to draw equally if not more from other fics and fandom tropes. (Although this certainly happened in the Harry Potter fandom, it ultimately caused a lot of controversy.) In terms of fanfiction, then, if not in terms of scale and internet and social media use, Harry Potter operated more or less in keeping with tradition: fans creating works of homage and sometimes parody, but creating them primarily out of love. Twilight fic writers, on the other hand, could be ambivalent about their source. They might love it, but they might hate themselves a little for doing so. Or they might not even love it at all, but love the fiction-writing community, bound by its characters and the actors who play them. Whatever their differences, each megafandom revolutionized fan-based internet culture and marketing in its own way, each led to commercial and financial gain for a few prominent individuals in fandom, and each generated controversy. A lot.  

Lesson four: Wank matters--even though everyone wishes it didn't. 

Greater wank hath no fan than to lay down one's fic for one's friends and then pick it up again and make millions. It's not that individuals hadn't profited from fanworks before Fifty Shades of Grey, or that fan writers hadn't repurposed work or gone pro with other material, but there really wasn't precedent for the scale of what happened with Twilight fanfiction going pro in 2011-2013. There was, however, plenty of precedent for wank big enough for even the biggest size queens.  

Or Snowqueens, as the case may be.  

As any Twifan could tell you, long before Snowqueens Icedragon changed some names in her popular fic "Master of the Universe" and published it as Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, the wank surrounding her, her attitudes, and her relationship to the fandom had already reached epic proportions. And long before Snowqueens Icedragon, there was the Harry Potter fandom's Cassandra Claire--now better known as Cassandra Clare of the Mortal Instruments series (which has 7,000-plus fics on FanFiction.Net). Aside from their fandom origins and being lightning rods for controversy as popular authors, these two bestselling writers' fandom histories have little in common. Cassandra Claire was a dedicated and central member of the Harry Potter fandom, participating in all kinds of ways, whereas Snowqueens Icedragon by her own account found the whole thing a little scary and preferred to hold herself a bit apart. The controversies that surrounded them, however, share a common element, and that has to do with ascribing credit--and eventually profit--to individuals for creative work that takes place in a collective culture of circulating texts and people.  

In a less explicit way, of course, all creative work takes place in a circulating, collective of texts and people. This is why fanfiction is interesting beyond the bounds of its own subculture, and why these controversies have higher stakes than some bruised egos, hurt feelings, or sour grapes.  

The fandom dynamics of wank--though I do not believe they show off the best of fanfiction or fan communities--are telling because they often serve as proxy controversies for working out complex but more abstract arguments about the nature of authorship, textual boundaries, and individual v. community ownership, and responsibility. Shipper wars--which long seemed incomprehensible to me, because I didn't see how people could get so angry at other people for liking to read about the sex lives of different imaginary people--function in much the same way. For many fans, who you ship, and how you tell that story, stands for what kind of relationship you think is right, what fits. In all these fandom dynamics, the central question may be the same: Who gets to tell the story? And whose story is it? Jane Austen--also a popular fanfiction source--makes the stakes clear in Persuasion: when the men are the ones telling the story, only certain stories get told. Dramione shippers apparently feel the same way when too much attention is paid to Drarry. Online fan communities evolved to give as much space as possible to all the different stories people wanted to tell.