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FROM REVERENCE TO REFERENCE: RETHINKING CONTEMPORARY CROSS-MEDIA ADAPTATION

TANIA DARLINGTON

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

To Lorelei Without your faith in me, I would not have made it this far.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has been a labor of love, but one that truly would not have gotten far past page one without the help of the many people who supported me and pushed me to keep going. I would like to thank Scott Nygren, who started this project with me and shared his limitless patience and insight for most of its duration; I am sorry he cannot be here to see me finish it. I would also like to thank my dissertation supervisor, Barbara

Mennel, whose generosity with her time and her feedback have inspired me to be a better writer, student, and teacher. I have also been blessed with wonderful committee members—Kenneth Kidd, Judith Page, and Jack Stenner—whose kindness and flexibility have made this process shockingly painless. Though he hasn't been my teacher or my advisor in many years, I also must thank Aiping Zhang, who has been my champion and source of encouragement for the majority of my academic career.

This project also would never have been possible without my mother, Sharlyn

Swofford, and my daughter, Lorelei Chamberlain. No matter how much I fretted over my ability to complete this work, both had unwavering faith that I would finish. They supported me through the most difficult challenges, and I am glad I can share this accomplishment with them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 7

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 FROM REVERENCE TO REFERENCE ...... 10

The Tradition of Nostalgia ...... 10 Fans and Adaptation ...... 15 Database Consumption ...... 20 A Referential Model of Adaptation ...... 25 Breadth ...... 25 Attitude ...... 27 Relationships ...... 28 Hindsight ...... 30 Currency ...... 30 Boundaries ...... 31 Project Overview ...... 33

2 THE PERSISTENCE OF DARCY: MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS AND JANE AUSTEN FANDOM ...... 37

Janeites and Media Fandom ...... 37 Adjudicating Austen: Fan-Scholars and Scholar-Fans ...... 45 Pride, Prejudice, and Predominance ...... 52 The Darcy Effect ...... 56 Navigating Nostalgia ...... 61 Playing with the Austen Universe ...... 65 Yesterday's Novel and Today's Novel ...... 67

3 "THE GREAT GAME": REFERENTIALITY AS PLAY IN CONTEMPORARY SHERLOCK HOLMES ADAPTATIONS ...... 71

The Question of Ownership ...... 72 Holmes and Watson for a New Generation ...... 74 The Commercial Adaptations ...... 77 Fan Adaptations ...... 79 The Referential Holmes ...... 85 A Change in Attitude ...... 87 A Sherlock for All Seasons ...... 90 Viewers at Play ...... 94

Slashing Sherlock ...... 100

4 FROM REFERENCE TO REHASH: A TALE OF TWO STAR TREKS ...... 111

What is Star Trek?: Canon, Timeline, and Fanon ...... 112 The Commercial Output ...... 113 Fans and Fan Activity ...... 116 Rebooting the Franchise ...... 119 Star Trek (2009): New Frontiers ...... 120 Playing with the Final Frontier ...... 121 Adapting the Franchise ...... 123 Romancing the Crew ...... 125 The Triumph of Khan ...... 126 The Seeds of Wrath ...... 127 The Anatomy of a Fan Hit ...... 132 The Wrath of Fans ...... 138 Where Have All the Women Gone? ...... 140 The Whitewashing of Khan Noonien Singh ...... 143 The Perils of Fidelity ...... 147

5 THE RELEVANCE OF REFERENCE ...... 152

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 156

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 165

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

DS9 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

DWG Derbyshire Writer’s Guild

ENT Star Trek: Enterprise

P&P Pride and Prejudice

P&P0 Pride and Prejudice (1940), Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier

P&P1 Pride and Prejudice (1980), Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul

P&P2 Pride and Prejudice (1995) Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth

SH Sherlock Holmes (2009)

SH:GOS Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows

ST09 Star Trek (2009)

STID Star Trek: Into Darkness

TAS Star Trek: The Animated Series

TMP Star Trek: The Motion Picture

TNG Star Trek: The Next Generation

TOS Star Trek: The Original Series

VOY Star Trek: Voyager

Wrath Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

FROM REVERENCE TO REFERENCE: RETHINKING CONTEMPORARY CROSS-MEDIA ADAPTATION

Tania Darlington

December 2014

Chair: Barbara Caroline Mennel Major: English

Adaptation scholars have spent much of the last several decades searching for ways to distance themselves from fidelity criticism and strictly comparative approaches.

Nevertheless, the issue of faithfulness to the original tends to underscore much of contemporary adaptation studies and is even enjoying in a new renaissance in critical anthologies such as McCabe, Murray, and Warner's True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity. Commercial adaptations themselves, conversely, are often taking greater liberties with their source texts, engaging in the kind of referential play that has long marked fan consumption and adaptation. To break away from the privileging of the original, then, adaptation studies would benefit from viewing adapted works through the lens of fans and fandom scholars.

This dissertation posits an approach to adaptation studies rooted in Hiroki

Azuma's database model of otaku (fan) consumption, which decentralizes the originary work by situating it as one of many possible combinations uploaded from a database structure whose inner layer holds fragments from all iterations in a textual universe— fragments which can be recombined into a never-ending series of surface texts that are constantly re-downloaded into the textual database. Using Pride and Prejudice,

Sherlock Holmes, and Star Trek as lenses, it demonstrates how contemporary adaptations have adopted the tactics of fanwork to resonate with, yet break away from, their originary texts and appeal to both new viewers and increasingly savvy and media- saturated consumers who often know more about previous incarnations of the text than the adapter her/himself. Fidelity-based approaches to adaptation are of little use in exploring these multi-layered contemporary cross-media works. However, by adopting a database approach, which allows for the intermingling of a multiplicity of iterations, adaptation scholars can better understand how closely contemporary adaptation parallels fan consumption and how adaptations operate in the transmedia landscape.

CHAPTER 1 FROM REVERENCE TO REFERENCE

Adaptation discourse is mired in contradiction. While many prominent adaptation scholars such as Robert Stam, Deborah Cartmell, Linda Hutcheon, and Thomas Leitch make consistent efforts to highlight the need for a view of adaptation that eliminates the issue of fidelity to the original text from discussions of adapted works, many viewers and some critics and scholars, including Colin McCabe and Karen Williams, continue to revere fidelity and authorial intent as primary goals for adapted works. Yet even the earliest scholarly work in the field, Bluestone's 1957 Novels into Film, problematized the focus on fidelity. Contemporary works on the subject, in their attempts to decry fidelity criticism, continue to make fidelity a central point of critique. In order to break with fidelity discourse and achieve a broader understanding of how adaptations work aside from indebtedness to their originals, we need to consider why so many scholars see fidelity criticism as the traditional approach to adaptation despite its limited ability to engage with works that stray from their source texts and examine how numerous contemporary adaptations move beyond fidelity. To do so, adaptation scholars must implement a new template that is better equipped to deal with these non-fidelity-based works.

The Tradition of Nostalgia

One of the primary causes for the dominance of the fidelity question is the longstanding links between adaptation, nostalgia, and prestige. The desire to relive the first encounter with an originary work seems to drive producers to recreate works by canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and George Eliot again and again and loyal consumers to re-experience them in all of their iterations. Many critics of

adaptation, too, see its primary function as nostalgia for revered canonical works. Julie

Sanders, for instance, suggests that adaptations are limited to the narrative ends established in their source texts—indeed, that reaching the established end is one of the main purposes and pleasures of adaptation: "This," she claims, "is surely the point of characters, stories and events that are appropriated: their end is predetermined in our imagination via prior knowledge of the precursor text" (104). In the introduction to a recent volume devoted to the issue of fidelity, Colin McCabe argues that the rejection of fidelity arguments in recent adaptation studies has limited adaptation scholars' ability to understand the sophisticated relationship of filmic adaptations and their source texts (6-

7). In the same volume, Dudley Andrew calls fidelity "the umbilical cord that nourishes the judgments of ordinary viewers" (27). Sanders further suggests that reliance on the expectations created by the original may be "the only fate we can expect of an appropriative text" (105). Studies of adaptation that focus on these nostalgic recreations and how loyally they adhere to their source, however, reinforce the false notion that the tradition of adaptation is dominated by reminiscence and repetition, particularly for

"classic" literary works.

While fidelity-based adaptations have long held a significant part of the adaptation market, they have never dominated it exclusively. Some of the most successful and timeless adaptations have been based, often loosely, on less prestigious works. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), The

Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), and

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) are all based on genre literature. Few viewers of Dr.

Strangelove have likely read or heard of the Peter George novel, Red Alert (1958), upon

which it is based. However, the lack of a prestige associated with George's novel has done little to stand in the way of viewers' appreciation of Kubrick's film. Likewise, adaptations of non-literary properties and to other mediums than film share a significant portion of the adaptation market. Comics and video games are frequently adapted to both television and film. Films are adapted to television, video games, and comics.

Television programs are adapted to comics, games, and film. Focusing dominant attention on nostalgic and prestige products and literature-to-film conversions discounts the array of adaptations that saturate all forms of contemporary media.

Nevertheless, as Thomas Leitch points out, for most of its history, adaptation studies has been closely aligned primarily with literary studies:

by organizing themselves around canonical authors, [studies of adaptation] establish a presumptive criterion for each new adaptation. And by arranging adaptations as spokes around the hub of such a strong authorial figure, they establish literature as a proximate cause of adaptation that makes fidelity to the source text central to the field. (3)

Therefore, the expectation of adaptation scholars has long been that adaptations are beholden to key prestigious works, and by not following these works faithfully, they fail to honor them.

This perception limits many scholars from breaking with fidelity criticism.

According to Robert Stam:

the conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. . . .One might easily imagine any number of positive tropes for adaptation, yet the standard rhetoric has often displayed an elegiac discourse of loss. ("Introduction" 3)

This "discourse of loss" marks many studies which assert to support a break from fidelity. For instance, while Sarah Cardwell, whose 2002 study Adaptation Revisited, the only study to focus exclusively on televisual adaptations, provides a useful framework

for resisting the impulse to centralize originary texts as exclusive sources for adapted work, she still enforces limits on the power of an adaptive work to break free from concerns of primacy and prestige. She argues for a non-center-based approach to adaptations which relies on a "subtle difference" between "adaptations" and "versions," suggesting that "'Adaptation' implies a continuity between source text and resulting text

(analogous to genetic adaptation); it implies that only necessary alterations are made— alterations that cannot be avoided because of the change in medium;" she views

"versions" as less legitimate because they "imply interpretation or variation" and are thus new texts altogether (20, 21). Despite her innovative approach to adaptation,

Cardwell's explanation of adaptations as only necessary, cross-media alterations—a stance taken by many non-fidelity-based critics—runs dangerously close to fidelity criticism by implying that adaptations must be beholden to their source texts. Thus,

Cardwell's model reinforces the notions of nostalgia and prestige.

The constant hearkening to nostalgia and prestige has created a somewhat false notion of a "traditional" strain of adaption, which I have dubbed "analogous adaptation"1 for the purpose of this text. Analogous adaptations draw on viewers' nostalgia for the source text and desire for its repetition with minimal narrative deviation and reprisal of the initial experience rather than extrapolation on it. Analogous adaptations are unavoidably concerned with fidelity. Again, according to Stam, "the notion of fidelity gains its persuasive power from our sense that. . .some adaptations fail to 'realize' or substantiate what we most appreciated in the source novel" ("Introduction" 14). As

1 It should be noted that "analogous" is used here to indicate an adaptation that runs parallel to the originary work and is distinct from Geoffrey Wagner's 1975 conception of analog, in which the originary text is so dramatically changed as to be practically unrecognizable.

Linda Hutcheon notes, "many professional reviewers and audience members alike resort to the elusive notion of the 'spirit' of a work or an artist that has to be captured and conveyed in the adaptation for it to be a success" while others insist it is "tone" or

"style" which ties a work to its originary text (A Theory 9-10). Whatever the term, such insistences on faithfulness to nebulous descriptions of author intent reflect a desire on viewers' parts to capture what it was that provided their pleasure in the originary text. An analogous view of adaptation, then, expects the adaptation to be equivalent to the initial experience. Such a framework is bound to focus on what the copy lacks rather than what it gains, creating dissatisfaction and bringing critics unremittingly back to the problem of narrative fidelity.

In the current age of media saturation and near-rabid internet fandom, where originary works and their subsequent iterations are rehashed again and again on

Tumblr or Blogger or Wordpress and retold again and again on fiction sites like

Fanfiction.net or An Archive of Our Own, adapters face another considerable challenge.

An analogous adaptation, one that aims to present a straightforward version of the originary narrative, has an existing fanbase prepared to find fault with it. While one need look no further than the continued success of Masterpiece Theatre and BBC costume dramas to confirm that prestige adaptations continue to draw an audience, the internet has served to make a significant portion of that audience both hyper-informed and hyper-critical, making it more challenging for such analogous works to excite the most dedicated enthusiasts. Many recent adapters such as Steven Moffat and J.J. Abrams have responded to the changes the internet has wrought in fan culture and have turned

to the adaptive practices of fans themselves to navigate both commercial and fan audiences successfully.

Fans and Adaptation

While some adaptation scholars have attempted to combat the dominance of fidelity criticism, another branch of scholarship has actively deprivileged originary texts and worked to validate non-commercial, less-than-faithful adaptations. To discover ways of approaching adaptations that break free of fidelity criticism, adaptation scholars can look to the field of fandom studies, where researchers have considered a Derridean archontic model to de-center the originary text in order to undermine the "derivative" stigma that fidelity criticism risks placing on adapted works.

Alongside mainstream adaptation, there has long existed a subcultural strain of fan-made adaptations. Fan adaptations, in their current form, originate from Star Trek fans in the late 1960s, who published stories and artwork that drew on the televisual text and fleshed out its characters, created relationships and romances that did not exist in the episodes, and filled in gaps between, before, and after the televised episodes, creating alternate lives for the show's characters. For years, these works were circulated in printed "fanzines," which were distributed to fellow writers and readers by mail or at conventions for just the cost of postage and printing. By the 1970s, several works, from the Lord of the Rings books, to the British science fiction series Space:

1999, to the buddy cop show Starsky and Hutch, had dedicated, fanzine-producing fandoms. Fan production has only become more prominent with the availability of the internet. Today, fan writers and artists create works devoted to almost every text imaginable (the popular fanfiction repository An Archive of Our Own includes 341 adaptations of the Christian Bible, for instance, and 128 works inspired by the video

game Sonic the Hedgehog). Multifandom archives (fanfiction sites that accept entries for multiple fandoms) like An Archive of Our Own or Fanfiction.net boast thousands of fandoms and often receive several hundred new story uploads daily.

Far from striving for analogy or prestige, these adaptations delight in undermining the accepted narrative to pull at and rearrange strains that are unrealized in the originary work. In his seminal work on fan culture, Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins' explains:

at once ironically distant, playfully close…the ongoing process of fan rereading results in a progressive elaboration on the series "universe" through inferences and speculations that push well beyond its explicit information. . . .This process of playful engagement and active interpretation shifts the program's priorities. Fan critics pull character and narrative issues from the margins; they focus on details that are excessive or peripheral to the primary plots but gain significance within the fans' own conception of the series. (155)

Fanwork, then, is not constrained by the limits of the originary text but is open to significant expansions which can be drawn from other fanwork, from fan-established canon (commonly known as fanon), and from surrounding critical and fan responses to the originary work and subsequent iterations, whether fan-made or commercial. Fans left wanting by either the originary work or its commercial adaptations spare no time in creating their own adaptations that are more to their satisfaction.2 Adapters who fail to meet fans' often exacting standards risk alienating a potentially significant audience, and the word-of-mouth that comes with it, to fanworks. Alternately, adapters who recognize and respond to fans' ways of reading are well situated to thrive in the contemporary market which is so driven by internet response.

2 That many of the best fan adapters go on to become commercial creators themselves, whether within or outside of the official franchise of their fanwork, speaks to both the potential quality and desirability of fan adaptations.

Jenkins notes five factors which separate fan viewers from more passive viewers, two of which are key to decoding fan adaptational practices. First, fans engage with texts multiple times in order to master the text and tease out all of its details, which can be used for later discussion and potentially creation: "for the fan, watching the series is the beginning, not the end, of the process of media consumption" (Textual

278).3 Fans' aim for mastery perpetuates a high level of criticism. Fan communities, both online and off, spend countless hours parsing each nuance of a text, analyzing where it fits into the textual continuum, and creating communal agreement on its implications and boundaries. Adaptations which fail to take those nuances into account or respect the boundaries of the textual database fail to engage fannish audiences meaningfully. Second, fans engage in a specific type of critical response to texts

Jenkins characterizes as "playful, speculative, suggestive." Rather than attempting to recreate a work, fans "work to resolve gaps, to explore excess details and undeveloped potentials." Fans' critical viewing practices lead them away from the surface text and into "a meta-text that is larger, richer, more complex and interesting than the original"

(Textual 278). Fan adapters view the originary text as an inspiration rather than a boundary. In short, fan texts are more referential than reverential. Fans view the text as a jumping-off point rather than a narrative template that they must faithfully follow. Many contemporary adaptations share this referential quality, and these adaptations can be better understood through a closer alignment with fandom studies.

The field of fandom studies is rife with tension, both within and without. Ever since Jenkins' Textual Poachers (1992), scholars who are also fans (commonly known

3 Jenkins' discussion of fan culture centers primarily on television fans. However, these fan practices are equally true of other media.

as "acafans," though that term is currently the source of much dispute, therefore I use, here, the term "scholar-fan," coined by Matt Hills in his 2002 work Fan Cultures) have struggled to find a balance between their affective position as fans and their critical position as academics. As Melissa Click notes, scholar-fans exist in and create academic discomfort because they "break the boundaries between researcher and researched," causing other academics to (often rightly) question their ability to achieve critical distance from texts (Stein).

Much of this tensions arises from what Matt Hills characterizes as the differing types of subjectivity privileged by academics and fans—types of subjectivity which scholar-fans are forced to negotiate. Hills notes that academics see themselves as concerned with larger intellectual issues of narrative and theory, while they view fannish readings as ones of excess, passionately engaged but more concerned with affective readings that privilege characters and events over larger issues (8-19). Though many scholar-fans successfully read against their passion, all too often works of fandom studies become celebrations or vindications of fanwork. The goal of this study is not to vindicate fans or fandom studies, but rather to show how fan readings align with contemporary adaptation and to demonstrate how a fandom-based model of consumption provides new ways of exploring contemporary referential adaptations that can begin to move the conversation in adaptations studies away from discussions of narrative fidelity.

Where adaptation studies, despite its growing resistance to fidelity-based approaches, repeatedly returns to the question of the relationship between originary work and copy, fandom studies views textual relationships as complex, archonitc

negotiations. Furthermore, fan studies work toward eliminating value judgments of prestige and canonicity, which often lead critics away from considerations about textual relationships and toward arguments about fidelity. Fandom scholars such as Abigail

Derecho have looked to Derrida's theory of the archontic to explore how fanworks complicate their source texts by adding to a vast textual archive that gathers around and decenters the originary work. Derecho applies Derrida's principle of the archontic to show the interrelation of source material and fan adaptations as well as to free fanworks from the commonly used terms "derivative" and "appropriative," which "announce property, ownership and hierarchy" (64). As Derecho notes, the archontic principle compels multiple iterations because the archive is driven to "seek to always produce more archive, to enlarge itself. The archnontic principle never allows the archive to remain stable or still, but wills it to add to its own stores" (64). Thus the archive continually gathers texts in order to expand its meaning and justify its existence. Though new works may forcefully reconstruct the archive, they do not violate it because

"archontic texts are not delimited properties with definite borders that can be transgressed" (64). This consideration of the archontic properties of texts can be equally applied to adaptation and does much to neutralize the notions of prestige and nostalgia that reverberate through the field of adaptation studies.

Derrida's concept of the archive is a useful model for de-prioritizing fidelity because of its emphasis on the constant reconfiguration of the textual universe, which is both destroyed and recreated whenever new information is added to the archive. The archive functions as an externalization of memory that, by its nature, reveres the past yet looks to the future. The archive is always in a state of flux. What is internal may exist

in a vacuum, where we may revere it without any of the inherent problems that are revealed by exposing it to analysis. Once the original is externalized through adaptation, however, our conception of it is bound to be destroyed at some level. It is only through this exposition and review that we begin to draw distinctions between the original and its subsequent iterations. Nonetheless, once the subsequent iterations have been viewed, the original is indelibly delimited and expanded by them. Because they are externalized, we cannot forget—the original and the iteration remain in relation to one another and cannot be unmeshed. In essence, an original does not become an original until it is violated by the act of copying. While the notion of the archontic does much to de- emphasize the originary work, more contemporary theories which build on Derrida's work provide an even more useful framework for understanding how fanworks and adaptations access and manipulate the textual universe.

Database Consumption

While the archive model is useful for deprivileging the originary text, it still focuses on how the initial work functions and how it attracts adaptations. To break fully with fidelity criticism, it is necessary to implement a model that focuses not on the original, but on the adaptation itself and how it builds both toward and away from the originary text. Japanese theorist Hiroki Azuma provides such a model in his theory of database consumption. With its focus on fan consumption of the textual universe and consideration of how fan texts draw on and add to existing textual databases, it allows for a model that can be applied to adaptation to explore how adapters construct works.

Using such a model, we can more effectively explore adaptations that break from their originary texts to employ references to a wider array of sources.

Despite not being a theory of adaptation per se, Azuma's model of the database structure of otaku4 consumption provides a useful lens for examining the way fan desires and fan productions operate and how they have influenced contemporary referential adaptations. Azuma sees fan consumption/creation as a key to understanding contemporary production, noting, "if we fail to consider the derivative works of amateurs in favor of only the commercially manufactured projects and products, we will be unable to grasp the trends of otaku culture" (25). His model begins from the premise that in the postmodern world the grand narrative has been extinguished. He posits that, with the collapse of the tree model of narrative, in which the proliferation of simulacra are regulated by a deep inner layer around which all versions of a text are centered, we are left with a database model of consumption, in which the deep inner layer has no center and provides no center.5 Azuma calls this model the "grand nonnarrative."6

The death drive that is inherent in the archive also propels Azuma's database, though Azuma focuses on an altered medium of storage and transmission. However, as

Derrida notes, the structure of the archive is dependent on the medium in which its

4 Though the term otaku itself is closely aligned with the English word nerd or geek, in contemporary use its overtones suggest an overzealous fan. The closest American equivalent would likely be the term "Trekkie."

5 Azuma specifically distinguishes his model from the rhizome, in which no deep inner layer exists.

6 As Thomas Lamarre points out, Azuma's initial premise is rather sweeping and perhaps overly concerned with radical and not wholly substantiated ruptures in patterns of thought and cultural climate. Lamarre notes, "Azuma thinks difference on the basis of rupture, which tends to homogenize and totalize formations, however unwittingly" (271). Nonetheless, whether one agrees with Azuma's suppositions about the shift between modernism and postmodernism or not, his model of database consumption expands Derrida's theory of the archive in directions that prove particularly suited to contemporary multimedia adaptation.

residents were composed, and the interjection of new mediums irrevocably changes the archive's structure:

The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. . . .What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that it archives. (17-18)

Since Derrida's archive was informed by a textual/postal model, largely dealing with journals, notes, and letters, his own conception suggests that it makes sense to modernize the archontic model through Azuma's database concept to better suit the decentralized, digitally-driven, multi-media content and the proliferation of fan-created works that will be considered here. The result is an archontic database, as it were, wherein the structure is violently altered by each new addition and the originary is radically decentered and made equal with the entire spectrum of subsequent iterations.

According to Azuma, the farther consumers move into postmodernism, the more the database structure replaces the need for an illusory grand narrative. With the proliferation of the internet and greater access to fanworks, contemporary fan consumer/creators (otakus) have no need for imaginary fictional structures or underlying stories—they have grown up in a world where forgery is a foreign concept, consequently they feel free to pick out and disregard fragments at their discretion. Thus, nostalgia for an originary text has gradually been overtaken by a model in which the text and its archive are continually downloaded,7 picked apart, reconfigured, and reuploaded

7 The translators of Azuma's work use the term "read up" to refer to the process by which fans access the internal structure of the database. However, they note that the original Japanese verb used by Azuma translates as "to load," though it also implies "to read thoroughly and voraciously," "to read into," or "to overinterpret" (132). Given both its appropriateness to the database model and its freedom from the accusations of overreading that often haunt both adaptations and fan texts, the definition "to load" is more appropriate for my own context.

to the database in limitless combinations. Resistance to the grand narrative structure results in both a much greater freedom and a greatly expanded archive. In this model, the originary text is not devalued, but it is not elevated to a position of reverence either.

It simply represents one possible combination of elements within the larger textual database.

The database model achieves this balance through decentralization. It is a double layer structure consisting of encoded information and individual pages, or small narratives. In the database model, agency lies with the reader, thus the surface goes through numerous expansions that are not determined by the database, but by the end user. Ultimately, though, these expansions must feed back into the database, broadening it and refreshing the structure and content of the inner layer. This inner layer does not consist of the originary work (which, like all its adaptations, is a surface narrative). On the contrary, it consists of a collection of fragments, uploaded from both the originary and the copies, that are constantly being accessed, downloaded, reconfigured, and then re-uploaded by end users. Thus, the deep inner layer is never stagnant and is never completely determined. It is an ever growing entity that, like

Derrida's archive, lends itself to constant recombination. In a textual universe like Harry

Potter, for instance, all seven novels and eight films are small narratives on the outer layer of the database. Each work contains characters, places, and situations that upload into the inner, fragmentary layer of the database. Once there, they can be accessed by fans, critics, or adapters who might pick out only specific pieces from the database to download from the inner layer to create a new story—perhaps a date between Harry

Potter and his archnemesis Draco Malfoy at the local pub, the Three Broomsticks. That

new story, once published (whether commercially or informally) becomes another small narrative that is then uploaded from the outer layer to the inner layer of the database, adding a potential romance between Harry and Draco as a new narrative fragment.

Because the originary works exists on the same outer layer as all of the subsequent small narratives, they are deemphasized and weighted equally with everything that comes after them.

Such a structure eliminates questions of faithfulness and prestige because the originary has been removed from the deep inner level from which adapters download data and the inner level itself resists fidelity because new information is constantly being uploaded and therefore changing its structure and contents. Referential adaptations work in much the same way as Azuma's otaku consumerism. While they download key recognizable elements from the originary work —most notably characters —from the inner layer of the database, they simultaneously download other elements which have come to the database through other uploads —including critical responses, fanworks and responses, and other commercial adaptations.

Far from suggesting that no grand narrative has ever existed, Azuma rather proposes that the grand narrative has fragmented, leaving discrete segments that feed both the originary work and the derivative works. The inner layer of the Pride and

Prejudice database, as an example, would include Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, and all of the other characters in Austen's novel as well as key places like Pemberley,

Longbourn, and Rosings, and major events like Lydia's elopement with Wickham,

Charlotte Lucas's marriage to Mr. Collins, and Mr. Bingley's abrupt exit from Netherfield.

It would not, however, include the entire narrative of Pride and Prejudice in the form and

order written by Jane Austen. That particular combination of events is just one potential small narrative structure derived from the aforementioned fragments. As with Derrida's archive, the "originary" work comes to bear increasingly less weight as the proliferation of subsequent iterations continually feed new bits of data into the "grand non-narrative" that is the inner layer of the database structure. Ultimately, the originary and the subsequent iterations bear equal significance because parts of each new iteration are uploaded into the database where pieces from the entire spectrum of small narratives can be downloaded and reconfigured into an infinite number of hybrid combinations.

