humanities

Editorial
Roundtable: The Past, Present and Future of Fan Fiction
Lincoln Geraghty 1, * , Bertha Chin 2, * , Lori Morimoto 3, *, Bethan Jones 4, *, Kristina Busse 5, *,
Francesca Coppa 6, *, Kristine Michelle “Khursten” Santos 7, * and Louisa Ellen Stein 8, *

1 School of Film, Media and Communication, University of Portsmouth, Eldon Building, Winston Churchill
Avenue, Portsmouth PO1 2DJ, UK
2 School of Design & Arts, Swinburne University of Technology, Kuching 93200, Sarawak, Malaysia
3 Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia, Wilson Hall, 115 Ruppel Drive,
Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA
4 School of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK
5 Independent Researcher, Mobile, AL 36695, USA
6 Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA 18104, USA
7 Department of History and Japanese Studies, School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manilla University,
Loyola Heights Campus, Quezon City 1108, Philippines
8 Film and Media Department, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA
* Correspondence: lincoln.geraghty@port.ac.uk (L.G.); bertha.chin@gmail.com (B.C.);
ldhmorimoto@gmail.com (L.M.); bethanvjones@hotmail.com (B.J.); kbusse2@gmail.com (K.B.);
francescacoppa@muhlenberg.edu (F.C.); kmsantos@ateneo.edu (K.M.S.); louisas@middlebury.edu (L.E.S.)

Fanfiction as a cultural practice has rapidly evolved in recent years, from a community-
based form of social interaction to a globally recognised form of narrative world-building.
Once a niche genre of writing, shared mainly within small communities to express emo-
tional connections with popular media texts, fanfiction is now viewed as a means to
create new content that extends and builds on those texts beyond national and
Citation: Geraghty, Lincoln, Bertha industrial boundaries.
Chin, Lori Morimoto, Bethan Jones, Moving from notions of the mass audience to individual levels of fandom—and thus
Kristina Busse, Francesca Coppa, from the sociological to the psychological—early studies largely explored the psychological
Kristine Michelle “Khursten” Santos, processes and motivations of female fans in the forms of pleasure, fantasy, and desire, as
and Louisa Ellen Stein. 2022. evidenced in key examples drawn from science fiction series such as Star Trek. By critically
Roundtable: The Past, Present and assessing notions of gender and sexuality in fan culture, these works highlighted the need to
Future of Fan Fiction. Humanities 11: account for sexual desires and pleasures in fandom while illustrating the limitations of such
120. https://doi.org/10.3390/ approaches in their inability to conceptualise sustained and regular consumption practices.
h11050120
More recent work has recognised the increasing popularisation and professionalisation of
Received: 8 August 2022 the genre, where authors are able to reach a wider audience, create their own readership,
Accepted: 17 August 2022 and see fanfiction of their work emerging. Digital platforms and alternative forms of
Published: 22 September 2022 storytelling have helped to change what we might now consider fanfiction. It is not just
about textual inspiration; celebrities and other personalities in the public eye have become
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral
with regard to jurisdictional claims in
the subject for fanfiction authors. Social media platforms, fanfiction websites, and other
published maps and institutional affil-
digital spaces for sharing content, such as YouTube and TikTok, have caused the genre to
iations.
become an international phenomenon that crosses linguistic and cultural borders.
This Special Issue of Humanities seeks to explore the new and changing forms of
fanfiction and consider the importance of new technologies, social platforms, and global
audiences in creating new methods of storytelling in a digital world. By way of an introduc-
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. tion, we invited four leading experts in the field to discuss what they consider to be the key
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. developments in the study of fanfiction and what important work remains to be done on
This article is an open access article this ever-evolving medium. We want to thank Kristina, Francesca, Louisa and Khursten for
distributed under the terms and agreeing to be on this roundtable discussion on the past, present, and future of fanfiction.
conditions of the Creative Commons
About the Panel
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ Kristina Busse has a PhD in English from Tulane University and teaches in the Department
4.0/). of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. As an independent scholar and media

Humanities 2022, 11, 120. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050120 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities

