Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Alexia Smit (South Africa) and Ioanna Vovou (Greece) (Part Two)

Alexia Smit : Second response to Ioanna

Sometimes when writing about South African TV, I worry about the usefulness of my research for those who are not familiar with the context of South Africa. Ioanna your response has made me realise that I should put those worries to bed. Because, as you so beautifully explain, that TV fandoms are interesting precisely because of the tensions between local contingencies and “collective imaginaries”.  I love this phrasing and it so well describes the rich repertoire of discourses that are enacted in fan cultures. These are not bound by a linear tension between centre / periphery, or a straightforward tension between local and global but rather by a much more complex and intersecting web of affinities, communities and material practices which produce TV culture.  

The term “geopoetique” is perfect! (sounds like a  great article title ;) ) And thank you for sharing with me MC Solaar!  How perfect for this conversation that as a scholar in Africa, I am learning from my Greek colleague about this this great African born musician! Geopoetique indeed!

This conversation raises another question of how transnational fandoms are mediated by language.  While I’ve written about the importance of local African languages in TV fandoms, I haven’t reflected as much on the transnational currency of English as a way of sharing fan activity. Much of the global and African TV I examine is linked by a shared use of the English language which is the result of English colonization of Africa. I am keenly aware of how little I engage with Francophone and Lusophone TV fandoms in Africa. I would love to know how you experience the negotiations around language and transnational culture. It strikes me that Greece does not have as extensive Greek speaking audiences abroad, compared to nations with more recent colonial history like Spain, France, Portugal and England.  How big is the Greek diaspora? Does this hamper the extent to which Greek TV culture can travel via tv networks and fan communities.  This makes me consider how, despite the flexibility and rapid changes of our era of global fandom, the conversations are still necessarily underpinned by colonial histories. 

I was interested in the questions you raised about how themes such as love and romance are apparently universal and yet enacted in specific ways across programme texts and contexts.  In particular I would love to carry on the conversation you raise about gender. I think reality tv texts perform such interesting work in terms of circulating ideas about gender across regions, and at the same time speaking to very particular ways in which these ideas are enacted in local settings. Here work by Simidele Dosekun (2015) on postfeminism as transnational culture might be brought into conversation with ideas about gender in tv fan cultures. 

The bridal television shows that you mention (Don’t Tell the Bride,  and A bride for my son [Mia nifi gia ton yio mou, [Μια νύφη για τον γιο μου, Aplha TV, 2010]) are great examples of the “collective imaginary” you discuss. Via reality tv franchising, reality television programmes bring a kind of global bridal culture to a dispersed range of fans across many national contexts. All share to some extent in a certain neoliberal and postfeminist sensibility about weddings as exercises of personal self-expression through consumption. And yet when the formula of the bridal show is enacted in different national contexts, this collective imaginary comes into conversation with local experiences. I am fascinated in the many ways this imaginary converses with local cultures, at times amplifying gender cultures locally and at other times coming into contradiction with local realities and mores (which are in themselves constantly shifting). This reminds me of your point about the tension or ‘paradox’ between this global collective and the importance of locality for fan communities. I think reality fandoms can be understood as a key site at which local and global modes of belonging are negotiated. 

The second part of your response deals with questions of diversity. I agree it would be hugely interesting to study how ideas about what constitutes “diversity” are negotiated in different fan communities across different national contexts.  The recent backlash about casting in the South African franchise of Love Island is a fascinating case from South Africa. I agree that this would make for a wonderful study and is perhaps something we could take forward. 

Finally, I enjoyed your description of how unstable the categories of backchannel and primary channel may become in fan culture. What you describe as the ‘oscillation’ of fans between primary texts and fan-made media ideas is fascinating because it asks us to question the differing levels of inclusion and access involved in textual reading and fan practice. In South Africa the extreme disparities in income within the population mean that access is always an important question driving the way fan engagement works. It would be fascinating to consider how this works in another nation and I agree it would make for a great study! 

Thank you so much Ioanna for this opportunity to reflect with you on fandom! It has been invigorating to think through my work from your fresh insights. I am excited both by the commonalities between our approaches and concerns and by the points of difference produced by our contexts. 

References

Dosekun, Simidele. "For western girls only? Post-feminism as transnational culture." Feminist Media Studies 15.6 (2015): 960-975.

Ioanna: Second response to Alexia

Global Fandom as in Politics?

As I am considering ways to pursuit our discussion and expand our research encounters in the future, dear Alexia, I would like to focus on two points that I think are running through your answer: a) the question of identity related to an engagement with global media products –even in their local variations; and b) the ironic dimension introducing a playful reception register.  I would try to discuss these points departing from specific examples, not exhaustive nor exclusive ones, in the manner of the French literary theorist Gérard Genette: “This corpus is worth another […] It cannot claim any exhaustiveness (Genette, 1982: 549).  

a)     Glocal fandom, an alter ego?

I would like to begin with an example -among numerous others- of a parodic glocal fan fiction, offered by my first year students in the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece, on the TV series La Casa de Papel. The video is titled La casa de Frappe and was originally broadcasted on YouTube on December 2018.[1] The pun here is based on the consonance of the word “Papel” with the word “Frappe” (pronounced ‘frappé’), a Greek shaken iced coffee which is very popular in Greece, especially in the summer. This linguistic association also refers to the stereotypical image of nonchalant Greek. Both familiar and yet a bit outdated, it refers to a nostalgic cultural stereotype of the past decades; nowadays the ‘Frappe’ coffee is largely replaced by the “freddo”, which "modernizes" Greek consumerism habits. This parodic meta-fiction of a group of high school students has nothing to do with coffee. It has to do with local cultural engagement to an internationally famous series. In fact, as a preamble to the latter fan fiction, we read a card that wonders and in the same time announces: “If the Casa de Papel was produced…. In Greece ". Then, a pastiche à la grecque of the famous series on Netflix (originally broadcasted on the Spanish TV channel Antenna 3) follows: the heroes’ code names are borrowed from Greek cities, islands and places, scenes from the Athenian metro are well recognizable in the video, etc. According to Rose (1993: 99), “while meta-fiction can be defined as a work of fiction which comments or refers upon another text, its ‘intertextual’ element can be described as the presence in its text of the metafiction of the words, passages, or messages of other texts”. Still, following the French media theorist François Jost, when it comes to audiovisual contents, what is missing from the literary definition of metafiction, and often of parody, is the fact that the presupposition of reception is based on the sharing of common knowledge of the parodied audiovisual content. As my former PhD thesis supervisor [indeed this is turning to a quite reflexive and personal discussion!] explains, there is a significant paradox: « parody operates at the level of linguistic transformation while not being a truly textual phenomenon » (Jost, 2008). Thus, this adolescent parodic metafiction, transforms and disguises the original text in such a way that it acquires a strong Greek locality. And that may be ‘technically’ happening in a textual level but it wouldn’t mean anything [or to be more precise it would mean something else] if it was not perceptible in a cultural level.

Illustration n.11

La Casa de Frappe

In similar registers, the myriad local based parodies of world-famous media products deal with questions such as: “How does this concern us?”, “In what way do they matter to us”?

b)    Beyond Irony… Meanness 

During our discussion and trying to reflect on fandom trends in both of our countries (South Africa and Greece), seeking at several cases of travestied fandom participation and engagement in media products, I could not help thinking of the turn taken by the “critical ironic detachment” you point out. As you explain in a very subtle way, Caughie’s category of ‘ironic suspensiveness’ (“…knowing and not knowing, being and not being…”, Caughie, 1990: 54) can be used as a frame inside which we can perceive global television culture.

But more and more often we witness an ironic mood in parodic fan creations that go beyond irony… they are mean. This move from irony to meanness is very often observed in the reactions to reality TV contesters and the situation in which they operate, as you notice Alexia on the comments on twitter for the South African TV show Our Perfect Wedding. It can also be discerned in so many hostile parodies (the expression is borrowed from Dentith, 2000). Laughing at the expense of others, canceling them, seems to open an alternative path to be part of a discursive community; that is of a community that previously did not have the opportunity, nor the power to express itself. Do you see there any relation with hate speech on Twitter, Facebook and other social media?

So (quoting once again Jost, 2018) what meanness is the symptom of? Jost hypothesis would be that these acts of meanness are committed diachronically through various channels and dispositifs in the name of an opposition to an elite that can take different forms over the years. In other words, they would be another people’s weapon against those who, in various historical circumstances, have expressed a hegemonic discourse. Therefore, meanness would be the expression of a populist protest –as Taguief (2002) has explained- that feels justified to go public… See any resonance with politics there?

I am aware that I am opening a whole new chapter of discussion rather than closing it … 

So dear Alexia, feeling so grateful I had the opportunity to discuss global fandom with you, I can only promise that this is not a final word… this is definitively an au revoir…

References

Caughie, J. (1990), “Playing at being American: Games and tactics”, in P. Mellencamp (ed.), Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University, pp. 44-58.

Dentith, S. (2000), Parody, London/New York: Routledge.

Genette, G. (1982), Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Paris: Editions du Seuil. 

Jost, F. (2018), La méchanceté en actes à l’ère numérique, Paris : CNRS Editions.

Jost, F. (2008), « Peut-on être drôle à l’insu du public? (Parodies, pastiches et faux télévisuels) », Humoresques 28.

Rose, M. (1993), Parody. Ancient, Modern and Post-modern, Cambridge University Press.

Taguieff P.-A. (2002): L’illusion populiste. Paris, Éditions Berg International.

Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Alexia Smit (South Africa) and Ioanna Vovou (Greece) (Part One)

Alexia Smit: Response to Ioanna’s Opening statement

Ioanna, I feel fortunate to be paired with you and during our initial zoom meeting we discovered a wealth of shared interests and ideas. Both of us have an interest in television (though Ioanna’s interests are wide ranging) and particularly reality TV. We both study television culture in nations (South Africa and Greece) whose television histories, have been impacted by complicated political and social histories.  And we both share an interest in ironic or mocking fan practices. It is refreshing to talk with you about the complexities of considering fandom in our respective nations.  

In your opening statement you explain how Greece gained a television service later than other European nations and how the military junta beginning in 1967- 1974 had tremendous impact on Greek social life. South Africa has a similarly fractured television history. The apartheid government banned television as a dangerous foreign influence until 1976. Television was then controlled as the mouthpiece apartheid state up until the advent of democracy in the 1990s. The television service has been overhauled in the post-apartheid era but has still been subject to tremendous instability due to factional party politics within the ruling ANC. As in the case of Greece, the 90s also saw the deregulation of the South television industry with global television pay television options expanding in the country.

While I can’t speak for Greece, certainly within South Africa the concept of a stable “national” television culture is something of a myth, and in my context television culture has been seen as conduit of transnational culture from the outset.  Audiences and fan practices in both of our nations might be understood in terms of complex struggles around identity and national positioning. It is thus not surprising that we have both identified irony as a fundamental feature of the fandoms we examine. 

In your opening statement you identified modes of fandom which rely on a playful critical distance and comic take-downs of the text. And you call this “[c]ynical fandom” or “fandom as mockery”. Both of these phrases could easily be applied to the cutting comic commentary made by TV fans in my own consideration of South Africa’s black twitter. 

I so enjoyed your description in this paragraph: 

Fandom shifts to mockery, into having fun at the expense of the participants and of the situations watched on various screens. At this point, we could diagnose a turning point, a shift taking place gradually over the years to a cynical way of watching TV and of enjoying popular culture products: that of derision, not only in production strategies but, also, in consuming attitudes.

Both of our studies are evidence of fandom as a form of creativity and criticism. It struck me that your ideas about cynicism could be brought into conversation with work on irony, cynicism and camp by British television studies scholars. I am reminded of Karen Lury’s  work on “cynicism and enchantment” in British Youth TV  and Faye Woods discussion of camp in British reality TV. But given our respective positions in Greece and South Africa, this shared observation of irony as a key characteristic means it might be interesting to examine what dimension nationality and the transnational brings to questions of irony the negotiation fans must make with global media cultures. That is, both South African and Greek fans place themselves and their fandoms in relation to globally popular texts produced the U.S. and the UK. This is evidenced in your discussion of fan responses to I Genia ton 592 Evro a text fans were able to enjoy while still acknowledging its debt to American shows like Big Bang Theory and Friends. It is possible that the negotiations and displacements involved in watching TV transnationally might be especially conducive to a critical or ironic positioning. 

In my work with Tanja Bosch on the twitter fandom of Our Perfect Wedding, fans are responding to a local show but also adapting global and largely African American cultural phenomenon of “Black Twitter.” The show itself is also drawing on the conventions of bridal reality TV. While we did not code for this in our study it would productive to examine fan responses to OPW which highlight tensions between ideas about local vs global bridal and television culture. From my familiarity with the twitter feed I know that many of the conversations turn upon comparisons between an aspiration to emulate global celebrities like Beyonce and the parochialism of the actual lifestyles represented onscreen. For example, twitter fans responded with great mirth when a bride described a dress as being “imported from Durban”. The joke turned on the fact that Durban is a city within South Africa rather than an elite overseas fashion capital. These comic observations are conditioned by the particular ways in which fans are located at the intersection of local and global ideas about femininity, blackness and luxury.

You introduce your  discussion of ironic fandoms by explaining the context which partially enables this ironic positioning: 

The circulation of concepts, ideas, formats, styles is a trend that characterizes in an international level TV and media production diachronically. The matrix of many media products and productions, as well as the adaptations of radio and TV shows, films, etc… seem to design a borgesian universe. Or, in other words, the mosaique of intermedial culture can, also, be perceived as a palimpsest: if one scrubs the surface, the remaining of another writing appears. As the French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1982) has pointed out, it is quite impossible to trace back the original text (impossible to figure out the urtexte). (Vovou, 2021)

I like the way you resist framing the discussion as an exchange between an imposing culture and a grounded local-ness but rather understand fan culture as operating in response to a “mosaic of intermedial culture”.  This is a lovely and useful phrasing. You’re description of media culture as  palimpsest conceives of fans as readers, not just of a surface  message but of layers of textual relationships. 

