#transformative fandom

[elizabethminkel]

For the wonderful folks at @ellipsus-writes, I wrote a guest blog post about fanfiction and generative AI!

"Where the Wild Stories Are"

If you outsource the act of being a fan to AI, what does that leave you? Fan creators are powerful because they’re deeply participatory media consumers—they don’t passively absorb a work, but grab onto it and reshape it to their will. Large tech and entertainment corporations prefer the passive: they want us sitting there, clicking a button, as stories wash over us like the automatic scroll of a video app. Next, next, next.

On the AI forces swirling around fanfiction—but especially people using AI to generate fic. (Why?! The writing is the fun part!!)

(Also if you're unfamiliar with @ellipsus-writes, definitely check them out, especially if you're looking to get off gdocs as Google bludgeons the product to death with useless AI features. This post was editorially independent—not sponsored content—though we were very happy to do a sponsored segment for them on @fansplaining a while back. Their values strongly align with much of transformative fandom—and they even have an export-to-AO3 button!)

[fansplaining]

🎉 Our May piece is live! 🎉 And it's an exciting one:

"I Came to Ruin You: The Collecting Practices of K-Pop Fandoms"

From photo cards to video art installations, a tour through a recent exhibition showcasing K-pop fans’ communal creativity and cross-cultural exchanges.

by Rea McNamara and Bo Shin

This piece is a bit of a departure for us—rather than our standard fandom reporting or analysis, this is an expanded version of a fannish art exhibition, complete with images, videos, and excerpts from the K-pop fans and artists whose work was featured in the show. The co-curators, Rea and Bo, are both BTS fans, so they write about that position as both fans and curators as well.

By highlighting the creativity, passion, and collaborative spirit of K-pop fans, I came to ruin you recognized fans’ roles as cultural producers. Their collecting practices intersect with and challenge traditional art forms, transforming what might otherwise be considered ephemeral or niche into meaningful cultural expressions.

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

As a follow-up to my let people use fanfiction as narrative therapy post I would also like to state for the record:

Ain’t nothing wrong with self insert fanfiction. Or Mary Sue OCs that are basically self inserts. Also nothing wrong with people writing ‘bad’ fanfiction that has nothing to do with the canon really. I don’t give a shit. People are making art and that’s awesome. I may not read stuff that isn’t to my personal tastes, but I am Glad people are making their art regardless. Especially young people. Especially people who are otherwise new to writing. Hell yeah, Make Art.

One thing I have noticed about fandom on tumblr is that in very large fandoms with mass appeal, there are often a lot of kids and youths and young folk watching or reading and thus wanting to create transformative art about it. This also means that a high concentration of fic may tend more towards having less to do with the actual canon of the thing and being more focused on whatever those kids really wanted to write or read about it. To discuss one specific example, the largest subsection of fandom that currently exists around the DC batman franchises on this site is the batfam fandom, a fandom comprised mostly of younger fans who are fans more of the platonic ideal of batman and his adopted kids and close associates that only really exists in their own works and also the webtoon**** For most of those people the appeal is the found family aspect, and that’s what they want to read and write about. Hell yeah. Good for them. At least they’re writing. At least they’re making art.

****I know there are a lot of people in the batman comics fandom that have serious issues with the webtoon and the way that dc comics publishing agendas have begun to reflect more what people on the internet are talking about and less coherent storytelling that makes sense based on past canon. And this is a very fair criticism.

But this is not a problem limited to dc. This is a problem of all major production companies who produce art for mass release. TV shows being written in response to what people say on reddit has been ruining creative endeavors in an obvious way at least since Game of Thrones was airing. Books being published based on what will be popular on tiktok derived from the popularity of some frankly terrible novels (yes I do mean acotar) leads to some absolute drivel on the best seller list. Of course the comics industry is also fucking things up the same way.

Your enemy there are not the young fans new to fandom who are just discovering writing fanfiction and doing so by writing about whatever interests them most. Please stop blaming kids and other people who aren’t writing fanfiction close enough to your concept of canon for this problem, it is far bigger than that.

Let people make their maybe bad art in peace. Everyone has to make bad art on the road to learning how to make better art. I am glad they are making their art regardless.

Also no shade meant to those fans this is just an observation and I wish you all well, but I do find it a little funny that the people who Are experts on the dc comics canon who I have seen criticize the existence of the batfam fandom on here are also usually like ‘this is my favorite character, I hate every single run this character has ever been in except this one from 30 years ago and five panels of this one run that got cancelled early.’ Like, you don’t really like most of the canon you wish other people would familiarize themselves with right? Give new fans a chance to want to learn more about it. Most of the fans in that circle are pretty young, they’re gonna have kinda bad taste sometimes and that’s fine and good actually. They’ll grow out of it and maybe some of them will come to know the comics canon more closely.

