“The flexible transmedia seriality of fan works becomes obvious in those which have “escaped” fan culture to become mainstream successes. Mainstream audiences often attempt to retroactively build a baseline to make sense of fan works’ narrative and aesthetic experimentation; yet, without access to the history of other fan works, they start from a much more information-light interpretative position than those within the fan community. Their interpretations are not “wrong”, as fan work itself is premised upon audience autonomy and interpretative freedom, but they lack access to the sequence of previous texts against which the fan work gains increased audience. They thereby read the climax of a serial narrative as if it were a stand-alone statement.”

Kustritz, A. M. 2014. “Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids.” TV/Series, No. 6, 225-261. https://doi.org/10.4000/tvseries.331.

“While it might seem self-evident that online patterns are repeated in offline spaces, it is vital to note that these exclusions occur within spaces already marked by the language of representation and inclusion. That is, queer fans of color are often called upon to support such spaces and movements through such labor as supporting hashtags, creating fanwork, and contributing to campaigns to buy billboards as well as through their emotional investments by the promise of representation. However, when they find these spaces to be, once again, structured by the logics of white supremacy, their discomfort and disappointment are seen to be the problem within the fannish space. These logics are highlighted only in moments of conflict but must be seen as a constant context within which fans of color have to operate even as they seek modes of contingent and tenuous representation.”

Pande, Rukmini, and Swati Moitra. “Whose Representation Is It Anyway? Contemporary Debates in Femslash Fandoms.” In Fandom, Now in Color, 151-163. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020. 

“A commercially published novel is multiply produced—editors, agents, designers, marketers, literary sources, and market demands, all have their parts to play—but it comes to readers as a discrete book‐shaped entity with a single authored name. It is Carry On by Rainbow Rowell. Its multiple influences are not readily apparent on the face of it. By contrast, all the popular understandings of fanfiction I’ve referred to here rely heavily on multiple relations—text to source, text to legal right, writer to writer, writer to community, fanfiction to other fanfiction—and fanfic texts themselves often announce these relationships on their front pages. This relationality—these multiple sources, influences, and participants—is something we immediately understand as intrinsic to fanfiction rather than something we might gradually become convinced of by delving into French theory or studying the publishing process. The “we” of Western reading culture, however, do not primarily think of literature as an assemblage, and while we are likely well aware that books are things that must be assembled at some point and that websites must be coded for display on complex devices, this material assemblage is not what we have in mind when we think of “literary composition,” whether digitally or codexically disseminated. For most readers and writers, the work of literary composition is the work of the author, and this way of thinking about authors and their works is conditioned by Enlightenment notions of individuality, genius, aesthetic value, and art. Fanfiction both challenges and owes its existence to these same notions.”

”…I posit that the unexamined yet assumed whiteness of media fan spaces has allowed for successive theorizations about their workings to have now solidified into accepted histories. This positioning now forces any consideration of racial dynamics within those spaces to be considered as something additional to, rather than constitutive of, media fan identity. Because the activities of (white) women interested in reworking popular cultural texts have been the target of societal scorn (like Cath), the project for the reclamation of their practices has been constructed as a particular narrative around the ways in which fan communities engage with difference and how fan works engage with bodies and sexualities.

In this theoretical construction, any discussion of race becomes an exception, an interruption, and a bringer of fandom drama.”

Pande, Rukmini. “Introduction.” In Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race, 12. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. 

Fandom isn’t just fandom. It’s an institution where many people learn a lot about life since they tend to get into it from a young age. And if fandom itself isn’t capable of recognizing when it’s going wrong because desire is clouding the mind and clunking up folks’ critical thinking skills, maybe a little help is necessary. Conversation starters need to be had.

It is a common assumption that illicit distribution of video footage from live events negatively affects those who have paid for a ticket by reducing the value of their experience, particularly visible when commercial organizations restrict this practice. However, the results of this study show that for this particular community of Supernatural fans, it is overwhelmingly the case that fans agree that sharing content with others online is of positive benefit and encourages ticket purchase. Not only did fans consider there was value in having access to convention footage but they also thought that access to content from the events increased inclusion and reinforced people’s desire to attend them in person. This view was held even by those who attend in person, who in some cases think that it enhances the experience. Evidence suggests online footage boosts interest in the events by raising awareness and increasing fear of missing out in those who have already attended and who want to recreate the experience.