The ideas in your opening statement prompted to re-read an older article: Playing at Being American: Games and Tacticsby John Caughie. Please forgive me for going on a bit of a tangent into this work. The openness of this format is making me feel playful! I so enjoyed re-reading the piece (written by my former thesis supervisor) after years of thinking about global television and fan cultures. I think it connects with so much of what you are discussing. While this article dates back to 1990 and a great body of work on transnational television and transnational fandom has been developed since, I think Caughie’s approach is still worth rehearsing now, especially when trying to understand TV fandom from particular national contexts. 

Caughie recounts an experience of watching Dallas and then a British Royal Wedding in the Pyrenees as a Scottish Tourist. He uses this anecdote about displacement and disjuncture as the starting point for thinking about the “suspensive irony” enabled by transnational tv viewing. Caughie notes the importance of early feminist work on the ironic fan experiences of women viewers and argues for thinking in similar ways about national audiences who we might be tempted to other as the “dupes” of an imperialist television system (1990, 47). Instead of thinking about the relationship between located viewers and imported television texts in generalised terms as a battle between dominant culture and ‘active’ or resistant audiences Caughie argues that thinking about irony might enable a rethinking of local fan practices in terms of knowingness and play. This means thinking about viewers as self-aware and active subjects but not necessarily overestimating the degree to which engagement means radical resistance. Caughie draws on Alan Wilde’s description of “suspensive irony”(Wilde cited in Caughie, 1990, 52), an ironic mode linked to postmodern discourse which responds to the world’s  “disorder” with “acceptance” rather than despair or a quest for order.  Caughie sees “ironic suspensiveness” as something which has “very little to do with authorial or institutional intention, and more with historical and textual condition” (1990, 52). In Caughie’s account ironic suspensiveness is a pleasurable viewing position enabled by the fragmentary and segmented nature of television texts and compounded by the global distribution of television texts beyond their immediate production contexts. That is, in contrast to the absorption and identification encouraged by the traditional viewing conditions of the cinema, television’s discontinuities might provide the conditions for critical ironic detachment. Such a set of “historical and textual condition[s]”  provide the framing for your discussion of the multi-layered engagements produced by the conditions of global television culture. 

Intermediality is another key theme which connects my research with yours. You discuss how fan parodies of television on TikTok complicate the false dichotomies between “old and new media” in popular culture. Similarly, the South African twitter fandom surrounding Our Perfect Wedding demonstrates the degree to which fan practices enmesh twitter activity and traditional television viewing practices in which pleasure relies on the relay between these media. 

Sometimes when I present on my research at international conferences I come away feeling that work on South African tv and audiences being received as an aberration from “normal” TV or as a quaint local example. But in reading your work on irony has allowed me to consider how the idiosyncrasies of the television fan cultures we have observed in our respective contexts are powerful sites for theorising about contemporary television as a cultural form which is by definition intermedial, transnational, layered with readings and open to ironic engagement.

Another feature of your discussion that I’d love to pick up on, perhaps in our next engagement, is the question of authenticity which you explore in relation to Wild Bees, #MeToo and the pandemic.  This investment in authenticity might appear to contradict the ironic discourse we have discussed so far but it would be exciting to explore to what extent a desire for authenticity lives alongside cynicism in television fan cultures. Indeed, such a discussion takes us back to early work on the soap opera. But I will leave this for our next exchange.

References

Caughie, John (1990) ‘Playing at being American: Games and tactics", in P. Mellencamp (ed.) Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University pp. 44- 58  

Lury, Karen E. (2001) British youth television: Cynicism and enchantment. Oxford University Press.

Woods, Faye. (2014) ‘Classed femininity, performativity, and camp in British structured reality programming.’ Television & New Media 15(3), pp.197-214.

Ioanna Vovou: Response to Alexia’s Opening Statement

#Global… as Intercultural ?

The above though came to my mind with persistence, after reading your opening statement, dear Alexia, and, also, after having followed the evolution of the Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation so far. That is the idea of something evolving between cultures, deriving from them, shared and transformed in multiple cultural and media landscapes. In the same time and as a paradox, though only apparent, the question of locality as an important element of reception and of creation of fan communities. 

It kind of struck me as a sort of epiphany that the so well-known global circulation of TV programs is not only about TV formats but also and, mainly, about collective imaginaries solidly granted in geo-cultural topoi, and at the same time travelling and metamorphosing from one register to another, just like ideas, concepts, thoughts and materialities move in a “géopoétique”, as MC Solaar would sing – you can read/hear through the lines/lyrics, that I am totally immerged here in an aca-fan posture, speaking à la manière de…!  

The palimpsest of TV formats’ circulation

Firstly, I thought about the kind of popular culture products generating fandom activities in South Africa, i.e. reality TV shows such as Our Perfect Wedding and Date my Family, that I immediately looked up on YouTube to get an idea. Thinking in a playful mood, we could also consider the programs in a logical association of series, at first dating the family in order, afterwards, to assure the perfect wedding. By that, I tent to shed light on the human interest storytelling involving sentimental relationships. In other words, the promise of love and happiness undertaken by these programs, in the core of our existence, of our personal life. How universal and global can this be? And yet, how socially/historically/culturally delimited? 

Date my family is a format, based on a concept that has circulated in various versions worldwide. It reminded me of the reality TV show Meet my Folks (NBC, 2002-2003), in which we could notice intertextual associations with the film Meet the Parents (2000). In Greece, we had a sort of a Greek version of Date my Mom (MTV, 2004-2006), a factual (sic) reality TV show called A bride for my son [Mia nifi gia ton yio mou, (Μια νύφη για τον γιο μου, Aplha TV, 2010)], the gendered representations of which would be the object of another jamboree conversation…. In this show, the mothers examined the potential brides for their sons. I am wondering whether we could find gendered representations and fan reactions in Date my family… Another interesting thing is that these formats seem to take some time before implementing local TV markets, in this case, several years (2010 for Greece, 2017 in South Africa, if I am not mistaken).

As for Our Perfect Wedding, it reminded me of two “factual” based entertainment TV shows: Say Yes to the Dress and Don’t tell the Bride (BBC 3, BBC1, Sky 1, Channel 4, 2007-2020), the latter produced also in a Greek version (Min to pis sti nifi [Μην το πεις στη Νύφη], Antenna, 2011), where the concept evolved around weddings organized exclusively by the groom, surprising the bride (see any gendered allusions there?)

Illustration n.10

Don’t tell the Bride, Greek version (Antenna TV, 2011)[1]

The “identity” question in fandom

Secondly, a very insightful element in your opening statement is the “negotiation of black identity in the post-apartheid space” and, consequently, the need to “seek out site of community around shared black cultural understandings” and the modalities of a “black belonging”. Consequently, your perceptive overview of the understanding of fandom as a “white phenomenon” reducing South African TV viewers to consumers, points out the neuralgic position of the researcher, as well as socio-historical features functioning as a prism under which theoretical analysis will develop. In a different register, following Tzvetan Todorov’s thoughts on ethnocentrism “the judgements that are carried on nations by other nations inform us on those that speak, not one those they speak of […] instead of the other, we find, most of the times, a distorted image of itself” (Todorov, 1989: 32). The latter quotation is also relevant when thinking for instance the claims on the special “community of Greeks”, made by the presenter of the first Greek version of the reality show Big Brother, back in 2001 (Antenna TV). Or, thinking of the claim on ‘diversity’ when it comes to the casting of participants in recent reality shows, ‘surfing’ on the social demand for the acknowledgement of “diversity” as a question that runs through political and public life, institutions, the business world and interpersonal relationships, retrieved intensively on social media. The question would then be not only “what is the meaning of ‘identity’ or ‘diversity’ in popular media products?” but, also, how this meaning is negotiated by the community of fans. 

Fandom as a democratization of TV entertainment 

Thirdly, the fan activity of retelling the story events in these two TV shows you mention, parodying scenes by the use of memes or mock the English language featuring in the shows on Twitter (as a marker of class identity and mobility), is, broadly, an inclusive one. Inclusive of a larger community of audiences within which everyone does not, effectively, watch the program but participates, nevertheless, in its narrative universe; more precisely, in its discursive universe. For the programs’ meaning is not only to be found in the audiovisual text broadcasted on a pay TV service, but also in the cultural practices taking place on Twitter, based on the idea of connectivity (see for instance, Simonsen, 2013). Hence, the dialectic between the “primary site of consumption” and the “backchannel” can be understood under the prism of a Gestalt perception, where the figure and the background are interchangeable. Depending on the situation one is placed, having or not having watched these TV shows, participating or not in the fan activity on Twitter, the meaning, as well as the discursive reality perceived by audiences, may oscillate. In a global fandom context, it would be interesting to observe and apprehend these oscillations in a cross-cultural perspective; what a thrilling social oriented and ongoing research project that would be!

References

Simonsen, T. M. (2013), « The Mashups of YouTube », Nordicom Review 34-2, pp. 47-63.

Todorov, T. (1989), Nous et les autres. La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine, Paris : Editions du Seuil.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16ONDC9DBlc, accessed on February 3, 2022.

Global Fandom: Ioanna Vovou (Greece)

Ioanna Vovou (Greece)

Fandom culture is developing world wide as a phenomenon similar to what Marcel Mauss (The Gift, 1924) has described as a total social fact, relevant to and spreading at all aspects of collective life. To make a long story short, the rise and rapid development of a local tradition of fandom in Greece -as we can acknowledge it under contemporary terms and without tracing back a kind of genealogy of fandom- is to be researched in the ‘80s. At that period the development of the life style press is interlinked and promotes the first steps in forming a celebrity culture both local and international.

A crucial boost in that direction has been given with the deregulation of radio/television in the late 80s and the beginning of the 90s. At that period production and programming of national  TV fiction in private TV channels implemented new and different trends as regards to the relation of TV viewers with a medium the origins of which are to be traced back in 1966 -much later than other European countries- just before the establishment of the military junta on 1967 that lasted until 1974 with severe implications in all levels of  collective life (Koukoutsaki-Monnier, 2010; Papathanassopoulos, 1994; Paschalides, 2005; Vovou, 2010).

If we turn our focus to contemporary expressions of fandom in Greece, one cannot pass by the expansion of fandom in multiple fields such as TV programs, gaming, Youtubers and influencers, artists and athletes (the list can go on…), also linked with a celebrity culture and a diffused regime of visibility (as Heinich, 2012, has described it) that social media shape and accentuate. 

TV series fandom

A quite stable element of Greek fandom is to be found diachronically in national TV series, starting from the ‘90s when private TV channels (and especially Mega Channel) produced a significant number of local TV series, popular to a large audience. After a period of penury in national fictional production during the years of the financial crisis mostly the first half of the 2010s, Greek TV fiction is making its strong coming back. Although comedy is considered among the most popular TV genre, it is worth mentioning the great success of the historical TV drama series Agries Melisses [Wild bees, Antenna TV, 2019-…], unfolding the life of three sisters in the Greek province during the ‘50s, which has been cherished by a large part of the Greek audience and has loyal fans, forming social media communities, expressing themselves on Facebook or Twitter. The series became a daily routine especially during the lockdowns due to the Covid 19 pandemic and, also, echoed through its plot, in the second season of the series, the Greek movement of #metoo in spring/summer of 2021. This was an element that increased the sentiment of authenticity and that of a fictional universe that matters to the audience and its real world.

Illustration n. 1

Fan craft making inspired by the TV series “Wild Bees”:

The characters of the series made by a confectioner during the lockdown

Source: Espresso, 22.08.2021 (retrieved on the 10.09.2021)

https://www.espressonews.gr/reportaz/289626/zacharoplastis-fanatikos-tiletheatis-agries-melisses-dimioyrgise-figoyres-protagoniston/

At the same time, Greek fans of international (mostly American) TV fiction are firmly present and in a constantly increasing orbit, an evolution related to the implementation of cable and streaming services (Netflix, Apple TV and so on). The pandemic period we are going through accentuates this trend. To give an empirical example coming from a personal experience, in the -pandemic- academic year 2020-2021, when asking first year students at Panteion University of Athens where I teach to choose a case study for the analysis of media products, Greek and American TV fiction was at the top of their choices, leaving far behind other genres such as news.

Diffused Intertextuality and Fandom: Mixing the local and the global

The circulation of concepts, ideas, formats, styles is a trend that characterizes in an international level TV and media production diachronically. The matrix of many media products and productions, as well as the adaptations of radio and TV shows, films, etc… seem to design a Borgesian universe. Or, in other words, the mosaique of intermedial culture can, also, be perceived as a palimpsest: if one scrubs the surface, the remaining of another writing appears. As the French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1982) have pointed out, it is quite impossible to trace back the original text (impossible to figure out the urtexte).

This intertextual yet reflexive trend is not only promoted by media productions and oeuvres; it is also acknowledged by the spectators and the fans. Τhe TV comic series broadcasted in the years of the severe economic crisis in Greece, I Genia ton 592 Evro [The Generation of 592 euros, MEGA channel, 2010 – 2011], which unfolds around the life of a group of friends, six young people trying to survive the economic crisis, is one example among many others. Some of the comments on YouTube where the episodes can be watched are quite telling, providing insights, and clues of how -in what mode- to watch the series, i.e. as a paratextual element of the text. In fact, spectators notice that characters, situations, scenes and lines are inspired from other TV series like The Bing Bang Theory (2007-2019, CBS) and Friends (1994-2004, NBC). A TV program can make a promise of referring to reality elements. The latter promise, however, in a pragmatic context of communication (which takes into consideration the eventual meanings or uses), is, or is not, acknowledged as such by the viewers. As it can be understood by the comments cited below, the relation of the series to the reality of the financial crisis is not an issue. Viewers seem to skip the pretext and go directly to the various layers of the text (Vovou, 2019). 

