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Considering the social origin of fanfictions and the fact that these pieces of literature are under the direct influence of society’s line of thought, they can be a valuable resource for studying what the common audience finds attractive and what captures their attention. The aim of this study is to find properties of the fanfictions that may contribute to their popularity among community members, including properties that are in contrast to their original stories and those that exclusively belong to the fanfictions themselves. For this purpose, we investigated different features of fanfictions, including their emotional arc and character graphs representing the characters’ interactions in the story. Our results show that the similarity between fanfictions and their associated original story in terms of emotional arcs and character graphs significantly relates to fanfictions’ popularity.

While the field of fan studies is constantly growing, it has been scarcely researched in relation to minority languages and language revitalisation. In this paper we have undertaken to explore the small and previously unexplored realm of Welsh-language fanfiction, focusing on the motivations to read and write it. The aim was to explore the possible role of fanfiction in language revitalisation by investigating a relationship between these motivations and the cultural and national identity of the authors and readers, as well as their attitude towards the Welsh language. The article presents the results of a study conducted in 2022 through the use of online surveys on a sample of readers of Welsh-language fanfiction found on the Tumblr platform, and semi-structured interviews with authors of fanfiction posted on Archive of Our Own. The study revealed that the decision to participate in the fandom was strongly connected to the cultural, and in particular linguistic identity of authors and readers, and to a much lesser extent to their national identity. Two out of three major motivations emerging from the study: a wish to broaden the use of language online and the wish to learn it can be connected with language revitalization. Engagement with fanfiction was perceived as an accessible form of leisure available in Welsh and as a safe space for both learners and native speakers to creatively use the language without fear of criticism, which suggests the importance and possible use of fandom in language revitalisation. However, the study also points to some difficulties in developing a fan community around Welsh fanfiction, mostly due to technical limitations and the small amount of popular media created originally in Welsh.

Research on cultural production has recognized that artistic creation, especially fandom subcultures, depends on social interaction within artworlds. Yet less research has examined how creative production functions when exogenous social forces disrupt key forms of interaction. This study leverages the case of Chinese fanfiction writers’ response when state censorship interrupts and threatens fanfiction writing to better understand the vulnerability of creative communities. Based on interviews with Chinese fanfiction writers who experienced an unexpected intensification of online censorship in 2020, and following fandom studies in understanding fanfiction as rooted in a gift economy, I show how censorship discouraged writing by destabilizing interaction and interfering with gift exchanges. I find that censorship transformed cultural production by (1) reorganizing and fragmenting networks, (2) reshaping the meaning of visibility, and (3) opening up new opportunities in a disintegrated community. As this study argues, we need to go beyond asking whether censorship is effectively destructive or not. While creative communities are vulnerable to outside disruption, especially in online space, the pressure of censorship leads to new conventions, networks, and fields for artistic creation as censorship does not simply strangle creativity.

PurposeThis pilot study explores how queer slash fanfiction writers reorient cis/heteronormative entertainment media (EM) content to create queer information worlds.Design/methodology/approachConstructivist grounded theory was employed to explore queer individuals' slash fanfiction reading and creation practices. Slash fanfiction refers to fan-written texts that recast cis/heteronormative content with queer characters, relationships, and themes. Theoretical sampling drove ten semi-structured interviews with queer slash writers and content analysis of both Captain America slash and material features found on two online fanfiction platforms, Archive of Our Own and fanfiction.net. “Queer” serves as a theoretical lens through which to explore non-cis/heteronormative perspectives on gender and sexuality.FindingsParticipants' interactions with and creation of slash fanfiction constitute world-queering practices wherein individuals reorient cis/heteronormative content, design systems, and form community while developing their identities over time. Findings suggest ways that queer creators respond to, challenge, and reorient cis/heteronormative narratives perpetuated by EM and other information sources, as well as ways their practices are constrained by structural power dynamics.Research limitations/implicationsThis initial data collection only begins to explore the topic with ten interviews. The participant sample lacks racial diversity while the content sample focuses on one fandom. However, results suggest future directions for theoretical sampling that will continue to advance constructs developed from the data.Originality/valueThis research contributes to evolving perspectives on information creation and queer individuals' information practices. In particular, findings expand theoretical frameworks related to small worlds and ways in which members of marginalized populations grapple with exclusionary normativity.