Humanities 2022, 11, 120 2 of 11

fan, Kristina is a former board member of the fan advocacy group Organization for Trans-
formative Works (2016–2019) and cofounder and former editor of its online peer-reviewed
academic journal Transformative Works and Culture (2008–2022). She is the author of Fram-
ing Fan Fiction (2017) as well as co-editor of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the
Internet (2006), Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (2012), and The Fan Fiction Studies Reader
(2014). Her work on fan fiction and fan communities has appeared in numerous anthologies
and journals, including Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, and Popular Communication. She is
currently co-authoring with Alexis Lothian Fan Fantasies and the Politics of Desire.
Francesca Coppa is a Professor of English and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College where
she currently chairs the Department of English Literatures and Writing. A founding member
of the Organization for Transformative Works and an architect of the Archive of Our Own,
her books include The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (U. Michigan, 2017),
which won the Prose Award for Best Book in Media and Cultural Studies, and Vidding: A
History (U. Michigan, 2022), an open-source, multimedia history of fan music video.
Kristine Michelle “Khursten” Santos is the Executive Director of Ateneo Library of
Women’s Writing (ALiWW) and assistant professor in the Department of History and
Japanese Studies Program at Ateneo de Manila University. Her research focuses on social,
cultural, at times historical, and affective interventions that impact women’s queer and
transformative engagements with Asian media. Her studies examine a wide range of lit-
eracies related to comics production, fan networks, and Boys Love culture. She specialises
in gender, cultural studies and history, and popular and fan cultures in Asia. Kristine has
recently written on the transcultural flows of queer practices between East and Southeast
Asia, self-published comics, and other developments within Philippine comic culture. Her
recent publications include “Independent and safe panels for youths Queer comics in a
time of Southeast Asian populism” in Queer Southeast Asia (2022) and “Queer Affective
Literacies: Examining ‘Rotten’ Women’s Literacies” in Japan (Critical Arts, 2020).
Louisa Ellen Stein is an associate professor of film and media culture at Middlebury
College. Louisa is author of Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age
(University of Iowa Press, 2015) and co-editor of A Tumblr Book: Platforms and Cultures
(University of Michigan Press, 2020), Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (McFarland, 2012) and
Teen Television: Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008). Louisa’s work explores
audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of cultural and
digital contexts, gender, and generation. Louisa is also mother of two fans, and in her spare
time she edits fan video and remix video.
Editors: We’d like to welcome and thank all of you for agreeing to participate in this
roundtable on the past, present, and future of fan fiction. To begin with, could each of
you situate yourself in relation to the subject and your particular interests?
Kristina: I am really excited about this roundtable with its focus on fan fiction, because I
am by training and at heart a literary scholar. My focus has always been on the written
medium rather than film or television and, as such, it is exciting that we finally seem to be
at a point where we can look at fan fiction as literary texts rather than ancillary documents
that allow us to study media and their fandoms more broadly. Even though fan fiction
is often the most widespread, most visible, and most referenced of all fan works and fan
activities, there exists surprisingly little research that looks at fan fiction as a literary text.
More often, fan fiction is seen as one aspect of fannish engagement–albeit one that can
easily be cited and referenced. As such, fan fiction most often has been read as collective fan
interpretation, as evidence of interpretive communities, and as ways through which fans
respond to their beloved source text. Fan fiction is used to corroborate fannish emotional
responses to the source text, the socio-historical contexts, and fannish self-understanding.
So, my main focus at the moment is to return to studying fan fiction within the academic
discipline of literary studies.
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 3 of 11

Francesca: I’m also a literary scholar as well as a performance studies scholar, and I’ve
historically been interested in fanfiction as a female-dominated literary world beyond the
marketplace. But lately I’ve been fascinated with the ways in which mainstream literary
criticism has taken on fan-studies perspectives—Kristina, what you want to be happening
is already happening, but more on the lit side than the fan studies side, I think! Fanfiction
has reshaped the traditional literary landscape by providing a broadly-visible, alternative
space for literary creation and criticism not only outside the market but also outside the
university (that is, the not-for-profit world of formal literary study and creative writing
workshops etc.) As the chair of an English department, I’m not supposed to say that’s a
good thing, but–(shh, I think it’s a good thing.) I’m sure I can’t be the only English major who
stopped writing, discouraged, after reading perfect sentence after perfect sentence in a lit
class. Fanfiction, by contrast, tends to incite creativity and participation, because if all of
these people can do it, why not me? (This is really what I think is meant by “you have to
read to write”—not only “you have to read the good stuff and be inspired by what great
writing can be” but also “you have to read the wide variety of what gets published and
realize that not every story is all that and a bag of chips”) In recent years it has become
obvious that fanfiction has given literary scholars new tools to think with, and we can
now see fanfic studies’ growing influence on both English department pedagogies and
contemporary literary criticism.
Khursten: Similar to Kristina, I am stoked to be a part of this roundtable discussion on
the state of fan-fiction. I am hoping to ground my participation in this discussion as a
scholar who has examined Asian fan histories and culture and as a participant who has
engaged in various iterations of fan expressions in Anglophone and Asian fan spaces
for a great part of my life. My experience as a fan has enriched my research which has
witnessed the way transformative fan literacies have broadened conservative notions of
gender and its expressions. Fan fiction is a rich repository of these literacies that shows
the infinite potential of reading, interpretation, and expression. It would be interesting to
situate fanfiction in an ever-evolving media landscape that has given fans more tools for
fan expression.
Louisa: Delighted to be part of this conversation as well, which I think is an important
one! I’ll build here on Khursten’s point about fanfiction as part of an ever-evolving media
landscape. This isn’t to undermine the importance of looking at fan fiction from a literary
perspective, but I do think it’s vital that we consider the multiple forms that fan fiction takes
in 2022, within multiple digital contexts and platform—be it Archive Of Our Own, Wattpad,
AsianFanFics, show specific archives (yes, these still exist!) Twitter, Amino, YouTube,
Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, Webtoons, or (Budiarto et al. 2021). All of these spaces host fan
fiction and fan fiction writer and reader community interactivity. I’d be interested to hear
what sites folks in this conversation have their eyes on for developments in fan fiction?
And what new patterns, genres, narrative structures, forms do you see emerging?
Editors: Starting with Kristina and Francesca’s opening statements, you both create a
seeming opposition between fan and literary studies. Can you all say a bit more about
your approach to fan fiction and/as literature?
Kristina: From the 1990s through the 2010s, fan studies was most commonly studied and
researched within the disciplines of media and new media studies, and, as a result, there
exist few academic approaches that engage more traditional literary research approaches.
Reader-focused models fell out of fashion in literary studies by the mid-late 1980s, but even
when they were popular, they discussed the reader as a function of the texts they studied
and analyzed rather than looking at how people were actually reading.
And it is at the very moment where reader response falls out of fashion in literature
departments that television studies begins to move away from the psychoanalyzed film
audiences that mostly were as imagined, intended, and ideal as the reader response readers
and begins looking at actual television viewers. Audience studies came out of cultural
studies and took seriously the attempt to interview actual viewers in their homes and
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 4 of 11

