unreconstructedfangirl:
bert-and-ernie-are-gay:
kkatot:
This post is
based on a presentation I gave at a seminar organized by a European Cooperation
in Science and Technology (e-cost) network dedicated to understanding digital
reading through the lens of
interactivity and reading’s game-like elements. My talk mostly
relied on existing literature, but as it
seemed to have many prominent gaps, I asked some of my fan-fiction-reading and -researching
friends and colleagues (thank you!) some convoluted questions about their reading habits,
practices and experiences. Their answers provided informal, anecdotal data that
I have used to elaborate and illustrate what I’m throwing up in the air here.
What’s going on with reading?
For decades now, people
have been worried about reading. Scholars, teachers, parents, writers,
publishers and activists are anxious about the possibly waning reading habits,
vocabularies and comprehension levels. When digital technologies and social
media are introduced, the discussions tend to turn sour with moral panic. Psychological
research has shown that reading fiction gives us models of the social world,
which in turn facilitates empathy and increases social support (Mar &
Oatley, 2008; Mar, Oatley & Peterson, 2009); reading fiction also helps us
instigate self-change; alters how we think (Mar & Mullin, 2011); and
modifies our self-understanding through producing new metaphors of personal
identification (Miall & Kuiken, 2002).
At the same time,
a body of literature known as “new literacy studies”, keeps pointing out that just
reading (and writing) printed texts is no longer enough. Pierre Levy (1997:
121) noted nearly two decades ago that the “distinctions between authors and
readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpretations will blend to
form a reading-writing continuum, which will extend from the machine and
network designers to the ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain the
activities of the others.” Simply put, traditional
forms of literacy alone are considered insufficient for effective participation
in the networked societies (Levy & Murnane 2004) instead a literate person
now needs to have many multiple, dynamic and malleable competencies and
literacies like reading online newspapers or participating in virtual
classrooms (Black, 2009).
Additionally,
it’s argued that literacies should be understood as socio-cultural practices
enabled by digital technologies, virtuality and participatory culture (Olin-Scheller
& Wikstrom 2010: 45), where meaning-making is contextual (Black 2005: 120).
This brings us to
the topic at hand. Where better to seek understanding of (digital) reading
experience of the early 21 century than in internet fanfiction (fanfic).
What is fanfic anyway?
In her doctoral
dissertation on the topic, Juli Parrish (2007:11) defines internet fanfiction
as:
writings by amateur fans of a particular media text
(television program, book, film, role-playing game, anime, cartoon, etc);
that starts from (but is not limited to) some of the
characters or premises of the source text;
which explicitly self-identifies as fan fiction;
and is published on the internet.
Fanfiction texts
often extend the plots, timelines and relationships in the source texts (Black,
2007); critique elements or ideologies of canon (Pich, 2013-2014); and weave
new tales by remixing ideas from different sources (Thomas, 2007).
Fanfiction is
published in specialized online archives like Archive of Our Own,
Fanfiction.net or on blogging pltaforms like Livejournal or tumblr. Right now
there are 147 739 stories for Marvel movies and
comics, 117 139 stories for the TV show Supernatural, 83 974 for Harry Potter
books, 42 652 for the band One Direction, 30 219 for the video game Dragon Age,
and 13 855 for the theatre show Les Miserables on Archive of Our Own (which
funds itself through donations and allows explicit content). On fanfiction.net (which
funds itself through ad sales and therefore recently purged a lot of explicit
content much to the dismay of its writers and readers) there are 393 000
stories for the anime series Naruto, 728 000 stories for Harry Potter books,
109 000 for the TV show Glee and so forth. In other words, it’s not really a
marginal practice.
It’s not a new
one either, Henry Jenkins - one of the key figures in early fanfiction
scholarship - has traced the origins of it to the 1930s Fanzines, and placed
it’s comeback in the late 1960s with the popularity of Star Trek (Jenkins,
1992). In the decades since internet fanfiction has become “an element of
popular culture that is ever growing in popularity as new technologies enable
native and non-native speaking fans from all over the globe to meet online to
share, critique, and build upon each other’s fictions” (Black, 2004).
image: Nogitsune by teenwolffandom on DeviantArt
Isn’t fanfiction all about writing?
