I am not your user-generated content

Fanfiction can be many things: an interpretation of the source text, an insight into a fandom culture, or an exemplar of popular narrative tropes and themes. But fannish stories are also, always, works of fiction, and they reward in-depth analysis as much as any other work of literature. 

In Reading Fanfiction/Fanfiction Readings, we aim to put together a collection of essays in which we treat fan fiction as an important form of contemporary literature, using the tools of close reading: focus on the author’s use of language, imagery, and theme. This project calls to all of us who have  discussed a story for hours (or over many comments or DMs), or who have a story that we rec to friends who don’t know the fandom or the characters, because it just has that much to offer, or who have a story we come back to long after we’ve moved on to another fandom, a story that we have analyzed in passing but feel it deserved an article of its own. If you love close textual readings and love fan fiction and have a story that says and means so much more, we want your contribution!

Hi - doing something new at OTW, blogging for Fanhackers. Hopefully on Sundays (more or less.)  Gonna try to be here more too. 

THE GREATEST is long, fast-cut vid not only made up entirely of characters of color (hundreds of them!) but the kind of wildly heroic genre fiction characters that fandom loves... It is 4:27 minutes of fabulous power walks, hero shots, bold looks, and big emotions, with characters of color finally getting, en masse, to experience the wonders of saving the world and exploring the universe. There is also love: bironic ends the vid with a montage of hugs and kisses, loving families and sexy relationships, het and slash. Bironic also released the vid with a subtitle track that identifies the characters and shows, so the vid also functions as a recruiter vid for stories featuring diverse characters.

TO TOUCH THE FACE OF GOD is a vid about the space program, and Destina uses the classical/epic music of E. S. Posthumus to invoke emotions like awe and humility at images too often used as mere backdrops for comic book violence: earth, the moon, the surfaces of other planets, rocket ships, the star field. TO TOUCH THE FACE OF GOD uses both real and cinematic footage to narrate mankind’s desire for flight, moving us from Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier through the various Mercury and Apollo missions to the achievement of the moon. The vid is, to quote Destina, “a tribute to manned space flight, and to the sometimes unheralded dreamers, technicians, engineers, science geeks, and support staff (and test pilots) who made it possible.” 

In PAUL MCCARTNEY, jarrow edits footage from Will & Grace so that the characters bounce and gyrate, gesticulate, snap, and boogie together.

There is joy in creating and observing these kinds of patterns. As jarrow recollects, “I decided to start by grouping similar clips together (fainting, victorious arm pumps, hugs and kisses, gasping in shock, dances, etc.) and see if I could make sense of it. . . . When I was rewatching the episodes, I grabbed interesting motion-y bits with absolutely no idea that they would be paralleled later (by other characters or themselves). It was such a delightful surprise to end up with something like twenty different clumps of paralleled motion.”