Legacy Tales and Immortalis have bought fan fiction into the spotlight through revamping and repackaging fandom through social media, research, and traditional publication.
Legacy Tales is primarily a Twitter based group that was formed by a small group of role play accounts, writers and artists with a vested interest in fandom. Generally, RP groups operate within one of two structures; they write brief in-character Tweets sticking to canon, lines and images found in the film they represent, or they are ‘lemons’ stories in which popular characters become romantically entwined. Fan fiction did not originate on Twitter, Wattpad and Archive of Our Own are formidable sites which allow fans to create stories of varying length around much-loved characters. The majority of these stories are ‘Lemons.’ However, these two sites are linear in that the author writes the story and the reader reads them, much like Kindle, with no facility for the reader and author to interact.
Twitter is a heavily layered platform on which users may interact, originally RP groups took advantage of this by creating their own universes in which members of the group would create parody accounts for their characters and the various accounts would interact to create a narrative. These narratives are usually limited to quote tweets and brief responses all reflected lines from the chosen franchise. The franchises selected tend to fall within the horror, science-fiction and fantasy genres.
Legacy Tales was started in December, 2020 by a group of six content creators; best-selling author and academic Valkyrie Kerry, published author and Horror Author’s Guild member Brett Dyer, published writers Christopher Baker and Jason Jenkover, comic fan, collector and writer Jon Dufresne and artist Atticus Jurnet. Prior to the creation of Legacy Tales, the group had been experimenting with various styles and formats of writing on Twitter, and subsequently developed a method to compose stories in threads. Essentially, the formula comprises an opening post which introduces the overall story title (much like a novel title), chapter number, chapter title and cover image.
Given the limited characters of each tweet they simply add further tweets and publish the chapter as an entire thread of tweets. Thereafter, further chapters begin by quote tweeting the previous chapter. This tried and tested method was developed further by the use of boxing chapters through quote tweets or the app TweetLonger. Simply put, Legacy Tales took the notion of multi-author fanfiction, the options to add images and videos, and began to create graphic novels on Twitter. Legacy Tales was born, and a new era of fandom created. The group took another step away from traditional RP by moving away from canon and creating their own storylines.
This step has been a gamechanger, fan writers do not own the copyright of their tales if they simply follow or stay close to canon. The characters of fanfiction cannot be owned by the content creators, but the story can if it offers a completely new angle that shifts the narrative away from the existing franchise. Immortalis formed alongside Legacy Tales. Valkyrie Kerry’s best-selling anthology Ultimate Horrotica largely consists of original stories with original characters, characters akin to vampires but with individual features, for example all Immortalis drink blood, but only some can shape-shift. She then developed the idea into a novel.
Ultimate Horrotica predates the implementation of Legacy Tales, but the group were already acquainted on Twitter. Valkyrie wrote very closely with Brett Dyer on a Hannibal and Dexter crossover (that still continues through Legacy Noir to this day). Valkyrie (known to her friends as Kerry) lives in Ireland and Brett lived in South Africa. They shared ideas regarding Immortalis and their relationship developed. In October 2020 Brett flew to Ireland to live with Kerry, who was by that time working in research at The Huston Film School. The group were extremely supportive of their relationship, and they subsequently married.
At that time, prior to the formation of Legacy Tales the group were working on their first major project, The Hive, a huge sci-fi cross-over that ended up 37 chapters long, a feat unprecedented in the RP world. The Hive allowed them to experiment with the formatting and styles that led to the standards set by Legacy Tales.
Thereafter the sky was truly the limit. Atticus developed videos of the characters wrestling one another, Chris formed Legacy Relics, a mash-up of film archaeologists, Jon created a lego world from the characters for sharing and Jason formed an alliance with another group Darkness_Calls. The group then developed video edits, music videos, graphic designs and further original characters.
Kerry and Brett formed further original Immortalis characters and created a novel on Twitter presenting their ideas to the world. This led to them signing with the horror publisher Godless for the mainstream publication of the novels that have developed from this 140,000-word Twitter story. For personal amusement they also created tongue in cheek horror film reviews with their characters Jason Voorhees (@JasonVoorheesIM) and Ash Williams (@Ashy_Slashee) and were recruited as reviewers for the popular site Horror-Nation.
The newfound confidence in their abilities led to members of the group submitting works for traditional publication. To date their publishing history includes, 19, 482 Words, Some Poets Love Letters, Wicked Words, Entropy2, ParagraphPlanet, Peeking Cat Literary Journal, Voices Ireland, Soft Cartel, Plum Tree Tavern, Eskimo Pi, Tiger Shark Horror Magazine, Grotesque Horror Magazine, Deep Underground, NDERF, Spillwords, SoulSeekers, Blood from a Tombstone, The Gates of Chaos and many more, they have also been featured on multiple websites. Valkyrie Kerry and Brett Dyer are full members of The Horror Author’s Guild, and both have won several competitions and take part in the annual poetry marathon.
The Immortalis concept is being developed into a series by Kerry and Brett and the first, The Thorn and His Rose, is due for publication imminently. Legacy Tales also published a selection of their completed fan fiction works in a Legacy Tales anthology.
Kerry is currently researching horror film fandom at NUI Galway and is also registered as a PhD candidate. Her research examines the importance of fandom in character development. The practical aspects of Legacy Tales have become integral to her research. Through the groups detachment from canon and development of fan culture they have, in short, received multiple publishing offers, positions as film critics and advanced research in the field. They have started to branch out by utilising other platforms to share their works, both original and fan, and hope to take this much further. Kerry aims to widely share a broad selection of the Ultimate Horrotica anthology across multiple platforms to build an audience and engage with other fans, particularly once the Immortalis series is launched.
Kerry explained her plans to The Washington Mail,
‘I had hit a wall in terms of the development of certain characters, and Brett asked to write those characters instead, he offered a darker take on them and then added three additional characters of his own. That’s when Immortalis really gained momentum. We have written together, not alongside each other, together which is an extremely difficult skill to attain, for two years. The Thorn and His Rose is a prime example of that. Now we are at a point when drafting storylines and content creation as a couple seems natural. We have signed a publishing deal, and we have the sites we intend to share on prepared. It has been a long road, but we are continually striving towards the next fork.’
The Thorn and His Rose and a new edition of Ultimate Horrotica are due to be released imminently. ‘They should have been released sooner, but we have a lot of work stacking up on our plates. As soon as we get through one job another comes along.’
In terms of Legacy Tales Brett and Kerry run Legacy Noir, Immortalis (horror) and Legacy SciFi. Chris operates Legacy Relics, Jon Legacy Comics, Jason Legacy Monsters and Atticus Legacy Wrestling.
In Fandom terms this group stands at the cutting edge of fan fiction and are preparing for so much more. The work put into and around this writing group is wholly unparalleled, exceptional, and unique, as is the opportunities afforded to them due to their hard work and distinctive method of content creation.