The activities of fan translators and distributors can be explained with the conceptual tools drawn from the existing literature (e.g. working consumers, consumers put to work, consumers co-creating with producers and consumers as a source of innovation). Yet, this paper tries to draw attention to the fact that the above participatory consumers are undertaking tasks of cultural intermediation that are essential to bring a cultural product to an overseas audience, i.e. the tasks of reproduction of the original product, translation and editing, mass-production, advertising and promotion, and dissemination. (…) However, recent years has seen the decoupling of manga scanlators from their initial support for the market economy of translated manga production and distribution. This has come with the globalization of scanlation production and consumption and with advanced digital technologies and communication tools. Due to the wider penetration of online networks around the globe, the English scanlation community has expanded to include many fans – either scanlators or their viewers – outside the USA. (…) What can be noticed by now is that scanlation created huge “missing markets” of digital manga on a global scale. (…) The industry views these missing markets as something that can be transformed into its markets once the viewing of scanlated manga is discouraged. However, it is not known to what extent this can happen given that the missing markets are a product of manga fandom and have served as a significant part of the fandom itself.

Lee, Hye‐Kyung. “Cultural Consumers as ‘New Cultural Intermediaries’: Manga Scanlators.” Arts Marketing: An International Journal 2, no. 2 (October 19, 2012): 131–43. https://doi.org/10.1108/20442081211274011.

“(…) there was a significant correlation between being a fan of K-culture and being a fan of Japanese or Chinese cultural content. (…) This illustrates how similar cultures, such as Japan and Taiwan, played a bridging role in the success of the Korean Wave, highlighting the ongoing flow of cultures that shape international cultural exchange.”

Shim,D., Gajzágó, É. 2023. The Rise of Korean Culture in Europe Based on a Survey of K-Culture Fans in Hungary. Mediální Studia | Media Studies – Journal for Critical Media Inquiry, 17(1): 27-53

The highlight here is on cultural similarity but looking at how Hungarian fans access these cultural content, there might be additional information about this connection. 

“Not only were subcultural businesses from related areas important during the fledgling period of the fandom, when the necessary subcultural goods could be obtained through the fringe offerings of these businesses (…) but these actors also proved to be the most prepared to step in as producers, offering imported or localized subcultural goods once the market demand became apparent.”

Kacsuk, Z. 2016. From Subcultural Producers to Subcultural Clusters.  Brienza, C. (ed.), Johnston, P. (ed.). Cultures of Comics Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 283-296.

–Posting for Szabó Dorottya

We are inviting them to tell us about a critical work, theorist, or piece of fan studies that is useful to them – not the best one, or even their favorite one, but the one they build with or build their work or thinking on: their “go-to” piece of criticism.  

We asked them for a quote and a bit of an explanation as to its importance.  We hope you enjoy hearing the results as much as we did! 

~ ~ ~

First up: Paul Booth. Paul Booth is a professor of Media and Pop Culture at DePaul University, and a prolific fan studies scholar – his recent books include Entering the Multiverse (Routledge, 2025), Adventures Across Space and Time: A Doctor Who Reader (Bloomsbury, 2023), Board Games as Media  (Bloomsbury, 2021); The Fan Studies Primer  (University of Iowa Press, 2021); Watching Doctor Who  (Bloomsbury, 2019); and the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley, 2018). Along with Rukmini Pande, his is the series editor of the Bloomsbury Fandom Primers.  His response is below:

~ ~ ~

“Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function as a deflection of reality.” (45)

From: Kenneth Burke, “Terministic Screens,” Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (University of California Press, 1966)

I’ve taken the liberty of picking a quotation I don’t use much in my research (although it influences me more than almost any other!), but rather one I use in my teaching quarter after quarter after quarter. Burke’s discussion here about how technology both guides what we view and always what we don’t view (e.g., what stories ignore, what stakeholders want us to forget) has implications not just for media and technology, but also for fandom. Fans often focus on the the things left out – the “deflection of reality” Burke talks about. Fans create stories in the margins, outside the line of sight for narrative, media technology, and more. At the same time, fandom provides new reflections, new selections, and ultimately new deflections as well: creating and making in different contexts but still, and always leaving things out. Fan studies research (and media studies more generally) is important because it helps us identify those deflections; to recognize and to combat them.

– Paul Booth, Professor of Media and Pop Culture, DePaul University

Notably, when artists are contracted to the three major publishers, they tend overwhelmingly to be credited only under their real name; by contrast, artists who publish with smaller presses almost always make use of their online nicknames or usernames (…) This practice not only refers back to the original online presence of both author and work, as brokered by Animexx.de, but also maintains a sense of community among the artists. At the same time, however, it cannot be overlooked that the exposure of these artists’ cultural capital under their nicknames on the Website and in their published work serves well to create a kind of “branding” or name recognition that can easily be turned to the generation of economic capital as well, while also maintaining the artists’ “civilian identities” for other projects, since most of the manga artists described here clearly want to have artistic careers beyond a specialty in boys’ love or even in manga in general.