Some of the viewers’ comments are quite eloquent in regard to intertextual citation of other media texts, in this particular case ‘flirting’ with plagiarism:[1]

 “They have stolen lines, themes and characters from American series BUT the series is very good and achieves its purpose of laughing. Good lines, very good interpretations, nice directing and despite the stolen it has some original elements!!!”

“Basically it must be a little bit stolen huh?”

“Sheldon from big bang, Rachel, Ross, Phoebe and Joey from friends, Fez from that 70s show… in a collage à la grecque”

“As a TV viewer of both series I have to say that they took some elements even whole scenes from the big bang theory” 

Illustration n.2

 I Genia ton 592 Evro [The Generation of 592 euros, MEGA channel, 2010 – 2011]

Diffused intertextual elements (characters, situations, scenes and lines) acknowledged as borrowed from American TV series The Bing Bang Theory (2007-2019, CBS) and Friends (1994-2004, NBC) by the fans of the series

Cynical Fandom or Fandom as moquery

Besides fiction, factual entertainment television and, in particular, reality shows have nourished a kind of travestied fandom. After 20 years of reality television the mode of reception has moved to a second degree, as a semiologist would put it. Fandom shifts to moquery, into having fun at the expense of the participants and/of the situations watched on various screens. At this point, we could diagnose a turning point, a shift taking place gradually over the years to a cynical way of watching TV and of enjoying popular culture products: that of derision, not only in production strategies but, also, in consuming attitudes. This tilt to a cynical mode of consuming, is a distinct element worth examining in the context of entertainment practices and attitudes which are far from being homogenous. In a pragmatic frame of analysis, this register of reception counts on the existence of a discursive community that makes possible the ironic effect.

Parody fan culture – an intermedial genre taken over by the fans

Following this evolution of fandom as moquery, another aspect of Greek fan culture is the increasing production of parodies of Greek television programs on platforms like YouTube or on TikTok. This takes place as a fan attitude that acts on the television document by travestying and producing multiple burlesque variations. In the midst of globalization of fandom mixed with local popular cultures, the parodies of television programs, as well as the pastiches of formats (such as TV news, personal confessions or telemarketing shows) and of forms of enunciation (testimony in front of the camera, journalistic commentary, etc.) testify to the appropriation of a television culture by the fans by the means of a burlesque diversion (Jost, 2008). The concept of fandom gets broader, considered in the first as well as in the second degree, in a love-hate relationship that embraces the tradition of buffoonery. 

We can find an illustrative example among many in the TV show Ta paratragouda (Tempo TV, 2001 – Alter, 2002-2011), where ‘everyday people’ who don’t get to access usually the public sphere expose their personal stories. A female participant, the ‘persona’ of “papadia” (meaning “the preast’s wife”) has triggered a series of parodies on TikTok,[2] many years later. These fandom moquery productions are retrieved by the TV show (titled nowadays Annita Koita [Annita look, after the name of the female presenter] OPEN, 2019-…),[3] implicitly self-claiming the cult value of the TV show.   

Illustration n.3

The TV show of personal confessions

‘Annita Kita’, OPEN TV, 02.05.2020

Illustration n.4

#Papadia TikTok

Illustrations n. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Parodies of the “papadia”

Alternative media memories

Fandom parodic productions, could be considered as a certain post-media conception of TV content driven by participatory culture. The intermedial participation of audiences in the consumption of popular culture products provides a crucial element of destabilization of the dichotomous “old/new media” conceptual (and sometimes even ideological) thinking. At the same time, the parodies of TV programs on various platforms are to be perceived in their function, both informal and in the same time intense, of creating/modulating a parallel history of television based on a fragmented memory and “coming from below”, in contrast with the “institutional” history of the medium. In that sense, the way in which the parodic travestissement (which relies on a long theatrical, literary and televisual tradition) is recovered by content creators on various platforms, leaves significant traces in what we understand by “media memory” and media productions worth to be included in a TV or media “anthology” as cultural heritage.

References

Genette, G. (1982), Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Paris: Seuil.

 

Heinich N. (2012), De la visibilité. Excellence et singularité en régime médiatique, Paris: Gallimard, « Bibliothèque des Sciences humaines ».

 

Jost F. (2008), « Peut-on être drôle à l’insu du public? (Parodies, pastiches et faux télévisuels) », Humoresques 28.

Koukoutsaki-Monnier A. (2010), “Greek TV fiction: diachronic evolution and production trends”, in Vovou I. (ed.), The world of television. Theoretical approaches, case study analysis and Greek reality, Athens: Herodotos, pp. 417-451. (In Greek).

Papathanassopoulos S. (1993), Liberating television, Athens: Kastaniotis. (In Greek).

Paschalides G. (2005), «Greek television», in Verinikos N., Daskalopoulou S., Cultural Industries. Procedures, Services, Products, Athens: Kritiki, pp. 173-200.

Vovou I. (2019), «Injecting Actuality in TV Fiction: The Financial Crisis in Greek TV Comedy Series», FILMICON, Issue 6, Dec. 2019. https://filmiconjournal.com/journal/article/page/93/2019/6/6

Vovou I. (2010), “Elements of a meta-history of Greek television. The medium, the politics and the institution”, in Vovou I. (ed.), The world of television. Theoretical approaches, case study analysis and Greek reality, Athens: Herodotos, pp.93-140. (In Greek).

Ioanna Vovou is an Assistant Professor at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece), in the Department of Communication, Media and Culture. She has also the title of « Maître de Conférences » in the French Public University “Université Paris XIII” where she was teaching for the period 2002-2007. She is a full member of the « Centre d’Etudes des Images et des Sons Médiatiques » (CEISME/CIM, University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle). Her research interests focus on the relation between the media and the society, on media analysis and on Television studies. She is participating in international research projects and is the author of essays dealing with the history of television, the political talk shows on Greek television, social representations in reality TV and TV fiction, gendered representations in the media, intermediality and media archeology.

[1] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_vaerIh_9w, last access 8 September 2021.

[2]https://www.tiktok.com/tag/%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%80%CE%B1%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%B1?lang=el-GR&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1, accessed at 09.09.2021.

[3] Excerpt from the show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTyMk3tITQQ, accessed at 09.09.2021.

Global Fandom Jamboree: Alexia Smit (South Africa)

A fan-made meme compares South African black twitter fans to an armed militia, ready to take aim at participants on the show.

Sunday Night Black Twitter and TV Fandom in South Africa

On Sunday nights South African viewers can be assured that the Mzansi Magic Channel (hosted on pay TV service DSTV) will screen its most talked-about reality television fare.  During the evening timeslot fans head to twitter to share responses, banter and memes for the duration of the programme screening.  The Sunday night slot became popular through Mzansi Magic’s hit show Our Perfect Wedding (OPW) which produced a culture of fan commentary on South Africa’s “black Twitter” during its 7pm timeslot.   OPW was soon followed by another local reality tv success Date My Family (DMF) in the Sunday 6pm timeslot.  While Mzansi screens other premium fare in the later timeslots it is Our Perfect Wedding and Date My Family which have garnered significant twitter activity. These shows centre black South African experiences and like much reality TV fare foreground ‘real people’ performing themselves for the cameras. The twitter responses to these texts are laden with acerbic comedy and linguistic play. The OPW and DMF fan activity is a significant example of South African television fandom and is a particularly creative and critical site for the negotiation of black identity in the post-apartheid space. 

While most of my work has been textual analysis-based, my studies of OPW and DMF have been my first experiences of engaging with fandoms. In 2020 I collaborated with Tanja Bosch on a study of the twitter feed for Our Perfect Wedding in an article which combined both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the twitter data attached to the hashtag #OPW. I admit that, while I knew we were examining the work of fan audiences, I gave little thought to how this activity might be theorized in relation to existing scholarship on fandom. This conversation series gives me the opportunity to reframe this work in relation to the field of fandom studies and to consider how the South African context fits in to broader discourses on fandom. 

As Tanja Bosch and I argued in our discussion, the twitter feed attached to OPW operates as a backchannel to traditional modes of television viewing. The TV channel (which is hosted on a pay TV service) actively encourages and reinforces the twitter life of these programmes, through in-text references to twitter, screen pop-ups with the twitter hashtags and active promotion of the show through the programmes official twitter page (Smit and Bosch, 2020).  Through an examination of twitter data for the hashtag #OPWmzansi, we found that the broadcaster maintains considerable power in the show’s twitter network. However, our qualitative study of the twitter responses revealed the work of fans in producing comedic responses to the text, constructing memes, and recounting storylines for viewers without access to pay TV networks. 

Work on fandom in South Africa has focused primarily upon sports fans (Davis and Upton, 2004, Kaminju and Ndlovu, 2011, Fletcher 2012, 2014, 2015). Some studies have explored local fan engagement with global fan culture, for example, Catherine Duncan’s (2018) work on transnational fandoms in South Africa, and Trish Ramrathen’s (2016) work on anime fandom in South Africa. There is little work on South African fandoms organized around local film and television productions despite the fact that very exciting fan cultures exist. This may simply be the result of a generally limited interest in television and popular culture amongst South African scholars.  I also wonder whether the limited development of fandom studies in South Africa might be linked to certain entrenched ways of thinking about South African audiences. Fandom has largely been constructed as a white phenomenon despite the existence of thriving black fandoms (Stanfill 2011, Wanzo, 2015) and black South African television viewers may not accord with assumptions about what constitutes a fan. With some notable exceptions in the small field of audience studies in South Africa (Tager, 1998; Roome 1998, Tomaselli, 2019) black South African audiences have often been conceived of either as receivers of public service messages or as markets for the consumption of TV products. There has been much interest in audience reception of messaging around the HIV/AIDS pandemic (Tufte, 2002; Ponono, 2014). And scholars have also examined how audiences have engaged with messaging around democracy and transformation in the post-apartheid years (Roome, 1998; Kruger 1999). 

Black South African television viewers are often positioned by media culture as “consumers” rather being considered for their active engagement as fans.  Indeed, as Iqani (2017) has argued, black South Africans have been fetishized for the potential promised by their consumer activity in post-apartheid space, with the increased spending power of black South Africans also taken as a representation of social change.  Work in critical consumption studies has explored how South African transformation has been expressed through representations of black spending power and through narratives of aspirational consumption (Posel 2010; Iqani and Kenny, 2015). The field of critical consumption studies is vibrant in South Africa, producing tremendously important and nuanced work.  But this emphasis on consumption both in popular culture and in academic spaces has possibly meant that black audiences have very often been considered in relation to consumption rather than fandom. 

Limited attention has been paid to the creativity of South African television fans and the cultural spaces and artefacts that they produce.  Examining the Sunday night fan practices around OPW and DMF provides opportunities for exploring how black TV fans in South Africa position themselves in relation to representations of consumption, aspiration and black identity. I want to highlight a series of points which may have interesting connections to global debates in fandom:

Twitter fans of OPW and DMF position themselves self-consciously in terms of shared black experiences through their alignment with black twitter.  The hashtag #blacktwitter frequently shares space with #OPW in fan tweets and tweeters make explicit reference to Sunday night practices as a function of black twitter.  This South African black twitter is a site of confluence with global fan practices, and particularly with American black Twitter. This is potentially an exciting area for further study. On the one hand this is a distinctly local space where tweeters share very situated experiences using local languages and expressions but through its positioning as “black twitter” this fandom also marks itself as connected to global blackness. Unlike black Americans, black South Africans are a majority audience, and yet due to the unequal nature of South African society, and a history of limited access to official cultural sites,  the self-aware positioning of fan twitter activity as  “black twitter” demonstrates the need to seek out site of community around shared black cultural understandings. Sunday night twitter practices could be constructively linked to broader debates about the role of Twitter in John Fiske’s “audiencing” (1992) which is defined by Highfield et al. (2013) as “the public performance of belonging to the distributed audience for a shared media event”. Here the practice of audiencing is also a means of producing a sense of black belonging.  While this belonging is crucial to the pleasures of black twitter, the twitter feed for these shows also features an active grappling with the complexities of black identity and a pointed undermining of performances of class distinction. 

Language play and multilingualism is a means through which South African Sunday night twitter fans express community and negotiate black South African identity.  This tendency potentially intersects with discussions of fan multilingualism in many different regional contexts and in transnational TV fandoms. OPW and DMF are both primarily narrated in English but feature a range of South African indigenous languages, depending in the ethnicities of the participants. South Africa has 11 official languages and many South Africans have some proficiency across these languages. However, due to the legacy of apartheid and colonialism, English language proficiency is often understood as a marker class mobility due its association with university education and employment opportunities. The twitter feed attached to these programmes features frequent comedic responses to language use and particularly to perceived failures in English pronunciation and grammar. I am interested in embarking on a more extensive engagement with the ways in which this interest in language operates as a way of critically examining performances of classed identity for black South African fans.  

Finally, because OPW and DMF are behind a paywall, the Twitter feed becomes a way in which fans without access to the service consume the texts. This means that for some Twitter is not the “backchannel” but the primary site of consumption. And so we could ask to what extent does DMF/OPWs reliance on fan narration and retelling of the story events undermine the traditional relationship between sites of TV production and consumption even as this twitter engagement bolsters the brand identity and prestige of the traditional pay TV broadcaster ? 

References

Duncan, Catherine. Production locality: practices in a South African transnational participatory fandom. Diss. University of Johannesburg,  2018.

