Salt and Fury By Liz Shipton

 If you like it, put wings on it

A (very brief) history of Wingfic

My very unexpected rabbit hole dive to learn exactly what, and why, wingfics are a thing, began to TikTok.  Of course it did.  A few months ago I stumbled upon a creator @thatonegaycousin_ who while talking about A/B/O aka Omega verse, ask exactly what Wingfic is.  It's notoriety in the different fandom spaces is undeniable, but getting a tangible answer as to why and how it something that takes a lot more leg work.  I had responded with just what I knew off of the top of my head at the time, but that got me curios.  Where exactly did this strangely wonderful subgenre of fanfiction come from?

To start my journey I hit up my favorite place to go AO3, and began looking through what exactly was trending in the Wingfic scene these days.  It was mostly what I would expect, a lot of Supernatural, a fair amount of Good Omens, Sherlock, and MCU.  Surprisingly Video Blogging RPF and Minecraft the video game also had top billing when it came to sheer number of flics.  More so Minecraft than Video Blogging RPF, but we'll get into that later.

Top fandoms by number of fics

Even though I have not really interacted with the Supernatural or Sherlock fandoms in a while, the newest Wingfics in each category seemed to be along the vein of what I remember from the post SuperWhoLock era.  The idea of what a Wingfic is for both has seemed to largely codify into a few main types, but this could largely be because they are newer writers in that particular subgenre and are heavily influenced by the going interpretations in Wingfic.  I'll admit I didn't look at every profile to see who was a seasoned fanfiction writer, and who just started posting two months ago.

Once I'd spent a few hours looking around, I headed over to my next favorite spot to find out exactly where everything comes from, Fanlore.  If you ever want to find out some piece of random fandom knowledge, chances are Fanlore has you covered.  I've only ever seen one or two things that haven't had articles, and trust me when I tell you they are very niche items.

The article on Wings in fandom is actually very detailed, and it has a lot of links leading towards other articles, and more information.  I'll save you the trouble and break down all of it in a concise way.  As best as anyone can tell, wings being added to characters in fandom began in The Professionals fandom.  The Professionals was a sort of secret agent show that ran in Britain during the 1970s-1980s.  I wasn't able to find any concrete information on how it was in the fandom, or how wide spread it was.  Take this as just another urban legend where fanfiction is concerned.

We have a much more concrete appearance of wings in Marilyn Cole's fanart from the late 1980's.  In my TikTok I mention and show her drawing from 1987, but her first had actually appeared the year before.  None of her work is exactly SFW, so click on the links at your own discretion.  It ran mostly in Trekkie fanzines, specifically in Naked Times and Styx and Stones.  You can guess by the name of the first one, exactly what kind of content it was geared towards.

After the craze of Trekkie themed fan magazines had died down be the late '80's, to early '90's, the X-Files fandom picked up the slack for a few years, namely with the creating team called The Theban Band. (Click on this link at your own discretion, not SFW).  Known for their photo manipulations, almost exclusively of Slash pairings, wings made on appearance specifically in their Mulder/Krycek art work.  This means that they either picked it up from earlier fandom zines, or they happened to stumble on to the idea all of their own.

I mentioned very briefly at the beginning of my YouTube video, that some part of me thought that maybe this was connected to religious trauma, or working through the conflicting emotions people sometimes have about certain things dealing with religion.  I'm not an expert, and I don't know if there was some sort of psycho-sexual thing going on here, but the fact that it seems to be very clearly Christian interpretations of angelic wings, and Slash pairings is fascinatingly. 

I'm going to glaze over Wingfic popping up in Anime fandoms here.  Most of it appeared in fandoms where characters having wings was not that unusual, and I think I need to do a deep dive with the help of google translate into some Japanese fanfiction before I can give a complete answer to this how I want to.  Keep an eye out for updates!

So instead I'm going to very briefly talk about Popsplash.  I saw briefly, because it does deserve it's own article, on top of key honorable mentions in the RPF sphere.  The best that I can tell Popsplash became a melding point of sorts, combining Anime fans with pop music fans, and much later Lotrips, which was RPF specifically for the actors who played in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  The early 2000's were a strange time, and you just sort of had to live then to understand exactly how all of it works together.

From there most fandom recording sites, like FanLore, just say that it disseminated out through fandom from there.  I believe it's morphing into Veela AUs and others of the like in the HP verse and others helped to keep the notion going.  I say this because there appears to be a continuation and expanding of the lore, and what is and is not considered part of this subgenre.  This denotes a continuation of a pervious interpretation, rather than things growing organically completely separated from one another.

Horn and tail fics are going to be their own separate thing, and while they predate their inclusion in the SPN fandom, I think their tying to Wingfic has a lot to do with how that fandom interpreted them and added to the mythos due to the canonical aspects of the source material.

All and all, Wingfic in a fascinatingly bit of cultural phenomenon.  Not only because of it's nebulas origins, but because it is one of the longest running Pan-Fandom subgenres.  Fandom osmosis is something I really want to dive in to and I can't wait to really get my teeth into it.