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In this paper I look at how gender is performed in fanfiction, specifically in gender-swap stories within the Harry Potter fandom. Fanfiction is not constrained by any editorial oversight, and there are no financial considerations attached to either reading or writing it, two facts which make it a unique and essential part of the discourse surrounding children's literature. Anyone can write and read it, and there are very few narrative constraints, both of which make the characters and the worlds open to almost infinite types of adaptation. Rather than being closed off within a printed text, the characters take on an elasticity which allows them to exist in worlds, relationships and stories outside their source material. This narrative freedom means fan fictions act not just as textual adaptations, but also social commentaries, narrative sites which are plastic enough to allow writers to project themselves and their opinions onto pre-existing and familiar characters. This elasticity and textual fluidity lends itself very well to a study of contemporary performances of gender, which in turn reveals how the offline publishing market's adherence to a patriarchal hegemony continues to produce a gender imbalance in terms of both subject and author privilege, something which doesn't adequately reflect either the desires or the reading habits of contemporary children and young adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, Archive of Our Own, a renowned fanfiction website, became inaccessible in China due to mass reporting by a celebrity's fans upset about him being portrayed as having a gender identity disorder in a fanfiction. This event led to increased regulation of Boys' Love (BL) content on many Chinese fanfiction platforms, posing challenges for writers. This study interviews Chinese BL fanfiction writers post‐incident and explores their strategies for navigating the shrinking creative space. It argues that China's current fandom culture is capital‐driven, data‐centric, and commercial, fostering a “fanquan (fan circle)” culture that redefines the meaning of “being a fan.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates—based on an interpretive discourse analysis of three types of memes (Rabid Feminists, Women's Bodies, Policy Ideas) and secondary thread discourse on 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" discussion board—two key findings: (1) the existence of a gendered hate based scientific discourse, "science fan fiction," in online spaces and (2) how gender "science fan fiction" is an outcome of the male supremacist cosmology, by producing and justifying resentment against white women as being both inherently untrustworthy (politically, sexually, intellectually) and dangerous. This perspective—which combines hatred and distrust of women with white nationalist anxieties about demographic shifts, racial integrity, and sexuality—then motivates misogynist policy ideas including total domination of women or their removal. 4chan users employ this discourse to "scientifically" substantiate claims of white male supremacy, the fundamental untrustworthiness of white women, and to argue white women's inherent threat to white male supremacist goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside contains a unique archive of slash fan fiction and yaoi/boys' love (BL) manga. Slash and BL refer to fanmade or commercially published works of male homosexual erotica or romance historically made for the pleasure and consumption of women. These fandoms have been a minor subject of academic scholarship for years, though few archives or libraries are actively acquiring them. In this article, we explore the value and challenges associated with collecting materials containing taboo subject matter. We contextualize this process with an overview of the history of archival theory, the emergence of critical archive studies, and the intersection of niche fan communities with feminist and queer studies frameworks.

Unlike a classic film, which requires the audience’s attention from the first to the last frame, every series is forced to deal with pauses, which constitute the aesthetic specificity of this artistic format. Breaks between seasons, episodes, and sometimes blocks within a separate episode (transitions to advertising) are often carefully thought out by the creators and supported by specific tools that are designed to maintain the viewer’s interest in the work: a cliffhanger, retroactive continuity, the module “in previous episodes,” etc. Using film, television and literary series as a researcher material, the author analyzes the process of the audience’s encounter with a work — both during its direct perception and in anticipation of the next part. High discreteness of the serial rhythm leads the extralong form to a succession of drama crises, forcing it not only to develop the action forward but also to correct its own past, resolve logical inconsistencies, and reinterpret the events that have already happened. The article argues that a series deliberately abandons the fabula (plot) as an eventual given, introduces new unspoken conventions that its devoted viewers must accept, and receives the audience’s feedback, entering an interactive narrative mode.

