sofstyle01

Studies of Fandom is a blog dedicated to people interested in Fandom and its practices as academic subject.

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

Fans are not unique in their status as textual poachers, yet, they have developed poaching to an art form.

Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers (p. 27). (via studiesof-fandom)

[queersintherain]

[W]hy do people who are heavily invested in low prestige taste communities, WHICH I ALSO AM, so often feel a thing I used to feel and no longer feel… Maybe I’m crap if my taste is crap, how can I make a recommendation? What’s wrong with me that I love this low prestige work so much?… “It’s not just fanfic and it’s not just boyband fan communities that have this. The sentimental novel had this. The novel itself in the early 18th century, just prose fiction about realistic people in general, had this. Several different kinds of music communities had this. I suspect that certain kinds of artmaking right now where the art is not in English, where it’s connected to an immigrant community, have this, although I don’t know because almost all my art consumption is Anglophone. And writing that we would now call porn, from the 60s and 70s, Samuel Delany’s good about this and he wrote some of this, had this a lot. “The common thread here is that these were genres and kinds of writing or kinds of music that were sexually explicit, or addressed to a subordinated social group and that social group’s concern, or both. So identifying yourself and trying to make public your taste in any of these things including early 18th century novels or gay porn in the early 70s was saying, “I’m a member of this out-group and its concerns are my concerns and that’s why I care about this genre,” or it was saying “I really wanna talk about sexy things in public.” And so if explaining your taste and describing your aesthetic criteria requires you to do either of those things, then you’re gonna say “maybe I shouldn’t do this, maybe it reflects badly on me if I do this.” “… the answer to that is if you really love something and it means a lot to you and you have the kind of personal security where you’re not gonna be fired or kicked off your insurance or kicked out of your house for explaining, or damage people you’re close to, by explaining why you like it, fucking go for it! “… it’s important that someone do this. Because it’s important that works of art that people have labored over, that have given so much pleasure and emotional support to people, it’s important that those works of art be acknowledged as works of art and it’s important that somebody fucking do this.

Stephanie Burt in Fansplaining episode 67 (via studiesof-fandom)

[cypheroftyr]

The Importance Of Fanfiction For Queer Youth - The Establishment

Stigma be damned, science says writing fanfiction makes people happier.

Many people outside the fanfic realm wonder why people are compelled to spend their time writing stories about existing fiction … for no pay and an ostensibly tiny readership. But research suggests something quite different. It turns out that fanfic communities can do a lot of good for writers—especially young, queer ones. Fandoms combine the undeniably awesome power of fiction with the unflaggable support of a community; in fact, science says this heady amalgamation actually make writers happier and better adjusted.

It appears that a large majority of the online fanfic world is young and queer. A 2011 analysis of user profiles on Fanfiction.net found that the average user’s age is around 15, while popular fanfic site Archive of Our Own found in their informal 2013 census (AO3) that the average user’s age is 25. The AO3 census also found that only 38% of respondents identified as heterosexual, and more people identified as genderqueer than as male. (Both analyses have sampling issues that make it difficult to know how well their results capture the fanfic community at large, but they’re the only attempts that have been made to collect stats on who writes fanfic.)

Read the rest at The Establishment

[centrumlumina]

Fanfiction: An Economic Review:

The nation of Fanfiction has a unique economic footprint. As areas of employment, agriculture and manufacture are nearly non-existent, suggesting that even processed goods are readily available in the natural environment. This resource generation seems linked to the placement of naturally occurring dwellings, as little construction exists, and transport jobs are minimal. With so much readily available, social progress is a low priority; computing, engineering and science are all far less active than the rates seen in America, and law and social work are similarly diminished.

