[QUOTE] From Mizuko Ito, Fandom Unbound, loc. 246-63

Even as otaku culture is recuperated by elites and the mainstream, and as the terms “anime” and “manga” have become part of a common international lexicon, otaku culture and practice have retained their subcultural credibility. In Japan, much of manga and anime is associated with mainstream consumption; otaku must therefore differentiate themselves from ippanjin (regular people) through a proliferating set of niche genres, alternative readings, and derivative works. In the United States, the subcultural cred of anime and manga is buttressed by their status as foreign “cult media.” This stance of U.S. fans is not grounded, however, in a simplistic exoticism. Susan Napier suggests that “rather than the traditional Orientalist construction of the West empowering itself by oppressing or patronizing the Eastern Other, these fans gain agency through discovering and then identifying with a society that they clearly recognize as having both universal and culturally specific aspects” (Napier 2007, 189). She describes how U.S. fans most often explain their interests in terms of the works’ “thematic complexity and three-dimensional characterization” rather than as an interest in Japan per se (Napier 2007, 177).

Put differently, the international appeal of otaku culture is grounded precisely in its ability to resist totalizing global narratives such as nationalism. The long-running and intricate narrative forms of popular Japanese media represent a platform or, in Hiroki Azuma’s terms, a database of referents that are highly amenable to recombination and customization by fans and gamers (see Chapter 2). We can see this in the stunning diversity of doujinshi derived from the same manga series (see Chapters 5 and 9) and in the activities of young Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh! card game players who design their own decks out of the nearly infinite set of possibilities on offer through a growing pantheon of monsters (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004; Ito 2007; Sefton-Green 2004; Willett 2004). While certain female fans might look to Gundam for source material to tell stories of erotic trysts between the male characters, other fans geek out over building and customizing models of the giant robots.

Mizuko Ito, Fandom Unbound, loc. 246-63

[QUOTE] From Casey Fiesler, Everything I Need To Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content, p173

The idea of fan cultures, or “fandoms,” cultivating fan fiction writers began at the earliest in the 1920s with societies dedicated to Jane Austen and Sherlock Holmes, but took off in the late 1960s with the advent of Star Trek fanzines. The negative stereotype of“fans today is that of obsessed geeks, like “Trekkies, who love nothing more than to watch the same installments over and over…” However, this represents a core misunderstanding of what it is to be a fan: that is, to have the“ability to transform personal reaction into social interaction, spectatorial culture into participatory culture… not by being a regular viewer of a particular program but by translating that viewing into some kind of cultural activity.” Henry Jenkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and expert on fan culture, likens fan fiction to the story of The Velveteen Rabbit: that the investment in something is what gives it a meaning rather than any intrinsic merits or economic value. For fans who invest in a television show, book, or movie, that investment sparks production, and reading or viewing sparks writing, until the two are inseparable. They are not watching the same thing over and over, but rather are creating something new instead.

Casey Fiesler, Everything I Need To Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content, p735

Update: Now with link to an open access version of the paper and correct page, apologies for the typo.

[QUOTE] From Anna von Veh, Kindle Worlds: Bringing Fanfiction Into Line But Not Online?

So if being online is so important to fanfiction, why has Amazon not adopted this central mechanism which could have drawn millions of views to its own online site? One reason may simply be that they are relying on sites like Wattpad to generate the traffic to Kindle Worlds. The other may have to do with content control. The plural “Worlds” in Kindle Worlds marks a clear separation between the different fanbases; there will be no boundary crossing here. For fanfiction, boundary crossing of various types is the point. Trying to constrain the unconstrainable is an inherent paradox in a model based on content control. Of course, one way to attempt to control content/text is to contain it in a book rather than have it online where control is always subject to slippage. However, the existence of Fanfiction itself undermines this attempt. Amazon and the licensors have a difficult balancing act. Most licensors would want to retain control over the content that appears online and therefore restrict official content, whether it be original or fan-generated, to their own fan sites; it might indeed be very difficult to keep the licensed Worlds separate in one online environment.

So one could argue that the “form” of the ebook in this case, where online would normally be the “native” medium, answers primarily the needs of the licensors rather than those of the fans and readers. This is not to say that Kindle Worlds shouldn’t have ebooks; even in the fanfiction communities, people create ebooks of fanfics for free download. It is the fact that Kindle Worlds appears to be only about ebooks that is the issue in the context of fanfiction.

