Learning from the failure of the second intervention on Reddit, I took some time to create an educational zine.

P2: Examples of original bestselling authors who started their career by creating fanfiction of existing popular works;

P3: 2 examples of fans taking over the original universe: Fans holding a funeral for Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character, and two examples of fans taking over the original universe as their own after the original authors have been charged with controversial statements online.

P4: Using the Media Specificity Theory, and indicating that fanfiction could be considered a new form of medium, which differenciates to traditional writing.

P5: A moodboard of fan-created content. Visually introducing the definition of fanfiction, fan art, cosplay, and parodies.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this intervention is to inspire new knowledge to the ones within the general public who are ignorant/nonchalant/initially opposed to fanfiction.(which is what I failed to do in the 2nd Intervention on Reddit).

PROCESS: This time I created a google form that included stereotypes of fanfiction, and sent it not only on original writing communities on Reddit, but also on several writing communities on Weibo and Red. By broadening my scope, I eventually found 8 participants who were willing to participate.

TOOLS: Google Forms, WenJuanXing(Chinese version of Google Forms), Photoshop

LOCATION: Online writing communities.

PARTICIPANTS: 8 people who are either ignorant or have negative stereotypes on fanfiction

REFLECTIONS & LEARNINGS:

One reader said it reminded them of the Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, and the fact that the author doesn’t get to define the “ultimate meaning” of a text they wrote, the meaning of the text is transformative and changes according to the reader/audience. This to me signified that it created new knowledge in this stakeholder, and it linked to their own knowledge of the definition of fiction, and it changed their original comprehension of what fanfiction could be.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: Apart from doing a visual intervention, I would love to experiment on different mediums. I had quite limited time to figure out the deeper and more abstract level of fanfiction, how it linked to participatory culture and transmedia storytelling, but I really loved the idea of media specificity because this sparked the theory that fanfiction could be legitimately marked as a new type of medium. I’m going to experiment on this area in the next intervention.