One of the most acute and poorly predicted social problems in modern educational institutions around the world and in Russia has become school shooting (armed mass attacks) with tragic consequences and a long-term subsequent media effect. Revenge, the will to power, the search for universal attention: what motivates school shooters and generates a chain of subsequent tragic attacks in educational institutions? To a large extent, this is determined not only by internal factors (mental, behavioral characteristics), but also by external influence, including informational ones. The study is devoted to the study of a underexplored segment of fan-literature about school shooting and its participants, posted on the Wattpat and Ficbook media resources, from the position of identifying the main gender, thematic and content characteristics that contribute to maintaining interest in school shooting, its glorification and mythologization. The characteristic of the specifics, forms and mechanisms of promoting the ideas of school shooting in the media environment is obtained by the example of communities of creators and readers of fanfiction. The study was carried out using the methodological capabilities of modern communication theories as well as using Data-Science. It has been revealed that through fan literature, the topic of school shooting has largely become legalized, expanded its audience, and became a “gray zone”, poorly controlled from the outside.

The scholarly discourse on fanfic and other fan works emerged over a decade ago as a niche topic mostly of interest to fans. It has since generated dozens of articles and a small but steadily increasing amount of litigation. When the subject was new, each article had to begin with an explanation of what fan works are, why fictional characters are or are not protected by copyright, and how parody and fair use are related. This Article seeks to place a capstone on the author's work during that early era of fanfic scholarship and to move the discourse forward by providing a brief review of foundational issues and previous work in the field before looking to new developments and making hopeful predictions for the future of the law governing fan works. The Article first discusses the fundamental challenge of delineating the border between derivative and transformative uses and then addresses the rights that must be balanced by the law regulating fan works: those of authors and those of consumers/fandom. Copyright law primarily protects the economic rights of authors, but this protection is essentially static; the Article argues that fan works can act dynamically to save the underlying originals from becoming dated or being dragged down by the original author, and copyright law, as it evolves, should acknowledge the cultural interest thus protected. Future developments in copyright law must consider the need for a system of shared and limited copyright, address past cultural appropriation by authors and related harms, and look beyond the flaws of individual authors and toward the fandom as a whole. The Article ultimately suggests that the recognition of a shared common area for creativity between authors and fans can not only benefit fans but also authors, both economically and in non-quantifiable ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This original teaching idea is designed for a course unit on protest communication. It consists of a performed protest speech, dubbed the "fantastical speech," and a post-speech reflective analysis. Students utilize the subversive genre of fanfiction to compose a protest speech in which, as a fictional character, they convince their fictional audience to change the canonical plot of their fictional universe. Students will leave the activity with an understanding of protest communication and the ability to convey their own protest messages effectively. Courses:Persuasion, Social Movements, Introduction to Rhetoric, Argumentation, Public Advocacy, Civic Engagement, Political Communication, Public Speaking. Objectives:This unit activity invites students to change the canonical plot of one of their favorite fictional universes by taking on the persona of a fictional character and engaging other members of that universe to make a dramatic, noncanonical change. By the end of this unit activity, students will: (1) understand the purpose, place, and other generic features of protest communication; (2) name, define, and utilize specific communication strategies to convey their own protest message effectively; (3) perform their own preprepared protest speech; and (4) concisely reflect on their invention and delivery processes using communicative theories of activism, advocacy, and social protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractRecently, fanfiction has gained attention in the field of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) as it provides space for language practice to facilitate genre-based writing and literacy development. However, there is limited research on using fanfiction as a pedagogical tool to encourage both language and culture learning in diverse foreign language (FL) school contexts. To address this gap, this article presents a pedagogical innovation that aligns fanfiction with a linguacultural (LC) framework to involve students in collaborative, technology-enhanced LC learning. The study involved 15 EFL school teachers in Chile who participated in a workshop on LC-based fanfiction project design. Data collected included teachers’ project plans and reflective