Through an analysis of three selected case studies, this study unveils how Ogham’s integration into contemporary narratives generates fresh layers of meaning and revitalises this ancient alphabet. The chosen focus on Alfredian fanfiction offers a contextualised exploration of the role of this ancient Irish script in shaping novel interpretations, bridging historical languages with the digital age, and shedding light on how fan communities reconfigure cultural heritage across temporal and geographical boundaries within the dynamic landscape of internet culture. By employing a comprehensive approach, this research elucidates the intricate interplay between Ogham, historical narratives, and contemporary fan creativity, providing valuable insights into how this ancient script sparks innovative meanings and propels narratives within the digital realms of fan culture.

Fanfictions are a popular literature genre in which writers reuse a universe, for example to transform heteronormative relationships with queer characters or to bring romance into shows focused on horror and adventure. Fanfictions have been the subject of numerous studies in text mining and network analysis, which used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to compare fanfictions with the original scripts or to make various predictions. In this paper, we use NLP to predict the popularity of a story and examine which features contribute to popularity. This endeavor is important given the rising use of AI assistants and the ongoing interest in generating text with desirable characteristics. We used the main two websites to collect fan stories (Fanfiction.net and Archives Of Our Own) on Supernatural, which has been the subject of numerous scholarly works. We extracted high-level features such as the main character and sentiments from 79,288 of these stories and used the features in a binary classification supported by tree-based methods, ensemble methods (random forest), neural networks, and Support Vector Machines. Our optimized classifiers correctly identified popular stories in four out of five cases. By relating features to classification outcomes using SHAP values, we found that fans prefer longer stories with a wider vocabulary, which can inform the prompts of AI chatbots to continue generating such successful stories. However, we also observed that fans wanted stories unlike the original material (e.g., favoring romance and disliking when characters are hurt), hence AI-powered stories may be less popular if they strictly follow the original material of a show.

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.

Scholars and critics that gauge Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton in terms of its historical accuracy or inaccuracy miss the point about Miranda’s creative endeavor. Hamilton represents a highly visible example of what might be called “Founders fanfiction”; although the musical is rooted deeply in historical fact, primarily via Ron Chernow’s magisterial biography of Hamilton, nonetheless, as a narrative the production is a piece of popular wish-fulfilment. Certainly, the show elides or ignores some of his more unpalatable characteristics, such as his deep elitism and love of military display and power. The elaboration of certain aspects of one’s character over another is a practice common to the creative endeavor of fanfiction. In fanfic, writers often create idealized or otherwise fantastical versions of beloved media characters, placing them in situations unreflective of the traditionally established narrative. This practice lets fanfic creators craft their own narratives with their own sense of agency and identity and make them more meaningful. Miranda performs the same kind of narrative reshaping of Hamilton’s life to conform to a particular view of Hamilton, much as historians and authors before him have done in the creation of what is known as “Founders chic”—the stressing of American Founders’ virtues and character at the expense of historical dimensionality and reality. Furthermore, the play has itself become a source of multiple instances of fanfiction, signifying significant emotional connections in the story that reflect Miranda’s own self-identification with Hamilton.

Self-insert fanfiction is a long-established but still controversial mode of writing, even within the already marginalized genre of fanfiction. Moreover, many of the specific terms and practices used to describe this kind of writing have not been formally explored or theorized. We maintain that self-insert fanfiction can be understood as a digital technology of the self, building upon Foucauldian roots and extending into digital platforms and their affordances. We begin by making connections to the precedents established by “Mary Sue” characters, then continue by tracing the shifts from those conversations to more explicitly self-insert subgenres of the present day. Then, drawing on a survey of self-insert fanfiction conducted across four platforms (Ao3, FF.net, Tumblr, and Wattpad), we explore how such works can be discovered, read, and engaged with, and we offer specific observations about self-insert subgenres, as drawn from a selection of these works. Ultimately, we maintain, self-insert fanfiction expands the possibilities offered by other digital technologies of the self (avatars, blogging, etc.) by attempting to create a self that can be open to any reader who encounters it, although this expansion is not without its own limitations and drawbacks. We conclude by offering potential directions for further work in this area that fall beyond the scope of this initial exploration.