Each time a new combination is uploaded, the entire structure of the database is altered and the place of the originary work becomes less significant. The originary narrative also cannot be downloaded in its totality because it exists on the outer layer of the database and represents just one combination of elements from the inner layer. This is the narrative freedom from which fanworks emerge. This is also the freedom which drives referential adaptation.

A Referential Model of Adaptation

In order to establish a referential model of adaptation, we must consider what commonalities it shares with fanwork and how it draws on Azuma's database structure.

Five key elements set referential adaptations apart from their analogous counterparts: breadth, attitude, character relationships, hindsight, and currency.

Breadth

The primary difference between referential adaptations and nostalgic works is their breadth of interaction with the existing textual archive. As Azuma notes, "in the shift from modernity to postmodernity, our world image is experiencing a sea change, from one sustained by a narrative-like, cinematic perspective on the entire world to one

read-up by search engines, characterized by databases and interfaces" (54). While an analogous adaptation attempts to remain faithful to the originary narrative and limits its interaction with other iterations of the work, a referential adaptation is less constrained and, like a search engine, provides a breadth of reference points, from the originary narrative, to critical responses, to fan interpretations, to other retellings. In Azuma's terms, the analogous adaptation latches on to one existing combination on the outer layer of the database structure, whereas the referential adaptation draws from several elements that exist along the inner layer while alluding to ways they have been previously combined on the outer layer.

Referential adaptations have high expectations of viewers. They feed on viewer knowledge of not only the originary text but of its archontic resonances. They also typically demand a high level of media-savviness. Though referential adaptations can be watched and appreciated without awareness of these factors, they have a game-like quality that is only accessible to viewers with a high level of foreknowledge. Like fanfiction, referential adaptations are produced with an "expert" audience in mind. An acolyte may appreciate the narrative, but only an initiate will understand the full implications of the text. A fan of both the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Helen Fielding's Pride and Prejudice adaptation novel Bridget Jones's Diary, for instance, will gain much more pleasure seeing Colin Firth as Bridget's love interest,

Mark Darcy, in the film adaptation of Fielding’s novel knowing that Firth played Mr.

Darcy (on whom Mark Darcy is based) in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation and that the Bridget of Fielding's novel was obsessed with Colin Firth after watching that

adaptation. The initiate quality of these texts appeals to fan audiences, who enjoy participating in the treasure hunt.

This gamelike quality of referential adaptations serves not only a narrative, but also a commercial function, providing a built-in audience and assuring the adaptation's longevity by feeding on and adding to an already existent fandom who will watch the work again and again in an attempt to master the breadth of its resonances. In fact, some of the producers of the referential works studied herein have been associated with fandom themselves or affiliated with shows that have large fan followings, giving them insight into the practices and preferences of fan communities.

Attitude

Analogous adaptations are serious in tone, burdened as they are with the responsibility for properly representing an esteemed classic canon. These prestige presentations are often what viewers most associate with the concept of "adaptation."

Referential adaptations, however, do not take their "responsibility" to the source text with the same gravitas. As fanfiction disclaimers8 such as "I own nothing. I'm just playing in J.K. Rowling's sandbox" reflect, referential adaptations are marked with a sense of play (lionesseyes13). They take pleasure in tweaking the originary story, mixing it with subtle references only an avid viewer or reader might know, and adding comic elements that are based on the entire database and its users rather than just the originary story itself.

In his discussion of the 1985 film adaptation of the board game Clue, Thomas

Leitch describes "post-literary" adaptations —those adaptations based on pop cultural

8 Author's notes disavowing any rights to the characters and situations of a commercial work. Fan authors include these in their stories in an attempt to circumvent potential claims of copyright violation.

or non-narrative originals such as superhero origin stories, songs, theme park rides, and video or board games. Though not all referential adaptations are post-literary, they do have in common some of the same conventions which, according to Leitch, include "the playful use of familiar elements from the original source whose recognition in a new context will evoke pleasure" and "a generally and often incongruously lightsome tone suggesting this sort of adaptation is fundamentally more whimsical than the serious adaptation of novels or plays or stories" (262). Like the post-literary adaptation, the referential adaptation assumes a somewhat whimsical attitude. Additionally, because referential adaptation draws freely from the textual database, it blends elements from a number of sources, creating an allusive puzzle that relies on viewers' comprehensive knowledge.

The overall attitude of a referential adaptation revolves around a knowing wink and nudge. As such, while the uninitiated can enjoy a referential adaptation, it is the avid fan who benefits most from its multi-layered approach to storytelling. Referential adaptations are ideally suited to succeed in an increasingly recursive mediascape where fans are often more familiar with the many iterations of a text than are its adapters.

Relationships

One of the most obvious influences of fanwork on referential adaptation is the change in characters' relationships. As Azuma's database structure suggests, fan consumption tends to be based on characters or character elements. Fan adaptations arise from the desire to revisit a favorite character and see him/her in new situations and new relationships, particularly if the originary work foreclosed those situations or relationships. As Jenkins notes, "fan stories shift the balance between plot and

characterization, placing primary emphasis upon moments that define character relationships rather than using such moments as background or motivation for the dominant plot" which, in the case of fanworks, "may form the basis for romantic fiction involving couples only suggested in the series" (Textual 169). These relationships, known as pairings or "ships," make up the core of fandom. Most collections of fan writing, art or media, whether in print or online, are organized by pairing, and most commonly accepted pairings are defined and fleshed out in essays known as "ship manifestoes."

The multiple layering of the database system provides a useful model for considering the way fans visit elements of a textual universe (the inner layer of the database) that do not accord with the originary work (a combination on the outer, or narrative, layer). Azuma takes into account the way otakus manipulate the database to cater to their fannish preferences, noting that:

if otaku discover some new element most characters and narratives are immediately transformed, and from the assembled and negotiated permutations of multiple elements, many analogous works are born. . . .The intensity of the works does not come from the message or narrative embedded by the author but is decided according to the compatible preferences of consumers and the moe9-elements dispersed in the works. (88)

This exemplifies the way that fans come to a collective agreement about potential relationships that exist outside of the originary narrative. Hints and "missed" possibilities in the initial work cause fans to recombine elements of the database to create additional surface narratives that then expand the archival resonances or points of database access to the new narrative element. A silent look between two characters, for example,

9 A Japanese slang term that indicates obsessive love for a character, character type, or character trait. It is these moe elements that Azuma believes are at the heart of the database model.

can be the impetus for a new proliferation of stories about the intimate moments that led to or resulted from that single on-screen cue. In this way, fandoms build up around character relationships. Referential adaptations make use of the inner, elemental layer of the database in the same way as fanworks, often using similar elements and creating identical relationships to appeal to the ever-growing legions of fans who desire relationships that move beyond those allowed by the originary narrative, even if only in glimpses.

Hindsight

Referential adaptations frequently make use of the benefit of hindsight. To be truly faithful to the originary work, an analogous adaptation must proceed without future occurrences or (in the case of a series) episodes in mind, moving in a set narrative order. A referential adaptation sets no such limits on its narrative. In a database model of adaptation, all of the elements of any textual universe are fragmentary entries and are available to the adapter from first access, and referential adaptations do not ignore this fact. Whether it be for continuity, for narrative layering, or merely to amuse viewers, referential adaptations do not hesitate to integrate later story elements and characters at earlier points in a work. Nor do they hesitate to combine later social and critical responses to the work, which also become part of the database, with the originary text.

Currency

Referential adaptations often have a sense of currency that goes beyond simple chronological displacement. This is most evident in the integration of media culture into the textual universe. The influence of new media is particularly evident through incorporation of text messaging, blogging, cyberstalking, and frequent references to fan culture, a clear precursor to many referential works. Even in referential works which are

set in the past or in the future, current media technologies pervade plot lines and link these adaptations to the media-savvy consumers who watch them. Whether it is

Sherlock Holmes text messaging or Elizabeth Bennet surfing the internet, contemporary media holds a place of prestige in referential adaptations.

Boundaries

In considering the specific structures of otaku consumption of anime and manga,

Azuma conceptualizes the fragmentation of the database as extreme. He claims that the core of the database no longer consists of narratives or characters but rather of the most basic elements that make up characters. An otaku who prefers glasses characters or characters with cat ears might create an entire small narrative that begins with these rudimentary elements. Thomas Lamarre rightly notes that Azuma becomes overly concerned with the breakdown of narrative and the deconstruction of character to the point where he loses sight of the fact that there must be some core that holds the database together. Whereas Azuma posits a complete fragmentation, Lamarre suggests that there must be some "centripetal force" that gathers the database's elements (260). According to Lamarre, a better understanding of Azuma's database structure can be achieved if we look at it as an exploded projection (260). As he notes:

in the exploded view or exploded projection, which is commonly used in engineering diagrams and assembly instructions, we see all the elements pulled apart yet held in place, to show how the wheel is put together. Yet the pieces. . .more distant from us are not smaller in accordance with one- point perspective. (120-21)

While Lamarre's exploded projection model of the database structure seems to limit the archival drive, it also emphasizes that the archive has boundaries. Without such boundaries, all archives would ultimately bleed into each other, creating a single boundless, intertextual archive.

Every database has a centripetal force that defines its content and how widely that content can range. Even a referential model of adaptation—with its emphasis on breadth and play—has certain elements which hold it together. In order to be successful with ardent fans, a referential text must balance its tendency to poke fun at the textual archive and the fans themselves with a reverence for the one aspect of text that fans consider inviolable—character. Genres may be shifted, settings may be changed, new narratives may be created, but the boundary of character may not be transgressed without the adaptation losing its ties to the textual database. In the context of fanfiction,

Deborah Kaplan explains that the work of characterization:

both contributes to and draws from the communities' collective understanding of character. . . .Although a work of fan fiction might otherwise follow the conventions of original fiction character development, it must also be in constant dialogue with the source text's characters, already fully realized and well known to the story's readers. (136)

Because readers have set expectations already developed through both canon and fanon, where character interpretations are discussed and debated at length, any significant character deviation is rejected in the strongest terms, amounting to what fans call "character rape."10 Azuma, too, as previously noted, suggests that the foundation of the database structure of fanwork is character elements—"as the importance of narrative has declined, the characters have become more important in otaku culture"

(47); thus, the one element that remains constant through all iterations of the database is character.

10 Fanfiction writer L. Goldman says of character rape: "Canon gives you a framework for the character and the subtext that you see in the interaction between the characters on the show gives you even more of a playground to work with. Even with all that, there are still some basic truths regarding the characters that cannot and should not be ignored for the sake of the author's Inner Drama Queen" ("Why").

Referential adaptations represent a break from fidelity to a single narrative.

Rather than receiving inspiration from just one originary text, they tend to adapt the database as a whole, pulling disparate elements from prior adaptations, criticism, fan reactions, scholarship, and any other type of small narrative that has fed fragments into the inner level of the database. Thus, while the casual viewer can enjoy a referential adaptation, the avid fan will experience a higher level of engagement through attempting to identify all of the references it presents. This break from narrative fidelity, however, is not completely free from constraint. The fan consumption that drives the database is beholden to a different kind of faithfulness, that of character continuity, which will be explored further in Chapter 4. Nevertheless, the freedom from narrative constraint that the database represents allows for the study of a referential model of adaptation and represents a significant step away from fidelity criticism.

Project Overview

My initial impetus for this project is a longstanding attempt to tease out the subtle lines that separate fanfiction from commercial adaptation. Far from coming closer to defining that line, however, I have, over the past decade, I have found it more and more blurry. Works such as the Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica reboots, Lost in Austen, and the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations, all of which overtly play to the foibles and fetishes of fandom, have all but obliterated it. However, the traditional ways of looking at adaptation, mired as they are in the issue of fidelity to the source text, are ill equipped to handle the growing spate of adaptations which adopt fannish practices. The following, then, is an attempt to bring the practices of fandom scholarship to bear on the study of adaptation to better understand the qualities which make these fannish adaptations

particularly well-suited to succeed in an increasingly internet-driven, fan-saturated media marketplace.

Chapter 2 will examine recent adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, many of which reverse the relationship between fans and commercial adapters. Within the Jane Austen fandom, many fan writers—usually a group that is open to far-flung textual interpretations and departures from the initiating text—express deep-rooted nostalgia for the originary work, while the most recent commercial works are far closer to the normal work of fandom. Referential adaptations of Pride and Prejudice such as Bridget

Jones's Diary and Lost in Austen make radical departures from the initial text and play on existing interpretations of the textual universe while introducing unexpected new elements that create a sense of modernity. These adaptations demonstrate the ability of adapters to draw from both layers of the database structure concurrently to create a rich tapestry of resonances that relies on the variety of enunciations available in the textual universe for its effectiveness while still playing on the nostalgia that drives Austen fans to seek out many iterations of the author's work.

Chapter 3 will focus on two of the most recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations.

Fandom scholars often cite Sherlock Holmes societies and adaptations as one of the first sites of modern fan culture. Non-commercial expansions of the Sherlock Holmes universe have existed practically since Doyle initially killed off his beloved hero in 1893.

In fact, fan reaction to Holmes's death was so intense that Doyle himself had to resurrect the character a decade later. Additionally, commercial adaptations of Holmes, which began as early as 1899, ran concurrent with Doyle's later entries in the series and have continued steadily into the present. An array of actors from Basil Rathbone to

Leonard Nimoy has played the revered detective. Fan adaptations have kept pace, with each new commercial work gaining its own sub-archive of fanwork. The years 2009 through 2014, though, have seen a new kind of Sherlock Holmes adaptation. Both the

2009 and 2011 Sherlock Holmes films directed by Guy Ritchie and the 2010 through

2014 BBC series Sherlock produced by Steven Moffat introduce new Sherlock Holmes storylines. More importantly, they playfully wink at Holmes fanfiction and criticism and elaborate on the non-commercial expansion that has taken place since Doyle originally killed his hero. Both also frequently allude to slash fiction, a kind of same-sex erotic relationship fiction favored among fan writers. In breadth, attitude, and relationships, both are excellent examples of referential adaptation. However, Ritchie's films, while garnering a large fan following and stimulating much fanwork, have not had nearly the effect on fans that Moffat's series has. This is largely the result of Moffat's facile use of the tactics of fan adaptation, which illustrates how effectively referential adaptation can succeed with both fans and nonfans by utilizing the allusive qualities of fan culture.

Chapter 4 will compare the 2009 Star Trek reboot and its 2013 sequel, Star Trek:

Into Darkness in light of Hiroki Azuma's focus on character as the motivator of the database structure which he claims underlies postmodern otaku (fan) production and consumption. The reboot includes as its background the entire (canonical) textual universe of Star Trek and its many continuations. At the same time, it willfully throws away that universe, opting for a parallel universe that acknowledges the existence of its predecessor. It includes the original characters intact but completely dismantles the original universe's narrative threads and makes a clear break from it in a way that pleases many fans. The reboot sequel, however, makes significant changes to a

popular supporting character and infuriates fans in the process. Azuma and fandom studies both play important roles here. Fandom scholars such as Henry Jenkins suggest (and rightly so) that fan creations are not narrative based, but character based.

This aligns with Azuma's contention that contemporary otaku culture is character rather than narrative driven and leads to further exploration of the role of character in the textual database.

As Linda Hutcheon notes, though the case study is an integral part of adaptation studies, "in practice, it has tended to privilege or at least give priority (and therefore, implicitly, value) to what is always called the 'source' text or the 'original'" (A Theory xiii).

My goal here is to reverse that tendency by giving value to the adaptations, illustrating the rich tapestry of sources available through the referential model. The closer alignment between fandom scholarship and adaptation studies that referential adaptation represents is well suited for understanding the cross-media database that underlies most contemporary adapted texts. Adaptation studies has become much more than a push-pull between written and filmic works; it has become a complex and media rich archontic negotiation that increasingly requires the tools of media-savvy consumers to navigate successfully.

CHAPTER 2 THE PERSISTENCE OF DARCY: MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS AND JANE AUSTEN FANDOM

Prestige, canonicity, and nostalgia have worked together to make British nineteenth century novelist Jane Austen fandom slow to accept non-analogous adaptations. Because Austen's works were revered by both readers and scholars long before they were adapted to multimedia texts, fans developed a sense that her novels are untouchable and that fanworks and adaptations should reinforce their original narratives rather than open spaces for change and critique. However, as multimedia adaptations of Austen's works have become common, creating more entry points into the textual database and more variations on which fans and adapters can build, referential adaptations that critique nostalgic readings of the novels have become more frequent. Nevertheless, a tension remains between fans' desire for analogous recreations of the texts and some adapters' desire to open the Austen database to alternate readings.

Janeites and Media Fandom

Due to their non-serialized nature, Jane Austen's novels did not draw fan adaptations as quickly as the works that will be discussed in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.

However, several dramatic rises in Austen-based fan production, particularly in productions related to Pride and Prejudice (P&P), have taken place over the last sixty years. Each of these rises has followed a filmic or televisual adaptation of one of

Austen's texts, demonstrating the significant impact of media renderings of Austen's work on written adaptations, both commercial and fan-made. Filmic and televisual renderings act as touchstones that energize and gather fan comminutes around a

shared love of the media text and open new gaps in the textual narrative and fresh points of entry into the textual database that feed further adaptations.

Seriality motivates fan adaptation. John Fiske's description of the televisual text can be applied to serial texts across a broader spectrum. Fiske notes that, in order to maintain popularity over a span of time with a variety of viewers, televisual texts (and, likewise, serial texts in general) must maintain a tension between closure and openness. They maintain a constant interplay between preferred readings and viewer- constructed readings. Thus, alternate readings, such as fan adaptations, tend to proliferate and are often even encouraged by producers. This interplay between openness and closure results in what Fiske characterizes as the "producerly text," one that "combines the televisual [open] characteristics of a writerly text with the easy accessibility of the readerly [and]. . .relies on discursive competencies that the viewer already possesses, but requires that they are used in a self-interested, productive way"

(95). The televisual text invites not only access, but interaction, therefore encouraging modes of expansion and secondary iteration. As Fiske notes, "it treats its readers as members of a semiotic democracy, already equipped with the discursive competencies to make meanings and motivated by pleasure to want to participate in the process" (96).

It is both adaptable and open to a multiplicity of new data and meanings and therefore ever-ready for reconfiguration of the textual archive. Because serial works leave gaps between releases, fans are motivated to become producers and create intervening works to bide the time between installments. Some of the most productive periods of adaptation, such as the burst of creativity from Star Trek fans in the ten years between the cancellation of Star Trek: The Original Series and the release of Star Trek: The

Motion Picture or the voluminous release of Harry Potter fanfiction during the three-year wait between the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the fifth book,

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, take place within these gaps.

Austen's novels, however, were not released serially. They did not leave room between stories or chapters that built fan anticipation, and thus, they did not inspire immediate vociferous fan reactions. Published anonymously between 1811 and 1817, each novel was published in its entirety (unlike the serialized works that would become popular during the Victorian era) with no notice of forthcoming work from the same author. Though the novels were praised by popular figures as dissimilar as Richard

Sheridan and the Prince Regent and were considered the fashionable novels of the day, they received only fifteen reviews during the author's lifetime, most of which, with the exception of a lengthy and glowing report in the Quarterly Review by Sir Walter Scott, were favorable if short and somewhat tepid (Fergus 18). However, the novels' popularity has risen exponentially over the past two centuries, and Austen's works have become some of the most beloved and widely commercially adapted in the English language.

According to Claudia L. Johnson, Austen's six novels were popular enough to be reprinted for the Standard Novels series in 1832, but her readership remained relatively small, if loyal, until the publication of J.E. Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in

1870 and Richard Bentley's deluxe 1882 Steventon Edition of Jane Austen's Work, after which Austen readership boomed and has remained steady since (211). By the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen fanaticism was in full swing. In fact, the now-well- known designation Janeite entered popular vernacular in 1894 when George

Saintsbury, in his preface to the Ruskin House edition of Pride and Prejudice (one of

many editions available by that decade), noted that "in the sect—fairly large and yet unusually choice—of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels" (ix). Both the evidence of competing editions of the novel and Saintsbury's description of the confederacy of

Janeites as "fairly large and yet unusually choice" illustrate the growing number of

Austen devotees just prior to the turn of the century. An active and growing fan base embraced Austen's work, but it focused on analogous readings and lacked the desire to fill in or eliminate gaps that characterizes fandoms of serialized works.

Without a doubt, Austen's popularity was firmly established by 1924, when

Rudyard Kipling published the short story "The Janeites" in MacLean's, Story-Teller and

Hearst's International (Lewis and Kieffer). This oft-discussed tale depicts the Society of the Janeites, a group of World War I soldiers, as a mason-like secret society whose members revere the works of Jane Austen and find brotherhood in their enthusiasm for

"Jane" despite their disparity in rank, background, and social status. "Tilnez an' trap- doors," a phrase from Northanger Abbey, is a password that allows access to an elite brotherhood which grants special privileges to its members. Here, Austen is depicted as a "a little old maid 'oo'd written 'alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago" whose works about "nothing at all" defy traditional boundaries of class, culture, and education to draw their readers together (Kipling).

At the same time, Austen's works were becoming a subject of academic study.

The first critical edition of Jane Austen's works was published in 1923. As Johnson notes:

[R.W.] Chapman's The Novels of Jane Austen, published by the Clarendon Press in 1923, . . .was the first scholarly edition of any English

novelist—male or female—ever to appear. . .and. . .[Chapman] treated Austen's novels with a scrupulousness customarily reserved for classical authors. (217-18)

Thus, Austen's works were established not only in the popular imagination, but also as a cornerstone of scholarly canon. Unlike Arthur Conan Doyle's works, which were genre pieces that brought more attention from devoted fans than from scholars, Austen's works developed an early reputation for being worthy of reverence, which likely made their textual archives seem less approachable by those who would offer alternate interpretations.

Nonetheless, even before Austen's surge in popularity, commercial adaptations, continuations, and completions kept her work in the public eye, though some of the earliest were by Austen's own relatives. The first was an 1850 continuation of Austen's fragmentary The Watsons by her niece, Catherine-Anne Hubback. Entitled The Younger

Sister, Hubback's completion was the first of a series of Austen sequels and completions that she penned between 1850 and 1863 (Wagner). Hubback's granddaughter, Edith Hubback Brown, also wrote a number of early Austen sequels and continuations between 1928 and 1930 (Wagner). These early works by family members, however, are a marked contrast to those by fans and adapters of other textual universes who fill gaps within or reconfigure original texts. They are largely restricted to continuations, which expand the database but revere the novels themselves as written.

Where the great hiatus of Sherlock Holmes or the ten-year gap between Star Trek and

Star Trek: The Motion Picture created a space for fans to fold new elements into the textual database, the reverence of family for its famous and tragic member closed the space for fanwork by appropriating the adaptational field early on and limiting its variations.

The earliest sequel written by a non-family-member is Sybil G. Brinton's Old

Friends and New Fancies: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen, published in 1913. Brinton's novel is a crossover1 sequel, combining characters from all of Austen's novels, but its primary focus is on Georgiana Darcy, Kitty Bennet, and

Colonel Fitzwilliam. While this may sound more like a piece of fanfiction than a commercial publication, Old Friends was published commercially and was reviewed by the London Times in 1913.

Nine years after the first cinematic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the 1940 film starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, Dorothy A. Bonavia Hunt published the second commercial Jane Austen sequel, Pemberley Shades. The novel combines a mystery and a marriage plot. It takes place four years after the events of P&P and foreshadows many of the tropes that later became common in both fanfiction and adaptation, including mysterious visitors causing strife at Pemberley, amorous clergymen, and romance for Georgiana Darcy. In fact, it is the first in a long line of Jane

Austen sequels, both commercial and fan-made, in the mystery genre and includes themes still apparent in the recent P.D. James Austen mystery adaptation Death Comes to Pemberley.2 Pemberley Shades is far more well-known than Old Friends and New

Fancies and may be the first Austen sequel directly associated with increased demand due to a prior visual adaptation.

The 1940 Garson/Olivier adaptation of Pride and Prejudice also appears to have been the impetus for the earliest-recorded Jane Austen fanfiction. Early fan activity is

1 A term used by fans to refer to works that combine elements from two or more textual universes.

2 Also adapted to miniseries by the BBC in 2014.

much more difficult to track than commercial sequels and adaptations because most of it was conducted through private channels. Fan lore, passed on through internet message boards on sites such as Austen.com and the Republic of Pemberley and collected at the online Fanlore database, reports that P&P fanfiction was being created at least as early as the 1940s in response to the film adaptation. In a 2008 posting to the Jane Austen Tea Room discussion board at the popular fan site Austen.com, user margb notes:

In the late 1950's early 1960's [sic], I belonged to a group of people that mimeographed and mailed to each other Bonanza, Perry Mason, and other TV show Fan Fiction.(my friend and I were the youngest in the group) One of the adults I believe was connected in some way to screenwriting, so he was probably getting free ideas from us. . . .My mom at the time told us that she had done the same as a teenager with Gone With the Wind and P&P (Sir Larry) and a lot of Errol Flynn movies!

This anecdote establishes that, much like the fanfiction of today, fanfiction, in the case of Jane Austen as well as many others, has historically tended to conglomerate around commercial filmic and televisual adaptations of popular works. Visualized works appear to draw more active fan communities than written.

This suggestion is borne out by more recent trends in online Jane Austen fandom. In The Newbie's Guide to Fannish LiveJournal, entry on P&P fandom, imacartwright writes:

Why is there such a collection of fan fiction on the internet today that is based on a book by Jane Austen? The answer is simple. In 1995, the BBC aired its famous production of Pride and Prejudice. . . .They cast Colin Firth as the brooding, smoldering, sexy Mr. Darcy. They took a little poetic license and added a scene where he dives into a pond. Immediately after, he happens upon Elizabeth Bennet again for the first time in months and his shirt is wet. She gets flustered at the sight of him. . .as did fangirls around the world, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Indeed, the history of Jane Austen fanfiction on the internet has very much been a record of the fannish obsession with the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and, particularly, Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.

The Republic of Pemberley, arguably the largest Jane Austen fan site on the internet, was formed in 1997 as a permutation of the P&P2BB, a web message board dedicated to the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (known amongst fans as

P&P2—the designation P&P1 being reserved for the 1980 BBC adaptation)3 that was itself formed in 1996 as an offshoot of the AUSTEN-L listserv ("Republic"). The

Derbyshire Writer's Guild, the oldest and largest Jane Austen fanfiction site on the web, is also, if more indirectly, linked to the 1995 adaptation as it is an offshoot of the

Republic of Pemberley's story archive, Bits of Ivory ("Contributor").

Even nearly a decade after P&P2, its influence continued to resonate in internet fandom. In 2002, the Darcyfic mailing list formed. As its name indicates, the Darcyfic list was dedicated to providing fanfiction centered on Mr. Darcy, specifically, in this case,

Mr. Darcy as played in 1995 by Colin Firth. Later that year, the list became a website, called Firthness, further denoting its role as a site dedicated to Firth's rendition of

Austen's hero. Unlike the Republic of Pemberley and the Derbyshire Writer's Guild,

Firthness accepts only fanfiction devoted to Mr. Darcy, and it hosts NC-17 stories. Site membership is required and is limited to those 18 or older. The tenor of the website is denoted by its nickname "The Pond," which indicates its devotion to appreciation of

Firth's physical attributes by calling to mind the infamous scene of Firth in a clingy, white wet shirt which eroticized Darcy and made Colin Firth a worldwide sex symbol.

3 The 1940 Olivier/Garson film, which only became popular with contemporary fans in the wake of the 1995 production, is designated P&P0.

