#juli parrish

We did it, kids! We wrote shark skin rough first drafts of the chapters on the history of fic media, author function, and reader function in fic production. I met with my advisor on Thursday and we worked through how to structure my analysis. We ended up having a long conversation about the aesthetic differences between ‘author’ and ‘reader,’ and who assigns meaning to a work. It was a bit of a head spinner, but he said that I’m asking really good questions, so I’ll take the win. 

I wrote 8529 words this week (just over half the 15,000 required!). It’s a relief to have something to work with, even though it needs a lot of editing (like...bucket loads. My advisor was like ‘I did control F and I couldn’t find a mention of Darnton?’ and I was like ‘oh right whoops that is indeed the scholar I am basing everything off of...I should probably mention him’). I had to remind myself of this tweet a lot while writing this week:

It’s nervewracking to confront my own mediocrity with my first drafts! I know it’s gonna be rough and I have to forgive myself for that.

Also! Also! I made graphics of those draft models I shared a few weeks ago (this was on Monday when I was having writer’s block.) Let me know what you think! Are they legible? (Particularly the community one - this is sort of how I’m imagining that Brownian motion concept I wrote about a few weeks back.) 

The design on the Fanfiction Communication Circuit is a lil clunky but Canva didn’t let me rotate my page to be horizontal so I designed everything in portrait orientation and then rotated it, hence the slight skew. 

I made these with good old Canva, watermarked with Watermarkly. These will end up being in the introduction of the dissertation, and I’ll return to them as framing devices in each chapter.

Part 3 looks at what fannish contexts are necessary to read fic, particularly knowledge of fandom tropes to make works legible.

Part 3: dual contexts of fandom and fanfiction

What are the contexts necessary to read Annerb, dirge, gedsparrowhawk, and waspabi’s works? They rely on knowledge of the books (Annerb), knowledge of criticism of the epilogue (gedsparrowhawk), knowledge of general fic tropes and fandom-specific tropes such as ‘what if they never made it to Hogwarts?’ (waspabi). How do these come into play in producing a work? These fics need to be read to a specific fandom and specifically as fanfiction.

The pervasive repetition of fannish interpretation through meta-analysis, fic, and social media discourse results in the consensus of fanon. In Harry Potter, some fanons portray Harry as South Asian and Hermione as Black, other fanons play with characters’ sexuality. The proliferation of an idea influences the portrayal of those characters in many fic. Juli Parrish suggests the mathematical model Brownian motion to describe this aggregation of fan discourse towards movement in favor of opposition to a given idea [1]. Over time, as text posts, fic, and essays circulate, individual ideas push the fandom in a given direction. Brownian motion decenters the fan as agent and instead determines a rhetorical or literary frame of reference useful for literary analysis, a context for examining how writers contribute and respond to this motion.  

Herzog asserts that fan’s ‘own ideas, their understanding of the source text, and their interpretation of and position within the fannish textual archive…(are) of essential concern for the fan authors’ [2]. Busse echoes that writers need to be aware of these interpretations to signal their understanding of the community. ‘Negotiating with a community’s surrounding interpretations can become as central to any fan fiction writer as negotiating with the source text’, and whether rejecting or accepting clichés, ‘she needs to be aware of them on some level if she wants to fully engage with her community’ [3]. For waspabi, accepting these clichés is at the center of her writing: in a Tumblr ask response, she describes her writing process as ‘basically i took a whole bunch of tropes and started throwing them at a wall for hogwarts crammer – let’s try some FAKE IDENTITY and some BED-SHARING and of course one cannot forget an encounter with the LADS…aside from the bits i had to put in for Plot Reasons i essentially wrote what i wanted’ [4]. These three tropes, among others, emphasize her awareness and enjoyment of fannish tropes, prioritizing working with them over the procedure of the source text:

‘i wanted to write a “grittier” found-family teen nonsense version of the camping bits in deathly hallows and i wanted the primary plot to be about the people and not about, you know, fuckin horcruxes, because tbh i find real plot very dull and have no interest in it unless it lands our main characters in a situation where they must TENDERLY TOUCH HANDS and/or PRETEND TO BE A COUPLE’

This response exemplifies yet another Coppa tenet: that fic is speculative and more often than not interested in character rather than plot. Waspabi echoes this in another ask response, writing that ‘the real plot of crammer was the emotional arcs of our heroes’, not seeking an alternative resolution to the war story of Harry Potter [5].

Waspabi’s use of general fic conventions (bed-sharing, fake identity, bar scene) as well as fandom-specific tropes demonstrates how ‘fan fiction can be understood as a form of exemplary embedded community writing that may be more (or only) comprehensible when understood in its particular context’ [6]. Fic is written to fannish standards of two kinds: those of the Harry Potter fandom and of fic tropes. In this case, an average reader of Harry Potter may not recognize the resonances of ‘Hermione Granger’s Hogwarts Crammer’, as it’s comprehensibility is tied to both its fandom and the process of fic production. The story must be understood as fanfiction, the genre, not simply fic of a fandom.

