Can online fan fiction platforms counter the literacy crisis?
Boys Over Flowers’ is ‘Pride and Prejudice’ fan fiction,” university lecturer and author Carmel Ilustrisimo tells me in full earnestness. “And so are the Taiwanese and Japanese stories, ‘Meteor Garden’ and ‘Hana Yori Dango.’” Later, over dinner, I relay this insight to my girlfriend. She pauses thoughtfully and starts laughing—not in mockery, but in steady, dawning agreement with Ilustrisimo, who teaches art appreciation, literature, and creative writing in the University of Santo Tomas and De La Salle University – Manila.
My girlfriend proceeds to gush, reminiscing about her high school days—during the pre-smartphone/desktop computer era in the late 2000s—when, during lull periods in class, a whispered buzz would swoop across the rows and columns of students whenever a new chapter in their favorite fan fictions would be released, with similar, if not more, anticipation toward a favorite TV show.
Sitting down, slowing down
Remember a time before binge-watching was a thing? When we had to wait a whole week for the next episode?
Likely during that time, we also had the attention spans to sit with paragraphs of text and follow overlapping narratives and trains of thought. Ilustrisimo believes that fan fiction can make people “slow down and focus on still text on a still background,” which, in turn, “can help us sit with uncomfortable thoughts.”
The lecturer believes this is the key to a truly empowered civic consciousness. She asserts: “How can we encourage sitting down with complex, uncomfortable feelings and thoughts, with contrasting ideas bumping against each other, making us a bit confused and bewildered? We read. Fan fiction sites can be the gateway to that.”
Timeless, two-way communication
“They’re not just websites,” the literature and art lecturer says of Wattpad, Archive of Our Own (AO3), and other fan fiction sites, “but communities.”
In the course of our discussion, it dawns on us that literature, even 200 years ago, was also like this. If today, stories would drop chapter by chapter, in the 1800s and well into the 20th century, what we now know as novels were actually serialized in periodicals and magazines. Readers could even write authors, and this sometimes influenced how stories turned out.
Many older stories, like “Pride and Prejudice,” have timeless resonances. “If you cut through early-19th-century English, it’s your 21st-century friends-to-lovers story. Some things just don’t grow old,” Ilustrisimo observes, noting how many in the fandoms of “Boys Over Flowers,” “Meteor Garden,” and the like call these stories “the Asian ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”
Ilustrisimo observes that many recognized Filipino authors also maintain a presence in Wattpad “as a way of engaging with fans,” citing Jamie Manuel, Mina Esguerra, 2015 Palanca Award winner for the Nobela sa Filipino Charmaine Lasar, playwright, University of the Philippines professor and Palanca veteran Layeta Bucoy, and feature writer Paolo Jose Cruz.
When it comes to “Pride and Prejudice” and its Asian and Filipino versions, the best “referential” stories for Ilustrisimo aren’t “copycats” of the source material, but a “tribute” and original, well-written stories on their own, citing Filipino homages like Maxine Jiji’s “He’s into Her” and “Fall in Love: Or Don’t” by Isabelle Kish.
What websites like Wattpad did was quicken two-way communication between readers and writers, taking the “ancient” process of serialization online.
Misogyny, alas
“It’s possible too that some of the denigration of sites like Wattpad and AO3, as well as independent romance novels, ties in with misogyny,” Ilustrisimo notes. Data shows that Wattpad’s readership skews heavily female, with Ashleigh Gardner, head of partnerships at Wattpad Studios, citing that “demographics are more than 70 percent female, and 80 percent of Wattpad users are millennials or Gen Z.”
But historically, the elite echelons of cultural production have been male-dominated. To date, there’s only one Filipina National Artist for Literature. Institutional art has historically represented male interests and experiences, often setting aside or downright looking down upon women and their experiences.
When women do get properly represented, as in the case of “the chubby, awkward, but palaban lead” in “He’s into Her,” who resonated with Ilustrisimo, they’re often “sanitized” when the story gets adapted to the screen.
Fangirling through a polycrisis and toward empowered citizenry
National Literature Month just ended recently. Meanwhile, a literacy crisis continues to make regular headlines.
Despite the denigration of fan fiction, independent publishing, and online, audience-driven literature sites like Wattpad and AO3 by some elite literary elites and even the general public, Ilustrisimo strongly believes that these spaces “are not the enemy of literacy. Rather, it’s a never-ending barrage of hyper-stimulating, short-form content that often leaves no room for nuance, or what we’ve come to call brainrot.”
While healthy doses of silliness and quick laughs are all right, we both acknowledge in our conversation the danger of endless scrolling—social media’s deliberate slot-machine-like design—aimed at “maximizing user time” to bombard us with ads. And the fact that “attention economy” is not a fictional term says a lot about the information landscape today, where our ability to sit down with more complex texts (be it an essay or film) is being hijacked by short-form content that provides instant gratification.
Ultimately, when our fried attention spans come across complex issues, we stand the risk of being sucked into narrow perspectives, which ultimately result in dehumanizing entire groups of people or justifying unjust wars.
Based on all the above, it seems the literacy crisis is actually a crisis of democracy. And the former isn’t always a cause but also a result of the latter, with quality materials too expensive, poverty and malnutrition hindering school participation, all amid classroom shortages.
Is readership really declining?
It seems a month isn’t enough to address the problems of declining readership, poor reading comprehension, and how these intersect and influence larger issues like misinformation, susceptibility to propaganda, and the crisis of democracy as people are swayed into voting against their best interests.
Statistics often say readership is declining, but I cannot help but wonder if those statistics have looked at the readership in fan fiction websites like Wattpad.
I ask Ilustrisimo how it is grading work that is inherently subjective. A person can write (or generate) a well-worded essay, but Ilustrisimo “can sniff out, so far, what a Chat-GPT-generated essay looks like.” “Normally, there are lots of generalizations that a writer cannot and does not specify,” she reveals.
Grades, however, get bumped up when “a student passes an essay that has several grammatical errors, but he’s hyper-fixated on these particular scenes and analyzes every single aspect of those scenes.” “The kid is thinking. I’m encouraging thinking whenever I see it. When you slow it down, your mind gets sharper,” she adds.
The feeling that fan fiction gives
At the end of each term, it’s an “amazing feeling” whenever “people start going off with their own ideas or making connections on their own. You’re not really doing anything; you’re just watching them form those connections.”
Ilustrisimo cites the case of gamers, who, through loving the world of say, Genshin Impact, start reading Genshin fan fiction, and discover that “I can do it! I can actually sit down and read!”
“And the next thing you know, you’re reading for fun. You’re looking up history for fun. You’re reading mythology for fun,” Ilustrisimo says, noting that many eventually try their hand at fan fiction and learn the related skills of listening to audiences while also standing up for their own stories.
“Even before they join a national writer’s workshop, the kids realize: I can do this as well! I can write my own characters!”
Carmel Ilustrisimo participated in the 2024 UST National Writing Fellowship, 2023 Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio Writers’ Workshop, and 2020 UST National Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have been published in several magazines, journals, and anthologies, including the Philippines Graphic Reader and the University of the Philippines’ Likhaan Journal. Her novella, “2nd Gen Synthetics,” was published in 2023