As the impact of the 1940 and 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptations indicates, media works spur further adaptation by creating new points of entry into the textual database. They also create new gaps for fans and adapters to fill in, leading to yet more texts and more gaps to create entry points into the universe of the text. As is the case with Pride and Prejudice, media works can help create a producerly openness in a text that adapters may have previously seen as closed due to its prestige, thereby evoking more expansive and less faithful adaptations. Despite being the impetus for so many commercial and non-commercial works, though, these incursions into the database by new media texts account for some of the most significant rifts in the Jane Austen fan community.

Adjudicating Austen: Fan-Scholars and Scholar-Fans

One of the most notable aspects of Jane Austen fandom is the considerable overlap between fan practices and scholarly practices and the tension between the two camps. As literature scholar Deirdre Lynch notes:

repeatedly over the last 190 years, certain admirers of her novels have seen fit to depreciate the motives and modes of everyone else's admiration. Indeed, a customary method of establishing one's credentials as a reader of Austen has been to regret that others simply will insist on liking her in inappropriate ways. (8)

Such exclusionary reactions mirror analogous adaptations by suggesting that there is one "right" way of reading a text rather than acknowledging the possibility of multiple iterations that build on one another creating unlimited potential for mixing, adding, and remixing.

Mark Hills notes these "opposing" ways of interacting with a text, designating the warring factions "scholar-fans" and "fan-scholars." While scholar-fans channel their enthusiasm for the text through the filter of academic subjectivity, focusing on the

theoretical and narrative concerns accepted by the academy, fan-scholars theorize outside of the academy, using their voluminous knowledge of a text to extrapolate on and critique both it and the practices of other fans. Many early critics of fandom described this difference as intensity versus excess (8-19). While Hills acknowledges that this is largely a false binary, both factions persist in Jane Austen scholarship and fandom.

An ongoing debate since the beginning of Austen's popularity has been between

Austen "fans" and Austen "scholars." The crux of the debate rests on to ways of reading. Claudia Johnson points out that the reading practices of Janeites "transgress the dogmas later instituted by professional academics presiding over the emergent field of novel studies" by focusing on issues such as character, biography, and history instead of the all-important themes and plot structures on which scholars tend to concentrate (214). Thus Janeites, much like the Baker Street Irregulars of Sherlock

Holmes fandom (who will be discussed further in Chapter 3), practice a way of reading marked by "fan-scholarly" excess. According to Johnson, "unlike current students and scholars of literature. . .Janeite readers resist plot with all its forward-moving momentums, its inevitabilities, and its closure, and they dwell instead on atemporal aspects of narration. . .and especially characterization" (215). These ways of reading also often represent the dividing line between faithful and fannish texts. As Jenkins and

Sheenagh Pugh both note, character is the one immutable aspect of a text for fan readers and, from Azuma's perspective, it makes up the core of the textual database; thus, Janeites read and recreate like fans, placing the inviolability of character at the

core of the textual database. Despite this commonality, however, "Janeite" style adaptations often remain quite narrow.

The rift among Austen enthusiasts goes deeper than differences of approach between scholar-fans and fan-scholars, however. As Austen fandom has ballooned over the past two decades, even further splintering has occurred between scholar-fans and fan-scholars as well as between Austen purists and Austen generalists. Whereas

Austen purists insist on fidelity and decry any adaptation, professional or fan created, which they do not see as true to the letter and/or spirit of the text, Austen generalists embrace multiple iterations of the Austen canon even if they do play with or largely break from textual fidelity.

The Republic of Pemberley, for instance, despite having been established specifically as a website for enthusiasts of the 1995 film, is by far the most exclusive

Austen fan site on the web. Rather than fostering the sense of inclusion its break from the more scholarly AUSTEN-L would seem to indicate,4 the Republic of Pemberley proudly establishes its spirit of elitism on its FAQ page:

We do tend to be a little cliquey, don't we? . . .The site's narrow appeal is intentional. We exude a bit of an attitude, which could be characterized as polite with a bite. We miraculously manage, even within this odd framework, to remain one of the most civil places on the Internet, a distinction we prize, but one which is cultivated through an emulation of Jane Austen's own honest, moral and forthright ways, as opposed to sprinkling artificial sweeteners on our words. . . .Of course we hope you like it here. . .but if you don't like what you see, keep shopping. ("Republic")

4 A message on the AUSTEN_L FAQ, noting "you can also go to the `Republic of Pemberley' (a Jane Austen writings and adaptations discussion board site), where some types of discussion (such as gossip about the actors) will be more welcome than on AUSTEN-L" certainly suggests that Pemberley was formed as a freer alternative to the original list ("AUSTEN-L").

The site moderators make clear their intention not to welcome just anyone, nor do they pretend they will be kind to new members who do not fit their idea of proper Austen fans. They claim these behaviors are true to the spirit of Austen's work. This sense of justified elitism extends to all areas of the site, including its selection of fanfiction. The moderators' mission to protect the sanctity of the original work creates narrow parameters for expansion. While temporal or geographic displacement might take place, little new content is uploaded to the database; data is neither expanded nor erased.5

Though the Republic of Pemberley no longer accepts fanfiction, all of the fiction

(known here as "Bits of Ivory"—another nod to a sense of insider privilege6) formerly accepted is archived on the site, and the most recent fanfiction submission guidelines are still available. They represent a counterpoint to the traditional broad scope of fanfiction and illustrate just how seriously the site creators take the business of adjudicating interpretations of Austen's texts:

The stories at Bits of Ivory are intended to present Jane Austen's characters behaving as she wrote them in scenes we might wish she had an opportunity to write herself. We may describe what happens before or after the events in the novels, re-tell parts from the point of view of another character, or elaborate scenes which she, in her wisdom, did not describe in great detail. In this, the guide is Jane Austen's own sense of taste and humanity. . . .BOI is simply yet another, very Pemberlean, expression of the delights to be found in Jane Austen's genius. . . .Your story must be about Austen characters and must present them in a manner faithful to

5 Both the Republic of Pemberley and the Derbyshire Writer’s Guild are frequented by Austen enthusiasts who hope to publish their own Austen adaptations eventually or who are looking to break into the Regency romance genre and follow in the footsteps of their favorite author. In fact, two authors for whom I have beta read (the act of editing and proofreading the work of a fanfiction author) have since published their Austen adaptations as profic (professional fiction), further emphasizing the fine line between fanfiction and professional adaptation.

6 The name refers to Jane Austen's letter to her nephew James Edward Austen regarding two missing chapters from one of his youthful literary endeavors: "What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow? -- How could I join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour" (Chapman 468-9).

their original conception. "What if" stories are acceptable if the premise is plausible within the world created by Jane Austen. Your synopsis will help us decide whether or not your story meets this criterion. ("Bits")

In addition to the parameters above, questionable language and adult themes are forbidden, and original characters are allowed only if the archivers believe them to be plausible and to play secondary roles to Austen-created characters. Given these strict guidelines, it's little wonder that innovative contemporary adaptations which poke gentle fun at Austen's work and legacy, such as Lost in Austen, have tended to receive a lukewarm reception from many fans.

As Lynch observes:

To visit, for example, the particular corner of cyberspace occupied by 'the Republic of Pemberley' is quickly to realize that the work of interpreting Great Books and of adjudicating between their acceptable and unacceptable appropriations goes on in forums besides those administered by professional scholars and journalists. (3)

In fact, the rift between Austen purists and Austen generalists often mimics Claudia

Johnson's description of the rift between Austen scholars and Janeites:

Trained to regard the text itself as a sacred boundary which must never be violated, [Austen scholars] are confounded by the common Janeite game of imagining how a character in one novel might behave toward a character in another, or of speculating how the novels might continue after the wedding. . . .If for academics meaning is generally foreclosed by the comic ending of marriage, Janeites. . .treat her novels instead as one capacious middle: balls, blunders picnics, incomes, hunting dogs, and marriages vie equally for our attention, none taking determinative priority over another, and where, moreover, all manner of "extra-textual" material on sailors, Addison's disease, and petty-theft is welcome so long as it somehow qualifies as a Janean artifact. (223)

What Johnson describes here as the interpretive methods of Janeites mirrors not only the methods and subject matter of fanfiction, but also those of many contemporary commercial adaptations of Austen's texts. Where scholars and purists see a limited canon defined by six primary texts and additional fragments and juvenilia, all with fixed

textual boundaries, generalist fans see a boundless universe, much like Azuma's database, made of the primary texts, fragments, and juvenilia as well as historical references associated with those works and secondary texts, either critical, historical, or adaptive, which build on those works, all of which blend together to defy interpretive limitations.

Many Austen fan-scholars act as gatekeepers. They foreclose the normal interpretive freedom encouraged in most creative fan communities, insisting that such a revered author demands respectful and faithful adaptation and that works falling too far astray of Austen's narrative, style, intent, and values are not welcome in their interpretive communities. Often, fan scholars, who insist on purity of text and fidelity to

Austen's imagined intent, refuse to admit fanfiction which breaks from Austen's style, narrative, or perceived moral compass As a result, many Austen fanfiction sites have strict guidelines for language and content, consigning adult-themed fiction, in particular, to a kind of enthusiasts' ghetto. Anything that is not seen as analogous with the values of Austen's time is unwelcome.

Even more welcoming Austen websites establish guidelines for what is and what is not appropriate Austen-inspired fiction. Currently the oldest, and easily one of the biggest, Austen fanfiction sites on the internet, the Derbyshire Writer's Guild (commonly referred to as "Dwiggie" or DWG), has long been an alternative to the stringent requirements of Republic of Pemberley's Bits of Ivory. The DWG accepts a far wider variety of fanfiction than Bits of Ivory, including "what ifs" and modernizations, but still places considerable, if more reasonably expressed, limitations on submissions,

restricting content to that which would be appropriate to "early teens and younger"

(“How Does”).

In contrast to fandoms such as Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes and even Harry

Potter, where adult fiction is an everyday part of the fan community, most mainstream

Austen sites do not host adult fiction. Slash fiction is even less visible. Where adult- oriented Austen sites are registration-locked, Jane Austen slash sites are almost non- existent. Even those that do exist seem to garner little participation. The Austen Slash livejournal community seldom receives more than one submission per year, and the

Slashing Jane livejournal community hosts only nine posts.

Unlike "serious" Austen fan sites, however, more general fan archives like

Fanfiction.net and An Archive of Our Own host a smattering of Jane Austen adult and slash fiction. Fanfiction.net, the largest fanfiction hosting site online, boasts almost

2,000 P&P offerings, nearly 900 of which are rated "teen" or "mature." An Archive of Our

Own offers a much sparser 172 stories, and of those, 39 are rated "teen and up,"

"mature," or "explicit." Both sites include m/m (male/male) and f/f (female/female) slash as well as alternate universe pairings—another common trope largely forbidden on

Austen-specific archives. These differences further illustrate the rift between purists and generalists. Sites like the Republic of Pemberley and the DWG cater specifically to

Austen purists, whose fanfiction reading is largely inspired by their dedication to the author herself.

Fanfiction.net and An Archive of Our Own are both sites that house fiction from many fandoms, and as such, both cater to fans who read across fandoms and do not restrict their interest to a single author or originary work. Furthermore, their multi-media,

multi-fandom backgrounds encourage a hybridization that the literary fandom sites largely lack. Both sites, for instance, have categories for crossover stories, and neither categorically or archivally distinguishes between an original work and its later cross- media adaptations or translations. In terms of Austen adaptations, this means that Lost in Austen, for instance, has its own categorization because it is a story with a new name and several new characters, while every direct adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, whether filmic, televisual or literary, is contained within the category for the original novel. Because of this structure, far less emphasis is placed on the primacy of the original or the specific interpretations of each adaptation.

Despite the exceptions on mainstream sites, Austen fandom and its literary output is quite analogous. Only a minority of works stray from the storylines and pairings established by the originary works two centuries ago. For offerings that creatively deviate from or comment on the originary novels, one has to leave the common online haunts of Austen purists. Fortunately, in this respect, many modern commercial adapters play a role more closely aligned with that generally taken up by fans, stretching the boundaries of the textual database to see how far creative interpretations of the text can reasonably be tested.

Pride, Prejudice, and Predominance

Some of the most expansive and playful readings of Austen in recent years have taken new approaches to her most ubiquitous novel, Pride and Prejudice. One such adaptation is Emma Campbell Webster's 2007 novel Lost in Austen: Create Your Own

Jane Austen Adventure, which lampoons the reader's nostalgia for the world of Austen's novels by placing her as the heroine of a Choose Your Own Adventure style retelling of

Pride and Prejudice.7 Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Lost in Austen does not have a single narrative throughline. Rather, it consists of several storylines that diverge at critical plot points, with the outcome of the plot depending on which decision the reader chooses to make. The goal of the reader, who acts as a stand-in for

Elizabeth Bennet, is to make the "correct" decision each time a page with a plot divergence appears or give the correct answer for each one of the many Regency-era quiz questions situated throughout the book in order to reach the ideal ending. Traveling to London with Jane and the Gardiners instead of staying at Longbourn results in a flirtation with Austen's real-life love Tom Lefroy, the outcome of which depends on how many good connections the reader has cultivated during the earlier parts of the novel.

Encouraging Jane to stay at Netherfield longer to recuperate fully results in a meeting and potential marriage to Henry Crawford. Amassing enough Regency skills and spending additional time with Colonel Fitzwilliam at Rosings result in a marriage with the

Colonel instead of Darcy. However, in keeping with the tide of Austen fandom, all of the

"correct" decisions follow the plot of Pride and Prejudice and result in marriage to Mr.

Darcy.

Campbell Webster's novel closely mimics the techniques of fanfiction and, indeed, the very structure of the textual database itself by adopting the core narrative of

P&P and overlaying it with cultural knowledge of Austen's era, references to Austen's other works, and events from Jane Austen's own life, all told in a sardonic tone that

7Choose Your Own Adventure books were a series of young adult books published between 1979 and 1988. The books, written in second-person, place the reader as the protagonist of the story and propose either/or decisions which the reader has to answer every few pages. Each decision leads to a different page in the book, and the result, either positive or negative, eventually leads the reader to one of many potential endings.

mimics that of Austen herself. In working through this addition to the Austen landscape, the reader creates her own story cobbled together from various branches of the Austen archive. The narrative reflects an expectation that readers are fans not only of Pride and

Prejudice but of the Austen universe as a whole by incorporating elements of all of

Austen's major novels and fragments as well as events from Austen's life and knowledge of Regency culture into the various potential endings. As such, it demonstrates the breadth of knowledge and sources common in referential adaptations.

Furthermore, in mimicking the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which are often categorized as game books, the novel also adopts the game-like qualities that referential adaptations use to engage audiences.

Additionally, the book questions the tendency to revere the Elizabeth and Darcy romance above other narrative possibilities. In a misguided prowl through the back corridors of Northanger Abbey, the reader comes across a hidden door which leads to

Fanny Price's attic room. The heroine of Mansfield Park has become half-crazed in her frustration over the constant attention paid to Elizabeth and expresses her frustration at the degree to which Pride and Prejudice has overtaken the Austen universe:

"Oh yes, Miss Bennet," she continues, "I have read all about you! Miss Bennet this, Miss Bennet that! So interesting, so witty! Engaging, bold spirited, and handsome; such bright eyes, so lively; no fortune, no connections, no talents to speak of, but when did that ever stop Elizabeth Bennet? . . .Do you think it's easy for the rest of us? Forced to live in your shadow? Forever being compared unfavorably to you? Now that I've got you here, do you think I'm going to let you go? I might not be able to escape my prison, but at least the others will have a chance; Elinor Dashwood, Catherine Morland, even your own poor sister Jane, even your own sister can never shine while she must walk beside you." (94-5)

Fanny's speech, while histrionic, reflects the degree to which Pride and Prejudice has eclipsed the other novels in fandom and, to a slightly lesser degree, adaptation. The

Bits of Ivory archive at the Republic of Pemberley, for instance, contains 337 Pride and

Prejudice stories but only 29 Sense and Sensibility, the second most popular novel in the archive.

The higher volume of Pride and Prejudice stories at Bits of Ivory no doubt arises from the fact that the Republic of Pemberley began as a discussion forum for the 1995

Pride and Prejudice adaptation starring Colin Firth. However, the same disparity exists in novelizations, with Pride and Prejudice getting far more attention than the sum of all of the other novels together.8 Again, the 1995 film may be partly to blame, since many fanfiction authors from sites inspired by that adaptation have gone on to publish their adaptations commercially. However, these numbers also reflect the expansion of the database. Each new small narrative offers another entry point through which readers may discover the database and expand on its contents. Major entry points—those that stand out because of their popularity or ubiquitousness—such as the 1995 Andrew

Davies adaptation draw a greater number of new consumer/creators to the database and therefore generate a greater number of new small narratives, as the burst of fan activity and creativity after that adaptation demonstrates. The more popular an adaptation becomes, and the more readers it draws in, the greater the capacity of the database to expand itself. In the case of Austen's works, no other novel has received a treatment that has been nearly as well-received as P&P2, thus its adaptational output continues to outstrip the other novels. As Lost in Austen demonstrates, the Pride and

Prejudice archive has become such a dominant part of the Austen universe that it has

8 Interestingly, this dominance does not extend to filmic and televisual representations of Austen's work. During 1995 and 1996, for instance, while Pride and Prejudice was adapted only once, Emma was adapted three times.

begun to pull other novels, and even Jane Austen's personal history, into itself, making it an ideal focal point for discussion of Jane Austen adaptations.

Given the overwhelming number of adaptations of Austen's novels and the predominance of Pride and Prejudice, this discussion will focus strictly on that most widely-adapted work. The upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (currently in development), itself an adaptation of a Pride and Prejudice parody novel, will be the fourteenth filmic/televisual version of Austen's novel.9 Though most of these adaptations have been true to what their producers feel is the spirit or meaning of the text and have offered little in the way of expansion of the database, a few have manipulated the source material in ways that illustrate the pliability and cultural resonances of any oft- adapted text.

The Darcy Effect

While Austen fans expect faithfulness in fanfiction, the bar is significantly less high for media adaptations. Though "faithful" adaptations of P&P such as the 1940

Olivier/Garson version, the 1980 BBC adaptation, the 1995 BBC treatment, and even the recent 2005 film are set to a high standard, the novel, film, and television markets are increasingly flooded with loose adaptations and homages, many of which are embraced by fans, who seem to appreciate commercial breaks from the originary text more so than they do fannish ones. While commercial adaptations such as Bridget

Jones's Diary and Lost in Austen represent significant departures from Pride and

Prejudice and signify massive expansions of the database, all are kept firmly in Austen's

9 More conservative adaptation lists will sometimes claim only 10 current treatments. I include in this number Bridget Jones's Diary and Lost in Austen. Though both view the original work through a broad interpretive lens, both are no less adaptations than the equally loosely interpreted Bride and Prejudice and should not be excluded simply because they do not include the name of the novel in their titles.

textual universe by their devotion to the one element that P&P fans hold unalterable: Mr.

Darcy.

The importance of characters to fan consumers and producers cannot be overstated. They are the crux around which fannish works gather. As Pugh explains, fanfiction authors and readers are acquainted with the most intimate details of their beloved characters, and

for some readers, the so-called "character junkies," a particular character or set of characters will be the key to their enjoyment to the point that they may not want to read anything in which that character is not involved or where he acts in a way they can't see as true for him. (70)

As previously noted, Azuma also emphasizes that in the process of moving away from the grand narrative and toward database consumption character has replaced narrative in importance (47). The proliferation of referential adaptations, with their focus on fragmentary elements of originary narratives pieced together around readily-identifiable characters, exemplifies this shift toward "connect[ing] many characters across individual works rather than emerging from a single author or work" (49). This is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in contemporary adaptations of Fitzwilliam Darcy.

While fans idealize Darcy as the perfect gentleman/hero, the many mainstream adaptations of Pride and Prejudice have complicated the character. As previously noted, during the first half of the twentieth century, P&P fandom embraced Laurence

Olivier's portrayal, and he became the inspiration for a generation of Pride and

Prejudice fans. However, for contemporary readers, it is Colin Firth's 1995 portrayal which has become inextricably linked with the character and created a doubling of

Darcy in the database that persists throughout fan and commercial adaptations. To many fans (and adapters), Colin Firth is Mr. Darcy.

Few adaptations since the 1995 miniseries have not mined implicit or even explicit connections to Firth's performance. This tendency was set in motion by the earliest adaptation to follow the miniseries, Bridget Jones's Diary, written and published the same year. A loose interpretation of the novel, Bridget Jones's Diary hinges on readers' expectation that its heroine will eventually win the heart of the rich and taciturn but secretly noble Mark Darcy, a character clearly inspired not just by Austen's hero but also by Firth's performance. The eponymous heroine's first mention of Mark Darcy plays on the character alone, noting only:

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree. (12)

However, the novel later engages in an intermittent conversation about the popularity of literary adaptations and of the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in particular by continually referring to Bridget's viewing of the series and her crush on Colin Firth and obsession with his relationship with his P&P2 co-star, Jennifer Ehle. In doing so, it announces its relation to several strands of the database, including not only the original novel and its recent adaptation, but also prestige adaptations in general and, therefore, earlier iterations of Pride and Prejudice as well as other BBC literary adaptations and with fans of those adaptations.

The divide between novel fans and media fans comes to the fore when one of the heroine's foils, taking on the role of cultural critic, laments "a whole generation of people [who] only get to know the great works of literature—Austen, Eliot, Dickens,

Shakespeare, and so on—through the television" (86). She claims that Bridget, the everywoman heroine representative of the more populous group of fans, believes "the

moment when the screen goes black on Blind Date is on a par with Othello's 'hurl my soul from heaven' soliloquy" (87). Fielding's approval of a more expansive, populist reading of great texts is clear through the novelistic context of Bridget Jones being one of the seminal early works of the popular "chick lit" genre, the story context of snooty upper class art aficionados who continuously attempt to insult Bridget's taste, and the character context of hero Mark Darcy who asserts the correctness of Bridget's defense of popular culture. The novel's continued interweaving of P&P2 and its reception further reinforces Fielding's mainstream approach.

The novel's structure and content also reinforce the centrality of the

Darcy/Elizabeth relationship, and of Darcy himself, to the Pride and Prejudice database by triplicating it, layering Elizabeth and Darcy with the actors who played them in 1995,

Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and with Firth fan Bridget and her own Mr. (Mark) Darcy.

At the structural level, Bridget and Mark Darcy represent Elizabeth Bennet and

Fitzwilliam Darcy, and the course of their romance loosely follows the plot of P&P: they meet at a party where Mark Darcy insults Bridget, they're thrown together often and

Bridget finds her Darcy attractive but taciturn, they begin to kindle a failed romance, and finally, Mark saves the day and confesses his love for Bridget. Within this adapted plot, though, are constant allusions to the current adaptation making waves on British television—adding the third layer of Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth—to the already resonant matrix.

As Bridget, like the rest of the nation, becomes obsessed with Andrew Davies'

P&P2, she acknowledges that "the basis of [her] own addiction. . .is [her] simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth" (215). Meanwhile, she can't help but compare

her Mark Darcy to Mr. Darcy, concluding that "Mr. Darcy was more attractive because he was ruder but that being imaginary was a disadvantage that could not be overlooked" (215). Furthermore, she, like the rest of the country, vicariously lives out her

Elizabeth/Darcy fantasy by watching their portrayers fall in love and selling the story of their romance as a pitch for the television show she reports for (217).

In its play with multiple iterations of the Darcy/Elizabeth romance and with the preeminence of the Darcy character with Austen fans, Bridget Jones's Diary mimics the structure of the textual database, which draws many narrative threads into its inner layer, creating a matrix that can be accessed and recombined in limitless forms, each feeding back into the inner layer to create more potential narrative threads. The novel draws from the P&P database, which contains not only the original novel but additions from each of its adaptations and media reactions to those adaptations, inclusive of popular chatter about the value of prestige adaptations, the obsession with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy that took Britain by storm in 1995, and fan gossip about the relationship of actors in the adaptation. From these disparate threads, it creates a new small narrative in the form of Fielding's book which then feeds into the database, creating yet another iteration of Mr. Darcy at the inner level for fans to fixate on.

The soon-to-follow adaptation of Fielding's novel did little to stem the tide of

Darcy mania—in fact, it greatly amplified it. The plot of the film more closely aligned with

P&P itself, including more transparent adaptations of the Meryton assembly scene, during which Elizabeth overhears Darcy insult her after their first meeting, and the

Rosings proposal scene, where Darcy first discloses his affection to Elizabeth in a most insulting manner—here portrayed through Bridget overhearing Mark Darcy call her a

"verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother" at the New Year's turkey curry buffet (the first scene of the film) and

Darcy's insulting confession of his affections to Bridget during a London dinner party:

I don't think you're an idiot at all. I mean, there are elements of the ridiculous about you. Your mother's pretty interesting. And you really are an appallingly bad public speaker. And you tend to let whatever's in your head come out of your mouth without much consideration of the consequences. . . .What I'm trying to say very inarticulately is that, um, in fact, perhaps, despite appearances, I like you very much.

Additionally, adding to the resonance of the multi-work adaptation, the film stars many of the actors that the book references in its discussions of popular culture (some of whom are still referenced in the film, creating yet another layer of resonance)—not the least being Colin Firth as hero and love interest Mark Darcy.

The use of Firth, whose Mr. Darcy Bridget idolizes, as Bridget's Mark Darcy creates a feedback loop that even more inextricably links the two characters and makes it nearly impossible for fans to separate Mark Darcy from not only Mr. Darcy himself, but more specifically from Colin Firth's 1995 portrayal of him. If characters are the structure which holds the database together and, as Azuma suggests, fans "read" across narrative for character rather than for continuity, then Bridget Jones's Diary is a pure example of fan-like adaptation, cementing Darcy's centrality to the database without linking him to a single controlling narrative.10

Navigating Nostalgia

With the exception of Bridget Jones’s Diary, until recently, both commercial and fan adaptations of Pride and Prejudice remained mired in nostalgic fidelity to the

10 The recent furor over Fielding's killing off Mark Darcy, including headlines like "Bridget Jones's Diary Fans Aghast as Helen Fielding Kills off Mr. Darcy," is further evidence of Darcy's centrality to the database and to the Bridget Jones narrative.

originary text and aimed for largely analogous treatments. The 1940, 1980, 1995, and

2005 versions, while all apt adaptations, did very little to break from the constraints of

Austen's narrative structure. McFarlane characterizes the 1995 adaptation as "the work of an industrious bricklayer rather than an architect, with one event from the novel remorselessly following another, without any sense of shape or structuring, without any apparent point of view on its material" (166). Most Pride and Prejudice adaptations produced over the last decade, on the other hand, have broken away from the text, using the narrative and its characters as a reference point and playing on and sometimes problematizing the nostalgia of viewers.

One such adaptation is the 2008 ITV costume drama Lost in Austen (not related to the novel), which explores contemporary Jane Austen fans' desire for repetition of the

Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy romance. In the opening lines of the first episode, Amanda Price, the series' heroine, clearly expresses a desire for fidelity and a longing for Austen's world and her most famous hero:

It is a truth generally acknowledged that we all long to escape. I escape, always, to my favorite book, Pride and Prejudice. I've read it so many times now, the words just say themselves in my head, and it's like a window opening. It's like I'm actually there. It's become a place I know so. . .intimately. I can see that world. I can. . .touch it. I can see Darcy.

Clearly, Amanda longs for the world of the novel and for its most beloved character. As she notes, it is an escape from her everyday reality, a journey to a time that is both familiar and yet out of synch with her own world.

Amanda's desire for escape dominates the early part of the first episode, which contrasts her current life as a customer service professional in London with her evening fantasies, lived out through consumption of wine, ice cream, and Pride and Prejudice.

