Loving Fanfiction

Exploring the Role of Emotion in Online Fandoms

Brit Kelley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000393965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Loving Fanfiction explores emotion within the context of fandoms, specifically online fanfiction. Through exploring fans' narratives about themselves and the fanwork they produce and consume, the author theorizes how identity, cognition, emotion, the body, and embodiment come together in literacy development and practices.

Drawing on affect theory to explore the complex roles of emotions, literacy, identity, and the digital, both in their own position and in the worlds of engaged fans, Brit Kelley systematically analyses work from a six-year ethnographic study across fandoms—from Harry Potter and WWE, to Gotham and Twilight. Their analysis expands upon current understandings of fandom by more thoroughly theorizing the deeply emotional element of fanfiction practices, and connects to the academic fan community to draw connections and implications for the role of emotion in teaching and research.

This unique perspective on emotions, love, and fandoms will be of significant interest to scholars and students of media and communication studies, fan studies, literature, creative writing, cultural studies, digital humanities, and literacy studies.

1 Emotioned research methods

The ethics of online fanfiction research

‘Brit? Don’t stay up too late, okay’, my dad warned as he went off to bed.

‘Okay’, I mumbled, not really listening.

I was a night owl, and it wasn’t really that late—11:00 p.m. Maybe.

I suppose, now, that my dad’s request was more for my parents than for me. Their bedroom door was right off of the living room in our small, two-bedroom apartment, after all.

But I loved the house late at night. I used only a couple of side table lamps to light the room, and the house was quiet. Still. With much less noise coming from the major road nearby. I felt embraced by the calm of the night—able to be whoever I was without comment. I felt all grown up, watching TV in those late hours. Like I had an apartment all to myself.

The channel was set to MTV, but I wasn’t paying close attention. I had a diary in my lap, trying my hand at a new poem.

I perked up a little as the next show was announced—a replay of Nirvana’s famous Unplugged performance. I wasn’t super familiar with the band, but kids I admired at school—well, one in particular, a dark-haired Kurt Cobain wannabe with beautiful eyes and a don’t-care swagger—would wear Nirvana t-shirts. I figured I’d give it a try.

I was taken in by Kurt’s ratty, green sweater, and his shaggy blond hair constantly falling in his eyes. But it was his solo performance of ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ that really did it.

The lights shifted to a low, almost romantic red hue, and the camera focused on Kurt’s face. His head hung down, and he closed his eyes through most of the song. His bandmates had shifted to a different side of the stage. When his eyes weren’t closed, he was looking down, singing softly.

I was captivated.

I couldn’t look away. My own eyes were riveted to his face. My whole body felt warm, and hot tears were streaming down my face as I quietly wept. I had pulled my knees into my chest, trying to embrace yet stave off the overwhelming emotions that were crashing over me.

The song only lasts for a little over three minutes, but to me, time seemed to stop—the world only me, Kurt, and his guitar. When the song was over, it switched to commercial. Tears were still streaming, and I felt destroyed. I felt euphoric. Something had changed in me.

I had finally fallen in love. I had finally found myself. I had found a set of connections to my dreams, my emotions, to some possible future that was ironclad and undeniable.

It didn’t take long for me to collect all of their albums. To stock up on merchandise—mainly t-shirts and books about Kurt’s life. I even convinced my parents to buy me an electric guitar, a beautiful, wine-red Mexican strat that made me feel powerful and strong and beautiful. All things I never felt otherwise.

Did I think Kurt was beautiful?

Sure.

Did I have an adolescent crush?

Without a doubt.

But it was deeper than that.

I felt like I had found this kindred, tortured soul, and, like him, I would turn my pain into art. When I listened to Nirvana, I didn’t feel like an ugly freak. I felt special. Like an artist. Like a true poet. So often, in the public media, teenage girl fans are seen as swooning, out of control, lusty, lesser. But for me, my fandom reaffirmed my love of writing, and it gave me something to strive for other than being acceptable to the male gaze.

This was my first real experience with fandom. It wouldn’t be the last, but it would remain the most intimate. The most intense.