journals. Analysis of teachers’ project plans identified creative opportunities for bi-linguacultural practice, online exchange, and identity reflection. Triangulation with teachers’ reflective journals revealed the benefits of fanfiction for enhancing student engagement, language creativity, cultural awareness, and use of information communication technologies (ICTs). However, challenges were identified, ranging from student-related issues to the complexities of remote teaching in rural areas. This study emphasizes the significance of exploring pedagogical innovations in diverse FL contexts, to identify and challenge the contextualized barriers hindering successful integration of language, culture, and technology in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a landscape where videogame development has long been dominated by a patriarchal tech culture, gendered engines create spaces for girls’ participation. In this paper I explore two gamemaking toolkits that are attached to existing—and highly gendered—interactive fiction applications, Episode and Dorian. The engines belong to a broader history of initiatives hailing girls to pursue STEM fields, yet they more-so draw on girls’ hobbyist coding practices, namely those rooted in fandom activities. The engines’ monetisation infrastructures, however, engage in an ethos of post-feminist entrepreneurism that entangles leisure and work. I analyse Episode and Dorian’s gendered branding and emphasis on romance storytelling as a limiting design convention, though I also consider the subversive potential at play when the hyperfeminine comes into contact with the masculinised realms of videogames and gamemaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how young adult (YA) literature-inspired fanfiction can be a space where responses to victim-survivors of sexual violence and rape culture are creatively and critically explored. More specifically, employing a feminist critical discourse analysis, this project zeroes in on fanfiction from Fanfiction.net (FFN) and Archive of Our Own (AO3) that is inspired by the award winning, popular, and widely-taught YA trauma novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. It investigates how authors expand on and reimagine the ways in which the victim-survivor protagonist, Melinda, is treated by her family and friends in the aftermath of sexual trauma. This project represents a piece of a larger feminist qualitative study examining how storied resistances against rape culture are being enacted online through YA fanfiction that reimagines trauma experiences. A significant finding from the work discussed here is how across the Speak fandom, fanfiction authors largely add complexity, extending or revising the testimonial smothering that Melinda experiences in the original text or by enriching and (re)producing new experiences of critical witnessing. As such, this research offers enhanced understanding about how largely adolescent creators respond, reimagine, and even resist rape culture through creative literacy practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper deals with investigating pragmatic functions of fan fiction. We define fan fiction as a corpus of texts (fanfics) written by non-professional authors based on a certain work of culture (book, film, TV series, etc.). Being on the Internet creates a number of features in fan fiction texts: conditional anonymity (nicknames), interactivity, hyper-authorship, verbal and visual interconnection, etc. Fan fiction is a multifaceted activity that fosters creativity, community, skill development, representation, and critical engagement. The conducted analysis showed that the megatextual structural elements of fan fiction can be conditionally divided into: technical, related to the volume of the text, visit statistics, the date of the last update, the degree of completion of the fan fiction; and meaningful, in which the rating, pairing, genre, some information about the chronotope and the plot are displayed in the descriptions; author's notes, from which the main themes and motives of the future fan fiction become clear. These megatextual elements give the reader a preliminary idea of the content of the text, so their correct design plays a big role in communities. On the one hand, the megatext contributes to the self-identification of the members of the fan fiction culture, and indicates belonging to this group. On the other hand, skillful, competent design speaks of a certain level of the writer and attracts more readers to his text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship on videogame fanfiction focuses on how these fictions transform game characters and narrative settings. However, this misses out on an important trope in videogame fanfictions, where authors transplant game procedures, systems, mechanics, and play styles into their stories. We term this trope the narrativization of ludic elements. This article examines how three popular fanfictions based on the Chinese MMO Jian 3 narrativize ludic elements in a way that reinforces hegemonic masculinity. The article contributes to a fuller understanding of the rhetorical strategies of fanfiction writers and explores the ideological implications of the intermedial relation between fanfictions and their source texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The paper highlights communicative, ethical, and educational aspects of AI applications for fan fiction writing. This study is the first attempt to analyze opportunities and academic