Separating
reading fanfiction from writing fanfiction is problematic, because the
convergence of the two is perhaps one of its defining characteristics and
definitely one of the reasons for why it is often used as an example of produsage
(Bruns, 2005, 2006) in audience, media and pop-culture studies. However, for the task at hand – to explore the
experiences of digital reading - it makes sense to attempt. I couldn’t find
reliable data on the proportions of fanfiction reader/writers compared to just
readers, but we could extrapolate from the scholarship on the prevalence of
produsage in analogous participatory practices (Bird, 2011) and assume, with
the help of eminent new media scholar Jose Van Dijck (2009) and a Guardian report
(Arthur, 2006) she has chosen to trust that only one in a hundred people are
active online content producers, with 10 ‘interacting’ by commenting, and the
remaining 89 simply viewing. Even if we think these proportions to have shifted
since 2006 or are somewhat different in fandom culture, we shouldn’t
underestimate the continuing practice of just listening online (used here as a
conscious alternative to “lurking” cf. Crawford, 2009).
image: Fancy Dean by euclase on DeviantArt
Existing research on reading fanfiction
In general,
reading fanfiction seems to have deserved less scholarly attention than writing
and related communal or identity practices. To situate my current reading
inquiry, I find helpful the work (Black, 2009) that notes the importance of headers
(contain information on the canon, genre, rating, romantic pairings, languages
used and warnings) and “author’s notes” sections (contain informal, emotional,
non fandom-related messages for readers). I interpret both of these as reading
guidelines.
Reading fanfiction
has also been found to be far less like traditional print literacy. Fanfiction
readers integrate their prior knowledge of the canon with the cues found in the
web interface to construct meaning in sophisticated ways (Chandler-Olcott &
Mahar, 2003). To be able to enjoy fanfic, readers have to understand its
hybridity and intertextuality (Black, 2007).
By and large,
there seem to be two categories of reading that has captured the interest of fanfiction
scholarship:
Beta readers (cf. Black 2005, Karpovich, 2006 Mcwilliams et al
2011), who read a work of fiction with a critical eye, with the aim of
improving grammar, spelling, characterization, and general style of a story
prior to its release to the general public (fanfiction.net). In a sense, beta
readers are voluntary, unpaid editors. The main difference is that they are,
similarly to the writer, fans of the canon. Beta readers can amass quite a lot
of status in the community, and are, as a norm, explicitly thanked in the
header of the fic. This means they are discursively linked with the text’s authorship
to a higher degree than editors in conventional publishing schemes are.
Interestingly the publishing industry, in particular the self publishing
segments of it, seems to have appropriated the concept of beta. When you look
around for popular resources on beta readers online, most of them seem to be
for and by people, who want to publish or self publish original fiction.
Reviewers (cf. Campbell et al 2015, Black 2009, Black 2005,
Chatelain, 2003), are also portrayed as an important resource for writers.
Reviews can be incredibly constructive (in particular for those writers, who
are not writing in their first language) as well as relatively perfunctory, but
still serve an important social function of networking, communication and
community building.
But what about
the rest of the readers/reading?
But howwwwww?!
Since the whole
point of this exercise was to see, what we can find out about digital reading
experiences by looking at how people read fanfiction, just focusing on reviewers
and beta readers isn’t enough. So I asked some of my colleagues and friends,
who read and study fanfiction.
It quickly became
apparent that different people approached this question in rather different
ways. Overlapping elements of motivation (why am I reading), reading intensity
(binge reading or scrolling through a hashtag), reading commitment (immersion
vs skipping over “boring” bits) reading curating (how I come across the stuff
to read) and the emotional investment of reading (reading as a low emotional
risk activity vs. emotionally risky reading) were evident in people’s
descriptions of how they relate to reading fanfiction. These elements seem to
configure into reading repertoires that people switch between with relative
ease.
Based on my
“data” and the existing scholarship I attempted reframing fanfiction reading
experiences and came up with the following (mutually non-exclusive) map:
I’m going to set aside “reading roles within fandom” and “interactive
responses to reading” for now and instead focus on the three remaining
relations to reading I noticed in people’s fanfic reading.
Looking at the intensity of the reading experience, a rough split into
two is possible:
Casual or habitual reading (was also called leisurely or
feed-based) happens when a writer updates their story or their content gets
reblogged onto your dash. It may also happen because as a reader, you are doing
a routine check of all of your feeds before going to bed or because you have
some empty time to fill. Neither the activity itself nor the need to read is
particularly pressing.
