I’ve noticed that since the shocking death of Michael Jackson last week, one of the top phrases showing up in our keywords for searches is Michael Jackson fanfiction. I admit I, too, was curious to find out if the Michael Jackson fan community had any kind of fan fiction activity to date, so I did a little searching around. The answer seems to be, not much–either that or it is well-hidden and only accessible to people deep within the fandom.

MJ Fanfiction is one site I found, but it only had 6 stories, mostly of the NC-17 variety with OFCs. MJJ Dream World is a bulletin board community which has a fan fiction section, which is locked to members of the board (and one must show posting activity on other areas of the site before gaining access). From looking at the feedback thread, which is open, it does seem as though this site has some considerable fan-fiction activity, again of mostly the OFC/potentially Mary Sue variety. MJSite.com has a “fan fiction” section which looked more promising volume-wise, but investigation reveals many of the postings there are not fanfic so much as personal stories and statements of support and love towards Michael. There are a few actual pieces of fiction in there, but one must go digging for them. One other forum, Make That Change, has a section for fan-fiction but the only activity seems to be on the poetry sub-forum.

What about Yahoogroups? Well, I found three groups that came up on a “Michael Jackson fan fiction” search, one of which only had 11 postings ever (all spam); one was a locked community for one author’s Michael Jackson/Prince story, Pale Perfection; the last, Novel Fever, showed some small amount of activity but was again locked to members-only.

LiveJournal? Plenty of MJ fan communities, but none that mentioned fanfic in the description.

That’s all I’ve been able to find so far. If there are other, better archives or sites for Michael Jackson fanfiction, I’d be curious to hear about them. And I also wonder if we’ll begin to see more of it now in the future, as his name is back in the spotlight, even if under such unfortunate circumstances. Will people feel freer to write fiction now, or more disturbed by the concept? I’m not sure. Real person/celebrity fiction is always an interesting thing to me to study, and this could be a particularly intriguing case depending on what the future of Michael’s legend holds in store for fandom.