As you see, getting back to posting daily did not work out as I hoped. Turns out, writing your Bachelors' Thesis while already being enrolled in a Master's Degree can lead to extra stress.
I still wanted to update y'all on here since a few of my interviewees are following me on here.
The Thesis is finished.
I'm not exactly content with it. (It felt way too crammed, and I don't know if my findings are as clear as I want them to be.) But it is done.
Currently I am waiting for the grade and the detailed report for it. Afterwards I'll clean up the summary of my Thesis. (That will be sent out at my interviewees.)
And I'll explain a bit more about what I tried to do and what I've found on here. So don't worry if you don't get the detailed abstract, I will post about everything important.
I actually want to keep this blog active. But its topic might change a bit after concluding my Bachelors Thesis on here. It'll still include Fan Studies and Media as general subjects. But I'll also post about what I'm doing in my Masters program.
These excerpts are from Fabienne Silberstein-Bamford's article, "The 'Fanfic Lens': Fan Writing's Impact on Media Consumption," which can be read for free here!
Silberstein-Bamford writes that the internet has allowed people to move from solely passively consuming to also participating (for instance, through fanfiction). This article examines in what ways being a fanfiction writer shapes one’s engagement with media. For example:
Consuming as a potential future fan (e.g., thinking about what kind of fanfiction you can write while reading/watching/consuming the canonical thing)
Predicting the fandom’s nature (e.g., thinking about which characters or tropes will be popular in the fandom or what the fandom culture will be while consuming canon)
Evaluating narrative structures (e.g., evaluating media in fanfiction terms, like identifying tropes)
Creating distance through recognizing agency (e.g., seeing reader interpretation as equally as valid as the author’s, like through fix-it fics)
I've been away from Tumblr for a few days since I took a small vacation. But everything will be back to normal again tomorrow. Be prepared for some interesting snippets from academic papers about fanfiction on the weekend.
Some of them are a bit weird out of context. And some of them are even weird if you have the context. Which does not make them any less interesting.
More about this in a few days.
Otherwise, I'm glad, AO3 seems to be up again.
Funfact about that one: The comment "Prove you are not Lore" you got to see (if you actually were able to load the archive without getting a server error) refers to a Star Trek Next Generation character. There is an evil Android called "Lore".
So it just was a neat nerdy way to reword the usual "Prove that you are not a robot" message.
Authors of Merlin BBC Fanfics needed (for my bachelor's thesis)
Do you write Fanfiction about the BBCs Merlin (2008) tv series, or have you written some a while ago? And have you – in the best case – published at least one of them on Archive of Our Own (AO3)?
And do you have at least 30 minutes of time and are interested in an interview?
My name is Kay, and at the moment I am writing my bachelor’s thesis for “Media Science B.A.” at the University of Bayreuth. As a topic I chose fanfiction and fan communities in the context of the tv series Merlin (2008) with a focus especially on fanfiction authors for this series. And this is why I want to interview a few of them.
It is not important whether you’ve been fan from the very first hour and wrote your first Merlin fanfiction back in 2008, or if you haven’t written any Merlin fanfiction at all for the last few years, or even just recently uploaded your very first one: Your impressions are still very interesting and important for me.
The interview should last about 30 minutes and would happen via Zoom. You need to be able to talk with me via microphone. It is not necessary for you to be on camera. And it can be held in English and German.
I do need to record the interview so I can transcribe it later. But nobody besides me will have access to the recording itself and all recordings will be deleted after transcribing. Within the transcript, any data that could be used to clearly identify a person will be anonymised. So you are able to stay anonymous and your data is protected.
Everything is in compliance with the european GDPR and the german BDSG (both are data protection guidelines) and participants will get full information regarding data protection beforehand.
Feel free to message me if you are interested. Also just comment or ask me via DM if you have any questions about this.
Thank you for reading and I am looking forward to messages from you!
Feel free to repost this, it would help me a lot. :)
Forgot to add that participants should be 18+/of legal age. Otherwise I cannot use the data.
Also: There is a workaround if you strongly prefer answering questions in written form, or are not able to do a verbal interview. It requires an extra step.
But if this is an option for you, please message me! I am happy about anyone who is interested.
I kind of like the quick question format as it is an interesting opportunity to get a live snipped of fandom(s). Anyways, another one is waiting for you:
Did you like the ending of Merlin?
