Power the Dark Lord Knows Not: The Fractal Serialities of Fanfiction

Abstract

Abstract This article examines contemporary fanfiction as a special type of engagement with popular serial narratives. It proposes the concept of fractal seriality as a lens through which to gauge the proliferation and popularization of fanfiction as a potentially fruitful strategy for critiquing fiction: part of fiction’s persuasiveness inheres in an author’s ability to consciously or unconsciously set the rules of the fictional world in ways that reinforce the author’s message and their vision of the real world, while fractal seriality allows fanfiction authors to change the focus and reorient stories in ways that will engage readers of the original series while refusing to circulate key aspects of the initial worldbuilding and moral values. E. J. Lomax’s boy with a scar builds on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series not by continuing it chronologically but branching off from it in a series of “what-ifs” that broaden and deepen the wizarding world by focusing on characters, events, and circumstances that the original series has elided, oversimplified, or otherwise treated in ways that Lomax finds inadequate. VeroniqueClaire’s Volée, meanwhile, expands the action of three scenes from the Phantom of the Opera stage play into 25 chapters, realizing the potential for transformative justice already inherent, but unfulfilled, in the original.

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