The first rule of fandom is: You do not talk about fanfic. 

The second rule of fandom--or of Supernatural fandom, at least--is that fandom has no rules. 

Supernatural first aired on September 13, 2005, and was a show made for fanfic. It had two attractive leads, drawn into an intense co-dependent relationship in the confines of a '67 Impala, spiced up with childhood trauma and liberally sprinkled with daddy issues. Toss in a rich mythology that drew on everything from urban legends to religion, and fandom needed no encouragement to hop on board.  

What we had no inkling of at the time was that this show we loved and wrote about with such passion would see what we were doing and love us right back. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever there are two hot men in a TV show they must be slashed, and such was the case with Supernatural. There was one little kink, so to be speak, in the arrangement this time: the two main characters--Sam and Dean Winchester--were brothers. 

The Supernatural fandom wasn't going to let a little thing like incest get in the way of our creative (and other) urges, and in fact the first fanfic posted for the fandom was a slash story featuring Sam and Dean, posted the day after the pilot episode aired.i In true fandom form, the pairing had a mashup name--Wincest--within a few weeks. 

Fanfic in any fandom is strongly shaped not only by the subject matter on which it's based, but also by its more popular writers and those who run fanfic communities in the fandom's early life. While some Supernatural fan websites made it clear from the start that slash featuring the brothers was unwelcome, on LiveJournal--the early creative heart of Supernatural fandom--the popular writers wrote across a variety of genres, including slash, Gen, and even stories featuring heterosexual pairings.  

Slash fiction written during the first three seasons of Supernatural was almost exclusively stories featuring the brothers Sam and Dean. Of course some fans were not comfortable writing or reading stories that centered on an incestuous relationship, and so they turned to Real Person Slash, or RPS.  

Ironically, at that time RPS, which features characters based on the actors, was considered rather ethically dubious by many fans, leading to the coining of the sarcastic phrase "Supernatural--where RPF is the moral high ground." 

RPS grew to be a large part of the fandom's fic for this reason, as well as the fact that there was already a well-established fandom around fanfic based on actors from The WB Network (and later the CW Network), particularly Buffy and Angel, and later Smallville, on which Jensen Ackles, the actor playing Dean in Supernatural, had also appeared. 

Other fans were happy to explore Sam and Dean's relationship without sex, in Gen fic. Supernatural fandom has a high proportion of Gen fic--it has been consistently around 20-25 percent of stories posted on LiveJournal.ii It is notable that Gen fic and slash in Supernatural fandom often share the same focus on the intense emotional relationship between the main characters, which is of course at the core of the show. Back in 2007, Supernatural scriptwriter and later showrunner Sera Gamble jokingly called the show "The Epic Love Story of Sam and Dean." In fact, aside from the sex, Gen and Wincest fics can be almost indistinguishable, leading to the coining of the terms "Gencest" and also "hard Gen." 

It's impossible to estimate how many tens of thousands of Supernatural fanfic stories have been written. There are over 80,000 Supernatural stories on FanFiction.Net,iii and over 43,000 on the Archive of Our Own.iv The number of stories posted on LiveJournal is impossible to estimate but a project that catalogued all the stories posted on the "Supernatural Newsletter" on LiveJournal between October 2006 and March 2010 found links to nearly 40,000 fics.v  

Supernatural fandom has been hugely productive and creative in its writing and other fanworks over the more than eight years of the show, from niche communities featuring stories around a single minor character such as angel Anna Milton,vi or stories where one of the Winchester men is pregnant, vii through to multi-genre communities and challenges. You would be hard pressed to find a topic or genre or sexual kink not covered by our writing, and when we run out of established tropes we invent our own. Supernatural fandom is credited, for example, with popularizing "knotting" fanfics, in which people take on the social and sexual characteristics of dogs.viii 