Malone, Paul M. 2010. “From BRAVO to Animexx.de to Export: Capitalizing on German Boys Love Fandom, Culturally, Socially and Economically.” In Boys Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, 36. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Even with the serial numbers off, a work like that might still attract not only fans of that specific fic, but of that canon, but even moreso, participants in fandom. Because we also know of published works that were not inspired by a specific canon, we even know about works that started as original and the author at one point attempted or even did convert it to fanfic. For sure, we know that there is something more to be gained from fandom than just canon. It is also clear that a good publicist can help the author gain a lot from revealing the fandom origins.

Do we feel safer trusting these authors, knowing they won’t bait us? Do we expect them to write differently and are they? Is it a different genre or a different mode of producing?

Malone specifies that these creators kept their fannish signifiers only when publishing with the smaller presses, and says elsewhere:

(…) several newer and even smaller specialized publishers have now arisen to cater exclusively to the boys’ love market: both Fireangels Verlag and The Wild Side Verlag license and import material from abroad – chiefly the U.S., France and Italy- but they also publish home-grown German-language boys’ love manga. All of the German artists currently publishing with Fireangels and The Wild Side also have a presence on the Animexx.de Website, so that the initial chapters of both Martina “Chiron-san” Peters’ boys’ love science-fiction thriller, K-A-E 29th Secret and Makiko “Zombiesmile” Ponczeck’s sexually less explicit but more violent Lost and Found, for example, were once available on their respective personal dojinshi pages. (…) Peters and Ponczeck are art directors at the Fireangels and The WIld Side respectively.

Malone, Paul M. 2010. “From BRAVO to Animexx.de to Export: Capitalizing on German Boys Love Fandom, Culturally, Socially and Economically.” In Boys Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, 34. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

There is a fic writer guarantee in a recognisable pseudonym. But is there a recognisable gatekeeper or recognisable production decisions that can provide the fandom guarantee?

In Media Res: A MediaCommons Project – https://mediacommons.org/imr

In Media Res is dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship. Our goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst scholars and the public about contemporary approaches to studying media. 

Sample work:
Lauren Rouse, “‘Don’t Ask Me About My Agenda’ or the Silencing Discussions of Racism in Reactionary and Transformative Fandoms,” September 28, 2023.

Videographic Books, by Lever Press – https://www.leverpress.org/videographicbooks

Combining the possibilities of digital scholarship with the long-standing strengths of the print monograph, this series strives to publish works that convey ideas and expand knowledge via the digital rhetoric of videographic criticism. Videographic Books will resemble traditional print books as accessed via an online e-reader, but use embedded video and audio to convey ideas through the distinct form of videographic criticism.

Sample work:
Jason Mittell, The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad: A Videographic Book

[in]Transition – https://intransition.openlibhums.org

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, the official peer-reviewed videographic publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, is the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies, and is fully open access with no fees to publish or read. 

Sample work:
Louisa Stein, On the Art of Affective Repetition: Fan Video & The Untamed

These motivations, while not mutually exclusive, do generate very different readings on the intended message in the Communication tags.

Gyhagen observes this specifically about tags added to bookmarks on the archive.

At the same time, Szczepaniak sees that works reuploaded to the archive from previous sites change their use of the Author’s Note: part of it is attributed to the site structure and the flexibility of tag usage, part of it is to the different relationship between the author, the work and the readers (publishing it all at once, instead of in installments).

While other research has rightly been fascinated how these folksonomies perform categorisation, this post and some of this research was focused on how these tags speak to reveal that metadata and sitestructure can be the message.

Does that mean we’ll be able to say if a fic was first posted on LiveJournal, Tumblr, FanFiction.net, Wattpad, ao3 or somewhere else and if it has been reposted and where? Not bloody likely.

Gyhagen, Mikael (2022) “Comments in Tags: Examining Bookmarking Cultures on AO3,” Proceedings from the Document Academy: Vol. 9 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.DOI: https://doi.org/10.35492/docam/9/1/7

Szczepaniak, Martyna. 2024. “The Differences between Author’s Notes on FanFiction.net and AO3.” In “Fandom and Platforms,” edited by Maria K. Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Lesley Willard, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 42. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2543.

Sample page:
Fanlore, “Femslash February”: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Femslash_February

The Sandy Hereld Memorial Digitized Media Fanzine Collection at Texas A&M
https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/collections/32fd52ea-ba8e-415c-bc04-b0d8cb48a0d5/search
The Sandy Hereld Collection consists of thousands of digitized images of media fanzines, letterzines, and club newsletters, dating from the late 1960s through materials published online or in print in 2013. The collection is an unparalleled assembly of media fanworks that document generations of fans’ continued creative engagement with media productions meaningful to them. 

Sample work:
S.T.A.R. (Star Trek Association for Revival) Membership Book (1974)
https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/items/8bb21227-a1ce-4f75-801d-79f989f9e0a1

Special Collections in the University of Iowa – Fanzines
https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/fanzines
This guide is designed to help interested researchers locate information related to fanzines and the worlds they chronicle.
Fanzines are important cultural artifacts that document the development and continuing life of particular social communities – in this case, fans of specific genre topics (i.e. science fiction). Fanzines were originally devoted to chronicling people’s interest in literary science fiction, but over the course of the 20th (and into the 21st) Century they have been adopted as vehicles of personal and cultural expression by a number of new fan communities.

