“Single, taken or in love with a fictional character?” or how fanfiction could help us understand (digital) reading.
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).
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?
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.
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 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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