Who is Clan Techie?

Examining trends in fanfiction.

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This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #88. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Nervous and lanky, his red hair hanging limply around his eyes, he’s more likely to cower in a corner than stand up in a fight. He’s got big blue eyes, courtesy of mechanical augmentation at the hands of a mob boss that formerly held his genius reins.

If you’ve seen the 2012 film Dredd, you might have a passing familiarity to a side character named Clan Techie. Played by Domhall Gleason, he’s Ma-Ma’s unwilling computer hacker. Before 2014, there wasn’t a lot of fiction about him on the Internet. His scenes make up only a few minutes of footage in a full-length feature and, as tragic a character as he is, he’s relatively unnoticeable.

Until early 2016 and the arrival of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens fandom.

Same actor crossovers are not a new thing for fanfiction. Several fandoms even incorporate these other actor characters as siblings – see the Stilinski twins, a fandom creation that usually combines Stiles Stilinski from Teen Wolf with another character Dylan O’Brien played, Stuart Twombly from the Internship. Clan Techie found his way into Star Wars fandom in much the same way as Stuart Twombly, as Domhall Gleason is the actor behind Star Wars General Hux. Early fic usually had messy and unsure Clan Techie as erudite and forceful Hux’s little brother. Later incarnations have paired him with Matt the Radar Technician (in a ship called Techienician), a SNL version of Kylo Ren.

For the nearly 400 pieces of Clan Technie fic to be found on Archive of Our Own, all but a handful is related in some way to Star Wars giving new life to a character that was near forgotten.

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Amanda Hudgins is an occasional writer, former rugby player and wearer of incredibly tall shoes.