Sample work:
Mariellen (Ming) Wathne Fanzine Archives Collection; Collection Dates: 1966-2005
https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/scua/msc/tomsc350/msc313/wathnefanzinearchivescollection.html

The definition accorded with film studies’ use of cult to refer to marginalised films that were perceived as trashy or, worse, offensive (due to violent or sexual content), that were hard to see (at least in pre-internet days), and that were treasured by a core group of aficionados who kept moving the goalposts to insure that rarity of what they valued.

As these texts were treasured, of course, the fans accessed them even when that required them to put in work, not required by regular viewers. It was not that these texts are treasured because they are hard to access. But Wu, in 2019 does show that a sense of exclusivity can arise from this extra work that the fans do.

So, if my love creates work, can my work also create love? Pearson also points at that many limitations were lifted due to the appearance of the Internet and we live in a different world of global media today. If that sense of exclusivity disappears, will the goalpost move again?

Fans not only help each other to access texts, but also to access different readings, an initiation described by Jenkins. Fandom is still the fandom of fans’ activities and participation.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

Pearson, Roberta. 2010. Observations on Cult Television. In The Cult TV Book, ed. Stacey Abbott, 7–17. London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.

Wu, Xianwei. 2019. “Hierarchy within Female ACG Fandom in China.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 30. https://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1456.

Fandom & Culture Series, U Iowa –  https://uipress.uiowa.edu/series/fandom-culture
Fandom & Culture seeks dynamic books that challenge readers to reexamine preconceived notions of fandom, fan communities, and fan works. Titles in this series employ innovative methods and analysis that address the unique dimensions of fan passions, whether dealing with personal reflections or transcultural topics.

Sample work:
Austentatious: the Evolving World of Jane Austen Fans, (2019) by Holly Luetkenhaus and Zoe Weinstein. 
https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/austentatious

Bloomsbury Fandom Primers – https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/bloomsbury-fandom-primers/
The Bloomsbury Fandom Primer series publishes original works from an international range of scholars that offer short, pointed, and deliberate investigations of particularly important fandoms, moments within fan history, transcultural fan audiences, debates within fandom and fan studies, unique fan practices, or events within fandom that speak to larger cultural issues

Sample work: 
The Construction of Race in Les Misérables Fanworks: Liberty, Equality, Diversity, (2024) by Nemo Madeleine Sugimoto Martin 
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/construction-of-race-in-les-mis%C3%A9rables-fanworks-9798765107669

Routledge Advances in Fan and Fandom Studies – https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Fan-and-Fandom-Studies/book-series/FAN
This exciting and innovative series publishes new and cutting-edge research on everything fan- and fandom-related. Covering all forms of media, the series presents new insights into this dynamic subject.

Sample work:
Fan Podcasts: Rewatch, Recap, Review (20245 by Anne Korfmacher
https://www.routledge.com/Fan-Podcasts-Rewatch-Recap-Review/Korfmacher/p/book/9781032721972

For many non-Korean or South Korean–based fans of K-pop, distance is a defining factor in their interaction with the industry. For Black fans, this distance is not only physical but also formed by industry practices that contribute to their abjection. (…) The ceremony for such divorce between fandom and racial discourse marks an impossibility for Black K-pop fans who may find that pleasure in the media object rests in the fractured space between fan and antifan. 

This impossibility is dissolved in a dream in which fannish identity and racialized identity, fan and anti-fan can be clearly separated. White fans are allowed to express their fascination and frustration as part of their fannishness, while Black fans’ vigil labor, a term coined by Otobele, is seen as placing them outside of this same fannishness.

Here, by speaking back to the K-pop industry and non-Black fans, these creators deploy vigil labor to demonstrate the potentiality of Black fan power in resisting fandom expectations and negotiating the fluid boundaries of being fans. (…) This resistance defies established modes of being a fan, placing critique not only on media objects but also on fandom and, doing so, through its transformative creations.

Otobele here points out that vigil labor actually obscures the boundaries of fan and anti-fan: it is transformative work and critique at the same time. Vigil labor creates value for the fans whose pleasure of fandom is disrupted by racism, the term an important addition to the theory of resistant fandom practices or might even be completely new lens through which we can view this theory.

Otebele, Osarugue. 2024. “The (Anti)fan is Black: Consumption, Resistance and Black K-Pop Fan Vigil Labor.” In “Centering Blackness in Fan Studies,” guest edited by Alfred L. Martin Jr. and Matt Griffin, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 44. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2465.

Today’s post will be about journals: these are typically peer-reviewed (the better the journal, the more peer-reviewed and the blinder the peer review).  Fan studies now has field-specific journals, but there are journals in other fields that have always been particularly friendly to fan studies work. (If you know of a journal that I should spotlight, please comment!) 

Transformative Works and Cultures – https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc

I can’t help but start, maternally, with the OTW’s own flagship journal, Transformative Works and Cultures.  This Diamond Open Access journal has been publishing consistently and on time since it was founded in 2007. (If you’re not an academic, you don’t know how rare that is! Academic time is glacial and things often come out really late – not TWC!)  

“TWC publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived, as well as articles about the fan community. We invite papers in all areas, including fan fiction, fan vids, film, TV, anime, fan art, comic books, cosplay, fan community, music, video games, celebrities and machinima, and encourage a variety of critical approaches, including feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, audience theory, reader-response theory, literary criticism, film studies, and posthumanism. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship; hyperlinked articles; or other forms that test the limits of academic writing.”