Fletcher, Marc William. " These whites never come to our game. What do they know about our soccer?": soccer fandom, race, and the Rainbow Nation in South Africa. Diss. University of Edinburgh, 2012.

Fletcher, Marc. "‘You must support Chiefs; Pirates already have two white fans!’: race and racial discourse in South African football fandom." Soccer & Society 11.1-2 (2010): 79-94.

Fiske, John. "Audiencing: A cultural studies approach to watching television." Poetics 21.4 (1992): 345-359.

Highfield, Tim, Stephen Harrington, and Axel Bruns. "Twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom: The# Eurovision phenomenon." Information, communication & society 16.3 (2013): 315-339.

Iqani, Mehita. "A new class for a new South Africa? The discursive construction of the ‘Black middle class’ in post-Apartheid media." Journal of Consumer Culture 17.1 (2017): 105-121.

Iqani, Mehita, and Bridget Kenny. "Critical consumption studies in South Africa: roots and routes." Critical Arts 29.2 (2015): 95-106.

Kaminju, Antony, and Thabisani Ndlovu. "Playing from the terraces: notes on expressions of football fandom in South Africa." African Identities 9.3 (2011): 307-321.

Ramrathen, Trisha. Rise of the Otaku: investigating the anime fandom in South Africa. Diss. 2016.

Roome, Dorothy. "Transformation and Reconciliation:‘Simunye’, a flexible model." Critical Arts 11.1-2 (1997): 66-94.

Roome, Dorothy. "Humor as" cultural reconciliation" in South African situation comedy: Suburban Bliss and multicultural female viewers." Journal of Film and Video 51.3/4 (1999): 61-87.

Smit, Alexia, and Tanja Bosch. "Television and black Twitter in South Africa: Our perfect wedding." Media, Culture & Society42.7-8 (2020): 1512-1527.

Stanfill, Mel. "Doing fandom,(mis) doing whiteness: Heteronormativity, racialization, and the discursive construction of fandom| Stanfill| Transformative Works and Cultures." Transformative Works & Cultures 8 (2011).

Tager, M. 1995. The Bold and the Beautiful: The relationship between the fictional universal universe of the soap opera and the lived experience of the black urban viewer in KwaZulu-Natal . Diss.  University of Natal, 1995.

Tager, M. 2002. The Bold and the Beautiful and Generations: A comparative ethnographic audience study of Zulu-speaking students living in residences on the University of Natal's Durban Campus . Diss. University of Kwazulu Natal, 2002. 

Teer‐Tomaselli, Ruth. "Drama, Audiences, and Authenticity: Television Programming and Audiences in Post‐Apartheid South Africa." A Companion to Television (2020): 423-438.

Wanzo, Rebecca. "African American acafandom and other strangers: New genealogies of fan studies." Transformative Works and Cultures 20.1 (2015).

Short Biographical Note

Alexia Smit is a senior lecturer in Film and Television studies at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She holds a PhD in Television studies from the University of Glasgow. Her research focusses on popular entertainment television, with a particular interest in South African reality television, gender, class, postfeminism, transnational African TV, and womens television genres in Africa. 

Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Yiyi Yin and Susan Noh (Part Two)

Susan (respond to Yiyi):      

Two features of Yiyi Yin’s entry stood out to me: the emergence of fan circles and the continued centralization of algorithmic cultures and digital features which mediate engagement between the fans and their objects of affection, as well as engagement with one another. I believe that “fan-circles” may need further clarification and definition of what it actually is. From the entry, I am presuming that fan circles are fandoms in which boundaries are blurred between various groups. For example, Chinese ACG fans can easily overlap with K-pop fans, as is often the case with the American anime fandom, and it may be safe to assume that one who is literate in anime culture within the United States may also have a fair amount of exposure to K-pop culture as well. It is interesting then to consider how fan morality may overlap with one another, irrespective of one’s object of affection. For example, the general acceptance of fansubs as being necessary within both K-pop culture and anime culture, even in the face of strict piracy laws, may gesture towards this overlap in ethical codes that govern global fandoms. How scholars can go about studying the overlap of international fandom, the moments of contact, and the frictions and symbioses that these moments of contact foster would be very productive. 

            In the case of K-pop fandom and ACG fandom within China, I would particularly be interested in how historical colonial legacies continue to shape the ethicality of these overlapping fandoms, and whether these histories influence the way Chinese fans engage with these various fandoms. Given the blurring of boundaries between fandoms in China, it would be interesting to see how one’s own historical background may contribute to this blurring. In the American anime fandom, but perhaps more specifically, the music fandom subsection of the anime fandom, there are sometimes discussions and frictions relating to how one should perceive K-pop within this merging of East Asian music fandom. While discussions between fans are tinged with a kind of political ethos that may go unnoticed by the fans themselves, it is fascinating to see how these historical legacies continue to color fan rhetoric. 

            In regards to using the formal features of platforms to shape fan practices, there was also a key moment of overlap between Yiyi’s research and my own on formal streaming services. Crunchyroll, which is a streaming service that caters primarily to the global anime fandom has a series of platform features which help to define them as a “fans-first” service within the slew of streaming services that originate from the United States. Given the intense competition that they face from more general and mainstream services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and more, all of which have stakes within anime distribution, it behooves Crunchyroll to really highlight features that foster fannish affect. This includes a five-star review system, forums, comment sections, review sections, news sections, and more. Given the high volume of fan contact that subscribers are privy to, it has been productive to observe the ways in which fans govern themselves within these spaces. 

            Much like the “report” function that Yiyi gestures to in her own research, fans can be seen occasionally using the “spoiler” function on Crunchyroll’s comments sections, which immediately whites out the comment. There are moments where these comments are not actually spoilers for the media text in question, but instead, reveals a kind of negativity that fans may not support. Defining some of these comments as “spoilers” immediately whites the comment out of the discussion and also forces those who are interested in these kinds of comments to have to do additional labor to see them. These small moments reflect the ways in which fans are using elements of the formal platform in order to govern themselves as fans, either to censor or to influence the general mood of the discourse that is occurring within these comments sections. 

            Despite Crunchyroll’s commitment towards creating a space in which fannish affect can flourish within their interface, there are moments when these features backfire. One example where we can see this is through the fan reception of an anime-inspired Crunchyroll Original series, High Guardian Spice, which was marketed as a progressive series that would have abundant LGBTQ representation. Fans used the comment and review affordances of the platform to “review bomb” the series, as well as create a hostile and homphobic/transphobic atmosphere within this progressive series. For fans who did not openly engage with homophobic/transphobic rhetoric, but were still critical of the series, they pointed to the fact that the production was “anime-inspired,” a term that often yields an ambivalent fan reaction due to perceptions of anime-inspired work being of lower quality in comparison to Japanese originated content. 

            This case study revealed two things: that fans can easily hijack the formal features of their platform to go against the platform itself and that fandom is certainly not guaranteed to use these spaces for progressive or supportive modes of expression. Indeed, one must never forget that a fan’s personal identity always governs their membership into fandom, and in this case, it became very clear that there was an active homophobic and transphobic branch within anime fandom that would foster a hostile environment for LGBTQ global anime fans. Homophobic fans may ban together in order to upvote comments that reflect their own political views, while simultaneously shutting down more productive commentary within these spaces. This is yet another use of the formal features of the platform. While the digitization of fandom does help large corporations to govern fannish affects to a certain extent, fans remain more than capable of using these features for their own governance, irrespective of the platform’s desire. Whether this is progressive and productive for the fandom has yet to be seen. 

            Given that Crunchyroll is a global platform that serves many different regions, I would be curious to see how this border crossing may affect fan attitudes towards media objects around the world. For example, does the homophobic and transphobic nature of the reviews stemming from the American branch of Crunchyroll affect the way fans may be receiving the work in Latin America or Russia due to certain forms of anime journalism and social media? I would be curious to see if there’s a merging of global fan ethics due to these platform features or a divergence. 

Yiyi (respond to Susan):

I would like to thank Susan for the inspiring response. Before I come to further discuss the fan-circle and the digitalization of fandom, I’d like to first respond around the impact of historical legacies on fan consumptions. This is a very interesting topic especially when thinking of the linkages between the historical colonial legacies and the current global relations. In China, the consumptions of Japanese anime and K-pop were long considered as “flattering” by the mainstream discussions. Back in 2010, the K-pop fans in China were seriously attacked online because the fans gathered chaotically at the World Expo before a concert inviting the K-pop group Super Junior. More recently, a domestic actor was boycotted because he took a photo in front of the Yasukuni Shrine several years ago. These cases show that the nationalist ideology emerged in China has largely influenced the fan rhetoric and the norms of fan practice in China. The fans, especially whose fan objects involve nations like Japan and Korea, have to paradoxically negotiate with their own historical background as Chinese and the affective passion towards the fan objects. For example, in celebrity fandoms, fans would voluntarily mute online on dates like July 7th (Marco Polo Bridge Incident), September 18th (Mukden Incident), and consider these historically significant dates as the “no-entertainment day”. This kind of norms of practice also becomes something that fans need to negotiate with in the overlapping fandoms, especially in emerging fandoms like the eSports fandom. As the eSports teams in China has started to invite Korean players since 2015, there were a lot of new coming fans from the K-pop fandoms. The conflict between fans of “all-Chinese teams” (i.e. a team with all Chinese players) and fans of Korean players has lasted till today. I agree with Susan that it would be very interesting to see the impact of one’s historical legacies on fan practice especially when the global relations have become intensive again in the recent years, as the contextualized fan participation could become the frontier of nationalism.

Going back to the topic of “fan-circle”, as Susan suggested, I need to further define it as a specifically contextual phenomenon in Chinese fandom. For my research, the definition was summarized from more than 50 interviews I have conducted with fans from various fandoms (e.g. anime fandoms, eSports fandoms, K-pop fandoms, TV fandoms etc.). A “fan-circle” refers to a group of fans with sharing cultural norms, knowledge, and ideologies. At first glance, the fan-circle carries similar meaning with the term “fan community.” Nevertheless, the “fan-circle” should not be interpreted as a particular fan community with its own performances and norms. Instead, it refers to a broad set of norms, rules, culture tastes, and patterns of participation that is cross-community. 

According to the interviews, the fan-circle culture has reclaimed the authorial legitimacy of certain affective practices, not on the basis of the moral economy but of a sort of rationale that can only be made sense with specific cultural imagination. Almost all of the interviewees who lived with such struggling attributed it to the influence of “the rules of the fan-circle”. In their narratives, the fan-circle is defined by specific patterns of rules and participation, including the regulation of online practices, supportive activities, sociality, consumption, fan-production, and so on. The formalization of the fan-circle practice is thus seen as a process in which fans explore and legitimate “proper” ways to actualize the abstract and affective fan-object relationship, negotiating it with specific industrial, socio-cultural and media circumstance. With its own characteristics and norms, the “fan-circle” culture has invaded to various fandoms, and thus been questioned, contested and challenged by many fandoms. This is a typical phenomenon that could happen in the trans-fandom when individuals traveled all across the fandoms and communicate with different types of performances and values.

The fan-circle type of fan practice can be easily identified on social media platforms like Weibo, not only because the topics will be mostly about a particular celebrity or fan object, but also because of the formats they have adopted. The formatted content of posts has become a sort of shared knowledge or social capital among the fan community, whereas the term “efficient” clearly hints at the platform logic. In a research proceeded by me and Zhuoxiao Xie (2021), we explored five functionally differentiated purposes of speaking on Weibo: resources, sentiments, fan works, ritualized tasks, and diplomatic interactions. We also found that most of the functional terms used by fans are highly technologically constructed. The construction of proper fan behaviour has shaped the discourse, as the fans selectively utilize certain functions or resources provided by the platform.

This observation echoes to Susan’s case in which fans use the technological settings of platforms like Crunchyrollfor their own governance, but meanwhile also suggests that the governance itself becomes digitalized and technological. For example, the use of “report” on Weibo and the use of “spoilers” both gesture to the logic of digital visibility. That is, fans govern themselves and the fan others by manipulating the visibility of certain (positive or negative) content on the platform. The digital governing has thus facilitated and meanwhile constructed the rule of fan practice. This logic of visibility, as we argued in our research, becomes the logic of fan-circle participation and legitimates the fan-circle as a dominant way of fan participation in the overlapping fandoms. In the case of fan-circle, even when fans start to use the formal technological setting for their own governance, the governance itself is made sense by the platformized rule. This is the reason that I come to argue that the Chinese fan-circle culture is becoming an algorithmic culture in which fans not only use the technology to participate, but also participate in technology. I’m thus very curious whether the logic of visibility or the significance of “traffic data” makes sense in other countries and regions as it does in China. For example, fans on Weibo pay particular attention to the trending, and would devote significant digital labor to control the content appears on the trending list (e.g. posting to heat the hashtag or posting the same content around the hashtag). I would be curious to see how global fandom develops differently in the trends of platformization and digital capitalism.

Bibliography

Yin, Y., & Xie, Z.E* (2021). Playing platformized language games: Social media logic and the mutation of participatory cultures in Chinese online fandom. New Media & Society. First published online. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211059489

Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Yiyi Yin and Susan Noh (Part One)

Yiyi (respond to Susan):

I would like to thank Susan for the fascinating introduction about the English anime fansubbing and especially the emergence of fan-ripping. Sadly I have not done any research on fan-subbing myself, so that I might not be able to provide many critical thoughts. However, as a Chinese anime fan, I grew up receiving translated anime content provided by online fan-subbing groups, and I’m now seeing a similar landscape where the grass-root fan-subbing groups were largely declined. For me, it is particularly interesting to see how the traditional distinction between the competitive camps, namely the speed-subbers and quality-subbers, has been challenged by the existence of fan-rippers who can distribute the official translated version of anime most rapidly. Fan-subbing can be a very good case indicating how fan practices and engagement might react to the shifting media industry and the formal media distribution portals. As Susan also mentioned, fan-subbing served primarily for accessibility in the earlier days. Similarly, in my interviews with Chinese ACG fans, they recalled that they were simply “fed” by the fan-subbing groups in the late 1990s as there was nothing else to consume. Today the problem of accessibility has been replaced by the difficulty to consume media content from different streaming services, and the fan-rippers emerged to solve the problem by downloading and distributing the content.