Yes, it was a brilliant tragedy
Yes, it well written
I would have, if it weren't for this **** truck
I accept it somewhat
Nope, I hate that Arthur died and the prophecy wasn't fulfilled
Nope, it was badly written
Nope, but I think it was a thought-out way to end the story
Voting ended onAug 28, 2023
Feel free to add more detail on why you like/despise the ending. (I know this discourse myself, but honestly, I feel like the general opinion about the ending did change quite a bit within the last few years.)
I will be on the road for the next few days. I planned doing nothing for my thesis during that time, but looks like that won't happen. I am honestly glad right now that I purchased a tablet earlier that year. Otherwise I would have needed to pack a whole folder of printed texts. That ... wouldn't be very practical.
So, general Question. How do y'all prefer reading texts? (For School, University, Fanfiction, Work ... everything counts.)
Academia and fandom - an uneasy relationship at the best of times. Fandom studies, including studies of fans, fan activities, fan spaces, fan communities, and all sorts of fan behavior, are usually categorized as a type of media studies, but overlap with plenty of other fields, including literary criticism and cultural anthropology.
On the surface, there shouldn’t be discord between academia and fandom. Many academics are also fans and engaged in fannish behavior. Many fans experience or analyze their preferred texts or media through academic lenses or practices. And indeed, there are a lot of academic studies that are written by fans, for fans. But there are differing motives in academia and fandom which can drive a wedge between the denizens who walk in both words. Some academics look at fans or audiences as mindless, naive entities who passively consume mass-produced pop culture, or as infantile social rejects who can’t let go of their ids. There are academics who enter fan communities and study them without respect. Fans, for their part, generally do not want to be seen primarily as objects of study or figures of scorn. There are also academics who are very wary of engaging in fannish behavior because it diminishes the appropriate distance between the scholar and topic. And though fans do process media and fandom thoughtfully and analytically, fandom space contains multitudes - enthusiasms, hatreds, reactions, personal gripes, flame wars, shipping, and tons of activities that could violate copyright laws. While academia certainly has a lot of that (especially personal gripes), there are academics who prefer not to engage with those activities, and view them as distractions that take away from substantive work.
Nevertheless, I am someone who is fannish and someone who has been an academic. It can take a while to negotiate the relationship, but with some care and self-reflection, academia and fandom need not struggle against each other, but can even work together. After all, both include critical analysis, investigations of texts, and a constant interplay between thought, creation, text, and analysis. In the end, we’re just nerds nattering on about our hyperfixations. For me, reading academic works on fandom is a fun, fannish endeavor, and it has helped me understand what I am doing as a fan, where I come from, and where I am going.
In that vein, I now present a reading list/bibliography - books, edited volumes, articles, and other sources that have shaped or informed my own activities and understandings of acafandom and fan studies. This list is not comprehensive, and not necessarily an endorsement. Rather, the listed work has something interesting to say or has been an important piece in the evolution of fan studies. I’ll add to the list as I continue to read and discover.
[Also on Dreamwidth at EarisRecs]
Start here:
Books
The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, Francesca Coppa
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, Anne Jamison
Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Culture, Nicolle Lamerichs
Edited Volumes
Fanfic and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse - table of contents here
Articles
Thinking About Slash/Thinking About Women - Edi Bjorklund (Nome #11)
Why We’re Terrified of Fanfiction - Constance Grady
The Fan Historian - E Charlotte Stevens and Nick Webber
African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies - Rebecca Wanzo
Want to Go Further?
Books
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Camille Bacon Smith
Novelization: From Film to Novel, Jan Baetens
Characters Before Copyright: The Rise and Regulation of Fan Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Matthew H. Birkhold
Black Women as Cultural Readers, Jaqueline Bobo
The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel DeCerteau
Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Abigail De Kosnik
Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida
Fanfiction and the Author, Judith Fathallah
Fan Cultures, Matt Hills
Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks
Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the motives, bell hooks
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins
Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent, Milena Popova
Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture, Janice Radway
Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellctual Property Protection, Aaron Schwabach
Edited Volumes
Fan Studies: Researching Popular Audiences, eds. Alice Chauvel, Nicolle Lamerichs, and Jessica Seymour
Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Story Telling, ed. SA Guynes
The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa Lewis
A Tumblr Book: Platform and Culture, eds. Aliison McCraken, Alexander Cho, Lousia Stein, Indira Neill Hoch
Science Fiction across Media adaptation/novelization edited by Thomas Van Parys and I.Q. Hunter
Other Resources
The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom
Fanlore - a wiki about fandom by the Organization for Transformative Works
Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures - a peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works
After a while of skimming academic texts about Fanfiction, fan culture, fan interpretations and transformative works overall, I always come to the same conclusion: I am not horny enough for this shit.
