Summary
Summary of "The 'Fanfic Lens': Fan Writing's Impact on Media Consumption" by Fabienne Silberstein-Bamford.
These excerpts are from Fabienne Silberstein-Bamford’s article, “The ‘Fanfic Lens’: Fan Writing’s Impact on Media Consumption,” which can be read for free here!
Silberstein-Bamford writes that the internet has allowed people to move from solely passively consuming to also participating (for instance, through fanfiction). This article examines in what ways being a fanfiction writer shapes one’s engagement with media. For example:
– Consuming as a potential future fan (e.g., thinking about what kind of fanfiction you can write while reading/watching/consuming the canonical thing)
– Predicting the fandom’s nature (e.g., thinking about which characters or tropes will be popular in the fandom or what the fandom culture will be while consuming canon)
– Evaluating narrative structures (e.g., evaluating media in fanfiction terms, like identifying tropes)
– Creating distance through recognizing agency (e.g., seeing reader interpretation as equally as valid as the author’s, like through fix-it fics)