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.
Henry Jenkins is a renowned media scholar and cultural critic, best known for his work on participatory culture, convergence culture, and fan studies. He is a professor at the University of Southern California and the author of numerous influential books, including “Convergence: The Future of Media” and “Fandom: Identities and Communities in the Age of the Internet.” Jenkins’ research explores how media technologies and fan communities shape our understanding of culture and identity.
REFLECTION & LEARNINGS:(how does this benefit my interventions/action research/creating change or impact on the real world)
BONUS: being invited to join the Transcultural Fandom of East Asia, a group of researchers of fan studies that Mr.Jenkins is recruiting along his travels. The aim of the Fandom is to broadcast the voice of the East-Asian fandom (Mr.Jenkins mentioned that he had fallen in love with Shanghai based fandom, which he thinks is the most vibrant and creative and engaging fan culture in the world). I was overjoyed to be invited. I really look forward to being with a group of researchers and looking at their direction of work. Because it’s definitely gonna be different than simply investigating alone on this area.
My research question currently starts with “How can I“, but I would love to investigate a little bit on “How can we” when the we means the East Asian Fandom.
And after that, when I look back, I will probably have new insights on the methodology I choose to use.
I planned out an intervention on inviting stakeholders from the fandom community to draw their first impression of a fanfic creator, and then invite stakeholders from the original writing community to do the exact same thing.
Stakeholders from the Fandom Community:
I didn’t plan this intervention as well as I had hoped for, asking people to draw on a small canva page was less fruitful than simply asking questions on Reddit.
My stakeholders more likely chose to ask questions instead of participating in my intervention, which only meant that I hadn’t communicated in a clear way.
I decided to go back to researching for the link between fanfiction, participatory culture and convergence media. Because this intervention to me still seemed forced out, like I was trying to do an intervention for the sake of doing an intervention, but it was better to do it and regret it rather than not do it and regret it.
Comparatively, stakeholders from the original writing community had a similar result.
in Subreddit Fanfiction: out of the 22 people that entered the canva page, only 3 left drawings.
in Subreddit Writing(for Original Writers), 5 people joined and only 1 person left a drawing.
REFLECTIONS & LEARNINGS: This intervention was not planned out at all. I had acted out of haste and had not used any methodology to help me gather useful feedback. But it was better than doing nothing at all.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: I had done case studies on fanfiction before the course but I hadn’t thought of pre-practising my means of communication. For my next intervention I needed to find a way to measure the change by gathering feedback before and after the stakeholders see the intervention and make sure that it is easy for them to receive feedback.
Neil Gaiman supporting fan-fiction but NOT reading it. Because if he read a canon idea of his own work, he wouldn’t be able to write(publish) the idea himself even though he had the same thought.
GO2 was, according to a group of fans, less interesting than some of the fan-fics that had been written earlier. What Neil and John Finnemore wrote in GO2 had a LOT in common with some of the fanfics with more in-depth research.
My Graduation Hat from my BA Last Year
I recalled that I had painted my BA graduation cap the colors of Good Omens, and had proudly showed it to one of the twitter accounts that played the character Aziraphale in the original novel/show.
Comic Con in Beijing on August,2023
This was a comic con I went to in Beijing on August, 2023.
I was in the Good Omens Fandom Group in Beijing and we had several online platforms, and I, as a fan, also participated in several face-to-face activities like comic-cons in Beijing.
DESCRIPTION: I went to the streets of Edinburgh, and asked members of the general public to draw their first reactions when they heard the concept “fanfiction”.
PURPOSE:
–Project-wise: getting an idea of how the public view fan-fiction in general, and try to find any direct evidence of social stigma and misconception that would occur in a setting that is considered open-minded.
–Personally: to practice my courage. Redefining my topic took longer time that I had anticipated, which meant spending several weeks frozen in place, terrified of proceeding forward and forcing myself to push forward at the same time. For a while, I was really, really afraid of conducting interventions because I was afraid I would do something “wrong”. However, researching on new knowledge can only be achieved by trial and error. So I decided to practice conquering my fears by taking action.
PROCESS: going around the streets of Edinburgh and asking people to draw their first reaction when they think of fan-fiction, fan-art, cosplay, and parodies, and asking them to explain their drawings or written words, and record if the participant gives consent.