Though she insists that "I'm not hung up about Darcy. I do not sit at home with the

pause button on Colin Firth in clingy pants," it is amply apparent that she seeks in the narrative a fulfillment that is lacking in her daily activities, including her relationship with her less-than-ideal boyfriend, Michael. Within its first fifteen minutes, Lost in Austen demonstrates a layering of P&P narratives that marks it as a product of not one, but many, iterations of the text. Amanda, an independent twenty-something woman living and working in London, echoes her Austen-obsessed predecessor Bridget Jones. Also like Jones, her fascination with P&P is at least partly anchored in the consumption of the

1995 BBC adaptation starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, despite her insistence that the original, "the manners and language and courtesy," and not the adaptation inspires her loyalty. Like many Austen fans, Amanda Price insists on fidelity despite being anchored in a world that is layered with adaptational resonances.

Lost in Austen exhibits multiple characteristic of referential adaptation. Most evident are its gamelike qualities—a breadth of references that encourage viewers to tease out allusions to other works and a playful attitude that continuously disrupts viewer expectations. The number of references to Pride and Prejudice itself, the 1995

P&P adaptation, viewer reactions to that adaptation, other Austen novels, and actors' roles in other Austen and prestige adaptations lead viewers on a scavenger hunt that tests the breadth of their knowledge of Pride and Prejudice and the Austen universe.

Furthermore, its playful attitude toward Austen's narrative and previous adaptations teases viewers, consistently raising expectations and alternately gratifying or upending them, as in its repetition of the famous Colin Firth pond scene and the sequence where

Lydia runs away with Bingley and Mr. Wickham, rather than Darcy, helps locate the pair.

Prestige adaptations such as P&P2, with their emphasis on fidelity to the originary text, are often categorized as "nostalgia programs" and associated with longing, whether for an idealized past or a re-experiencing of the initial thrill of encountering the originary work. The original, clinical meaning of nostalgia—the pain of longing to return home—aligns with the desire for fidelity that Amanda and many fans and viewers express. The fundamental problem with the longing for the "original" or

"authentic" work, though, is that, as Hutcheon notes, "nostalgia. . .may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia's power" ("Irony"). Nostalgia looks to an idealized version of the past, or in the case of adaptation, of the work, which can never be replicated, as it exists only in the viewer's mind. Susan Stewart characterizes it as "the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition and denies the repetition's capacity to form identity" (23). Through its purposeful inauthenticity, Lost in Austen questions the possibility of fidelity and the desire of viewers like Amanda for an authentic replication of the originary text.

Fidelity issues are brought to the fore when Elizabeth Bennet herself emerges from a mysterious portal in Amanda's bathroom wall and traps Amanda in the world of

P&P so she can remain in London and enjoy learning about the modern world. Amanda is transported into the world of the book just as the Bennets discover that "Netherfield

Park is let at last," and her presence immediately disrupts the classic narrative, resulting in many attempts on Amanda's part to call Elizabeth home and return the narrative to the one with which she is familiar (Austen 43). While Amanda grasps for fidelity and tries to hold on to her nostalgic view of Austen's world, however, viewers are constantly

confronted with allusions to other Pride and Prejudice adaptations, leading them to wonder exactly which text Amanda is faithful to, the book, as she purports (she keeps a copy with her throughout the switch), or one of the later versions.

Playing with the Austen Universe

The most common echoes in Lost in Austen are with the 1995 BBC P&P, which is easily the most popular with fans though not necessarily the most faithful. Elliot

Cowan, who plays Lost in Austen's Mr. Darcy, is clearly selected for his physical similarity to Colin Firth. In fact, the first time he appears, he is staring out a window at

Netherfield with his arms behind his back in a distinctive posture that mirrors exactly

Firth's routine manner of staring out the Netherfield windows in the 1995 version.

Following the Meryton Assembly, when Jane asks Amanda whether Darcy lived up to her expectations, she replies, "Yes. And no. I mean, he's not Colin Firth, but even Colin

Firth isn't Colin Firth. They had to change the shape of his head with makeup." This exchange clarifies that Amanda's desire for the "authentic" Darcy is actually a desire for the "inauthentic," Colin Firth's version of Darcy, who is also an "inauthentic" version of

Colin Firth, as his appearance was changed for the role.

Despite her insistence that her consumption of Pride and Prejudice isn't rooted in a desire for Mr. Darcy, Amanda's reading of the book is obviously influenced by the miniseries. Further, Amanda's reacts tepidly to the "authentic" Mr. Darcy of Lost in

Austen because of her previous exposure to the "inauthentic" depiction by Colin Firth and the supposedly authentic version of the original novel—neither of which align perfectly with her "real" Mr. Darcy. This layering of versions of Darcy troubles the notion of authenticity by demonstrating that many slightly altered versions of the character can coexist through the multiplicity of small narratives that feed and draw on the character

fragments at the core of the database. Thus, nostalgia for a character can be divided from nostalgia for the original.

In fact, the most culturally resonant moment of Lost in Austen takes place as

Amanda and Mr. Darcy stand before a large pond in front of the Pemberley estate, where Amanda states that she has one request for him. Viewers of the previous adaptation immediately know what that request is—she wants him to jump in the pond and emerge in a wet shirt. In fact, Lost in Austen's creators anticipate such a widespread understanding of the request that they immediately cut, leaving it unvocalized. Following the cut, Darcy is depicted emerging from the pond in a clinging, see-through shirt asking if he's fulfilled Amanda's request, to which she replies, "I'm having a bit of a strange postmodern moment here." Indeed, so are many viewers.

Amanda has just asked Darcy to recreate the most famous scene from the BBC 1995 adaptation, the very scene which made uncountable Austen fans swoon over Colin

Firth. In Lost in Austen, nostalgia for the novel and nostalgia for the miniseries, itself and exercise in nostalgia, become layered. Amanda longs to recreate a defining moment (a database fragment) from the small narrative of the 1995 adaptation. That moment, though, is an elaboration on a fragment from the original narrative, the moment when Elizabeth, during a tour of Darcy's country estate, Pemberley, unaware that Darcy has returned home a day earlier than expected, stumbles upon him while walking the grounds, reigniting their earlier failed romance. Miniseries producer Andrew

Davies interpolates fan desire for Darcy with the much more staid and proper original scene creating a sexually charged moment that resonates with fans as the privileged reading of the meeting rather than its much more tame original. The referentiality of the

database here allows Amanda to pick and choose which version of this moment she wishes to experience, upending any notion of authenticity.

Amanda's recreation of the pond scene is far from the only "postmodern moment" for viewers. From casting to dialogue, Lost in Austen constantly recalls other

Austen adaptations. Though star Jemima Rooper is primarily associated with prime time and teen fare, perhaps appropriately given her role as out-of-place modern woman, many other members of the cast have appeared in Austen-inspired works. Most immediately recognizable is costume drama veteran Hugh Bonneville (Mr. Bennet), who previously appeared in both Miss Austen Regrets and Patricia Rozema's 1999

Mansfield Park, another somewhat nontraditional Austen adaptation. Also from

Rozema's Mansfield Park is Lindsay Duncan (Lady Catherine De Bourgh). Finally, Guy

Henry (Mr. Collins) appeared as Mr. Knightley in Andrew Davies' 1996 A&E adaptation of Emma. Another echo of Emma arises when Amanda chastises Bingley for breaking

Jane's heart by invoking one of its most famous lines: "Badly done, Bingley. Badly done." Even the very name Amanda Price itself is reminiscent of another Austen heroine, Fanny Price of Mansfield Park. These echoes of other novels and other adaptations create a sense of dissonance, for as Amanda is relentlessly trying to "save"

Pride and Prejudice, viewers are constantly reminded of how enmeshed the original story has become with other Austen works and other variations.

Yesterday's Novel and Today's Novel

Lost in Austen places Amanda in the role of an Austen traditionalist, consistently attempting to return the narrative to its rightful order despite the fact that her very insertion ensures that the narrative can never realign with the novel or with previous analogous adaptations. Each attempt on the character's part to force such a

realignment, in fact, results in a further remove, demonstrating the futility of trying to erase the impact of intermediary adaptations on current readings of the original.

Elizabeth's insistence on staying in contemporary London despite Amanda's pleas that

"you have to meet him. . .it's what happens" and "I have no idea how to fix this book" reinforces that the contemporary cannot be erased in order to restore an "authentic" reading of the original; "this book" is no longer that book. Far from being "buggered up," though, as Amanda claims, the story gains layers of resonance that can increase the contemporary viewer's pleasure by integrating not only the narrative of Pride and

Prejudice, but also fragments from the larger Austen universe and contemporary critical and fan reception.

Amanda frequently overlooks the fact that the "story" she has read so many times and the reality of the current narrative are not one and the same. Certainly Darcy isn't the same, as she excoriates him for failing to meet her high expectations:

Do you know why I'm so angry? . . .I've been in love with your life for fourteen years.11 Cut my heart out, Darcy, and it's your name written on it with Elizabeth. God almighty. Here you are, one half of the greatest love story ever told. You. And you know what? You don't deserve her. . . .You're such a disappointment, I can hardly bear to look at you.

Even with the evidence that her expectations are no longer reliable, though, Amanda continues to attempt to place the narrative within its original constraints. Even when

Darcy declares his love for her, she insists that he is supposed to be telling Elizabeth.

Lost in Austen juxtaposes Amanda's insistence on Austen's original narrative against the fragments from the inner layer of the database which are forming around her to create an altogether new surface narrative that simulates some viewers' resistance to

11 Interestingly, this is almost the period of time between the 1995 BBC P&P and the 2008 production of Lost in Austen.

narratives that they believe lack authenticity. In her determination to be faithful to the plot that she knows, Amanda completely misses the expansive new narrative unfolding before her.

Given its commentary on nostalgia, Lost in Austen's interplay between longing for the past and longing for the future is little surprise. Like many referential adaptations, it focuses on currency, interweaving present-day London with Regency England. The narrative begins in the present, and no matter how long Amanda spends in Austen's time, the present is never far removed, be it in Amanda's unfamiliar trinkets and her seemingly-prescient references to events that have not yet happened or in Elizabeth's refusal to give up her twentieth century life. Much as we find in analogous adaptations, the past and the present are ever at odds here.

Amanda's immersion in the early nineteenth century and her occlusion of her modern knowledge mimic the desire of fans of prestige adaptations and hint at the failure of the nostalgia impulse. Just as no adaptation can ever truly be Austen's novel and no viewer is really transported to the early nineteenth century, Amanda will never truly be of the period she travels to, no matter how badly she longs to be. She is bound to be forever a simulacrum of a nineteenth century gentlewoman.

In its play between revision and fidelity and between currency and nostalgia, Lost in Austen challenges the notion that an adaptation must be true to either the mood or the narrative of an originary text. It embraces the desire for repetition that is at the heart of both fandom and adaptation but demonstrates that such repetition can be accomplished without fidelity to the originary narrative. Though some fans resisted the treatment initially, particularly the disruption of the Elizabeth/Darcy relationship, it has

become a respected part of the Pride and Prejudice database, clearing the way for even looser examinations of P&P nostalgia such as Austenland and the third entry in the

Bridget Jones series, Mad about the Boy.

Despite the nostalgic tensions in Jane Austen scholarship and fandom, innovative referential adaptations such as Bridget Jones's Diary and Lost in Austen have done much to call attention to the expansive potential of the Pride and Prejudice database. These adaptations demonstrate that the layered multi-resonant approach that the referential model of adaptation offers allows for not only new narratives but also innovative critical approaches within adaptations that examine both viewer reactions to adaptation and the act of adapting. As Erica Sheen illustrates, however, there tends to be a reverse correlation between newness of form and adaptive innovation (18). Pride and Prejudice adaptations, such as the internet series Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2013), have made exciting incursions into transmedia12 but have not yet displayed the expansiveness of some of their literary, filmic, and televisual predecessors. As these transmedia adaptations become more prominent, the ways they expand the database while incorporating new forms of both traditional and social media will warrant further study.

12 Storytelling that uses multiple media platforms concurrently to relay a single narrative.

CHAPTER 3 "THE GREAT GAME": REFERENTIALITY AS PLAY IN CONTEMPORARY SHERLOCK HOLMES ADAPTATIONS

Sherlock Holmes adaptations have been far less mired in canonicity and nostalgia than those of Jane Austen's works. In fact, even when Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing Sherlock Holmes stories, fans were exploring and exploiting gaps in his works to create a network of extratextual references. Commercial adaptations of Doyle's tales began in 1894, and Doyle himself drew on some of the more popular adaptations of his work for future characters and settings. Sherlock Holmes remained popular well into the twentieth century, particularly in the film series starring Basil Rathbone (1939-

46) and the television series starring Ronald Howard (1954-55). Though Sherlock

Holmes adaptations waned for fifteen years following Jeremy Brett's iconic representation of the detective in the 1980s and 1990s, two recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Steven Moffat's Sherlock

(2010-14), have revitalized the franchise. These two adaptations prove excellent examples of how referential adaptations incorporate the tactics of fandom to create narratives that have a particular appeal to fans. Both adaptations trouble the idea of ownership by drawing on the rich history of fan exploration and exposing the impact of earlier adaptations on our understanding of Holmes himself as well as the Sherlock

Holmes universe. The chapter at hand studies these works to offer an understanding of the playful attitude, breadth of reference, and privileging of characters and relationships that mark referential adaptations.

Guy Ritchie's and Steven Moffat's successful use of the referential model in their adaptations has led to a resurgence of interest in Sherlock Holmes and a spate of new adaptations. The U.S. series Elementary, which launched in the wake of Sherlock's

popularity was recently renewed for a third season and has become a mainstay of the

CBS lineup. A 2013 Russian Sherlock Holmes television series has seen great success both at home and abroad. Ritchie has begun production of this third film, and Moffat has already scripted the eagerly anticipated series four of Sherlock. Additionally, a film adaptation of Mitch Cullen's novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, which features Holmes in his old age, starring Ian McKellen and Laura Linney, is currently in production. These new approaches to Holmes have cemented the detective in the popular imagination and created a doorway into the Sherlock Holmes database that has allowed the great detective to flourish once again.

The Question of Ownership

In 2012, Steven Moffat, producer of the BBC's Sherlock, caused a minor internet uproar by explaining he was "annoyed" over the forthcoming CBS Sherlock Holmes adaptation Elementary. Moffat seemed to claim some ownership of Holmes, noting "the bigger problem for us with Elementary is, what if it's terrible? . . .Then it degrades the brand. . .So if there's this completely unrelated rogue version of Sherlock going around and it's bad, it can be bad for us" (Izundu). He also warned, "If it's too like our show, we'll have to take action" (Moffat). At the same time, he invoked fidelity, arguing:

what we did with our Sherlock was just take it from Victorian times into modern day. . .They've got three big changes: it's Sherlock Holmes in America, it's Sherlock Holmes updated, and it's Sherlock Holmes with a female Watson. I wonder if he's Sherlock Holmes in any sense other than he's called Sherlock Holmes. (qtd. Wieselman)

Given Moffat's own cutting-edge adaptation and his close relationship with fan culture, such an emphasis on narrative fidelity seemed to contradict the referential tone of his version of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch, however, joined Moffat in his admonition, saying of his friend Johnny Lee Miller taking on the role of Holmes:

I don't feel threatened by it and I wish him the best, which is as diplomatic as I can be. . .It is very odd. . .I wish him the best of luck, but I am a bit cynical about why they've chosen to do it and why they cast him. (qtd. Wicks)

Like Moffat, Cumberbatch appears to assume Sherlock is the definitive modern take on the franchise and belittle any other work attempting to put a different spin on Holmes.

Cumberbatch has since backpedaled on his criticisms, claiming:

I never said that Johnny took the job for the paycheck nor did I ask him not to do it. . .Over 70 actors have played this exceptional character before us. To say that there can be only one Holmes would be ludicrous. ("Benedict")

Both reactions, nonetheless, illustrate the problem of ownership as it applies to adapted works. Elementary, like Sherlock before it, is just the latest in a more than century-old line of Sherlock Holmes adaptations. To suggest that it owes its origin entirely to

Moffat's Sherlock, while nominally true in that Sherlock created a demand for more

Sherlock Holmes adaptations and in that it makes use of the same source material, is no more true than to say that Sherlock owes its origin entirely to the earlier Granada

Television series starring Jeremy Brett, whom most pre-Sherlock audiences associated with Holmes.

Moffat's reaction to the competing adaptation raises several questions about the degree of claim any adapter can have to an archontic text. While Moffat sees a clear delineation between "original" Holmes and his later incarnations, such a line is not so easily drawn. Even Doyle himself relied on subsequent adaptations of the Holmes universe, using lines and characters from William Gillette's iconic stage version in later stories. Indeed, many of Holmes' most iconic symbols—his deerstalker, his calabash,

his cry of "elementary, my dear Watson"—are culled from later adaptations. If even

Doyle drew from adaptations, and the broadest associations of the character are not derived from the original text, can we claim that anyone owns Sherlock Holmes?

Furthermore, Moffat's allusions to textual fidelity are troubling. His own Holmes adaptation is successful, in part, because it downplays fidelity in favor of a wide frame of reference which encompasses both the Holmes canon and the Holmes fanon1 as well as tropes from other adaptations of the Holmes universe. In fact, it often seems to poke fun at the very idea of faithfulness. This suggests that, much like Lost in Austen, an adaptation can be faithful to the textual database in a broad sense without necessarily being faithful to the originary text(s). Nevertheless, the textual database has boundaries that cannot be crossed. As such, the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations provide an excellent lens for examining how broad adaptations use the database and how the database model constrains its textual universe.

Holmes and Watson for a New Generation

The years 2009 to 2014 have seen a renaissance of Sherlock Holmes adaptation. While Sherlock Holmes fan societies continued to meet and an occasional adaptation made its way onto television, interest in the great detective waned after the end of the Granada television adaptations in 1994. Much as Colin Firth has with Mr.

Darcy, it seems Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes for ten years in the Granada series

(1984-94), had become inextricably linked with the character. However, in 2009 and

2010, two new portrayals of Holmes broke free from Brett's looming shadow and revitalized the Sherlock Holmes universe.

1 Extra-textual canon created and accepted by fans.

The Granada adaptations appeal to viewers' sense of nostalgia, steeped as they are in Victorian architecture and costume. Cut scenes based on Sidney Paget's illustrations (which accompanied the original Sherlock Holmes stories) play up the similarities between Brett and Paget's image of Holmes. Watson's voice-over narration at the beginning and end of episodes often follows Doyle's original text directly as a means of anchoring the adaptation to the thoughts and observations of Watson in the originary tales. Generally following Doyle's tales as closely as possible and adapting only canonical works, the Granada features invoke an overall sense of fidelity even when they occasionally depart from it. In fact, Leitch claims that "the most striking innovation of the Granada adaptations is Brett's performance as Holmes" (225).

Bringing much of himself to the role, Brett played a more manic, moody Holmes than any other actor had before him, an interpretation that persists in current Holmes portrayals. Many aficionados still consider Brett the definitive Holmes, one who appears to have stepped out of one of Paget's drawings and on to the television screen, and the

Granada adaptations the definitive adaptations.

However, two new Sherlock Holmes adaptations have finally overcome viewers' devotion to Brett. In December 2009, Silver Pictures and Village Roadshow released the Guy Ritchie directed film Sherlock Holmes (SH), starring Robert Downey, Jr. as

Holmes and Jude Law as Watson. Premiering more than seven months before the

Moffat adaptation, Ritchie's film revitalized fandom, which had not seen a compelling

Holmes since the Granada adaptations. While some internet fandom dates to the 1990s and early 2000s, 2009 saw a spike in Sherlock Holmes fan communities, and many of these communities, such as holmeswatson09, newbakerstreet and sherlock09, are

devoted specifically to the Ritchie film.2 The high profile stars of the film as well as its steampunk aesthetic and the overt homoerotic banter between Holmes and Watson appealed to fans and made it the first adaptation since the Granada series to spur new fan communities and attract droves of new fans. Its 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A

Game of Shadows (SH:GOS), and forthcoming third film continue to inspire new creative works and keep this version of the franchise in the public eye.

The reaction to Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, however, pales in comparison to the impact of the 2010 BBC series Sherlock on both internet fandom and the overall

Sherlock Holmes franchise alike. As noted on Fanlore,3 fandom was primed for the new adaptation even before it aired. In addition to having their appetites for Holmes whetted by the recent Ritchie film, fans were excited about the series' producers, Stephen Moffat and Mark Gattis, who are also associated with Dr. Who, another show with a considerable and active fan following. Anticipation for the series was so feverish that fanfiction began appearing the same night the first episode of the series aired in the UK.

Much of the appeal of the BBC Sherlock can be ascribed to its facile incorporation of fannish themes and practices and its adoption of a game-like tone that encourages viewers to seek out clever references to both the originary stories and their previous adaptations. Even so, fan reaction to this iteration of Holmes is hardly out of

2 Though many fan communities dedicate themselves to a work or series of works as a whole, others focus on a single adaptation or a single character or romantic pairing and accept submissions of fiction, art, or criticism about only that work, character, or pairing.

3 An online wiki/database that attempts to chronicle this history of contemporary media fandom.

the ordinary. The Sherlock Holmes franchise has a history of zealous fan reactions dating back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's day.4

The Commercial Adaptations

One of the biggest challenges in studying Sherlock Holmes adaptations is, as

Thomas Leitch notes, that they often draw not on the canon but the franchise or the characters. Settings can change, new stories and characters can be invented, but

Holmes and Watson remain the same. In Azuma's terms, this means adaptors draw from the inner layer of the database. In fact, they adapt the very core of the database structure. Every database has a centripetal force that defines its content and how widely that content can range. Even a referential model of adaptation—with its emphasis on breadth and play—has certain elements which hold it together. As noted in Chapter 2, in order to be successful with ardent fans, a referential text must balance its tendency to poke fun at the textual archive and at the fans themselves with a reverence for the one aspect of texts that fans most privilege, character. Genres may be shifted, settings may be changed, new narratives may be created, but the boundaries of characters may not be transgressed without the adaptation losing its ties to the textual database. If, as

Azuma suggests, character has become more important than narrative in contemporary media, adapting a character carries with it significant risk. While changes in stories, situations, and settings can signal expansion of the textual database, violations of character can signal its breakdown. Readers and creators of fanwork have a term for this—OOC (Out of Character), known in its most extreme form as "character rape."

4 With only two episodes aired as of fall 2012, fan reaction to Elementary remains to be seen, though it has already amassed a considerable number of fanfictional adaptations—54 on one site alone, which is more than several shows have generated in their entire runs.

Many fans refuse to read works which have been dubbed OOC. With Holmes, though, this designation can be difficult to delineate, as it is not always clear where "Doyle's"

Holmes ends and the adapted Holmes begins.

Sherlock Holmes was one of the earliest works adapted to film, and it has been adapted more frequently than almost any other literary property. The 49-second

Sherlock Holmes Baffled, the initial filmic Holmes, was released in 1903 for Edison's

Mutoscope, but it was far from the first Sherlock Holmes adaptation. Holmes already had an active life on stage, being first portrayed by C.H.E. Brookfield in the 1894 parody adaptation Under the Clock and most famously played by William Gillette intermittently between 1899 and 1915 (Klinger lii). Sherlock Holmes has been adapted to stage, radio, film, cartoon, television series, and internet series and has enjoyed fame in countries such as Denmark, Germany, Japan, France and the Czech Republic in addition to the U.K. and U.S. More than 80 actors have played the illustrious detective.

The earliest Holmes adaptations occurred while Doyle was still writing Holmes stories, making the line between original and adaptation murky at times. Doyle himself adopted items from Gillette's stageplay, most notably Billy the Baker Street page, who first appeared in Gillette's work and later made his way into The Valley of Fear, "The

Adventures of the Mazarin Stone," and "The Problem of Thor Bridge" (Leitch 209). The proliferation of early Holmes adaptations has led to a number of misconceptions becoming critical parts of the textual universe. Holmes' famous calabash pipe, for instance, originates from Gillette's portrayal. Though Doyle depicted Holmes with many pipes, none was a calabash. Likewise, the deerstalker cap in which Holmes is so often depicted is an invention not of Doyle, but of Sidney Paget, whose illustrations

accompanied the 1891-1904 periodical serializations of Doyle's stories. The oft-spoken line "elementary, my dear Watson" is also Gillette's invention and appears in none of the stories. Because adaptations fed into the textual database concurrently with the originary texts, even in their earliest form, the textual database exceeded its originary work, making claims of authenticity or fidelity impossible.

Fan Adaptations

Be they Holmes fan societies or contemporary internet writers, fans have done as much as commercial adaptations to expand the Sherlock Holmes universe and concurrently provided new approaches to studying Holmes and interacting with the

Sherlock Holmes database. Sherlock Holmes fan societies have thrived for nearly as long as the great detective himself. In fact, one of the earliest instances of fan reaction changing the course of a character is the response to Holmes' 1893 death. Fans cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand in droves, wrote furious and beseeching letters to Doyle, and paraded through London wearing black bands to signify their mourning. When Doyle finally wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles, a short novel set two years before Holmes' death, nearly seven years later, it was not enough; fans clamored for assurance that the beloved sleuth was still alive. Doyle finally relented and brought Holmes back to life in the 1903 short story "The Adventure of the Empty

House."

Sherlock Holmes fandom was quite active during the time Doyle was writing his tales and has continued uninterrupted since. Though hundreds of Sherlock Holmes societies exist across the globe, the most prominent and enduring are the Baker Street

Irregulars5 and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. The Baker Street Irregulars

(B.S.I.), formed from the attendees of Sherlock Holmes aficionado Christopher Morley's famous "Three Hour Lunch Club," is the oldest existing Holmes society, having begun in

1934. Both societies hold meetings where members engage in traditional fannish activities such as quizzes, games, presentations and, most notably, what Roberta

Pearson calls "Sherlockian 'art.'" As Pearson notes:

Sherlockians write what others would call fanfiction, pastiches of the original stories and novels, and what they themselves call Sherlockian scholarship, nonfiction that employs the techniques of textual hermeneutics and historical contextualization to clarify the contradictions and lacunae that stemmed from Conan Doyle writing in the serial format. (105)

Sherlockian "pastiches," however, began well before the Irregulars, and many paralleled the original publications. Some famous early writers of Sherlock Holmes pastiche include Doyle's close friend J.M. Barrie, Bret Harte, and O. Henry (in 1893, 1902, and

1911, respectively). One particularly interesting example of early Holmes pastiche is

"The Man Who Was Wanted," which was inadvertently published in 1948 as a lost

Sherlock Holmes story. The author, Arthur Whitaker, sent the story to Doyle some time between 1892 and 1910, and Doyle offered to buy the rights to the material but never used it. It remained unpublished until it appeared in Cosmopolitan in the aforementioned year, causing a protracted battle between the Doyle estate and Whitaker over attribution of the story ("A Brief Note"), demonstrating just how entangled Doyle's commercial works are with fan writing.

5 Named after the group of street urchins who worked as an information network for Holmes in a number of the original works.

In many ways, Holmes societies have laid the groundwork for contemporary fandom. Notably, early Sherlockian pseudo-scholarship (published or presented papers by Holmes fans studying subjects such as Victorian maps, train schedules, or tobacco brands that might shed greater light onto events in the Sherlock Holmes stories) includes what most scholars believe to be the first fannish use of the term "canon" to refer to the published corpus of a text. Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, in his 1911 tongue- in-cheek "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes," used methods of biblical scholarship to analyze Doyle's tales, inspiring later Sherlockians to refer to the texts as the "canon" or the "sacred writings" (Klinger lxi). Today, the term "canon" is used widely in fandom to refer to the entire commercially produced output of any given textual universe.

