ProQuest Dissertations

Transcription

THE DISCOURSE OF FAN FICTION
By
Susan Ashley Wright
B.A., Campbellsville University, 1999
M.A., University of Louisville, 2002
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of the University of Louisville
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky
May 2009
UMI Number: 3370027
Copyright 2009 by
Wright, Susan Ashley
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Copyright 2009 by Susan A. Wright
All rights reserved
By
Susan Ashley Wright
B.A., Campbellsville University, 1999
M.A., University of Louisville, 2002
A Dissertation Approved on
December 10, 2008
by the following Dissertation Committee:
ACKNOWLE DGEMENT S
I would like to thank my dissertation direction, Dr.
Debra Journet, for her guidance and patience.
I would also
like to thank the other committee members, Dr. Bronwyn
Williams, Dr. Aaron Jaffee, Dr. Dawn Heinecken, and
Professor Paul Griner, for their comments and assistance.
In addition, I would like to express my thanks to my
mother, Sue Wright Yaden, and to my dear friend, Janet
Moleski, for both their encouragement and their
proofreading.
Finally, I would like to thank David Yaden,
Adah Mays Lawson, and Richard Wilson for their support.
iii
DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to
my mother, Sue Wright Yaden,
my father, Ralph Wright,
my step-father, David 0. Yaden,
my maternal grandmother, Adah M. Mays,
and my dear friend, Janet K. Moleski
all of whom shared my dreams and aspirations.
iv
ABSTRACT
SUSAN ASHLEY WRIGHT
DECEMBER 10, 2008
Because of their prominence, online writing
communities and avenues provide the field of Rhetoric and
Composition with insight into quotidian writing and help
for composition classrooms.
The specific online
communities created by fan fiction writers reveal not only
dialogic and heteroglossic interaction with or against
producers of written and visual texts, but also hegemonic
gatekeepers who control which writers may enter and remain
in the community.
By analyzing a baseline of one hundred stories in the
Buffy
the
Vampire
Slayer
and Star Trek:
fandoms, as well as twenty Thunderbirds
The Original
Series
stories, I
discovered hegemonic moves in the discourse generated by
the stories' reviews, authors' notes, authors' biographies,
and authors' site-sponsored interviews.
While Buffy
fans
show a preference for policing writers' portrayal of canon
facts, they also critiqued writers' style and grammar.
v
Conversely, while Star
Trek
fans show a preference for
policing style and grammar, they also critiqued writers'
canonical accuracy.
However, Star
Trek
Thunderbirds
and
reveal a gate-keeping dynamic absent in the Buffy
fandom—
the power of the Original Fan (i.e., someone who watched
the shows during their first run in the 1960s).
Such fans
occasionally abuse their status to expel younger or less
experienced fan writers from the community.
However,
despite this potentially hostile atmosphere, teen writers
create a space at the discourse's edge and support each
others' writing.
For the field of Rhetoric and Composition, my research
indicates that within fan fiction discourse, agency both
does and does not exist.
Although fan fiction is an act of
appropriation, the discourse is controlled by expert
writers; however, the teenage writers creating subcommunities prove that writers suppressed by the dominant
discourse can and will create space for themselves in the
open landscape of cyberspace.
In the composition
classroom, instructors may discuss with students these
gate-keeping behaviors and their significance and function
in a writing community.
In doing so, instructors may
compare and contrast fan fiction conventions and discourse
to academic conventions and discourse.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
iii
iv
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DEDICATION
ABSTRACT
CHAPTER
I.
PREFACE
1
II.
A REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
III. RESEARCH METHODS
IV.
V.
11
62
Research Questions
62
Methods and Texts
63
Questions for Analysis
69
Method of Analysis
71
Definition of Key Terms
75
THE DISCOURSE OF BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
84
The Show, the Fans, and the Fandom
89
Inclusion and Exclusion
95
Audience Awareness and Behavior
109
Heteroglossia: Challenges and Reactions
117
Conclusions
125
STAR TREK AND ITS SISTER THUNDERBIRDS
127
The Show, the Fans, and the Fandom
131
Status, Abuse, and Hegemony
133
vi
VI.
Style and Storytelling
145
Purview of the Expert
14 9
The "Original" Fan
153
The Black Sheep
165
Fan Community Discourse
168
Conclusions
173
IMPLICATIONS FOR RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
175
Authority, Discourse, and Pop Culture
175
Pedagogy
178
REFERNCES
182
APPENDICES
191
CURRICULUM VITAE
210
vii
INTRODUCTION
Why the Discourse of Fan Fiction?
Discourse communities have been moving to cyberspace
for over fifteen years, and in the midst of this paradigm
shift are two interconnecting fronts for Rhetoric and
Composition Studies:
savvy student.
academic discourse and the techno-
The incoming college freshman begins a
years-long process of entering academic discourse
communities and learning the specialized language and
genres they entail.
This same student often is the owner
of an Ipod, a laptop, a Gameboy, and a cell phone.
How
does the world of the techno-savvy student meet with
academia?
How do they inform each other?
Students wield
authority and knowledge in the venues they inhabit, such as
Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.
The guestions driving this
dissertation are how might this knowledge affect the
classroom, and how can Rhetoric and Composition instructors
use teens' techno-savvy to help them enter academic
discourse?
To find an entry point into this multifaceted inquiry,
I will consider one segment of the cyber experience:
1
fan
fiction.
Fan fiction, which started out as paper fan
'zines, is now a mostly internet phenomenon in which fans
of movies, television shows, books, and video games write
short stories, novellas, or poetry about their favorite
characters or world.
The discourse created by these
writers and readers resembles academic discourse in several
areas, and a student familiar with the former may be aided
by that knowledge while trying to learn the latter.
For
example, the world of fan fiction operates on established
conventions and specialized vocabulary which are used and
modified by each fandom, e.g., terms like alternate
universe (AU), porn without plot (PWP), and homoerotica
(slash).
Learning these conventions is reminiscent of the
hurdles new arrivals to academia often face as they enter
their chosen field's discourse.
As I will demonstrate, the genre of fan fiction, which
is supposedly democratic, actually abounds with forces that
determine who may enter the discourse, what they may write,
and who may stay and speak.
In short, the discourse
surrounding fan fiction entails more than a celebration of
viewer/reader agency.
Some writers are silenced when they
interact with the fandom's gatekeepers.
When fans
appropriate texts they watch/read, they may subvert the
authority held by the producers.
2
Power, however, is often
re-inscribed by the fan community as gatekeepers police
characters' portrayals, canonical accuracy, and grammar.
Nevertheless, some writers who encounter such policing defy
discourse authorities by constructing their own space at
the community's edge.
Still, because of their segregation,
these writers do not necessarily challenge, change, or
expand fan traditions.
In addition to discussing discourse power dynamics, I
will explore the specific challenges faced by new fan
writers entering the discourse community.
The areas in
which new writers receive the most critique from the
gatekeepers are storytelling mechanics, grammar/spelling,
and canonical knowledge.
In the process, the gatekeepers
often either ignore or, conversely, harshly criticize
stories that do not follow the standards, rules, "jargon,"
and traditions of the discourse.
To explore this trend, I
will turn to M. M. Bakhtin's (trans. 1981) concepts of
dialogic,
centripetal,
heteroglossia,
hegemony, centrifugal,
and
and argue that hegemony is maintained by the
fan fiction community as the centripetal forces surrounding
"good fanfic" clash with the dialogical and centrifugal
nature of fan fiction itself.
Finally, I will analyze audience awareness and
audience behavior, arguing that fan fiction communities
3
separate along the axis of age and writing maturity.
As a
result, two sub-communities exist within the discourse, one
with centripetal power and the other refusing to be
silenced even when not fully accepted.
Research Questions
I used the following groups of questions to guide my
inquiry into the nature of fan fiction discourse:
1. How is fan fiction discourse controlled, and what are
the parameters of that discourse?
Who enjoys the
status of dominant voice within the discourse, who are
the minority voices, and why?
What dialogues and
interchanges are occurring within the fan writing
community?
2. How do new writers gain entry into the discourse?
When are they rejected or shunned, and why?
What
qualities are associated with successful or
unsuccessful entry into the community?
3. How does the variation between different fandoms'
audiences affect the discourse of those fandoms?
How
does the level of writers' audience awareness or the
quality of audience treatment vary between specialized
fanfic archives and umbrella websites?
How does the
social context and intertextuality of the reader-
4
writers, who are always already an audience, affect
the discourse community?
For my analysis, I chose the Star
Series
and Buffy
the
their fan status:
Vampire
Slayer
Trek:
The
Original
fandoms because of
both series were unpredicted, run-away
successes; both broke new ground in gender portrayal and
television story-telling; and both generated a cult
following.
Also, these series represent two points in
television history and two generations of fans, and they
were both aimed at a younger target audience.
By studying
the fan faction of two series separated by three decades
but comparable in cult status, I will explore the
authoritative moves of fan writers through an empirical
analysis of the reader reviews, author's notes, author
biographies, and site-sponsored author interviews of one
hundred stories per fandom.
In the first chapter, I will review the relevant
literature, including theories of discourse communities,
popular culture, and fan fiction. For my discussion of the
term discourse
community,
I explore the definition
established by rhetoric and composition researchers
(Bartholomae 1985; Russell 1990; Bizzell 2002; & Maybin
2006) based on M.M. Bakhtin's (1981) linguistic theories.
In addition, I explore the debate of how discourse affects
5
the composition classroom (Berlin 1982; Hartwell 1985;
Harris 1990; Fox 2002; Mao 2002; Borkowski 2004; & Maybin
2006) , and how this has given rise to alternate or hybrid
discourse, a theory that addresses the dominant, residual,
and emerging discourses in academia (Bizzell 2002; Dobrin
2002; Elbow 2002; Long 2002; Beech 2004; Lindquist 2004; &
Tannen 2006).
Likewise, I investigate the connections
between writing and popular culture and the impact of
popular culture upon the classroom and literacy (Buckingham
1993; Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1995; The New London
Group 1996; Stephens 1998; Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Street
2001; Williams 2002; Knobel and Lankshear 2002; Dyson 2003;
& Jenkins 2006).
In addition, I discuss the scholarship concerning fan
fiction itself.
Previous research on fan fiction has
tended to focus on socio-cultural issues, with a majority
of the scholarship generated by Cultural Studies, Media
Studies, and Gender Studies.
Most research (Penley 1997;
Jenkins 1992; Scodari and Felder 2000; Woledge 2005; Lee
2003; Bacon-Smith 1992; and Heinecken 2005) has addressed
social critiques, gender politics, gay/lesbian politics,
and the representation (and critique) of sex and sexual
roles.
However, Literature Studies has also begun an
exploration of the phenomenon (LaChev 2005 & Pugh 2005), as
6
has Rhetoric and Composition.
For example, Angela Thomas
(2006) explored the nature of collaborative writing in fan
fiction, and Rebecca Black (2007) analyzed specific fan
writers and their interactions.
In chapter two, I will explain my research approach
and methodology.
As mentioned previously, I analyzed the
stories posted to the internet by fans of Star
Trek:
Original
While my
Series
and Buffy
the Vampire
Slayer.
The
initial efforts were structured and involved my gaining a
baseline from 200 Buffy
and Trek
stories, I quickly found
that the hypertextual nature of cyberspace influenced my
ability to gather information, causing me to branch from
reviewer to reviewer and story to story.