Anna von Veh, Kindle Worlds: Bringing Fanfiction Into Line But Not Online?

[QUOTE] From Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately, location 944

Annette Kuhn’s work with “enduring fans” of 1930s films is illustrative. Kuhn interviewed numerous women in their seventies who still enjoyed watching and talking about the films and stars of their twenties, and who still found new meanings in them. She argues, “For the enduring fan, the cinema-going past is no foreign country but something continuously reproduced as a vital aspect of daily life in the present.” As these women grew older, watched different films, and gained new experiences, they were able to return to their beloved texts with new interpretive strategies or nuances, hence keeping the texts alive and active for decades. “As the text is appropriated and used by enduring fans, further layers of inter-textual and extra-textual memory-meaning continuously accrue.”

Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately, location 944

[QUOTE] From Thomas Lamarre, Introduction to Mechademia 6: User Enhanced

in the wake of government policies in Japan promoting Akihabara as a tourist destination and championing otaku culture as a new national paradigm for economic prosperity, some otaku were quick to point out that the prosperity of otaku culture was built by otaku, not by government policy makers or corporations. It was otaku prosperity, and otaku wanted not only credit for it but also their share of it. Such a response returns to and deflates the mass deception theory. It

demonstrates not only the increased significance of user activity but also an increasing awareness on the part of consumers about their role in the generation of value in the context of commodity-worlds. As such, even as user enhancement results in value-added commodities, the value of those com modities, taking the form of commodity-worlds prolonged both by producers and consumers, is not solely the property of corporations. And the questions of “To whom does a commodity-world belong?” and “Who belongs to it?” are becoming a site for the construction and contestation of social paradigms.

Thomas Lamarre, Introduction to Mechademia 6: User Enhanced

[QUOTE] From Patrick Galbraith and Thomas Lamarre, Otakuology: a Dialogue, p362

Scholars working on Japanese popular culture are only distinguished by the quantity of their publications and the novelty of their topics, which conditions a preference for niche subjects, which are analyzed by applying simplified superstructures. The result is a tendency toward exoticizing and essentializing. This tendency often reflects or even reproduces sensationalist journalism about Japan. This is very clear in the context of otaku. Definitions are set up on the basis of “otaku” in Japan, but often with little or no contact with these imagined others, and there is a critical lack of engagement with experts in Japan. Thus discussions of otaku repeat assumptions about unique, even bizarre habits and practices. And such assumptions go unquestioned, because Japanese uniqueness is the last remaining rationale for continued study of Japan itself. Japan appears as the quintessential “non-Western” example.

Patrick Galbraith and Thomas Lamarre, Otakuology: a Dialogue, p362

[REQUEST] Transformative Works and Cultures wants reviewers!

Transformative Works and Cultures, the OTW’s scholarly fan studies journal, is looking to expand its pool of volunteer reviewers. If you are interested in peer reviewing for TWC, please come over to the site, sign up, and create a profile as Reviewer: journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/user/register. You’ll be asked to fill out some information (such as uni affiliation if applicable), but, most importantly, there’s a field in the software where you input your interests and expertise. 

Once you’ve created a reviewer account, please e-mail us to tell us who you are, how you found us, and what you are specifically interested in. We use the journal’s database to find reviewers, but it is often easier when we have spoken to reviewers already and know a bit about them. Then we’ll contact you when a manuscript comes in that fits your expertise, and ask if you can review it.

If you have any questions about reviewing; if you want to know more about submitting essays, Symposium pieces, or book reviews; or if you there’s something specific you want to know about TWC, please feel free to contact us. For more info on what TWC does, check out the recent interview with the editors on the OTW blog.

The Journal Team

editor@transformativeworks.org

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/56457445212

[QUOTE] From Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

(…) fans who create new material or pass along existing media content ultimately want to communicate something about themselves. Fans may seek to demonstrate their own technical prowess, to gain greater standing within a niche community, to speculate about future developments, or to make new arguments using texts already familiar to their own audiences. As the Mad Men Twitter example proves, content often gains traction when people are given the latitude to use “official” media texts to communicate something about themselves.

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

[QUOTE] From Jane Davitt on her transition from fandom to professional writing. Read the full interview at the Verse Versus Versus website.