The prosperity of the environment creates a surplus of leisure time, which many fill with additional education and training. Nearly a third of the population are employed in colleges as professors or full-time academics, while another quarter work as high-school teachers. Entertainment and the arts are prospering, and food retailers - predominantly small, locally owned artisanal coffeeshops - are commonplace. Non-food retail is largely focussed on luxuries such as flowers, books and pets. However, crime rates have risen in line with increased leisure; while criminal activities are not directly measured in this survey, law enforcement employs around 2.5 times as many people per head of the population as the police force in the United States.

Inspired by this post, I completed a survey of AO3 tags, measuring all non-fandom-specific AU tags that implied the existence of real, modern, legal jobs. Click the graphs to see larger versions.

Click here to view the source data used for this project.

[armoredsuperheavy]

I bind fanfic and other underground writing into real books.  I am a Guerilla publisher.

In a nutshell, the reasons why:

A demonstrative statement on the validity of “fic” in general (and fanfic within that specifically) as a newborn genre of literature that has really only come into its own in the last 15-20 years.

Disrupting preconceptions about what is valuable and worthy of being in print, much less published in a fine edition.

An act of anti-capitalist resistance. Participation in the traditional gift economy of fandom. Most of my projects are volunteer and gifts.

Preservation of fandom history and works for future generations. These books cannot blip out of existence by puritanical updates to a socmed terms of service. These books are acid-free, archive ready, made to survive for another century.

Demonstration against censorship of fiction. Most of the books contain subject matter some people may find objectionable on various grounds.

In summary, it’s a big Fuck You to power structures that silence people. Also it makes my friends so happy that they cry, so that’s nice too.

My book design is deliberately conservative because I am challenging ideas of what should be inside the book. The more a book looks like something a “real” publishing house would put out, the stronger and more subversive the statement it makes.

I am also doing a lot of research working on replicating the style of books from centuries past, and publishing historical fic set in whatever period, in an embodiment that matches. Colors, typography, even form factor as much as possible. I have done Victorian, Edwardian, Renaissance eras. 

Here are some various process pics. Books pictured:

WAR, CHILDREN by Nonymos (Captain America: Stucky)

AND THEN THERE WERE TWO by NymeriaKing (Star Wars / Kylux)

BLUTRUNST by IncurableNecromantic (Over the Garden Wall)

CHOSEN MAN by Sineala (Eagle of the Ninth)

[fanhackers]

I am going to add some links here, too, for anyone whose introduction to gift economy and fannish preservation practices was this post and want to learn more. You can also search our bibliography at Zoter by keywords for any of these topics. Fandom and/as labor, guest edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/view/16 “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” special history issue of TWC guest edited by Nancy Reagin, Pace University, and Anne Rubenstein, York University: https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/view/7 Zotero bibliography: https://www.zotero.org/groups/11806/fan_studies_bibliography/items

[sbooksbowm]

This is super fascinating and exciting and totally derailed me from my reading this afternoon. My train of thought here:

There’s a newborn resistance (meaning, in the last decade) to printing fanfiction for profit in codex form (a la filing off the serial numbers). There’s an underlying resistance to for-profit fanfiction unrelated to form (recall the backlash to platforms like Kindle World that marketed themselves with potential for for-profit gains through posting fanfiction). Fanfiction is such a gift-based culture (as OP recognizes) that transforming a popular fic for profit can feel like a slap in the face to long-time readers who supported a writer, suggested ideas, and partook in the fic-making process. These mores and forms separate fanfiction from the literary marketplace, to quote Francesca Coppa.

We (readers) often understand codex books as bought or borrowed, tying codices to the literary marketplace. How do you get books? You buy them, or borrow them from a library (woohoo!), or skirt the cost by trying to download them illegally or legally from the web (which also skirts the form…is an ebook a codex? A different conversation).  Much of book history is steeped in understanding the production economy of books, i.e. one element of the literary marketplace. The oft-repeated line is that book making is laborious, expensive, and driven by profit, uninterested in romantic notions of ‘books are art!’ Anyways, that’s how a Euro-centric approach to book production sees it. 