In response to
the generational divide between "original" Star
Trek
fans
and the younger generation of new fans, I decided add a
third fandom, Thunderbirds,
occurs.
in which a similar dynamic
In this chapter, I also define my use of the
Bakhtinian terms dialogic,
centrifugal,
heteroglossia,
hegemony,
centripetal.
and
Chapters three and four focus on Buffy
Slayer
and Star
Trek:
The Original
Series,
the
Vampire
respectively,
with chapter four containing an auxiliary but enlightening
discussion of the Thunderbirds
fandom.
In these chapters,
I will first analyze fan writers' and readers' dialogue on
7
such issues as audience awareness, canon facts, grammar,
and feedback.
Second, I will explore the entrance of new
fan writers into the Buffy
and Trek
discourse communities
and their interaction with the gatekeepers who police their
style/storytelling mechanics, grammar/spelling, and canon
knowledge.
Third, I will analyze audience awareness and
audience behavior, arguing that the Buffy,
Thunderbirds
Trek,
and
discourse communities divide along the axis of
age and writing maturity.
In chapter three, my analysis of the Buffy
fandom
reveals that reviewers are the most preoccupied with
writers' canonical accuracy, and by extension, also their
treatment of fanon (fan-established traditions).
Whether
it was to compliment a writer for excellent use of the
canon or to critique a writer for canonical errors, readers
seem concerned that Buffy
Buffyverse.
fan fiction remains true to the
In addition, the fandom revealed a dynamic
between younger writers and older writers which included
younger writers answering harsh criticism with equally
harsh responses, as well as the creation of a sub-community
of younger writers at the fringes of a fandom where older
and more experienced writers tend to draw most of the
reviews and maintain hegemonic power.
8
In contrast, my analysis in chapter four of the
Trek
Star
fandom, paired with a comparable analysis of the
Thunderbirds
fandom, reveals a reviewer preoccupation with
the style, setting, and plot of fan fiction.
However,
concern with canonical accuracy ranks second, and both
fandoms show power plays made by "original" fans.
That is,
fan writers and reviewers who watched the shows when they
originally aired in the 1960s usually draw attention to
their status and occasionally abuse it.
The
Thunderbirds
fandom reveals the most extreme form of this abuse, with
"original fans" critiquing the canon usage and writing
style of second generation fans so harshly that flame wars
have erupted on review boards and new/younger writers were
run out of the fandom.
In chapter five, I will suggest connections to and
applications of my research for the field of Rhetoric and
Composition and the teaching of composition.
indicates a nearly contradictory finding:
My research
within the
dialogic of fan fiction, agency both does and does not
exist.
Granted, fan fiction has long been seen as an act
of appropriation and has even been hailed as "democratic"
because the readers/viewers reshape, rewrite, and refashion
their beloved texts to their own purposes.
both the Buffy
and Star
Trek
However, in
fandoms, groups of teenagers
9
will band together to create a sub-community at the edge of
a discourse controlled by expert writers who invoke
initiation rituals by critiquing canon knowledge, writing
style, and grammar.
not exist.
Agency, therefore, both does and does
After discussing the implications of this
paradox, I will outline a potential Freshman Composition I
course based on an inquiry into fan fiction and academic
discourse communities.
10
CHAPTER 1
A REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
In this chapter, I will review the literature related
to the issues of discourse, popular culture, and fan
culture as well as the literature that discusses fan
fiction specifically.
In doing so, I will illustrate how
discourse studies, pop culture studies, and fan studies
intersect in my study of the power hierarchies of fan
fiction discourse communities.
First I will explore why today's cyber-culture
warrants a rhetoric and composition scholar's study of
online writing, specifically that of fan fiction.
Next, I
will review the longstanding work on academic discourse and
writing, explaining in the process why I will be using the
term discourse
community
to refer to a community that
focuses on writing and that displays power hierarchies
maintained by the struggle between Bakhtinian centripetal
and centrifugal forces.
Since the work of M.M. Bakhtin
(1981) will be used to foreground my work, I will proceed
11
to discuss his concepts in more detail, especially as it
concerns heteroglossia, hegemony, and sites of struggle.
Afterwards, I will explore popular culture's impact
upon writing and literacy by focusing on the concept of the
reader or viewer as an active participant in cultural texts
and as a centrifugal force opposing the centripetal force
of authors and producers.
Lastly, I will detail previous
research on the phenomenon of fan fiction, which has almost
exclusively been considered through a cultural studies
lens.
As a result, most previous work on fan fiction has
focused on writer resistance to cultural forces, such as
sexism or gender roles.
Then I will outline research on
fan fiction in literary studies before summarizing the
focus of my project.
Power, Authority, and Discourse
Constructing Definitions and Understandings
The use of the word discourse
problematic at best.
for my work is
In rhetoric and composition studies
alone, the word discourse
may be used to indicate such
diverse concepts as an academic community (Bartholomae
1985), a classroom or academic power hierarchy (Bizzell
2002), a cultural power hierarchy centered on language
(Bakhtin 1981), and interaction between speakers (Tannen
2006).
What these widespread usages have in common is an
12
analysis of power and authority in language, whether it be
spoken or written, within a specific community.
Therefore,
for reasons detailed below, I will be defining the term
discourse
community
as a community (academic or fan) that
focuses on writing (essays or stories) and that displays
power hierarchies maintained by the struggle between
Bakhtinian centripetal and centrifugal forces.
of discourse
community
This usage
has been established by multiple
rhetoric and composition researchers (Bartholomae 1985;
Russell 1990; Harris 1990; Bizzell 1997, 2002; & Maybin
2006) based on M.M. Bakhtin's (1981) linguistic theories.
In addition, I will define the term discourse
as the site
of Bakhtinian power struggle of centralizing and
decentralizing forces in language and writing.
As a
result, the phrase "discourse of fan fiction" may be read
as "the centripetal and centrifugal struggles of the fan
fiction (discourse) community."
usage of the word discourse
Bakhtin.
My reason for the broad
is once again grounded in
As Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, the
editors and translators of M.M. Bakhtin's The
Imagination
Dialogic
(1981) , explain, the Russian word discourse
has
a complicated English translation:
The Russian word slovo
covers much more territory than
its English equivalent, signifying both an individual
13
logos]
word and a method of using words [cf. the Greek
that presumes a type of authority.
Thus the title of
our final essay, "Discourse in the Novel," might also
have been rendered "The Word in the Novel." (p. 427)
discourse
Similarly, I have complicated my use of the word
to cover one broad and one narrow term—one, a
community,
discourse
which—as used by rhetoric and compositions
researchers such as Bizzell (1997; 2002)—consists of people
and their literary interactions; and two, discourse,
which—
as used by Bakhtin—is a site of power struggles over
language and meaning.
With these thoughts in mind, let us
turn to the scholarship on academic discourse communities.
Over the past forty years, scholars have debated and
contested both the definition of discourse
community
and
its function in writing and in the composition classroom
(Kinneavy 1969; D'Angelo 1978; Berlin 1982; Hartwell 1985;
Bartholomae 1985; Porter 1986; Russell 1990; Harris 1990;
Fox 2002; Elbow 2002; Mao 2002; Borkowski 2004; Tannen
2006; Maybin 2006).
In her early work on the subject,
Patricia Bizzell (1997) explains that discourse communities
form when "Groups of society members . . . become
accustomed to modifying each other's reasoning and language
use in certain ways.
Eventually, the familiar ways achieve
the status of conventions" (p. 366). Bizzell continues by
14
arguing that while one cannot escape academic discourse, a
composition teacher can help those failing to learn the
style of the academic discourse community by presenting
such "difficulties as the problems of a traveler to an
unfamiliar territory"—in other words by making the
community and its conventions transparent (pp. 379-386).
However, as David Russell (1990) states, this view of
academia as a singular discourse community carries several
implications:
"First, community implies unity, identity,
shared responsibility.
Second, it implies exclusion,
restriction, admission or non-admission" (p. 53).
Nevertheless, students must become proficient in the
specialized vocabulary and styles of the academic discourse
community in order to be deemed literate (p. 53). The
problem, according to Russell, is that general education
courses like freshman composition cannot define what a
general audience is, nor can they teach all the specialized
vocabulary (i.e, in the non-pejorative sense, "jargon")and
conventions of every discipline represented at the
university (p. 57).
Despite Russell's insights, he—like
Bizzell (1997)—defines academic discourse community and
one's entrance into it as homogenous in nature, implying a
student's status as either inside or outside of that
community.
15
Rejecting this homogenous view, Joseph Harris (1999)
notes that students are simultaneously inside and outside
of academic discourse communities:
"one does not step
clearly and wholly from one community to another, but is
caught instead in an always changing mix of dominant,
residual, and emerging discourses" that are often
overlapping (p. 266).
The debate over this more complex
view of discourse communities gave rise to a more
heteroglossic view of academic discourse (Bizzell 2002;
Dobrin 2002; Fox 2002; Elbow 2002; Long 2002; Borkowski
2004; Beech 2004; Lindquist 2004; Tannen 2006; Maybin
2006):
alternate or hybrid discourse, a theory that
addresses these dominant, residual, and emerging
discourses.
In "The Intellectual Work of ''Mixed' Forms of Academic
Discourses," Patricia Bizzell (2002) notes that
"traditional" discourse was shaped by white, middle to
upper class men.
However, alternative forms of discourse
have arisen as women, people of color, and members of the
working class have entered the academy and added their
voices to the discourse (p. 1-2). According to Bizzell,
the new forms of writing and presentation that have
resulted have allowed greater numbers of people to access
new forms of intellectual work (p. 5 ) . For example,
16
composition teachers and scholars have explored
collaborative writing, hypertext essays, and multi-genre
papers that allow students to present their compositions as
a mix of forms ranging from traditional prose to shopping
lists and recipes (e.g., Long 2002).
This same
collaborative and hypertextual work can be seen in the
realm of fan fiction (Thomas 2006), as will be discussed
below.
This exploration of students' everyday voices and
experiences within the context of academic writing has
recently moved beyond the focus on race and gender and
increasingly focused on class (Beech 2004; Borkowski 2004;
& Lindquist 2004).
As scholars ponder classist ideology in
academia (Beech 2004) and the support of minority students
through collaborative writing or multi-genre texts (Long
2002), scholars like Julie Lindquist (2004) encourage
instructors to consider that when exploring class, our
"resources lie within the domain of the emotional: they
include students' affective experiences of class and
teachers' affective responses to these experiences" (p.
188).
Further complicating the idea of hybridized
discourse, Lindquist calls for hybridized instructor
identity—that is, she calls for instructors who are willing
to make their own class motives and positions evident, in
17
addition to adjusting that identity and emotional affect
based on the social classes represented by their students.
If instructors are willing to explore their socio-economic
identities along with their students, then students will
value their life experiences and knowledge when they write
(pp. 196-197, 205-206).
This valuing of working class ways
of knowing and writing furthers the agenda of hybrid or
alternative discourse in the composition classroom and runs
parallel to fan writers who contest what characters in a
show should value by recasting the characters within genres
that suit their everyday concerns (Jenkins 1992, 2006;
Bacon-Smith 1992; & Penley 1997).