TOOLS: a notebook, several markers, and a phone for recording.
LOCATION: Edinburgh
PARTICIPANTS: Random passersby on the streets.
PROCESS:
It wasn’t easy for me to encourage random passersby to participate, because the majority of them were on their way to see a show and they either politely refused my invitation to participate in my intervention, or just downright ignored me…What was interesting was that the people who didn’t want to participate varied in age, gender and positions. This broke my initial stereotype of thinking that only the older generation(aged 50 and up) would hesitate to participate.
However, as I gradually grew bolder and started chatting to people on a whim on the streets, people started to slowly respond. One girl told me the definition of Rule 34*, which I didn’t know before; a performer who had been a professional wrestler drew Godzilla vs Kong and told me that it represented his own passion for his career; a group of teenage dancers crowded around me and chattered about their favorite characters and ships from Harry Potter; a girl drew a sex scene out of stick figures, with the woman dominating the man, and claimed that the fan-fic universe was a safe space and psychological sanctuary for her to create and enjoy those fantasies while the real world prevented her from doing so.
* Rule 34: If it exists there is porn of it, no exceptions.
OUTCOME:
REFLECTIONS & LEARNINGS:
ABOUT THE LOCATION
This intervention to Edinburgh was impromptu, and I got the most feedback on areas in Edinburgh where the Edinburgh Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was taking place. Both festivals are relatively open-minded spaces for all kinds of performances and welcomes artistic creativity.
This ultimately means that I’m “preaching to the converted”, in other words, telling people who already have relatively open minds for adapted works that fan-fiction is good. (I knew this before conducting the intervention, but I still decided to do it because it would help me practice my courage. And who knows? Maybe I’ll find something that I wasn’t expecting.)
Even in a location as open-minded as this, there were still people who shied away from my approaches. The people who avoided me on the streets are the exact ppl who I should gather data from if I wanted to “change” or “challenge” the misconception of fan-fics.(Arguably, this was probably because I picked busier streets in Edinburgh and they would not usually pay attention to a random girl with a notebook in her hands.)So I needed to center my research on less open-minded places and less open-minded people.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT:
I need to locate stakeholders from less open-minded places and talk to them why they had a stereotype of fan-fiction.
From the people that agreed to participate, only two people agreed to record their voice on my phone. I have documented the others’ feedback of their drawings as clearly as I could, but I will have to make sure that I find a better way to document the information.
I didn’t find an accurate way to measure the impact of this intervention. The thing I want to measure in this project is “challenge” or “change”, but I didn’t really provide the evidence of the change that occured because of my intervention.
The audience that took part in this intervention were participants of the Edinburgh Fringe. They are considered more or less open-minded. The worst comment I got from my participants was that they didn’t read fan-fics at all. So I needed to relocate my stakeholders to a group of people that doesn’t think fan-fic is legal( for example).
Or, as I said before, the anti-fandom had a valid reason for hating on the fandom(hating pro-shippers(problematic shippers) in general. I would personally agree with the anti-fandom at this point….
OTHER NOTES AND JIBBERISH(COMPLETELY WITHOUT LOGIC)
After reading reddits and twitter that Anti-fandom ppl had sent, I found myself slowly edging to the other side…because there are a lot of gray areas within the fandom. So basically exposing the reality of both parties to each other, and documenting their view on fanfics before and after.(via drawing…or recording stuff)
New Knowledge??? Wtf is the new knowledge generated through this project? That fan-fiction is a playing field that allows some ppl to commit crimes and hurt ppl without breaking the rules.
So do we need rules? What if…we create an alternate reality where we add specific rules to fan-fiction that 100% restricts the crimes(I mean the fictional crimes) This may turn out worse than what is happening in reality but whatever. It’s the idea of an intervention.
Redirecting my research after the Intervention
Let’s just say that the fan-fics and fan art that I read and saw was wayyyy tooo pure compared with the fan-fics that causes the “misconceptions” to the outsiders. https://www.reddit.com/r/FanFiction/comments/n0qt6o/is_it_illegal_to_write_explicit_fan_fiction_of/
After I read this, I was like: should there be rules? There are explicit grey areas in this realm that could potentially hurt innocent people who just wants to be creative in what they thought was a safe space.