I’m not as involved as I was and I miss it, but it can’t be forced. It’s a combination of things; I wrote myself out of Buffy, Stargate and then The Sentinel; when you’ve written hundreds of fics based on a set amount of episodes, eventually you run out of ideas or just feel you’ve said all you want to say. But nothing has piqued my interest the way those shows did. […]

Add that to the slowly shrinking pool of friends on LJ as people leave for other sites, and I feel that my door into fandom has narrowed to a crack. I can still get through, I still belong in there — but it’s somewhere I visit, not somewhere I live.

Jane Davitt on her transition from fandom to professional writing. Read the full interview at the Verse Versus Versus website.

[QUOTE] From Fan-Yi Lam, Comic Market: How the World’s Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped Japanese Dōjinshi Culture, p244-245

Though its most important function is still to provide a physical place, Comic Market has also become a symbol of the otaku and dōjinshi communities. It is not only by a wide margin the biggest dōjinshi event in Japan (and therefore related to many subcultural and independent media in Japan), it is also the oldest such event, and the one most famous in the mass media. As the center of attention, with its size and its links to the industry, it is undeniable that Comike possesses the power and the means to influence social, market, and even political developments. In recent years it has not been reluctant to use this power. Whether through conferences on copyright issues or on the establishment of a “National dōjinshi fair liaison group” (Zenkoku dōjinshi sokubaikai renrakukai) in 2000, it has taken on the responsibility of representing and of regulating Japanese dōjinshi culture.

Fan-Yi Lam, Comic Market: How the World’s Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped Japanese Dōjinshi Culture, p244-245

[REQUEST] Attacks on Jane Austen Fanfiction from the establishment?

Hello,

I’m looking for attacks on Jane Austen fanfiction – preferably online fanfiction – from the cultural establishment (scholars, critics, journalists, etc), perhaps denigrating fanfic in terms of its popularity, literary quality, etc. Do you know any of these?

I’ve found comments along these lines on Star Trek ff, not so on JA’s – there’s of course still the general stigma on ff and popular culture as something of a “secondary” order. To my surprise, there does not seem to be much scholarly work on JA ff, whereas there’s quite a lot on Star Trek, X Files, Harry Potter, etc.

Thank you.

 Marina

[QUOTE] From Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, location 2324

Far from giving the audience a role in the storytelling, the participatory aspect of Lost was actually a result of its creators’ strict control. Viewers were ambivalent about the role they wanted to take. One of the most persistent questions the producers got was, how much of this has been plotted out in advance? “The fans want the story to be completely planned out by us,” said Lindelof, “and they also want to have a say. Those two are mutually exclusive.

Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, location 2324

[QUOTE] From Casey Fiesler, Everything I Need To Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content, pp730-731.

When writer Lori Jareo self-published her novel Another Hope and listed it on Amazon.com (Amazon), she expected only her family and friends to see the page and consider purchasing a copy. However, the novel also attracted a great deal of unwanted attention: from mocking bloggers, outraged fans, and Lucasfilms’ lawyers. Another Hope was not a wholly original work, but rather an unauthorized Star Wars “fan fiction” novel: a story using characters and settings from Star Wars without the consent of Lucasfilms, which owns the copyright to the Star Wars universe.

Lucasfilms’ lawyers sent a cease-and-desist notice to Jareo, who then removed the book’s listing from Amazon. While that was the only legal consequence of Jareo’s obvious copyright infringement, the punishment that she received from the public was much more severe. When several well-known science fiction writers and bloggers latched onto the story, they all had strong negative opinions of Jareo’s actions. In April 2006, the story hit dozens of popular blogs, inspiring such mockingly clever titles as “The Stupid is Strong with this One,” and “I Bet She Finds Our Lack of Faith Disturbing.”

Were it not for the Internet publicity concerning the Amazon listing, Lucasfilms may not have ever noticed it. In fact, the book was published nearly a year before the scandal erupted. It was not intellectual property lawyers or the copyright holder that condemned Jareo; rather, it was her fellow fan fiction writers. Jareo broke a major rule when she tried to profit from her fan fiction, and other fans were there to point out her mistake—not only for the faux pas in the fan community but also for the potential attention she brought to the world of fan fiction, a world in which copyright law is largely untested.

Casey Fiesler, Everything I Need To Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content, pp730-731.

[META] Anime gets its own Veronica Mars Kickstarter: overseas fans raise $150.000 in 5 hours for ‘Little Witch Academia’

As reported by Anime News Network and others, Japanese animation studio TRIGGER’s Kickstarter campaign to make a sequel episode to their Little Witch Academia OAV met its goal of $150.000 in less than five hours. The Kickstarter is at $285.000 right now, with a whopping 28 days still left to go.

