The topic that I decided to look into was fanfiction. What brought this up to my mind was watching one of the latest movies released on Netflix called ‘After’. What I had forgotten about this movie was that it was based off of a popular One Direction fan fiction story. The true story actually had 1D front man Harry Styles as the main protagonist. It was then bought and turned into a popular selling book. The names were changed but the story was still exactly the same.
Coming from a huge One Direction fan, these fanfictions were everywhere at the golden age of One Direction. There was a popular site called onedirectionfanficition.com where you could create an account and write your own stories for others to read. It was really a huge platform.
This leads me to how did this get so popular, and actually become viral and be a hit in the One Direction fan community. The fan fiction community for one direction directly correlated with participatory culture. When talking about participatory culture we can investigate that things become popular because there’s a low barrier to engage and express your artistic ability.
Whether you were reading or actually writing a story it didn’t take much to actually get involved. You had the ability to write your own story, and you had all this original content to be able to read. Even if you didn’t want to write your own story, being able to read all these stories, and encourage people to continue their stories was participating in this culture. This got all big fan involved boosting the popularity of the One Direction fan fiction community.
It was also available on multiple platforms. There were different websites, apps such as Wattpad, and through social media. This made it even more accessible for people who may have not had access to other platforms it was on. This made the barrier even lower and made the culture so easy to participate it.
This made the community go viral. It was so popular that it actually still is a thriving community for different fan bases. Even though One Direction is no longer a band anymore, there is still talk and jokes of the times when we would write and read fan fiction about the band.
Maggie's Going Viral Blog 