(Definition: Narrative inquiry records the experiences of an individual or small group, revealing the lived experience or particular perspective of that individual, usually primarily through interview which is then recorded and ordered into a chronological narrative.)
Feeling that this type of method was the best way to gather qualitative info from an interview, I used this method for Leah’s interview.
Leah Holmes is a London-based PhD student at Bath Spa University, specialising in anime and manga, fandom, and cultural studies. Her MPhil thesis is about the history of UK anime fandom and talks about hostility and resistance from wider society.
INTERVIEW SUMMARY:
-Can you share a bit about your background and what inspired you to specialize in anime, manga, and fandom studies?
–I read a lot of manga when I was young. My bachelor’s degree was media production and I had the freedom to write about anime.
-In the anime that you were centered on, were they considered original works or were they considered as fan-fiction?
-Fan studies came around after anime, so I came across fan studies after this. After that I was pointed towards fan studies and fan content. The UK fandom is relatively new and is seldomly documented, so I decided to do the job myself.
-In your experience, what are the most common misconceptions about fan-created content such as fan-fiction, fan art, cosplay, and parodies?
-There was a lot of that in the 90s because a lot of that was very niche, manga videos. It was very hard to share things because the internet was at its infancy. There is a hierarchy there which indicates that fan-fiction is lower in rank than original fiction.
-There is a saying in fandom that “women are creators and men are curators”. If women become interested in something, that thing becomes devalued.
-Hardcore novel fans look down on media fans. Male fans look down on female fans.
-Is this misconception still happening now? In 2024? Or has it evolved?
There are several fandoms who had gained a lot of legitimacy, like the works of Cassandra Claire and Fifty Shades of Grey.
-Can you share any examples of successful interventions or initiatives that have helped to change negative perceptions of fan-fiction?
-No specific examples off the top of my head. It’s well known that Fifty Shades of Grey became such a great hit that it spawned a large amount of fan-fiction. It’s a middle finger to people who are like: “You’ll never get anywhere with writing your fan-fiction!!” It’s writing at the end of the day and it can still get you places.
-People were disgusted that women had access to this “filth” when it was considered “common” when men had access to porn.
–According to the demographics, the big shifting was the arrival of Pokemon. The way the industry works, is that this thing is working so we put it into the media, and we’ll add whatever similar to that thing to make more money.
-Does it really matter if they are original or not? Whether or not they are considered as “fan-created”?
-Not really. It mostly depends on the amount of the audience. Media doesn’t care whether it is original or not so long as it is popular.
Notice: This intervention redefined my research question from fantasy to fanfiction.
I am currently very aware of the fact that my current research question: “How can we measure the impact of fantasy-based fiction?” has yet to generate new change into this world and that has made me quite anxious and hesitant to do interventions.
After discussing this problem with the course tutor, I was given the advice to explore the area of both fantasy and magic tricks via traditional research(first and secondary) as well as action research(interventions).
So for action research(7.13~7.15), I decided to put the comic I showed the expert out publicly and show it to different people.
I printed out the comic, went to Kings Cross, and tried to interact with the pedestrians who were passing by. This proved unsuccessful and only one person wrote down a dream that they wanted to do.
So I changed tactics, and decided to reposition my intervention online. [There were 24 participants in total]
I asked each participant 4 questions:
Quantitative data:
1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you think the comic influenced you personally?
2. Do you think that this transformation of the concept of an “unfinished building” into a story has a greater impact on the real world than it did before?
Qualitative Data:
3. What does this story remind you of? Do you have any thoughts about this story? Please feel free to write down any feedback you have on this comic.
(This question generated a lot of very long feedback that I’m still integrating into a readable format for a learning log. I will update bullet points of audience feedback shortly.)
e.g. I really liked the theme of giving meaning to things that seem otherwise meaningless. Personally, I like this subjective, materialistic way of understanding the world, and I feel quite strongly about this theme. Because everything in the world is meaningless in itself, it is we who give meaning to it. The unfinished building remind me of ruins, like when we go to see a historical site that is objectively just some broken rocks and mounds of earth, but just because someone says that it was once the splendour of a dynasty, we instantly feel a lot of emotion. And I really like the meaning you’ve given to it, it’s very cute and cosy, for me it can hold not only buried dreams, but also more of those carefree old times, childhoods that I can’t go back to.