Sample work:
Kennedy, Kimberly. 2024. “‘It’s Not Your Tumblr’: Commentary-Style Tagging Practices in Fandom Communities.” In “Fandom and Platforms,” edited by Maria K. Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Lesley Willard, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 42. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2475.

Journal of Fandom Studies – https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-fandom-studies

The Journal of Fandom Studies is subscription-based, so access is best gotten through a library that subscribes to it. (Or – hot insider tip – if you need an article, typically if you write to the scholar/author they will share a copy with you. Scholars live to be cited! :D) 

“The Journal of Fandom Studies seeks to offer scholars a dedicated, peer-reviewed publication that promotes current scholarship into the fields of fan and audience studies across a variety of media. We focus on the critical exploration, within a wide range of disciplines and fan cultures, of issues surrounding production and consumption of popular media (including film, music, television, sports and gaming).”

Sample work:
Oh, Chuyun. 2015. Queering spectatorship in K-pop: The androgynous male dancing body and western female fandom.Journal of Fandom Studies,  Volume 3, Issue 1, Mar 2015, p. 59 – 78. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jfs.3.1.59_1

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies – https://www.cmstudies.org/page/jcms and  https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jcms

The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies – previously called Cinema Journal – has long been friendly to fan studies scholarship. Many sections are open access, including the “In Focus” section, and the journal is typically available as part of the Project Muse database in libraries.

“JCMS’s basic mission is to foster engaged debate and rigorous thinking among humanities scholars of film, television, digital media, and other audiovisual technologies. We are committed to the aesthetic, political, and cultural interpretation of these media and their production, circulation, and reception. To that end, JCMS is dedicated to intellectual diversity of all kinds.”

Sample work:
Anselmo, Diana W.  2022. “Picture Pain: Anti-Heteronormative Female Fandom in Early Hollywood,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Volume 62, Issue 1, pp. 7-35. doi: 10.1353/cj.2022.0061

M/C Journal – https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal

M/C Journal was founded (as “M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture”) in 1998 as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the meeting of media and culture. M/C Journal is a fully blind-, peer-reviewed academic journal, open to submissions from anyone.

Sample work:
Svegaard, S. F. K., & Vilkins, S. (2025). “Fandom and Politics.”M/C Journal, 28(3). Retrieved from https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/3190

When the Dallas police launched the app iWatch Dallas for people to report law-breaking demonstrators, K-pop fans flooded the Dallas police official Twitter account with random K-pop videos—and many of these videos were fan cams. The app was disabled due to “technical issues” within a day, possibly because of such negative reactions on social media (Alexander 2020). Later, many K-pop fans spammed racist, white supremacist Twitter hashtags, such as #WhiteLivesMatter, with fan cams, eventually leading to these tags’ trending under the “K-pop” category on Twitter (Aswad 2020).

Zhang, Muxin. 2024. “Fandom Image Making and the Fan Gaze in Transnational K-pop Fan Cam Culture.” In “Fandom and Platforms,” edited by Maria K. Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Lesley Willard, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 42. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2463.

Fans in general are certainly very aware of discourse about them and their activities – that is the entire premise of this blog. It is more of a question of whether a transformative approach is accessible, not if we are aware that alternatives might be needed.

However, Zhang also shows that this use of fancams was not universal among stans. The difference is made between North American fans and South Korean fans and this difference is attributed to the identification with an idol’s success.

This identification might be very well grounded in the way the industry operates.

(…) fan leaders are portrayed as individual opinion leaders or fan clubs (formal or informal) who set the agenda and organize the collective action of daily fan activities, while they also function as intermediaries maintaining a close communication with the idol’s media companies and uniting individual fans. 

Wu, Xueyin. 2021. “Fan Leaders’ Control on Xiao Zhan’s Chinese Fan Community.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 36. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2053.

Because of this coordination between the media company and fan leaders, the activities of fans can have an impact of the idol’s reputation and thus success. This responsibility is not shared by the North American fans.

In this way, while all the fans described can identify with their bias but it is an identification that is expressed in different ways which leaves them with different ways of expressing their fannish identity. Though, we are only looking at one case here, it already reveals some of the complexities and nuances we can encounter in fandom.

Yet Tumblr was also a deeply flawed “blue hellscape” to many of its users, a technologically frustrating, often unsafe platform that did not always serve all its users well. As our authors testify, its most vulnerable groups faced the same challenges on Tumblr as they did in real life. Nonetheless, these sub- cultures persisted on the platform because it offered participants the best option and tools for alternative networking among very limited choices. Tumblr was, for many, a deinstitutionalized, underfunded, unauthorized, constantly on-­ the-­ run think tank–­ cum–­ chocolate factory, a subcultural, countercultural place where alternative pleasures, education and resource-sharing, creative and critical work happened. During its first decade, Tumblr became the space for the development of, for example, Black feminist theory, LGBTQ+/nonbinary identity formation, disability and chronic pain collectivities, critical media culture, and alternative body erotics and porn. The increasing calls for social justice that marked the 2010s, especially among young people, prompted The New York Times in 2014 to acknowledge the platform’s youth subcultures as heralding “the age of Tumblr activism.”