This hybridized approach to understanding and
approaching discourse reflects the media and digital age,
where anyone with access to a television has access to
countless discourse communities and anyone with access to a
computer and the internet can theoretically join any
discourse they discover in cyberspace:
academic, or fan.
political,
However, Sidney I. Dobrin (2002) warns
that "we may be risking silencing and neutralizing a good
number of discourses when they interact with academic
discourse," since such institutional discourses
"appropriate nonacademic portions of the hybrids with
little effort" because of their socio-political power as
18
gatekeepers (pp. 54-55).
Likewise, he warns that any
discussion of alternative or hybridized discourse risks
also silencing the recognized, authoritative discourse of
the academy.
Conversely, Dorbin warns us that using
alternative or hybridized assignments in the composition
classroom might lead a student to turn in a multi-textual
paper to a professor in another department who would reject
such writing as inappropriate (pp. 54-55).
Despite such
concerns, scholars such as Patricia Bizzell (2002) and
Peter Elbow (2002) encourage the valuing of different—or,
as Bakhtin would term it, centrifugal—ways of speaking,
writing, and knowing even as the white, upper class,
centripetal forces resist the inclusion of working class,
female, and other minority voices.
In contrast, however, fan fiction has been a
predominantly female discourse since its modern
reincarnation in the early 1970s (Jenkins 2002), and that
perhaps makes fan fiction the first modern alternative
discourse to rise.
In fact, fan fiction communities have
been viewed as the epitome of readers engaging in complex
dialogue with otherwise authoritative producers or authors
and as discourse communities that welcomed and trained new
members with open arms.
This view was especially upheld by
early fan fiction researchers, who observed new writers
19
being quickly and systematically inducted into a unified
and Utopian community of shared knowledge and love (e.g.,
Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992; Penley 1997).
However, to focus on a Utopian social view of
discourse is to ignore the struggle between hegemony and
heteroglossia.
Harris (1999) argues that descriptions of
academic discourse have portrayed it as devoid of conflict.
In fact, his dissatisfaction with the Utopian vision of
discourse led Harris to critique the use of the word
"community" because it is a loaded term devoid of negative
connotations and because it fosters a dualism of "us"
versus "them."
Harries argues that "Abstracted as [these
definitions of community] are from almost all other kinds
of social and material relations, only an affinity of
beliefs and purposes, consensus, is left to hold such
communities together" (p. 263-264).
This conception of
community sees teaching discourse as an act of assimilation
or conversion even as scholars fail to specify why and how
students should enter discourse.
In Harris's mind, "it
might prove more useful (and accurate) to view our task as
adding to or complicating [students'] uses of language" (p.
266) .
To a fan fiction writer, such complication of language
is a matter of course.
Fan writers and readers are
20
endlessly creating new "jargon" in order to discuss their
beloved texts; for example, "Spirk" is a Star
Trek
term
used in a story blurb to indicate the story has a Spock and
Kirk romantic pairing.
However, the jargon quickly becomes
"fanon"-fan canon—and the accepted and expected way of
discussing texts.
In other words, fans create a discourse
of their own (e.g., jargon, facts, and other fanon) by
which they expect members of the discourse community to
abide.
This tendency reflects Janet Maybin's (2006)
reflection that words and phrases assume different meanings
in different contexts—meanings that are not listed in
dictionaries.
She notes that this shared usage and
negotiation of words implies that "every time we use
language at all we are speaking with the voices of others,"
(p. 68). This formulation suggests a Bakhtinian view of
language as a site of struggle.
Bakhtin's concepts of
hybrid or heteroglossic discourse, hegemony, centrifugal
forces, and centripetal forces have been useful for
rhetoric and composition scholars studying writing within
the academy.
I will similarly foreground Bakhtin in my
research and discussion of fan fiction, as his work
provides a rich ground for understanding the sites of
struggle—the centripetal and centrifugal forces—within fan
fiction.
21
The Power of Discourse:
The Dialogic
To discuss discourse in either an academic or fan
studies venue is to consider how members of a discourse
community negotiate meaning and power and how new members—
whether they be freshman composition students or new fansenter into an established discourse, learn that discourse's
language, and challenge the community's traditions.
In
order to discuss this dialogic process, I would like to
consider the work of Bakhtin because he focused on the
power structure of both literature and language itself,
particularly how people and their voices vie for influence,
meaning, and prominence.
In "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin (trans. 1981) set
forth a theory of language and poetics that would influence
literary theorists for generations.
underlie Bakhtin's work:
Two assumptions
language is centered in social
interaction and at sites of social struggles; and language
is both reciprocal and interactive, whether it occurs
between readers and texts or between speakers (Maybin,
2006, p. 64). Bakhtin wrote during the 1920s and 1930s
against Saussure and structural linguistics, which hold
that language is an abstract system of signs without
context.
However, Bakhtin states that language is a
"concrete lived reality" that is "essentially social and
22
rooted in struggle and ambiguities of everyday life" (pp.
64-65).
More specifically, Bakhtin proposes that language in
the novel allows for a "multiplicity of social voices" that
reveal "an individualization of the general language" (pp.
263-264).
In other words, language—whether spoken or
written—involves sites of struggle that contain centripetal
Centripetal forces are
"authoritative, fixed, inflexible discourses of religious
dogma, scientific truth, and the political and moral status
quo" while centrifugal forces are "stratified and
diversified" into "different genres, professions, agegroups, and historical periods" (Maybin p. 65). One or the
other force may dominate discourse briefly, but the other
force will resist, causing a never-ending struggle.
The
stratification caused by centrifugal forces creates
heteroglossia, which is the "dynamic multiplicity of
voices, genres and social languages" (p. 67).
Therefore, Bakhtin argues that an author enters into a
complex dialogue between himself/herself and the
centralizing forces of the culture, which results in a
battle over language, identity, and authority (p. 271). As
a result, "all talk is dialogical, meaning that when we
speak we combine together many different pieces of other
23
conversations and texts and, significantly, other voices
(Wetherell p. 24). This stratified and diversified
language means the "distinctions between speaker and
listener, and between writer and reader become blurred as
the purposes and understandings of each are anticipated by,
and interpenetrate the other" (Maybin p. 69). The novel
itself was "shaped by the current of decentralizing,
centrifugal forces" and dialogic voices surrounding its
birth, and therefore has the ability to introduce
heteroglossia into language (Bakhtin p. 273). Bakhtin
explains:
Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel . . .
is another's
speech
in another's
language,
serving to
express authorial intentions but in a refracted way.
Such speech constitutes a special type of
doublevoiced
discourse.
It serves two speakers at the same
time and expresses simultaneously two different
intentions: the direct intention of the character who
is speaking, and the refracted intention of the
author.
(p. 324)
However, Bakhtin's theory may be used to explain more
than language itself.
It may also be used to explain the
complex ways in which readers engage with the discourse
surrounding any given text, be it an academic article, a
novel, or a television series.
This is because when a
speaker speaks or when a writer writes, he or she has to
navigate and create meaning from these centripetal and
centrifugal forces.
Bakhtin explains it thus:
24
The word in language is always half someone else's.
It becomes one's own only when the speaker populates
it with their own intentions, their own accent, when
they appropriate the word, adapting it to their own
semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this
moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a
neutral and impersonal language . . ., but rather it
exists in other people's mouths, in other people's
concrete contexts serving other people's intentions
(p. 293).
However, at the same time that the novel first entered
the literary world and introduced heteroglossic and
dialogic forces into language, poetry was "accomplishing
the task of cultural, national and political centralization
of the verbal-ideological world" (p. 273).
In other words,
the heteroglossia of the novel was met and resisted by the
hegemonic forces surrounding poetry.
In Bakhtin's view,
"decentralizing, centrifugal forces" are resisted by
"forces
that
serve
to unify
270, 273, italics original).
set on heteroglossia:
and centralize"
language (pp.
Hegemony represents a limit
"Unitary language constitutes the .
. . historical process of linguistic unification and
centralization, an expression of the centripetal forces of
language," and as a result it "makes its real presence felt
as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing
specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of
mutual understanding" (p. 270). Thus the novel and
language itself remain a never-ending site of struggle.
25
Bakhtin's description of appropriation and
centralization of language is also a perfect description of
fan fiction discourse, wherein fan writers take a text and
populate it with their own intentions and accents,
appropriating characters and worlds from the mouths—books,
shows, games—of others.
To borrow Bakhtin's words again,
fans are struggling for "ever newer ways
to mean"
(p. 346) .
Yet fans generate their own hegemonic forces by creating
terms (i.e., "jargon") to easily identify their stories
(e.g., "hurt/comfort," "slash," "femslash") and communityaccepted fan facts (e.g. "fanon").
Why are fans successful at this appropriation?
As
Janet Maybin (2006) explains, in the view of Bakhtin and
his colleague Volosinov, the audience is "centrally
involved in creating the meaning of the texts they hear or
read" because a reader or listener "orientates themselves
to [a text], locating it in relation to their own inner
consciousness" (p. 69). This orientation is possible
because our own thoughts are dialogues:
"we internally
rerun the dialogues we have with others and their ideas and
reflections feed into our own ongoing struggles with
knowledge and meaning" (p. 69).
A fan fiction writer might, therefore, internally
combine dialogue spoken by characters, dialogue with fellow
26
fans about an episode, and her own thoughts in a struggle
to generate a foundational meaning of a story.
This
interior process is significant because the "dialogic
quality of communication means that there is always at
least one other respondent voice implicit in any
utterance"; in other words, an "utterance or text always .
. . faces two ways:
backwards towards previous utterances,
and forwards towards its own addresses" (Maybin pp. 69-70).
For a fan fiction writer, this means that a story is always
answering back to the canon text in addition to addressing
the fan readers.
Using Bakhtin's theories, I will argue that writers
inside the composition classroom often feel they lack power
or agency because they do not yet understand that quoting
from authoritative texts is only one style and genre of
speech and meaning:
a centripetal one.
Interaction with
such texts and the formulating of one's own opinion or
answer to those texts is a more complex, centrifugal
approach student writers must learn.
However, many writers
outside of the classroom feel they have the power both to
engage in otherwise centripetal discourse and to exercise
centrifugal power by writing alternate endings for
television shows, proposing alternate romantic pairings, or
even rewriting an entire season of a show.
27
In fact, many
scholars, including Henry Jenkins (1992), have noted
multiple dialogic interactions with canon texts in fan
fiction, such as recontextualization, expanding the series
timeline, refocalization, moral realignment, genre
shifting, crossovers, character dislocation,
personalization, emotional intensification, and
eroticization (pp. 162-175).
These fan fictions fill in
the gaps of the canon text or extend the canon text, and bydoing so, the stories give fans the dialogic power to
interact with the original discourse:
not just fill in
missing scenes or explore secondary characters, but
actively oppose the canon if they reject a character's
death or a story arc.
However, as mentioned above, even as the fans enter
into a dialogue with the canon text, they build fan
traditions and discourses of their own, both as preferences
by fandom and as general fan-writing taboos.
In other
words, as Bakhtin predicts, all discourse involves
centripetal and centrifugal forces.
Pugh (2005) explains
that fans build accepted myths about their characters that
have not been established by the canon, e.g., a general fan
consensus that a character was sexually abused in the past
(p. 41). Likewise, Pugh explains, fan communities tend to
ban stories that commit unforgivable sins such as getting
28
canon facts wrong, portraying characters as acting out of
character, and "Mary Sues," which are authorial insertions
into the story (pp. 40, 65, 85).
These observations invite further exploration of the
dialogic discourse within fan communities, not just with
the canon text but with fan texts and fan voices.