Knox's "Studies" also establish the practice, known in Holmes societies as the

"Grand Game" or "Great Game," of resolving inconsistencies in the Holmes canon.

Practices of the great game can range from pseudo-scholarly studies to imagined tales that account for the discrepancies between stories. One of the most important facets of the great game is accounting for the "Great Hiatus," the years between Holmes' supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls in "The Final Problem" and his (canonical) return four years later in "The Adventure of the Empty House." Holmes scholar and author of the omnibus New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Leslie S. Klinger explains that

Sherlockians are more dignified than mere fans, though: "It's just for fun. These are not

Star Trek fans who walk around being Klingons and all that. We know we are having fun. It's serious fun, but it's fun" (Cole). Nevertheless, their practices clearly align with

Jenkins' descriptions of fan activity, particularly the practice of recontextualization,

wherein fans "fill in the gaps" of texts to explain inconsistent or unaccountable behaviors or missing sequences by providing "off-screen" explanations for them (Textual 162). At the same time, Klinger is correct in noting that Holmes societies have a decidedly different character than many groups of contemporary media fans.

Though the great game parallels much contemporary fanwork, the motivations of

Holmes societies are removed from those of more media-based Holmes fans. As

Sherlockians express it, for Holmes societies (of which many, including the Irregulars themselves, have remained active since B.S.I.'s 1934 founding), "it is always 1895."

Their practice of fandom is one of nostalgia and fidelity. As Stanley Hopkins of Sherlock

Peoria notes, for Holmes societies:

the Game compels us to accept that every word of the Canon is utterly and absolutely true, that it was all written by Watson, and that both he and Sherlock Holmes indeed existed. . . .The more real that Holmes and Watson seem to us, the more involved we as readers become, and the better we can relate to their adventures, and the further that Sherlockiana will be propagated. ("The Grand Game")

Indeed, according to Morley, "the fundamental doctrine of the B.S.I. . . .is that the

Holmes Watson saga. . .is more actual, and more timely, than anything that happens to ourselves or happened to its mortal mouthpiece" (75). Morley also notes that study of the Victorian age is critical to understanding the Holmes milieu and a worthy companion to the study of the canonical works (75). Striving always to be "in 1895," Sherlockian societies seek to align their extrapolations on the text with a greater understanding of canonical works, primarily limiting their extra-canonical resonances to Holmes pseudo- scholarship.

In terms of fidelity, Holmes societies present a rather unusual case. The fidelity impulse among traditional Holmes fans is largely intra-textual. One of their primary

activities involves questioning discrepancies between stories, places where Watson is called James instead of John, the changing location of Watson's war wound, differing reports of Holmes' and Watson's relative waking and breakfast times. Though these are undoubtedly speculative fannish interests, they keep Holmes societies anchored in the realm of the originary texts and limit their forays into the larger textual database. Like any text(s), whether literary or visual, serialized over an extended period, the Sherlock

Holmes stories contain inconsistencies and contradictions. Jenkins explains that "one way fans have of addressing these contradictions is to write stories or essays which develop. . .alternative explanations" (Textual 104). In doing so, fans move outward to expand the database by creating alternative or additional material that extrapolates on the gaps between inconsistent canonical narratives. Holmes fan societies, rather, move inward and attempt to explain textual mysteries and inconsistencies through studies of minutiae rather than alternate retelling, thereby reinforcing and clarifying tradition. As

Morley explains:

These are the hints the B.S.I. follow through. Why did passengers on the G.W.R. have to take lunch at Swindon? Exactly how (and with what type scalpel) do you nick the tendons of a horse? What was the precise layout of the rooms in Baker Street? Was Sherlock illiterate, I mean could he read? Why did Watson always have to read aloud to him all letters and telegrams? Why did Holmes never eat fish but always game, beef, and boiled eggs; Why did he never drink tea? Why was he such a poor marksman? These are the paraleipses or paralipomena to which we devote the most innocent diversion of our lives. (76)

Early pastiches do expand the textual database by adding new Sherlock Holmes adventures. However, the traditional fan societies blanch at speculation that deviates from their reverential attitude toward the inviolability of the originary texts. Nero Wolfe

author Rex Stout's humorous 1941 Baker Street Irregulars address,6 "Watson Was a

Woman," in which he suggests that Irene Adler is the real Watson, for instance, caused immediate uproar and provoked a ferocious response, including a formal rebuttal by

Julian Wolff published in 1944 in The American Journal of Surgery.

While Holmes societies continue to thrive, in the wake of the Guy Ritchie and

Steven Moffat adaptations, internet Sherlock Holmes fandom has gone viral. Its take on the franchise embraces alternate readings and expansions of the textual universe. In fact, the very speech which inspired such ire among the Irregulars in 1941 has recently become an anthem for online slash writers7 such as Miss Roylott, who posted the essay as a source of "slashy inspiration." Holmes/Watson slash has long been a mainstay in fanfiction; as Sheenagh Pugh notes, "The great male dyad in book-based fandom. . .is

Holmes and Watson, and there are several fanzines in print dedicated purely to

Holmes/Watson slash, quite apart from any number of websites" (103). However, its volume and accessibility were limited before the new adaptations. The dissemination of stories on the popular fiction website Fanfiction.net, though only representing a fraction of Holmesian transformative works on the web, creates a clear picture of fan distribution. The Sherlock Holmes book category, which has been active since 2002 and includes works inspired by the originary texts, the Granada series and the recent adaptations, contains roughly 3,600 works. The Sherlock Holmes film category, which originated in 2009 following the release of the Ritchie films, contains just over 2,000 works. The Sherlock category, which includes only works dedicated to the BBC series

6 Later published in The Saturday Review of Literature 1 Mar. 1941: 3-4, 16. Print.

7 Writers of fanfiction that features homoerotic pairings not found in the original works.

and began to receive postings months before the series officially aired, contains more than 48,000 works.

The uptick in Holmes postings has inspired much discussion online regarding the historic changes in Sherlock Holmes fandom. On the Queering Holmes blog, damned_colonial observes that:

now we have this new movie, there's a whole new generation coming to the fandom who don't have experience with the older phases of the fandom, and while there is a lot of interesting stuff coming out of the newer fans' engagement with the canon, there are also older fans shaking their walking sticks at those kids on their lawn.

Language_escapes adds,

I think Holmes fandom is moving towards the transformational,8 especially with the 09 movie fans flooding the Internet. I think that in some ways, in the past, fandom was primarily held in the hands of whoever could join the BSI and other large organizations, which, in my experience, aren't really into a queer interpretation of the text. But now we have 09 movie fans mixing with Canon-only fans mixing with fans who grew up with Granada!Holmes and Russian!Holmes, and we're all coming out of the woodwork, as it were, with the release of the new film- even if people didn't like it and thought of it as blasphemy, they're interacting with people who loved it, and I think that's blurring the lines between the 'authority' and the people.

In essence, the new adaptations have encouraged greater freedom and creativity in

Sherlock Holmes fanwork, which, in turn, has fed into the popularity of these freer adaptations.

The Referential Holmes

Despite their pronounced differences, both Ritchie's and Moffat's versions share important commonalities that mark them as referential adaptations. Both use elements

8 The term "transformational" as used here refers to a blog entry by obsession_inc in which she posits that there are two primary types of fanwork, the "affirmational" and the "transformational." Affirmational works are primarily nostalgic, in that they hold the originary works sacred and remain within their boundaries, while transformational works transgress those boundaries, creating new pairings and narratives.

of contemporary fan culture to give their narratives a playful air and to appeal to existing

Sherlock Holmes fans. They accomplish this through emphasis on the media's role in

Holmes' popularity, integration of fannish tropes, sly allusions to other Holmes adaptations and criticism, and allusions to Holmes fanwork—particularly slash fiction.

Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes is significantly less allusive than Moffat's, yet it still has many markers that separate it from the more traditional Sherlock Holmes adaptations that came before it.

Guy Ritchie's Holmes is a stereotypical, if unusually intelligent, action hero, with

Watson as his faithful sidekick. Robert Downey Jr. plays a Holmes who is slovenly, lovelorn (he has had a previous affair with Irene Adler and is hopelessly smitten), and physically adept, as evidenced by his prowess at amateur boxing and his use of martial arts. Meanwhile, the BBC adaptations depict an asocial (or, as Holmes would have it,

"high functioning sociopath") Holmes for whom Watson acts as both a chronicler and a go-between to smooth relations between him and those around him. Benedict

Cumberbatch's Holmes is acerbic and ascetic, high in intellectual prowess but with negligible social skill. He would be considerably out of place in a boxing ring.

Though both Downey, Jr.'s and Cumberbatch's interpretations of Holmes are clearly influenced by Jeremy Brett's human, fallible detective, the tones and milieus of the adaptations are decidedly removed from the Granada version. In Guy Ritchie's 2009 film, a fantasy steam punk aesthetic, replete with underground boxing rings and satanic secret societies, replaces the staid, Victorian flavor of the Granada adaptations. The

2010 BBC version depicts a contemporary, text-message obsessed Holmes and a

blogging Watson. Additionally, both films reject Granada's conservatism in favor of a playful, sometimes flippant, tone.

A Change in Attitude

One of the most notable changes in these referential Sherlock Holmes adaptations is their attitude toward the source material. Playful and irreverent, these adaptations demonstrate their knowledge of the originary work but do not hold it as inviolable. Though they hold the originary work in enough esteem to adapt it, they cast aside the reverent, nostalgic attitude toward the work that marks it as above criticism. In fact, their tendency to poke fun at the tales, such as exaggerating Holmes's drug use or pointing out the inconsistent locations of Watson's war injury, often borders on parody.

In addition, these adaptations frequently tease fans of the works, spoofing and critiquing their devotion through depictions of frighteningly dedicated Holmes aficionados. In effect, they not only lampoon existing elements of the database, they make the fans themselves a part of the database by internalizing them as components of the story and associating them explicitly with their additions to the textual universe.

Some of the most obvious points of humor in Ritchie's and Moffat's adaptations revolve around the foibles of Holmes himself. Ritchie plays on Holmes's drug use by making his Holmes an indiscriminate experimenter with any drug available to him.

Watson excoriates him for taking everything from a tincture reserved for eye surgery to embalming fluid. Meanwhile, Moffat's Holmes teasingly alludes to the several scholarly and literary attempts to psychoanalyze him by offering an analysis of himself. When

Scotland Yard detective Anderson calls Holmes a psychopath, Holmes replies, "I'm not a psychopath. I'm a high functioning sociopath. Do your research!" ("Study"). In both

cases, the adaptations take established elements of the database (one concrete, on speculative) and magnify them, adding twists that point out and intensify their oddity.

In addition to intensifying already peculiar database elements, referential adaptations like Sherlock playfully erase inconsistent data. One ongoing point of debate among Holmes societies as well as modern fans is the location of Watson's war injury, which he claims is in his shoulder in "A Study in Scarlet" but places in his leg in "The

Sign of the Four." Sherlock reconciles this by having Holmes suggest that Watson's leg wound is psychosomatic, a point he eventually proves by engaging Watson's assistance in a spirited foot chase through the streets of London during which Watson runs perfectly well without the use of his forgotten cane ("Study"). This reconciles the variety of locations by suggesting that each location is both valid and invalid, as the wound can be anywhere, since it exists in Watson's mind rather than on his body. At the same time, this erasure of difference artfully draws in Holmes aficionados who have enough knowledge of the originary or critical materials to be aware that the location of the injury has been a consistent point of debate.

Finally, both SH and Sherlock parody fan culture by employing fans as a part of their texts. In SH, Watson's fiancée, Mary Morstan, is not one of Holmes' former clients but rather an aficionado of detective novels who is thrilled to test Holmes' deductive skills and is only too happy to let Watson put off their honeymoon in order to help

Holmes with a case. The depiction of fans in Sherlock is both more modern and more salient. During Moriarty's trial in "The Reichenbach Fall," Holmes is accosted in the bathroom by a young woman, Kitty Riley, wearing a deerstalker cap and an "I 

Sherlock" magnifying glass pin. "I'm a big fan," she claims. "I read your cases. Follow

them all. Sign my shirt, would you?" To which Holmes replies, "There are two types of fans. 'Catch me before I kill again,' type A. . .[Type B] Your bedroom's just a taxi ride away." Though Riley is actually a journalist attempting to get a scoop on Holmes, this depiction opens the database to the subject of fans themselves, identifying both fan demeanors and overexaggerated stereotypes of fans. Much like fanworks that feature self-insertion, the scene with Riley plays to fans by making them see themselves through a more objective eye and engages discussion of both how fans consume and what role they play in creating views of the characters. Though the discussion of fans in

Sherlock may seem negative, fans are accustomed to such depictions as they often satirically overemphasize the folly of their practices in their own work for the consumption of other fans. When depicted playfully, such caricatures delight rather than repel fans, who take pleasure in the acknowledgement of their dedication to a text and can join in making fun of themselves.9

Both SH and Sherlock stand in contrast to the earlier Granada depictions, which take the job of translating the originary works faithfully as an almost sacred duty. While

Holmes might employ a humorous outlook toward his cases, the Granada adaptations take the source text quite seriously. Their employment of Paget's drawings, authentic locales, and literal dialogue from the source texts demonstrates that the Sherlock

Holmes tales are not material to be trifled with. Though entertaining, these works are clearly reverent rather than referent. The post-Granada Holmes adaptations, Sherlock in particular, represent a broader use of the database, which leads to an acceptance of

9 Playfulness is the key here. When self-insertion is performed seriously, fans often take umbrage at the narrative disruption the fan's placement in the work creates.

knowledge rather than a critique of fidelity. In this, they reflect the multiplicity of readings and modes of reading that are common in fanwork.

A Sherlock for All Seasons

In eschewing the historical Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Ritchie and Moffat

Holmes adaptations evoke a sense of currency and media savvy that appeals to today's media-saturated fans. Where the Granada adaptations aim for historical authenticity to the slightest detail, SH rejects authenticity altogether, creating a fantasy Victorian

London which draws clearly on both the contemporary steampunk aesthetic and an older pre-Victorian London filled with underground dungeons, ramshackle wooden hovels, and open-air jails. Even in this archaic fantasy London, however, Holmes is a media sensation, and his face is constantly plastered across the front page of the newspaper. Meanwhile, Sherlock aims for a modern Holmes obsessed with text messaging and contemporary scientific methods (much as his predecessor was obsessed with the telegraph and chemistry) and a blogging Watson whose popular online chronicle draws most of Holmes' clients. This pair struggles to maintain any sense of anonymity as they are media darlings whose frequent television and newspaper appearances have made them instantly recognizable, much as the characters themselves are in contemporary media culture.

In fact, Sherlock's engagement with contemporary media technology mirrors the ways in which popular textual universes are disseminated and collect meaning. Holmes and Watson are both avid media consumers, and text messaging and blogging respectively are their forms of communication of choice. Like a modern teenager,

Holmes' lifeline to the rest of the world is his smart phone. Text messaging, for this

Holmes, is a means of power. He uses texts to harass those he believes to be his

inferiors, such as when he mass texts a crowd of journalists at a press conference each time Inspector Lestrade comes to an inaccurate conclusion in a high profile murder case

("Study"). He uses texts to keep Watson at his beck and call, sending messages like

"Baker Street. Come at once if convenient. . .If inconvenient, come anyway" ("Study").

He even uses his knowledge of texting to entrap criminals, uncovering Irene Adler's top secret Blackberry password thanks to his familiarity with the sounds of letter tones

("Scandal").

Holmes does more than just communicate by text, though; he thinks in text. By projecting Holmes' deductions onscreen in the form of text type, Moffat not only circumvents a difficult narrative problem—how to present the detective's though process without resorting to laborious explanations—he creates a Holmes who is such a part of the digital age that his very though process becomes digitized. Furthermore, the transmission of Holmes' thoughts in this manner is easily consumable by an audience who has also integrated text as a major mode of communication. Finally, the relatability of this thought structure makes this version of Holmes, who is irascible at best and cruel at worst, more palatable to an audience who can relate to this brief, often disjointed way of thinking.

Watson is more explicitly aligned with modern fan practices. Like many a fanfiction author, he keeps a blog filled with Holmes' adventures. The first scenes in the series open with Watson talking to his counselor about the therapeutic potential of blogging. Though he is reluctant to do so, he agrees to share his experiences through a blog. While his blog begins slowly, as soon as he meets Holmes, he becomes an active inspiration, and chronicling Holmes' work becomes Watson's new purpose in life

("Study"). Like so many contemporary bloggers, Watson uses his blog to express himself and chronicle his daily life, to reach out to others, and, most importantly, to share his stories and his admiration for Holmes.

While the idea of Watson as a blogger adds an updated view of the character to the database, Watson's online blog (johnwatsonblog.co.uk), a cross-media marketing tool published by the BBC, which includes synopses of Holmes' cases in Watson's words along with commentary from an array of secondary characters, also serves as an excellent example of transmedia storytelling and how cross-platform narratives expand the textual database. As Jenkins notes, transmedia storytelling unfolds across a combination of platforms to create "complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories" ("Transmedia"). Extensions beyond the initial medium can sustain the product, add depth to the textual universe, and invite new fans from different points of initiation. According to Jenkins, transmedia storytelling serves as an "ideal aesthetic form for collective intelligence" and, because of its multiplicity, creates gaps and excesses that invite greater end-user involvement and elaboration

("Transmedia"). In essence, transmedia storytelling is, itself, a series of expansions to the textual universe which unfold as multiple small narratives, each creating more access points to the textual database and uploading more facets for adapters to choose from. Transmedia elaborations such as Watson's blog expand the database exponentially by creating an open structure that pushes the universe of Sherlock far beyond its initial small narrative level and acts as a database within the database.

Likewise, "The Hounds of Baskerville" alludes to the power of modern tabloid media to build up stories, whether true or false. The mysterious hound has acquired a

bigfoot-like legend thanks to television and newspaper reports that bring supernatural tourism to Grimpen, where village businesspeople take advantage of the opportunity for profit by selling hound tours and paraphernalia. The innkeeper's lament that the

Baskerville testing site outside of town "buggers up tourism a bit" is quickly followed by a hearty "thank God for the demon hound. Did you see that show, the documentary? . .

.God bless Henry Knight and his monster from hell." Clearly, the locals view the hound legend as an asset and encourage the media attention as it increases profit. Whereas the role of the hound in the originary text is a gothic horror designed to drive newcomers away, in the modern interpretation it has become an almost irresistible attraction.

Finally, other modernizations serve to catapult the Sherlock Holmes database into the 21st century and add to it a layer of postmodern temporal unease. "The Hounds of Baskerville" trades in the Gothic overtones of the novel for an entirely modern horror—a lab performing genetic experiments on animals as a cover for chemical warfare experiments. Likewise, "A Scandal in Belgravia" features not a plot against the

King of a foreign nation but rather a terrorist plan to hijack an international flight. Both of these examples mimic the fan practice of character dislocation which is routinely invoked to create new tensions and interactions by placing characters in unfamiliar settings that will evoke unexpected reactions. As Jenkins illustrates, fans will often relocate characters into new historic, generic, or geographic contexts to achieve the desire to imagine a character in their preferred setting (Textual 171). However, as Paul

Booth has argued, temporal displacement can also serve to enhance narrative complexity significantly:

nothing can elicit spectator attention and emotional attachment more so than a well-executed moment of temporal disorientation. Narrative affect

can become spectacle in and of itself. The audience may experience breaks in the temporal structure of the narrative, only to "wow" at their return to the relative "present" of the show with their knowledge of the narrative somehow altered. (376)

The "relative present" of the text can easily be replaced here with the present of the originary text to illustrate how substantially chronological displacement impacts the breadth of the characters and the potential for variant readings of the database that displacement of the characters provides. Booth suggests that traditional media, such as books, television, or film, locks viewers into a sense of "temporal permanence" in which schedules and histories are fixed and predictable, which can create a sense of disconnect as online technology changes our relationship with time and linearity.

Temporal displacement, then, engages postmodern viewers by mimicking their own changing relationship with temporality (375-6). Moments of temporal displacement, with their overlapping of the relative present with the present of the originary text, create the same sense of temporal multiplicity within the textual database that referentially creates for narrative multiplicity.

Viewers at Play

The scope and gamelike qualities of referential adaptations are most evident in the breadth and creative use of their references. Referential adaptations do not aim to be one-to-one correspondences, and one of the ways they break from analogous retelling is by creating a kind of adaptational treasure hunt that draws upon elements of the database culled from everything from the originary work, to previous adaptations, to critical responses, to fanwork. They are at once a quiz, a retelling, and a transformation.

For referential adaptations, the textual database is like a playground, and each new sly allusion is an invitation for viewers to join the game. The more obscure the

reference, the more exciting it is to tease out; thus these adaptations encourage viewers to explore the entire database rather than focus on a single item along the surface layer as analogous adaptations do. References can range anywhere from the simplest associations with the stories that even the most casual fan can identify to connections that would only be obvious to the most avid critic.

SH uses elements of Doyle's stories which other adaptations seldom highlight to create a different kind of Holmes—a rough and tumble action hero. Though many viewers are accustomed to associating Holmes with the power of his mind, there is a physical element to Holmes, in his associations with boxing rings and his knowledge of martial arts, which later interpretations often overlook in favor of his deductive skills.

Ritchie builds his Holmes from these elements, creating a Holmes that seems decidedly different to viewers who are less familiar with Doyle's stories but piques the interest of fans who understand that these are originary elements of Holmes and appreciate their clever use.

Ritchie and Moffat pepper their adaptations with memorable scenes from the originary stories, such as Holmes shooting holes in the wall because he is bored or failing to realize that the Earth revolves around the Sun, that do little to move the narratives forward but add much to the tone of the works, particularly when used with the characteristic humor that marks each of these versions. Additionally, Sherlock makes use of both intra and extratextual references in its episode titles to play on the originary works and drop hints at which works might play roles in each episode. Thus, A

Study in Scarlet becomes "A Study in Pink" and "A Scandal in Bohemia" is Londonized to become "A Scandal in Belgravia," while "The Final Problem" is allusively renamed

after its most famous scene (geographically displaced in this version, but represented by the famous Turner painting of the landmark) "The Reichenbach Fall." The penultimate episode of series one is named after the very practice fans likely employ as they watch it, "The Great Game."

Some references, including those to Watson's bull pup and to the Cottingley faeries, are so obscure that only the most dedicated Sherlock Holmes scholars and fans will identify them. These elements are enjoyable on a surface level to the casual viewer while being deeply satisfying to the expert, who can revel in being in the know and appreciate the equal expertise of the adapter. One such reference is the pet bulldog,

Gladstone, in Ritchie's adaptation. Sherlock Holmes aficionados have long argued over the nature of the "bull pup" mentioned once and never referred to again in Doyle's tales.

The disappearance of the bull pup has been a source of much speculation in Sherlock

Holmes pseudo-scholarship. It is mentioned explicitly only once, in A Study in Scarlet, when Watson and Holmes first discuss sharing an apartment and Watson describes his faults, one of which is "keep[ing] a bull pup." Some critics, such as Robert S. Morgan, and Thomas Tully, suggest the bull pup is a dog (Klinger 25-6). Others suggest alternate explanations. Many critics, however, including W.E. Edwards, George

Fletcher, J.R. Stockler, and R.N. Brodie, believe the bull pup to be a gun, as "bulldog" was a term commonly used to refer to a short-barreled rifle during Watson's time

(Klinger 26). Jack Tracy, in his Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana, notes that "To keep a bull pup, in Anglo-Indian slang, means to have fits of quick temper" and suggests this explanation (52). Ritchie's use of an actual pet bulldog marks a definitive stance with literalist interpretations of the bull pup and resurrects him as if he never disappeared.

Though this reference will slip by casual viewers, it captures the attention of highly knowledgeable Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, whether bull pup literalists or not, and creates a thrill of appreciation for the film's knowledge of debates about the canon.

Sherlock employs even more obscure extratextual elements than these.

Aficionados of the supernatural are probably more familiar than Sherlock Holmes fans with the infamous case of the Cottingley faeries, which tarnished Doyle's credibility in the 1920s. The faeries in question appear in five photographs of Frances Griffiths, ten, and Elise Wright, fifteen, in the forest of Cottingley near Bradford, England. Despite popular opinion that the photographs, taken in 1917 and 1920, were fakes, Doyle, who was obsessed with the supernatural at the time, championed their authenticity, much to the chagrin of his more incredulous supporters, who adopted the more skeptical attitude of the author's famous creation rather than that of the author himself. In Sherlock, "The

Hounds of Baskerville" case is prompted by an email from a young girl searching for her missing rabbit which, before disappearing, "turned luminous. 'Like a faerie.'" Sherlock nearly takes the case out of boredom, and Moffat and Gattis subtly vindicate Doyle by including the (actually) glowing rabbit as a clue in a larger case. The reference to

Doyle's credulity is so understated, however, that only readers familiar with the extratextual elements of Doyle's biography are likely to notice it. Nonetheless, the viewers who do notice receive a veritable Sherlockian gratification from picking up the reference.

In addition to references to debates about canon and extratextual issues,

Sherlock makes subtle allusions to earlier adaptations. When Sherlock has trouble solving a mystery, for instance, a front page headline announces "Sherlock Holmes

Baffled," the name of the first film version of the great detective ("Scandal"). When

Holmes is desperate for cigarettes and Mrs. Hudson offers him a cup of tea instead, he laments that he needs something stronger than tea—"seven percent stronger," a clear reference to Nicholas Meyer's 1974 Holmes pastiche novel The Seven Per-Cent

Solution (subsequently adapted to film), in which Holmes seeks the help of Sigmund

Freud to recover from his cocaine addiction ("The Hounds"). Such allusions deftly indicate that it is not only Doyle's tales being adapted in Sherlock, but the Holmes database as a whole. In adapting the database, Moffat and Gattis demonstrate how later additions to the database have become part of Holmes character.

One of the most engaging characteristics of the BBC's Sherlock is its consistent and facile reference to elements of the larger database that fans and adapters have mistakenly associated with Doyle's stories. Moffat cleverly gets around the problem of providing Holmes with his obligatory pipe, calabash or otherwise, by having him addicted to nicotine patches to the degree that he often layers on multiple patches when faced with a particularly challenging conundrum. Moffat's more creative inventions, though, relate to Holmes' famous deerstalker cap and Watson's mysterious marital status.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous "errors" in Sherlock Holmes adaptations is the association of Holmes with his famous deerstalker cap. As noted above, the deerstalker is never mentioned in the stories, yet from the first time William Gillette donned the hat on stage, it has become one of the most iconic features of the detective. Nearly every

Holmes has worn a deerstalker, and merely providing a character with a deerstalker and

Inverness cape almost immediately marks him as Holmes or a Holmes imitator. Thus,

the iconography that marks Holmes comes from the Sherlock Holmes textual universe and not from Doyle's stories themselves. The character has picked up inextricable resonances that derive from the larger database and have become part of what viewers and adapters alike think of as the "authentic" Holmes, demonstrating that authentic and originary are not necessarily equivalent.

Sherlock acknowledges this erroneous attribution frequently, stretching its deerstalker joke over an entire season. Holmes initially grabs the deerstalker from

(appropriately) a prop room and dons it to try to hide from reporters. In "The Hounds of

Baskerville," while reading over the paper to find new cases for a bored Holmes,

Watson notes, "Military view of Uganda. Hmm. Another photo of you with the, uh" as the camera zooms to a newspaper article titled "Sherlock Holmes: Net phenomenon" featuring a large picture of Holmes complete with requisite deerstalker and trench coat.