One thing I’ve been curious about throughout the reading was: Who were the fan-rippers? More specifically, to what extent were they also fans? I ask the questions because the ripping seems to require much less labor the time than translating and subbing, which somewhat makes the fan-ripping less a “fannish” practice but more “commercial”. For example, there are several non-official video sites and Apps in China that do similar things as fan-rippers, as they rip the content from streaming services and distribute it onto their own sites. Unlike fan-subbing groups, these ripping websites gained profit from advertisements and low subscription prices. These websites and Apps are very popular among common audiences and consumers (partially because the accessibility remains a problem to Chinese audiences), but fans would rather embrace the version released by fan-subbing groups to consume the content with better “quality”. As Susan emphasized, the “quality” remains as the important cultural capital of fan-subbing groups not only because the text type or special effect was necessarily needed by fans, but also because it indicated the distinctive time and effort dedicated by fans. Consequently, in China, the conflict between fan-ripping and fan-subbing was always paralleled with the binary of fans/non-fans, or true/fake fans. To some extent, fan-ripping seems to be recognized by fans more within the formal economy rather than the informal economy in China. I’m thus particularly interested in how fans and the fan-rippers themselves consider their identities, and how they might share the content in specifically different ways.

            Another topic that interests me is the blurring boundary between formal and informal economy, as Susan mentioned that the co-option of fan-subbing groups was not likely to happen in the English-speaking anime fandoms. A quite interesting observation for me is that in China it is the platformization of fandoms that progresses this kind of co-option, in which the platform exploits but also saves the fan-subbing groups by hiring them as “professional fan-subbers” to distribute the content with the quality that fans need. For example, the video site Bilibili, the largest video platform for ACG content and subcultural fans in China, began to collaborate with fan groups and fan-subbing groups recently. In some cases, Bilibili purchased the license from the distribution company and collaborated with the fan-subbing groups to produce the subtitles. The subtitles usually include special text type and animation, especially during the openings/endings and special scenes such as charm spelling. The subtitles might also include extra information for fans or for the common audience to learn when watching the anime series. This kind of co-option can now be seen also in the cases of English drama and film fandoms. In its recent release of The Lord of the Ring, Bilibili worked with the fan group “LotR Chinese Wiki” to produce the official version of the subtitle with the beautiful translation of poems in the background soundtrack.

In the case of Bilibili, the co-option happens when the platform, which purchases the license from the content distributor and needs to translate it, tries to snatch the fans from fan-subbing groups. The “quality” still plays a significant role that justifies the survival of fan-subbing groups and distinguishes fan-subbing from either official or speed-subbing works. However, the “quality” is also becoming the means for industrial players to exploit labor within the formal economy. I’m thus interested in how platformization and digital capitalism might influence fan practices such as fan-subbing. From the case of Bilibili, I think the platformized fan labor might be the way that the declining fan-subbing groups reenter the neoliberal market. Yet, the underlying ideology within the informal economy that “quality as the proof of love” has been largely replaced by the social media logic of visibility or popularity in van Dijck’s term.

Susan (respond to Yiyi):

            An interesting point that Yiyi brings up in her response is this perceived divide between the commercial, formal economy of media distribution and the fannish shadow economy, which helps to sustain a wider web of interest. Indeed, as Yiyi has accurately pointed out, fan-rippers often help to bridge the gaps between franchises that are split apart due to digital platforms vying for popular media titles. Particularly for Japanese anime, narratives can expand to multiple seasons, movies, remakes, OVAs (original video animation), and more. These wide-spanning franchises are often fractured in their distribution along the lines of streaming networks. For example, for the enormously popular Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, Netflix currently streams the original anime series and two films in the United States, but Amazon Prime distributes the newest filmic remakes, as well as a documentary series revolving around the series creator. Unless one has the economic means to legally access all of this content through streaming subscriptions, which is often not the case for younger viewerships, fansubbed and ripped content continues to be the primary means in which fans can gain access to all of the fragments of a media franchise. As part of my own research, I engaged in an online survey of anime fans within the United States regarding where they got their content and why they chose the particular routes that they did. Unsurprisingly, not being able to afford all subscriptions to legally gain access to their desired anime content was one significant reason why fans continued to turn towards ripped and pirated content.   

            Certainly, these dynamics may continue to change as fans witnessed announcements in 2021 of the consolidation of two major anime streaming portals, Funimation and Crunchyroll, in the North American anime streaming scene. This merging may help in further centralizing a formal access point for fans. Further, as anime industry related news regarding the challenges and hardships of industry laborers continue to travel from Japan to the rest of the world, fans may also reconsider where they decide to source their content along the lines of personal ethics. 

            Returning back to the divides between fansubbing groups, rippers, and formal streaming services, it should be noted that an antagonistic relationship between fansubbers and services like Funimation and Crunchyroll need not have necessarily been a foregone conclusion. As a case in point, Crunchyroll began as a pirating site for anime fans, before they changed their branding and models of operation in order to collaborate directly with Japanese anime studios. Because of the streaming service’s legally questionable beginnings, gaining the trust of Japanese studios was an uphill battle for the founders of Crunchyroll. Becoming a more legitimate global distributor required purging fansubbed content from their catalogues, which drew critique from both formal industry players and fansubbers alike. 

Instead of the rather antagonistic route that formal North American anime distributors and tertiary anime companies took towards English-language fansubbers, there is also an alternative tactic that could have been engaged, where industries co-opt fansubbers’ talents and help them to professionalize, fostering a potentially more harmonious relationship. There have been moments where fansubbers and formal distributors have collaborated successfully with one another, and these collaborations may be seen as a source of pride by fansubbing groups due to the legitimacy and testament to quality that is implied in such relationships. For example, one fansubber that I interviewed enthusiastically recounted how the popularity of their group’s fansubs influenced the studio behind a widely-known anime series in using the group’s naming conventions within the formal subtitles.  However, it seems like these moments remain unlikely exceptions, particularly when considering the punitive measures that have been taken against anime piracy within the United States, as well as the rhetorical strategies that have been leveraged against fansubbers in order to try to delimit their practices. For example, on June 8, 2003, Anime News Network released an article titled, “A New Ethical Code for Digital Fansubbing,” which sought to encourage the formation of some ground rules for fansubbing groups. For example, suggestions included ensuring that a fansubber always aims to minimize their impact on the commercial sphere and that motivations for doing such labor should never be for personal fame or profit. Of course, these rules tend to go against the ethos of fansubbing, particularly in the contemporary moment, when fansubbing tends to differentiate itself through discourses around quality, as well as a more personal interest in learning the technicalities and artistry behind the trade. Far from not attempting “​​to match or better the quality of a professional DVD,” fansubbers continue to push the limits of what fansubbing can do or be both in technique and artistry. For example, productive fansubbers have programmed scripts that help to automate certain steps of the process in order to ease the labor of their fellow fansubber, as well as make the communication processes between fansubber and their viewerships smoother.  Given this ethos of constant self-improvement and exploration that characterizes the industrious fansubber, it is no surprise that fansub groups did not fall in line with these ethical codes that were outlined for them. 

While I would argue that fansubbing is not necessarily “dead,” we are certainly witnessing a moment when former motivations that once encouraged individuals to pick up the labor of fansubbing are no longer so prevalent. Challenged both by streaming services and ripping groups alike, the existence of fansubbers are intimately connected to the whims of digital platforms and portals. Contrary to the “social media logic of visibility or popularity,” fansubbing is seeing a decline in returns for both factors, as content hungry fans are more likely to default to what is most convenient and available fastest (simulcasting or ripping), as opposed to what is arguably of better quality. In this manner, perhaps the current state of English fansubbing reflects an exception to this rule that Yiyi has stated at the end of her response. 

Global Fandom: Yiyi Yin (China)

I’m Yiyi Yin. I self-identify as an aca-fan and have been working on Chinese fandom studies for several years. In 2002, I wrote and posted my first fanfiction on a BBS where fans of the Japanese animation B’TX congregated. I was 12 years old back then, and hardly knew anything about fandom or fan culture. I even had never heard the word “fans.” Every day I discussed the storyline of B’TX with one of my neighbors who was also fond of it, and wrote poems together for our favorite characters. I remembered how we snuck into her mother’s office and dialed-up to the Internet, reading everything we could find on a themed forum related. I remembered my very first post on the forum, which was a repost of another B’TX fanfiction from one forum section to another. As I recalled, my personal experience as a “fan” probably started from there, even though I had no idea of such identity at that time. 

Since then I’ve been a long-term observer and participant of multiple fandoms, including some in Japanese manga, some in English television dramas and films (e.g. Lord Of The Rings, Sherlock, and Marvel movies), some in popular music, and some in eSports. Growing up in the 1990s in mainland China, my own experience as a media fan was accompanied by the process of becoming a “netizen”. In terms of the expanding media industry of China, the period between the 1990s and the 2000s was also a critical process in which the marketization, commercialization, and the national “soft power” construction significantly progressed. Meanwhile, as the acceleration of the process of globalization has led to a drastic transformation of fan culture in China, the fandom has emerged from hitherto underground development and community-based activity to a vibrant social group operating on the Internet. During this time, I, as a teenager, inevitably encountered new genres of media and cultural products, new patterns of participation, and new forms of fandom. For me, the meaning of the term “fandom” has been constructed precisely during this time, as a naturally dynamic and relational concept that never restricted to only one single object.

In mainland China, the development of local fandoms was not linear, as it was varied constantly by waves of foreign culture. The local fan culture was firstly introduced into mainland by Hong Kong celebrities and their fans, and thus formed the earliest celebrity fandom in mainland China. Another influential fan culture was shaped by the imported Japanese animations in the late 1980s. The ACG culture and Otaku culture influenced Chinese fan culture to a large extent, which have made the Chinese fan culture notably different from the Western country where Star Trek was always noted as the early fan-text. It is fair to say that the transcultural Otaku culture initially shaped the Chinese fan culture in terms of the patterns of participation, ways of expression, and communal appearance. However, the Japanese cultural products were mostly banned in China in the early 2000s. The materials for fan consumption have thus changed, way before the Chinese fan culture has been formalized by the Otaku culture. Since then, along with the development of the Internet, the Chinese fan culture was primarily influenced by the K-pop celebrity culture, and then the Anglo-American traditions of media fans. When the so-called domestic fandom focusing on local celebrities and cultural products emerged in around 2005, the Chinese fan culture has become a very hybridized and multi-cultural combination of various subcultural traditions. Figure 1 shows the fandoms that my interviewees involved. Almost everyone has involved at least two fandoms in the past decade. The fandoms are thus interconnected with a flow of participants.

Figure 1: Hybridized online fandoms in China

Interestingly, these foreign waves, including Japanese Otaku culture, Hong Kong/Taiwan celebrity culture, Hallyu, Western media fan culture, had not appeared as separate fandoms in China. In the age of digitalization, we’ve seen different patterns of fan cultures clashed, negotiated and converged especially in the 2000s. My research interest thus comes from the dynamic development of fan culture in China, especially how fan performances are constantly negotiated and reconstructed, while fan norms, values and cultural practices are formalized and legitimated. My recent works focused mostly on the phenomenon of “fan-circle” in China, which was defined as a dominant pattern of fan participation, involving intense digital labor and regulation of online communicative practices, sociality, media use, consumption and production. [YY1] The fan-circle became discursively powerful in the past decade, ruling out other fan performances by establishing new moral values and redefining the legitimacy of being a fan. These fan-circle moral values first penetrated the popular or mainstream fan communities such as ACG[HJ2]  (Animation-Comics-Games) and celebrity fandoms, and then the relatively marginalized or underground communities like eSports and crosstalk fandoms. In this process, fandoms have become interrelated, without clear-cut boundaries separating each fan realm. Instead, the new boundaries have been set as fan-circles, where fans instantly step in and out to struggle with their own cultural identities of being fan.

My general interest is to see the process of formalization of the fan-circle [HJ3] [YY4] and its rules in multiple fandoms (Yin, 2020a). I and Dr. Xie Zhuoxiao from Nanjing University first noticed the technology-specificity of fan-circle, as it largely reflects the platform setting and algorithm in terms of how fans speak, consume, produce and use the media (Yin & Xie, 2018). One of my works (Yin, 2020b) examined particularly the Chinese online fandom as an emerging algorithmic culture in which the ongoing interaction among affect, fan subjectivity, and the algorithm continually shapes and reshapes the everyday fan practice in terms of its sequence of acts, norms, and ways of thinking. In this dynamic process, some activities have been formalized into everyday practice, with authority borrowed from the commercial or industry framework, while others are still negotiated by fans in playing with the rules of the algorithm. The platforms and institutions such as Sina Weibo strategically embed the logic of data in daily fan practice by promoting numerous algorithmic operations including all the indexes, ranking and their rewards. The digitalization significantly shapes the fan performance when it promises certain affective fan-object relationship. The rematerialization of data has allowed the fans to connect themselves to the fan objects that were inaccessible in the past. Through practicing around the data, fans can actualize certain relationship to the foreign celebrities that were out of reach before.             