Much of the debate surrounding “Rebel Girl” centers on the question of whether or not someone can be a political fan in the same way one can be a sports fan or media fan. In an essay on youth activism, Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova (2016) tell the story of an MIT conference where several speakers, who had just presented on participatory politics, were asked if they viewed their work as activism. The speakers were quick to distance fan engagement from activism because of the perceived political connotation. Increasingly, fan communities are becoming places to mobilize political action; yet it seems fan scholars are reluctant to view fan work as overtly political (Brough and Shresthova 2012; Hinck 2012; Jenkins and Shresthova 2016; Sandvoss 2013). Ashley Hinck (2012) points out that many would prefer to refer to fan engagement with politics as media engagement instead of civic engagement.

The Yogscast are a group of online Let’s Players who produce YouTube videos in which they play video games, joke with one another, and sometimes engage in long-form storytelling. Some members of the Yogs have been friends for a decade, having met through playing the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004), while others are YouTube content producers who started out independent and then later joined the group. The Yogscast as a business entity takes a portion of earned revenue from member YouTube channels in exchange for promotional, editing, and legal services. The Yogscast is thus both a friend group and a business arrangement. The Yogscast fandom in turn includes discussion of and fan works about personalities and/or characters based on both content producers who are contractually bound to the Yogscast and various friends of those content producers who appear in their videos.

Fan debates that spiral out of control used to be called wank, ostensibly because it was seen as self-aggrandizing with no particular goal except for an anonymous emotional release on the internet, and it was labelled and described as such in communities such as fandom_wank and fail_fandomanon on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. Nowadays, these similar arguments on Tumblr and Twitter are called discourse, a term co-opted from academia which lends gravitas and credence to the arguments being expounded in the post. Similarly, squick in old fandom simply implied a visceral dislike of a given topic, but the new fandom term trigger makes someone’s aversive feelings towards that topic more intensely personal and potentially traumatic. As fandom became more and more political and critical of its consumption of media, its preferred terms to describe its engagement with the media have also shifted towards a more academic, professional lexicon.

In the end, perhaps that is what the old fandom denizens currently on Tumblr are bemoaning when they note the shift from wank to discourse or squick to trigger. This cultural shift to becoming more serious about one’s hobby has thrown people who have been in fandom before Strikethrough slightly off-kilter. (…) In its current iteration on Tumblr, fandom’s shift from wank to discourse and squick to trigger indicates its growing acceptance of critical analysis of media, especially in regards to increasing representation for marginalized populations.

Old fandom—in the context of this article, fandom from before the rise of microblogging platforms like Tumblr and Twitter—was a very different place by virtue of being hosted on journaling platforms like LiveJournal or individual domains like GeoCities. The structure of those sites was more friendly toward written posts and long, individual discussions in comment threads, as well as communities keeping to their own and not having to see content from other parts of the site unless the user crossposted or linked to them. The average age skewed a lot older, with users on LiveJournal talking about families and jobs alongside their fan works, and younger users often either lied about their age or said nothing at all.

The above video clip shows my interaction with EVE performer Nina Samuels, who demands I approach the ring before chastising me for my lack of respect, reminding me that she is a media star.  Yet my (auto)ethnographic research on fan performance and participation at EVE events leads me to question the extent to which I should also perform as a fan. While I am currently drafting work based on this interaction with Samuels, does my fannish performance here indicate some kind of coercion or manipulation of the research environment? Or am I simply acting as I would as a “normal” fan, to then reflect on it later as a scholar?

The reception the Lexa Pledge has received suggests ambivalence about the impact of #BuryYourGays. Showrunners are now more aware of television’s tendency to kill queer characters, but they are wary of a blanket commitment to avoiding the trope. Their reluctance indicates that remedying the ‘bury your gays’ trope is not a question of simply asking creators to consciously choose to avoid it. We need to credit the forces history and context exert on creators as well. In the context of queer televisual death, critiques of individual creative choices should also contest the industry structures that make queer demise the path of least resistance.

Supernatural, hands down, from the time I started working with this type of data, has just continued to be so huge, not only with the show, but we see the characters trend, and we see the actors around the show trend. Misha Collins just did his third Answer Time—Answer Time is our Q and A on the site, and he’s just so successful and they get such great engagement that we had him on for a third. And he loves doing them, so it’s very exciting to see that. As for changes, anime and K-pop have both really surged since I started working here. I mentioned that Bangtan Boys is often one of our top tags of all the tags; if it’s not Bangtan Boys, it’s Yuri!!! on Ice. So, to see this anime kind of overtake the whole community and trend so much higher than everything else on the site—it’s just wild to see how things ebb and flow. And One Direction—I’m actually working through some 2013 data for a project I’m working on in secret right now (https://thefandometrics.tumblr.com/post/162441496429/fandometrics-in-depth-shipping), and most of the ships from that year are One Direction ships. And now it’s very rare to see the Larry Stylinsons come out. It just feels like One Direction was this cornerstone of Tumblr fandom in the beginning, and now it still exists in different metadata, because people are talking just about Harry or just about Zayn, and it just has ebbed and flowed. It’s on the way down.

