17 - Slashing Rome: Season Two Rewritten in Online Fanfiction

Summary

Fans of Rome used the internet to respond to the series and share their views with other fans by reviewing episodes, responding to polls on favorite characters, and speculating on future plotlines via discussion forums. Fan sites such as the Rome Fan Club pages on Fanpop.com and the Rome Fan Wiki on Wetpaint.com make it easy for fans to interact with each other and engage with the text. Creative forms of fan engagement include devising role-playing games based on characters from the series and creating fan art including pictures, icons featuring characters from Rome that fans can use to represent themselves, and fan videos or vids, using excerpts from the series set to music.

This chapter explores a specific mode of creative fan production: Rome fanfiction. The focus of this study will be on fanfiction written in English and made available online via fanfiction archives on Fanfiction.net and Livejournal after January 2007, when the first episode of Season Two was first broadcast, and before December 2012. Rome fanfiction continued to be produced and posted after this date, but as Matt Hills states, “one can only extract artificially bounded sets of information” from the vast amount of fan-produced material available online. My survey includes all types of creative fiction based on Rome from novel-length works to short pieces of less than five hundred words, sometimes referred to by the authors as oneshots, or drabbles, which should be one hundred words exactly in length, but are often slightly longer. Poetry or stories written in languages other than English will not be a part of this study.2 As most fanfiction is written by female fans, and published under often gender-neutral pseudonyms, authors are referred to by their pseudonyms or preferred first names and the female pronoun will be used throughout.

FANFICTION AND SEX

Fanfiction for Rome, as for other films, television series, and novels, can be split into three genres: slash, het, and gen. Slash focuses on same-sex relationships, most frequently male, but femslash is also written by some fans; het focuses on heterosexual relationships; and gen is general, so any other fiction that is not based on romantic or sexual pairings.