Given Tumblr’s uniqueness as a platform and the ephemerality of the internet, we began this book in early 2016 with the goal of representing and preserving evidence of Tumblr’s creative forms and critical voices, and we structured this book accordingly. The experience of Tumblr is the experience of multiplicity. Our intention has always been to make this volume as poly-vocal as possible, which means we have included a wide variety of voices, some of which clash with each other, in an attempt to mirror the experience of encountering the variety of perspectives on Tumblr. 

–“You Must Be New Here: An Introduction” (2020), by  Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoc,
from a tumblr book: platform and cultures

Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S. Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.*

“The Ecstasy Of Influence: A Plagiarism.” (2007) by Jonathan Lethem

* Editor’s Note: for those of you who don’t know this essay, every bit in it comes from a different work; this essay is itself a collage of other texts.

Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness. Like other popular readers, fans lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural production and have only the most limited resources with which to influence entertainment industry’s decisions. (…) Within the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not propreitors, a recognition which must contextualize our celebration of strategies of popular resistance.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
This cultural marginality appears in the definition of fandoms and in the past few posts, I was looking at fandoms through the lens of ‘save our show’ campaigns with Savage (2014).

First, we discussed how viewing communities and a sense of ownership develops which enables these campaigns. This affection also appeared in what viewers wrote in their letter campaigns but was far from the only or even most effective tool they used.
Savage (2014) describe a variety methods. One way was to prove to be valuable as an auidance despite the Nielsen ratings which is possible through highlighting certain characteristics of the community: their demographic attributes or their loyalty.

Niche marketing (for example, gay programming) or strategic diversity values demographic attributes, particularly attributes that – in advertisers’ eyes – are connected to purchasing power or potential interest in certain particular products.
Sender, Katherine. 2007. “Dualcasting: Bravo’s Gay Programming and the Quest for Women Audiences.” In Cable Visions: Television beyond Broadcasting, edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, 302–18. New York: New York University Press.
Patterson, Eleanor. 2018. “ABC’s #TGIT and the Cultural Work of Programming Social Television.” In “Social TV Fandom and the Media Industries,” edited by Myles McNutt, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1147.

Audience loyalty is an emotional investment that can translate to longterm planning and, also, purchasing power.
Abbott, S. 2010. The Cult TV book: From Star Trek to Dexter, New Approaches to TV Outside the Box. Soft Skull Press.
In other cases, audiences looked for sponsors and advertisers themselves or the already existing viewing community advertised the show to potential new viewers or educated each other in how to watch the show the right way (through broadcast, cable, streaming etc.), the right way here being the ones that generates the best data.
Data fandom is something we have discussed before in this post. Just like then, no matter if we see these cases as the producers guiding the behaviour of fandom or fandom behaving in a way that makes it so that the producers will find beneficial to make certain decisions, at the end of the day, it is the logic of the market that is behind these behaviours. We would have to say: everything is for sale, including…
Savage, Christina. 2014 “Chuck versus the Ratings: Savvy Fans and ‘Save Our Show’ Campaigns.” In “Fandom and/as Labor,” edited by Mel Stanfill and Megand Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0497

Coming together in a hotel ballroom with the rebels in the cause of a women’s art/communication system, the researcher feels a tiny thrill of danger. The community is open to anyone willing to participate, but closed to anyone who might jeer, or worse, blow the whistle. A man in a ten-gallon hat approaches and wants to know what is going on. There is a gleam in his eye: he sees only women about. Not all of them are pretty – some of them are middle-aged, or overweight, or both. They all return his bravado with suspicion. 

Lois, in her late forties and looking very prim, looks up from her place at the registration table and smiles the smile of PTA mothers everywhere. “It’s a meeting of a ladies’ literary society,” she answers very properly.

“Mighty nice,” the ten-gallon hat responds.

As he walks away, another voice at the table whispers: “And terrorist society.”

Beneath the grins and the giggles and the pajama party atmosphere, the ladies gathered here know they are engaged in an act of rebellion. They have stolen characters, settings, plots off the home and movie screens, fleshed them out, created new characters for them to love and given the characters permission to love each other.

– Enterprising Women (1992), by Camille Bacon-Smith

Something new

Technology and art have always existed together, with new technologies like photography (and later Photoshop) being hailed as the death of painting (and later photography), yet all of these forms continue to be used. However, generative AI introduces new questions around creative agency that fans are currently grappling with in terms of, for example, whether a story written by a large language model could be considered a valid form of fan fiction (see Cisternino and Radillo, this issue). Certainly, it is, as we have seen, quite possible to ask these models to produce derivative text that recognizably draws from media sources to transform them into a new text. Chiang (2024) suggests, however, that generative AI is not likely to become a new technological medium for artistic creation in the way that, say, photography is, because it does not allow for creative expression and choice-making as these other technologies do. He suggests that it is not the quality of the output that matters but the intent of the human originator to communicate—something that with AI exists in the prompt but is then filtered, mediated, and diluted by the normalization of the language models. A thousand works of fan fiction may have the same characters, setting, and basic plot, but the choices the author makes reveal something unique about their affective response to the material—something AI cannot do in its current form. 

