I attempted to contact researchers and experts within the Transcultural Fandom for expert feedback on my intervention of comparing fanfic with original literature, but up till now nobody was available for an online chat for work, life and health reasons. So I extended my scope of researchers and managed to reach a professor of fandom studies from University of Novi Sad—–Prof. Bojana Vujin.
The professor explained that fanfiction mostly focused on specific characters and original fiction focused on literary techniques. As my stakeholders were all in original writing communities, it wasn’t hard for them to decipher this.
This explained what Prof. Henry Jenkins said during our interview: “What’s so good about fanfic is so much of it is bad. it creates a space where you can be bad and get better.” If I look at this result from a more holistic perspective, it does alter how I evaluate the results in a positive way.
Bonus: one of the stakeholders contacted me afterwards and told me she had started to read fantasy-based fanfics. Which was an astonishing surprise for me. Interventions do give the feedback that you are not aware of.
Because my last intervention is based on his works, I sent an interview invitation to Mr. James Riley in hopes of gaining his feedback. (I sent the same email twice on 11.27 and 11.29)
AND HE REPLIED!!!!!
Although Mr.Riley wasn’t able to participate, it was still really exciting to receive an email from one of my favorite authors.
“Dear Writers” proved to be a fruitful intervention and managed to reduce fanfiction’s marginalization by showing one evidence that it is beyond its stereotype. Although the change is tiny, it is still a change.
I sent invites to fans of the Harry Potter fandom because it has a large fanbase and therefore more people might respond.
Three participants responded to my chat, and I asked them to write a short excerpt of their favorite plot of the universe and send it to me, and I sent the excerpts in ChatGPT and asked them to generate a reply for the authors called “Dear Writer”.
1st participant: Peter Lee
Peter was surprised by this approach and touched because the character inside their favorite universe praised the way they wrote. They immediately wrote a letter back and repolished the story they wrote.
Yilan found the intervention very interesting, and later sent me a link of a Harry Potter fanfic audio that she is currently listening to. I was surprised because this was her first fanfic ever.
I had several interations on online forums and got pretty severe backlash, which led me to reflect on whether my initial approach to stakeholders was useful for attracting audience and gaining feedback. No matter which genre it is catagorized in, stories and storytellers need to make their stories approachable and intriguing enough for audience participation.
Recalling our unit 1 activity: Narrative, Myth and Belief, our group created a ghost that haunted the students of CSM and consumed their luck for food. The process of creating this project was stressful but fun, and we managed to make everybody in class knock on pieces of wood to get their luck back.
It proved to be a very approachable story, mostly because we threatened to steal everybody’s luck of getting a good grade…and that hooked everybody’s attention.
Now viewing the way I approached online forums such as Reddit and Weibo:
While the questions about collecting misconceptions sparked hundreds of replies, the one about exploring slash fanfiction drew several pieces of backlash.
So I’m trying out different ways to convey myself more clearly in this project to draw people in.
For a very long time in my project, I hadn’t felt like I was being heard, and I felt like I was working extremely hard at the wrong angle of what fiction, and fanfiction is. It had something to do with characters, it had something to do with stereotypes and what other people thought, but for several months I couldn’t piece it together.
At the end of September, my project took a heck of a large detour. The medium of my project consisted mainly of TEXT, and I missed VISUALS so much that I tried to wrestle my research question to let me put something visual to it, hence “cosplay”, because that related to fiction, and that contained visuals, and that somehow in my mind related to masks that I was always mindlessly drawing about.
I still remember the objects from my Box of Uncertainties from the very start of the course: the Patronizer, the Pin of Norse Myths, the Book of Narnia, and the Trial Frame that creates fiction through fragments of reality.
Inside the box are two basic things: Rules and Mythology.
When we write fiction in the world we are right now, we have to follow certain rules. The rules of copyright, and the rules of making it a real job. Fanfiction breaks those rules by simply allowing people to have a hobby.
Yesterday I had a conversation with Abani about my project, and I told her that I couldn’t help censoring myself when I faced the tutors (which, however I tried, could not get rid of the student perspective that they were a representation of authority) and how at the start of the course I thought this course wanted everybody to be activists of a certain area. But I wasn’t an activist. I’m just someone who likes stories and likes to tell stories, and I was having huge trouble writing a report about this because I’ll instinctively censor myself again.
Abani suggested that I write a report not to the tutors, but to a fictional character whom I really liked, and since they do not exist in this world, I wouldn’t have the anxiety of how they would think about me.
This led me to think and experiment. I picked Jinx from Arcane 1 and 2, went to ChatGPT, programmed it with my words to make it sound like Jinx, and started a conversation with her.
I interviewed Sherry Liu, fellow cohort of MAAI and also an avid fanfic reader and writer.
CONTENT: Sherry started her fanfic writing journey by watching the first movie of Spiderman in 2017. Mesmorized by the plot and a lot of the memes in the story, and the way it linked to the Ironman movies in the Marvel Universe. Being an original writer initially, she found the “shipping”(fans writing romantic stories between Spiderman and Ironman) intriguing and started writing fan stories herself and posting them online. Writing fanfiction was a psychological sanctuary for her as it is for me. She used to check for comments on her posts online during math classes in high school, and it kept her happy during a stressful period at work.
“One of the best things about being a fanfic writer for so long is that I forget about the fics I write,” Sherry laughs. “I would go back to some of the characters I shipped several years back, come across a fic that I really enjoy and suits my flavors completely, and then find out that I wrote it myself!!”
She states that fanfiction is an outlet for her emotions when school and work gets unbearably stressful. She explained that this creative freedom wouldn’t be possible if she was doing this as professional work rather than a hobby.