aspects of using AI for fan fiction writing. The article offers a brief overview of research aspects of AI and fan fiction and presents a case study an AI-generated fanfic based on Naruto series. The objective of the work is to study the use of artificial intelligence in the context of fan fiction writing, specifically focusing on how AI technology can assist or enhance the creative process of fan fiction authors. The research questions aim to investigate the implications and opportunities of employing AI in fan fiction writing and education, shedding light on the evolving relationship between technology and creative expression in online communities. While AI technology can offer various benefits and enhancements to the creative process of fan fiction writing, there are also some drawbacks to consider when using AI for this purpose. AI-generated fan fiction may lack the creativity, originality, and emotional depth human authors can bring to their writing. Using AIpowered fan fiction can be a creative and engaging way to assist in learning foreign languages. AIgenerated fan fiction can expose learners to authentic language use, colloquial expressions, and cultural references in a fun and interactive format. Reading fan fiction in the target language can help improve vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension skills. When working with already published fan fiction, some ethical and legal issues arise, such as copyright infringement, plagiarism, and misrepresentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares and analyzes Soniah Kamal's Unmarriageable (2019) and Sonali Dev's Pride and Prejudice and Other Flavors (2019) both loosely based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813). Labeling both Kamal and Dev as Austen's Sub-continental fans the paper closely reads their works in relation with fan fiction theory. The hallmark features of fan fiction, collected by Hellekson and Busse (2014) in their edited essay collection spanning over the ideas of the leading theorists and critics of the expanding field of Fan Fiction Studies, help establish both the novels as emblems of Kamal's and Dev's status of being the pioneering Sub-continental fans of Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Both novels depict their respective protagonists situated in a social background similar to that of Austen's time and explore how social conditions influence a female's psychological structure and anxiety towards marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web-based fanfiction is an increasingly important species of modern fiction that is necessary to understanding contemporary literary culture in a multimedia world. Using the Harry Potter fandom on the platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) as our case study, we combine close reading and computational analysis to examine the narrative features of fanfiction and the rhetorical commentary surrounding it. Our approach models a rapprochement between literary studies and fan studies, offering a new data-driven method for analyzing the relationship between traditionally published fiction, web-based fanfiction, and empirical forms of reader response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alfred the Great, the ninth‐century King of Wessex, has been a popular subject of media representations, including scenes focused on his childhood. These representations, from paintings to contemporary Netflix series and fanfiction, have created an imagined past for Alfred that has contributed to his legendary status. This article seeks to explore the media representations of Alfred as a child, and the stories, themes, and messages conveyed in different mediums, with a special focus on 21st century online fan cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up epistolary writing and the chronicling of experiences with and the impact of sexual violence in an example of fanfiction written in response to the classic young adult (YA) trauma novel, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Because this novel explores the impact of childhood sexual abuse, this project posits that two particular fanfiction stories (a fic and its sequel) offers a theorization of Charlie's letters as a kind of ongoing victim impact statement, which then produces a unique narrative opportunity to create brave space for witnessing experiences of sexual trauma in community. As such, the fanfiction represents a kind of epistolary education wherein Charlie's letters are positioned as a learning tool and source of feminist development through co-created emotionally supportive experiences. Specifically, how Charlie's epistolary trauma testimony is responded to by allies and friends Patrick, Sam and Mary Elizabeth in the fanfiction is educative, particularly through their collective employment of two key practices: being generous and being generative in their responses to Charlie's letters. Their epistolary education then positions them to uniquely process and prepare to reunite with and show up for Charlie as ethical witnesses to his trauma testimony. Thus, these two fanfiction stories function as significant sites for learning about sexual violence, ethically supporting victim-survivors of it, as well as strengthening the characters' senses of community and selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary reception is a special case of language processing. The judgment of literature reveals deep social patterns with embodied cognition. In this study, we investigate how differences