Methodology: Ethnography
After the first intervention, I decided to seek for people who have strong opinions about fanfic, both for and against, on places such as Reddit, Threads,Tumblr, and Discord.
- Successfully connected with a few members of audience that were interested;
- Received backlash because I wasn’t initially familiar with Reddit and did not communicate my intentions clearly;
- Continued to conduct an autoethnographic intervention on another profile;
- (By this point I simply decided to flirt with the idea of fucking up. So I decided to do exactly what idiom6 said.) Took idiom6’s advice and created a survey for collab. Hopefully will get fruitful results. (My audience basically pointed out that I had huge problems with LO4: The ability to use appropriate formats to communicate a range of critical positions, contexts, methodologies clearly and professionally with a range of relevant and external audiences.(AC Communication)) So I had to figure out a way to fix it.
- Went back to secondary research. Reread Leah Holmes’ paper and a few others on fandom and transformative works.
“Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators.”
“A story from Voldemort’s perspective is transformative, so is a story about a pop
star that illustrates something about current attitudes toward celebrity or sexuality.
Transformative uses are uses that add new insights or meaning to the original work,
often in ways that copyright owners don’t like. For instance, a book review that quotes a work in order to criticize it, or a retelling of a story that offers the villain’s point of view sympathetically or adds explicit sexual content, can be a transformative fair use.
Kelly Boyd (2006), slash fiction is “sexually explicit, amateur, gay male and lesbian tales produced predominantly by heterosexual women for heterosexual women,
about characters in mainstream television series and feature movies” (13). Joanna Russ (1985) describes it as, “Pornography by women, for women, with love” (79). But these definitions only scratch the surface of what slash fiction is and can be.
Slash can be read as anti-feminist because it focuses mostly
on relationships between male characters, but it also serves a feminist function of allowing
women to imagine
Recently, there have been studies that pay exclusive attention to slash writers.
For example, Jung (2004) and Heiden (2016) both used autoethnography to situate the
author as a fan writer and draw on their own fanfiction writings to make generalized
claims about how writing slash fanfiction is implicated in the trend of female
consciousness and liberation
Henry Jenkins: Textual Poachers. Fan Critics.
There were a few fruitful answers that I plan to continue for collab.
Yumestar20:
First, from an academic viewpoint, fanfics are an expression of fans. In media studies, there is the theory (based on Hall Stuart and John Fiske) that readers (regardless the media) are active participants even if they’re only ‘passively’ watching a show. (Which lead to some false claims like games being more interactive than movies etc.) Fanfic can be regarded as a product of that active participation, especially when it comes to books and movies. After viewing the media, one starts to engage further with the media by writing or reading fanfic. It’s the active participation part even if watching a show is often regarded as passive. But it’s even more. It creates a community. Some also refer to it as the neo-liberian politics: Common people have become free workers for the media industry, pushing the product by promoting it with free fanfics. (A claim I particularly don’t like, because I don’t feel this is what I do).
(Note to self: So writing fanfic(creating fan content) is an intervention for consuming media?)
Anyways, that’s the academic standpoint I’m aware of.
I’m a German fanfic author for eight years now. I also love reading fanfic in English and German, but more in English (this is funny enough very common for young German people – they rather read and write in English while the older ones stay in the German community. I’m just the exception xD)
Funny enough, back in 2018, I guess, there was a new law in Germany that everyone thought would forbid fanfic. (Which luckily didn’t happen despite the law being enforced). I also recently heard that Russia banned many fanfic sites, so maybe that could be interesting for your research as well.
Personally, I absolutely love fanfic, because of its community. You can connect to people, you share your own stories and for me, it’s all about representation. I never see a pansexual woman with ADHD being represented in media, or ADHD in general, so I use fanfic to represent myself. For example, one of my fanfics was all about King Julien from Madagascar having ADHD and trying to get into a relationship with someone who was still questioning their own sexuality. Currently, I’m writing a Star Trek fanfic in which the main character, Spock, is dealing with a neurological disorder caused by a virus that makes him think like an ADHD person. I’m actually translating that scene right now. I wrote it while I was in one of my episodes so it’s a pretty accurate description of how someone with ADHD thinks and writes.
This is probably what makes fanfic for me special: Representation. Media doesn’t represent me, so I take the media and ‘make it mine’. It’s like a queer interpretation.
VicarOfAcess:
While I’m no expert or anything, and I do like Fanfiction, it has been a more recent affair for myself. I previously disliked Fanfiction for the preconceived notions that it was mostly catered to sexual gratification, mostly due to early encounters with Harry Potter fanfics that are… disturbing, to say the least. On top of that, most people I knew who had an interest in Fanfiction focused on Romance Fanfics that catered to people’s desires to see characters get into relationships that appeal to those specific people. Alternative pairings, LGBTQ pairings, etc. I’ve never had an interest in those stories personally and assumed all Fanfiction was like that. Only recently did I get into Fanfiction after absolving myself of those previously held notions. It started with Star Wars Alt time lines, and expanded from there, to Warhammer & ASOIAF SIs to WORM ALT!POWERS. To put it bluntly, I realized there was more to it than P*rn. And honestly the ONLY people who care about Copyright are the Copyright holders. Especially how companies will abuse Copyright law to bludgeon anyone that they perceive as a threat to their brand. Games Workshop, Nintendo, etc. It’s literally free advertising. That’s all I’ll say on the subject.
One stakeholder stated that I hadn’t stated my point well enough, which is totally valid, especially because I mispelled the word “proshipping”(problematic shipping). I should state my wording much more clearly next time…