describe their reactions and interpretations. So, when Henry Jenkins writes Textual Poachers
(Jenkins 1992), he does so with a cultural studies lens and while he cites some reader
response theorists, his driving models are more indebted to Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and
Stuart Hall (1991) than Wolfgang Iser (1974) and Stanley Fish (1980). And while he analyzes
and categorizes fan fiction, much of the fan studies of the following decades looks at fan
fiction as a function of television viewing and interpretation instead of literary texts in their
own right.
[Kristina] And the one important academic work on literature that uses ethnographic re-
search like we see in audience studies is Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance
(Radway 1984). And it is not incidental, I’d argue that it is genre fiction, in particular
romance, that receives this treatment. Fan fiction, just like genre fiction, is seen less as a
literary text in its own right and more as a cultural artifact that tells us something about
the communities that write, share, and read the stories. And yet we all know that there are
amazing short stories, novellas, and novels published every day that deserve to be studied
both as examples of particular genres of writing and as literary artifacts!
Francesca: I think we’re seeing a potentially fruitful collapse between fanfiction and other
kinds of literary writing as fan studies forces people to challenge the various distinctions
and definitions. While I am particularly sensitive to money as a factor which differenti-
ates fan and professional work, when it comes to literary writing, market forces are not
necessarily dispositive. So, I think literary studies and fanfic studies are heading for a
merge. Critics like Rita Felski are now using affect theory and network theory to talk about
literature in ways familiar to fanfiction fans: arguing that stories survive the proverbial test
of time not simply because of their aesthetic qualities or the relevance of their themes, but
because they are at the center of an affective network—or what we might call a fandom.
To be fair, theatre scholars got there first: it doesn’t matter how good a play is, if it’s not
picked up by directors who want to produce it (that is to say, reproduce it), then it’s a dead
thing, a museum piece.
[Francesca] Similarly, books are kept alive by their fans (readers, critics, librarians, publish-
ers, makers of “best of” lists, creators of syllabi) and their fandoms: all the adaptations,
remixes, reboots, sequels, homages, and other kinds of fanfiction. (Everyone was teaching
Beowulf again after Maria Dahvana Headley wrote both The Mere Wife, a contemporary
novel retelling the story, and a hip-hop-ish translation of Beowulf itself, for instance. And
of course, it was mostly Tolkien who argued that Beowulf was an important literary—as
opposed to historic or linguistic—text in the first place; Tolkien was a Beowulf fan!) The
idea of a network of textual works—an ecosystem, or in Gail De Kosnik’s framing, an
archive—also challenges the conventional hierarchy of a “great”, “original” artwork and its
“derivative” fanfiction (De Kosnik 2016); as any fan knows, no text is great until its fandom
says it is, and some fan works or fanons forever change earlier works or even displace
them. All these ideas are all now being discussed and used in mainstream contemporary
literary criticism.
Louisa: While I absolutely agree with the value and necessity of considering fan fiction
as (to borrow Kristina’s words from above) “literary texts in their own right,” as a media
studies scholar, I’m especially aware of the evolving multimodal nature of what constitutes
fan fiction. Indeed, I’d suggest that one of the key challenges that fan fiction studies scholars
(and the field as a whole) must grapple with is the diversity of what fanfiction is in 2022.
On top of that, there’s the ephemerality of fan fiction forms that change so rapidly within
various microcommunities on ever-shifting platforms.
Given this ever-expanding and shifting diversity of fan fiction forms, as scholars of fan
fiction, we face the tricky problem of who chooses to write about what types of fan fiction
and within what fields/for what audiences, what practices get heralded as worthy of
scholarship to whom, and what works get canonized, and why. This challenge isn’t new
though; fan scholars often write with insight into the communities they know, and this
personal insight can lend nuance but also can limit the field of what they write about.
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 5 of 11