This is also why even though I am vocal about personally disliking the works of SJM (acotar my beloathed) and its impact on the publishing industry, I am honestly happy for anyone that read those books and enjoyed them. Same for every other book I don’t like. If you read it and get something out of it hell yeah good for you. I was unironically into twilight for many years as a teen I am not here to pass judgement on teens or anyone for that matter for what they enjoy.

Most big fandoms I have dipped my toes into have this same problem. If there are a lot of young people in that fandom, there’s gonna be a lot of fanfic that is written by people just learning to write, and that’s great, I love that actually, good for them. But those are always the fandoms where I see people being perhaps more vitriolic than necessary towards other fans for not being up to snuff. Let people make art that you don’t think is good, please. It’s fine actually. If you don’t like it you don’t have to read it. Just be glad someone is making art that makes them happy and move on.

[gcu-sovereign]

@myconetted

what's the oldest piece of unsupported software you have to work with regularly?

[fanfic-thesis]

Another Quick Question:

If you were, was there anything you were disappointed about when you started the series?

(At first I was completly taken aback that Season 1 Morgana was not yet the evil counterpart of Merlin.)

[gcu-sovereign]

I could recognize the track from seeing what the rhythm was before I scrolled down.

[and I don't even go here!]

[fansplaining]

Our May piece comes out tomorrow, and it's a fascinating one! Attention: K-pop fans! Art fans! Collecting fans! Transformative work fans! There's something for everyone. 😄

[fanhackers]

The Classics of Fan Studies: Henry Jenkins - Textual Poachers

"Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk."

Today we’re continuing our exploration of the classics of fan studies with an early work that is still regarded today as one of the most important of the field: Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins. Jenkins is generally considered to be the first scholar to also define himself as a fan, becoming the first aca-fan (academic fan) before the word had even been invented. 

The work of John Fiske, that I talked about in my last post, is often cited in Textual Poachers where the idea of viewers having an important role in the meaning-making process is very important. But Jenkins also distances himself from the old-fashioned way of studying television viewers that often overlooked fan culture and fan activities.  

The central argument of the book is that transformative fans shape their perception of a text by “poaching” elements from it. In other words, they create their own interpretation by picking and choosing meanings that fit into it. This is a collaborative process that takes place within the fan community:

"Fan reading, however, is a social process through which individual interpretations are shaped and reinforced through ongoing discussions with other readers. [...] For the fan, these previously “poached” meanings provide a foundation for future encounters with the fiction, shaping how it will be perceived, defining how it will be used."

This also means that the fans are resistant to the authority of the original author(s) and have the power to subvert the intended meaning and reclaim ownership of the text:

"From the perspective of dominant taste, fans appear to be frighteningly out of control, undisciplined and unrepentant, rogue readers. [...] Undaunted by traditional conceptions of literary and intellectual property, fans raid mass culture, claiming its materials for their own use, reworking them as the basis for their own cultural creations and social interactions."

For Jenkins, fanworks are thus inherently resistant to the dominant reading. The intentions of the author are not necessarily ignored, but they are powerless against the fans’ ability to create their own meanings. 

Though some people have later come to nuance, or even oppose, Jenkins’ ideas, his work is still considered by most to be foundational in fan studies. What do you think?

[gcu-sovereign]

@official-kircheis your boy's got bars

i have news for you @spaceaudio

[gcu-sovereign]

Leviathan approaches

[fanfic-thesis]

Day 3 Fanfic Bachelor's Thesis

Looks like some Merlin fanfic autors actually have interest in being interviewed by me \o/ Still need a few more, but it is a good start. (Feel free to message me or look at my pinned post, if you are an author of merlin bbc fanfics.)

My current problem is, I kind of got too deep in screening literature for anything that fits my research question and now there are so many academic texts I want to read. Will be fun breaking them down to the topics I actually need. Why is fan studies always that interesting? >_>

[fanhackers]

Mark Heresy, American, b. 1965. Will to Power (detail), 1992, Ink on paper, 28 x 22 in, 2000.11.5, Gift of Peter Norton, Collection of the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University

Putting on an exhibition was the furthest thing from my mind when, through my PhD assistantship, I was placed at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art in the Fall of 2022. To say that I was anxious to talk authoritatively about fine art would be a dramatic understatement. Historically, my visits to art museums included confusion about what was (and wasn’t) considered “good,” and my daily experience with art centered around the fan pieces I saw posted on Tumblr and Instagram. I was, to put it bluntly, terrified.