Nothing sums up the collaborative and communal nature of fanfiction better than the SPN J2 Big Bang challenge.ix This challenge has become a much-anticipated annual fandom event, pairing artists with writers and involving many other fans as sounding boards, betas, and of course readers. From 2007 to 2012, it has seen over 1,000 stories, each averaging 40,000 words in length, with accompanying artwork produced. That's over 40 million words written in one challenge in one fandom. There are now fifteen other Supernatural-centric Big Bang challenges in existence, each focusing on specific characters or genres.x  

Two events that had a huge impact on fandom and fanfic occurred during Supernatural's fourth season. As the season started in September 2008, we saw the arrival of the character Castiel the angel, who was embraced by fandom. Fans adored his "profound bond" with Dean, and the pairing (known in true mashup form as "Destiel") become hugely popular; it now outranks Wincest as the most popular slash pairing.  

The other significant event in season four was that slash fanfic became canon.  

Back in 2005, the prohibition against sharing fanworks with those involved in the show was much stronger than it is today--especially when said works involved incestuous gay porn. Despite this, and despite fandom's first rule, fanfic has never been a secret from the people involved in making Supernatural. In May 2007 in England, at the first convention where Jensen Ackles appeared, he was asked whether he knew about fan fiction. He had:

One of my favorites is, uh, Wincest . . . I only hope that my grandmother never reads those. Jared [Padalecki, who plays Sam] and I had a good laugh about that one. It was only brought to our attention because [Supernatural producer] Kim Manners posted it.

Fans have raised the topic of fanfiction at nearly every Supernatural convention. When asked about what he thought of Wincest at the EyeCon convention in Florida in April 2008, Jared Padalecki managed to validate transformative works while avoiding the tricky incest issue:

With fanfiction and RPGs, . . . everyone's taking a part in Supernatural and they're not just watching it . . . and they're really passionate about the show, and especially the fans of Supernatural. It's a great learning tool, and exploring tool, to explore this world. So I'm supportive.

Jim Beaver (who plays Bobby Singer) was the first actor to tease fans with his knowledge of fan culture when he wore a T-shirt proclaiming "I read John/Bobby" (referring to slash fanfic featuring his character and Sam and Dean's father) to the 2008 EyeCon. He even once sent a complimentary email to the author of a fanfic piece that created a backstory for Bobby (note: it didn't contain any Bobby/John slash).  

Misha Collins in particular has shown a great curiosity and willingness to talk about fanfic, which still discomforts some fans, as Misha noted in an interview in 2009: 

You can sense the whole audience tensing up, like they don't want you to talk about this slash fiction weird pervy stuff that they get into. So I do like to bring it up for that reason.xi

Even the media asks Misha about fanfic. In a 2012 interview by Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan, she commented that his character Castiel and Dean Winchester were "a continual source of speculation, fan fiction, pornography . . ." In response Misha said: "Yep. I'm just always gratified that I'm in some small way contributing to any kind of pornography. It warms the cockles of my heart. Words chosen carefully."xii 

From the beginning, our fanfic was clearly no secret, and yet that still didn't prepare us for the aptly named season four episode, "The Monster at the End of This Book." In this episode, Sam and Dean discover a series of novels called Supernatural by author Chuck Shurley, which appear to be based on the Winchesters' lives. The episode also introduces Sam and Dean to fandom, and fandom into the canon of the show, when the brothers discover a message board about the books:

DEAN: There's Sam girls and Dean girls and . . . What's a slash fan? 

SAM: As in "Sam slash Dean," together. 

DEAN: Like together, together? They do know we're brothers, right? 

SAM: Doesn't seem to matter. 

DEAN: Well, that's just sick!

Some of us were delighted to be included in the meta commentary alongside the show's own writers. Other fans were uncomfortable about the (literal) airing of what they saw as "fandom business." Some fans saw it as the writers' support of Wincest, others as their condemnation.  

In "Sympathy for the Devil," season five's premiere episode, written by Eric Kripke, we were introduced to ourselves, in the form of fangirl Becky Rosen. An avid fan of the Supernatural books, Becky runs a website called morethanbrothers.net. We first meet her as she works on her latest fanfic, which reads in part:

The brothers huddled together in the dark as the sound of the rain drumming on the roof eased their fears of pursuit. Despite the cold outside and the demons who, even now, must be approaching, the warmth of their embrace comforted them. 