If you look at how AO3 is built, consent is also at the core of its infrastructure. The concept of Archive Warnings, how it’s implemented, and the content of these warnings are all about consent. Warnings are all about allowing readers to make informed choices – to give informed consent – to the kind of content they engage with. And two of the four things you can warn for (rape/non-con and underage) are directly related to consent. The interesting thing that does is that when you are writing your fic, when you are posting it, you are prompted to think about and engage with consent issues. And if you don’t, readers will comment on that and start a conversation. So thinking about consent is a community norm that is baked into our infrastructure.

The internal struggle for the control of the television text is clear in the case of The 100. In this regard, fans participating in the ‘LGBT Fans Deserve Better’ campaign used social media to denounce the distorted and harmful representation of lesbians and bisexuals. Fueled by their newly developed fan-tagonism or anti-fandom, the actions and initiatives of the fan activists were not only directed towards the producers of the series and towards the actors in the industry, but also to other fans, specifically toxic fans, within their own community. The comments analysed reveal a constant negotiation for the ultimate goal of the campaign and the means to achieve it at a time when the hostilities towards the producers by toxic fans threatened to damage the ethos of fan activists and the whole campaign. Therefore, the self-regulation strategies deployed by fan activists on ‘The L Chat’ illustrate the tensions that are intrinsic to most, if not all, fan cultures.

Participatory fans on Tumblr adopt specialized fandom tags, which are unlikely to be used by Tumblr members who do not identify with a particular fandom or subsection of fandom. Such tags are not merely composed of the name the fandom (such as a show or movie title), or even one of the primary characters. Rather, specialized fandom tags further delineate the potential audience, trying to draw the attention of a specific subsection of the larger fan base or to conceal content from other fans (and content producers) who do not want to view romantic or sexual content. In using these tags, widely scattered fans take on some characteristics of communities. Norms develop regarding what is posted and how fans interact with each other when a particular tag is deployed. Without an architecturally defined community structure, content and conduct are nonetheless debated and controlled.

If I had written an essay in 2006 about “the future of fandom,” I might have imagined a possible future that looked very much like AO3—except I would have considered it far out of reach. The idea that a community of people could come together to create among themselves both the infrastructure and the code for an entirely new platform is remarkable—but it is even more remarkable that this was a community of mostly women, who are traditionally underrepresented in computer science and even more so in open-source development. Another success of AO3 is that they didn’t just build a platform; they also built a batch of fan-coders because, as the founders realized at the time: “we’re going to have to grow our own”.

Shops like the Who Shop and Alien Entertainment use their authority as merchants to help shape the fandom, and to reinforce the feelings of alterity within fan subcultural communities through discourses of historicity and activity. Importantly, both discourses are reflective of, and appear to react to, the rise of digital technology; both the Who Shop and Alien Entertainment emphasize the importance of local, in-person events while also developing a web presence. In addition to the in-person merchandise sales, the museum, the convention, and the signings, both shops use the internet frequently to sell wares around the world. That both stores have maintained a connection to the fan base itself portends a revisitation of traditional ways of understanding fandom.

The basic issue with monetizing fan fiction is that organic, noncommercial communities that create transformative remixes cannot be moved into the commercial sector without being fundamentally altered and diminished. The market changes what it swallows.

Morimoto: The Yuri!!! on Ice thing …

Brennan: Yeah, it’s wild. People love anime with sports. Haikyu!, the volleyball anime, is also huge, and Free, when that happened, also was such a cultural phenomenon. When the first trailer came out for Free, a whole fandom sprung out of just the trailer—there was no information about the characters or anything. People just went in on headcanons and found something to connect with, with just a few seconds of content. So, there’s something about sports anime!