In the
process they ask us to consider a less romantic view of fan
dialogue than early researchers have suggested.
While the
celebration of centrifugal fan activity in rereading and
rewriting popular texts is understandable, one cannot
ignore the ultimate erection of an opposing centripetal or
hegemonic hierarchy within fan culture itself.
The Intersection between Discourse, Writing, and
Popular Culture
To speak of fan fiction and discourse, one must first
speak of popular culture and its impact on literacy and
writing.
This is especially true since the rise of modern
fan fiction corresponded to the rise of television's
popularity in the 1960s and 1970s (Pugh, 2005, p. 223). It
then comes as no surprise that scholarly study of the
connections between writing and popular culture has
increased over the last decade, with several scholars
noting the impact of popular culture upon the classroom and
the wider culture's literacy (Buckingham 1993; Buckingham
29
and Sefton-Green 1995; The New London Group 1996; Stephens
1998; Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Street 2001; Williams 2002;
Knobel and Lankshear 2002; Dyson 2003; & Jenkins 2006).
The position of such scholars ranges from damnation of
popular media to enthusiastic praise for the expansion of
everyday literacy practices.
From the viewpoint that popular media causes damage to
literacy, Bill McKibben (1992) argues that television has
replaced the natural world as our source of information.
More than that, he argues that television is not truly a
source of information at all, although he simultaneously
claims television shapes our world and our worldview.
He
calls us the Age of "Unenlightenment," claiming we "live at
a moment of deep ignorance" (p. 9 ) . The culprit for this
brain-drain is television—a force viewers cannot resist or
critique.
Margaret Morse (1998) agrees, to a certain
extent, because she argues that although television is like
a pane of glass through which we view the world, we don't
focus upon it enough to draw a measurable amount of
information from it.
Morse claims that "even in nonfiction
genres such as the news, the dominant reference point of
the utterance will be a simulacrum of an ultimately
fictitious situation of enunciation rather than the outside
world" (p. 108). This means that for the viewers, the
30
*real world' is made to seem unreal, which distances
viewers and makes criticism difficult, if not impossible,
for most people.
However, Bronwyn Williams (2002) argues against this
common perception, claiming that popular culture—and more
specifically television—is a site not of brainwashing, but
of knowledge for students, who are able to discuss form,
style, audience, genre, and narrative conventions of
television shows even if they do not use academic jargon to
do so.
In his study, Williams found that when watching
television, students are "able to move quickly from affect
to irony, from complete emotional engagement to detached
cynicism about the manipulative nature of the program" or
its business interests (p. 74). Likewise, Williams's
predecessors, among them David Buckingham (1993), found
that young students were far from the dupes they are often
represented as being, showing that children are often
skeptical of advertisements, their claims, and their
rhetoric.
Later, Buckingham, together with Julia Sefton-
Green (1995), also argued that students have a more
sophisticated interaction with pop culture than that for
which they're given credit.
When considering popular
culture texts like television shows, the students'
discussion was "characterized by a constant barrage of
31
satire and condemnation" (p. 36). Buckingham and SeftonGreen note that "there is a sense in which the critical
distance that these [television] programmes permit (if not
encourage) enables the reader to experience a kind of
personal 'empowerment,' a sense of superiority both to the
text and to the characters" (p. 37).
Unfortunately, television also brings handicaps to
students, for the seemingly authorless shows complicate
students' ability to grasp both their own and others'
identities as writers.
Williams notes, "It is difficult
for television viewers to see a program as having been
'written' instead of simply being there to be read when the
set is switched on" (p. 84). This, of course, causes
problems for students because "In the writing classroom . .
. students are not only supposed to author their own work,
they are supposed to see the print works they read as being
authored" (p. 84). The result is that students have "much
less experience with what an author does,"
meaning that
they do not consider a television writer's motivation or
that writer's agency (pp. 115, 113).
In addition,
Buckingham and Sefton-Green point out that the students'
criticism does not extend to all texts either inside or
outside of a school environment (p. 38). Yet the students'
ability to criticize popular culture still provides a
32
strong argument against the widely held belief that
television is a mindless, brainwashing activity.
In fact,
Jenkins (2006) sees the interaction between popular culture
and literacy as inevitable:
"More and more literacy
experts are recognizing that enacting, reciting, and
appropriating elements from [pulp fiction] stories is a
valuable and organic part" of students' development of
literacy (p. 177). His question concerning this
intersection of popular culture and literacy is "What
difference will it make, over time, if a growing percentage
of young writers begin publishing and getting feedback on
their writing while they are still in high school?" (p.
179) .
If viewers, and students specifically, are not passive
dupes of popular culture, then the power of popular texts
carries extra weight when one considers the claims of
scholars like Gwenllian-Jones (2002) who argues, along with
Pugh (2005) and Jenkins (1992; 2001; 2006), that immersion
into a fandom's discourse is a common fan experience.
If
this is so, then the readers of popular culture texts are
indeed capable of immersing themselves in and critiquing a
text's discourse.
The members of fan discourse, in fact,
have achieved an unheard of level of audience
participation.
For example, Jenkins (2001) notes that over
33
the last decade, producers of television series have
"created openings for participation and performance" to the
extent that "the 'clear line' between producers and fans
[has started] to look rather different" (n.p.).
Jenkins
argues that the emergence and popularity of fan fiction,
message forums, and other forms of audience interaction has
forced the media industry "to become more accountable and
more responsive to its audience than previously" (n.p.).
As an example of this trend, Jenkins cites Xena,
which in
response to fan pressure had to render a more lesbian
reading of Xena and Gabrielle's relationship, and
Babylon
5, for which writer/creator J. Michael Straczynski went
online to talk with fans not only during the show's airing
but also before its production.
These trends led Jenkins
to conclude that fans have been actively recruited into the
production of shows like Babylon
Buffy
the
Vampire
Slayer
(n.p.).
5, Xena,
Star
Trek,
and
Jenkins (2006) uses the
term "media convergence" to define this shifting world of
consumer participation, which is occurring across multiple
technologies, although he notes that the producers,
advertisers, and consumers caught in this convergence "do
not yet agree on the terms of that participation" (p. 22).
In short, everyone is aware of participatory culture, but
34
no one is quite sure what it should include or what it will
become.
One thing that renders the increasing engagement with
popular culture noteworthy is the way in which the
engagement with discourse affects the authoritative moves
fans can execute when writing about their favorite shows.
In the context of popular culture, as in the field of
academia, a writer's power and authority within the
discourse community rests upon her engagement with the
discourse, her specialized knowledge of the discourse, her
credibility in the community, and her awareness of
audience.
In academia, these qualities translate into
building upon previous research, establishing a name in the
field, and anticipating and addressing the concerns of
one's peers.
However, in popular culture, discourse about
a television show, for example, translates into knowledge
of storylines, character history, character interaction,
episode content, and actor profiles.
Therefore, when the
fan of a television show, or any other aspect of popular
culture, decides to write about those characters or
episodes, the new writer faces a struggle similar to that
of a new scholar in academia because she must demonstrate
her knowledge of the discourse and its conventions and win
audience acceptance and approval.
35
Nevertheless, such rhetorical moves, which are seen so
clearly in scholars and fans in their respective discourse
communities, are often absent in the composition classroom.
For student writers, the academic authority needed to enter
discourse is often seen as either impossible or unwanted.
Yet many of these students who struggle with authority in
the classroom are the authoritative fans found in popular
culture.
For example, Alvermann and Heron (2001) discuss a
student who can make sophisticated rhetorical critiques of
the anime Dragonball
Z (i.e., a Japanese cartoon) and wield
impressive ethos and authority when discussing the text
with other fans.
However, this same student has difficulty
in English class and has no sense of authority or voice of
his academic writing (pp. 118-122).
As Jenkins (2006)
notes, this vast ocean of literacy is occurring "outside
the classroom and beyond any direct adult control" (p.
177) .
The student Alvermann and Heron studied is not an
isolated case because instructors and professors of
freshman composition and business writing courses often
spend an entire semester teaching and reinforcing such
concepts of discourse and audience only to watch students
fail.
However, beyond the worlds of scholarship and the
classroom lies a host of fan writers battling for
36
recognition on the internet.
Likewise, a portion of these
fan writers are either traditional or nontraditional
college students—the same ones with whom instructors are
struggling to teach concepts like voice and audience
awareness.
Understanding how fan writers enter and
navigate discourse, accept or resist discourse conventions,
explore their authorship, and contend with their audience
may help teachers use similar tactics with their students
as they teach academic writing.
As Jenkins (2006) notes,
students engaging in activities such as fan fiction find
that the "role-playing was providing an inspiration for
them to expand other kinds of literacy skills [in addition
to cultural and social abilities]—those already valued
within traditional education" (p. 177).
The Fan and Fan Fiction
Encoding and Decoding:
Producers and Audiences
In order to discuss fans, fan writing, and fanfic
discourse communities, I must first discuss what it means
to be a "fan," both in the sense of consumerism and fan
culture.
During recent years, the meaning of "fan" has
been changed and territorialized by both scholars and fans
struggling over the analysis of fandoms.
The audience's
role in the production of popular culture texts has
increased, as I noted earlier, and the increasing presence
37
of mass media, especially the internet, has caused audience
members to differentiate between interested viewers, who
simply enjoy the show, and true Fans, who often buy
memorabilia and readily quote episode lines or facts.
Scholarship has followed this evolution closely.
Gwenllian-Jones (2002), in "Virtual Reality and Cult
Television," argues that cult television series "already
include processes and devices of deterritorialization
within their primary texts, making exuberant use of
intertextual, intratextual, and self-reflexive references"
(p. 85).
Such space, Gwenllian-Jones asserts, allows for
more than a passive producer-to-receiver relationship,
enabling fans to augment the original text with fan
fiction, fan art, fan criticism, and websites (p. 85).
Jenkins (2001) agrees; in the case of fan agency, he states
that producers of television series have increasingly
"created openings for participation and performance" (Hills
2001, n.p.).
Jenkins further indicates that the pressure
of the fan community, through both the traditional and
creative facets of its culture, has forced the media
industry "to become more accountable and more responsive to
its audience than previously" (n.p.).
Encoding is
therefore becoming a part of the traditional and creative
cultures of fandom and is not exclusively the producers'
38
purview.
As Pugh (2005) notes in The Democratic
Genre,
fan
writers specifically resist attempts from authors or
producers to tell them how to decode—in other words, what
the text should mean or even how the characters should be
read (p. 220). This resistance is now so obvious to
producers that, Jenkins (2006) suggests, "Rather than
talking about media producers and consumers as occupying
separate roles, we might now see them as participants who
interact with each other according to a new set of rules
that none of us fully understands" (p. 3 ) .
Resisting and Re-containing:
Audiences Appropriate
Over the past twenty years, scholars have noted the
engagement of fans and their ability to resist, re-contain,
and appropriate popular culture texts.
Knobel and
Lankshear (2002) observed fan conversation, debate,
resistance, and criticism in fan magazines (^zines) that
covered a wide range of topics and fandoms, including those
of television shows and musical bands.
Radway (1984)
explored the readers of romance novels, noting that her
participants sought help in order to be more selective in
their reading and also learned "to decode the iconography
of romantic cover art and the jargon of back-cover blurbs"
so that they could find books that met their preferences
(46).
