i wrote an essay on aftg as a knowledge building community and it convinced my 40 year old man of a prof to read the books so here it is. also i had to learn how to cite tumblr posts in mla for this
An Analysis of All For The Game As a Knowledge Building Community
Neil Josten is the main character of a self-published trilogy by Nora Sakavic called “All for The Game” (AFTG). The series starts when Neil, after spending the last eight years on the run from his father, decides to join a college exy team (a fictional sport) a year after his mother died, where he finds love and belonging, and the Japanese mafia, with whom his father is associated, find him. The fandom, which almost entirely resides on Tumblr or Ao3, has extensive fanon (alternative canon which is decided and widely accepted by fans), stretching far beyond the books themselves with few limits as to what will be acceptable in fanfiction, as proven by the 105,156 word pirate alternate universe fanfic with 821 kudos (Coritkyo). A Tumblr post by @holyshitthatsilegal describing their frustration with how Neil Josten is sometimes presented in fanfiction, reduced to a helpless and soft character, as opposed to the independent and dangerous individual he is in canon, is an example of the enforcement of one of the few unwritten rules within the “All For The Game” fandom. They say “i hate, HATE it when people write a fic where Neil is a helpless stupid boy who needs someone to babysit him […] Neil josten isn’t in danger Neil josten IS THE DANGER” (Holyshitthatsilegal). This post received 1340 notes and nearly all of them were in complete agreement. Amy Bruckman, author of “How Does the Internet Change How We Think” describes knowledge-building discourse as “One person [contributing] a new idea, and others [critiquing] it. Over time, the group finds things they agree on, and this is new knowledge” (92). These fandom interactions further Bruckman’s theories of knowledge-building discourse in “How Does the Internet Change How We Think?” in that fans are not only sharing existing knowledge but formalizing entirely original ideas and rejecting aspects of a canon text. @holyshitthatsilegal’s post concerning Neil Josten’s treatment in fanfiction showcases the necessary role of legitimate peripheral participation in ensuring that All for The Game fans restrict their creativity to merely altering events, rather than personalities, but also raises questions as to how and why the fandom has developed in such a way. The process of legitimate peripheral participation combined with the unique source material have been essential in creating a close-knit community with ideas, practices, and rules entirely different from fandoms in the greater contemporary queer young adult genre. In having a small, dedicated community and through the use of knowledge building discourse, the AFTG fandom pushes the boundaries of how extensive fanon can be, whilst remaining coherent and unified.
Given that the AFTG series is self-published and the author has done little promotion for it (McCartney), new fans often find the series through periphery fandoms, often within the contemporary young adult romance genre, which tend to each have a similar set of unwritten rules for fanworks as each other, but whose rules differ from the AFTG fandom’s in significant ways. The most important rule for AFTG is that one can interact with plot and intercharacter relationships however they see fit, but they must stay true to the personalities, trauma, and grit of the characters in canon. For most other young adult contemporary queer romances, such a rule would be unnecessary because most of the books that center the love story of two men within this genre have them fall within the same character dynamic, often colloquially referred to as the sunshine one and the brooding or shy one. However this is not the case for AFTG. Both Neil and Andrew keep to themselves and are often aggressive towards outsiders, each for their own reasons, but within fan fiction there is a tendency to put Neil into the position of the sunshine one in order to have them fit this dynamic. Tumblr user @bloody-wonder describes this phenomenon in more depth, saying “canon andrew’s already very masculine and grumpy so he’s fine and these sides of him don’t get erased, so [Neil] must necessarily be the blushing sunshine uwu boi”. As demonstrated by this post, @holyshitthatsilegal’s post, and many others, long-time fans of this series actively try to fight against the pervasiveness of this trend and the greater trend of simplifying characters down to base traits. Newer fans who are used to periphery fan cultures are less conscientious of how they treat these characters. The transition from one side of the argument to the other happens as new fans who are lurking in popular threads read more and more posts that encourage nuanced readings of these characters. The purpose of lurking according to Bruckman is “learn the rules and norms of the group, so that they can contribute appropriately when they are ready” (93-94). Bruckman’s theory that new members go from lurking, to small acts of engagement, to eventually being central in discussions, is bolstered by the evident effects of a lack of lurking in some AFTG fan works. Fans from peripheral communities who have read the books and create content but haven’t lurked enough to gauge the differences between this community and others online help to demonstrate the importance of lurking within the AFTG community.