In the Kickstarter video, TRIGGER co-founder Masahiko Otsuka explains that after the studio uploaded the single-episode anime on YouTube, they got an unexpected flood of comments from overseas fans, many urging them to hold a Kickstarter campaign so they could make more episodes. TRIGGER looked into this Kickstarter thing and decided to give it a go.

TRIGGER was only asking for $150.000 to make one episode, not 2 million like the Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter. I think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to compare the potential effect of the Little Witch Academia campaign on that other now justifiably famous and much-discussed fan funding success, though. TRIGGER has raised almost twice what they asked for already, and the Kickstarter isn’t nearly done.

On the English-speaking part of the Internet, where the concept of using Kickstarter to raise money for creative projects is already very familiar in and of itself, The Veronica Mars campaign fueled a lot of talk about the ethics of pro creators asking fans for money (for a product that they will end up paying for again once it’s ready for sale). I reckon that the discussions surrounding the Little Witch Academia campaign will be more about how Kickstarter could enable overseas fans to support the Japanese anime industry. Overseas fans not only motivated TRIGGER to start the Kickstarter in the first place; they were probably also largely responsible for its smashing success. It sounds like Japanese fans can also participate in Kickstarter campaigns via their Amazon accounts, so there’s no way to tell for sure how many of the people who participated in the Kickstarter were non-Japanese fans, but the comment section seems to be almost entirely in English. 

In the video, TRIGGER’s Otsuka urges other Japanese creators to consider Kickstarter as a way to raise funds for projects among overseas fans. I wonder if any anime studios, game studios, or other individuals or companies will follow TRIGGER’s lead soon. Fan funding in and of itself isn’t a new thing in Japan, of course; Ken Akamatsu’s J-Comi, for instance, regularly holds very successful “fanding” FANディング campaigns to raise money to re-issue out-of-print manga, special sets of manga that include material previously issued only in dojinshi, and so on. These campaigns are aimed at Japanese fans, though. I don’t remember any examples of Japanese creators aiming directly for overseas fans with a fan funding campaign. The success of the Little Witch Academia campaign should certainly give ideas to other studios.

(On a totally different note, I’m no doubt the millionth person to mention this, but could anyone point me to a discussion of how Little Witch Academia is a cross between maho shojo and Harry Potter? There’s a lot of meta in there. Here is TRIGGER’s YouTube upload.)

[QUOTE] From Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories

In Dickens’s own time, however, serialized novels were hugely controversial. Novels themselves were only beginning to find acceptance in polite society; for upper-class commentators, serialization was entirely too much. From our perspective, Dickens is a literary master, an icon of a now threatened culture. From theirs, he represented the threat of something coming.

(…)

Worse, the format seemed dangerously immersive. In 1845, a critic for the patrician North British Review decried it as an unhealthy alternative to conversation or to games like cricket or backgammon. Anticipating Huxley and Bradbury by a century, he railed against the multiplying effects of serialization on the already hallucinatory powers of the novel.

(…)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as further advances in technology continued to bring down the costs of printing and distribution, books and periodicals evolved into separate businesses and book publishers gradually moved away from serialization. The threat of immersiveness moved with them, first to motion pictures, then to television. Books, movies, TV—all were mass media, and mass media had no mechanism for audience participation. But the reader’s impulse to have a voice in the story didn’t vanish. It went underground and took a new form: fan fiction.

Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, location 1308-1321

[QUOTE] From tishaturk, fandom: best vs. favorite

One of the things I love about fandom is that fandom, for the most part, operates not on a “these are the best things” model (where the criteria for “best” are typically undefined yet implied to be shared by all right-thinking people) but on a “these are my favorite things” model, which can be frustrating but is also wonderfully democratic.

[LINK] Fanworks Inc. directory of pro writers’ policies on fan fiction

www.fanworks.org/writersresource/?tool=fanpolicy

A large directory of pro writers’ policies on fan fiction, including mostly authors who write in English. The directory links to direct quotes or other sources that indicate the authors’ opinions on fan fiction about their works. The directory is somewhat outdated but still a very interesting resource, especially since it seems to include some authors who aren’t mentioned on Fanlore’s Professional Author Fanfic Policies page yet.