When a suspect recognizes him at Baskerville, he notes, "I know who you really are. I'm never off your website. Thought you'd be wearing the hat, though" and goes on to say "I hardly recognize you without the hat" despite Holmes' protest of "that wasn't my hat." As with contemporary media depictions of the detective, the deerstalker is such a part of

Holmes' image that it becomes a representational icon despite not initially being a part of the character.

Moreover, these references to iconic but non-originary depictions demonstrate that the "truth" of a text is not built merely from its originary source, but from the associations it collects over time. Accordingly, many concurrent truths are possible.

These "truths" highlight the degree to which popular perceptions and responses help to construct a story or character in the same way accepted adaptational perspectives gain

prominence and become acknowledged as canon or fanon. Resonances, regardless of their source, rather than originary texts, create icons. Thus an oft-adapted character or story is a conglomeration of database elements which are frequently invoked rather than a strict interpretation of a single text itself.

By using such an array of sources, referential adaptations create new entryways into both the inner and the outer layers of the database. Viewers become more familiar with the textual universe as a whole because they can search out data and trace it to its point(s) of origin. For instance, a viewer who does not know that Doyle never depicted

Holmes with a deerstalker might be inspired to seek out the origin of the hat jokes in

Sherlock and, as a result, discover Gillette's play. Furthermore, the breadth of references draws together database elements, increasing cohesion within the textual universe by creating more explicit links between elements just as Sherlock attaches itself not only to Doyle and Gillette, but also to more obscure sources such as The

Seven Per-Cent Solution. As Sherlock demonstrates through its references to Doyle's original text, later Sherlock Holmes literary, stage, and televisual adaptations,

Sherlockian pseudo-scholarship, and Doyle's personal life, as the database builds a stronger nexus, it becomes more, rather than less, adaptable as its wider scope allows for a greater array of potentially relevant elements.

Slashing Sherlock

What draws the contemporary Sherlock Holmes adaptations closest to fanwork is their use of fannish tropes, including emotional intensification, and their consistent allusions to homoerotic relationships, or "slash." Slash is one of the most pervasive and established tropes in fanfiction, crossing into all fandoms and all genres. While allusions to Holmes/Watson slash make their mark as early as Stout's "Watson Was a Woman"

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speech (1941), it did not become a highly visible part of Sherlock Holmes fandom before the rise of media and slash-related fanzines in the 1960s. Since that time, as slash has become a dominant strain in fanwork, Holmes slash has gained prominence as well. The contemporary adaptations speak to fans by teasingly playing up the possibility of a homoerotic pairing between Holmes and Watson, bringing this formerly subtextual or fantextual strain to the surface of the database.

Most slash writers and readers are women. This seems counterintuitive, since slash primarily features erotic, often explicit homosexual relationships between men.

However, slash as it is known today originates from Star Trek fanzines, which were written, produced, distributed, and read almost exclusively by women. The first slash stories, sensual tales of emotional and sexual relations between Captain Kirk and Mr.

Spock, appeared in 1974. While slash represented only a small niche of fan production initially, it has grown to account for a significant percentage of fan output. Though its often explicit nature would seem to indicate that sexual desire motivates the production and consumption of slash, critics like Elizabeth Woledge ("From Slash to Mainstream,"

2005), Constance Penley ("Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular

Culture," 1992), Camille Bacon-Smith (Enterprising Women, 1992), and Jenkins

("Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," 2006) agree that slash is much more complex, and that sexual desire is often not a primary stimulus. Though there is no single, simple explanation for why women write slash, two major reasons are to establish emotional closeness and identification with male protagonists (who are often better-drawn than heroines) and, like all fanfiction, to draw out character and relationship potentials that are foreclosed in the text. In fact, because slash is so

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interwoven with attempts to explore untapped potential, many fans argue that same-sex romantic or erotic stories about characters who are canonically homosexual are not slash. Thus, much slash acts as an emotional intensifier as well as an opening of gaps in the originary work.

According to Pugh, the first adult fanzine10, Grup, appeared in 1972 (90). Just two years later, slash fiction began to trickle into fan publications, though it had trouble gaining ground with canon purists. By the late 1970s, slash had become significant enough to warrant its own zines, but it remained a relatively small niche, even in the early days of internet fandom.11 Over the 2000s, though, slash has grown so exponentially as to become the dominant part of some fandoms and has certainly become the aspect of fan writing that scholars and critics (including those noted above) discuss with the greatest frequency. Sherlock Holmes fandom has kept pace with this trend, as evidenced in both the Downey films and the Moffat and Gattis series.

Much like the genre TV shows of the 1960s and 70s that gave rise to contemporary media fandom, the originary Sherlock Holmes stories do not feature sex.

Though Watson is intermittently married, our heroes are largely available to fill fans' fantasies. As in many fandoms whose objects of fixation feature "male dyads,"12 however, Holmes fan writers often eschew female romantic leads, instead pairing the heroes off with each other. Both recent adaptations play on this romantic pairing.

10 A fanzine dedicated to stories with content considered appropriate only for older teens and up, usually due to sexually explicit material.

11 In her 2005 publication The Democratic Genre, Pugh characterizes slash as "a very small part of fandom" (91).

12 A term coined by Camille Bacon-Smith in her seminal 1992 work on Star Trek fandom, Enterprising Women.

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The slash text in both SH films is light and playful. The relationship between the heroes could easily be categorized as a "bromance"—itself a term that plays on the subtextual slash potential between all male dyads. Holmes and Watson affectionately refer to each other as "old cock" and "mother hen," and Holmes is so threatened by

Watson's relationship with his fiancée-to-be, Mary Morstan, that he is afraid to meet her and refuses to believe that Watson is really leaving him for a woman. He is so determined to dissuade Watson from marrying that he hires a fake psychic to play up the importance of the bond between himself and Watson and speak poorly of the act of marriage and of Mary's future unattractiveness. For his part, Watson cannot resist the allure of helping Holmes with his cases though he complains constantly about the inconvenience his dedication to the detective causes in all other aspects of his life.

Despite near-constant bickering, the two are nearly inseparable. Though the text never overtly includes slash, it is what fanfiction authors and readers would label "slashy," in that it continually teases that Holmes and Watson share a suppressed desire for a romantic relationship that is taboo in their cultural context.

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows continues to cement the relationship between Holmes and Watson, demonstrating that Holmes is actually more important to

Watson than his marriage. The film begins the day before Watson's wedding to Mary

Morstan. The pair spends the night before the wedding lamenting their impending separation, ending up in a drunken adventure that causes Watson to nearly miss his wedding. Although he ultimately makes it in time, wedded bliss is quickly delayed when

Mary acknowledges that he will never be happy unless he helps Holmes solve his latest case, so Watson gives up his honeymoon with his new wife for "bromantic" adventures

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with his dyadic partner, Holmes. SH:GOS is one of the only adaptations where Watson's marriage is shown on screen; nonetheless, the ceremony itself only serves as a contrast to the Holmesian adventures that bookend it, with Watson both entering the ceremony and leaving the train to his honeymoon destination with Holmes and not with his bride. The wedding itself is accompanied by mournful music, marking it as an occasion for sorrow rather than one of joy, with Holmes lurking in the shadows, removed from the other guests and markedly lonely. While the hints at Holmes' and

Watson's untapped affection noted above are immediately recognizable to many fans, they remain relegated to the inner layer of the database—easily accessible to viewers who know what to look for, but not readily apparent to viewers unacquainted with this particular subset of the Holmes database.

Where SH and SH:GOS merely hint at slash, though, Sherlock consistently engages it, teasing viewers with the potential for a relationship between Holmes and

Watson, even parodying viewers' expectations by repeating them through supporting characters in nearly every episode. The first episode alone features three extended sequences (examples below) where supporting characters or Holmes and Watson themselves discuss the status of their relationship.

It seems everyone close to Holmes assumes that Watson is his lover as soon as they meet him. When Watson accompanies Holmes to 221B Baker Street for the first time to decide whether to share tenancy with Holmes, the landlady, Mrs. Hudson, implies that they may not need two bedrooms, assuring "Oh, don't worry, there's all sorts round here" in response to Watson's protests ("Study"). Likewise, Holmes' elder brother, Mycroft, kidnaps Watson and offers him money to spy on Sherlock. Though

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Holmes and Watson have just met, Mycroft already knows who Watson is and has made a very clear assumption that the partnership between the two is romantic as well as professional, asking "Might we expect a happy announcement by the end of the week" ("Study"). Yet again, when Holmes and Watson go to dinner together, the owner of the restaurant, a former client of Holmes, assures that dinner is "on the house for you and your date," to which Watson replies, "I'm not his date." During the dinner, an awkward conversation ensues:

WATSON. You don't have a girlfriend then? HOLMES. Girlfriend? No. Not really my area. WATSON. Oh, right. Do you have a boyfriend? Which is fine, by the way. HOLMES. I know it's fine. WATSON. So you've got a boyfriend, then? HOLMES. No. WATSON. Right. Okay. You're unattached. Like me. Fine. Good. HOLMES. John, um, I think that you should know that I consider myself married to my work and while I'm flattered, I'm really not looking for any. . . WATSON. No, I'm. . .not asking. No. I'm just saying, it's all fine. HOLMES. Good. Thank you. ("Study")

Though Holmes makes it clear that he is not currently interested in a relationship, this conversation hints at the potential for a future relationship between the two—a potential that is not foreclosed over the course of the series.

While the overt references to slash in the opening episode speak directly to fandom, even viewers who know nothing about slash and fan pairings can't miss the hints that the producers are teasing out a well-established subtextual relationship between the detective and his partner, bringing even non-fans into the nexus of expectations that the series expertly weaves. While those familiar with slash can appreciate the way these moments tease their expectations, more casual viewers find

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humor in Watson's exasperation at being constantly misunderstood, which plays out as an ongoing joke across all seasons of the series.

As Jenkins notes, the desires to fill in gaps and to explore untapped potential in character relationships are primary drivers of fan creation. Slash fiction has been a direct outgrowth of both desires. Because it plays with unrealized potentials, however, the elements of slash tend to be buried in the deep inner layer of the database where they are accessible only to those "in the know." Fans call these elements up for their own narratives, but they have seldom been openly attached to a mass-produced, commercial surface level narrative that is easily consumable by the general public.

Increasingly, though, particularly as changing attitudes toward homosexuality have made slash subtexts more socially acceptable, creators like Gattis and Moffat, who are consumers of fan culture and are familiar with the additions of fans to the narrative database, have commercialized those elements that have previously been largely covert, making those parts of the narrative structure visible and accessible to viewers who are casually consuming rather than acting as consumer/creators within the database structure.

Throughout the series, secondary characters mimic the practices of fan consumption, creating presumed relationships between Holmes and Watson based on their own preferred readings and the subtexts to which they have access. Mrs. Hudson is the most consistent example, from repeatedly insisting that they must share a room

("Study"), to asking if they have "had a little domestic" when the two are angry at one another ("Great"), to stating, "well, you really have moved on" when she discovers that

Watson is dating a woman after Holmes' supposed death ("Empty"). When Holmes and

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Watson visit the village of Grimpen to investigate the mystery of the Baskerville hounds, the innkeepers assume that the two are lovers, offering apologies for not being able to provide a double room and later asking Watson, "is yours a snorer" ("Hounds"). In "The

Reichenbach Fall," diehard Holmes fan Kitty Riley asks the detective whether he and

Watson are more than platonic friends. Even Holmes' nemesis, Moriarty, is so convinced of the bond between the two that he uses Watson to lure Holmes into giving away government secrets, knowing that there is no one more important to the detective.

Because the hints at a relationship are a narrative constant, the slash element that is usually related to an inner-layer, fan-accessed subtext becomes an active part of the outer layer of the database, creating greater cohesion between fannish texts and better- known surface iterations.

The narrative does more than just play on the fannish expectations of viewers, however; it visually emphasizes the closeness of Holmes and Watson and directly contrasts that intimacy to the affection of each hero for the female in his life. This contrast is particularly evident in the second season episode "A Scandal in Belgravia," which pits Holmes against his female nemesis, Irene Adler, for whom he has a grudging admiration. Throughout the episode, verbal and televisual prompts juxtapose Adler and

Watson's current girlfriend (the latest in a rapidly-changing string), Jeanette, against the bond between the dyad. The visuals also emphasize the jealousy between the pair and their respective partners.

A scene in the study at 221B where Holmes attempts to break a code on Adler's phone exemplifies the rivalry between Watson and Adler. An extended tight close-up of

Adler's lips perched just centimeters from Sherlock's ear precedes a slow pan to an

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extremely canted head shot of Watson watching the pair, emphasizing his mental disturbance over their intimacy. Dialogue also emphasizes Watson's possessiveness when he reveals that he is counting the number of texts that Adler sends Holmes:

WATSON. Fifty seven? HOLMES. I'm sorry. What? WATSON. Fifty seven of those texts, the ones I've heard. HOLMES. Funny that you've been counting. ("Scandal")

Despite the fact that Watson's girlfriend sits at his side during the duration of the conversation, Watson's behavior clearly mimics that of a scorned or jealous lover. In these scenes, Adler does not serve as a romantic interest for Holmes, as one might expect. Rather, her presence draws Watson's jealousy, demonstrating that, despite his many denials, his affection for Holmes might actually be romantic in nature.

For her part, Adler is perfectly comfortable teasing Holmes (who is baffled by her frank sexuality) and Watson about their relationship and playing to their jealousies.

When Holmes and Watson first stop at her flat to investigate, she enters the room naked and brazenly flirts with Holmes all the while turning attention to the affection he and Watson have for each other, beginning by commenting on a punch Watson gave

Holmes just before they entered:

ADLER. Somebody loves you. If I had to punch that face, I would avoid your nose and teeth too. WATSON. Could you put something on, please? Uh, anything at all. A napkin. ADLER. Why? Are you feeling exposed? HOLMES: I don't think John knows where to look. ADLER: No. I think he knows exactly where. I'm not sure about you. HOLMES: If I wanted to look at naked women, I'd borrow John's laptop. WATSON: You do borrow my laptop. HOLMES. I confiscate it. ("Scandal")

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Despite the naked professional dominatrix (Adler) in the room, the primary sexual tension at play is that between Holmes and Watson. Adler's presence only serves to bring it to the surface.

Though she is on the periphery of the narrative, Watson's current girlfriend,

Jeanette, also sees that she is secondary to the connection between him and Holmes and ends their relationship (with little protest from Watson) as a result:

JEANETTE. You know, my friends are so wrong about you. You're a great boyfriend. WATSON. M'kay. That's good. I always thought I was great. JEANETTE. Sherlock Holmes is a very lucky man. WATSON. Jeanette, please. JEANETTE. No. I mean it. It's heartwarming. You'll do anything for him. You don't even tell your girlfriends apart. ("Scandal")

The implications of intimacy between him and Holmes throughout the episode finally leave Watson sharing a lament that writers, producers, and actors often find themselves levelling against fandom: "Who the hell knows about Sherlock Holmes. But for the record, for anyone out there who still cares, I'm actually not gay" ("Scandal").

Nonetheless, the intermingling of fan slash narratives with the core narrative of Sherlock has elevated the potential of a homoerotic relationship between Holmes and Watson to such a visible part of the surface database that Watson's denials are likely falling on more deaf ears than ever before. In many ways, this iteration of the Holmes stories, much like so many fan texts, is about a latent relationship between Holmes and Watson with clever nods to the originary texts and earlier adaptations as a backdrop.

While the Granada Sherlock Holmes adaptations were perfectly suited for the media landscape of the era during which they were produced, their endurance for so long as the definitive Sherlock Holmes indicated that no iteration of the tales that resonates with contemporary audiences had yet been produced. The dominance of the

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internet and the new ways of viewing inherent in fan culture, though, demanded an approach which could appeal to fans already immersed in the franchise as well as causal viewers.

The new Sherlock Holmes adaptations have managed to walk that line primarily because of their use of fannish elements. Not only have they drawn on fan techniques, but they have embedded fans themselves deeply into the textual database, making them both character elements within the narrative, honoring them as consumer- creators, and acknowledging and drawing on their tactics. Furthermore, by bringing elements and narrative strains that were previously hidden either in avid scholarship or fan-produced works to commercial surface narratives, the adaptations have brought a new richness to the Sherlock Holmes database that ensures its continued expansion and makes it relatable to a wider audience. All the while, both adaptations remain "true" to the most important element of the database, the characters of Holmes and Watson, who are easily recognizable and keep longtime viewers engaged by demonstrating the characteristics that have helped them endure for more than a century.

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CHAPTER 4 FROM REFERENCE TO REHASH: A TALE OF TWO STAR TREKS

As the Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 have discussed, contemporary adaptations have moved increasingly away from narrative fidelity and toward referential models of viewer engagement, which privilege character continuity and appeals to fannish knowledge and desire over faithful retelling of a single source narrative. Fidelity models of adaptation study are ill-suited to analyzing referential adaptations because such models emphasize an adaptation's similarity to its source narrative whereas referential adaptations often reject both reliance on a single source and faithfulness to earlier narrative structures.

Rather than attempting to copy a single existing source, thereby limiting the possibilities for expansion of the textual database, referential adaptations like Lost in Austen and

Sherlock build on the character and narrative fragments in the database while drawing in a number of other "small narrative" elements, such as critical and fan reactions to the work, and incorporating them into the textual universe. Rather than swearing fealty to a single definitive text, these adaptations "validate" alternative sources of authority by exposing their narratives and reactions to the surface narrative level and making them more visible, thereby expanding the textual universe. This expansion aligns them with fannish readings and desires, making them particularly popular with fans. In fact, as the case of Star Trek: Into Darkness demonstrates, a referential work that fails to expand the database may be successful with casual viewers, but will not thrive with this most devoted audience.

Star Trek has one of the largest databases of modern media fandom, and, because so many early entries into the database generated from fannish activities, it places the least privilege on distinctions of canonicity, with both commercial and fannish

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non-canon small narratives dominating database references and often later becoming part of the canon. Star Trek fans tend to favor the expansiveness of the series' universe, privileging readings which are true to what they view are Star Trek's ideals and its characters. Therefore, works that adapt from the entire franchise (versus a single episode or film) or expand the characters or philosophies of Star Trek gain greater acceptance with fans than those which hew closely to a single small narrative: these fans prefer inspiration to narrative fidelity. As a result, the recent Star Trek reboot film,

Star Trek (2009) (ST09) scored with casual viewers, critics, and fans of the franchise because it weaves references to many Star Trek series and films and the original Star

Trek characters with a new narrative and altered universe. Conversely, its follow up,

Star Trek: Into Darkness (STID), which remade the immensely popular Star Trek II: The

Wrath of Khan but undid the philosophical expansion of the franchise and had limited character depth, while still popular with critics and casual viewers, failed to gain fan acceptance.

What is Star Trek?: Canon, Timeline, and Fanon

Surely in 1966, when a low-rated space opera with a small-but-devoted following premiered on NBC, viewers had no idea the show would go on to change the modern media landscape irrevocably. Nevertheless, with just 79 episodes to its credit (fewer than the number required for contemporary shows to receive syndication), Star Trek has become a media juggernaut whose production has continued virtually unabated for nearly 50 years. The show would never have achieved such prestige and longevity, though, without its devoted fans.

The history of Star Trek is largely a history of its fans, and the history of its fans reads like a compendium of firsts: the first media fandom, the first "save our show"

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campaign, the first media fanzine, the first television fan convention, the first film continuation campaign, the first slash fandom and fanzine. As with Sherlock Holmes, untangling the commercial output from its fan influences is nearly impossible. In fact, the lapse between the show's cancellation in 1969 and the premier of the first Star Trek feature film in 1979 resulted in early fan adaptations far outweighing the initial commercial output of the franchise. Even now, the lines between commercial output and fan output in the Star Trek universe frequently blur, making fan contributions to the Star

Trek database as vital as, perhaps even more vital than, many of the commercial contributions. Furthermore, as fanwork and commercial work converge, as they often do in the Star Trek universe, fans gain increasing power in shaping the future of the franchise, making their reactions to commercial works vital to its ongoing success.

The Commercial Output

The Star Trek commercial catalog alone dwarfs that of most other franchises. In addition to the original series (TOS)1 (1966-69), the franchise has included five television spin-offs, Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS) (1973-74), Star Trek: The

Next Generation (TNG) (1987-94), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) (1993-2000),

Star Trek: Voyager (VOY) (1994-2001), and Star Trek: Enterprise (ENT) (2001-2005).

The series has also spawned three series of films. The TOS series includes six films:

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (TMP) (1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Wrath)

(1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek: The Voyage Home

(1986), Star Trek: The Final Frontier (1989), and Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country

(1991). The TNG series includes four films: Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek:

1 Fans have created three-letter abbreviations, which I use throughout this chapter, for each series.

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First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). The most recent series, which fans have labeled "the reboot," thus far includes Star Trek

(2009), Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013), and an as-yet unnamed sequel schedule for

2016 release. However, the 725 Star Trek episodes and 13 Star Trek films still make up only a fraction of the commercial releases associated with the franchise. Yet they are the only works within the Star Trek universe considered definitively canon. Therefore, even the bulk of the commercial small narratives that have fed into the Star Trek database, everything from novels to comic strips, has been non-canonical.

To illustrate how deeply canon and non-canon intertwine within the Star Trek database, one need only review one of the most enduring branches of (mostly) non- canonical commercial output, the Star Trek novels. The novels span 46 years and range from the canonical to the virtually heretical. Nevertheless, they add commercial bulk to the database, pulling in many more characters and ideas on which later works, fan or commercial, may build.

Though the most well-known Star Trek novels are those published by Pocket

Books, which became responsible for the franchise in 1979, Bantam Books published the first novels and novelizations beginning in 1968. In all, Bantam published thirteen volumes of episode adaptations and fifteen original novels, all but three of which predated the 1979 film.2 Additionally, between 1974 and 1979, Ballantine published the

Log series of novelizations of TAS episodes. As of this writing, Pocket Books has published more than 150 novels and novelizations, not including its recent Mere

Anarchy e-book series, devoted exclusively to TOS.

2 The Motion Picture novelization was the first Star Trek book to be published by Pocket Books.

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As with TOS, each remaining series (with the exception of TAS, which is itself based on TOS) has several books based on it (TOS, 136; TNG, 133; DS9, 73; VOY, 48;

ENT, 17). Further, several original, spin-off, and crossover series have been published along with several miscellaneous reference books and short story collections as well as a young adult novel series. Together, these total more than 200 additional works without including comic books, manga, or graphic novels.

The producers of the show and Pocket Books agree that the novels are not part of the original Star Trek canon—with some exceptions. As a rule, only works written by the series' producers or senior writers are considered part of the franchise canon.

Therefore, though novels are not canonical, novelizations, which are prose versions of episode or film scripts, are, as are the two early Voyager novels, Mosaic and Pathways, written by series co-creator Jeri Taylor. To further complicate matters, the Star Trek novels, though primarily non-canonical, make up what is known as the series timeline, clarifying the history of the Star Trek universe and placing the events of the episodes and films within a chronology. Though the novels are not canon, the showrunners

(creators and producers of the show who are responsible for its themes and story arcs) consider their timeline official. Again, there are exceptions. These include the Strange

New Worlds books, a series of short story collections, published yearly from 1998 to

2007, which feature winning works from an annual fan writing contest, and a group of alternate timeline novels popularly known as the "Shatnerverse," a series of ten books written by William Shatner, Judith Reeves-Steven, and Garfield Reeves-Steven, chronicling the adventures of a resurrected Captain Kirk after the events of Star Trek:

Generations.

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Yet another issue complicates distinctions between canon, non-canon, and timeline. Episodes of later series and films often refer to events or facts that only exist in

Star Trek novels (for example, Lieutenant Uhura's first name, which will be discussed later in this chapter). Once these events or facts are mentioned in an episode or film, they officially become part of Star Trek canon. Thus, even the canonical works themselves draw from non-canonical elements within the database, creating an increasing interweaving of canon and non-canon and erasing distinctions between the two. The history of fan activity and fan contributions to the Star Trek universe erases such distinctions even further.

Fans and Fan Activity

Even more than Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek has been influenced for many years by fan culture and commercial adaptation. It would not be nearly as prolific as it is today without fans, and fans have shaped much of our critical and commercial understanding of the Star Trek universe, particularly female fans. In addition to interventions through fanzines and at conventions, Star Trek fans have been pivotal in shaping critical understanding of fandom itself as well as later permutations of the franchise. Fandom studies as a discipline largely begins with Star Trek. Two of the groundbreaking and still-oft-quoted earliest works on fandom, Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women

(1992) and Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers (1992), focus primarily on female Star Trek fans, who have been the most active in keeping Star Trek alive through fanzines and fanfiction, conventions, and continuation campaigns. In fact, in her 1986 New York

Times article "Spock among the Women," Bacon-Smith estimates that, of the 10,000 fans actively working on or contributing to fanzines at that time, 90 percent were women. Women also organized the majority of early Star Trek conventions, and they

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ran (and paid for) the "Save our Show" campaign that kept TOS on the air for an additional season as well as the campaign that resulted in the first Star Trek film.

Almost from the beginning of the series, fans were pivotal in shaping the franchise. By 1967, they were initiating a letter-writing campaign that belayed the show's cancellation and won it a third (and final) season. By 1971, fans actively campaigned for a movie or additional television series, besieging Paramount with a well-organized drive that lasted beyond the conciliatory animated series produced in 1973 and ultimately spurred the first Star Trek film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in 1979. Star Trek fanzines became active 1967, before the show had even begun its second season, and both actors and contributors actively congratulated and contributed to fanzines. In fact, creator Gene Rodenberry submitted a letter to one early fanzine, Spockanalia, in 1968, claiming, "Spockanalia is 'required reading' for everyone in our offices. . .anyone who makes decisions on show policy have [sic] read your fanzine, and Juanita Coulson's ST-

Phile" (Verba 3). Rodenberry's sentiment suggests that fan knowledge was pivotal during the first Star Trek series, and it has continued to be so throughout the life of the franchise.

In addition to official novels and fanzines, conventions kept the franchise alive and even attracted new fans in the time between the cancellation of the series and the first film. In fact, conventions are still one of the backbones of Star Trek fandom, with dozens taking place around the world each year. At these conventions, fans gather to meet fellow devotees, hear panels with their favorite producers and stars, learn news of upcoming events, get autographs, buy and sell memorabilia and fanworks, and participate in activities, such as costume contests and episode or film screenings. Much

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as early fanzines did, conventions provide not only a gathering place for fans, but also a place where they can exchange ideas with the actors and producers of the series.

Though major conventions did not start until 1972, various fans report small, localized gatherings going back to 1969 ("Star Trek Conventions"). The first major convention, Star Trek Lives!, which took place in Manhattan in January 1972, boasted

3,000 attendees and received feature coverage in both Variety and TV Guide. That number doubled for the 1973 New York convention, and in the meantime several other major conventions had emerged in cities such as Detroit and Los Angeles. By 1974, convention attendance had exploded well beyond what organizers expected or were prepared to handle, with 15,000 attendees at the New York convention and another

6,000 turned away at the door (Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston 5). As organizers split into separate groups, each with their own slate of conventions, turnout at major gatherings became more manageable, but attendance at such events still numbered in the thousands. Despite the downturn in activity that many fans expected in the wake of the show's cancellation, attendance figures confirm that Star Trek's popularity continued to rise after its cancellation. Fanzine and fanclub subscription figures confirm this trend:

The STW [Star Trek Welcommittee] Directory kept up with the increase in fan and club activity for the year. The April issue, edited and published by Allyson Whitfield, listed 244 clubs (88 of them STAR chapters), and 186 fanzines. The July issue no longer listed STAR chapters separately, in recognition of the fact that STAR Central had disintegrated (though some chapters continued). The number of clubs here was 264, and the number of fanzines was 176 (by July 1977, two years later, there would be 458 fanzines listed). (Verba 20-21)

It seemed the longer Star Trek was off the air, the greater its fanbase grew.