Francesca: In response to what Louisa said above: what I’ve personally grappled with is
the tension between talking about fanfiction in terms of a network, an archive, a collective,
an ecosystem (which is what I think is accurate, because it’s difficult to impossible to read a
single piece of fanfiction in isolation; fanfiction is a networked thing best read in batches
which inform and explicate it so as to form something more than the sum of its parts) but
also wanting not to lose fanfiction in the great sea of “crafts” rather than as named, credited,
literary art. I mean, you really can’t read a single poem in isolation either if you know
anything about poetry, but we force students to do it all the time, and we credit—whomever.
John Keats. T.S. Eliot. Marianne Moore. Danez Smith. I find Chuck Klosterman’s (2016)
essay, “Which Rock Star Will Historians of the Future Remember?” useful for thinking
about canon formations; as he points out, marching music was once an incredibly varied
field, and now it’s all reduced to one guy: John Philip Sousa. Time, Klosterman argues,
will inevitably narrow rock and roll to one or two artists who get studied in school: The
Modern Lovers what, Adam Ant who? Franco Moretti’s “The Slaughterhouse of Literature”
(Moretti 2000) makes a similar argument about the minute percentage of Victorian literature
even 19th century experts read; the Victorians were just too damn prolific.
Those of us in fanfiction studies experience a similar Slaughterhouse of Fic every day; you
just can’t read even the tiniest percentage of it. So, it is in that context that I’ve chosen to err
on the side of naming artists and forming canons: we’re fighting the tides of time anyway.
(Blake’s what? SGA who?) But as more fanfiction scholars emerge, and more fanfiction
stories get written about in more contexts, things will shake out. Our sort of fanfiction is a
pretty new literary form and we should expect most of it to be ephemeral–and that’s okay,
that doesn’t make it bad or pointless. (We don’t read most of what was on the bestseller
lists of yore, either, and English Departments have changed radically in the last 20 years;
we’re just losing whole subfields on the undergraduate level. Who can afford classics, a
medievalist, an 18th century specialist; there’s just not the demand.) But, to go back to
network theory and to paraphrase Felski, artworks have friends, and in fandom, rec lists,
tweets, newsletter recs, podcast reviews, Fanlore pages, and academic articles are all part of
the network that may or may not help a particular story get read or be seen as significant.
Editors: Louisa and Francesca are already hinting at the changes that fan fiction as a
genre has seen over the decades and how these changes are connected to changing in-
terfaces, generational zeitgeist, and size and types of fan communities. We’d like to
hear more of your thoughts on the topic of generational divides and on the effects of
ever-changing platforms?
Louisa: One of the challenges I think about a lot is the rapid generational shifts in per-
ceptions of what fiction is, where it’s found, who knows about it, what it means to young
people, and generational tensions around who should be writing what fan fiction and for
whom. Scholars writing about fan fiction see it as a longer tradition, and are aware of
histories and developments in the form. But young people engaging with fan fiction come
to it fresh, if influenced by the various forms and works that permeate digital culture. And
the fan fiction that an 8-year-old might encounter online is very different from the fan fiction
a 12 year old may encounter online, and both are likely quite different from the fan fiction
writing cultures of adult fans. Not that there aren’t intergenerational intersections, but
experiences of fandom as a whole and fan fiction within it are quite diverse generationally
in 2022.
As much as interfaces shape fan fiction trends, so do developing norms within specific
communities, often delimited by generational usage and spurred on by microcommunities’
particular feedback cultures. That is, what types of fan fiction achieve popularity and take
off as new forms of fan fiction differ within particular microcommunities. Trends within
narrative videos on the Chinese video-sharing site Bilibili created by Chinese video editors
are significantly different from those within Wattpad fan fiction, or those within fan fiction
written within the National Novel Writing Month/Young Writers’ Program (Nanowrimo),
or those within crowdsourced twitter-fic where people build and share fic concepts tweet
by tweet. There may be some overlap between these trends and the communities that
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 6 of 11

