guys i found a 100+ page scholarly article about dream smp fandom and i'm not joking
i literally opened my computer to do fan studies research. thank you for the fucking gold mine holy shit
also i feel the need to emphasize that this is not an ordinary article, this looks like a dissertation. this is years of research. what the fuck
ok throwaway sideblog for purposes of not doxxing myself but hi i actually go to mount holyoke and this was someone’s senior thesis! I reached out to them the first time this made the rounds on MCYTblr (last year)
i dont think they still have access to their institutional email bc otherwise i might let them know that they’ve made it to tumblr again.
but yeah no this person spent their entire senior year at minimum writing this thing. it’s rly good and it’s also an incredible experience to read shit like this in an academic paper:
THAT'S CRAZY OMG SOMEONE DID ALL THIS FOR A BACHELOR'S? lord i commend them. thank you for clarifying, this is. crazy levels of research and effort
and since this is actually my field of study i wanted to say that there are a lot of academic papers like this!!!! the field of fan studies is small but thriving and is SO much fun :D
a journal i hold very near and dear is Transformative Works and Cultures, a completely open-access journal that publishes stuff like this:
all of which are brilliant articles that i recommend searching for on the website
yeah i find fan studies to be very cool! I took an intro to media studies course a few years back and i enjoyed it it was really interesting.
I’m an envi sci major so the majority of my academic paper reading experience is either scientific papers or like, critical theory/social justice stuff, so seeing pogchamp in the same format as the paper i was reading about systemic injustices in Bangladeshi environmental policy is just like, tonal whiplash purely bc i’m not used to it. was not intended as a dig at fan studies i think it’s rly cool.