The fervent defense of characters is not solely for Neil Josten, in fact there are near constant discussions within the fandom about the intricacies of each character within the books. @aftghasruinedme writes “it annoys me so much when Kevin is written as an extreme exy obsessed asshole…”, and @wiccan-fangirl says “Aaron is not homophobic. He just fucking hates Neil.” This demonstrates that this fandom does not simply have a need to protect the image of Neil Josten, but that the close analysis of each character is an intrinsic quality of this knowledge building group. Within the discussion surrounding @holyshitthatsilegal’s post, many of the comments discussed the upperclassmen and Andrew’s characters in relation to Neil’s, rather than having Neil exist in a vacuum.
This is not to say that the AFTG fandom is strict in terms of what is acceptable in fan works; in fact, this community has evolved well beyond the scope of what Bruckman proposes through her example of Company Command. One of the most widely accepted parts of this fanon, which not only builds well beyond the established canon, but actively contradicts it, is the relationship between Jeremy Knox and Jean Moreau, which has 818 works under their relationship tag on Ao3 (Works In Jeremy Know/Jean Moreau). A post by Tumblr user @play-exy-be-sexy is evidence of the relationship’s popularity, saying “the ship of jean moreau and jeremy knox is so perfect bc not only is it hilarious given they had zero scenes together. BUT every fic and head canon is INCREDIBLE. […] like we were able to take two people and create such a beautiful ship and story.” These are two very minor characters, each with a few pages of dialogue, but it is confirmed that Jean would be sent to play on Jeremy Knox’s team for the remainder of his college career at the end of the third book “The King’s Men”. This was enough for fan’s to ship them extensively and forget that Jean had a canon love interest to begin with. Framing Fan Fiction : Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities by Kristina Busse discusses the complicated relationship that fanfiction has with canon, stating “Fans passionately debate the exact boundaries of what constitutes canon” (102). This framing of fanfiction as a negotiation of canon helps AFTG’s place as an outlier to be understood because the sanctity of canon as an irrefutable truth has already been broken by Sakivic herself. Once the books started gaining popularity on Tumblr, Sakivic started answering questions about the series on her personal Tumblr, from mid 2015 to mid 2016 (Korakos). These posts, which are now referred to as simply the “extra content”, clarified aspects of the series, discussed post-canon events, fleshed-out pre-canon events, and allowed Sakavic to disclose events from previous drafts of the books. In doing so, the boundaries of what constitutes canon were broken entirely. While lurking, one may come across long-time members of the community who have no clue whether or not a certain aspect of fanon originated amongst fans or the extra content, and fans quite frankly don’t care. Sakavic encouraged fans throughout these posts not to disregard their own headcanons just because they contradicted something she said, thus fostering a community with malleable canon. Busse later says that “A canon before or without interpretation doesn’t really exist” (108), and when interpretation is encouraged and unfettered, interpretation becomes indistinguishable from canon when interacting with other fans.