The owner of the Fanworks Inc. site has indicated in May this year that they may take the whole site down, so best grab the information on here soon if you need it.

[LINK] CfP European Fandoms and Fan Studies Conference

European Fandom and Fan Studies: Localization and Translation
One Day Symposium, 9 November 2013
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and
University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies
Call for Papers

The increasingly global circulation of media often threatens to obscure local contexts of reception, identification, interpretation, and translation.  This one day symposium at the University of Amsterdam seeks to explore the state of Fan Studies and the variety of Fandoms focused within the social and geographical boundaries of Europe, particularly with regard to processes of localization and translation, broadly interpreted.  Inter-disciplinary papers are invited to explore the nature of the field itself, how different fandoms function within Europe, and how European fan cultures re-interpret, re-imagine, translate, and localize foreign media texts or foreign fan practices.  Potential avenues of exploration may include how Fan Studies is represented, studied, and received within European universities, by funding bodies and publishers.  Papers on fandoms may explore how European (English and non-English speaking) fans of European and non-European objects of fan appreciation participate in fandom, the differences between internet fandoms and local/national/international fan practices, and objects of fan appreciation that originate within Europe.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

-Regional fan histories.
-Negotiation between international and local fan infrastructures.
-Local and national adaptation of fan cultures and identities.
-European fans’ impact on international public policy and industry practice.
-Fans’ relationships to national media industries and public policy.
-National and transnational economies within fandom and/or fan studies.
-Crossing national, cultural, and language boundaries in fandom and fan studies.
-Translation, both linguistic and cultural.
-Fans’ local and international languages and economies of desire.
-Framing local European fan objects and cultures within fan studies.
-Processes of translation, adaptation, and localization in European fans’ interaction with global media.

The symposium is associated with a special issue of the journal of Transformative Works and Cultures
tentatively slated for 2015, with full papers due January 1, 2014.

Event Details
The symposium will be held in the center of Amsterdam, easily accessible from Amsterdam international airport.

Submission Process
Please send a 300 word abstract along with a short (100 word) biographical note to Anne Kustritz (A.M.Kustritz@uva.nl<mailto:A.M.Kustritz@uva.nl>) or Emma England (E.E.England@uva.nl<mailto:E.E.England@uva.nl>) by 10 September.

[QUOTE] From Catherine Coker, Earth 616, Earth 1610, Earth 3490—Wait, what universe is this again? The creation and evolution of the Avengers and Captain America/Iron Man fandom

The relationship between slash fan fiction and comics fandom is problematic not only because of the shift of medium from source text to fan text but also because of the shift of fan community. Comics fandom is often viewed as consisting of heterosexual white men and comics are often explicitly marketed to them, excluding and othering the rest of the audience. Comics fandom online subverts this expectation of audience because the majority of fan authors and creators are women. While canon plots privilege action and conflict, and the problematic depiction of women characters in them is so obvious it hardly need be discussed, comics fan fiction reverses these trends: stories privilege emotional arcs, and female characters are depicted as more recognizably human even when they are secondary to the male characters.

Comics fan works thus become completely transformative because of the shift in both fan space and fan audience: texts that are homophobic become homophiliac, authors and readers who are male become female, and that which had previously been other becomes the new norm. For these reasons, the fans are not just aware but indeed hyperaware of their own identity as subaltern and subversive practitioners.

Catherine Coker, Earth 616, Earth 1610, Earth 3490—Wait, what universe is this again? The creation and evolution of the Avengers and Captain America/Iron Man fandom

[QUOTE] From Suzanne Scott, Fangirls in refrigerators: The politics of (in)visibility in comic book culture

Fan conventions have historically been characterized as safe, even utopian spaces in which differences are embraced. My work on the Twilight protests at San Diego Comic-Con 2009 (Scott 2011), the recent sexual harassment debacle at Readercon 23 (Colby et al. 2012), and comic book artist Tony Harris’s November 2012 Facebook screed against “COSPLAY-Chiks [sic]” who “DONT [sic] KNOW SHIT ABOUT COMICS” (Dickens 2012), all indicate that these utopian characterizations of comic book conventions belie how gendered subcultural tensions manifest in these spaces. Specifically, the hostility directed at the Batgirl of San Diego from fans and publishers alike suggests a sort of panopti(comic)con, in which fan expression is increasingly policed.

Suzanne Scott, Fangirls in refrigerators: The politics of (in)visibility in comic book culture