Mafia
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #166. 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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Examining trends in fanfiction.
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There are a few classics in fandom alternative universes that almost every fandom will see in a fic at least once. The coffee shop AU. Tattoo shop. Regency era if there is even a hint of romance. But the likeliest is, by far, the Mafia AU. Mafia AU’s take the Cullens from Twilight and re-imagine them as hitmen and crime families that work in seedy back rooms, drink dark liquor from expensive glasses and absolutely spoil their paramours while covered in blood. Bonus points for a knife to the neck, a Casino Royale-esque scene where a man in a suit cleans blood off his lover, or a threatening posture taken for a perceived slight.
The show KinnPorsche is probably the best example of the mafia alternative universe aesthetic. Everyone is beautiful and darkly dressed and prone to drinking and smoking in dark rooms and their actual criminal engagement is mostly an excuse for guns and knives. It also strikes to the heart of one of the biggest subversions of the mafia AU compared to real life crime families – they’re frequently queer as hell. Heterosexual pairings on the subgenre tend to take a fairly toxic masculinity stance (man protect, woman faint), but a lot of fanfiction is queer, so instead you see one of the members of Exo punching a member of GOT7 for daring to hit on his boyfriend (another member of Exo). Is this toxic masculinity? Yes, of course it is. But pretty boys sleeping with each other while occasionally licking blood off a knife is pretty far removed from the actual horrors or reality of real-life crime.
Despite its extreme prevalence, the mafia AU has its detractors. There’s a famous copypasta that hits to some of the arguments about it:
IF YOU’RE NOT ITALIAN AND YOU’RE NOT EDUCATED ON WHAT MAFIA ACTUALLY IS U HAVE NO RIGHTS TO SPEAK OVER US! MAFIA IS NOT A GENRE TO USE FOR YOUR EDITS OR FANFICS IT’S A REAL CRUEL TERRIBLE ISSUE. SO IF AN ITALIAN PERSON TELLS U IT’S NOT OKAY TO DO THAT U SHOULD NOT SPEAK OVER THEM
But real-life Cosa Nostra is not what people are engaging with in the mafia takes on Attack on Titan or Supernatural. It’s a game of visual telephone. The aesthetics of Scorsese films like Goodfellas twisted over decades and seen through media incarnation after media incarnation to effectively hide the reality of the situation. These works don’t typically deal in heavier topics, or if they do, it’s with such a wildly out of left field perspective on crime that it becomes clear that the writer has never engaged in either criminal enterprise or the criminal justice system at all. It’s a Western teenage perspective on “samurai” honor, typically hyper-violent with an implication of duty. It’s romanticized violence, dark romance, with a touch of found family. Your mileage may vary.
The idea that romanticization is a one-to-one direct endorsement is a, frankly, slippery slope that I’m not interested in falling down. There is an argument that good fiction should exist in a well-developed reality, one that at least is internally consistent, but mafia AU’s tend to read more like high fantasy where the magic is not dying and there is endless gold, and less tied to the reality of criminal enterprise – drugs and sex trafficking.
The counter is a clear “fiction as escapism,” wherein the reality of crime and the mafia in specific is one of terror and hyper-masculinity, while in practice the execution tends to still hold elements of that hyper-masculinity, but with a fixation on leather and guns. It’s a BDSM-AU with more violence and a heavier societal weight.
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Amanda Hudgins is an occasional writer, former rugby player and wearer of incredibly tall shoes.