Figure 2: The popularity ranking designed by Weibo

It is also very interesting to see how fans, including the fan-circle participants, make use of the technological resources provided by the platform in unexpected ways. Examples might include how fans appropriate the “report” function to achieve their own goals, and how they flood to resist against the visibility algorithm manipulated by the platform. I’ve seen a case in which the Weibo trending topic was originally about one thing (e.g. “Marvel screening”), but was transformed by fans into a completely different thing by flooding with Weibo posts containing the same keywords yet in different combination (e.g. “Marvelous film screening”). For those who clicked the trending topic without knowing the original event, the content of the trending topic has been efficiently changed by fans. In doing so, they still claim to control the visibility that is powerfully manipulated by the platform and the media producers engaged. In cases like this, fan agency is still potentially creative in a sense that fans would never entirely compromise to the dependency of commercialized cultural industry. 

I discussed mostly about how fan-circle is technologically specific. And I am now interested in how and why this algorithmic fan culture can be culturally specific. For instance, Weibo was known as similar to Twitter in terms of its technological settings and social media functions. In media use, fans on both Twitter and Weibo participate in producing Trending, Hashtags, Super Hashtags. Yet the specific patterns, rules, and purposes of fan participation vary. A forthcoming paper of mine and my coauthor would examine the very particular communicative practices of celebrity fans on Weibo, but we have not yet elaborated it from a comparative perspective.

 Another interesting but rather pessimistic concern about the cultural specificity of fan-circle is the politicization of fan culture, which can also be seen in other countries (e.g. the fans of Donald Trump) but is especially noteworthy in China due to its complex socialist tradition and political scene. The stressful cultural censorship has forced the fans to further regulate their own participations to prevent the possibility of being criticized or even banned. While there has been a dangerous trend that fans make use of the authorial power to attack the vital fan groups or fan individuals. In fact, the use of “report” function can be seen as a case in which fans take use of the “punishment mechanism” to shut down the posts they don’t like. In recent years, along with the increasingly strict control of Boy’s Love literatures, some fans even report the disliked fanfic to the governmental Weibo accounts. When fandom is becoming more and more mainstream, it is noticed not only by the capitals but also the political actors as potential social power. As the political intervention and fan activities have progressively overlapped, the politicization of fan practice is becoming an increasingly significant and another complicated aspect of the fan-circle phenomenon. 

My Projects for References

Yin, Y. (2020). An emergent algorithmic culture: The data-ization of online fandom in China. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(4), 475–492.

Yin, Y., & Xie, Z. (2018). The bounded embodiment of fandom in China: Recovering shifting media experiences and fan participation through an oral history of Animation-Comics-Games lovers. International Journal of Communication, 12 (18): 3317–3334. 

尹一伊（2020），《粉丝研究流变：主体性、理论问题与研究路径》，《全球传媒学刊》，7 (1)：53-67页。

Global Fandom: Susan Noh (United States)

Anime Fansubbing in the Age of Simulcasting

The widespread exposure of anime in the United States and the global community more broadly has largely been predicated on fansubbing communities which have existed since the 1980s. Fansubbers are industrious fans who translate and distribute international work to their various social and digital networks. Despite this history, fansubbing and peer-to-peer distribution remain deeply ambivalent and polarizing practices, exemplified by the ways in which fans, industry, and practitioners grapple with the motivations and effects of these cultural practices as it relates to questions of access and impact on production industries. While much has already been written about the motivations and practices of fansubbers prior to the rise of streaming services, my research seeks to centralize the impact that the existence of formal distribution portals has had on the English anime fansubbing community, and where different forms of illicit distribution have emerged to challenge the once-dominant presence of anime fansubbing. One such emergent figure, which intersects with the streaming services’ rise to mainstream popularity, is the fan-ripper: individuals who use automated scripts to download content from these formal streaming services to distribute illicitly elsewhere. Whereas previously, the practice of fansubbing had largely been justified as a means for proliferating awareness and access to anime in a media landscape that seemed disinterested and incapable of licensing productions in a timely fashion, that is no longer the case, as simulcasting services like Crunchyroll, HiDive, and Funimation release content often merely an hour after the official broadcasting in Japan. 

            Given the prevalence of fan-ripping and formal anime streaming services in the United States, the number of individuals who are devoted to the practice of fansubbing has declined. Anime fansubbing used to be divided into two distinct groups that were distinguished by their strategy of approaching translation. There were the speed-subbers, who focused on delivering fans rapid-fire subtitles, often at the cost of quality, and then there were the quality-subbers, who would often take their time to ensure accurate subtitles, immersive typesetting and effects, and more. The advent of simulcasting streaming services largely put speed-subbers out of business, as no matter how speedy a fansubbing group may be, it was impossible to compete against streaming services who often receive early access to the work in order to create their own subtitles for coordinated international releases. Beyond the formal streaming portal, it was also difficult for speed-subbers to compete against the growing community of fan-rippers, who would automatically download the content that streaming services provide and distribute them to often-illicit anime providers. It is no surprise then that one of the primary justifications that contemporary fansubbers give for their continued presence in the distribution landscape is that of “quality,” as this discursive thread is a remnant of the quality fansubbing groups that used to exist alongside the speed-subbers. 

            How “quality” is discursively defined within the fansubbing community and their supporters primarily revolve around the editing of the translations, typesetting, and the inclusion of unique textual features that fansub groups incorporate in order to cater specifically to fans’ needs. These definitions of quality exist against the grain of official releases from streaming portals. For example, throughout a series of interviews that I did with active fansubbers, features like karaoke type during the opening/endings of series, immersive typesetting of background signs and text, as well as organic sounding translations that carefully balance accuracy became markers that distinguish the fansub from the official translations. Simultaneously, fansubbers were quick to denounce the quality and perceived weaknesses of official translations, often criticizing exploitative labor practices as one primary reason for the continued mediocrity of official releases. As a few interviewees noted, their fansubbing work would not be complete until official releases can meet their unique standards of quality. To the contemporary fansubber, spending more time working on a translation as a passion project is more amenable than the idea of working for a company that provides paltry pay and demands an unreasonable schedule for getting this labor done. Indeed, several fansubbers were deeply critical of the ways in which they saw corporate entities exploit the professional translator’s fannish passions for anime to encourage them to take lower rates than what may otherwise be considered the norm for translation labor in other fields. While much of the news regarding low pay rates and exploitative labor conditions are not publicized, the whisper networks that connect fansubbers to professional translators continue to allow certain forms of gossip and knowledge to travel. Admittedly, it is difficult to discern the extent of veracity of this news, but its existence nevertheless reveals much about the ideological tensions that exist between official corporate players and those that work within the informal economy. 

This distinction between the unpaid digital laborer feeling empowered through their hobbies and the professional as being exploited, despite being economically compensated and retaining the clout of working on their beloved projects in an official capacity, echoes Tizianna Terranova’s observation of free labor on the Internet as “not necessarily exploited labor” (Terranova 2000, 48). While in the earlier years, the clout that fansubbers would receive from making anime accessible to non-Japanese speakers may have deeply shaped the neoliberal fannish economy, such clout is rarely found today, as the viewers who often engage with fansubs are those who are willing to wait for their release, sometime after the ripped or official version has already been made available. When asked why contemporary fansubbers continue to do this labor in spite of dwindling subcultural capital, my interviewees often repeated that as much as contemporary fansubbers continue to toil in the name of “quality,” what often really motivates them to remain is the friends and forms of community that continue to persist in the face of a changing distribution landscape that may eventually call for their obsolescence. While Matt Hills noted in his work on fansubbers that these groups often acted in highly competitive and individualized manners that reflected the neoliberal market dynamics of cultural production, that no longer seems to be the case within English fansubbing, as individuals often moved and collaborated between groups depending on where they saw a need for their particular skill sets (2016). Where we see the neoliberal branding function of fandom is now largely between fan-ripping groups, due to their rise in visibility in the current media distribution network.  

Despite the multivalent work that the concept of “quality” is doing in both discursively marking the boundaries between fansub and official release, as well as providing justification for the continued necessity for fansubbers, there remain critical points of overlap between these two supposedly rivaling factions. The emerging figure of the fan-ripper is one result of these areas of overlap. While the fan-ripper takes advantage of the simulcasting capacity of the formal service, they continue to compete for space and attention within the digital arenas that once were occupied primarily by fansubbing groups. With faster release schedules, it is often the fan-ripped content that receive the most engagement from viewers with a few exceptions, such as the fansubbing groups that strategically work with content that reside in “Netflix jail,” a term that was coined to describe when content was being broadcast to nations abroad, but purposely stalled for a full “bingeable” season release in one’s own country. While most fansubbers seem apathetic about the presence of rippers within their community, many were quick to denounce that what they did was fundamentally similar to that of the rippers, leveraging labor and dedication to the crafts that come with fansubbing as something that fundamentally separates them from the rippers.

Fansubbers were once the primary means of access to many anime titles; however, with the mainstream success of streaming services, accessibility is no longer a concern for many English-speaking anime fans. While the fracturing of anime catalogues along the lines of each service may be a challenge for avid consumers, rippers conveniently fill in those gaps with relative ease and piracy continues to challenge official industry players across national and cultural boundaries. While much scholarship has been done on the impact of streaming services on current media industries, its effects on the shadow cultural economies which powered much of the engagement with international media forms like anime in the past has largely gone understudied. For some fandoms, such as East Asian dramas (Viki) and Webtoons, the labor of fansubbing seems to have been co-opted by official industries as a convenient source of labor, further blurring the boundary between formal and informal economy (Dwyer 2012). However, this co-option will likely not happen between the English-speaking anime fandom and the official distributors that serve them, due to the continued antagonism between fansubbers and official industry players. Despite the myriad ways in which both actors contribute to one another’s cultural practices, the discursive strategies employed by both official industry and fansubbers alike reveal how one can understand the distinct ethical systems and ideologies that emerge within the formal and informal economy.  

Bibliography

Dwyer, Tessa. "Fansub Dreaming on ViKi: “Don’t Just Watch But Help When You Are Free”." The Translator 18, no. 2 (2012): 217-243.

GJM. Kamisama ni Natta Hi episode one screenshot. Oct. 12, 2020. Digital image.  

Hills, Matt. "Transnational cult and/as neoliberalism: The liminal economies of anime fansubbers." Transnational Cinemas 8, no. 1 (2017): 80-94.

Terranova, Tiziana. "Free labor." In Digital Labor, pp. 41-65. Routledge, 2012.

Author Bio 

Susan Noh is a PhD candidate in the Media and Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research interests include the digital circulation of international media, fan studies, and the formation of global audiences. 

Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation Series: Libertad Borda and Thessa Jensen (Part Two)

Libertad Borda: Before tackling the subject of our role as researchers, I would like to comment on some very interesting points in your reply. I definitely agree with you on most. Social media platforms like the ones you mentioned really did make a big impact on fan universe, but not always with desirable results. For instance, together with another colleague, Carla Trovarelli, I tried to delve into the Wattpad phenomenon a few years ago, and we were really shocked to find how many of the things we thought were a given in fandoms, or at least in fanfiction writing communities (such as implicit reciprocity rules, gift economy and the like), were completely out of the picture in this new environment. This can be read in

Borda, L. and C. Trovarelli (2021). “Relatos en Wattpad: ¿es posible una fanfiction sin fanatismo?” [Wattpad Stories: is fanfiction outside fandoms possible?” in Borda, L. and F. A. Gandolfi (eds.), Fanatismos. promoteo libros.https://prometeoeditorial.com/libro/1260/Fanatismos.

And much of this new panorama derived from the fact that the link between the old fans and new fans was broken in a way. You hit the nail on the head in two respects: mentorship and ownership. “Mentorship falls away”, you said. We found a whole new trend of fanfic writers who landed on Wattpad without any knowledge of the old fandom traditions, so many things that were so often discussed over the years like Mary Sue, or respecting the fanon, were completely dismissed, not even actively, but just because they ignored them. Real Person Fiction, which was often marginal within fanfiction writing communities, started to emerge as a potent force within Wattpad. Maybe there is another good explanation for that emergence, but we concluded that it might be due to the fact that “filing off the serial numbers” is much easier when it comes to RPF. The nice boy with the face of Harry Styles simply becomes Billy or similar, and there is no “author” sending you cease and desist letters if you publish the story with a major publishing house. And with this growth of RPF we get to a point where a very peculiar thing happens; fanfics are revamped leaving no trace of the original connection to fandoms (that is the reason for the title of our article).

And then there is the second question, ownership. Wattpad is a for-profit company, and indeed now a very profitable one, so the only traditions encouraged are those that lead to profit. Whereas “real” publishing for the world outside fandoms was very rarely considered in the old communities, Wattpad as a platform motivates users to think that their fic can be printed and that they can be the next Anna Todd. These cases are exceptional, that is true. But the expectation is created, and even industry players have their Wattpad profiles. Down goes the fourth wall…

If we stick to the question of the site architecture, another problem comes up. Wattpad is a site for stories, any story, so even if fanfiction is often characterized as the third genre in the platform as regards the quantity of stories posted, it is not the only type of fiction there. On the other hand, tagging stories in Wattpad is not very orderly, mainly because (back to your lucid comments) there is little or no mentorship. So, users get an explosive combo of corporate ownership, lack of mentorship and poor tagging, which can make Wattpad into a confusing universe for those who were used to the old traditions which prepared the reader about what to expect from fics. And at this point I would like to return to one question I raised in my opening statement and that is the new role of corporations/industry in relation to fandoms and fanification. In a context where this is happening, we cannot expect corporate-owned platforms to lean towards memory and content safety, because that is not important for these players. Of course, I really think that moves such as OTW/AO3 are extremely important to resist profit drive, and maybe one of our roles as researchers is to call attention to this asymmetric situation.

