Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet

Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Naruto Fan Fiction Writing: A Case Study

“…Such genre designations, however, do not at all reflect the features that are unique to fan fiction. In this regard, the authors of fan fiction works departed from traditional genres, replacing them with fundamentally new forms (Hills, 2008;Knight, 2016). Peculiarities as mentioned above underline the relevance of the present research as it focuses on the correlation between two relatively young and non-traditional phenomena, namely, fan fiction and AI.…”

“Worlds. . .[of] Contingent Possibilities”: Genderqueer and Trans Adolescents Reading Fan Fiction

“…The tendency in fan studies to view fan fiction-based communities as made up of “women in their thirties and older” (Lackner et al 2006, 191) emphasises the “adult.” This dissociation of fannishness from youth relates to fan studies’ historical impetus to defend fans from accusations of juvenility (Jenson 1992; Tosenberger 2014). Nonetheless, examinations of fans in education and children’s literature studies often assume fans are young (Duggan 2017; Tosenberger 2008b, 2014), while recent work in fan studies has acknowledged the increasing presence of young people in digital fandom (Duggan 2020; Hellekson and Busse 2006; Jenkins 2006; Tosenberger 2014; Willis 2006). I have previously argued (Duggan 2020) that we ought to consider fan fiction communities as intergenerational spaces which blur the boundaries between “child” and “adult.” As Tosenberger (2014) suggests, many fandoms are “mixed-age,” with tremendous “potential for cross-generational interaction and.…”

“…Some scholars have used queer theory as a framework for understanding the interactions between women in fan fiction communities (Lackner et al 2006; Lothian et al 2007), considered how writers use fan fiction to question hetero-/homonormativity (Duggan 2017; Lackner et al 2006), or demonstrated how fan fiction makes visible queer reading practices (Brennan 2019; Duggan 2017, 2019; Tosenberger 2008a, 2008b). Particularly in the last decade, scholars have begun to explore the queer identities of fans and the characters they write (Brennan 2014, 2019; Busse and Lothian 2018; Driscoll 2006; Duggan 2017, 2019; Lothian et al 2007; McClellan 2014; McInroy and Craig 2018; Russo 2013; 2018; Tosenberger 2008a, 2008b; Willis 2006, 2016), and scholars increasingly agree that “the fantasies of gender mobility and sexual freedom apparently played out in fan fiction may be really manifest” in fan fiction communities (Driscoll 2006, 86).…”

“….experience a gendered disjunction between their corporeal (literal) body and their felt (metaphorical) body” (p. 303). Indeed, Willis’s (2006) autoethnographic study of her experiences in the Harry Potter fandom demonstrates how slash can be reparative for the queer child, as it challenges “the queer-eradicating impulses” and “effacement of homosexuality” so common to commercially published texts for young people (p. 161).…”