deploy them, but we need to acknowledge them as distinct evolving forms. That’s a rich if
daunting scope for fan fiction studies present and future!
Kristina: Totally! I also think it’s important to look at the way terminologies, trends, tropes,
etc. differ not just between communities but also how important shifts occur over time.
In fact, my co-author Alexis Lothian and I have been working on the history of slash fan
fiction and when we drafted our proposal we realized that we’re not just writing a history,
but that effectively the term is already one of the past. Today’s fanfic readers and writers
rarely use the term and I doubt many under 30 would ever consider themselves slashers,
as many of us older folks did in the 90s/early 00s. Or, to give another example about
shifting norms and expectations, there were four more or less taboo subjects in many fan
fiction communities in the nineties: underage, real people fiction, incest, and domestic
discipline. Now three of those four mainstreamed in the early 2000s, heavily driven by
Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings Real People Fiction fandoms. So, you’d suddenly
encounter Cartercest (Aaron Carter/Nick Carter), which was the trifecta of taboo subjects,
in regular channels rather than hidden away.
More recently, of course, new and different concerns have arisen, and it’s worth looking
at the way not only fan fiction changes but also fan discourses about fiction are changing.
At the center of many of these current conversations lies the relationship between fiction
and reality, which is a question that I feel almost every generation faces yet again, be it
Plato wanting to banish the poets from his ideal Republic, Victorians wanting to encourage
edifying literature only, or second wave feminists battling pornography as encouraging
actual rape. Sadly, a lot of the conversations flatten a really complex subject when it
becomes a simple binary that either posits a 1:1 correspondence or declares fiction to be
utterly disconnected from reality. Fantasy plays a central role in literature in general and
fan fiction in particular, and I’d argue that looking at the reality/fiction dichotomy through
the lens of fantasy can usefully complicate questions of influence and potential harm.
Louisa: As a media studies scholar, I’m certainly aware of the overlap (if we can call it that)
between media studies exploration of new forms of digital authorship and community
and the emerging practices of fan fiction that unfold within those spaces. But from a
media studies framework, these practices are not always understood as fan fiction or put in
conversation with other traditions of fan fiction, past and present, and this is something
fanfic researchers can offer to these literatures on digital media tools and uses, for example,
the growing literature on TikTok, Instagram, and Webtoons. Plus, there is growing literature
on fan authored narratives, for example, on Webtoons, that are perhaps not making the
“fan studies” radar but really could and should be considered as such.
Kristina: I love how Louisa always returns to the way platforms and interfaces meaning-
fully matter, not only in terms of accessibility and dissemination, but also in the way they
actively shape fiction. We wrote an essay together some years back on the way constraints
(in source text, fan text, context but also medium) can engender creativity, and this relation-
ship between form and content, between platform limitations and the types and forms of
stories created in response to that. Back then, we looked at the character limits of USENET
and mailing list messages, at drabble trees on multi-threaded social media like LiveJournal
and text-based role-playing games where every character has their own (fictional) social
media account.
With every new media platform, we see fan fiction being shaped by the technical affor-
dances. Wattpad encouraged reading and writing on smart phones, which tended to create
very short chapters and immediate publication. AO3 mostly followed traditional fan fiction
archives, but its metadata and the central role of tags in the search engine has affected
the way fans think about genres, tropes, pairings, and more. Twitter, Tumblr, and other
interfaces become both content in media narratives (i.e., a fanfic told entirely in Twitter
texts or IM conversations or a mix of various forms of online textual interaction) or they
can become the actual place of publication, which, obviously, affects the types of stories
that can and will be created.
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 7 of 11