While waspabi poses the question ‘what is fandom without fic?’, Annerb poses the inverse: ‘what is fic without fandom?’ The two are mutually constitutive: the source text’s fictional universe makes fic legible, and ‘the characters are so indelibly tied to their settings and the events of the universe, I have no idea what you would have left if you tried to remove any of it’, should one, for example, pull-to-publish [7]. Goodman agrees that ‘while the fan’s construction of the fictional universe continues to adapt as the narrative continues, the use of the fictional universe as a reference point for the text is essentially immediate’ [8].

Employing fandom-specific tropes demonstrates how ‘citation and variation of statements is a large part of how fanfic consolidates and changes popular texts’ [9]. Basically, Fathallah argues that the repetition of fanon statements changes the extratextual information used to understand, interpret, and write fic, so writers gain authority by partaking in and referencing those statements. Perhaps the most poignant evidence that a fic has succeeded in attending to the context of its fandom while distinguishing itself for the reader is fannish response to the fic text in new productions: additional fic, fan art, podfic (recordings of fic), etc. Waspabi indicates that her story is open to interpretation in her final author note and links to continuations by other authors. The links between these stories demonstrate again how community is a recipient and context for fic production: the community of readers benefits from the expansion of the possible in-text worlds, and the community also situates these texts in relationship to one another.

Citations

Parrish, Juli J., ‘Metaphors we read by: People, process, and fan fiction’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 14 (2013).

Alexandra Elisabeth Herzog, ‘“But this is my story and this is how I wanted to write it”: Author’s notes as a fannish claim to power in fan fiction writing’, 4.6.

Kristina Busse, Framing fan fiction, p.114.

Waspabi.tumblr.com, ask response.

Waspabi.tumblr.com, ask response.

Busse, p.141.

Annerbhp.tumblr.com, ask response, 22 Aug, 2020.

Lesley Goodman, ‘Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author’, p.666.

This chape examines the reader function of the fandom communication circuit. What makes the reading experience of fic? How do readers acknowledge and interpret meaning, and how do they set expectations for the reading material with which they engage? Finally, how does the practice of reading (which is often considered private) actually maintain community? Let’s break it down:

Part 1 examines intertextuality, or how a fic makes reference to other works in its text, and how those references build an in-text universe for the reader

Part 2 examines paratexts, which are all the texts in a work that is not the body (i.e. the title, the tags, the chapter titles, summaries, author notes, appendices, etc. as opposed to the actual story). I look at how paratexts, particularly tags, are crucial infrastructure for signaling a fic’s content, which helps readers set expectations for what the fic will do

Part 3 puts the two together, looking at how the reading experience unfolds with these two textual features and how reading fic maintains the boundaries of a fandom

Introduction: intertextuality? paratexts? 

In this chapter, I explore the reader node of the fandom communication circuit, discussing how circulating textual meaning to readers relies on paratexts and intertextuality, which root fanfiction in the network of writing from which it was born. Rather than focus on individual selection, which I foreground in Chapter 2, Brownian motion is a useful model for considering the overall motion and interpretation of these textual means, aligning it with the community aspects of reading fanfiction. I argue how the intertextual and paratextual elements of fic are crucial to its reading. Readers expect resonances of intertextuality in a fic, and they rely on paratexts to signal a fic’s basic content for their reading selection purposes. 

I define intertextuality, to paraphrase Busse, as the explicit or implicit references in a fic to metatexts, cultural and literary contexts, and other interpretive texts (i.e. other fic) [1]. The intertextuality with other fic is most important in developing fanon and signaling the place of a fic in the larger fandom. Busse characterizes fic through fragmentation, intertextuality, performativity, and intimacy [2]. These elements, especially fragmentation and intertextuality, underscore the Brownian motion of fic production, a concept adopted by Juli Parrish to describe the aggregation of fannish textual output in constituting fanon [3]. Fic—as works-in-progress, stand-alone pieces, series—constitutes the broader fandom, and the referential intertextuality employed by fic moves the fandom in a given direction [4]. Intertextuality also signals to the reader the writer’s experience and knowledge of the boundaries of the universe, and it employs self-referential elements that, when understood, affirm the reader’s own fandom experience and knowledge. Goodman argues that fanon and rigorous classification ‘actually help police or maintain the boundaries of the official fictional universe’, by signaling to a reader what differences from canon they will encounter in a fic [5]. 

Paratexts, which signal interpretation, are an expression of those boundaries, a framework that speaks to the agreed upon or favored tropes, styles, conventions, and characterizations. Paratexts amount to ‘authorial guidance, instructions and injunctions’, and writers must choose paratexts themselves, thus these boundaries are necessarily dictated by the writers [6]. For example, AO3’s robust tagging system serves as boundary markers for readers looking for fic, who can filter for specific relationships or content. The tagging system is managed by tag wranglers, who monitor the tags of a fandom and group similar tags that express the same fannish ideas. Tag wrangling is a concrete expression of the boundaries of the fictional universe, which are ever expanding with each new interpretation.

