Twitter user kawí brought the idea of featureless protagonist in video games. There is a reason I didn’t make that connection before and that reason is a presupposition. Video games, to state the obvious, brings the question of games into
Imagination Gaps: Magic and Language in SFF
I’ve been thinking a lot about magic this week. As an SFF writer (both in fandom and outside of it), almost all of my work involves building fantastical worlds and magical systems that are both realistic and believable. Systems in
Where is the author in reader insert?
These past weeks, reading about RPF, I danced around the question of the fan fictionalizing the very fan narratives that they live in. Yet so far I haven’t touched on a genre that appears to be more popular in RPF
Meet the Volunteer: Shyamala
Hello, hello! I (she/her/hers) am Shyamala—feel free to rhyme that with Pamela—and I am the latest Fanhackers recruit. Armed with a B.A. from the Global South, an M.A. in English Lit and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, I’ve been writing
The fiction of stars and fans as real people
(The question at the centre of RPF is) “what if?” This question is the question asked by each one of these Hiddleston fans arguing that he should be left some space. What if a man performed six nights a week
The porn in slash and slash in porn
I have brought you a paper before that talked about how derivative practices appear in the work of porn studios. We can also observe porn fragments used in fanworks. By their very nature, slash manips also make clear the oft-overlooked
Real Person Without the Fiction: Idol Success As Fannish Activity
In their work, describing the data manipulation tactics of fan leaders of Chinese idols’ fan clubs, Wu Xueyin describes two kinds of fandoms. Two categories of fan identities account for a large proportion of fans in Chinese fandom: only stan/solo
How the visual image of the star can contribute to the actor/character resonance?
Earlier, in this post, we have talked about Jenkins’ idea of how fans, in the process of slashing, might read the body of characters (especially in media fandoms). We also talked about in this post I quoted Cathy Yue Wang
New Transformative Works and Culture issue is out!
The new issue of the OTW’s fandom studies journal is out! Look into it and read one of the many interesting texts. I started out with this paper on Censorship and Chinese slash fans. It presents an image of Chinese
Repetition and variation
I certainly do talk a lot about fanwork’s transformative quality, that’s why I found the below reminder welcome: (…) in a transmedial perspective, fan fiction can be seen as one more instantiation contributing to building up a collectively imagined fictional