So: if fanfiction is resistant to the literary marketplace, it follows that fanfiction is resistant to codices (in its current, most popular iteration, I’m excluding zines here, because those pose their own complications to understandings of book history). To turn around and say, ‘hey, I print fanfiction in codex form, I gift those codices, I do this as an act of anti-capitalist resistance, I do this to preserve and to disrupt, and I’m thinking critically about the form of the codex as reflective of its content’ spins all of these notions of their heads. Fanfiction already challenges so many understandings of book history: it is not materially expensive and it is more often than not made out of passion and exploration than for profit. It positions itself in opposition to The Book. OP has taken The Book, loaded it with all of the disruptive qualities of fanfiction, and now reformed the codex as antithetical to the literary marketplace via fanfiction. 

I don’t know if that makes any sense to anyone but me, but that is really really cool. 

[olderthannetfic]

A New History of Fandom Purges

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

1992 - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed

1995 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites

1995 - Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere

1997 - Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites

1998 - AOL goes after X-Files fansites

2000 - Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites

2000 - Anne Rice anne rices again

2001 - Tripod Massacre

2001 - Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN

2001 - The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks

2002 - FFN bans porn

2002 - FFN bans RPF

2003 - Gryffindor Tower implodes

2004 - FFN bans script format

2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic

2005 - Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded

2005 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again

2006 - Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes

2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal

2007 - Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids

2008 - Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it

2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites

2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted

2009 - Marvel gets scans_daily deleted

2009 - imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly

2010 - FFN forums purged for inactivity

2010 - DeviantArt purges adult fanfic

2010 - Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN

2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence

2011 - China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org

2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn

2012 - Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic

2013 - Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content

2014 - Quizilla shuts down

2014 - China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors

2014 - Blip.tv deletes vids

2014 - Viddler deletes vids

2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

2016 - y!Gallery deleted

2016 - Elfwood goes offline

2016 - Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic

2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama

2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad

2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs

2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban

2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning

2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.

Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.

Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.

Fans grudge reported each other.

Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.

[jhholtzmann-deactivated20190111]

so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing

and the results were:

it’s all fanfiction

which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic

idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick

i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool

[hannahrhen-deactivated20181219]

Ha! Love it!

One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. <3

To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.

[simplydalektable]

I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk. Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else

[jhholtzmann-deactivated20190111]

whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular - they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.

LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!

[reliand]

I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels. 

I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.

The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful. 

[kinneas]

FASCINATING

and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?

we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?

QUESTIONS!

[a-deadletter]

@wasureneba @allthingslinguistic

[allthingslinguistic]

I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.

One thing that we do know is that written English has gotten less formal over the past few centuries, and in particular that the word “the” has gotten much less frequent over time.

In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone! 

See also: the gay fanfiction pronoun problem, ship names, and the rest of my fanguistics tag.

[stoneyboboney]

if I may add the descriptor to a person’s odor, “He smelled of ____, ____ and SOMETHING UNIQUELY HIM.”

[avenger-nerd-mom]

I think this is really the key:

In the three years I’ve been reading fan fiction, and then writing it, fan fic feels more real. Even as I turn back to reading novels, I’m finding my favorite authors got their start fandom. The words jump off the page, the descriptions create more visual images, and the language and characters are real.

Fan fiction produces amazing work!

[samjohnssonvt]

Okay, I had to check, though, because I’ve heard “toeing out of his shoes” growing up. A really fast check at the Corpus for Contemporary American at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ found an entry from 1990, from Rosamunde Pilcher’s September, that lists “Then she went into the house by the kitchen door, toeing off her rubber boots and hanging her jacket on a hook.” It may not be common, but it’s there!

[wyomingnot]

I don’t know that I’ve heard toeing *out of* one’s shoes. My brain insists it’s toeing *off* one’s shoes, which I do because I don’t like (and sometimes can’t) bend down to pull them off with my hands.

But the phrase that I keep seeing in all corners of fanfic, is some variation on “letting out a breath they didn’t know they were holding.”  For nearly 20 years, it’s been there.