And then Sam caressed Dean's clavicle. 

"This is wrong," said Dean. 

"Then I don't want to be right," replied Sam, in a husky voice.  

Thus the creator of the show that inspired Wincest, wrote Wincest. Of course, Kripke left this "fanfiction" unfinished, but on September 13, 2009, only three days after the episode's airing, a LiveJournal member using Becky's online handle--Samlicker81--posted a completed version of the story called "Burning Desires" to a Wincest fanfic community.xiii This is so postmodern it almost hurts. 

"Sympathy for the Devil" was actually not the first time Kripke had written fanfic. In November 2008, the last issue of "Rising Son," the second series of Supernatural comics, included a six-page standalone story called "The Beast with Two Backs" written by Eric Kripke and producer Peter Johnston. 

The beast of the title is revealed to be a chimera of Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, a beautiful two-headed creature that kills fangirls because it cannot bear to let anyone prettier than itself live. The title is a reference to the phrase, "to make the beast with two backs," which is a slang term for having sex, most famously used in Shakespeare's Othello and James Joyce's Ulysses. Kripke, it seems, ships his stars-or at least is well aware that we do. 

The integration of fandom and the stories we make into the text of Supernatural fits with a show that has always been interested in the role of storytelling in the world. On an individual level it has looked at the stories we use to construct our own identities, and it has explored modern morality tales (in the form of urban legends) and ancient ones (from folklore), and the epic stories of society--the ones we call religion.  

The storytelling of pop culture has been examined in episodes featuring movies ("Hollywood Babylon"), TV ("Changing Channels") and celebrity culture ("Fallen Idols" and "Season Seven, Time For a Wedding"). "The French Mistake" is a notable episode in that it portrays the making of a TV show called Supernatural, and many of the behind-the-scenes crew and the actors are portrayed as parody versions of themselves.  

The episode "The Monster at the End of the Book" uses the metafictional device of the Winchester novels to comment on the process of writing in general and on Supernatural and its writers in particular. The character of author Chuck Shurley stands in for show creator Eric Kripke and is used to explore the role of the author.xiv By the end of season five, the viewer is left with the impression that the Author may, in Chuck's case literally, be God. 

In season eight, an angel called Metratron is revealed as Heaven's scribe. He is an ardent collector of stories, and can be seen to represent both the show's and fandom's writers when he says, "When you create stories, you become gods, of tiny, intricate dimensions unto themselves." Notably, he is later revealed to be a twisted, vengeful character.  

Geek and fan culture in particular have been represented by a number of Supernatural characters and in episodes such as "The Real Ghostbusters," "The Girl With the Dungeon and Dragon Tattoo," and "LARP and the Real Girl." In addition to fanfic-writing fangirl Becky, other fannish characters include roleplaying fanboys Demian and Barnes and lesbian fangirl hacker Charlie Bradbury. 

The show itself has always been overtly fannish. Dean Winchester was established from the beginning as a fan of horror and sci-fi movies and classic rock, and we find out he has a big fanboy crush on the eponymous star of a TV drama called Dr. Sexy, M.D. Sam Winchester was revealed to be a Harry Potter fan, and even crusty old Bobby Singer revealed himself as a fan of Deep Space Nine (a shout-out to actor Jim Beaver's late wife, who appeared in the series). It is left to the angel Castiel to represent the non-fan, as he comments more than once, "I do not understand that reference." 

The show has also deployed a number of tropes popular in fanfiction, many of which had been explored in Supernatural fanfiction long before they appeared on the show. Acafan Henry Jenkins, upon viewing the show back in season one, also noticed its fanfic similarity, calling it "one long hurt/comfort story."xv General fanfic tropes that have appeared include alternate universes, time travel, time loops, body swaps, evil doppelgangers, and post apocalypse scenarios. Some have been specific to the Supernatural-verse--fandom was exploring the possibility of evil Sam and vampire Dean long before the show did. Fandom even has a term for when a fanfic story is validated or replicated in canon--"Kripked."  