The case of Sherlock Johnlock fandom reiterates the question Jenkins (2006) posed about Twin Peaks (1990–91) fans and David Lynch: what if fans found out the text was meaningless or that all meaning came from their interpretive community and not the author? This is an especially pertinent question, given that a photo set of Lynch asserting the primacy of the text has been making the rounds on Tumblr among Johnlock fans in the wake of Freeman’s March/April 2018 comments. Further, a July 9, 2018, Tumblr Q&A, which Moffat and Gatiss conducted as 221b-investigates to promote their Sherlock-themed London escape room experience “The Game Is Now,” reiterated for many Johnlockers that Mofftiss—with their “patronizing, supercilious and teasing” nonanswers (we-love-the-beekeeper, July 9, 2018)—still do not wish to meaningfully engage them. Several fans submitted questions already knowing full well they would not be answered but with the intent to hold the writers accountable for their narrative, while others were disappointed in the lack of serious answers. Worse yet, Moffat and Gatiss appeared to disdain analysis—or recognize its potential for narrative disappointment. In response to a question meant to echo Sherlock’s words in “TST,” alwaysanoriginal asks, “Any words of advice for those who like to pull on the ‘loose threads’ of the world?” Mofftiss responds, “You’ll ruin your jumper.”

This study (of New York Times articles on fan fiction) provides little evidence that the news media bias parents and administrators against the use of fanfiction in the K-12 classroom. Throughout the narrative, fanfiction is depicted as an increasingly normal (Bazelon 2007), “mainstream” youth practice (Manly 2006, 1).

(…)

Since The New York Times does not negatively frame fanfiction literacy practices, why do so many fanfiction scholars and practitioners report that negative discourses about fanfiction hinder classroom literacy initiatives? One possible explanation is that fanfiction scholars have relied too heavily on isolated examples of negative discourses, and have not considered the overall ratio of these negative discourses to positive discourses. For example, Jenkins (1992) refers to several films, television shows, and non-fiction books that negatively depict fans, but Jenkins never provides the size of his entire data set or information about positive depictions. Since Jenkins only presents eleven films in his findings, and does not provide his data collection methodologies, it is difficult to determine the implications or transferability of Jenkins’ study. A parent might view fans negatively if they were to watch all eleven of these films, but what if they were to watch eleven random films that depicted fans?

Based on inconsistencies between this study and other fanfiction research, I recommend that other fanfiction scholars attempt to reproduce these findings by analyzing the discourses of other news media outlets.

However, just because new blood has arrived in the fandom doesn’t mean the old behavior patterns have vanished. In this, the structure of a microblogging platform plays a role. Tumblr and Twitter aggregate all content made by all users with global tags that are accessible by every user. These porous boundaries between blogs and users, coupled with the ease with which one can retweet or reblog a post to disseminate its contents, mean that fandom and nonfandom parts of a site can easily find each other to exchange ideas, information, and—as may be the case for the introduction of the terms discourse and trigger in lieu of wank and squick—lexical items.

The separation between fandom as a subcultural social practice and the mainstreaming of fan culture wherein “fannish values and reading practices spread across the entire viewing public” in ways supported by media corporations is noteworthy (Jenkins 2006). In the mainstreaming of fan practice, media industries use the labor of fandom, whose practices have been altered and molded, in service of another group of fans, ultimately for corporate gain. While mainstream fans might become members of fandom, as Jenkins points out, the Star Trek fan film guidelines place fans associated with fandom in the middle of a tug-of-war between corporations and mainstream fans. This tug-of-war parallels the structure of the Axanar case: where Peters might have taken advantage of other fans’ donations and engaged in copyright infringement, the corporation prepares to regift and control fan films, using the labor of one fan group to generate support for mainstream fan platforms. As Stanfill concludes about media industries appropriating fan labor, “The same corporations filing takedown requests on fan transformative works are quite willing to appropriate fan labor by monetizing those works, and they often profit from appropriating other artists who never get to count as artists” (137). In this scenario, neither Peters nor Paramount/CBS seem especially ethical. There is realized and potential exploitation on both sides.

The tension between the private act of journaling and the public sharing of journal entries via a social network architecture makes LiveJournal a site of performance (Kendall 2007; Lindemann 2005). Busse (2006) observes that women sharing fan fiction with one another through their LiveJournal accounts use affectionate and sometimes sexual language with one another, even if they identify as heterosexual in other contexts. Collaborative online discussions with fan fiction writers and readers confirm that some participants consider LiveJournal fandom communities to constitute a “queer female space” where women can be verbally affectionate with one another (Lothian, Busse, and Reid 2007). Fan cultures do develop norms that may differ from the cultural norms enacted by those same individuals outside the context of fandom.