4. Please recommend a work of fantasy (novel, film, TV show, musical or any other genre) that has had a profound effect on you, and explain briefly about the impact this work has had on you in real life.
(Same.)
e.g.1. I’m a big fan of “The Three-Body Problem”. It has a very ambitious setting, but if I were to say how it affected my actual life, I’d probably say that the line in the book that stuck with me the most was “To the civilisation of time, rather than to life in time”. This line is actually originally from Pascal’s “to the time to life, rather than to life in time, that is, “to give time to life, rather than to life in time”, Liu Cixin extended this line from individual life to the survival of the whole civilisation. He extended this phrase from individual life to the survival of civilisation as a whole. In the book, human beings, facing the invasion of the Trisolarians, and realising the disparity in the level of technology between the two sides, after complete despair, established a calm mindset: since human civilisation is bound to be destroyed after a century, we might as well make the most of our last years and live our lives to the fullest. And it is precisely this mentality that has made the human mind break free and soar freely, and in this short span of 100 years, the level of human science and technology has taken an unprecedented leap forward. This is the meaning of the saying that what we should pursue is not the continuation of civilisation, but to let civilisation blossom most beautifully in the years of its continuation. In the same way, each of us, with regard to life, should seek not to extend our life span, but to live out more values in our limited life.
e.g.2. There are countless fantasy and sci-fi works that I’ve read and enjoyed. Sci-fi still has quite a few logic holes, and fantasy relies even more on strange powers that don’t quite fit the rules of the real world. That said it may lead to a new question, what if the fantasy elements in this work are just observers of the real world and not interlopers? Or if we only look at the part that observes the real world and ignore the part that interferes with it for the time being, are there any works that have had a profound effect on me? Reality itself is full of “fantastical” but reasonable things, and compared to the sheer size of the real world I live in, a particular work of fantasy would be a drop in the ocean, and its effect on me would be like a handful of salt sprinkled in the ocean. So it’s a slight shame that there doesn’t seem to be any fantasy that really has a profound effect on me, it’s basically just fun to read.
Reflection
Although I received a lot of positive and constructive feedback from this intervention, the process in designing it felt forced. The fear of not being able to link this intervention to my research question had been paralysing to me, and was slowing my research process down distinctly.
The fantasy I created has different amounts of impact to different individuals. I will try my best to use the data I collected from this intervention and form a logical link to my current research.
Similar to the curse of the Pyramids of Egypt, a myth/belief of ray-cats was developed in the 1980s to keep people away from nuclear waste repositories. If people in the future(10 thousand years later) see a glowing cat, they’ll know to back off from that place, therefore backing away from the nuclear repository and avoiding radioactivity.
By instilling a sense of fear or reverence around the waste site through superstition or religious beliefs, the priesthood aims to deter future populations from approaching the danger.
By telling a story, by instilling a belief in its audience, experts of this project managed to keep people away from possible danger.
Hadestown is a beloved show of mine that I had rewatched thrice. It combines Greek Mythology with current problems in modern society like famine and poverty, using Hell(Hadestown) as an analogy for cheap labor in factories.
Hermes, as the narrator of this story, enters in and out of the narrative of Hadestown. Orpheus also plays the role as narrator when he sang the ancient tale of Hades and Persephone. We, as the audience, see three layers of reality onstage. Hermes’s narrative, Orpheus’ narrative(in one scene), and Hades and Persephone’s narrative.
The picture above is a paragraph from the pamphlet of Hadestown.
This process is to demonstrate the power of placebo and show that even when people know they’re taking a placebo, it can still have physical effects on the body.
After receiving a “fear erasure tablet”, participants are put into scary situations like being locked in a dark room or a coffin, and their physical reactions are monitored. Remarkably, even though the participants verbally acknowledged taking a placebo, their body’s stress responses are lowered after taking the pill compared to before.
This shows the mind’s ability to override our autonomic fight or flight responses and biologically reduce fear through expectation and suggestion alone.
Derren Brown discusses how placebos have been clinically proven to reduce pain and change hormonal secretions through psychological factors.The video is an entertaining demonstration of just how powerful the placebo effect and mind-body connection can be.