in literary quality resonate in the human brain. Modifying a series of stimuli previously used in studies of the emotional potential of Harry Potter, we alternate passages fromthe original novels with passages from imitative and intentionally poorly written fanfiction. EEG data shows how the three text types are processed differently by the brain. Comparing the brain activity of the readers for the various text types, we see a difference in the absolute power but not in the relative power of the frequency bands. Reading badfiction evokes the lowest activity. However, the functionality of this activity is the same for all texts since the relative power of the frequency bands does not differ. When comparing the participant groups, we observe the opposite situation. Here, different relative powers of the frequency bands reflect different judgments and reading habits of participants. For example, fans of Harry Potter, regular readers of fantasy texts, and generally frequent readers read the texts more attentively, which is reflected in a pronounced relative activity of the theta and alpha frequency bands. Non-frequent readers and readers who are not devoted to Harry Potter and fantasy in general have increased activity in the delta frequency band. This suggests their saliency detection is more prominent because they are less familiar with reading or the subject matter. To support our findings, we use the EEG data without averaging over stimuli and participants, capturing the participants' responses on the level of individual stimuli. A Kohonen self-organizing map trained on this more extensive data finds reliably detectable differences in the responses to passages from the original Harry Potter novels and fan- and badfiction. Our study allows for an interpretation of an adaptive brain response. Readers who enjoy Harry Potter or have experience with the fantasy genre show different reactions from those who do not. Thus, badfiction appears to be processed differently by the human brain, but not for all readers in the same way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores such phenomena of modern artistic culture as Japanese manga and anime. In the article, the author analyzes the origins of manga and anime, their main stages of development. The works of individual manga artists and animator directors are considered. The categories and genres specific to manga and anime are characterized. Stylistic, compositional and plot features are defined. The study also examines the main differences between manga and anime. Their influence on modern world art and culture is revealed. The contribution of Japanese artistic style to new Western visual products is noted. The peculiarities of the spread of manga and anime, their impact on the consciousness of the masses have been clarified. The reasons for the global popularity of manga and anime and the emergence of the anime subculture were also determined. Summarizing the research, the author found out that the multivariate nature of manga and anime, their ability to transform, says that manga and anime are artistic types that are actively developing and evolving and providing artists with the almost unlimited opportunities for new searches. In addition, their followers and fans continue to make their contributions to the developments of manga, anime, and, directly, to Japanese and world culture and society in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, Chinese internet publishing has seen a surge in literary production in terms of danmei, which are webnovels that share many of the features of Anglophone fanfiction. Thanks in part to recent live-action adaptations, there has been an influx of new Western and Chinese diaspora readers of danmei. Juxtaposing these bodies of literature in English in particular enables us to examine the complexities of how danmei are newly circulating in the Anglophone world and have become available themselves for transformative work, as readers also write fanfiction based on danmei. This paper offers a comparative reading of the following three such texts, which explore trauma recovery through the arc of romance: Tianya Ke, a danmei novel by Priest; Notebook No. 6 by magdaliny, a novella-length piece of fanfiction based on Marvel characters; and orange_crushed's Strays, a fanfiction based on the live-action drama that was, in turn, based on Tianya Ke. The space described by Lotman's semiosphere offers an additional model in which these texts reflect on one another; furthermore, along the porous digital border between fanfiction, danmei in translation, and fan novels based on danmei, readers and writers negotiate and vex contemporary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way fanfiction has influenced entertainment culture is an interesting phenomenon. Fans can make their favorite celebrity a global sensation within short span of time. Though fandom or fanfiction is not a novel phenomenon, however the way it has undergone transformation with the emergence of digital media is critical. Digital revolution has postured profound effects in determining the fan culture in media and entertainment industry. Digital media has widened the scope of "fancelebrity" relation. The boundaries between media content producers and consumers are being redefined. This study explores the fandom in entertainment and media industry. Literature suggests that there exists a symbiotic relation between consumers and producers and both work for mutual benefit. The study has applied qualitative method i.e. in-depth