In addition, Dyer, Lovell, and McCrindle (1997) note
39
that although soap operas are steeped in dominant ideology,
audiences do not necessarily accept that ideology.
However, to say that fans only engage in resistance
would be to present a one-sided picture of fandom.
Textual
Poachers
In
(1992) Jenkins notes that the various
forms of fan publishing, including fan
A
zines, fan music
videos, fan music, fan art, and fan fiction, both interact
with the original text creatively and simultaneously stay
within fan cultural tradition.
Jenkins explains, "most
[fan writers] choose to build upon rather than reject or
ignore fan traditions.
Most new fan writers create stories
that fit comfortably within the range of precirculating
materials" (p. 160).
Jenkins' observation can be related
to Bakhtin's (1981) concept of the novel, which is
simultaneously heteroglossic and hegemonic, with voices
that challenge the social order and voices that align with
the larger community.
Similarly, Matt Hills (2002) argues that previous fan
studies have focused too much on fan resistance to consumer
culture while ignoring the co-existence "of both anticommercial ideologies and commodity-completist practices"
like fan merchandise (p. 28). Likewise, the fan's
appropriation of a text "pulls this text away from . . .
exchange-value and towards . . . use-value [in Marxist
40
terms], but without ever cleanly or clearly being able to
separate the two" (p. 35). Hills cautions scholars not to
see hegemony and resistance as clear categories or to
assume that cultural power can be completely located in one
group versus another (p. 43).
In this view, fans both do
and do not appropriate and resist, and power is neither
completely in the hands of the producer nor the fan.
The Discourse Community of Fandoms
Although one must acknowledge the dialectic forces in
fan culture—that is, that both producers and fans wield
power and the two groups engage in a struggle with/against
hegemony—there is still one fact that scholars must
consider:
If fans are engaging in creative, discerning
communities that appropriate, challenge, and publish in
response to their favorite canon television show, movie, or
pulp fiction novel, scholars would do well to consider fan
practices and how the above definitions of fanship play
into a fandom's discourse community.
However, to discuss
what it means to be a fan is to discuss what it means to
read
a text as a fan.
In Textual
Poachers,
Jenkins (1992)
explains that to a fan, "The reader's activity is no longer
seen simply as the task of recovering the author's meanings
but also as reworking borrowed materials to fit them into
the context of lived experience" (p. 51). In fact, as John
41
Tulloch notes in the study he co-wrote with Jenkins (1995),
fans are superior readers who build mutual knowledge—the
"^inside'
144).
knowledgeability of [their] social group" (p.
Fans are more emotionally intense than typical
consumers, and their power comes from their proximity to
the text, which allows them to critique, predict, and
rework the text (Jenkins, 1992, pp. 56, 58). This critical
power is generated by multiple re-readings of the text.
Introduction into a new fandom requires not only these rereadings but "rehearsal of the basic interpretive
strategies and institutional meanings common" to the fandom
(pp. 69, 72).
For some fans, the re-readings result in
rewritings, allowing fans to challenge the notion of what
it means to be a consumer, to generate a contemporary folk
culture, and to build an alternative social community (pp.
278-280).
Perhaps most importantly, in Jenkins' estimation
of what it means to be a fan, the fan's position as
rereader and rewriter allows her to "challenge attempts to
regulate the production and circulation of popular
meanings," which includes turning the discourse to
interpersonal themes that matter to the reader, such as
religion, gender roles, sexuality, and professional
ambition (pp. 32, 82).
For the increasing number of tweens
and teens entering fan fiction, Jenkins (2006) has observed
42
that fan fiction also allows reader-writers to "compensate
for their estrangement from kids in their neighborhoods. .
. . Children use stories to escape from or reaffirm aspects
of their real lives" (p. 174).
Hills (2002) reminds us to consider challenges to the
definitions and portrayals of fans as set forth in Jenkins,
Tulloch, and others.
Hills takes issue with the
predominant academic vision of the fan, in which "fans are
represented as miniaturised academics" and are often
portrayed along the lines of a moral dualism—as either
passive or agents, good fans or bad fans (pp. 10, xii) .
He
also cautions against readings of fan experience that
remove the element of affection, passion, and play from fan
psychology or accounts that rely on fans to self-articulate
(pp. 90, 66). Hills further reminds scholars that fan
interviews with scholarly researchers "cannot
and analyzed"
be
accepted
since fans are being ultimately asked by the
researchers to justify themselves (p. 66, italics
original).
This justification causes fans to develop a
defensive mantra to ward off accusations of irrationality,
and the end result is that "The fan cannot act, then, as
the unproblematic source of the meaning of their own media
consumption" (p. 67).
43
However, what Hills does not contest is the propensity
of fans to reread and rewrite their beloved texts.
Therefore, if being a fan means to modify and put to
personal use a media text, then the emergence of fan
fiction is no surprise.
Yet, how are these fan writers
positioned within the larger community of the fandom?
Fans
who are immersed in the fandom's discourse are often
consumers of fan fiction, and therefore have a fledging
understanding of authorship and identity in the context of
poaching texts.
A number of such fans obviously find
themselves drawn to trying on the mantle of authorship,
given the growing number of internet sites dedicated in
part or whole to archiving fan fiction.
Perhaps more
significant is a fan writer's sense of audience and the
authority attached:
who else except a fan best knows what
fans of a television show, movie, or book wish to read?
The issue of fan fiction discourse, then, promises a rich
exploration of the inner-workings of dialogic discourse,
and it is exactly this rich exploration that I hope will
inform composition instructors' views of student engagement
with academic discourse.
Fan Fiction
Previous scholarship on fan fiction has tended to
focus on socio-cultural issues, with a majority of the
44
scholarship generated by Cultural Studies, Media Studies,
and Gender Studies.
Many studies (Penley 1997; Jenkins
1992; Scodari and Felder 2000; Woledge 2005; Lee 2003;
Bacon-Smith 1992; and Heinecken 2005)have addressed social
critiques, gender politics, gay/lesbian politics, and the
representation (and critique) of sex and sexual roles,
especially as it concerns slash—that is, erotic stories
typically written about two male characters.
Of these
issues or trends, slash has received the most attention,
despite the fact there is more heterosexual fiction ("net")
than slash fiction and more general/nonsexual fiction than
either of these (Pugh, 2005, p. 91). For example,
Elizabeth Woledge (2005) considers how feminine portrayals
of male characters and gender-blending are treated in the
slash community where such portrayals seem to be accepted,
and in the academic community, which ascribes too much
cultural transcendence to the fans' gender-blending (pp.
59, 62).
The two major researchers of slash fiction and fan
fiction in general are Constance Penley and Camille BaconSmith.
Penley's work in the 1980s might be best understood
through her later publications, such as NASA/Trek
(1997),
in which she spends less time analyzing the canon texts and
more time studying the fan fiction.
45
Here her attention is
most captured by slash fiction and its writers.
The slash
writers rarely identify as feminists, yet their stories
treat classic feminist issues while engaging in the
American mythos surrounding interethnic male bonding or the
homosocial bonds that structure male friendship in the U.S.
(p. 104, 136).
The result is a focus on male romantic
relationships for several reasons:
the relationship is
erotic; it "avoids built-in inequality of the romance
formula"; it avoids the politically charged bodies of 20 th
(and 21st) century women; the canon women characters are
often weak or marginalized; and "such a couple . . .
is one
in which love and work can be shared by two equals" (pp.
125-130).
(1989), Star
As Penley notes in The Future
Trek
of
an
Illusion
and other science fiction shows provide
the perfect playing ground for such stories because SF is
the only fictional realm that can clearly define sexual
difference, and it does so through human/alien,
human/cyborg, and similar SF tropes (p. 132). A
human/alien pairing like Kirk/Spock, then, defines sexual
difference without succumbing to the inherent inequalities
of male/female relationships.
Like Penley, Camille Bacon-Smith (1992), in
Enterprising
Women,
such as slash.
focuses primarily on sexual fan fiction
Bacon-Smith argues that "sex is a primary
46
metaphor in the language of the group [of fan writers]; it
symbolizes the search for trust and community and security"
(p. 6 ) . This search by fan fiction writers is possible
because fan fiction, which she finds is primarily written
by women, is a "conceptual space where women can come
together and create—to investigate new forms for their art
and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men
have placed on women's public behavior" (p. 3 ) .
In addition, like Penley, Bacon-Smith attempts to
determine why heterosexual women write male homoerotic
stories, and the answers are numerous.
For example, there
are no viable TV models for strong women, men act as
surrogate women who are free of domination, and the writers
can reconstruct both men and romantic relationships (pp.
240-248).
Unfortunately, the final point, that romantic
relationships can be challenged or rewritten, has become
the politically correct answer among many scholars, and as
a result, heterosexual fan fiction is often degraded in
academic circles by the accusation that het fie accepts and
propagates dominant ideology concerning women's gender and
sexual roles.
However, recent scholars have resisted the assumption
that heterosexual fiction is ^buying into the status quo'
and does not resist or re-imagine romantic relationships.
47
Christine Scodari and Jenna L. Felder (2000) explore the
fan discussions and fan fiction of The X-Files
audience,
focusing specifically on fans' treatment of the romance
between the series' protagonists, Mulder and Scully, who
are often portrayed as having an egalitarian relationship
that resists gender dichotomies.
Likewise, Dawn Heinecken
(2005) discusses the resistive work of sadomasochistic fan
fictions about the heterosexual couple Buffy and Spike in
Buffy
the
Vampire
Slayer.
In these stories, the male
character plays the maternal role and is often
unappreciated, and the sadomasochism creates a space in
which the female writers critique women's social roles (pp.
51-52).
Buffy's role as the sometimes abusive sadist and
female saddled with both power and maternal responsibility
is also explored and critiqued by the female writers
because "Buffy's situation speaks to the paradox
experienced by many contemporary women" (pp. 54-55).
In
this way, Heinecken challenges the long-held assumption by
scholars that het fanfic cannot do social work because
Buffy/Spike stories "offer explicit critiques of repressive
social norms regarding female sexuality and caretaking
duties" (p. 58).
While Cultural and Gender Studies have devoted
significant time to fan culture and fan writing, Literary
48
Studies has paid little attention to the fan fiction
phenomenon.
Anik LaChev (2005), in "Fan Fiction:
A Genre
and Its (Final?) Frontiers" notes that there is
considerable resistance to the literary study of fan
fiction because of "a very classic notion of literature as
something stable and finished, of high cultural value . . .
and crafted by one single, professional individual" (p.
85) .
By its nature, fan fiction seems to be in motion,
always moving, transient (pp. 85-86) .
Likewise, fan
writers see "the writing process as a public occurrence,
separating the process much less, if at all, from the
published product" (p. 86).
In addition to making a call
for Literary Studies to analyze fan fiction, LaChev points
to an interesting change in the relationship between fan
fiction and its writers:
fans are now sometimes entering
fandoms through fanfic instead of by watching or reading
the canon text.
This new type of reader/writer relies on
fanon (i.e., fan traditions) to understand the stories they
read or write (p. 85).
However, LaChev is not the only scholar from
Literature Studies to initiate discussion of fan fiction.
Sheenagh Pugh (2005), in The Democratic
Genre,
launches an
extensive exploration of fan fiction as a literary genre:
why fans write fanfic, their chosen genres, their narrative
49
methods, and their writing communities.