The first section of this chapter examines how intertextuality crosses multiple zones of the community model, couching reading practices in community-generated context. I illustrate this phenomenon with a Percy Jackson meta-speculative analysis on Tumblr that was transformed into a fanfiction piece and a series of Harry Potter ‘what if?’ reimaginings built from Tumblr prompts.

As a reminder, the community model looks like this:

Part 1: Intertextuality as Reader Recognition

‘the jackson files’ by ideasofmarch exemplifies how the ‘dialogic amateur community status’ of fic ‘foregrounds collective and intertextual aspects’ of reading and writing, demonstrating how intertextual reading crosses multiple zones of the Community Model [7]. Based on a Tumblr post by couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name, ‘the jackson files’ articulates the meta-speculative analysis presented in couldnt’s Tumblr post in a mix of narrative and Twitter-style storytelling. Notably, couldnt posted her analysis on 10 July, and ‘the jackson files’ was posted on AO3 four days later, capturing the rapid reader response that ebbs and flows on Tumblr and that is usually difficult to track ex-post-facto. The fic’s reliance on that post affirms the transitional relationship between writer and reader in the fandom communication circuit, as well as reader-as-participant in a quickly-moving development of fanon (couldnt’s post has 11,727 notes as of 5 August, 2020 and 13,015 notes as of 25 Aug, 2020) [8]. ‘the jackson files’ is doubly intertextual: it is a Percy Jackson fic and Buzzfeed Unsolved crossover, and it draws from a Tumblr meta-analysis. The fic is more legible in the context of couldnt’s post, demonstrating how ‘the text’s meaning can be tied to a specific place, time, and community in ways that make it difficult to read’ outside of the context of the fandom and the circulation of the Tumblr post [9].

ideasofmarch’s interpretation demonstrates how the circulation of fic text through the reader is a multi-layered process: ‘Fan fiction becomes an exemplary instantiation of reader-response-based approaches, not only because the source text’s readers clearly and literally respond but also because any reading of these responses requires a complex reading model that cannot separate text from reader and author’ [10]. In this case, ideasofmarch’s roles as narrative and creative interpreter of couldnt’s post cross multiple zones of the community model: drawing from meta-analysis in the response zone, acting as reader and writer, in order to form the text.

Although tracking the fannish artifacts that anchor fic production can prove difficult after discourse has swept into new territory, some fic writers consistently cite the digital artifacts that service their fic production. The writing practice of both ideasofmarch and dirgewithoutmusic is predicated on reading practices that are engrained in the community context. Many of dirgewithoutmusic’s AU fics, for example, respond to reader prompts, articulating dirge’s role as an interpreter of said prompts. dirge, as a reader of Harry Potter, plays on the structure of the books, which relies on the reader’s knowledge of the series to understand the poignancy of certain moments, motifs, alterations, and flourishes. In ‘the last son’, dirge imagines the progression of the Harry Potter series with Ron Weasley as the Chosen One instead of Harry Potter. 

**(an aside: if you enjoy HP fic and have not read this piece, go read it now so I don’t spoil it for you)**

Among the many changes, including different deaths of major characters and a shift in the Weasley family dynamic, is the motif of the blue Ford Anglia owned by Ron’s now-deceased father, Arthur. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Ron and Harry fly the Ford Anglia to school because they’ve missed the train; the car later rescues them from acromantulas in the Forbidden Forest. dirge concludes the fic—after two Weasley brothers are lost to the war and the surviving siblings return home—with Ginny Weasley repairing the car, claiming, ‘I bet I can get this thing to fly’ [11]. The conclusion resonates with the reader because it points to what the car symbolizes in another strand of the Harry Potter universe while containing the promise of adventure in the current iteration. dirge’s works are bookended by community-based reading practices: a reader-submitted prompt, then a reader response contingent on understanding the intertextuality of the fic.

Kristina Busse, Framing fan fiction, p.142.

Busse, p.142.

Juli Parrish, ‘Metaphors we read by: People, process, and fan fiction’, 3.11. 

Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, p.9. ‘The events created by the fan community in a particular fandom and repeated pervasively throughout the fantext [body of fan creations]. Fanon often creates particular details or character readings even though canon does not fully support it—or, at times, outright contradicts it’.

Lesley Goodman, ‘Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author’, p.666-667. 

Martin Barker, ‘Speaking of “paratexts”: A theoretical revisitation’, p.240, 242. Paratexts ‘points of reference and relevance in relation to the work, suggest and contribute to the mode of participation in it’.

Busse, p.143.

couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name, “okay, so: Rachel is literally one of the richest people in the country…’, Tumblr, 10 Jul, 2020; Busse, p.114. ‘Fan fiction increases both the quantity and the speed of dissemination and intertextuality, however, so that fans can often see tropes get created, picked up, subverted, and dismissed within months, if not days.’

Busse, p.151.

Busse, p.155.