I showed her my intervention of comparing fanfiction to actual literature. “I really like the idea, but I’m not really surprised that most of your stakeholders could tell the difference between the two. The ultimate reason for writing fanfic is that people have love for one or two specific characters. Unlike original fiction, which starts on worldbuilding and backgrounds of main protagonists and antagonists, fanfic is more likely going to focus on one specific plot and dimm the stories of other characters, so readers can immediately tell the difference.”
REFLECTION: Sherry’s journey highlights the emotional and creative sanctuary fanfiction provides. Her experiences reflect how writing fanfiction can be a deeply personal and emotionally driven activity.fostering a deep connection to characters. Her humorous realization of rediscovering her own work demonstrates how personal and immersive fanfiction is, showcasing its ability to offer not just escapism but also a sense of accomplishment and creativity.
EVALUATION:
I was deeply inspired by Sherry’s passion and enthusiasm for retelling stories about the characters she loved, which highlighted the unique focus of fanfiction on specific characters and plots. Unlike original literature, fanfiction often prioritizes emotional connections and personal expression, offering a creative outlet free from the pressures of professional expectations. Her feedback on my intervention validated why stakeholders could distinguish between fanfiction and original works, reinforcing the idea that fanfiction is rooted in love for existing narratives rather than extensive worldbuilding.
Sherry’s experiences further emphasized the emotional and creative freedom that fanfiction provides. It serves as a therapeutic outlet, allowing writers to reclaim control over narratives and channel their emotions into storytelling. Moreover, her insights reflected the communal nature of fanfiction, where shared passion fosters a sense of belonging and motivation. These perspectives align closely with my project’s goals, showcasing fanfiction as not just an artistic medium but also a powerful tool for emotional empowerment and creative growth.
As I was writing my report, I reflected back to the feedbacks from previous units. One specific detail of my assessment feedback from Unit 3 really stood out to me: I was encouraged to shift away from presenting a dichotomous stance on fan fiction, and considering the spectrum of opportunities in between.
I was pinpointing how people view fandom as something linear: either they were completely against creating fanfiction in general, or they were completely aligned with the sexual parts of fanfiction.
This was exactly what Steve said during Comic Con a month later. For some frustrating reason I didn’t completely understand what “the spectrum of opportunities in between” and “the stories in the middle” really meant, I simply had a vague idea that this was the area of fiction that encouraged, rather than suppress, people to tell more stories.
Currently my interventions still stuck to the 2 sides of the spectrum. I found it quite hard to measure what is the “stories in the middle”, apart from people’s subjective viewpoint of it.
I have been taking part in biweekly conferences within the Transcultural Fandom of East Asia since the start of September. I gained some valuable feedback from fellow fandom researchers during our 15-minute conversation, as I shared my research question and current interventions with them.
After a brainstorming during the tutorial on Monday, I decided to conduct an intervention in which I let people compare the difference between slash-fic and actual literature.
I initiated a starter intervention on Nov.9th by picking a fanfic that portrays Mary Bonnet in Our Flag Means Death and paired that up with a dialogue of Sense and Sensibility. I asked 4 of my friends to read two short excerpts of those 2 works, and then guess which one is the fanfiction and which one is the original. The results were pretty unerving…all four of them guessed it correctly.
Reflecting on the starter intervention, I realised that I hadn’t controlled the variates of the excerpts, and the genre of original fiction and fanfiction was similar only in portraying a female character, for Our Flag Means Death is a pirate comedy, and Sense and Sensibility is a romance novel.
Since different fanfic writers research in remotely different areas when writing different genres(Spotify, 2022), I decided to pair original works and fanfics of the same genre together. Because I was working on a time limit, I decided to search for 4 main genres of fiction based on the top 10 most popular fiction genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-fi and Romance.
Based on the 4 most popular genres from the pre-intervention survey, I searched for 4 different novels, paired them up, and sent them to the corresponding participants.
Here is an example of the 2 excerpts from the genre “FANTASY”.
Here are the 4 pairings I chose.
Fantasy: (from The Hobbit) Correct aswer: A
Adventure: (from Treasure Island) Correct aswer: A
REFLECTION: The results from both rounds clearly showed that fanfiction is often seen as lower quality compared to original literature, reinforcing a common stereotype about fan-created works. At first, I might have seen this as a failure. But now, I’m approaching it from a broader perspective. It really highlights the uphill battle in shifting people’s perceptions of fanfiction as a legitimate art form.
Before this course I would have marked this intervention as “failed”, but I chose to look at the results from a more holistic perspective. This demonstrates a prevailing challenge in changing perceptions about fanfiction’s artistic value. Moreover, many fans praised the fanfic they read, saying that they enjoyed reading the excerpts, however “low quality” they were because they loved the plot and characters in the original work and enjoyed the stories that were retold and continued.
Despite the perception of “low quality,” a lot of fans genuinely enjoyed reading the excerpts. They appreciated the fanfiction not because it was polished or literary, but because it brought beloved plots and characters to life in new and creative ways. The familiarity and emotional connection they had with the original works made these stories meaningful and fun for them. This shows that fanfiction doesn’t just succeed or fail based on traditional literary standards—it’s more about the passion and joy it brings to fans, which is a huge part of its cultural value.
EVALUATION: My reflection suggests that comparing fanfiction to original literature is not about superiority but about recognizing fanfiction’s unique participatory state and the importance of exposing the diversity and range of stories within fanfiction. It’s much more useful to give exposure to the range of stories that exist within fandom.