As you can see, I am trying to link this with your question about our role as researchers and your legitimate worry about bringing some practices into the limelight, I wonder if in these which we might call “new ways of being a fan”, this is really seen as an issue or, on the contrary, visibility can become a goal for many. But if the fandom or even the individual fan in question is not ready to “come out of the closet”, we must find ways of referring to those practices without revealing data that they do not want to expose. You know this is an old problem for field research.  But I did not stumble on this kind of issue during my work. Instead, it was fun to read in one telenovela forum I researched in the past a comment as to “Why researching on this? It is like researching on a coke lid, no use”. That is, they were not really worried about it, indifference was more the attitude. On the other hand, when a boy wrote me once telling me that he had created a Facebook group to post Betty la fea (the Colombian soap opera) fanfiction, I was thrilled because Betty writers had never used the term fanfiction before. They spoke about “Betty stories”, “imagined stories”, etc. So I asked him when they had started to use it, and to my dismay he said that it was after reading one of my papers. I had not participated in the forums I studied because they were too many and they stretched over a 15-year long period. But still, the fan’s answer proved that sometimes you intervene in the field even if you do not intend to.

I have one last question for you. I would like to know your position about this corporate advance on fan traditions, or if you coincide about this diagnosis. Maybe you are more optimistic.

 Thessa Jensen: So, the corporations and commercialisation of fandom. I really like your paper on Wattpad! We need more of that kind of research! And it also shows how important it is to keep “our” kind of fandom safe. Not just because it is special–which it is–but because it shows how things can be done online. How you can create spaces where people feel safe, recognised, and belonging to a community, which they help build and maintain. All things, which you won’t find on Wattpad or other platforms that use user-created content to earn money. And sorry to say, I am not optimistic. Look at AO3, every time they make a donation drive, we get the usual discussions on why they need money and how it can be so expensive to just run a few servers. Again, it shows the lack of history, lack of knowledge about how AO3 works. It is fan created, fan maintained, voluntary work–and anybody can become part of it and get their ideas tested and discussed, maybe even implemented. But you must do something, must invest time and work in this–instead, people seem to dismiss it, complain about it, and have lots of ideas on how to change it, without taking steps to make those ideas workable. So, sorry, I’m very pessimistic about this.

One of the things which worries me is the growing use of Patreon and sites like it, where fans earn money by writing fanfiction. It blurs lines between hobby and work, copyright and fair use. Also, between being a fan, a follower, just a reader–creating expectations, demands, and probably lots of other stuff, which will further erode the community-based culture of fanfiction.

And maybe, maybe, that should be our prerogative as a researcher? Fighting to keep the good things of fandom alive, by showing what is possible today? And showing the new side of fandom, entangled in money and possible fame (with all the bad things this entails)?

Libertad Borda: We both seem to agree on the importance of highlighting these tendencies to fandom commercialization as researchers. Anyway, in my view, we should not forget two aspects of this situation: 1) many fan practices have been disseminated into much bigger audiences/communities as compared to previous small and protected groups, which is not necessarily a problem. I made a point of researching on these fan practices that transcended small groups. As is often the case in an expansion process, some traditions change and are likely to continue changing over time. On the other hand, 2) fandoms themselves, as you and I already pointed out in our opening statements, are not free from the issues that affect society at large, and this drive to profit is one of them, operating at the expense of neglecting or directly abandoning other practices based on reciprocity. Some fans claim that the urge to monetize fan labour is legitimate, and they may be right, but the problem is the power asymmetry that I pointed out before. Selling your work to corporations may imply following the path those companies have already marked for you, no matter how good your intentions are. This phenomenon is not likely to change if society itself does not, but I think that we must keep on reflecting on these matters and even trying to engage into dialogue with fields of studies which approach these problems in other areas.

Thessa Jensen: YES! To all of the above. And thank you, Dr Borda, for this interesting and eye-opening discussion!

Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Libertad Borda and Thessa Jensen (Part One)

Libertad Borda: Hi, Dr. Jensen, it is a pleasure to take part in this dialogue with you, because our countries are really far apart, but there are always common areas to talk about. For instance, although many of the things you mention in your statement were extremely interesting, I think we might start talking about what you call “the darker side of fandom”. You rightly focus attention about the fact that research of fandom and fanfiction communities implies approaching not only creative and positive practices “but also the ugly sides like extremism, conspiracy theories, racism, shitstorms”. In some works, mainly from people who are beginning their research on online fandoms, only the bright side emerges, but fandoms are framed in a bigger structure where class, race and gender biases still prevail in many respects.  I would like to hear more about how the design of platforms could help to somehow control this negativity, as you suggest.

Thessa Jensen: Thank you, Dr Borda!

Like you, I find a dialogue like this very interesting, especially because we belong to such different cultures and, as far as I can tell, work on and with fandom in very different ways. So, let’s start with your question on the design of platforms and how or if it could help control the darker side of fandom. Well, the short answer would be: I would love to have a clear and positive answer for this one. It is easier to tell which design choices aren’t working. Like, Tumblr’s reblogging, which is copying the original post, enabling the reblogger to comment and with that, totally change the original meaning. At the same time, neither the original blogger nor any subsequent reblogger and commenter will be able to follow each of the ensuing arguments. Comments aren’t threaded, and what started out as a positive post about a certain fandom might end up as a threatening attack on fans, who love a certain ship in that fandom.

Because Tumblr as a platform focuses on the posts, that is, content, content creation, and ease of reblogging, rather than community building. The latter would need the possibility to engage in a meaningful dialogue with other fans. Making it possible to follow comment threads as well as identifying and possibly block certain fans from participating in a certain community. All of which is not possible on Tumblr. You can find that kind of functionality on platforms like Discord or Facebook, where fandom groups are plenty. However, here you need an invite, which means, these groups are not easy to find for new fans. Also, you are dependent on the administrators of these groups. While most have explicit rules on how to interact and what to post, these groups can be shut down at any time or certain fans can be blocked from entering the space.

While this is still a problem, I have encountered several groups, where not one but at least two or more people are collaborating as administrators, making the risk of a random shutdown, or blocking of other fans less likely. Also, several of these groups have a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy, again, making it possible for fans to learn how to behave, or to discuss whether a certain rule should change.

So, to sum up, for the design part I would recommend looking at sites like Discord, where the users have a site which provides possibilities for organising groups in a very democratic way, in principle giving each fan a voice on which behaviour is wanted and unwanted. However, Discord is not good when it comes to the archiving and content creation part. It’s very difficult to search for certain comments or memes or other content, which is created on the go, through the various chat channels in a given group.

For this, the archiving part, you would need something like the archiveofourown.org (AO3). This is to me the epitome of what online communities are able to create, maintain and use for community building, even if the focus is on the archive and the content creation. I won’t explain a lot about how AO3 came to live, please read

Fiesler, C., Morrison, S., & Bruckman, A. S. (2016, May). An archive of their own: a case study of feminist HCI and values in design. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2574-2585)

Fiesler, C., Morrison, S., Shapiro, R. B., & Bruckman, A. S. (2017, February). Growing their own: Legitimate peripheral participation for computational learning in an online fandom community. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 1375-1386).

What AO3 offers, beside the community, which operates behind the scenes and keeps the archive running, is a way to connect with other fanfiction writers (collections, fandoms, writing competitions, translations, etc.), fanfiction readers (comments, likes, follows, etc.), and through all of this create a tent-pole, a place, where fans can find other fans in the first place. However, there is no means of private messaging or chatting like on Tumblr or on Discord. You had part of this on livejournal.com, where you could post content, comment on it, create fandom groups including a set of rules and an administrator. And while you had fandom wank and fandom rants, in your own group of fellow fans, you could discuss fandom related issues in relative safety.

Does this help on how to tackle the darker side of fandom? *sigh* I think you'll always have problems with people who can’t accept other people. People, who will not play by the rules, either because they find it funny to stir up drama (which, sorry to say, seems to be the main cause for trolling, doxxing and the like–because it is “fun” to watch people getting furious, sad, or irritated) or because they have a just cause, which other people don’t or won’t recognise as such. The latter probably because of privilege and not wanting to change one's ways. Which probably isn’t a very good answer for your very good question in the first place.

With the above, I would like to point to three elements of importance regarding the design of platforms.

First, the possibility of having a shared history. History creates context, a common ground for fans to talk from and understand any ongoing discussion. But history is elusive, especially with social media platforms. Their design is built on new-ness; new content is created and distributed constantly, changing the timeline, pushing the most engaging posts to the front. None of this helps in creating a common ground, rather the opposite. Sites like fanlore.org, a part of the OTW, is trying to change this. But it also shows why it is problematic: to have a history, you need a separate website. This includes a certain slow-ness; instead of new content being pushed our way, existing content should stay for longer, being examined, discussed, and catalogued, before being pushed away by a new post.

Second, participatory culture needs media, which are easy to use, access, and distribute. With this, mentorship falls away, because anybody can comment and share every post on a platform without the need of learning anything about the context or background. Using platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr for fandom means a constant call to action: Like this! Reblog that! Comment! Tweet! Do! Participation in fandom presupposes not only knowledge about the fandom in question, but also knowledge about canon and fanon of said fandom. Participation should require a certain patience on the side of fans with each other, teaching and learning the do’s and don’ts about the fandom. A patience, which is contrary to the world of social media as we know it.

Third, ownership. As it is, archiveofourown.org (AO3) is one of the very few platforms on the Internet, which is created, developed, and maintained by the users who use it (another one is Wikipedia). Ownership regarding fandom is more than controlling your data. In our case, fandom has time and again experienced platform owners who with short or no notice close profiles, delete fanworks, or change terms of service. All of which is a call back to fandom history and the need to remember. Ownership means influence on how fandom could move on, change, and become a new way of participation and community. Ownership, on the flipside, also means hard work, and in the case of AO3, volunteers, who work for free.

This leads me to a question for you (or maybe both of us). You come from another part of the world, and another part of fan studies. How do you see our roles as researchers? I for one, am always afraid of breaking things, meaning, I want to understand fandom, but at the same time, I’m afraid of drawing attention to people and their work in a way, which drags them into the limelight. Maybe making it difficult for them to continue doing what they do.

Global Fandom: Thesa Jensen (Denmark)

The Hogwarts Express at Magical Days in Odense, Denmark, 2019. The one week long festival started as a Harry Potter reading event at the Odense Libraries in 2016.

An interweaving braid of fanfiction, design thinking, and ontological ethics

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/33774943.

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The Løgstrupian

Thessa Jensen & Peter Vistisen, Thessa Jensen & Bo Allesøe Christensen, Thessa Jensen & Bo Allesøe Christensen & Jacqueline Meintzinger

Knud Ejler Løgstrup, Peter Vistisen, Bo Allesøe Christensen, Jacqueline Meintzinger

ontological ethics, design thinking, crossmedia content quadrant, positioning theory, secular eschatology

Published: 2021-09-09 Words: 1212

An interweaving braid of fanfiction, design thinking, and ontological ethics

by ThessaJensen

Summary

Prompt by professor Henry Jenkins:

"The statement would introduce you and your work and offer some more general observations about fandom and fandom studies in the country where you do your research."

Notes

While the following is an introduction to fandom studies in Denmark, at least in the way, I have conducted my research through the years, it is not a particularly Danish fandom research.

While we have Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) and Olsen Banden (an old movie series about three crooks, always trying and failing to carry out the great coup), identifying Danish fans in fanfiction has proven rather difficult. Most Danes speak and write English quite well, and just blend into online fandoms without identifying themselves as Danes.

I hope, the following will suffice anyway.

See the end of the work for more notes

”The radical demand says that we are to care for the other person in a way that best serves his interest. It says that but nothing more. What this means in a given situation a person must discover for himself in terms of his own unselfishness and in the light of his own understanding of life. This is why in the very nature of things it is impossible to obey the radical demand on the basis of motives which are foreign to the demand.”

Løgstrup, K. E. (1997), The Ethical Demand, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, p. 47.

I am an academic, and was for a long time, before I discovered fandom and with it, fanfiction. It took a while, before I realised how well my research into interactive digital media and design thinking would fit within the realm of fandom communities. From the crossmedia content quadrant, which shows how a tentpole event can give rise to fandom (1); through understanding how the design of platforms used by fans support or restrain different kinds of communities (2); the importance of presence in fandom spaces (3); an analysis of The JohnLock Conspiracy expanding the notion of secular eschatology and analysing the design of Tumblr as part of the problem (4); and using positioning theory to understand the was fans interact with each other through the creation of fanfiction (5). As scattered and disorderly as this may seem, there is one thing, which connects these different themes besides all being part of fandom life. It is the theory of ontological ethics by Knud Ejler Løgstrup, a Danish philosopher who contemplated the ethical basics of everyday life.

For Løgstrup the ethical starting point is the specific, dyadic meeting of two people. This meeting places demands on the two people involved. The ‘other person’ places an unspoken demand of trust, openness of speech, compassion, and a wordless appeal for non-violence on the first one, the ‘I’. These demands are the sovereign expressions of life, and they will, according to Løgstrup, always be present when two people meet each other. The sovereign expressions of life can be seen as an undercurrent in the meeting.

The radical demand found in Løgstrup’s ethics, is thus based on the actual situation, the actual people involved in it, and how the one person determines what is in the best interest of the other. This leaves the ‘I’ in a constant struggle with the threat of paternalism, because the ‘I’ must keep listening to and empathically recognize the other’s needs without assuming unlimited responsibility for the other.

Fandom and fanfiction communities are people meeting other people. The online platforms used by fans can be seen as a kind of institutions, mediating certain structures, constraints, and possibilities for building of communities. Basically, however, a fan meets another fan–and magic happens. Fandom is about human beings coming together, recognising, acknowledging, and respecting each other. This is the reason why I understand Løgstrup’s ontological ethics as the basic grounding for my research.