Noting that fanfic
has ancient precursors in the practice of writers borrowing
from myth, history, and other writers' works, Pugh argues
that when an author creates characters who come alive, they
are no longer just the author's characters and instead
become "our characters"—a shared love and resource between
fans (pp. 13, 17, 67). He explains that many fanfic
writers want "either 'more o f
their source material or
'more from' it" and that "Fan fiction happens because
people are not ready for a story to end" (p. 19, 31). He
notes that fanfic writers, who build the specialized
knowledge of their discourse through multiple rereadings of
the canon texts, use those canon texts as a jump-off point
that can lead to prequels, sequels, fan spin-offs, AUs
(alternate universes), and crossovers (putting characters
from two different shows into one story) (pp. 26, 42, 64).
As a result, fan writers tend to be highly imaginative and
adventurous and are not impressed with accusations that
they are not being original (p. 133).
Pugh also explores the interaction within fan writing
communities, finding that they are highly supportive, with
writers and readers providing feedback on stories, grammar
guides, beta-readers (peer reviewers), and chances for
collaboration.
By way of contrast, Pugh admits that the
50
amount of support varies by website, and there are several
raging debates over measures seen as elitist, such as
writing contests or awards (pp. 116-126).
However, Pugh
does not consider how "democratic" the fan writing
communities may or may not be.
In other words, other than
his nod to fan taboos, Pugh does not consider what voices
are silenced or if and why new writers are denied entry
into the fanfic community even when they demonstrate the
appropriate specialized fan knowledge.
The field of Rhetoric and Composition and Literacy
Studies has only recently become interested in fan fiction,
and in order to explore the most applicable examples of
rhetoric and composition research in these areas, I will
comment upon a few studies in detail.
However, it is not
surprising that Composition and Literacy Studies continued
to ignore fan fiction for two decades after Cultural and
Media Studies studied it.
Angela Thomas (2006) provides
insight into the issue of resistance:
Writing fan fiction in the classroom was once
considered inappropriate (and possibly still is). In
my own teacher education courses of the mid-1980s, for
example, we were taught to value the fostering of
children's imaginations, and as far as writing lessons
were considered, we went to great lengths to talk
about the ways we should stimulate children's
imaginations to create their own original characters
and stories. The idea of children using
51
existing characters in their fiction writing was
definitely considered bad practice and against
teaching philosophies of the time. (p. 229)
This attitude that fan fiction writers are bad writers or
lazy writers still persists.
The teens Thomas interviewed
responded passionately against the claim:
When I spoke to Tiana about the ways people (including
teachers) have traditionally dismissed fan fiction as
trivial or shallow, she responded: ^True! Because
people feel that we're lazy, not creating our own
worlds and characters (which I've done BOTH in
fanfic). They regard us, sometimes, as bad writers
because we don't use our own canons, when, in fact,
some people's fanfics are much more enjoyable than
novels.' (p. 229)
However, Thomas notes that a growing number of literacy and
education scholars are taking interest in the phenomenon
(p. 237).
In fact, Thomas cites Lewis (2004) as supporting
fan fiction as a scaffold for young writers:
w,
It allows
young authors to practice their craft without expending
huge amounts of time and energy developing something
"original"'" (p. 227).
This acknowledgement is a powerful
first step to the valuing and researching of fan fiction by
composition and literacy scholars, although both Thomas and
Lewis fail to acknowledge that professional writers compose
fan fiction, as do adults who are simultaneously writing
original fiction and fan fiction.
For her study, Thomas focused on collaborative writing
and its literacy and social implications.
52
By studying two
teens, Tiana and Janalf, who run a website dedicated to fan
fiction that mixes Star
Wars with Lord
of
the
Rings,
Thomas
made several important discoveries about the nature of
collaborative online writing.
She observed online role-
playing games in which members of the website built stories
one post at a time as well as Tiana and Jandalf's coauthoring of multiple fics.
Tiana explained why their
collaboration was so helpful:
By working together in conjunction with someone who
writes three times better than I do when it comes to
dialogue - though I am probably better at view
points - we balance each other out, and contrast our
individual skills. My spelling, for one thing, has
improved, as has my grammar. . . But we contrast with
our writing skills, and by that, make each other
stronger. By focusing on strengthening another's weak
points, you begin to allow yourself to write deeper in
on your own weaknesses, and strengthen yourself in
those points, (p. 230)
This speaks clearly to the potential of fan fiction to
create stronger writers; however, Thomas focuses more on
the narrative and social elements of fan fiction.
Using
narrative theory, Thomas observed the role-playing games in
forums that were sometimes later translated into fan
fiction in traditional narrative form and noted, "we see
the central plot as a dramatic unfolding of events, and it
is here we see a richness and intricacy of narrative form.
. . Reading and viewing the range of narrative discourses
allows the reader to construct the story" (p. 234). As for
53
the social elements, Thomas feels that fan fiction allows
young girls to critique and explore issues of female
empowerment in the androcentric genres of fantasy and
science fiction, as well as refine their sense of identity
as they move into adulthood (pp. 235-236).
As for observations that are more closely tied to
rhetoric and composition, Thomas took particular interest
in the fact that her participants were role-playing their
stories in Yahoo Instant Messenger and then translating the
scripted format into narrative prose (p. 231:
This process intrigued me. I have observed roleplaying communities, and fanfiction communities, but
had never seen any young people who were crossing over
from one practice into another. Tiana and Jandalf
seemed to be pushing the limits and blurring the
boundaries in a number of ways, including blurring
understandings about narrative as a distinct form,
blurring the boundaries of reality and fantasy and
challenging all notions of what it might mean to be
literate in the digital age. (p. 231)
Granted, as a fan fiction writer and composition scholar, I
was intrigued by Thomas's intrigue.
I have collaborated
with three other writers by using Microsoft Instant
Messenger to role-play a story that was then translated
into narrative prose.
Both times, I thought nothing more
of it than considering it the only way a woman in Kentucky
could co-author a story with a young woman in New
Hampshire, one in Washington state, and one in Canada.
54
However, as a participant in fan fiction, I failed to see
the issue from a composition scholar's point of view: roleplaying a story line-by-line through Instant Messenger is
similar yet still a far cry from my adolescent
collaborations with my best friends in which we took turns
writing entire scenes or chapters into a co-owned notebook.
While my best friends and I would keep the notebooks for
days at a time, each one writing large chunks of prose
containing multiple characters, MSN Messenger allows a
real-time play script format in which each person plays a
set role(s) and dialogue and events are reacted to
immediately.
The result is a conversation-style flow.
Clearly, Thomas is pondering an interesting turn in
literacy and technology, but no matter how intriguing her
findings, she has not touched upon the issue of power
within the discourse communities of fan fiction writers
except to briefly note that teenaged girls who write from
heroes' viewpoints are sometimes penalized by girls who are
exploring female empowerment by writing through "action
chick" heroines' viewpoints, such as Buffy from Buffy
Vampire
Slayer
the
(p. 236).
It is noteworthy that in the course of her research,
Thomas resisted the use of Michel de Certeau's theory of
the poaching of texts.
Thomas writes that if we accept
55
that fan fiction writers are gaining experience in
composing that builds their writing skills, "we are able to
re-conceptualise an image of young fanfic writers
without
the stigma associated with Jenkins's use of de Certeau's
term ^poacher'" (p. 227). As a result, Thomas claims
"Instead writers of fan fiction can be described as active
manipulators and designers of original texts, using given
cultural artifacts as a scaffold and launching point from
which to develop considerable and worthwhile originality"
(p. 227).
I agree with Thomas's assessment.
De Certeau,
writing before the explosion of the digital age, perhaps
could not envision what active readers could truly achieve.
In L'Invention
Life]
du Quotidien
[The Practice
of
Everyday
, de Certeau remarks that
Far from being writers—founders of their own place,
heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on
the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of
houses—readers are travellers; they pass through lands
belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their
way across fields they did not write, despoiling the
wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves, (as qtd. in
Ahearne, 1995, p. 171)
Several implications arise from de Certeau's metaphor,
not the least of which is the inherent insult tied to the
words "poacher" and "despoiling," which aligns active
reading with an act of intellectual rape—especially when
compared to the Westerners' destruction of Egypt through
56
their own greed.
However, setting aside the problematic
language, one also finds that de Certeau's model
oversimplifies the complexity of reader-producer
interaction, as he notes that " x a social hierarchization
works to bring readers into conformity with the
'information' distributed by elite (or semi-elite)'" even
as readers attempt to "'use their wits'" to resist this
process (as qtd. in Ahearne p. 175). This model does not
consider how readers become writers of texts as they
produce their own versions in fan fiction, nor does it
consider the aforementioned tendency of modern television
producers to invite and consider feedback from their
viewing audiences.
Jeremy Ahearne (1995) encapsulates this
issue best when he suggests that "the lines which
Practice
of
Everyday
Life]
[The
draws are too clear-cut.
They
occult some of the confusions which characterize the
operations of power in contemporary society" (p. 162).
Therefore, while luminal scholars in fan fiction and fan
culture, such as Jenkins (1992), used de Certeau as their
platform, his work no longer applies to the growing
complexity of reader-writer/producer-writer interaction.
In addition to Angela Thomas, Rebecca Black's (2007)
article "Digital Design:
English Language Learners and
Reader Reviews in Online Fiction" closely explores specific
57
fan writers and their interactions.
Black analyzes the
experiences of a sixteen-year-old Mandarin Chinese speaker
who posts English fan fiction on Fanfiction.net for the
Japanese anime (cartoon) Card Captor
Sakura.
Black notes
that "fan fiction sites are spaces where school-age fans
are using new ICTs [information and communication
technologies] to engage, not only with pop culture and
media, but also with a broad array of literate activities
that are aligned with many school-based literary practices'
(p. 115). Black believes that the nature of fan fiction
communities—that of sharing a common passion—allows for
traditional roles of expertise to be inverted, allowing
young teens to take roles of authority over adults:
"the
roles of 'expert' and 'novice' are highly variable and
contingent on activity and content" (p. 117). Although
Black underscores this upheaval, it must be noted that the
fandom in which she did her case study—Card Captor
Sakura—
is an anime that overwhelmingly draws young teens, having
been "kiddifed" (i.e., having the blood, gore, and curse
words removed and the Japanese names replaced with English
ones) and marketed like Pokemon
children.
and Yu-gi-oh
to American
In other words, unlike other anime fandoms or
live action television series, Card Captor
Sakura
is far
less likely to draw fans or writers aged eighteen and
58
older.
Black herself admits this by pointing out that
shows such as Guiding
Light
base on Fanfiction.net.
have an older reader and writer
However, Black's claim that social
roles can be reversed in the discourse communities on
Fanfiction.net is not untrue, as some younger writers have
been known to display more canon knowledge and greater
engagement with the fandom than older writers and therefore
gain a large audience of dedicated readers and reviewers.
Black specifically focuses on writer Tanaka Nanako,
who requests in her first chapter's author's notes that
readers overlook her grammar since she has only been
speaking and writing English for two and a half years.
Likewise, she specifically requests feedback on her content
instead (pp. 121, 123).
In order to discourage reviews she
finds offensive or unhelpful, she posts a list of her
favorite reviewers in each subsequent chapter of her story
(p. 123). Black found that readers took her requests and
her reactions to her reviews into consideration, leaving
reviews on her characterization and plot or, if giving
suggestions on grammar, doing so by bracketing the
suggestion with praise for other aspects of the story (pp.
