7.18

After the tutorial on July 17th, I felt like I had much more agency in my project and I realised what I had initially done wrong: I had been trying to stuff everything I want to do into a single project, and that, while maximizing its possibility, had shrunken my own ability as a creator to actually finish it.

So after a significant amount of consideration, I had given my passion, the broad topic of “fantasy-based fiction and sci-fi”, a more focused approach: “fan-fiction and fan-created content”, because my tutor helped me to realise that the reason I always went back to fiction and stories when I felt lost or was in a dark place was because I regarded fiction as a psychological sanctuary, and the characters inside the stories I loved always gave me strength and made me confident and positive enough to face the difficulties in my own life. I am in several groups of fandoms of certain fantasy works and together we would feel much better because we feel less alone.

7.24

How can we change the misconception of fan-created content, including fan-fiction, fan art, cosplay and parodies?

I chose this topic for 3 reasons:

1. I have been a constant fan-fic reader for 3-4 years, and have been hesitant to post fan-created content myself for fear of it being “unoriginal”, and have grown used to its “bad rep”.
2. I never considered picking this topic for the same reason. I had the same hierarchical mindset that creating change in the field of “education” or “original fiction” was “better” than doing a project about fan-fiction, while fandoms that share their artwork and fan-fics with each other has been, secretly, a psychological sanctuary for me for a very long time.
3. I considered picking the therapeutic potential of fan-created content but decided against it, because I felt it best to let fan-fiction go about its own functions freely rather than constraining it to professional therapy. Audience of fan-fics would much rather participate in fan-fic workshop rather than a therapy workshop about fan-fics, but I will definitely include therapeutic elements in it nevertheless.

I have a list of stakeholders, including:

1. Individual fan-fic writers, artists, and content creators.
2. fan groups and communities of original works.
3. creators of original works. (mainly to ask about their opinions about fan-fiction in general and how they view fan-created content of their own work, collecting both friendly and unfriendly feedback)
4. academics whose work includes the field of fan studies and fan-fiction.

I currently don’t have any ideas about further interventions yet but I think it’s because the research I currently have are either second-hand or autoethnographic. I hope the project will develop once I gain some first-hand research via interviews or questionnaires.

7.31

I’m scared…I am so scared because I was afraid that I had done sth wrong…but I have learned that MAAI is a course that pushes you to practice your courage…so I decided to train myself to do just that.