This article includes spoilers for “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance,” “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus.”
As a longtime player of the Last of Us video game series, Sam Gaitan knew the death was coming. Still, the brutal murder of Joel in a recent episode of the HBO adaptation hit her hard. It was already midnight when she went on Tumblr to read fan reactions. Then, in a fit of inspiration, she started writing.
“I was a wreck, and I needed to get those strong emotions out,” Gaitan, a tattooist and artist, said in a recent phone interview. By 5 a.m., she had written 3,761 words featuring Joel and Red, an original character Gaitan had previously created, and an alternative scenario that spares Joel from his onscreen fate.
Writing under the alias oh_persephone, she posted the story on AO3, an online repository for fan fiction and other fan-created art, and crashed until her dogs woke her up the next morning.
“It probably wasn’t the most coherent thing I’ve written,” she said, laughing. “But I figured other people could use it as much as I did.”
Gaitan’s urge to change the narrative is a familiar one among a subset of fans who write fan fiction, or fanfic, original stories that borrow characters, plots and settings from established media properties and are published mostly online, on sites like AO3, Tumblr and FanFiction.net.
Increasingly, these fans are taking matters into their own hands by writing “fix-it fics,” or simply “fix-its,” which attempt to right the perceived wrongs of a beloved work — and often provide some measure of emotional succor.
“The Last of Us,” which killed off its male lead surprisingly early in a hotly anticipated second season — a lead played, no less, by “the internet’s daddy,” Pedro Pascal — has proved to be particularly generative. Real numbers can be hard to track because of inconsistent labeling, but more than 50 “The Last of Us” stories tagged “Fix-It” were uploaded to AO3 in the week after Joel’s death, ranging from about 300 words to almost 80,000.
But if a TV writer can dream of it, a fan can feel betrayed by it: Fix-its have appeared in recent months for series like “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance” and “The White Lotus,” all of which contained whiplash-inducing plot twists.
“When something happens to a character that doesn’t resonate with how you see them, and you can’t let it go, you want to get out there and tell the story differently,” said Larisa Garski, a licensed therapist in Chicago who co-wrote a book with her fellow therapist Justine Mastin titled “Starship Therapise: Using Therapeutic Fanfiction to Rewrite Your Life.” And when that something is death, fix-it writing can resemble the bargaining stage of grief.
“We’re going to fanfic to mourn,” Garski said. “We’re going to fanfic to try and take back agency because this beloved character has been taken from us.”
Fan fiction has existed arguably for centuries, but its modern incarnation traces back at least as far as the “Star Trek” fandoms of the late 1960s, whose members published fanzines with stories by fans for fans. By the 2000s, the popularity of fanfic exploded with widespread internet access.
Written often under pseudonyms, fanfic can be wildly experimental, playing with storytelling conventions, timelines, identity and unabashed eroticism. (Such elements have long made it a safe haven, Mastin observed, for people “on the fringes: geeks, nerds, punks, L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. folks.”) Occasionally, fanfic evolves a life of its own. The “Fifty Shades” series began as “Twilight” fanfic.
Fan connections to fictional characters can be profound, becoming versions of parasocial relationships — one-sided, imagined intimacy some people form with strangers, often celebrities. As Garski noted, parasocial relationships can feel as intense and meaningful as reciprocal ones in the real world. The hurt they cause can feel visceral.
“It feels like I’m grieving a real person right now, which seems really dramatic,” Sofia Sears, an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing who writes on AO3 as mrsdallowayxoxo, said by phone of the “Last of Us” twist. Sears mourned that Joel’s death left much unresolved between him and his surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and wrote a modest fix-it in which they got a final chance to express their love for each other.
Science fiction and fantasy are especially fertile ground for fan fiction; as Garski put it, they echo the myths that people have long improvised and riffed on. Think, for example, of the many retellings of creation myths (“Prometheus”) or the hero’s journey (“Star Wars”).
Superhero stories are a prime example. The fanfic sites erupted, for instance, after Disney+ revived “Daredevil” in March, nearly seven years after Netflix canceled it, only to gun down the beloved character Foggy in the first 15 minutes.
Many fans had considered Foggy (Elden Henson), who was the best friend of Daredevil (a.k.a., Matt, played by Charlie Cox), to be the show’s heart, soul and conscience. Many had also been involved in a passionate campaign to bring back “Daredevil,” complete with collective media actions, branded T-shirts and a petition that drew more than 430,000 signatures.
Almost as quickly as Foggy died, the fix-its started streaming in, much of it drawing from decades of existing comic book lore. In one story, Daredevil offers Mephisto, a demon and frequent adversary of Spider-Man, his soul in exchange for a magical do-over. In another, Dr. Strange casts a resurrection spell.
Gabrielle Boliou, a lawyer (AO3 name: ceterisparibus), wrote a story at breakneck speed that reimagines an existing comic book plotline in which Foggy survived and went into witness protection. In Boliou’s version, Foggy is saved by a heroic female emergency medical worker.
“At one point, I had nine different tabs open on gunshot wound survival possibilities, and I watched a YouTube video on a paramedic,” Boliou said.
Shows more rooted in reality get the fix-it treatment, too. Kensi Bui, a graduate student in clinical mental health counseling, is an avid fan of the HBO resort-murder drama “The White Lotus.” But it wasn’t until the Season 3 finale last month, and the death of sweet Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), that she felt compelled to write (or even read) “White Lotus” fan fiction.
So Bui wrote a fix-it, under the name alittlemoretime, in which Chelsea escapes Thailand with her troubled boyfriend, Rick (Walton Goggins).
“I really wanted what’s best for Chelsea and felt like she deserved a happier ending,” Bui said.
Fix-it writers sometimes express a desire to work through their own personal challenges. Grief is a common subtext. Meredith Deaton, a high school English teacher who unexpectedly lost her mother two years ago, said she had been disappointed by the way “Daredevil” jumped immediately forward a year after Foggy’s death. What might have been a means of catharsis felt instead like a missed opportunity.
“It’s so hard to lose a best friend,” said Deaton, whose alias on FanFiction.net is IGS1701. “I just caught myself thinking, I wish this season had been about the story of Matt recovering from this death.” To fill in the gap, Deaton wrote a thoughtful, deeply felt fix-it depicting the vagaries of grief.
Laura Zeilo, a graduate student in social work who lost five family members between 2012 and 2018, said she had found herself drawn to the depiction of grief in the Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller “Severance.” In that show, the character Mark (Adam Scott) undergoes a procedure to split his consciousness in two: a home self, or “outie,” who mourns the apparent death of his wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), and a work self, or “innie,” who doesn’t remember her.
When the series revealed that Gemma was alive, Zeilo, a.k.a. ohwhatagloomyshow, began writing stories to explore her past. But when Mark’s office persona, Mark S., chose his workplace love, Helly R. (Britt Lower), over his wife in the Season 2 finale, Zeilo took it up a notch. She wrote not one but two fix-its in which Gemma gets her man.
“I just want Gemma to be safe and happy,” Zeilo said. “I need to see it. I need to write it into being so it’ll show up in Season 3.”
Produced by Tala Safie
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