123-125).
Tanaka seemed to take the grammar suggestions
into consideration, showing an improvement on the errors
noted by her readers (p. 130).
59
Black's case study is an interesting cross section of
what I would call the best possible scenario.
The excerpt
of Tanaka's writing provided by Black shows Tanaka engaging
in a readable—if not error-free—paragraph of decent
description.
It would seem the writer has some talent, and
her teenaged audience was willing to support her and gently
correct her.
Unfortunately, as my research found, this is
not always the case.
For example, Trek
fan writer sfordcar
received several hateful reviews for her first story "The
Mad Captain," among them this:
If you plan on a second chapter, don't. This is a dry
chapter with no feeling to it whatso ever [sic]. One
gets the feel that yu [sic] cut the characters out of
cardstock instead of dealing with actualy [sic] flesh
and blood people. You explain very little as to what
is really going on other than boom, boom and then
fizzle. Very sad first attempt.
Therefore, while as a fan fiction writer myself I
appreciate the Utopian and democratic view of fan fiction
offered by scholars such as Pugh (2005), Thomas (2006), and
Black (2007), I also am aware of a darker dystopian side
filled with harsh critiques, flaming, and attempts to
silence or expel writers from a fandom.
My research found
what I consider a more realistic balance between the two
views:
supporters and discouragers.
In addition, while
Black's case study is excellent for a detailed look at one
60
writer's experience, I have explored the larger scope of
two fandoms.
Therefore, while researchers such as Pugh (2005)
provide a fascinating and informative exploration of fanfic
as a literary genre, and scholars such as Thomas (2006) and
Black (2007) provide insight into fan fiction as a means of
online collaborative writing, for my study I have
considered the outlook and methodology of writers as they
enter and navigate fan discourse.
In doing so, I hope to
add another facet to the discussion:
or literary one, but a rhetorical one.
not a social/cultural
While the discourse
communities surrounding fandoms such as Star
Trek
and
Buffy
have many facets, including fan art, fan analyses, and fan
videos, I have chosen to focus my study on fan fiction in
particular for two reasons:
one, because I hope to draw
parallels or insights for students in composition courses;
and two, because I wish to use (alternative) discourse
theory to discuss the power dynamics of fan writing—the
entrance into and navigation of the discourse of language
and writing.
61
CHAPTER TWO
RESEARCH METHODS
In this chapter, I will outline my research
methodology, beginning with my research questions and
moving on to my approach and methodology.
Although my
initial efforts were structured, I quickly found that the
hypertextual nature of cyberspace influenced my ability to
gather information.
In other words, the way readers and
reviewers connected to each other and to other stories
caused me to follow the social networks they created, and
as a result, my research became an act of networking as I
hopped from friend to friend and story to story.
Once I
finish outlining how I gathered my data, I will discuss my
coding in detail.
Then I will define the key terms that
will control the discussion of my findings as presented in
chapters three and four.
Research Questions
I used the following groups of questions to guide my
inquiry into the nature of fan fiction discourse:
1. How is fan fiction discourse controlled, and what are
the parameters of that discourse?
62
Who enjoys the
status of dominant voice within the discourse; who are
the minority voices and why?
What dialogues and
interchanges are occurring within the fan writing
community?
2. How do new writers gain entry into the discourse?
When are they rejected and shunned, and why?
What
qualities are associated with successful or
unsuccessful entry into the community?
3. How does the variation between different fandoms'
audiences affect the discourse of those fandoms?
How
does the level of writers' audience awareness or the
quality of audience treatment vary between specialized
fanfic archives and umbrella websites?
How does the
social context and intertextuality of the readerwriters, who are already an audience, affect the
discourse community?
Methods and Texts
As mentioned earlier, I analyzed the stories posted to
the internet by fans of Star
Buffy
the Vampire
Slayer.
Trek:
The Original
I chose Star Trek and
because of their fan status:
Series
and
Buffy
both series were unpredicted,
run-away successes; both broke new ground in gender
portrayal and television story-telling; and both generated
a cult following.
In addition, I have chosen these series
63
because they represent two points in television history and
two generations of fans—one from the 1960s-70s, and one
from the 1990s-early 2000s—,and they were both aimed at a
younger target audience.
By studying the fan faction of
two series separated by time but similar in cult status, I
will explore the authoritative moves of fan writers.
Granted, Matt Hills (2002) has called for scholars not to
focus on one specific television series or fandom because
it isolates us from the broader picture of fan behavior and
media consumption:
"too may previous works have focused on
single TV series, singular fan cultures, or singular media"
(1-2).
However, as Woledge (2005) notes,
Hills' main concern is not with the literature . . .
fans produce but rather with their interpretive
practices, a focus which facilitates his discussion of
how some fans have become academics and how this may,
or may not, differ from cases where academics have
been informed by their knowledge of fandom. (51)
Since I am interested in the discursive moves of fan
writers and their entry into discourse, I felt I had to
focus on one or two specific communities in order to gain a
clear picture of the discourse.
Future work in other
fandoms will be able to expand, verify, or adjust my
observations until a broader picture is assembled.
In order to gain a baseline and general understanding
of each fandom's fan fiction, I picked three fan fiction
64
sites per fandom: two fan archives and one umbrella site.
The difference is as follows:
a fan archive collects
stories for one series or "universe" (i.e., the
universe and the Trek
Buffy
universe, named so because both
original shows produced spinoff series) . An umbrella site
collects stories from multiple fandoms and acts as a
database of fan fiction.
In both cases, writers generally
submit for membership to the site and then submit stories;
however, fan archives tend to have administrators who have
the power to reject submissions while umbrella sites do
not.
Only reader complaints for violations of the umbrella
site's TOS (terms of service) will result in the removal of
a story.
Because of the site moderators, most fans assume
fan archives have higher quality stories; however,
observation of umbrella sites shows they have a higher
submission rate.
Therefore, the dynamics of both kinds of
sites bear study.
For Buffy
the
following sites:
and the Buffy
Vampire
Slayer,
I read stories from the
the BtVS Writers' Guild, All About Spike,
section of Fanfiction.net (the most famous
fan fiction umbrella site).
For Star
stories from the following sites:
Trek:
TOS, I read
Orion Press Online
Archives, the Kirk-Spock Fanfiction Archive, and the Star
Trek:
TOS section of Fanfiction.net.
65
Later, I also added
the Trek Writer's Guild because of the imbalance between
the archiving of stories between the fandoms, since the
BtVS Writers' Guild is not simply a single website or
archive, but rather an archive of character and characterpairing archives.
The addition of the Trek Writer's Guild
gave me a cross section for Trek
complexity to that of Buffy
comparable in size and
because, like the BtVS Writers'
Guild, the Trek Writer's Guild amasses stories under
multiple subsections such as TOS,
Voyager,
Deep Space
Nine,
Enterprise,
The Next
Generation,
and various fan-
created Starfleet ships.
In order to gain a random sampling of stories, I read
every tenth story posted on each of the sites until I had
read a minimum of fifty stories per fandom.
I then focused
on the network of reviewers and writers until I had read a
minimum of a hundred stories per fandom.
In other words, I
purposely looked for stories and/or writers who were
applicable to my research for the following reasons:
they
self-identified as new authors or as non-English speaking
authors; they were new to the fan site; they were obviously
rulers or gatekeepers of the fan site; they received flame
reviews (harsh or cruel feedback); or they had amassed a
fan-following as a writer.
66
I set guidelines for choosing which stories I would
read for the baseline, and I kept these guidelines when I
began my networking approach to story-finding, which
involved following a particular writer's work or choosing a
story based on its reviews or its mention by another
writer.
•
Those guidelines were as follows:
Stories were in prose narrative, since it is the
more popular and accepted form of fan fiction.
Given that poems rarely receive reviews, determining
poet-audience interaction would be difficult, and
acceptance or rejection of the poet is not
indicative of the community at large.
•
Stories qualified in length as short stories (20,000
words or less), not novellas or novels, since the
inclusion of more novels in one fandom over the
other could cause me to misunderstand the audience
of that fandom.
This misunderstanding could arise
because of sheer volume of reviews and/or flames
generated by a novel-length work.
•
Stories chosen in addition to the baseline stories
were selected based on evidence of the stories'
impact upon the discourse community.
In other
words, the story had a sufficient number of detailed
reviews; was widely accepted or rejected based on
67
its placement in its discourse community; or its
author interacted with the discourse community and
its stated or unstated rules, trends, and
assumptions.
In addition to examining the stories, I looked at the
author's notes, which are usually posted at the beginning
or ending of a chapter, the stories' reviews, the authors'
biography pages, the site forums, and the site-sponsored
interviews.
I also made note of the writers' ages, which
were often revealed on the authors' biography pages, and as
a result, I collected specific age data from over 200
authors' biographies in addition to considering further
data such as the authors' mention of school work, parents,
graduate school, jobs, spouses, and children.
As I researched, the dynamics of flame reviews and
fan-followings of fan writers caused me to branch into the
Thunderbirds
section of Fanfiction.net and The Tracy Island
Chronicles in order to compare/contrast the attitudes of
members of older fan fiction communities.
The
Thunderbirds
was a British science fiction show that aired almost
simultaneously with Star Trek:
TOS in the 1960s and
generated a smaller but equally loyal cult following.
Trek,
Like
it produced a Hollywood movie many years after its
cancellation that caused a sudden influx of newer, younger
68
fans into the fandom.
I gathered a baseline of only twenty
stories in the Thunderbirds
fandom, having had previous
acquaintance with its fan fiction, and then chose further
stories entirely based on audience reaction and reviews.
Questions for Analysis
As I read the fan fiction and considered both the
writers and their audiences, I operated on more detailed
versions of my research questions, which are as follows:
To address how fan fiction discourse is controlled and
who the dominant and minority voices are, I asked the
following questions:
1. How is the specialized knowledge of the fandom (the
canon text) further modified by the discourse
community (e.g., fanon)?
How does fanon enter into a
dialogue with canon text?
How are writers and their
position in the community affected by their attitudes
toward fanon and fanfic cliches or taboos?
2. How is status determined?
How does quality of
stories, length of time in the fandom, or quantity of
writing affect status, and which one seems to have the
most impact?
3. What role does feedback play in fan fiction
communities, and how do writers react to feedback?
69
To what extent is feedback considered a social custom?
How or when is feedback abused?
To address how and when new writers gain entry into
the discourse and what qualities most often lead to success
or failure, I explored the following:
1. How does the age or writing experience of the writer
affect his/her acceptance into the discourse?
does that acceptance entail?
What
To what extent is the
discourse unified or divided by factors such as age
and writing experience of the fans?
2. How are new writers treated?
and if so, why?
Are they often shunned,
Is there a pattern of shunning or
acceptance by fandom or website, and if so, how does
that pattern play out?
3. How is successful entry into the fandom affected by
the story's quality (e.g., good grammar and factually
correct) versus other factors such as genre or
pairing?
How are ESL writers treated?
To address how variation between different fandom's
audiences affect the discourse of those fandoms and how
audience awareness varies between specialized and umbrella
websites, I asked these questions:
1. How often do writers try to push the boundaries of
their fan traditions (i.e., canon versus fanon or
70
revisions to canon lore) and how is such pushing
received?
2. What differences exist in audience behavior between
fandoms and/or specific websites, and what seems to
cause those differences?