One of the most critical roles fans played in the life of the franchise was ensuring its continuation by lobbying for a Star Trek film. Finally, in 1975, Paramount conceded.

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In its February 1975 issue, A Piece of the Action (the official newsletter of the Star Trek

Welcommittee3):

reported a speech by Gene Roddenberry, in which he said, "Paramount Pictures. . .has suffered a year-long deluge of mail demanding a Star Trek motion picture. And Paramount finally cried 'enough.' We are now finishing negotiations for a full-length, wide-screen Star Trek motion picture. . .it will be shot with the original cast." (Verba 20)

Without the active intervention of fans, the franchise may never have survived beyond its initial three years.

Several fans have also gone on to contribute to Star Trek's commercial output.

Star Trek novelists Della Van Hise, Peter David, Howard Weinstein, Keith R.

DeCandido, and Una McCormack all began their careers as fan writers. Furthermore, due to Star Trek's policy of accepting unsolicited scripts, many fans of the original series, such as Ronald D. Moore, went on to write and produce for later series. To a great degree, fans are responsible for shaping the Star Trek database as it exists today, and more than any other Western media franchise, Star Trek adopts and incorporates the techniques of fandom.

Rebooting the Franchise

Nowhere is incorporation of fannish techniques into commercial Star Trek works more evident than in the two latest entries in the franchise, Star Trek (2009) and Star

Trek: Into Darkness. Being the first commercial Star Trek offerings since the 2005 cancellation of the underperforming Star Trek: Enterprise, the films had to balance the nostalgic desires of fans to reconnect with the characters and ideas they love with the

3 The official welcoming committee of Star Trek fandom. The Welcommittee was active from 1972 to 1997 and served as a way for new fans to locate other fans and groups with similar interests and to learn about conventions and fanzines. Though fan-run, the group maintained close ties with Rodenberry and Paramount; thus its publication, A Piece of the Action, was often privy to insider information (Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston 4).

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commercial drive to bring in a larger viewership to ensure the continuation of the franchise. Both films take a referential approach to the material, incorporating characters and elements from TOS and other Star Trek series while creating a "new" universe and tone to appeal to viewers who are less familiar with the franchise. While

ST09 achieves the balance quite successfully, STID overplays its hand by attempting to balance a referential tone with a less-than-innovative adaptation of one of the most revered Star Trek films.

Star Trek (2009): New Frontiers

When Gene Rodenberry met with Paramount in the 1970s to discuss the possibility of a new Star Trek television show, he pitched the notion of a prequel series that would show the origin stories of each of his original characters. Though the idea never came to fruition, it has long remained intriguing in the imagination of fans. Thus, when J.J. Abrams was recruited to oversee the reboot of the franchise and produce a prequel in 2006, fans were cautious but excited, looking forward to seeing the series on screen again but worried the Abrams' presence might turn the film into a mindless summer blockbuster with little mooring in the original Star Trek universe.

In the end, Abrams adopted a novel approach that would make the film stand on its own, keep the existing universe intact, and allow him the freedom to tell an entirely new story while still mooring the work in the universe that fans and non-fans alike know so well. Within the first five minutes of ST09, an alien spaceship from the future appears and creates a new timeline by blowing up a Federation ship (and eventually the planet

Vulcan), thereby changing the history of the Star Trek universe. This change allows the original Star Trek universe and the Star Trek reboot universe to exist simultaneously within the Star Trek database and creates ample room for referential play by duplicating

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the characters—leaving them largely intact but crafting a clear excuse for minor variations in their personalities, actions, and futures.

Playing with the Final Frontier

Because of the franchise's intense fan following and its prestige as a media megalith, commercial Star Trek adaptations in the past, whether televisual, filmic, or literary, have taken a reverent attitude toward the source material. While there was room for play within the works, the philosophies and characters of Star Trek itself were above even good-natured critique. Much like the newest Sherlock Holmes adaptations, however, the Star Trek reboot approaches its source material with a playful attitude, remaining largely true to the characters that fans have come to know while still illustrating, and often emphasizing, their flaws and foibles.

Even in its most critical moments, ST09 manages to slip in sly references or in- jokes about TOS, playing a double hand of engaging casual viewers by offering action and emotional impact while delivering knowing humor to hardcore fans. The first instance of doubling, a reference to Kirk's rather unusual middle name, Tiberius, takes place during the opening scene, as Kirk's father sacrifices himself to a predatory alien ship to make sure his ship's escape pods, one of which includes his laboring wife, launch safely. He asks his wife, with whom he is in contact via communicator, what she wants to name his newborn son. When she replies, "We can name him after your father," her responds, "Tiberius? You kidding me? No. That's the worst." Thus, amidst this gut-wrenching scene of Kirk's father's death, thanks to this reference to the origin of

Kirk's middle name, fans already know that they can look forward to many winks and nods to insiders.

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These games continue throughout the film. Because it is not moored to a single episode, the film draws freely from the entire Star Trek database and offers many references and puzzles that add extra value for fans of TOS. For example, an early scene in ST09 depicts one of Kirk's sexual conquests—a green-skinned Orion woman, a clear reference to the future captain's reputation for wooing alien women, particularly the famous Orion slave girls that originated in TOS's "Menagerie" and became a fixture throughout the franchise, appearing again in both DS9 and ENT. The ubiquitous, furry tribbles, small, irresistible animals who breed with such frequency that they once featured as part of a plot by an alien race to take over the Enterprise by driving its crew off due to infestation, made their debut in fan favorite episode "The Trouble with

Tribbles." In ST09, engineer Montgomery Scott keeps a tribble as a pet when he works at a lonely outpost on an arctic planet. The most famous lines of TOS make appearances as well. Many of Doctor McCoy's lines are so iconic that they have become buzz phrases in geek and internet culture. For instance, his most repeated line,

"he's dead, Jim" has become so well-known that the Google Chrome internet browser even uses it to relay that a tab has ceased to function. While "he's dead, Jim" doesn't make an appearance in ST09, McCoy repeats some of his other most iconic phrases, most notably, "I'm a doctor. . .". Fifteen times during TOS and countless more in films and at conventions and events, DeForest Kelley, who played Dr. McCoy in the first series, repeated some variation of the line, "I'm a doctor, not a…". The phrase is so well-loved by fans and many non-fans alike that it has been repeatedly mimicked by the doctor in every Star Trek series since and has evolved into a media trope known as "I'm a doctor, not a placeholder" due to its pervasiveness in popular culture ("I'm a"). When

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McCoy complains, "Damn it, man, I'm a doctor, not a physicist" in ST09, both fans and non-fans immediately tune in to the phrase's many resonances. Meanwhile, avid fans will recognize Kirk's mentor in ST09, Christopher Pike, as the original captain of the

Enterprise in the initial rejected pilot for the 1967 series. While ST09 provides many references to TOS that keep fans engaged in seeing how cleverly Abrams' new narrative has incorporated elements from that work, ST09 doesn't stop there.

References to the entire Star Trek database, including offscreen trivia, pepper the film.

Adapting the Franchise

One of the key components of referential adaptation is its breadth of source material. With a franchise as far-reaching as Star Trek, the database offers many points of entry, and determining the scope of an adaptation can be difficult. Too much breadth, and the work can seem like a series of references designed to provide "fan service"4 with little plot to carry it. Too little breadth, and the work can seem like an unnecessary rehash of a single narrative entry point. ST09 uses characters rather than specific narrative entry points (preexisting small narratives) to anchor it to the database.

Therefore, rather than trying to mimic an existing narrative, it uses a breadth of references to establish itself within the Star Trek universe.

While the most obvious references in ST09 are to Star Trek: The Original Series, producers go to great lengths to demonstrate their mastery of the material and provide rewards to the most loyal Star Trek fans. Just as Sherlock goes far beyond textual references to the Sherlock Holmes canon to embrace adaptations and fan theories,

ST09 includes references to nearly all of the Star Trek television series and many of the

4 A term derived from anime, fan service refers to gratuitous or unnecessary use of popular words, gestures, scenes, or intertextual elements included solely to give fans what producers believe they desire.

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films as well as novels and even some Star Trek trivia with which few contemporary fans are acquainted. The most frequent source of inspiration is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, from which ST09 derives some of its significant plot points. During the first third of ST09, Kirk faces a disciplinary hearing for reprogramming an unwinnable leadership simulation test, the Kobayashi Maru, to allow him to pass. Because of this hearing, he is not an official Starfleet cadet when he boards the Enterprise. The Kobayashi Maru is a critical character development point for Kirk in Wrath, where a young cadet notes that the fact he cheated on it shows that he has never faced death and loss—the major themes of the film. Likewise the Centaurian Slug which the villain Nero drops into

Captain Christopher Pike's mouth, claiming it will wrap around his brain stem and secrete a toxin that acts as a truth serum which will force him to give up Starfleet secrets, is a nearly-exact replica of the Ceti Eel which Khan uses to the same end on

Commander Pavel Chekov in The Wrath of Khan.

Most fun for ardent fans, of course, are references to obscure facts that fall beyond the scope of what appears on screen. While these recurring jokes or themes do not interrupt the storyline for casual viewers, they provide an additional layer of pleasure and gratification for fans. Throughout the first half of ST09, Kirk repeatedly pleads with

Uhura to tell him her first name, yet she refuses. Finally, during a climactic moment where Spock kisses Uhura goodbye before beaming into an enemy ship, she tells him,

"I'll be monitoring your frequency," to which he replies, "Thank you, Nyota."

Overhearing, Kirk asks, "So her first name's Nyota?" This may seem like a simple ongoing joke to viewers unfamiliar with Star Trek literary output. However, this nods to a significant gap in early Star Trek canon. During the original series, Uhura was never

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given a first name. In 1982, for The Wrath of Khan tie-in publication Star Trek II

Biographies, author William Rotsler sought and received permission from Gene

Rodenberry to use the first name Nyota for the character (Van Hise 16). As with other information established in Star Trek books, the name did not become canon until it was incorporated in the media universe through the 2009 film. Thus, the delayed reveal of

Uhura's first name accompanied by the question, "So her first name's Nyota" actually mimics the drawn-out experience of fans waiting for a reveal of the character's given name. Another sign of the breadth of the film's engagement with the database is its handling of the Spock/Uhura relationship.

Romancing the Crew

The referential model of adaptation builds on relationships between characters in the database, particularly those relationships with untapped or unexplored potential in earlier iterations of the textual universe. One of the relationships with the most untapped potential in the Star Trek database is that of Spock and Uhura. In numerous interviews, including a 2009 interview on StarTrek.com, Nichols notes that she believes Uhura and

Spock had feelings for each other in TOS. That notion may be borne out by the history of the controversial kiss in the 1968 episode "Plato's Stepchildren," famous for featuring the first interracial kiss on television. During the episode, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy face off with the Platonians, aliens with highly developed minds and powerful psychokinetic abilities. During a celebratory feast, the Platonians psychically manipulate Kirk and

Uhura to kiss. However, the scene was originally written for Spock and Uhura.

Apparently, as Leonard Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols rehearsed the scene, William

Shatner observed them and insisted that if anyone were allowed to kiss Uhura, it should be the captain. Thus, the scene was rewritten to the version fans are familiar with

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(Inside). ST09 reverses the roles of "Plato's Stepchildren," placing Kirk as the character chasing after Uhura, hoping to add her to his long list of sexual conquests while Spock, as it turns out, has already gotten the girl. Viewers learn of Spock and Uhura's relationship within the first thirty minutes of the film and spend nearly an hour watching

Kirk try to flirt with her before he finds out that she and Spock are involved. The original plan for the kiss in "Plato's Stepchildren" is well known in Star Trek fanlore, and ST09's fulfillment of the long-withheld Spock/Uhura relationship gratifies viewers who were disappointed by its revision.

Despite some complaints about the first film's thin plot, its innovation and attitude toward the source material left viewers looking forward to further works in the reboot universe. It used the database effectively, balancing fan service and narrative structure in a way that pleased both longtime viewers and those new to the franchise. This balance paid off for ST09, earning it a higher box office gross than any Star Trek film before it as well as overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and viewers alike.

Unfortunately, Abrams' next offering was doomed to disappoint.

The Triumph of Khan

While the latest film in the franchise, Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013), was the most successful Star Trek film to date in terms of global box office figures, it alienated the franchise's most loyal fanbase. A recent poll of fans at the 2013 Las Vegas Creation

Con, the biggest annual Star Trek convention, placed STID last out of the twelve official

Star Trek films produced to date. The film immediately above it in ranking, The Final

Frontier, is a film most fans and non-fans alike consider virtually unwatchable. One journalist who attended the polling panel described the general fan sentiment about

STID: "a bad movie made badly that is also bad Star Trek and, worst of all, a cheap

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rehash of better things" (Faraci). Notably, the "better" thing the film rehashed, Star Trek

II: The Wrath of Khan, received a nearly-unanimous vote for best film in the franchise.

The disparity of placement between The Wrath of Khan and its reboot illuminates several missteps that violate the core of the database and can alienate fans from an adaptation.

The Seeds of Wrath

The first Star Trek film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, represented something of a departure in tone and subject matter from the series. Though it is still the most financially successful film in the franchise5, it received mixed responses from fans and unfavorable reviews from critics due to its poor pacing and lack of action. While the film brought a new level of activity to fandom, it also drove some disappointed fans away, as evidenced by a dip in the number of fan clubs and fanzines between winter and fall of

1979. In The Making of the Trek Films, Gross, et al describe TMP as anathema to everything that the television series stood for:

It was as if the powers-that-be decided to remake Star Trek by violating every principle the series' popularity was based on. Couched in subdued, generally unpleasant hints of their former personalities, the characters wandered through an aimless and irritating plot which seemed primarily an excuse for a self-conscious special effects extravaganza. (23)

Though many fans reacted positively out of excitement over seeing Star Trek on screen again after more than a decade, the film's dependence on big-budget special effects and lack of character development displeased them as well as the general audience.

5 Given that one fanzine at the time tallied how many times contributors saw the film in theaters, and many responders had attended as many as twenty to thirty times (the highest number being thirty-nine), the film's high revenue may have been a result of fans' thirst for new material (Verba 57).

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Despite many fans' distaste for the film, by mid-1980, a sequel was already in the works, and it seemed both Rodenberry and Paramount realized the need to hew closer to the themes of the series, as Rodenberry announced that Paramount called the script for the second film "ten times better than the first movie" and "real Star Trek" (qtd. Verba

48). Though the initial script idea was ultimately scrapped, and Paramount brought a new executive producer, Harve Bennet, and a new writer/director, Nicholas Meyer6, on for the film, the mission to make a film that was "real Star Trek" remained. Bennet and

Meyer fulfilled this mission by returning to one of The Original Series' most popular episodes, "Space Seed."

"Space Seed" guest stars Ricardo Montalban as Star Trek's most famous villain,

Khan Noonien Singh, a product of the fictional Eugenics Wars that nearly decimated

Earth in the mid-1990s. As Charlie Jane Anders describes him,

Khan is almost emblematic of what we no longer see in movie and TV villains. . . .He's suave, in a way that nobody is suave any more. . . .He's ruthless, and willing to do whatever it takes to win, and to prove his superiority. His arrogant swagger isn't just bravado, it's ideological: he believes, deep down, that he's the pinnacle of human. ("Keep Khan")

In this episode, the Enterprise finds an ancient Earth vessel from the 1990s floating in a far-off sector of space. Reading faint signs of life on the vessel, Kirk sends a landing party, including ship historian Marla McGivers, to discover its origin. While turning on the lights to explore the ship, the landing party discovers a group of genetically altered human tyrants from the Eugenics Wars and inadvertently awakens its leader, Khan.

Khan woos McGiver and convinces her to help him take over the Enterprise, awaken his crew, and attempt to conquer the galaxy. Though Khan succeeds in reviving his crew,

6 Meyer also penned the Sherlock Holmes adaptation novel The Seven Percent Solution and the screenplay for its film version.

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Kirk ultimately foils his plans and exiles the group to the distant, densely vegetated, uninhabited planet Ceti Alpha V. As if foretelling the film that would be produced fifteen years later, the episode closes with Spock observing, "it would be interesting, Captain, to return to that world in a hundred years and learn what crop has sprung from the seed you planted today." Fans agreed. Almost as soon as Gene Rodenberry announced a

Star Trek film was in the works in 1975, fan discussion gravitated toward a desire to see more Khan.

In 1975, discussion of the potential for a "Space Seed"-inspired film began in the letterzine7 Halkan Council. One fan speculated that a "Space Seed" follow-up would potentially demonstrate that "perhaps after all the struggles and hardships, Khan and his people and descendants would learn some things about the value of life, and become less arrogant and easier to get along with" (Verba 21). Another noted:

Khan's people pose a dilemma—'twould be equally likely for them to emerge from the planet-taming experience as a tamed and more amiable people or for them to come swarming out stronger than ever for the experience, glowing with tales of their glorious history and ready—possibly able—to take over the galaxy. (Verba 21)

Speculations about the Botany Bay crew's future were also common in fanfictions such a Cheryl Rice's "Space Seed" sequel "To Rule in Hell" (Verba 57). Clearly fans looked forward to hearing more about Khan. While they didn't get their wish in the first film, they finally saw it realized in the second.

Though the story and setting of the second film changed several times before the filmmakers settled on its plot, Khan's presence in it is nearly constant even from the earliest script drafts. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan picks up fifteen years after "Space

7 A type of non-fiction fanzine dedicated to chat among fans. Letterzines were the pre-internet equivalent to online message boards.

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Seed," detailing Khan's fate after Kirk exiled him to Ceti Alpha V. A loose adaptation of

Moby Dick, it sets up Khan as classic anti-hero and builds on the sympathy viewers already had for Khan following "Space Seed." Khan is no ordinary villain, but a brilliant and tragic character on a universal quest for vengeance. The film follows Khan's journey as he sets out to make Kirk pay for abandoning him and his crew to an unstable planet that became an uninhabitable desert less than a year after their exile. As a result of

Kirk's failure to follow up on Khan's progress, Khan lost his wife, Marla McGivers, and most of his crew to the unforgiving climate and the planet's only living indigenous creature, an insect which causes its victims to become insane before dying an excruciating death. As Alan Cerny notes, "Ricardo Montalban is so good as Khan…that

[viewers] sympathize with him a lot more than other sympathetic villains….Khan's anger feels righteous and honest, and Montalban plays Khan as so wounded by his loss that it strips him of reason" ("Class of 82"). Convinced of the nobility of his cause and driven by the desire to avenge his crew, Khan is a particularly sympathetic villain and one Star

Trek fans have remained fascinated with in the years since Wrath.

Additionally, rather than relying on a large budget and overwrought special effects as the first film had, Wrath focuses on the kinds of philosophical issues that Star

Trek is famous for—life, aging, and mortality. Advanced to admiralty, Kirk begins to feel his age and spends much of the film denying his longing to relive his youth and return to the helm of a starship once more while Spock constantly reminds Kirk that his tendency to break rules means he has never had to face death. Meanwhile, Khan, who has faced the deaths of all but a fraction of his crew, sees the Genesis Project, a device designed to create life from barrenness, as a final hope for a better life for his remaining subjects,

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but his desire for vengeance against Kirk subsumes him. While Khan runs willingly into the jaws of death to make Kirk pay, Kirk finally realizes that one cannot escape aging and mortality forever, a realization brought home near the end of the film, when his closest friend, Spock, sacrifices his life to save the Enterprise.

Fans had three years to build excitement and trepidation for the second installment in the film franchise. Early reports that Star Trek II would be closer in tone and subject to the television series than to the first film gave fans hope, and reports that

Harve Bennet had watched nearly every episode of TOS in preparation for his role as producer encouraged fans to believe that the product would reflect Rodenberry's characters and themes accurately. In contrast, some leaks from the film set sparked concern; fans railed at news that DeForest Kelley's Dr. McCoy might have a limited role in the film. The greatest uproar, though, began in June 1981, when an early draft of the film's script was stolen, and fans learned that Spock would die in Star Trek II.

Entertainment Tonight spent three episodes discussing the probability of Spock's death and interviewing crew and fans alike, and both The New York Post and The Wall Street

Journal published feature articles on the fan uproar. A fan group calling itself

"Concerned Supporters of Star Trek" initiated a letter-writing campaign and took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, begging that Spock be spared ("Concerned").

Though the "Concerned Supporters" didn't get their wish, fans who attended early screenings of the film reacted positively, and when Star Trek Welcomittee member Kay

Johnson reported to Entertainment Tonight after a May 8, 1982 early screening, "the fans will love it," anticipation reached a fever pitch (Verba 58). Ultimately, despite a handful of dissenters, fans did love the film, and, as the aforementioned ranking from

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the 2013 convention indicates, that love has only grown in the years since Wrath's release.

The Anatomy of a Fan Hit

Like Star Trek: The Motion Picture before it, Wrath is a traditional continuation of a single, hour-long series episode that plays heavily to nostalgia, layering viewers' own feelings of nostalgia for the television show with its characters' nostalgia for their original time together on the Enterprise. Kirk's longing to leave his admiralty and return to space exploration and his crew's desire to have him back parallel the fans' desire to see the crew together again. Moreover, the introduction of Khan, a respected villain from TOS, links the film explicitly to the series, a connection that was lacking from the initial film. In fact, though the film was well-received by both critics and fans, it is often clear that its producers valued nostalgia over continuity or believability. The most famous instance of this (and one of the primary reasons for some fans' initial negativity) involves Khan's immediate recognition of Commander Chekov after he captures him on Ceti Alpha V.

Khan turns to Captain Clark Terrell, a character introduced in Wrath, and notes, "I don't know you," then turns to Chekov, saying, "but you. I never forget a face. Mister Chekov, isn't it?" Khan's recognition of Chekov gave rise to much complaint among fans given that Chekov did not appear in "Space Seed." In fact, Walter Koenig, the actor who played Chekov, did not join the Star Trek cast until season two, several episodes later.

Continuity issues aside, the nostalgic tone of the film won over fans who did, indeed, feel it was "real Star Trek."

On top of appealing to fans' nostalgia, continuing "Space Seed" made good sense from a fiscal and production point-of-view. TOS had been off the air for thirteen years, the VCR was in its infancy, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, despite its failure

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with critics, gave fans hope for the future of the franchise and left them begging for another film. Furthermore, while the slow pace and delayed narrative action of the first film may have made for good television due to the inherent openness and expansiveness of the medium, they made for a poor film due to that medium's need for concision and contraction. Therefore, expanding on a single episode was not only fiscally sound, it was also generically preferable. This alone did not account for Wrath's success, however. Wrath returned to what most fans believe was the heart of Star Trek, its characters and their relationships. It also expanded the position of women in the Star

Trek universe and created a genuine emotional stake for the viewer.

As with most television series, the heart of Star Trek, whatever its iteration, has always been its characters. As Craig Koban notes:

the key to the original Star Trek TV series—and the subsequent films that germinated in its wake—are held solely within its character dynamics. . . .The best of Star Trek—TV shows and movies—worked most expeditiously when they honed on Captain Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, whose relationships to one another were what really counted. . . .[T]he potency of Star Trek has always been its sense of humanity. ("Star Trek")

In fact, the relatability of its characters was one of Star Trek's primary selling points. In his initial series outline, Rodenberry argued that Star Trek would appeal to a larger audience than most science fiction programs "by avoiding 'way out' fantasy and cerebral science theorem and instead concentrating on problem and peril met by our very human and very identifiable continuing characters" (Whitfield and Rodenberry 26). Ultimately,

Star Trek is a show about people being human and relatable no matter how distant in space or time they might be, and Wrath worked because it forswore the big-budget special effects of its immediate predecessor in favor of the kind of personal concerns that kept fans longing for the show in the first place. As Roger Ebert recognized in his

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review of the film, Wrath of Khan works because "the Star Trek stories have always been best when they centered around their characters. . . .[F]ans of the TV series wanted to see their favorite characters again, and 'Trek II' understood that desire and acted on it." As viewers see Kirk and crew deal with moral dilemmas, aging, and the ramifications of their past actions, they feel as if they are entering a new segment in the life of long-lost friend, in essence, growing with the characters.

While its focus on character feels like a return to form, one of the most readily- apparent changes between "Space Seed," and, indeed, TOS in general, and The Wrath of Khan is the expanded role of women in the film. A longstanding problem for female fans of TOS is the limited roles for women in the show. Early fandom scholars like

Bacon-Smith and Jenkins see this limitation as one of the primary motivations for fanfiction—opening up a place for an audience who feels underrepresented despite the show's vast potential. Jenkins describes both the allure and the frustration of Star Trek for female fans (the most active group of consumer-creators).

A particular fascination of Star Trek. . .appears to be rooted in the way that the program seems to hold out a suggestion of. . .greater and more active involvement for women within the adventure of professional space travel while finally reneging on those promises. ("Star Trek Rerun" 93)

Though Rodenberry tried to place women in roles of authority, the network balked.

Rodenberry recalls that NBC, in rejecting his original Star Trek pilot "The Cage," cited one of the primary causes as the unbelievability of having a logical, dispassionate female as the Enterprise's second-in-command, Number One. Though Spock appeared in the pilot, he was a highly emotional character, and he was not First Officer. The

Spock viewers know today has filled the rational supporting role that Rodenberry intended to give Number One, who acts as the voice of reason in the pilot episode

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(Inside). This leads to what Francesca Coppa calls "the displaced woman" at the center of Star Trek. Number One is excised and replaced with Yeoman Janice Rand and

Nurse Christine Chapel (played by Number One actress Majel Barrett), who are primarily defined by their unrequited affections for Kirk and Spock respectively. The only female officer on the bridge of the Enterprise (the center of activity and authority),

Communications Officer Nyota Uhura, is little more than a glorified switchboard operator.

Marla McGivers exemplifies the problematic portrayals of women in TOS. In

"Space Seed," McGivers exudes dependence and desire for a domineering man, a role which Khan, a man who, in the series, represents a time when men were more virile and controlling, easily fulfills. Keeping in mind Jenkins' postulate that TOS encouraged fan activity due to its tension between progress and foreclosure of progress, as Marla

McGivers is the only woman featured prominently in the episode, "Space Seed" forecloses more than it opens. Wrath, on the other hand, does exactly the opposite.

Perhaps, then, one cause for Wrath's popularity is its expansion of women's roles

(a trend that would continue in TNG, DS9, and VOY). The film opens with a woman at the helm of the Enterprise. Though viewers later discover that she is a command trainee, Lt. Saavik (Mr. Spock's protégé) is depicted as well-educated, confident, competent, and thoroughly prepared to begin her own command. Furthermore, this is the first glimpse viewers have of a woman in the captain's chair, showing that the world of Wrath is a world of increased possibilities for female officers. Additionally, Dr. Carol

Marcus, one of the most prominent scientists in the universe, is a woman. Marcus is the creator of the Genesis device, an invention so groundbreaking that her son notes that

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she will be remembered as the equal of Newton and Einstein. She is a strong woman who leads a group of genius scientists and mathematicians in creating the most innovative terraforming device the universe has seen. Moreover, she does so as a single woman who successfully balanced a career and motherhood without any help from the father of her son. Both Saavik and Marcus are a far cry from the submissive

Marla McGivers, and in Wrath viewers see the potential that was foreclosed in TOS finally realized.