TV writing, of all artistic pursuits, can be seen as most analogous to fanfic. From script to screen it's a collaborative effort, in which writers, artists, crew, and actors work within a shared universe to produce a story each week. Perhaps those involved in making TV are best able to understand what we do, because it is a version of what they do themselves. It came as no surprise to fans when Supernatural writers Robbie Thompson and Adam Glass joined Twitter and immediately started to encourage fans to write fanfic about them, even inventing the mashup pairing name Robdam for themselves.xvi  

While Supernatural is not the first show to mention fanfiction, it is certainly the first to specifically reference its own fandom and have incestuous gay fanfic discussed by the characters about whom it is written. It is a sign of a broader, changed relationship that goes beyond breaking the fourth wall, to an open acknowledgment of the epic love affair between fans and creators.

--

Jules Wilkinson (missyjack) is a fangirl, writer, and comic from Australia who watches a lot of TV. She runs the award winning Supernatural Wiki--a site covering both the show and the fandom of Supernatural, which started in 2006 and attracts nearly one million visits a month. She co-edted the first ever essay collection about Supernatural, Some of Us Really Do Watch For the Plot. Jules' fanfic and original writing explores the post-modern self, gender identity, and desire. To be honest a lot of it seems to be about sex. As an occasional comic, Jules has confused, and occasionally amused, audiences at festivals around Australia. She is currently editing an anthology of stories by and about fangirls called SQUEE! You can find out more about her at juleswilkinson.com.

Learn more about FIC: WHY FANFICTION IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD: http://www.smartpopbooks.com/fic 

References

i JaneDavitt. "Reunion." 14 Sep. 2005. http://supernaturalfic.livejournal.com/550.html. 

ii Estimates of proportions of genres and pairings in Supernatural fanfic are based on analysis of the fic listed on the daily "Supernatural Newsletter" (http://www.spnnewsletter.livejournal.com), which covers only stories posted on LiveJournal.  

iii As of June 28, 2013. 

iv As of June 28, 2013 

v Black Samvara @supernatural_fic. Accessed 16 July 2013. http://delicious.com/supernatural_fic. 

vi spn_anna commuity homepage. Accessed 16 July 2013. http://spn-anna.livejournal.com/. 

vii Winchester Mpreg community homepage. Accessed 16 July 2013. http://mpregwinchester.livejournal.com/. 

viii "Knotting." Supernatural Wiki. Last modified 29 June 2013. www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Knotting. 

ix The SPN J2 Big Bang challenge can be found at spn-j2-bigbang.livejournal.com. 

xAnalyses of stories, and a list of other Supernatural-centric Big Bang challenges, can be found at www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Big_Bang. 

xi "Drinking with the Stars: 'Supernatural''s Misha Collins." YouTube.com, 21 Oct. 2009. . 

xii "Cockles" is the mashup pairing name in fanfiction for stories featuring Misha Collins and costar Jensen Ackles. Ryan, Maureen. "'Supernatural' Season 8: Misha Collins Talks Castiel's Big Return and More." HuffPost TV, 31 July 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/supernatural-season-8-misha-collins_n_1726114.html. 

xiii Samlicker81. "Burning Desires," posted under "The Completion of My Fic from Sympathy for the Devil." 13 Sep. 2009. http://wincest.livejournal.com/2647212.html. 

xiv Chuck Shurley writes under the pen name Carver Edlund, which is a portmanteau of two of the show's writers at the time-Jeremy Carver and Ben Edlund. 

xv Jenkins, Henry. "Supernatural: First Impressions." Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 15 Jan. 2007. http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/01/supernatural.html. 

xvi "Robdam." Supernatural Wiki. Last modified 30 April 2013. http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Robdam.