Then, almost suddenly, it was November of 2001, and I had only been at my new school for a little over a year. I was 15, and bumbling through that awkward process of trying to make and retain friends at a whole new school. The two most likely candidates, for friends that is, were another new girl like me, and the misfits of the drama department. I was desperate for some sort of friendship-like thing, so when Zoë, the other new kid, asked me if I wanted to go see something called ‘Harry Potter’, I said yes, even though it sounded pretty childish to me. But then something unexpected happened. The whimsy and the drama and the larger-than-life score completely captivated me. By the end of the first Quidditch scene, I was hooked. So much for ‘kids’ stuff’. I guess. What had seemed to me a concession towards friendship soon became me obsessively reading each new book I could get my hands on, and, eventually, dressing up as Harry Potter at the midnight releases of new books and movies. It soon led to searching out Harry Potter-related news online. It led to a particularly embarrassing obsession with Alan Rickman. [Listen, there’s just something special about that man driving around town on a motorcycle in An Awfully Big Adventure, or cutting hair with a tattoo of scissors on the bottom of his foot in Blow Dry, or, of course, ordering around his lackies in a German accent in Die Hard—all the SS/HG fanwriters agree.¹]

And, then, maybe a little less suddenly, it was spring of 2008, my final year in college. I was bored with my choice of major, and feeling pretty certain I’d amount to nothing. So, to cope, I spent every available moment reading and writing fanfiction. That’s when Leilani Lachesis was born. She’s average height, lean, and muscular. She has long blond hair and dark blue eyes. She’s intelligent—almost a genius. She’s young, about 23, but she’s already a seasoned spy. She is a natural Occlumens and Legilimens. She is an uncannily strong witch. But she finds it hard to connect with anyone. She’s haunted. She’s coming apart at the seams, because of PTSD. She happens to be the main character of my yet unfinished fanfiction story, The Unfortunate Incident. I chose her name carefully: She’s named after one of the three fates, Lachesis, the one who measures a person’s lifeline, and the Hawaiian word for ‘heavenly flowers’ or ‘royal child’, Leilani (at least according to www.behindthename.com, a premiere source of knowledge, I’m sure). Her dark blue eyes are meant to resemble my own. She’s strong and emotionally controlled. In short, she’s got the intelligence and strength and beauty I’ve always wanted to see in myself, not to mention the women I found in books and TV shows and movies. She’s also totally a Mary Sue.² Despite the derision that the so-called Mary Sue stories receive both within and outside of the fanfiction community, Leilani helped me make the link between undergraduate and graduate degrees. She helped me to rediscover my love of writing. In so many ways, she led me to my current career. I can’t fully describe how any of these things happened, but I do agree with Larsen and Zubernis (2013), who in their book, Fangasm: Supernatural fangirls, stated ‘Falling into fandom is like falling in love’ (p. 8). It sure is.

But why write any of this? Why does any of this matter if we’re talking ethics? It matters because so many of these heady, emotionally charged, even erotic human moments make up so much of what is really going on in online interactions, particularly within more niche communities. In fact, one aca-fan, Bethan Jones (2016), has famously argued in her article for The Learned Fangirl that much of fanfiction constitutes a ‘a private act in a public space’, meaning we need to be especially careful when and how we study this phenomenon, and certainly when and how we report on it in academic activities like scholarship and teaching. What’s more, I’m writing about my own somewhat embarrassing fannish experiences, because it raises a whole host of complications within the research process that so often get obscured by human subjects protection certification and consent forms. So often, in that process, we can lose sight of what led us to that work in the first place, and the sheer complexity of human decisions, especially when it comes to people agreeing to share their lives with us when we do research. But this human component is so crucial to doing effective and ethical research online.

