Nicole Beharie WCE

In “The New World”, the 10th episode of the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic horror drama The Walking Dead, showrunner Scott M. Gimple gave those of us who had been waiting for three long seasons all we have ever wanted. In the episode, characters Rick (played by Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) sat on a sofa laughing over a pack of breath mints. Still smiling, with their hands entwined, they leaned towards each other, and kissed.

Finally, we breathed, overdramatically, as “Richonne” was made canon (to the chagrin of a subsection of the show’s fans). GIFs of the moments leading up to and after the kiss arrived on Tumblr almost instantaneously. On YouTube, ecstatic fans posted reaction videos, shock and delight written into their expressions. And slowly but surely, the fanfiction engine rooms for the good ship Richonne cranked up to propel fans to dizzying new heights. Two days after the episode aired, I logged on to fanfiction.net (and Archive of Our Own) for the first time in years, and gorged on all the Michonne fanfic I’d (clearly) been hungering for. Almost all lapsed productions surged back to life with new chapters; reinvigorated by the passionate and tender lip lock, the muse was in a purple patch again, and new fics (shorthand for fanfiction stories) sprung up with frightening haste. It had only taken a kiss in a zombie apocalypse.

That kiss would go on to be reimagined, over and over and over again, with writers taking on all sorts of literary devices to flesh out that two-minute scene and what followed into literally millions of words.

Fanfiction as a byproduct of one art form (a TV show, a book, a film, and so on) is perhaps one of the purest “consequences” in pop culture: While Star Trek fanfic is the modern jump-off point for modern analyses (and Kirk/Spock remains the gold standard of slashfic, i.e. fanfiction with characters of the same sex), it existed in decades prior. Its purpose is simple: If you love it, write (more of) it. Necessarily derivative, it is nevertheless a distinct art form in its own right, and interestingly, it is a movement overwhelmingly crewed by women.

Fanfiction’s function as a creative outlet – as pleasure for pleasure’s sake – is the one unchanging feature of the art form. Modern fanfic writers do it because they are among the savviest of pop culture consumers out there: They understand the tropes, the constraints, and even the industry process. These writers exist to broaden and further furnish the universes of their fandoms.

This moment feels like a feverish high point of expanded diversity on screen: People of colour (and black women in particular) have been enjoying an increase in both visibility and variety on television. It makes sense that the explosion of (Richonne) joy that catapulted me back into the waters of fanfiction coincides with an explosion in fanfiction starring black female characters and written by black women. But we are still dealing in partially built worlds – even the likes of Shonda, Issa, and Michaela Coel (in the UK) can only do so much – so it is still up to black fangirls to build up the remaining parts of their missing worlds (and the characters who inhabit them) in fanfiction.

In these stories, black women get to be more than just platonic friends and trusted advisers. They are more than just cogs in the wheel to keep the story moving, and they get to sin and come back from it, with rich and complex redemption arcs. They also get to be playful and fun, and flawed. Importantly, they also get to self-define their sexiness, and are uncomplicatedly desired without harking to either hyper- or de-sexualisation. In these small ways, fanfiction (especially as written by black women and girls) is the perfect vessel to advance the much-needed view that black women’s lives are more complex than films and television would have us believe. In the larger picture, these fics are acts of radical self-love and self-determination.

Nicole Beharie (@nikkibeharie), Alfre Woodard (@alfrewoodard), Laverne Cox (@lavernecox), &Danai Gurira (@danaigurira) BTS of Essence Magazine’s October 2014 cover shoot.

*via Lacy Redway: #Tbt to the Women in Hollywood cover shoot with Essence Magazine.