Finally, the conversations surrounding fan fiction, the fannish meta, recs, and analyses
changes depending on where these conversations take place. LiveJournal was actually
an outlier in the way it collapsed fiction, paratexts, and response/feedback/ commentary
into the same spaces, often having them side by side in one post or crosslinked within
the same platform. Between the rise of AO3 and the particular nature of Tumblr, Twitter,
and Discord (among the many places where fans now congregate and communicate), the
shared conversations, the prompts and gifts and other forms of fiction as social interaction
and parts of ongoing conversations still exist, but it is much harder to follow it, both as
fans, but even more so as researchers.
Francesca: Following up on these thoughts about platforms, it’s been fascinating to see
fanfiction culture move onto visual platforms like TikTok which are so much less anony-
mous (and less textual) than fanfiction internet culture has historically been. I have a
student, Katherine Behling, who researches the ways TikTok users are integrating their
lives as fanfiction readers (and less frequently, as fanfiction writers) into their existing
TikTok personas; in a way, this is both a return to the kind of squeeful, in-person encounters
that we used to see in the fannish convention space, and also a place that we’ve never
been before in terms of embodiment and the performance of the self as a (squeeing and
sometimes shamed or shameful) fan.
Kristina’s 2007 article with Alexis Lothian and Robin Reid (Lothian et al. 2007) framed
fanfiction fandom as a queer female space, but it was always an (apparently) disembodied
and carefully pseudonymous one; my own work on vidding (Coppa 2022) talks about the
way in which fans have historically worked to be the subject of the gaze/the one who
looks rather than (as is more common for women) the object of the gaze/the one who is
looked at. But now, with fans filming themselves giving enthusiastic fanfiction recs or
sometimes performing their fannish shame (Behling (2022) discusses TikTok memes that
purport to express fannish shame: e.g., “Would you rather drink a bucket of bleach, or
show your parents your entire ao3 history?” or “Rap or I’ll expose the fanfics you read”)
we are seeing new kinds of embodied fannish performance. This provides the opportunity
for new kinds of fannish community, but also the potential for (or should I say, the risk
of) anonymity collapse. Anonymity, or rather, pseudonymity, is something I value in
fan culture, because I fear surveillance and agree with Peggy Phelan’s (1993) assertion
that “Visibility is a trap.” So I’m simultaneously touched by and afraid for these fannish
Tiktokers and the information they’re giving to the world.
Khursten: I do agree with everyone thus far that the shapes of fan fiction are adapting and
transforming along with the technological developments of various media platforms that
have different points of access for people across the globe. While some of us easily imagine
how different social media platforms are easily accessible to everyone, my exposure to
fan communities faced with economic challenges have made me realize that particular
platforms become increasingly central to fan fictions or communities because of low band-
width consumption (such as Wattpad) or promotions with mobile service providers (e.g.,
unlimited access to Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok is free for a particular amount of days
under specific providers). This limited access enabled many fan creators to work within
their economic and technological limits. Seeing Francesca talk about TikTok reminds me of
how the platform has been used by some Southeast Asian fans to merge local viral audio
with edited fan clips creating interesting transnational fan fictions. The elaborate fan fiction
videos in danmei fandom as mentioned by Louisa are also deeply immersive. There are
also Social Media AUs seen on Twitter that was particularly popular during the pandemic
within Asian fandoms (K-Pop and ThaiBL) that increasingly localized fan fictions and
imaginations (e.g., Desi AU and Filo AU). In my ongoing research on these local fan fictions,
I’ve noticed how these works empower queer expression in highly conservative countries.
Location-specific platforms, such as Pixiv in Japan or Naver and Postype in Korea or Weibo
in China also offer a different fan experience and culture for their local audiences. These
localized fan spaces have pushed global fans to widen their literacies for these platforms,
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 8 of 11

languages, and cultures. Fan translations of fan fictions are also increasingly becoming
commonplace and diverse across different languages. Wattpad, Ao3, and community
forums become important spaces for these translated works. Collectively, these platforms
provide very important contact zones for transcultural exchange within fandom.
Editors: We’d like you to speak a bit more about how fan fiction fandoms have or have
not fully engaged with the internationalization of sources and fan creations. Further-
more, as we shift from a community model to one of contact zones, as Lori Morimoto
and Chin (2017) have described them, what are ways in which we can acknowledge and
give voice to those that often were ignored in earlier fan fiction and fan fiction studies.
Louisa: I find myself thinking frequently about the internationalization of fandom these
days and what it means for fan studies more broadly and the studies of fan works more
specifically. Or rather, fandom was always international, of course, but with increased
access to international digital media, fan communities from different national and cultural
contexts are becoming increasingly more aware of one another, and with more visible
transcultural interaction and frictions. My own fan interests and involvements (and media
viewing practices) have shifted to encompass anime, c-dramas, k-dramas, j-dramas, and
kpop, and the fan works surrounding them, in part because of fandom visibility and in
part because of access to these texts on streaming networks like Netflix Amazon Prime,
Youtube, and Viki. I’ve been struggling with how to integrate my more recent transcultural
fan experiences and consumptions into my own scholarship given the limits of my cultural
knowledge.
I think the answers I’m finding are in collaboration and increased dialogue between
scholars across national as well as disciplinary boundaries. One amazing (pre-pandemic)
example of this type of collaboration was the Fan Studies Japan Tour organized by Lori
Morimoto that I was lucky enough to participate in back in 2018. We wrote about our
experiences and their value in a Transformative Works and Cultures piece here (https:
//journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1975). Another more
extensive example of the value of transcultural fan studies conversation is the more recent
instances of the Fan Studies Network North America conference (of which I’m one of the
organizers). Because we chose to go virtual with the pandemic, the conference has attracted
a much wider set of scholars leading to valuable transcultural conversations that we hadn’t
had at previous in-person instances of the conference. I think it’s vitally important that we
intentionally and actively foster these collaborative transcultural fan studies conversations
and experiences to mirror the transcultural evolutions of fandom.
Kristina: There has been a challenge from the very beginning of fan fiction studies (and
fan studies in general) in that we all too often only study the things we know and love (or
love to hate). And while I endeavor to move beyond my own fannish interests, I am most
comfortable writing about fan fiction where I know the fandom well and about fandom
spaces where I am an active participant. Yet this clearly raises several questions: (1) How
should we select our research objects? (2) Should we purposefully study texts and fandoms
we don’t actively participate in? (3) Are we merely describing fannish popular subjects or
should we actively focus on selecting previously ignored fannish interests?
As a English literature scholar, for example, I don’t see myself studying non-English
language fan fiction, though I know it is an under researched area. As a non-native English
speaker, I am quite fascinated by the way fan fiction in English is immensely international
in its authorship. (In fact, I have a special interest in podfic, and the percentage of nonnative
speakers recording English podfic is surprisingly high, and I will write about that one of
these days!) So, speaking realistically for myself, the one move I have been trying to make
actively is focused less on expanding my object of study and more on critically engaging
with my methodologies and theoretical frameworks. This means moving beyond the
well-trodden fan fiction studies texts in order to bring in insights from different disciplines
and nonacademic writing. Expanding our critical approaches forces us to break open the
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 9 of 11