With this in mind, my three main categories of fandom research are:

1. The platform, its design, and the designer as the “I”, and the fandom community as the “other”. Here, my main interest is on the possible interactions of fans with each other provided through the design of the given platform. How does design influence the creation and maintenance of a community? Further, how can a design afford for the creation of new content? And why can different kinds of communities, one appreciative and creative, another misrecognising and destructive, exist side by side on the same platform? While the designers of the platform are invisible, their choices decide, how the platform can be used–even if the users, here, the fans, often create workarounds, or simply flood a new platform for their own purposes, forcing the designers(?) into a re-design (as seen with the chat roulette platform Omegle).

2. The researcher as the “I” and the fan and fandom community as the “other”. This is the always present question of power, paternalism, freedom of research. Who has the right to articulate how fandom works? Should we even use fandom as a subject for research? How much has fandom changed from the hidden, sold under the counter fanzines, to influencers advertising their fannishness as a way of monetising through sponsors and followers? Is fandom as critical, inclusive, diverse, and equal, as we as researchers want to believe?

3. The fan and The other fan. This meeting of two likeminded people.The idea that a common third, the fandom, makes it possible to create a third space, where people can meetup and hangout, being themselves, their true selves, behind the security of a pseudonym or total anonymity. Participating as a fanfiction writer, reader, and commenter; taking part in fandom events, writer’s challenges, even a few cons over the years. The joy in being accepted as an equal, despite my shortcomings as a writer (English not being my native language), but also feeling the anxiousness as a fanfiction writer when posting. Will they like what they read? Will there be any readers at all? The happiness about comments, likes, follows. But most of all the direct interactions with other fans on Tumblr, in AO3’s comments section, in real life. Realising that fandom can make friends, can be life changing in so many ways.

Løgstrup’s ontological ethics, based upon he actual meeting between two or more people, has been my guiding principle. Even so, I am bound to have made mistakes, of course I am and will be. As well as doubting my research. Should I publish my findings? Am I doing the right thing, exposing this to a world outside fandom and fanfiction? Is it even necessary to do so?

While the doubt is ever present, I use myself and my own stories, the way I react, as the seed for understanding and explaining what fanfiction and fandom is about. I use my colleagues and co- authors as sounding boards, incorporating different perspectives on the phenomenon, we are trying to analyse. And, I have my ‘fan whisperers’ who have spent more years than me in fandoms, lived through the ups and downs of Harry Potter, livejournal.com, or Tumblr. Fans who know about my research, have participated actively in it, explained and listened, discussed and argued. Showing me new perspectives, supported my conclusions, dismissed others.

And yet, here I am, still wondering if it is the right thing to do. Fandom and fanfiction communities can be seen as petri dishes for the Internet as a whole. Small groups, high interaction and engagement, seriousness and passion, but also the ugly sides like extremism, conspiracy theories, racism, shitstorms. Research of fandom and fanfiction communities is research into the creativity and passion of people, showing what fandom can provide for fans, but also, and maybe more importantly, the negativity which is the darker side of fandom–and which might give a glimpse of how and why the design of platforms can be seen as a solution to some of the problems we encounter on the Internet these days.

The Hogwarts Express at Magical Days in Odense, Denmark, 2019. The one week long festival started as a Harry Potter reading event at the Odense Libraries in 2016.

Thessa Jensen, PhD, associate professor at the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark.
The focus of her research is on the emergence and development of fanfiction communities on online platforms. Based on K. Løgstrup’s ontological ethics and A. Honneth’s theory of recognition, she explores the possibilities and challenges faced by fans within these online communities. She reads and writes fanfiction, and maintains a Tumblr blog.

NOTES
(1) The crossmedia content quadrant was developed with my colleague Peter Vistisen, PhD, associate professor, Aalborg University, Denmark. Together, we have explored fanfiction, designers as fans, and lately looked into the field of design fiction, fictional accounts of emerging technologies and diegetic prototypes, set in the near future.

Jensen, T., & Vistisen, P. (2013). Tent-Poles of the Bestseller: How Cross-media Storytelling can spin off a Mainstream Bestseller. Akademisk kvarter / Academic Quarter, 7, 237-248. http://www.akademiskkvarter.hum.aau.dk/pdf/vol7/16a_TjensenPVistisen_TenPoles.pdf

Jensen, T., & Vistisen, P. (2017). Ethical Design Fiction: Between storytelling and world building. In ETHICOMP 2017 Conference Proceedings: Values in Emerging Science and Technology (2 ed., Vol. 1). Ethicomp https://doi.org/10.29297/orbit.v1i2.56

(2) Jensen, T. (2013). Designing for relationship: Fan fiction sites on the Internet. In H. Nykänen, O. P. Riis, & J. Zeller (Eds.), Theoretical and Applied Ethics (1 ed., Vol. 5, pp. 241-255). Aalborg Universitetsforlag. Applied Philosophy / Anvendt Filosofi Vol. 5 No. 1 http://forlag.aau.dk/Shop/laering-og-uddannelse/theoretical-and-applied-ethics.aspx

(3) Jensen, T. (2017). On the importance of presence within fandom spaces. Journal of Fandom Studies, 5(2), 141-156. [1]. https://doi.org/10.1386/jfs.5.2.141_1

(4) Together with my colleague Bo Allesøe Christensen, PhD, associate professor, Aalborg University, Denmark, I have been working on understanding the social, philosophical, and ethical implications of online fanfiction communities. We are currently working on an elaboration of positioning theory to explain how online media and platform design influences communities.

Christensen, B. A., & Jensen, T. (2018). The JohnLock Conspiracy, fandom eschatology, and longing to belong. Transformative Works and Cultures, 27, [2]. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1222

(5) Jacqueline Meintzinger, independent researcher, is a fandom friend and co-author, who provides valuable insights into the life of online fandom, as well as a profound knowledge about fandom history.

Jensen, T., Christensen, B. A., & Meintzinger, J. (2020). Positionierung und Kooperationspraktiken in Fanfiktiongemeinschaften. AugenBlick - Konstanzer Hefte zur Medienwissenschaft, 78/79, 141-157.

Please drop by the archive and comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!

Global Fandom: Libertad Borda (Argentina)

A handwritten note (The Peronist Box) advertising cheap items in an anime convention in Buenos Aires (Photograph: Gerardo del Vigo).

Although it has become more and more difficult to establish a clear correlation between fandoms, practices and national roots, mainly for online researchers, I am going to speak from the perspective of the Argentine context. But in the first place, I would like to summarize the hypothesis built in my PhD dissertation (2012), which was a theoretical input for other researchers whom I was honored to tutor in their graduate and postgraduate works. In dialogue with the different trends within fan studies literature, I ventured the idea that the fan phenomenon [fanatismo] has become a true pool of diverse resources (comprising attitudes, expectations, practices, and relational modes between peers and with institutions) which increasingly contributes to the creation of individual or collective identities. I borrowed this expression from E.P. Thompson (1990) with the intention of addressing some of the criticism directed at previous academic approaches and moving away from the reference to a condition corresponding to a certain “type” of consumer. In these observations I made a provisional list of the items in that pool, which is constantly growing or being restructured. Among many other items, the list included elements such as enunciative and textual productivity, the building of community and reciprocal ties, modes of performance.  The main objective of this enumeration was simply to highlight the fact that there were no a priori hierarchies among items: against any prescriptive or normalizing notion of fans, this hypothesis proposes that we cannot predict whether they will be “textual poachers” like the DeCerteausian consumers, industry watchdogs or any of the multiple possible grades between the two. 

Which will be the combination of ítems and the direction the fandom or fan in question will go? Will they appropriate the text in an escapist way? Will their reading be resistant? Will they form a subculture with their peers? Will they be functional to industry interests? Will they generate new practices opaque to the eyes of that same industry? There are no answers previous to field analysis, as it will all depend on the specific configuration of the historical context, industry conditions, former fan experience of the members and, very importantly, some other cleavages like gender, class, or race. 

Another key aspect of this proposal is that though this pool of resources was firstly sketched by fan actions, today it is also available for the industry itself.  Industry always took fans into account, providing them with material and taking advantage of their networks. However, this was a relationship with fans who were already self-identified as such, because the main aim was to gain bigger and bigger mass audiences, and they considered fans as enthusiastic, though eccentric, disseminators, who helped in this process.  

Today, though mass production is still an intrinsic drive for industry, fans clearly stopped being the marginal helper who knocked at the back door to become a key word in marketing lingo, not only in entertainment but also in all economic fields (“turn customers into fans” is today’s marketing mantra). Thus, fanification of audiences is another step in the process of commercialization. Industry strategically selects resources, discarding those which do not guarantee control over the activity they encourage. 

As from this general theoretical basis, my research group has been able to find common grounds for local studies on very different fandoms such as music fandoms (cumbia and romantic music fans), media fandoms (comprising such diverse objects as global franchises and local TV genres), and soccer fandom. 

Now that I have outlined theses general premises, I would like to make three specific observations:

1) Nominalization issues: In the so called peripheral countries (as opposed to central ones,  but mainly to US central position), fan studies researchers experience an extra challenge which is the linguistic mismatch as regards English lexicon. For decades, in Argentina the term used was “admiradores” [admirers], and when “fan” began to get used, it was only restricted to club membership. To add further confusion, “fanático” was also used, and this probably contributed to fuel both the religious overtones in media representations, stressing the negative aspect of the practices.  It was approximately around 2000 that “fan” started to encompass a more neutral meaning. In the sports field this mismatch is even larger, because “fan” was only incorporated in recent years and its use is still limited. Soccer fans (Argentina’s most popular sport) are named “hinchas”, and the fandom is “hinchada”. These terms tend to refer more to bodily practices and do not easily travel from offline to online. This fact may have influenced the special isolation of scholars who study soccer fans (a field with an important development in Argentina. Pablo Alabarces’s work, for instance) from other fan-related object researchers. Up to a point, the rejection of many soccer fans to be named as such is also found in scholars of that area, who avoid interacting with fan studies literature. We could also hypothesize a gender bias here, because “passion” for soccer is seen as a legitimate feeling whereas “adoring” a singer or an actor is still rejected as teen feminine irrationality (though with much less aggressiveness today) and, much more often, unproductive expenditure. 

2) Transformation of objects and fandoms: Fandoms have always been prone to change, but sometimes the change in fandoms derives from transformations in the object itself. Such is the case of the Latin American TV genre knows as telenovela.  As it has very often been remarked, melodrama is the Latin American cultural pattern par excellence, permeating languages, genres and even political and religious discourses. Telenovela has been its main exponent for decades and the online reactions of its audience was the focal point of my PhD work. Years ago telenovelas showed locations of nearby countries, such as Brazil, México or Colombia, and old telenovela fan forums (today practically non-existent due to new social networks such as Facebook or Twitter) brimmed with questions on the meaning of certain words not used in Río de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay) Spanish, or of slightly different local habits. Currently, this situation has changed, mainly in Argentina, where very few telenovelas are produced today (even before pandemics) and the genre is no longer the transgenerational object it used to be–now it is relegated to lower income, older demographics. To make matters worse, new industry players made their way into the market, such as Turkey (today you can watch four Turkish soap operas a week in Argentine broadcast TV, and none from Argentina). So the old melodrama has moved to some very restricted spaces within streaming platforms, mainly Netflix. These platforms have a much lower share among the lower income sectors, which traditionally formed the core telenovela audience even when it was watched across different social sectors. On the other hand, the panorama of streaming platforms is completely different from that of television. US and other central countries shows take up the overwhelming majority of the options available, and local offerings face a David-Goliath fight, so they have to adapt to different production modes from those of the old national products. Thus, one of challenges facing melodrama fan researchers is to enquire how the sociocultural profile of this new fan has changed and which of the old fandom practices still prevail. 

3)              National peculiarities. Whereas fandoms tend to have common features worldwide, there are always peculiarities. Argentinians are often considered very politically minded, and youth plays an important part in political participation. So (party) politics is part of everyday social discourse and consequently it can crawl its way into many situations involving fan practices. For instance, six years ago when a new telenovela was announced starring actors and actresses who sympathized with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (aka CFK, former President and today’s Vice-president), many genre fans who hated her announced an anti-fan campaign against the telenovela. So many CFK supporters took it as a sort of duty to watch it as part of its political obligations, and to advocate it in Facebook and Twitter. Unknowingly for most, they acted like a very vocal fandom. 

To give an example from a very different fandom, we can see party politics also making its way into local anime conventions. The use of Peronism as a synonym for cheap and popular (image 1), or the offer of “Otaku and Peronist” pins (image 2) are indicative of tensions within society in general but also within this fandom, which has, in the last two decades, witnessed the surge of new fans from a different social sector than that of upper and middle classes who used to form most of the fandom. This use is probably ironic for most Otaku, but there might be newcomers sincerely identifying themselves as Peronist. 

Paradoxically, mainly due to the fact that fan studies are only beginning in Argentina, the questions posed by the link between fandoms and party politics, which are arising in other parts of the world, are still an unexplored field. 

Libertad Borda holds a degree in Communication Sciences (Universidad de Buenos Aires, UBA) and a PhD in Social Sciences (UBA, 2012). Since 1998 I have been a faculty member in UBA, where the course name is Popular Culture and Mass Culture. The title of my doctoral dissertation was Bettymaníacos, luzmarianas y mompirris. El fanatismo en los foros de telenovelas and I coauthored with Federico Álvarez Gandolfi a collection of research works on fandom (Fanatismos. Prácticas de consumo de la cultura de masas, Editorial Prometeo, in press). 

A pin sold in an anime convention in Buenos Aires.