Another factor that has endeared Wrath to fans is its high emotional stakes. The film invites fans to relive the glory days of spacefaring with its characters, but it also asks them to embrace aging and loss with them, and it does so in a way that seems irrevocable. At the time the film began casting, Leonard Nimoy had expressed a reluctance to play Spock again, wanting to break away from the iconic role. The only way producers were able to convince him to sign on for the film was by promising to kill the character. The film placed fans, who learned both of Khan's role and Spock's rumored death before the film wrapped production, between two emotional poles— excitement over the return of a favorite villain and despair at the possibility of losing a long-treasured character.

Today, so many characters are killed permanently or killed and resurrected that the emotional impact of killing a character has lost much of its power. In 1982, though, it was highly unusual for a franchise to kill a major character, and the shock and loss that came from doing so was deeply felt. Alan Cerny recalls the initial moviegoer reaction to

Spock's death:

In 1982, audiences weren't given that kind of reprieve, even with the extraneous coffin shot at the end. I remember hearing a lot of crying in the

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audience that night, and the only reason I didn't join in at the time was because I wasn't as familiar with the character as I am now. But Spock's sacrifice should resonate with anyone who has ever lost a friend to tragedy. . .It's a moment of great nobility for the character. . .Spock's death just helps accentuate the bigger themes of The Wrath of Khan—the fear of dying, the fear of growing old, and not serving your purpose. . . .The Wrath of Khan means something. It takes us on an emotional journey, and it isn't just a thrill ride. It's rich with feeling, honest in its portrayal of mortality, age, and friendship, and it respects the audience enough to take them through those feelings without dumbing down to them. ("Class of 82")

Though Spock's death seems less final in retrospect given his return in Star Trek III:

The Search for Spock, that film had not yet been commissioned, and at the time of

Wrath's release, both producers and viewers believed Spock's death was final. Thus, longtime viewers experienced a genuine sense of loss.

Though it does share the interest in character that is at the core of the database,

Wrath of Khan is not a referential adaptation. Produced before the rise of internet fandom, it does not include the sly references or the gamelike attitude that characterize referential works. Rather, Wrath relies on allusions to TOS and to literary classics. This ties Wrath to what Azuma notes is the first generation of otaku, or fan consumer- creator, culture, which struggles to balance the emerging database structure of fandom with the tradition of the grand narrative.8 During the early years of postmodernity,

Azuma posits, otakus worked from a desire to balance the earlier tree structure of the grand narrative with the emerging database model. Unlike the database model, where the inner layer is composed not of a narrative but of fragments that do not represent a whole but, rather, work as elements which consumer/creators can draw on to create small narratives, in the tree model, small surface narratives acted as a way into the

8 Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter, the parallel trajectories of Star Trek fandom and adaptation and Azuma's timeline of changes in otaku consumption warrant further exploration.

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larger inner layer composed of the grand narrative(35). Both models are present in

Wrath of Khan. The film acts as a way into the grand narratives of Moby Dick and

Paradise Lost through its consistent allusions to both works and its narrative parallels to

Melville's novel. As such, it reflects an older model of consumption. Khan's quest for revenge against Kirk, for instance, mimics Ahab's pursuit of the whale, and, as the shot of the Melville's novel on Khan's bookshelf on Ceti Alpha V reveals, Khan has been reading Moby Dick as he has been stoking his desire for retribution. He vows his vengeance with a modified quote from the novel: "I'll chase him round the moons of

Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up." Conversely, Wrath's connections to the Star Trek universe align more closely to the database model, relying on not just one small narrative as a point of entry, but encompassing odds and ends of multiple Star Trek episodes in addition to its precursor

"Space Seed."

The Wrath of Fans

Even after Wrath, Khan lived on in the Star Trek franchise through a well- received trilogy of novels detailing his rise, fall, and eventual exile, The Eugenics Wars:

The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, volumes one and two, and To Reign in Hell:

The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh. The concept of genetic manipulation and its perils also became a consistent theme in later series. Given fans' affection for the character of

Khan, he must have seemed an ideal candidate to follow up the success of the franchise reboot.

Unfortunately, several factors converged to turn fans against Star Trek: Into

Darkness. Among the primary issues that caused fans to reject the remake were its poor representation of women, its whitewashing of Khan and its failure to convey his

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perceived character, and its lack of originality. Producers' dishonesty with fans and refusal to admit that the film was a remake of Wrath only served to exacerbate fans' annoyance.

Like the Star Trek reboot that preceded it, STID is a referential adaptation.

However, unlike ST09, STID did little to delight fans. On the contrary, the most devoted

Star Trek fans reacted most vehemently against it. Where ST09 borrowed references from Star Trek films, series, and episodes and collected them around an entirely new story, STID attempted to affix its references to a loose adaptation of The Wrath of Khan.

Attempting to balance referentiality with adaptation of a specific story ultimately shortchanges both elements. Khan becomes a caricature—neither mere reference nor fully-sketched character. As a result, neither the story nor the character fully engages viewers. This is most true for viewers familiar with Wrath, whose expectations for the character were matched only by their trepidation.

Unlike the wake of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, fan reaction against Khan appearing in the sequel to ST09 was surprisingly negative. Where fans usually relish repetition, they dreaded the idea of a retelling of the Khan story. ST09 won fans over with its new take on the well-trodden ground of Star Trek, but fans feared that STID would lose that momentum by including Khan. As Charlie Jane Anders notes, "it's hard to imagine a storyline starring Khan that wouldn't feel a bit warmed-over. It would be the opposite of the first movie: a few fresh ideas, wrapped around a core of fan-pleasing deja vu" ("Keep Khan"). Fans feared that producers would reproduce Khan to please fans but eliminate the depth that made the character so well loved in the first place.

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While STID scored with critics and casual viewers, many avid fans, after seeing the film, felt their fears were well founded.

Where Have All the Women Gone?

If Wrath exemplifies the progression in representations of women that female

Star Trek fans had longed for, STID signifies a return to limitations. It not only features fewer female characters than Wrath, but it also gives those characters less to do and undercuts their self-motivation by tying their limited moments of action to men.

Furthermore, women are reduced to sex objects. The pantsuits and professional uniforms of 1982's Wrath are gone, replaced with sleeveless minidresses and gratuitous underwear shots. Far from considering the importance of such a move for female fans, costume designer Michael Kaplan confirms that gratuitous scenes are included specifically to titillate the film's perceived mostly-male audience: "Last time, [Uhura actress] Zoe [Saldana] needed to wear underwear, and this time it was [Carol Marcus actress] Alice Eve's turn. You know, it's a rather large male fanbase, and JJ [Abrams] wanted to appeal to that" (qtd. in Nealey). The concern in STID, then, is more to pander to a perceived fanbase than to embrace the progress the franchise has made over the past four decades, a priority that is apparent in its two female characters.

At the time of Wrath's release, Carol Marcus was the most progressive female in the Star Trek universe. Though she is one of Kirk's many ex-lovers, shortly after their affair and giving birth to his son, she asked Kirk to stay away from both her and the boy so he would not be a bad influence in his son's life. As a single mother, she managed to balance raising a child with becoming the most respected molecular biologist in the universe and inventing "Genesis," a terraforming device capable of creating new life from inert mass. Marcus is capable of commanding a team of prominent scientists as

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well a cadre of Starfleet officers assigned to find a planet on which to test the Genesis device. A far cry from Janice Rand and Christine Chapel, Marcus represented a new progressive, independent kind of woman in Star Trek, one that opened the door to the many strong female representations that followed.

The representation of Carol Marcus in STID, however, caused significant fan and critical backlash. An applied physicist and advanced weapons specialist, Dr. Marcus stows aboard the Enterprise to find out what is in the torpedoes that her father, Admiral

Alexander Marcus, Kirk's nemesis, transferred to the ship. Her most prominent actions are disarming a torpedo, attempting (unsuccessfully) to dissuade her father from attacking Kirk and the Enterprise, and telling Kirk not to look at her as she strips down to her underwear so she can change clothes. Understandably, female fans were disappointed. Felicia Day calls Marcus "the worst damsel in distress ever."

I kept waiting for her turn, waiting for her to not be the victim, to be a bit cleverer, to add to the equation in a "yeah you go girl" way but no, she was there to be sufficiently sexy that Kirk would acknowledge her existence, to be pretty, to serve the plot. I loved her bob. That's it. What if she had been a less attractive woman, older, overweight? A tomboy? Wouldn't have that been a tad more interesting choice? Or at least give her a moment where she's not a princess waiting to be saved. ("Star Trek Movie")

Peggy Korpela also notes that Marcus "gets no backstory, other than the fact that she is the daughter of a general and is really good looking. And in the end, both those attributes completely overshadow the fact that she's a physicist and weapons expert."

Rebecca Deatsman adds, "Carol Marcus. . .strips for no apparent reason other than to pander to the fanboys in the audience. . . .For a woman who's supposed to be a brilliant scientist, Carol seems to spend most of her time running, screaming, and undressing."

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In the end, Marcus is more similar to the Janice Rands or Christine Chapels of TOS than she is to her namesake, representing a regression for the franchise.

Despite being a character who received at least limited development in ST09,

Uhura is similarly restricted in STID. She is one of the United Federation of Planets' leading linguists, yet her character is relegated to an emotional barometer for her boyfriend, Spock, and a deus-ex-machina during his final battle with Khan. As with

Carol Marcus, this new characterization undermines the progress that the original character represented. Even though Uhura's role in TOS was limited, that a female

African American bridge officer made it past network executives at all represented significant progress. As Triona Guidry notes, though, STID forgoes Uhura's independence to make her little more than an accessory to Spock.

We like Star Trek because it has strong women. Gene Roddenberry's original pilot had one of the series' strongest women in Number One, its first officer. Although this was too much in the 1960s for chauvinistic network execs, the series slipped one over with Uhura, whose short skirt belied her intelligence, wit, and talent. That's why I'm saddened to see Nu-Uhura reduced to lip quivering and teary eyes as her primary means of communication. In STID she exists solely to express Spock's emotions for him, so we can see he is a Deeply Troubled Vulcan. ("Star Trek Into Darkness")

Even with her limited role, Uhura was important to female Star Trek fans, many of whom were involved in the sciences themselves. Her presence on the bridge and her competence, imperfect as it was, meant that perhaps in the future they might be seen as equals of the men in their fields. The new Uhura, on the other hand, makes them concerned that their forward progression has been halted.

The regressive position of women in STID matters not because of its link to

Wrath (Uhura, in fact, barely appears in the film) but because of the contraction of the textual database it represents and the degree to which it violates viewers' understanding

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of the textual universe. Successful adaptations, even those that are traditionally nostalgic or that limit the scope of the material in some way, contain elements of expansion that enhance the textual universe and viewers' experience of it. By limiting the roles of women—roles which have been expanding in the textual database for more than forty years—STID creates dissonance within viewers, especially female fans.

While this version of Star Trek represents an alternate timeline, that timeline is created far into the future, at a time when the values and codes of Starfleet as they exist in the franchise's other iterations were already established. Yet STID's representations of women suggest that viewers' understanding of the textual universe is flawed. As Guidry notes, this is not the Starfleet "where women like Janeway and Kira kick as much ass as the men. This is not a Starfleet that will develop a Borg Queen-defeating Janeway.

She'll be designated some desk job at Starfleet HQ where her talents are wasted."

Despite the many female admirals, captains, and warlords in the Star Trek database,

STID depicts only two female officers on the Enterprise and not a single female among the officers or admiralty at Starfleet headquarters, leaving fans to reconcile their understanding of women's role in the Federation with this new depiction.

The Whitewashing of Khan Noonien Singh

While the limited, retrograde roles of women in Star Trek: Into Darkness is one of the prime sources of critique, another significant concern among critics is the whitewashing of one of Star Trek's most intelligent and alluring villains. One of the greatest allures of Star Trek, both originally and today, is its multiculturalism. In the

1960s, Gene Rodenberry had to fight network executives to get his multicultural vision of the future on the air, often directly defying their orders. Believing that humans could never make it into space if they could not make it past issues of race and gender,

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Rodenberry painted an idealistic portrait of a truly diverse bridge crew that included

Americans, Asians, Africans, Europeans, aliens, and, during the height of the cold war, even a Russian.

The embodiment of Rodenberry's vision of a more accepting future is the Vulcan philosophy of infinite diversity in infinite combinations (IDIC). Part marketing opportunity part philosophy, IDIC came to represent everything that fans loved about Star Trek and became a rallying cry for the show's egalitarian ideals. As a 1969 advertisement for IDIC pendants describes it,

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations represents a Vulcan belief that beauty, growth, progress—all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of Man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences as well as learning to recognize our similarities. ("IDIC")

Though it was partly a marketing ploy, IDIC did represent the ideals that Rodenberry practiced in casting and in writing. When NBC attempted to persuade Rodenberry to eliminate Spock and Uhura, because network executives believed that viewers would not respond to an alien or an African American woman in positions of power,

Rodenberry fought to keep them. Thus, it was in keeping with Rodenberry's embracing of diversity that he wrote one of the greatest political and intellectual geniuses of Earth history—a member of the master race—as a Sikh and cast a Latino actor to play him at a time when few Latinos on television were portrayed as anything more than unskilled laborers and south Asian characters were not represented at all.9

9 While the practice of swapping persons of color from one race for another is itself a problematic practice, the social context of 1967 is significantly removed from that of today. In 1967, few in the media business realized how racist the practice was—today, media producers are much more aware of the issue.

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Many Star Trek fans are invested in Rodenberry's view of a diverse and equitable future and cite it as one of the main reasons they became interested in the program.

Therefore, Englishman Benedict Cumberbatch's casting as Khan caused considerable outrage. While producers were secretive about Cumberbatch's character and denied that he was Khan, rumors quickly swirled, and they resulted in vehement online objections. Fans started websites to protest the whitewashing of Khan and suggest

Indian actors who could play the character, noting that producer J.J. Abrams was passing up "a chance to show that Indians can be superhuman. And villainous. But in the best possible way" (Khanna). Marissa Sammy of Racebending.com called the move

"an enormous and horribly ironic step backwards. For Star Trek, for media representation, and for the vision of a future where we have transcended systemic, racist erasure" and one that was made worse by the studio's attempts to hide it by temporarily renaming Cumberbatch's character John Harrison and insisting in interviews

(both with producers and actors) that he would not be Khan.

Since the Eugenics Wars of the Star Trek universe took place before the timeline split that created the reboot universe, Khan should remain the same even if the his ship is discovered by someone other than Kirk and his crew, but the film offers no explanation for the change in Khan's ethnicity. Nor is Khan the prime villain in the film.

He is, rather, a tool for Admiral Marcus in his fight to militarize Starfleet, a demotion fans found less than convincing. Given the importance of character continuity to the database, both of these changes rankled fans. As Chapters 1 through 3 have established, character is at the core of the database structure that represents both referential adaptation and fan consumption. To keep fans engaged, an adapter must be

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true to the characters viewers love. A minor character with limited defining traits, such as Christine Chapel or Janice Rand, can easily be redrawn due to the little information established about him or her and the unlikeliness of viewer investment in his/her persona. A character like Khan, though, while beginning as simply a villain of the week, has come to iconic stature through his emotional depth and his increasing importance in the canon and the timeline. Even in his first appearance, he was better drawn than many of the recurring secondary characters, and subsequent appearances in both film and novels have made him an enduring force in the Star Trek universe. In addition to playing down Khan's mental and physical allure and his pride, by far his most defining characteristics, STID diminishes his motivations by placing him under the thumb of another villain. As Charlie Jane Anders points out, the Khan of STID is reactive rather than zealous ("Star Trek"). He spends more time trying to overcome Marcus than he does making plans of his own, and thus neither his genius nor his ambition are obvious in the film. Aside from his name, there is very little that makes this character Khan.

Kendra Hunter's advice to writers rings true in this case:

A writer, either professional or amateur, must realize that she. . .is not omnipotent. She cannot force her characters to do as she pleases. . . .The writer must have respect for her characters or those created by others that she is using, and have a full working knowledge of each before committing her words to paper. (qtd. Jenkins 487)

Merely referring to a person by a well-known name does not make him or her that character. As Azuma suggests, characters, and specifically character elements, are at the core of otaku consumption. The appeal of specific characters lies in a combination of precise elements that appeal to fans (42-8). Thus, a memorable character like Khan is not just a name but a sum of his specific traits. Later works may add to or accentuate these traits, but if any of these fundamental traits are stripped away, what is left is an

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unconvincing replica of Khan with no character depth or continuity. It is this driving force that Pugh refers to when she notes that, among fans, no amount of literary prowess can overcome an author's failure to be true to character (70-1). The failure of the STID writers to incorporate Khan's most definitive characteristics violates the core of the database, guaranteeing its failure with most avid fans.

One of the primary characteristics of a successful referential adaptation is its ability to incorporate what has come before while adding to the database and creating new entry points and avenues for interpretation. Star Trek: Into Darkness violates this expansive drive by negating the progress that came before it. Decades of commercial and fan adaptations and continuations have established the importance of gender and racial equality in the Star Trek universe, and stripping STID of that equality creates a dissonance within the database. Since the database is by its nature expansive, a work that contracts the textual universe or threatens erasure of its previous expansions violates its very core and does not have a clear place in its structure. It may exist as a small surface narrative, but little is left to download to the inner layer. Thus, it finds no place in the database's ongoing growth. Likewise, stripping a character of his most defining characteristics contracts rather than expands the database. Thus, it makes no lasting impact on the textual database and causes dissonance with fans who look to increase their knowledge of the character and see this loss of meaning as a violation of their understanding of the universe.

The Perils of Fidelity

Though Star Trek relies on viewers' nostalgia, it does not, like many other oft- adapted works, feature frequent repetition. Unlike the previously discussed fans of literary adaptations, who tend to value close repetition, the television fans who devote

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their time to Star Trek value innovation. After all, while television has multiple episodes and seasons to tell stories that can span several hours, films are limited in scope, making it necessary to pare down television stories to adapt them to movies.

Furthermore, when so many years of fanfiction have managed to avoid rehashing old episodes/films, fans rather expect producers to do better. Where Star Trek: Into

Darkness went wrong with many fans was in trying to directly repeat a story from the original Star Trek series and its corresponding films.

Though ideas and themes are often repeated across the Star Trek universe, specific stories seldom are. Concepts originated in TOS, such as its overbreeding tribbles, the darkly-twisted mirror universe, and the perils of genetic manipulation, appear again and again in intervening series, but none of those appearances attempt to repeat the stories told in the original episodes. Even DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations," a

"remake" of the TOS episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" was less a remake and more a reference, as it used computer generated graphics to place DS9 characters in the background of the original episode to play out a B-story that involved traveling back to the time of "The Trouble with Tribbles." While the newer characters showed up in scenes from the original episode, they interacted only loosely with its narrative and used it primarily as fodder for references to how Star Trek has changed over the years and to common fan observations about the series. For instance, the modern Klingon Worf (who looks very different from the human appearance of the early Klingons thanks to advances in makeup artistry), when asked why his ancestors looks so much like humans, replies "we do not discuss it with outsiders," officers O'Brien and Bashir profess confusion over how the uniform color designations have changed and how

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much more scantily clad women were during that period, and science officer Dax gushes over finally getting to meet her famous crush, Spock, in person. ST09 included just enough of this kind of reference and repetition to tie it clearly to its predecessor, but it resisted rehashing the stories TOS told. While fans had some reservations about

ST09, overall, they embraced the film because it represented new potential and interesting, fresh directions for the franchise while tying itself clearly to its predecessor in ways they were well-versed in previous series. It worked on levels that pleased both newcomers and fans of the franchise.

Part of the disappointment of STID is its abandonment of this well-established pattern. Where fans saw a wealth of potential in the first reboot, they saw a tired rehash in the second, particularly in its failure to invent new story lines and characters of its own. Screenwriter Alex Kurtzman claims that

By creating an alternate timeline, we are allowing familiar characters to come into the world and have very recognizable traits, and yet have their stories be somewhat different, and therefore unpredictable. The whole point of the alternate timeline was so that an audience can watch the movie and not know where it was headed. The jeopardy could always be real. (Vary)

Nonetheless, STID repeated the most emotional moments of Wrath with very little novelty, leaving fans feeling shortchanged on the innovation the new films claim to bring.

Comments from screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci suggest that the two tried to maintain a balance between a new story and references to TOS and specifically to "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan. According to Orci, they found themselves "designing a story that existed as its own solid story" and "incorporat[ing]

Khan into the mix in a way that felt reverent and appropriate with that story" (Vary). The

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result is a semi-original story about an admiral who wants to militarize Starfleet and will go to any lengths to do so combined with a hodge podge of references to Star Trek series and films and a partial retelling of Wrath of Khan that repeats Spock's death scene near the end, merely reversing the roles of Spock and Kirk and resurrecting Kirk

(via a tribble and Khan's genetically modified blood) before the end of the film, thereby blunting the emotional impact that its predecessor boasted.

The first half of the film offers some promise. It introduces what seems to be an original story about the Enterprise attempting to capture John Harrison, a rogue agent from the secret Starfleet security force Section 31 who has perpetuated a terrorist attack against the Federation. STID is the first Star Trek film to refer to Section 31, an organization introduced in Deep Space Nine; thus its integration is a refreshing new angle that appeals to fans of the later series. It also incorporates playful winks to fans, such as Chekov's abject terror when Kirk asks him to put on a red shirt and head down to engineering. In TOS, nearly every minor character who wore a red shirt on an away mission died on that mission10, and Chekov's seeming knowledge of this is a clever metatextual moment. However, once it is revealed that John Harrison is actually Khan

Noonien Singh, the film devolves into pure fanservice in its attempt to recreate the emotional impact of Wrath. Without the loaded background of "Space Seed" behind him, however, this Khan's motivations are unclear. Furthermore, without a well- established friendship between Kirk and Spock to add emotional gravitas to Spock's feelings, his reaction to Kirk's death appears overblown. Kirk's resurrection by the end of the film further moderates its emotional impact.

10 So common was this trope that the term "redshirt" has come to refer to any extra or minor character on any program whose sole purpose seems to be dying by the end of the episode.

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Part original story, part referential adaptation, and part remake, Star Trek: Into

Darkness fails to navigate between the inner and outer levels of the database. One the one hand, it attempts to connect to the inner layer by referencing disparate elements from across the Star Trek universe but it abandons those elements by the second half of the film. On the other, it ties itself explicitly to a single small narrative along the outer layer and attempts to merely repeat that narrative while undercutting the deeper connections to the inner layer that made that small narrative successful in the first place. Paired with its contractions of gender, race, and character, the film ultimately does little to please fans or add to the textual universe.

While referential adaptations appeal to contemporary consumers through their cleverness, their breadth, and their focus on characters and relationships, as Star Trek:

Into Darkness demonstrates, they can easily miss the mark. It is not enough to merely throw a group of well-known characters together and make clever allusions to earlier works. To overcome stagnation and move beyond nostalgia, a referential adaptation must rise above the level of fan service and attune to the inner workings of the textual database, understanding what both new and returning viewers value and using those elements to create a small narrative that accentuates the textual universe and impels the database to further expansion. A small narrative unmoored from this expansive drive is ultimately devoid of meaning and quickly loses its relevance in favor of works that add meaning to the universe and provide viewers with new insights into the textual database.

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CHAPTER 5 THE RELEVANCE OF REFERENCE

Though fidelity arguments have long held sway over adaptation studies, scholars can no longer afford to ignore adaptations that do away with faithfulness and prestige in favor of a more open structure that draws on textual databases and a breadth of insider knowledge. As works like Lost in Austen, Sherlock, and Star Trek (2009) demonstrate, these types of adaptations, which employ the tactics of non-commercial fan adapters, are only becoming more prevalent as internet fan culture becomes a more powerful force in the media landscape. Indeed, if the inaugural MTV Fandom Awards held in July

2014 are any indication, fandom will only increase in importance in the foreseeable future, pushing more adaptations of this sort to prominence.

Given the growing visibility of fan-like adaptations, implementing a theoretical model driven by fan consumption will allow adaptation scholars to explore this new proliferation of works in ways that fidelity scholarship is ill-equipped to manage. Hiroki

Azuma's model of database consumption provides such a framework. Because

Azuma's theory studies the way fans create work from existing textual universes, it is well suited to analyze contemporary adaptations that utilize the strategies of fanwork.

Drawing on Derridean theories of the archontic and his own supposition that the grand narrative has collapsed only to be replaced by a series of small narratives made up from fragments of stories and characters rather than complete existing narratives, Azuma posits a database structure of fan consumption and creation that decenters originary works by viewing them as only one of several combinations of textual fragments.

Azuma's double layer structure separates narratives from fragments, moving the narratives themselves to the outer layer of the database, where authors download from

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the fragmentary information found at the inner level and re-upload new structures and information created in their narrative combinations back into the inner level. Thus, the inner level of the database, from which fans create their adaptations, does not contain any completed narratives—it contains only pieces derived from the array of works that congregate around the originary text, including adaptations, fan reactions, and critical studies. Therefore, fans adapt not from single narratives, but from the entire textual database, using its many elements as a broad frame of reference.

Many contemporary adaptations work this way as well. Because these types of adaptations rely not on reverence to a single originary source but rather to an array of references within the textual universe, I have dubbed them "referential" adaptations.

Instead of narrative fidelity, referential adaptations feature a breadth of references to works across the textual database and a gamelike attitude that encourages readers and viewers to take a less reverential approach toward the originary work in favor of seeking out references and in-jokes. They also focus on character continuity and relationships over strict observance of narrative faithfulness. Finally, they employ a sense of modernity that is often translated through saturation of contemporary media even in non-contemporary settings.

As the foregoing discussion has illustrated, referential adaptations do not forsake fidelity altogether. The force that holds the database structure together is character, and successful referential adaptations maintain character fidelity rather than narrative fidelity. They often elaborate on characters or incorporate character elements from an array of small narratives, but they are largely faithful to the characters as drawn in

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canon or as agreed upon by fanon. Few referential adaptations downplay or erase character elements, and those that do raise vehement reactions from fans.

Medium also matters in referential adaptations. Prestigious literary works like

Pride and Prejudice tend to leave fewer perceived gaps for referential adapters to exploit. However, as a multiplicity of analogous filmic and televisual adaptations arise in response to such a work, gaps between the originary text and the adaptations or within the adaptations themselves invite further elaboration, eventually leading to more entry points into the textual database and more referential works. Conversely, serial works, like Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories or televisual texts, are replete with the kind of textual gaps fans and adapters thrive on filling in, thus inviting immediate referential adaptation, as the instant (same day) proliferation of fanworks based on

Steven Moffat's Sherlock illustrates.

Ultimately, the referential adaptive mode is one of expansion. While fidelity scholarship often focuses on the original and which elements of it an adaptation leaves out, scholarship in the referential mode can focus on the adaptation and how it draws in elements from disparate sources. A referential adaptation is never beholden to a single source. Additionally, successful referential adaptations comment on and add to the textual database through their recombination of sources, feeding the database's drive to constantly change and expand.

Fidelity criticism still has value. However, if referential, fan-like adaptations continue to flourish, as they seem poised to do, scholars must employ a new theoretical framework for exploring them that understands their overlaps with fan culture and consumption. Azuma's database provides such a system, if not a perfect one. The

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limitations of the database model—its tendency to be monolithic, its ahistoricism, its erasure of notions of value—must be further explored. Nonetheless, utilizing the database model in adaptation studies represents an important step toward better understanding the structure of adaptations that break from narrative fidelity to their source texts.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Tania Darlington earned her bachelor's degree with honors in English and master's degree with distinction in English Literature at California State University,

Chico. She received her doctorate in English from the University of Florida in 2014. Her research interests include film, television, adaptation, transmedia theory, gender studies, and fandom studies. She is currently an assistant professor at Santa Fe

College in Gainesville, Florida.

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