During the same time period, I was struggling to find the focus of my dissertation. With Master's degrees in both English and Business Administration, and with a passion for fanfiction, I knew I wanted to talk about fan compensation. I had read plenty of scholarly books and articles that were passionate about promoting fandom as valid, positive, and useful, and plenty more that broke down the unpaid labor that fans engaged in for their fan objects, but I had never seen these two concepts addressed at the same time. Texts considering fan compensation tended to view fan labor in a negative light. At best, fanworks were viewed as a gift from a fan to the fan community at large, with fans knowing they would be repaid when other fans within the community gifted their own fanworks in return. (Nevermind that I myself have a fic on AO3 that is—as of writing this—the only fic belonging to its extremely rare-pairing). At worst, fanwork was viewed as unpaid labor, utilized—often unethically—to prop up the mass-media corporations who profited from it. I wanted to consider the ways in which fans were paid that weren't specifically monetarily based, and I wanted to address the topic from a position of honoring and respecting fanworks in all their forms. 

Even with this knowledge of what I wanted to discuss, I was struggling in my program. My experience in both of my Master’s programs had not prepared me for the fast pace at which new ideas and theories were disseminated in fan studies and through digital communities. Each time I thought I had found something new and exciting to add to the scholarship, I read a new paper—or more often watched a TikTok—which said my great idea in a better and smarter way than I had considered it. I felt discouraged and lost. I took a step back from my research, deciding to focus my time and energy on my assistantship instead. The museum was showing a portion of Marquette University’s collection of Tolkien manuscripts, and part of my duties included gathering three minute oral histories from fans for The J.R.R. Tolkien Fandom Oral History Collection. Inspired by this experience, I began to think about museums and archives, about what gets archived, about what gets displayed, and about who gets to make those decisions.

When the Haggerty Museum’s Curator for Academic Engagement approached me about an exhibition centering my own research, my first thought was to hang fan art on the walls. This, I was quickly told, was not an option for a plethora of reasons. Couldn’t I instead, it was suggested, use fine art pieces to discuss these types of fanworks? I first considered using pieces that could themselves be seen as fanworks—variations on mythology and biblical stories, new ways of considering historical moments and places, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe… but this didn’t feel like enough. Everything is inspired by something. Is that enough to make it a fanwork?  

It was from these thoughts and musings that Affirmation/Transformation: Fandom Created was born. Fourteen fine art pieces were selected from the Haggerty’s permanent collection—each of which will be used to discuss something that fans create. I categorized fan creations broadly: alternative readings, collections, community and collaboration, emotional responses, histories, identity, meanings, new texts, parasocial relationships, play, political and social movements, rivalry and opposition, rules, and theories.. The 14 fine art  pieces will be hung in the gallery during the exhibition, but are also currently available to view online. In this ongoing project, fans are invited to create fanworks inspired by these 14 pieces, and the fanworks submitted will be displayed digitally alongside the fine art. Think of it like a Prompt Meme challenge, featuring fine art as your prompt!

My experience with fandom is as much about community as it is about the thing I’m a fan of, and this is why it was so important to me to avoid discussing fandom in a vacuum. An exhibition of just my voice explaining what fans created felt cold; it felt disconnected from and disrespectful to the very thing I was trying to celebrate. This is why my dissertation project is collaborative, featuring the voices and creations of fans everywhere. I also feel called to ensure that these fanworks are treated with the respect that they deserve. This doesn’t just apply to the ways in which I will write about them in my final dissertation text; moreso, it is vitally important to me to take advantage of the opportunity I have to archive fanworks in Marquette’s institutional repository. Archiving these fanworks not only preserves them for potential future academic research, but also marks them—and fanworks in general—as being worthy of a place within the academic archive.  Fan submissions for Affirmation/Transformation: Fandom Created are being accepted now, and will continue to be accepted through the close of the exhibition (December 22, 2024). In order to be on display in the gallery on opening night (August 23, 2024), fanworks must be submitted by August 1st. All types of fanworks are welcome, as long as they are submitted digitally. Sound will be available to be played in the gallery (fanworks will be displayed on tablets with headphones attached).  For more information, visit https://epublications.marquette.edu/fandom/Affirmationtransformation/, or email Kate Rose at AffirmationTransformationShow@gmail.com

[gcu-sovereign]

I would just have it out with that reader instead of crying about it to reddit.

This is the worst timeline. (x)

[cani-bal]

evil

[local-seeker-shit]

Catformers but colored