The other kind is vigorous (also called active or intentional) reading. This means
that reading material is sought out more urgently, reading immersion is higher
and the motivation is more pressing. Typical examples of this are binge reading
or reading routinely, but with a clear identification of it as a practice of
self-care, stress management or escapism.
It also seems
that emotional commitment or emotional stakes is an important way of framing
reading experiences. Among the limited people I talked to, two contrasting
descriptions were evident. These could be called low stakes and high stakes
reading.
The low stakes reading means people only read
pairings, tags and authors that they know
they will like. They have created (probably by allocating significant time to
this task at some prior point) a carefully curated “safe space” for themselves,
where reading is diverting, but not demanding and where they can find suitable
reading material quickly and with little effort. Thomas (2007) has written that
fan fiction offers young writers a great existing storyline; interesting, three-dimensional
characters that have already been developed; and a wealth of back story to both
pull from and write about. I think this existing storyline/world is also
extremely significant when it comes to reading.
And then for other readers, emotional stakes can be
much higher. Reading fanfic can be slightly dangerous, as another member of the
fandom can take a character to a place that clashes with how the reader thinks
about the character or the fandom.
Finally, there is
no escaping people’s motivation when reading. Why do we read what we read? What
are we looking for, when we read fanfic? It’s interesting that while for some
people choosing to read fanfiction already serves a specific need (escape,
emotional release, stress-relief) but for others it is more nuanced. On a
particular day, a particular reader looking for particular stimulation might,
based on their reading expertise and repertoires, satisfy those needs by
looking for a specific genre, pairing, or even traverse fandoms by following an
author.
Here are some
examples:
When we need joy or silliness, when we want to laugh
WITH, we might choose crackfic (“Crackfic” is a term for a storywhich
takes a ridiculous premise as its starting point, such as casting all the canon
characters as My Little Ponies. It may or may not deal with this premise in a
serious way. Source: fanlore.org)
to get off we might choose PWP (Plot, what plot? Or
Porn without Plot, basically a story that mostly describes explicit sex)
to get lost in a story we might choose longfic or
binge
for anger/catharsis we may pic a fix it fic (fix-it
fic refers to a specific type of alternate universe story
in which the author attempts to correct or rewrite something that they feel the
original canon should not have done or failed to do properly. source:
angelfire.com)
for catharsis, to get off and for self care we may
follow a specific pairing (“ship”)
to wallow a little and enjoy the twinge of nostalgia,
we may select old fandoms
and of course, we read our friend’s fics to strengthen
social ties.
So what?
So what are we
going to do with this?
First of all, I
think there is something to say about how many filtering options fanfiction
offers its readers and thus how much control it affords interested readers over
their reading experience. You can, if you’re so inclined, curate your reading
space with laser-like precision. You can choose the authors, hashtags,
pairings, genres and trigger warnings to create repertoires or profiles of more
and less emotional investment. You can fine-tune what you want your reading to make
you feel. Consider the ‘control to effort’ ratio this has compared to reading
jacket blurbs in bookstore, or reviews online. Is this what reading is moving
towards? Would more people read original fiction if this level and ease of
control would be possible? How is this connected to the availability of a loved
and pre-existed universe created by the authors of the canon?
Secondly, of
course, there is the inherent multimodality and hybridity of fanfiction texts.
Sometimes they come with fanart, sometimes they come with playlist suggestions,
sometimes, someone has recorded an audio version of the fic (podfic). They might
be translated into multiple languages. Someone has probably made gifs from TV
show screen-captures pairing them with text from a fic, making the fix-it
interpretations of canon so much more persuasive. Affectively, fanfic can thus cover
many more bases than original creative canons can. And again, control. By
reading multimodally, we can pull the strings of our favorite fictional
characters and make them behave in ways that soothes our weird little hurts and
desires.
Thirdly, because
the canon texts are often initially consumed alone, reading fanfiction allows
people to get validation for their embarrassing, too-strong, fannish reactions
to the canon. Even without writing, commenting, or going to conventions,
reading fanfic offers proof that it’s not “weird” to have such affective
reactions or enjoy those. Reading fanfic us thus low-investment validation for
some aspects of our identities.
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(a blogpost, she calls this. nbd, just a tiny little wee blogpost)
*DEADED*
(before dying, bookmarks For Science™)
Saving to read later.