interviews to investigate the phenomenon. Under the theoretical foundation of Uses and Gratification this study found that the emergence of digital media (particularly social media) has reformed the entertainment culture with increased influence of the fans. Fans play significant decisive role in determining the nature the entertainment content being produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the popular adoption of “fanfiction” as it applies to eighteenthcentury fiction, this essay calls for a closer attention to terminology from the established field of fan studies. By doing so, we may be able to better understand our own period’s relationship to creative output, the commercial print marketplace, and the making of celebrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies the Foucauldian concept of practiced freedom to examine how Chinese female gamers work hand in hand with game developers to negotiate government restrictions on in-game erotic material. Game developers have redesigned certain visual and textual game elements and used sexy dubbed voices to comply with state censorship while maintaining a game's appeal. Female gamers have meanwhile aligned themselves with the game developers by spending significant money on games and creating fan fiction, demonstrating their financial and sexual agency. This article explores how the practice of sexual freedom can serve as a useful lens for understanding the alliance between game developers and players, providing a glimpse into the everyday, conditioned, leisure-driven micro-resistance by engaging with existing scholarship that criticizes the commercial nature of digital games. Instead of overthrowing the conservative political framework, the goal of such gaming micro-resistance is to increase the profits of game developers and the sexual, consumptive rights of women gamers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world of fanfiction online provides a haven for young women and teens to read and create stories about their favorite characters in media. Despite the importance of this cultural scene and a large audience comprising millions of users, little is understood in the academic context of the implications of reading fanfiction through the life course and how the stories one reads in development can stay through adulthood. By qualitatively interviewing a purposive (non-random) sample of two university-age self-identified women on their experiences of reading fanfiction, the author examines how the sampled respondents describe their perceptions of love and relationships in the fanfiction they read, and how fanfiction creates an online community through female-centred media. Her findings suggest that as the interviewees' reading patterns changed during their development, so did their outlooks on love and relationship-- with age and maturity playing a key role in conceptualizing new story lines. This exploratory investigation illustrates the importance of fanfiction in providing women and girls with a venue to narrate their own depictions of romantic relationships outside of mainstream media, and how those romantic ideals may shift over time to reflect women's changing values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the queer pleasures of the 2015 sf movie by the Wachowski sisters, Jupiter Ascending. We find that these pleasures operate on two intertwined levels: the movie's campy villains and over-the-top aesthetics reflect the themes of queer temporality and reproduction on the textual level, while the straight romance of the protagonist draws on the queer archive of fan fiction. We engage with queer studies and fan studies as critical frameworks that allow us to center affective pleasures of recognizing well-established romantic tropes and character archetypes. Critical debates surrounding Jupiter Ascending point to a larger discussion concerning the space for pleasure within sf texts and sf fan communities, while the movie's commitment to fan fiction tropes and narrative practices anticipates recent changes in media consumption and production patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash fanfiction subculture. Popular among Chinese youth, the writing and reading of slash are subjected to increasingly stringent regulations due to changes in the political environment. Drawing from the theoretical framework of minor transnationalism, the current study situates the development of the Chinese slash community in the context of post-socialist reform and globalization, arguing that slash fanfiction is a form of non-institutional, border-crossing cultural practice that challenges orthodox heteronormativity in nationalistic discourses. Foregrounding the double-edge-sword role of digital platforms, this article dissects the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash community—manifested as various strategies in keeping the viability of their cultural practices, including cultural enclosure, border-crossing platform-switching, and social media activism. This article contributes to the study of subcultures by bringing a transnational perspective that focuses on continuous, resilient cultural practices in negotiations of alternative cultural and political agendas. Methodologically, it also contributes to social media ethnographic research by testing out a comprehensive toolkit that combines close reading with computational text-mining and visual network analysis in the analysis of multimodal social media discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