[icarus-suraki]

See, this is why I think there’s a Tumblr-style to writing too–especially those semi-spontaneous responses to, say, someone’s off-hand comment or some artwork someone’s posted. All of those bits are similar to but not entirely identical to fanfic-style writing (obvs, right?), and that’s probably because most of the Tumblr bits have no dialogue and the “characters” are “OCs” if anything.

But flash around one of those Tumblr pieces and it’s got an identifiable style to it. Like, it reads like a Tumblr writing piece. 

[barbex]

Sources: https://twitter.com/myangryuniverse/status/1297616494176735234 https://twitter.com/_dankou/status/1298187651728715778

Aaand here we have the problem. Fandom is international and I’m sick and tired of american morals being set as the one rule to follow. 

[daisytje-deactivated20201204]

American exceptionalism demands we conform to their standards. Even down to what form of English you use omg there’s tons of different versions of English deal with the fact that some of us write cheque instead of check which means something totally different in British English. There’s this moralising, judgemental pearl clutching which is uniquely American too and permeates fandom at every level, especially crusading white women with their white guilt and white saviour complex. Like, women in Africa and Asia (huuuge tracts of land with billions of people residing there) are perfectly able to fight their battles on their own, in a way which works for their culture? Why do you have to stick your oar in? It’s so infantising and demeaning. 

White American feminism has done so much damage and it’s pervasive in fandom. It needs to stop.

[corvidkusnos]

I thought I’d add the first half of my tweet in case people don’t want to click through, but I think it’s definitely something that helps paint the picture of how Americanised fandom is:

Additionally from that, “ Even down to what form of English you use” - yes!! This!! I was basically expected from a young age in fandom to learn American English and change the way I spoke and if there was something I didn’t understand, I was ridiculed for it. And if I spoke in British English at any point, I was, again, met with ridicule - especially if I used slang that’s common among the working class (which the UK has a huge classism problem).

I could go on forever about the other things I’ve experienced in this way but honestly I’d rather not come across as “woe is me” or anything. Especially as when this topic is talked about, Americans want to believe it’s just a “Europeans wanting to be special” thing and not an international problem where non-Western people have spoken up about this exact problem, too.

But yeah, even though these are things that happen in general being on social media in general while being non-American, it pours over into fandom and what’s expected of you in that regard. And while American and European issues tend to share some overlap, there is no one-size-fits-all experience which people just don’t want to acknowledge.

I think understanding that complex issues don’t always have a black and white answer to it is scary for people to accept (especially as oftentimes situations that should have a black and white answer tend to get treated as though it’s a grey area when they’re not), but alas.

(Also I am aware not every American is like this and there are those with genuinely good intentions)

[therealmnemo]

^^^^^^

[disaster-j]

I actually think about this A Lot. Every time I read fanfics that are set in Japan or Thailand or Korea and the set up is completely americanised and everyone is using American slang and it is painfully clear the author has taken zero time or effort to actually learn what life is like in the respective countries.

I’m sick of seeing anime fics where people can’t afford to go to the doctor. Sick of reading fics where a high school in Korea somehow magically operates like an american public school. Sick of having tags flooded with Christmas fics every December where non Christian people in asian countries are celebrating a traditional christmas.

WHAT IS NORMAL FOR YOU IS NOT ALWAYS NORMAL FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD.

Yet for some reason that is the norm and it is what everyone does and how everyone writes and it is accepted by one and all on the internet because according to the internet the american way is the right way and everything else is not.

If I were to write fics about non Indian characters in countries outside of India and incorporate my culture in them it would be a crime. People would leave comment after comment going “um actually this is how things work” and others may even send me hate tell me I’m stupid and I shouldn’t write and so on and so forth. Yet, the fact that fandom is so Anglo centric and has almost entirely whitewashed and westernized non white and non american works and characters is “just how things are.”

Well they shouldn’t fucking be.