–   “Fans and AI: Transformations in fandom and
fan studies” (2025), by Susanne R. Black and Naomi Jacobs  

Although the fans’ styles differed considerably, their themes overlapped: those seeking to use copyright law to silence fandom or assert copyright claims against new works featuring Sherlock Holmes were inauthentic, greedy, and morally bankrupt.

Rosenblatt, B. (2017). The Great Game and the Copyright Villain. Transformative Works and Cultures, 23. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.0923

In this framing, the copyright holder might not be the same as a creative author of the intellectual work or in some other way distanced from it (for example, through claims that the creators changed the story based on their expectations for the financial success of certain storylines). On the other hand, these fans can offer their affective ownership.

Savage (2014) shows how fans expressed their love for their favourite show through letter writing campaigns. Because of this affective connection and understanding, they hoped to convince the decision makers that they can help the show more effectively.

Savage, C. (2014). “Chuck” versus the ratings: Savvy fans and “Save our show” campaigns. Transformative Works and Cultures, 15. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0497

Affective ownership is, of course, only one aspect of how fans relate to their canon but it is also important for us to note how this affective ownership relates to the modern concept of copyright as a legal and economic concept, instead of an intellectual one.

I have a thing to confess, and that thing is: I love Marcus Tullius Cicero. No, seriously, I adore him. I’m fascinated by his intelligence, his ambition, his—grandness, I suppose you could call it; he’s a historical figure who is genuinely larger than life. (Emilyenrose)

And 

I love Callicratidas!…I love him for his straightforwardness and integrity and honour, for his vigour without rashness (well, mostly) and obedience without obsequiousness, for being a man of principle in a morally bankrupt world undergoing rapid, profound social change, and I can’t help but adore his total lack of people skills. (tevildo)

But the particular parts of this essay I want to tease out are the ways these Yuletide asks invite the prospective fanfiction author not just to interpret and extend the canon, but to invent things, to make new things with these old texts. So, for instance, Wilson discusses how Rumpleghost asks for a Yuletide story based on Demosthenes’s legal speech “Against Conon,” noting that Rumpleghost’s letter “takes a character-focused approach that opens up the speech to fannish imagination but likewise balances this with historical detail.”  Rumpleghost tells her Secret Santa that:

because the only information we have about Ctesias’s character is from the speech and most of that is slander, you can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want, though I would love it if you based him on details you found in the text.

Hence the title of my post: you can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want is actually the subtext of a lot of fanfiction, even though fans talk a lot about good fic seeming canonical and hewing closely to canon.  Wilson shows that fandom is doing something more complicated: while Rumpleghost would love it if the characterization is based on details from the texts, those details are the basis for going totally wild.  Wilson explains that:

The request fleshes out the bare bones of the story about these two men gleaned from the legal speech, suggesting a story about “the days they first meet at the army camp on garrison duty, where Ctesias and his friends are drunk every day and Ariston is a little:|:|:|-faced dude, follow flirtiness/hijinks/confrontation/sex there!” The request overall conveys deep affection for these characters and a profound affective investment in the antagonistic relationship that Rumpleghost imagines between them (“Ctesias being lazily charmed by Ariston’s snarky little existence”), while there is an unspoken shift away from the aspects of the speech typically studied in the classroom (such as its legal, ethical, political, and linguistic elements) onto its affective content: Ariston, the speaker, is “prickly” and “pompous” with “incredible self-righteousness,” while Ctesias is “a provocative douche,” and the speech shows “what grumpy, similar little guys they could be.”  

Wilson thus argues that the letter “establishes the fannish discourse from which fan fiction can emerge.” The fanfiction writer is here being encouraged to fill up the dry details of canon with affective life as well as meaningful (and pleasurable) tropes and themes. 

Fandom Friendships: A Zine explores and honors friendships made and sustained through fandom.

The zine was open to contributions from anyone and solicited contributions last year. Contributors were asked questions like:

• Who are the friends you met through fandom, and how did you meet?
• What makes fandom friendship special?
• How has making friends through fandom changed over the years for you?
• What can we learn from fandom friendships?

Just some of what this compilation includes tells the story of: friends showing up in a time of a parent’s death during the pandemic, the bonding capabilities of Superwholock and K-pop, what happens when you move in with someone you met when you were teenagers bonding over Merlin, friendships lost, and the unique medium of fanfiction.net forums.

Please join us in celebrating this zine! You can read and download a copy for yourself at: Fandom Friendships: A Zine.

Television was initially a set of machines, capable of receiving the broadcast signal. As a practice at the same time, television viewing is something families, communities and groups with shared interests can do in the livingroom or on the street. This first phase bring people into the same physical space where they can discuss what they are viewing.

Later, these interest groups are expanded through the practice of copying and sharing videotapes. These tapes not only provide chance for the community to initiate new members but also, rewatch potential. Television communities might lose the temporal or spatial community at this point, but the shared reference frame continues to allow for discussion. Instead of the people connected by proximity watching the same program, now people watching the same program are connected by it.

Later changes to television will also bring changes to the practices of this community. That is to say, to be continued…

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

Abbott, S. (2010). The Cult TV book: From Star Trek to Dexter, New Approaches to TV Outside the Box. Soft Skull Press.