With as much interpretation as there is, fans work hard to ensure that some things remain unchanged. In Abby Kirby’s Examining Collaborative Fanfiction: New Practices in Hyperdiegesis and Poaching, Kirby describes the phenomenon of collaborative fanfiction, which she defines as “having several stories, written by different authors, [which] combine into a larger narrative.” She uses the Gravity Falls: Transcendence AU, a collaboratively created spin off of the animated show Gravity Falls (2012), as an example. Both the Transcendence AU and AFTG are collaborative fanfiction; Transcendence AU is collaborative in its entirety, and AFTG is only in some aspects. In many ways, AFTG fans are fighting against a Transcendence-AU-like fate. Now that Sakavik’s blog has been archived and is much more difficult to find, instrumental backstories and character nuances have been blurred into fanon. @andrew-dramaqueen-minyard discusses this in a recent post, saying “I’ve noticed after coming back to AFTG after many years away […] that a lot of people don’t seem to realize that where we get these kind of recurring things in post canon talk and fics is from noras extra content.” This leaves far more room for what Kirby calls squishy canon, when some aspect of the narrative has too many overlapping ideas to be properly canonized. Squishy canon is a necessary side effect of collaborative fanfiction, but it can get difficult to handle very complex characters in such an informal manner. For example, the Minyard-Josten rivalry, the idea that once Andrew and Neil have both graduated and play on different teams a fake rivalry develops between them, is entirely from fanon, not the extra content. However, Neil and Andrew getting two cats named King Fluffkins and Sir Fat Cat McCatterson is from the extra content. Both are widely accepted aspects of squishy canon, but the latter example paints a far softer portrait of Neil and Andrew than the former. Without the greater context that Sakivik provides in the extra content, going to great lengths to describe how Andrew learns to balance the cats and his previous trauma, this softer image could be taken at face value and result in a split from canon resembling that of the Transcendence AU. In a knowledge building community that is neither strictly creative nor informative, a balance such as the one between plot freedom and faithfulness to character must be struck. This balance is found in creativity being left for plot, and analysis and information sharing being for characters.
That the AFTG fandom is able to have (relatively) civil discussions on sensitive topics, like the treatment of Kevin’s trauma in the books, with no formal moderation is another example of how this fandom has grown beyond the limits Bruckman writes about. She says “[Peer-produced information] can be highly reliable if (and only if ) significant peer review takes place” (93) but Tumblr as a platform changes what exactly peer-review constitutes. Tumblr’s algorithm is, to put it bluntly, bad. Though it has improved in the last year, when this fandom was being established users still relied on hashtags to find new content, rather than having similar content automatically recommended for them. What content is not found through tags is found through the reblogs (reposting of another user’s content, with or without extra comments) of users one already follows. In McCracken’s “A Tumblr Book: Platform and Cultures” a roundtable discussion highlights how Tumblr’s near inability to foster bureaucratic systems allows for members to become popular through interacting with others in a fandom, rather than merely gaining the most followers. Rukmini Pande says in the discussion that Tumblr structure “has allowed for a greater proliferation of content within and between fandoms. […] In this way Tumblr is certainly more dialogic than previous platforms, and that has enabled more visibility for critiques of both popular cultural media texts and fandom practices.” In a small group, collective values get adopted quickly, much like how a large friend group may have disagreements but generally share the same values, which decreases the risk of discussions being held on false or differing premises. Bruckman stresses the importance of solid premises, saying “If you start from false premises, the things you conclude using that as a base will be unreliable.” (103) which is why Tumblr fosters small communities so well. This form of informal peer review works in such a way that if a user begins posting with false premises, like Neil being unable to take care of himself, the user will either be ignored or called out by anyone, regardless of followers or popularity, and then the only way they can continue to participate in the community would be to correct their premise. No moderation is needed when a small fandom can regulate participation by regular social means.
What makes AFTG a unique expansion on Bruckman’s ideas is the fandom’s ability to consistently engage without the regulation of moderators or a stable canon to work from. It is a study of exactly how far a community can evolve with only a group of dedicated fans who facilitate the lurking and thus education of new members. The books are strange, implausible, and needlessly dark, which is exactly what makes this work. The lore is flimsy enough that discussions of canon fall apart within minutes, and ship wars never develop enough to cause significant rifts in the fandom, so the characters, with all of their flaws, traumas, and criminal records are all that is left. In a time where some of the most popular fandoms (My Hero Academia, Attack on Titan, Supernatural) are known more for their problematic discourse than anything else, it is refreshing to see what exactly fans are capable of, beyond what even Bruckman proposed. AFTG proves that modern fandom culture continues to evolve, and with it so too should the framework used to analyze it. Which is all to say that due to AFTG’s effective methods of online fan education through lurking, even Tumblr user @carothehotmess who commented “I just realized I know literally nothing about this book series. I legit thought it was about gay hockey players or something,” on @holyshitthatsilegal’s post can figure out what these books are about.
I have a class with this prof this semester, 4 years later. The first thing he says to me?
Oh weren't you the one who wrote about that sports book?
This is who I am now