St Boniface, the eighth-century scholar, missionary, and eventual martyr, is generally characterized as an important historical figure but a bad poet. In part it is because his verse is so strongly marked by direct borrowings from Aldhelm that it is easy to assume he did not possess the creativity or ability to write for himself. Here, we seek to rehabilitate Boniface's collection of Latin riddles about the personified Virtues and Vices, engaging especially with Humilitas Cristiana ('Christian Humility'), Virginitas ... humilium ('Virginity of the Humble'), Superbia ('Pride'), and Vana gloria iactantia ('Vainglorious Boasting'). We examine Boniface's riddles through the lens of fan studies, arguing that fandom and fan fiction provide insights into group-identity formation and gift-giving that reframe Boniface's debt to Aldhelm, as well as his entire creative project. Like a writer of fan fiction, Boniface creates new characters based on his reading of Aldhelm's De virginitate ('Concerning Virginity') and, through them, he develops Aldhelm's warning against taking pride in virtue. However, Boniface's riddle-subjects speak an encoded message that only a true fan of Aldhelm could appreciate. Distance from this fandom has led to scholarly neglect of a fascinating poetic collection, but we hope to bridge the gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the construction of the self in romance fiction written today and argues for a reading of romance and selfhood through a negativist lens, suggesting that romance is best understood as participating in the relational selfhood as the means by which happily-ever-afters are achieved. To that end, this article first surveys broad approaches to reader-centric scholarship of the romance from Janice Radway to the present and concludes that such scholarship understands the romance as working to build or construct a sense of social self for its characters and readers. This article argues that this understanding, while foundational to the field and useful in its own moment, face problems as the genre evolves in the present. Sketching some queer theoretical approaches to problems of identity from which this article takes its cues, this article then offers a negativist alternative. To that end, this article explores the negativist, disruptive potential for selfhood through romance fiction either disseminated on or written about the internet, and explores how the negativist lens evades the theoretical problems discussed earlier. Finally, this article concludes by offering a close reading of the 2020 novel The Love Study by Kris Ripper as a case in which a romance novel featuring the internet deconstructs its hero's selfhood to enable his happily-ever-after.

Zarys zjawiska i jego społeczny charakter. Elementy literackie i funkcjonowanie formy w fandomie. Motywacje autorów do tworzenia tekstów. Fanfik jako utwór współtworzony, oparty na zbiorowej wyobraźni.

When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut and I was a hard-core science fiction fan. I was always drawn to heroic characters that invented something new that resulted in an amazing breakthrough. When I started my scientific career, I did not want to do something small-I wanted to do something that would be really different and impactful. This is why I chose to work on one of the most difficult problems in the field of optical (light-using) microscopy-how to see objects that are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. This meant challenging a limit that was long believed to be unbreakable. In my research, I developed a method called photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), which enabled us to break that limit with the help of glowing (fluorescent) molecules. Using the PALM method, and other methods based on glowing molecules, scientists can learn new things about living cells and single molecules and significantly advance our understanding of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses 120 fan-authored stories focusing on the character of the 'Hot Priest' in the television comedy Fleabag (BBC/Amazon 2016–2019), examining how fans use their fandom to explore religious issues and develop religious and theological literacy. This challenges the 'banality' of media representations of religion suggested by Stig Hjarvard's mediatisation thesis through exploring fan responses to a 'secular' television show. As they engage through fandom, fan authors participate in reflection on contemporary Catholic issues and discuss God's character and interpretations of Scripture. This is a form of 'serious play' that allows for detailed meditation on these subjects. Although fans' engagement with religious issues is not a reversal of the decline of religious affiliation in the West, it is a sign of the 'new visibility of religion' in which examples of both 'traditional' and new religion emerge in novel, and often unexpected, contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages José Esteban Muñoz's concept of queer utopian temporality through the heuristic of fanfiction. Beginning with a discussion of accusations of "excessive reading" as a normalizing disciplinary tactic of media viewership, I problematize representations of LGBT+ experience in mainstream television and cinema through Muñoz's figuration of "straight time." I then turn to close readings of several fannish texts created in conversation with the 2014 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo) to demonstrate fanfiction's utility in imagining queer utopian