Certainly, when we use the internet in our daily lives, we’re doing so from some kind of tool—a smart phone, or a tablet, or a computer, say—which makes it easy to think of the internet as mere technology. However, so much of what we do online is related to social media, but those places can feel as big and dispersed and impersonal as they can intimate and, well, human. Indeed, the near global ubiquity of digital and internet technologies has raised some crucial concerns about privacy, ownership, and representation. In the current moment, the entities with the most power over representation are institutions—corporations, the government, and even academia (McKee, 2008; MacKinnon, 2012). The onus is therefore on us, as scholars and writers and educators, to continue developing ethical research methods. In this chapter, I argue that ethical online research should consider, first and foremost, how people interact with a certain website. How do they use that? How can we negotiate with users’ expectations while we design research methods? I also argue that ethical research online starts from a disposition of goodwill—both towards our participants and, importantly, towards ourselves, especially when we explore things that we might find especially horrible, even violent towards our identities.

These goodwill ethics tend to break down into four major principles: respect, reciprocity, transparency, and, importantly, vulnerability. We show respect by openly and carefully representing ourselves, as complex as that prospect is. And we show respect by representing participants in ways they might represent themselves. We enact reciprocity not only by providing balanced accounts of the communities we study, but also by accepting and fulfilling some roles these communities might ask of us. We are transparent when we state our positions, values, institutional affiliations, and methods, and are willing to negotiate the latter. And, finally, we can best achieve all three by doing vulnerability. ‘Doing vulnerability’, as I come to discuss, means acknowledging the harm that we can potentially cause through our research, but also doing our best to mitigate harm to ourselves.

As I discussed in the introduction, fanfiction is a literacy practice—a practice of making, through writing, video-making, podcasting, and art—wherein fans take their favourite features of a source text and use these to create their own, novel texts. But, very basically, at its core, fanfiction is composing—writing. And as we all know from our own writing, our own making, while we may feel some sort of urge to share our work with others, most of us also tend to feel extremely nervous about that very prospect. In his new book, Embarrassment: The emotional underlife of learning, Thomas Newkirk (2017) addresses how learning more generally, but certainly learning how to write, is a bumpy process often beset with embarrassment, shame, and anxiety. There’s something very personal, very raw, very vulnerable about writing. As Riche (2017) has argued, however, this vulnerability is part of what makes writing so powerful. As he says in his article, ‘Toward a theory and pedagogy of rhetorical vulnerability’, ‘my existence as a rhetorical being necessitates my existence as a vulnerable being, someone whose life is contingent, perpetually exposed, and always subject to the effects of language (among countless other factors)’ (Riche, 2017). In other words, vulnerability is the capacity to both affect and be affected by something. Considering the very vulnerability of writing overall, it becomes, perhaps, much easier to understand why Jones (2016) would argue that, for fans, posting a fanfiction story is similar to ‘A woman talking about an abortion with a friend in a café’ that it is ‘a private act in a public space’.

Importantly, while we cannot simply use whatever is not password protected, by the same token, not everything that an individual person might post in a privately public manner is hands off. Academics should have the freedom to engage critically with cultural texts, including online fan texts. But I would also point out that, unlike authors of traditionally published works (that is, works published through academic or commercial presses), fanwriters are often highly vulnerable. Online fan spaces were created as safe zones for reading and writing that was otherwise unsanctioned. Because of this, fans developed certain rules of engagement in order to both support and protect each other. Busse and Hellekson (2012) have argued that ‘many fans find unacceptable the notion that their works may be freely perused by outsiders. Fan publications…are perceived as existing in a closed, private space even though they may be publicly available’ (39). This perception has a long history in fan communities that have been extremely stigmatised (Bacon-Smith, 1992; Jenkins, 1992). Historically, fans have seen themselves as resistant to dominant forms of consumption, and this status is fiercely protected and defended in fan circles.

As we’ve already seen from Jones (2016) and Busse and Hellekson (2012), many fans tend to feel very uncomfortable with the prospect of having their work read and shared by community out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1 Emotioned research methods: the ethics of online fanfiction research
• 2 Emotion economies: the complex emotional nexus that makes online fanfiction work
• 3 Fanfiction on the margins: fanfiction as feminised and racialised practice
• 4 Fanfiction—a family affair?
• 5 Family, friends, and desire: Lilo’s emotioned fan literacy
• 6 Growing out (?) of fanfiction: Madshrubbery’s journey from fanfic to o-fic
• Conclusion: emotioned literacy practices
• Index