In putting this proposal together, I found myself reviewing the works of particularly literary fanfiction scholars, so I might do a few posts shouting out literary acafans, particularly those who do readings of particular stories. One scholar who came to mind was Khaliah Reed, and her essay Fanfiction as Performative Criticism: Harry Potter Racebending. Reed argues that fanfiction writers “are blurring demarcation lines between creative writing and literary criticism,” but comes down in many ways on the creative side of that equation with particular style and verve.  

Reed starts with a quote from Tumblr user Vondellswain about racebending; this quote serves as an excellent manifesto for fanfiction writing in general:

All my interpretations are based squarely in canon. But if they weren’t, that would be damn well acceptable. Squeeze representation out of anywhere you can feel it and fabricate the rest. Own your fiction.

Reed later analyzes the fanfiction story “Black” by Potterworm and celebrates the way the story is interested in the particular social and political realities of people of color. This is the part of the story that that Potterworm innovates.  As Reed notes:

Racebending allows Potterworm to directly insert perspectives of marginalized people where they explore and vocalize the experience and concerns of people of color. Consider, for example, the way that Potterworm writes Hermione’s discovery of her blackness. Potterworm takes the canonical backstory of Hermione—her intelligence and ‘know-it-all’ attitude isolated her from her peers—and uses this to set the backdrop for her first encounter with racism. Hermione considered Bobby her first (and only) friend, and unfortunately, one day he abruptly refuses to play with her anymore:

“Get away from me,” he yells, and then he screams a word that Hermione hasn’t read and doesn’t know. But she’s a smart girl – she’s never gotten less than a perfect report card – and she can read his body language. She knows he just said a mean word, and she knows friends don’t yell mean words at friends …(Years later, Hermione’s parents will tell her that Bobby’s father was an abusive drunk, and he hated black people, and he told Bobbynot to be friends with her. Bobby was just a scared little boy … Now, though, it doesn’t matter. Now he’s just a little boy, and Hermione is just a little girl, and they are not friends anymore). (“Black” Ch.1)

Reed further argues that ““Black” and fanfiction that uses racebending forces the reader to not only think about race but also to think about it in ways that may create discomfort for the reader,” and notes that “In Potterworm’s story, in spite of Ron’s personal experience with class prejudice, Hermione still must explain to Ron what being black and being muggleborn means.” It’s Potterworm who brings the intersectionality, having Hermione note: “I’m black in the muggle world, and I’m black and a muggleborn here.”

For a long time, we’ve seen fanfiction as doing a reading of the source text – and of course it is. But fanfiction is also about expressing fanfiction writers’ own preoccupations, which are sometimes not in the source text. The preoccupation with the Black experience isn’t Rowling’s; it’s Potterworm’s own contribution. Squeeze representation out anywhere you can feel it. Fabricate the rest. Own your fiction.

Today’s excerpt will be from “Tumblr Fan Aesthetics” by Louisa Stein (published in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, Routledge, 2017.) 

From the start, some key elements of Tumblr appeared to align well with fannish concerns. From its initial entry in 2007, Tumblr offered users the ability to share visual images, still and moving, combined with limited text, in what seemed like a fresh aesthetic, although in truth it had evolved from prior platforms Projectionst and Anarchia (Alfonso). With its unfamiliar and somewhat opaque-to-outsiders interface, Tumblr felt less policed in comparison with fans’ perception of LJ after Strikethrough. Tumblr’s seeming illegibility to outsiders, while a deterrent for some fans, also functioned as part of its appeal. Like LJ, users navigated Tumblr via hyperlinked interests, but Tumblr’s user-driven tagging practice seemed more excessive and disorganized, sometimes even put to expressive rather than organizational purposes (e.g. a hashtag might read #ilovethisshowsomuch). Tumblr seemed to offer a coded public, in which individual authorship was subsumed into the collective, and within which transgressive meanings could hide in plain sight.

Tumblr’s reblogging logic, in which a user could easily “reblog” any post they find onto their own dashboard, with or without the addition of notes, resonated with fan practices of return, recirculation, and transformative reworking. Posts on Tumblr could be reposted tens of thousands of times, giving them the weight of community-held beliefs or community-hailed icons. This recirculation and reworking of cultural meaning meshed with fandom’s valuing of transformative reworking and repeating of tropes and beloved images. Tumblr’s particular brand of reblogging also resonated with fandom’s emphasis on a multiplicity of interpretations and affective returns to beloved media objects. Moreover, retumbling suggested a copyright stance that embraced the collective creative repurposing of already existing media, a core value for much of fandom (Rodrigo). Indeed, Tumblr’s emphasis on collective authorship yielded a sense of power in multiplicity, including the power to evade cultural policing.