hitherto established fan studies canon where a small number of people cited one another
and effectively created a fairly narrowly focused idea of accepted knowledge.
Khursten: If fan fiction is an exploration of the infinite potential of various literature and
media then I think there is room in welcoming the infinite ways of studying fan fictions
from different communities all over the globe. An interesting example that highlighted this
infinite potential is through fan fictions in relation to Boys Love culture which has its roots
in Japan but has grown to develop fandoms and fan communities in the Philippines (Fermin
2013), China (Yang and Yanrui 2017), and Thailand (Baudinette 2019) which eventually
contributed to the diversification of BL media in the world. We have also seen how fan
fiction has empowered English-language learners in literacy studies (Black 2009; Sauro
2020), opened new avenues for postcolonial imaginations (De Kosnik 2019), and provided
an interesting contact zone between different media cultures and fan communities across
different ethnicities and languages (Nadkarni and Sivarajan 2020; Bauwens-Sugimoto 2021).
These are just some that are distributed in English-language scholarship and there are many
others that have been published in other languages. The burden to represent this foreign
language scholarship could be shouldered by English-language fan studies scholars who
have the skills to dialogue with these works. Within fanfic studies, embracing scholarship
that focus on non-Anglophone fanfics or fanfic creators outside of “centers” of fan cultures
can help decolonize the field. If fanfic studies can decentralize the imagination of fan fiction
outside of the English language or outside of fan communities in the United States or
Britain, there are opportunities to broaden and develop our understanding of fanworks. As
mentioned earlier, this is already happening. The more these works are visible, the more
we could expand our imaginations of how vast fanfiction could be.
Embracing this growing literature on fan fictions from diverse communities all over the
world can help make Fanfiction Studies inclusive. As academics, I think we can help foster
interest in this growing scholarship by dialoguing with these works, including them in our
citations, inviting them in our panels, or by encouraging younger scholars from diverse
backgrounds to capture their own diverse fan experiences and dialogue with different
kinds of scholarship on fan fiction. For example, a Japanese Studies graduate student
is currently looking into the transformations of Omegaverse in Japanese media, rooting
their foundations on Kristina’s work while also learning from Japanese fans and creators
who have transformed aspects of this trope. This kind of transcultural dialogue in fan
fiction scholarship helps raise the visibility of other forms of fan fictions, broaden how
we imagine fan fiction practices and communities outside of Anglophone spaces, and
embolden scholars from diverse backgrounds to contribute to the field.
Our largest hurdle in decolonizing the field also involves our own disciplines and institu-
tions that may push specific perspectives that enforces this colonial hold on our scholarship
on fanfics. This is a tough hurdle which hopefully can help us think of creative ways to
respond against this colonial hold that could disempower our research.
Editors: Thank you for your comments that both delineate the field of fan fiction studies
but also show the fertile intersections with other disciplines. What are your thoughts
and hopes for the future of fan fiction?
Kristina: If there’s any guesses (or maybe wishes?) I have for the future of fan fiction
studies it is that we look at fan fiction less as an artifact that allows us to study source texts,
fan communities, and online platforms and instead situates fan fiction as a particular form
of literature. It connects fan fiction to its various literary ancestors and to various contem-
porary genres that may offer insight into structural, thematic, and aesthetic connections.
These include traditional collective storytelling, mythologies, and classical transformative
works as well as adaptations, genre fiction, and forms of writing that may be ephemeral,
more personalized, and for smaller specific audiences. As such, we must look at fan fiction
and its relationship to other literary texts, both premodern and modern literature and
contemporary fiction. We must study particular fan fiction genres and tropes as well as
specific characteristics when looking at types of source texts. Finally, we must look at
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 10 of 11