temporalities through the practice of "reading too much into" extant narrative media texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readings of Taiwan's Japanophone colonial-era fiction are typically influenced by politicised interpretations of Japanese rule (1895–1945) on the island and its significance to contemporary Taiwanese identity. Till recently, these discussions often marginalised colonial-era texts by Taiwanese women, initially due to limited translation during Taiwan's period of martial law (1945–1987), and later due to the fragmentary nature of these short stories. This article explores how millennial author Yang Shuangzi (1984-) overcomes the anticipatory politics of reception surrounding colonial-era fiction by adapting a short story by Yang Qianhe (1921–2011) through the lens of 'Girls' Love' (GL), a predominantly online subculture made up of media (fanfiction, manga, fanart) portraying queer relationships between women and girls. By understanding the text as an adaptation, it is possible to explore how contemporary Taiwanese authors read and relate to colonial fiction, breathing new life into such texts through interpretations grounded in contemporary culture. In Yang Shuangzi's case, I argue that she not only emphasises Yang Qianhe's importance to Taiwanese women's fiction through adaptation, but that she also creates space for literary play and creativity. The article focuses on the process of adaptation to develop an argument about literary connection between generations of Taiwanese women, whilst also outlining how online subcultures can revitalise literatures caught in the back-and-forth of nation-state politics by establishing their own practices of language and form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses on-line fanfiction communities, based on the understanding that these communities operate as art worlds (Becker, 2010), which consist of cooperation networks between people, with a view to the production, distribution, consumption and legitimation of artistic products. It is conceivable that in platforms dedicated to writing and reading fanfictions, the dependence on collective and shared work in dealing with literature is evident, and this collaborative dimension is now facilitated by the use of resources available in digital media. For the development of the proposed discussion, the present article examines the Brazilian community Nyah! Fanfiction, which stands for a homonymous site on the web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fan-fiction is proposed as a participatory and discovery-learning approach to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education; communication; and collaboration through the epistemic third space afforded by artscience. The objective is to increase the affective dimension in STEM instruction by allowing STEM to enter intimately into social spaces, all the while drawing interests from girls and women. There is strong female participation in fan-fiction creation, whether in the form of textual stories or other transmedia objects, that could be used to develop more multi-dimensional STEM-based experiential and imagination-centric learning without excluding the more technical aspects of the science – in fact, the technical aspects could be weaved in as a STEM problem or project to be collectively tackled through the communal experience of creating and responding to fan-fiction. Moreover, the world-building capability of fan-fiction, with its ability to bring together multiple fandoms such as multiple works from the same creator or different creators within similar genres, means that there is ample room for using fan-fiction during interdisciplinary engagement for STEM problem-solving or research creation approaches to learning and doing. In this article, some examples of activities are taken from workshops targeted at Malaysian audiences to explore the possibility of deploying fan-fiction approaches to STEM, or STEM through the lenses of artscience, within the culture of learning and doing in Malaysia. These workshops were not originally conceived with fan-fiction as method and medium in mind and yet, were found to share certain similar traits with fan-fiction. The world-building capacity of fan-fiction could be deployed to mainstream the incorporation of indigenous and cultural ways of knowing within Malaysia into the rubrics of institutionalized STEM education. However, the convergence and compatibility between fan-fiction and participatory design, which were featured in at least three of the four workshops depicted here, are the reasons for the choice, while the fourth workshop considers the practice of fan-fiction and its relevance to more informal practices in STEM publishing and communication at a meta level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside contains a unique archive of slash fan fiction and yaoi/boys' love (BL) manga. Slash and BL refer to fanmade or commercially published works of male homosexual erotica or romance historically made for the pleasure and consumption of women. These fandoms have been a minor subject of academic scholarship for years, though few archives or libraries are actively acquiring them. In this article, we explore the value and challenges associated with collecting materials containing taboo subject matter. We contextualize this process with an overview of the history of archival theory, the emergence of critical archive studies, and the intersection of niche fan communities with feminist and queer studies frameworks.