The amout of equalization of deeply understanding a series, a book, ecetera, as a fan, with penetration in those papers is astounding. (With my favorite being a comparison between fanfiction in general and theology. The conclusion was, both is inherently sexual as both is penetration.)
And no. That does not only include explicit slash fanfics. That was a general statement.
Might do a follow up explanation post on that topic. (If I remember, or someone reminds me next week.)
Sorted my notes for a few chapters in my thesis and finally decided on a outline. I am pretty sure that won't be the final one, but it is something I can work with at the moment.
And because it is a neat funfact: Atm I have several chapters starting with quotes from different books. One of them beeing Good Omens, another one the Bible. And I also have one from Hitchhiker's Guide through the Galaxy.
I kind of have a thing for including at first glance out-of-context quotes in my term papers. They make readers think out of the box. And so far no lecturer complained about them :D
My favorite one so far was a paper about "Transgender Cinema" that I started with a Sailor Moon quote where Haruka (Sailor Uranus) was asked if they're a boy or a girl, and they reply with "Is this actually important?".
Just finished transcribing the first interview. (A few more to go.) And I really wish I had more participants.
There are a few interesting tendencies within the answers. But my data base ist just not big enough to actually draw any conclusions.
So, anyone here interested in an ~30-45min interview about writing Merlin Fanfics?
(Can be done in a written form as well. Just dm me and we'll talk about the options/details.)
Started to actually learn Citavi. Did not use it before. But maybe it is actually helpful getting a good overview over all texts I gathered at this point.
I had less time for actually working on the thesis than I wanted, but guess that's just life.
But I might have a few interesting little fun facts about fandom and fan studies to post here within the next days.
This was way more interaction than expected :o
But now: EXPLANATION TIME!
"Hoyay" or "Ho yay" or "HoYay!" is short for "Homoeroticism yay!". I don't know if the word itself existed before, but it was thrown into the world of fandoms in 2001 and could be read on Television Without Pity (website with Infos about different TV series and a discussion forum).
Long story short: A recap for an episode of Smallville is the starting point for hoyay.
Hoyay, in contrast to queerbaiting, has a mainly positive connotation. Hoyay highligts and celebrates the existance of homoerotic subtext. Which makes it an interesting descriptor for me.
These days it should be the standard to allow creators to include openly queer characters, story lines, romances and much more in their works. But that does not always mean that it will be stated clearly and non-ambigous as it can make a story much more interesting if you tell something like this between the lines.
Queerbaiting describes the aspect of creators hinting on including queerness to generate interest of a broader fan base and include it at the last possible second in the worst way possible, or not at all (common known examples: Supernatural, BBC Sherlock). But using queerbaiting feels wrong if the homoerotic subtext is there from the beginning, and just not the main plotpoint, or the characters take it slow (think about Good Omens). And hoyay is a neat short descriptor for this.
Depending on how it is used, hoyay is not without issues. (For example: Originally it was only meant for male homoeroticism, and the term "Les yay" was created for the female equivalent.) But might be interesting to bring the term back for some use cases. At least I found the idea interesting.
If someone wants to read more about it:
Hoyay! on Fanlore
Ho Yay on TV Tropes
Queerbaiting: The 'playful' possibilities of homoerotcism by Joseph Brennan (The Article uses BBC Merlin as an example. It is not officially as a free fulltext version online rn, but it is an interesting read and it is easy to request the PDF. I also own the pdf. Just as an information.)
Johnlock meta and authorial intent in Sherlock fandom: Affirmational or transformational? by Melissa A. Hofman (Article discusses inspiration that may emanate from perciving a work in an by the creators unintended way.)
Good Omens isn't queerbaiting, here is why by Katharine McCaine (A blog article, that explains what exactly is the issue about people calling something queerbaiting just becaus it is subtile.)
I had not much of an interesting progress the last two days. I set up the word document for the thesis, but besides that I mostly did housekeeping stuff.
I hope I can actually start writing this weekend. But theoretically there is still a lot of textwork to do beforehand. I am excited for it, as it actually interests me. But it stresses me that it will take a lot of time.
Further, I still have to figure out how to illustrate some of the data I gathered on AO3 directly. And I need doing that without falling in that rabbit hole called "reading the Merlin fanfics" because if I am on AO3 anyways ...
Second Interview done. More to go next week. And hopefully I'll have enough participants for it actually counting as research. Otherwise it will be fun to establish the groundwork of my research question with just papers.
At that point I am just happy that I definded my hypothesis pretty strict as the interviews are maaaaybe a bit to inspiring about including even more details ...