writing engagements within fan fiction communities and various approaches of studying
and teaching fan fiction within different disciplines and methodological frameworks.
Khursten: In the next few years, I’m hoping to see diversification in fanfic studies, one that
recognizes that there are various forms of fanfictions all over the globe, that contributors to
Anglophone fanfiction come from all corners of the world, and that fanfiction has become
increasingly multimodal on social media. This is already happening but I hope this diversity
in fanfiction and fan cultures continues and become increasingly visible. As fanfiction
finds new forms, I also hope that fanfic studies can capture these developments. These
multimodal fanfictions are growing (and disappearing) quite quickly so the challenge is for
fanfic studies to remain on the pulse of youth expression and fandom.
Louisa: I feel like/hope that we can see the near future of fan fiction studies in the current
student papers and theses being shared online now; or perhaps we should consider those
the present of fan fiction studies, rather than gatekeep to officially published works by
more senior scholars. Fan fiction studies is growing (and needs to grow) to encompass
close case studies of the diversity of forms that fan fiction now takes, from vtube narratives
to twitter threads, from TikTok fan fiction readings to still thriving Buffy the Vampire Slayer
archives, from POV reader insert “imagine” structures to the increasing visibility of and
diversity of uses of Archive of Our Own (some not the intended uses!) and everything in
between.
Francesca: I hope fanfiction stays small and literary and resists becoming mass culture
storytelling even as our digital platforms seem to be encouraging that. By that I mean, I
hope fanfiction keeps on being a grassroots world of personal artistic decisions and a site of
connection and community between readers and writers (and readers who become writers,
and writers who become readers) rather than a “broadcast” system that seeks a large,
paying audience. Fanfiction writers who have gone pro still routinely return to fandom
Humanities 2022, 11, x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 ofand
12
fanfiction for that close writer-reader connection: that place where the author (pace Barthes
(1977)) is not dead but is chatting happily with you (and where tomorrow they’re the
writer and as
fanfiction you’re the reader!)
a form Writing alone,
of performance, andand then sending
performance that textboth
nurtures out tocreators
an audience
and
(even a large one, even a profitable one) isn’t the same. I’ve written about fanfiction
audiences; it’s about the bodies in the room. Performance also is difficult to commodify, as a
form of performance, and performance nurtures both creators and audiences; it’s about
and that’s one of its strengths; from that point of view, the inability to create meaningful
the bodies in the room. Performance also is difficult to commodify, and that’s one of its
long-term canons of fanfiction stories is a plus and a sign of fanfiction’s health and
strengths; from that point of view, the inability to create meaningful long-term canons of
importance as a performance structure. It’s responsive, it’s for the people reading now; I
fanfiction stories is a plus and a sign of fanfiction’s health and importance as a performance
feel like I would end by quoting Kristina’s and Karen Hellekson’s introduction to Fan
structure. It’s responsive, it’s for the people reading now; I feel like I would end by quoting
Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet (Hellekson and Busse 2006), where
Kristina’s and Karen Hellekson’s introduction to Fan Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age
they describe the day to day practices of fandom: “Somewhere in cyberspace, someone
of the Internet (Hellekson and Busse 2006), where they describe the day to day practices of
complains: ‘I had a lousy day! Need some cheering up’. Soon after, a friend posts a story
fandom: “Somewhere in cyberspace, someone complains: ‘I had a lousy day! Need some
dedicating the piece: ‘This is for you, hon’”. This is the spirit of fanfic, to me, or as one of
cheering up’. Soon after, a friend posts a story dedicating the piece: ‘This is for you, hon’”.
my favorite Tumblr posts puts it:
This is the spirit of fanfic, to me, or as one of my favorite Tumblr posts puts it:

“I love “I
howlove how internet
internet bestshow
best friends friends show
each each
other howother
muchhowtheymuch they other
love each love
each other by dedicating fan fiction to one another It’s like ‘Hey, You’re
by dedicating fan fiction to one another It’s like ‘Hey, You’re a fantastic bestfriend,
a fantastic
Here’s two bestfriend,
guys fucking Here’s [sic]—emilyjanesturgess
in a kitchen” two guys fucking in a kitchen” [sic]—
emilyjanesturgess

Funding: This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Humanities 2022, 11, 120 11 of 11

Funding: This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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