Today’s excerpt comes from Esther Brownsmith’s “‘I Wrote My Way Out”: Embodied Appropriation, Fan Fiction and the Book of Esther,” by Esther Brownsmith (The Bible & Critical Theory, 2023).  In this article, Brownsmith applies  what she calls “the fan fiction lens of ‘embodied appropriation’” to the book of Esther, making comparisons between it and fannish rewrites like Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.  As she explains in her introduction:

I believe that fan fiction can provide a crucial model and lens for reading biblical and parabiblical texts—not just because the latter includes rewritten compositions, but because both are striving transformatively with their canons. This is certainly true in parabiblical texts like Jubilees, Joseph and Aseneth, and Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities), but also within the Hebrew Bible itself. Chronicles creatively retells the narratives of Samuel-Kings; Daniel reimagines the Ugaritic hero Dan’el as an exiled Jew in Babylon. But in my upcoming monograph, Queen of the Alternate Universe: The Book of Esther as Fan Fiction, I focus on this process as it manifests in the book of Esther. Just as Hamilton reflects on mythic figures like Washington and Jefferson from a racially marginalized perspective, so does the book of Esther reflect on Mesopotamian deities— Ishtar/Esther and Marduk/Mordecai—through a diasporic Jewish lens. Indeed, it neatly mirrors Hamilton in its fusion of mythic characters with a minoritized culture, using a familiar genre.

Brownsmith reads the Esther tale as “a performance of emotion, an embodiment of the the author’s own Jewish identity,” and as a transformative work by an engaged fan. Fandom and fan studies inspires Brownsmith’s thinking about the text:

[T]he comparison with fan fiction gives us a possible motive for why the ancient Jewish author would choose to write a Jewish story whose central characters are borrowed from Mesopotamian culture. The authors that Kelley examines are engaged in emotioned literacy: the process of writing that stems from their emotional and bodily identity, including their deep love for the source material. But as fan fiction scholars have said from the beginning, love is not the only emotion that fuels fan fiction authorship. For instance, Henry Jenkins described the dueling emotions of “fascination” and “frustration,” noting that frustration is what often fuels authors to go in and write a new text, instead of simply rereading an old one. Those fan authors thus become “active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.” (2013, 24) The corpus of Mesopotamian literature about Ishtar and Marduk was broad and pervasive; just as Israelite biblical texts reimagined Canaanite myths like the triumph over the chaotic sea, so did the author of Esther reimagine the Mesopotamian characters of their broader social sphere. And just as the fan author I mentioned earlier wrote about a Filipina protagonist like herself, so did the author of Esther project their own embodiment into the text through characters like Esther and Mordecai.

There’s much to love in this essay – including some great images of zines and mimeograph machines and other things that make me sentimental and nostalgic for the analog world that was – but maybe my favorite thing is her description of zinemaking being demonstrated for an appreciative audience. IYKYK.

I have looked at a lot of fanzines; they have been an interest of mine since about 1982, when I was in high school and I joined a Doctor Who fan club that put one out. Further, as someone employed in the printing industry, I remain interested in how this world and its requirements overlap with the world of printing hard-copy fanzines. I do have experience in creating physical artifacts like fanzines: I was always on the newsletter committee at church camp when I was a girl, and I preferred typing mimeo stencils to interviewing fellow campgoers. I worked as a secretary in college and used carbon paper and Selectric typewriters. I was a secretary in grad school and used the Xerox photocopier with a sheet of yellow plastic so the machine could copy the professors’ light purple mimeographed handouts; the grad students used dot-matrix printers and had to rip the pages apart. Now we all print things out on laser printers, or maybe we don’t need a hard copy at all. But I am familiar with the smell of the solvent used to mask errors on a mimeograph stencil. I know about the erasers used when typing a fair copy; there’s even a sculpture of one in Washington, DC (Oldenburg & van Bruggen, 1999). I know what a pain it is to center or right-justify text on a manual keyboard. I know what the cc: means at the bottom of the letter: it’s the literal carbon copy I’m making when I type.

It turns out that all of these things are important when reading old fanzines, because their authors are office-supply geeks and secretary wannabes who make a lot of references to the joys and terrors of putting out a regular zine. They write of the pain of having to right-justify a newsletter, which only goes to show how much they care for their readers—although the extra work made the issue late. They lament the hideousness of having to retype a stencil after making an error at the end—no wonder it was late! They hurl accusations at certain people who owed articles but didn’t write them, so the editor had to write everything himself at the last minute—no wonder it was late! They report on the hassle of having to draw everything the wrong way round so it would appear correctly when printed—it made them just a little late. They preen because they hand-colored a photo and pasted it into every issue—it was worth the wait! 

I am one of a subset of readers for fanzines, the existence of which I hadn’t considered: the office-supply geeks, the once-upon-a-secretaries who had to hand- crank the mimeo machine, the grad student wielding a yellow plastic sheet at the photocopier while wondering why the professors didn’t update their mimeo’d handouts, the folks who remember that one time they created a newsletter with some friends but never got past issue 2, because nobody could get it together enough to do issue 3. To people like me, for whom this is nostalgia—those of us who have done all these things and know exactly what these fan writers are talking about—the fanzine editors’ focus on physically creating a timely newsletter is hilarious. And it’s not just people of a certain age who find this riveting.

At the 2014 Worldcon in London, I attended a demonstration of fanzine making via spirit duplication. Instead of watching the presenters, I watched the audience watching the presenters. I was delighted to see that they were fascinated. For me, the sharp smell of the solvent was familiar; so was the chug-chug-chug of the machine as it pooped out wet pages of light purple typewritten text. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten these smells and these sounds. But to the newbies, it was, well, new. Imagine! Smelling that! Imagine smelling that every day as you wrote a fanzine in 1953! It was thrilling, seeing that on their faces. And it was thrilling, feeling that: 1953! I was 40 years after that! They too smelled that smell! In 1953!