3. What differences can be seen between the level of
audience awareness for writers who post partially or
exclusively to specialized fan archives versus those
who post exclusively to umbrella sites?
After reading over a hundred stories per fandom with
these questions in mind, I proceeded to code the authors'
biography pages, site-sponsored interviews, author's notes,
story reviews, forum posts, and my notes on the stories
themselves.
Method of Analysis
For each story I read, I copied the author's notes in
the chapters, the author's biography from the author's
page, the story's reviews, and/or the author's interview
from the author's page.
How much of this information was
available varied by site.
Fanfiction.net, The Tracy Island
Chronicles, and the Kirk/Spock archive provide each author
with an author's page that automatically contains all the
links to their stories.
Past that, they may add whatever
other information they wish.
Likewise, All About Spike
71
provides an author's page where, in addition to having
links to their stories, the authors may answer a voluntaryinterview about writing and fan fiction.
The BtVS Writers'
Guild and the Orion Press provide no such opportunity,
although some authors write author's notes for their
stories.
The Trek Writer's Guild has a page of short
biographies for its authors based on information the
writers submit when they join the site; they may not add
further information or comments of their own.
Half of the
websites provided a page for reader reviews.
This wide variety of biographies, author's notes, and
interviews allowed me to gather information on writers'
attitudes toward writing and toward reviewers, as well as
other facts such as their age, their occupation, their
gender, and even at times their religion.
The review pages
allowed me to access reader response to the texts.
I
gathered all these comments, interviews, and reviews into
four massive documents:
Trek
Stories, Buffy
Stories,
Thunderbirds
stories, and All About Spike Author
Interviews.
Then I printed them and color-coded them with
highlighters, adding marginal comments and layers of color
as I recoded.
The key for the interviews, author biographies, forum
posts, and author's notes was as follows:
72
•
Yellow for evidence of a writer's view of herself as
either an active or passive reader
•
Orange for comments about writing stylistically (e.g.,
cliches, metaphors, plot)
•
Blue for writers' reactions to feedback and audience
•
Pink for why they write fan fiction
•
Green for comments about the treatment of canon or
fanon facts
•
Purple for references to a particular website's rules
or terms of service
The key for reviews was as follows:
•
Yellow for reviews that mentioned canon facts, 00C
(out of character) behavior, and other such fanfic
concerns
•
Orange for reviews that mentioned grammar,
punctuation, and/or spelling
•
Blue for reviews that revealed a fandom power play,
such as flaming or comments meant to run a writer out
of the fandom
•
Pink for reviews that touched on new fan or new writer
issues (e.g., welcoming someone to the fandom)
73
•
Green for reviews that commented upon fanon issues or
fan fiction genres such as an AU (alternate universe)
story or a H/C (hurt/comfort) story
•
Purple for reviews that mentioned style, setting,
description, plot, or language art
•
SLAMMED written in the margin for reviews that flamed
a story or purposely humiliated a writer
•
IGNORED written in the margin for a new writer who
receives no reviews or acknowledgements from the
fandom
For an example of coding for a story's reviews, please
see Appendix I; Appendix II provides an example of coding
for an interview/author's notes.
(Note:
for the sake of
publication, I had to substitute grey highlighting in each
appendix.)
Once I finished coding, I copied and pasted chucks of
applicable data into a document with my research questions,
in essence matching the results from each fandom to the
questions asked, which meant reading and analyzing a few
extra stories to fill in unanswered questions.
themes emerged:
Three major
discourse, new writers, and audience.
These controlling themes caused me to return to the
research on discourse, active fan reading, and reader
74
re-visioning, such as the work by M. M. Bakhtin (1981), M.
Hills (2002,) P. Bizzell (2002), H. Jenkins (2002; 2006),
S. Pugh (2005), D. Heinecken (2005), A. Thomas (2006), and
R. Black (2007).
With these reader/writer issues in mind, I analyzed my
limited data on age and gender between umbrella sites and
fan archives in order to create a cursory picture of both
the readers and writers of fan fiction.
When I realized
age played a role in the tone and style of the audience's
reception of a text and the writer's response to that
reception, I matched, when possible, the reader interaction
on review boards to the ages of the readers and writers.
This gave me a more complex view of the discourse within
the fandom, causing me to realize there are separate sets
of writers and readers within each fandom, often divided by
age.
A clearer picture began to emerge of the discourse
between audience and writer, new writers and established
writers, and older writers and younger writers.
Definition of Key Terms
Because M.M. Bakhtin's (trans. 1981) terminology
defines much of the discussion in chapters three and four,
I will explain both Bakhtin's and my usage of five major
terms:
dialogic,
and hegemony.
centripetal,
centrifugal,
heteroglossia,
In doing so, I will clarify how I have
75
maintained or adapted Bakhtin's key vocabulary for
discourse.
As stated in chapter one, two assumptions underlie
Bakhtin's work:
language is centered in social interaction
and at sites of social struggles; and language is both
reciprocal and interactive, whether it occurs between
readers and texts or between speakers (Maybin, 2006, p.
64).
Bakhtin disagrees with Saussure and structural
linguistics, who hold that language is an abstract system
of signs without context.
In contrast, Bakhtin states that
language is a "concrete lived reality" that is "essentially
social and rooted in struggle and ambiguities of everyday
life" (pp. 64-65).
Dialogic
Simply put, the term "dialogic" refers to the
relationship among voices in a discourse.
In other words,
Bakhtin theorizes that an author enters into a complex
dialogue between herself and the consolidating forces of
the culture—i.e., the "processes of sociopolitical and
cultural centralization" that create a "unitary language
[that] gives expression to forces working toward concrete
verbal and ideological unification" (p. 271).
However, against this unification are the dynamics of
languages or dialects that exist in each profession, social
76
group, or genre, some of which consciously resist
unification.
The result is a battle over language,
identity, and authority (Bahktin pp. 271-272).
As a
result, "all talk is dialogical, meaning that when we speak
we combine together many different pieces of other
conversations and texts and, significantly, other voices"
(Wetherell, 2006 p. 24). This stratified and diversified
language means the "distinctions between speaker and
listener, and between writer and reader become blurred as
the purposes and understandings of each are anticipated by,
and interpenetrate the other" (Maybin, 2006 p. 69).
Therefore, "dialogic" refers to a multiplicity of
voices in language that are not only primarily "a struggle
among socio-linguistic points of view" but also an "intralanguage dialogue" (Bakhtin p. 273). Both definitions are
applicable to fan fiction, which involves fans struggling
against producers for the meanings of texts as well as fans
interacting with the unifying cultural forces within their
intra-language (i.e., intra-discourse) community.
That is,
fan writers and readers labor to define their voices and
ways to mean within fan fiction society.
Centripetal and Centrifugal
According to Bakhtin, "every concrete utterance of a
speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as
77
well as centripetal forces are brought to bear" (p. 272).
Centripetal forces register those places where speakers
already agree and can understand one another; centrifugal
forces represent the new information that must be in each
utterance in order to avoid endless repetition of words and
ideas.
Therefore, "every utterance participates in the
''unitary language' (in its centripetal forces and
tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and
historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying
forces)" (p. 272).
More specifically, Bakhtin proposes that language in
the novel allows for a "multiplicity of social voices" that
reveal "an individualization of the general language" (pp.
263-264).
In other words, language—whether spoken or
written—involves sites of struggle that contain centripetal
Centripetal forces are
"authoritative, fixed, inflexible discourses of religious
dogma, scientific truth, and the political and moral status
guo" while centrifugal forces are "stratified and
diversified" into "different genres, professions, agegroups, and historical periods" (Maybin, 2006 p. 65). One
or the other force may dominate discourse briefly, but the
other force will resist, causing a never-ending struggle
(p. 67).
78
Therefore, "centripetal" refers to a force that is
commanding and uncompromising, a gatekeeper that works not
only to keep language unified so that speakers may
understand each other but also to hold language to the
specifications decided by the experts and authorities in a
discourse.
Meanwhile, "centrifugal" refers to a force that
resists unification, introducing diverse voices and
stratifying language.
When balanced, the two forces not
only allow language to grow and not stagnate but also
remain understandable to most speakers.
Within the realm of fan fiction, these same forces are
at work.
Centripetal forces control elements such as
language (e.g., grammar, spelling, and syntax); character
interpretation (i.e., writing "in character"); and canon
purity (i.e., using textual facts correctly).
Centripetal
forces are opposed by centrifugal forces, which use nonstandard English, develop or challenge characterization,
and expand or resist canon or fanon facts.
Hegemony and Heteroglossia
According to Bakhtin, hegemony is "^unitary language'
(in its centripetal forces and tendencies)" while
heteroglossia is the occurrence of multiple voices, often
"social and historical . . . (the centrifugal, stratifying
forces)" (p. 272).
In other words, the stratification
79
caused by centrifugal forces creates heteroglossia, which
is the "dynamic multiplicity of voices, genres and social
languages" (Maybin, 2006 p. 67). So while "dialogic"
refers to the relationship between voices, "heteroglossia"
and "hegemony" are the forces exerting pressure on those
voices.
The novel itself was "shaped by the current of
decentralizing, centrifugal forces" surrounding its birth,
and therefore has the ability to introduce heteroglossia—
i.e., multiple voices—into language (Bakhtin p. 273).
Bakhtin explains:
Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel . . .
is another's
speech
in another's
language,
serving to
express authorial intentions but in a refracted way.
Such speech constitutes a special type of
doublevoiced
discourse.
It serves two speakers at the same
time and expresses simultaneously two different
intentions: the direct intention of the character who
is speaking, and the refracted intention of the
author.
(p. 324)
Therefore, when a person speaks, "The word in language
is always half someone else's.
It becomes one's own only
when the speaker populates it with their own intentions,
their own accent, when they appropriate the word, adapting
it to their own semantic and expressive intention" (p.
293).
This appropriation occurs within a novel, according
to Bakhtin, but it also occurs in society.
Fan fiction
writers appropriate texts and make them half their own even
80
though they remain half someone else's.
This move by fans
makes fan fiction inherently heteroglossic.
However,
within the community of fan fiction writers a unitary
language arises:
ways to interpret characters, agreements
concerning fan-created beliefs about characters' pasts
(fanon), and terms ("jargon") that identify the genre and
intentions of a story.
In other words, centripetal forces
and tendencies exist within fan discourse, creating an
hegemony within a phenomenon that can be interpreted as
heteroglossic at its core.
Bakhtin saw such forces at work within the realm of
literature in his lifetime.
At the same time that the
novel first entered the literary world and introduced
heteroglossic forces into language, poetry was
"accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political
centralization of the verbal-ideological world" (p. 273).
In other words, the heteroglossia of the novel was met and
resisted by the hegemonic forces surrounding poetry.
In
Bakhtin's view, "decentralizing, centrifugal forces" are
resisted by "forces that
serve
to unify
and
language (pp. 270, 273, italics original).
represents a limit set on heteroglossia:
centralize"
Hegemony
"Unitary language
constitutes the . . . historical process of linguistic
unification and centralization, an expression of the
81
centripetal forces of language," and as a result it "makes
its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this
heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing
a certain maximum of mutual understanding" (p. 270). Thus
the novel and language itself remain never-ending sites of
struggle.
Therefore, "hegemony" is a single voice created by the
unifying, centripetal forces within language or texts,
while "heteroglossia" is a multiplicity of voices created
by the stratifying, centrifugal forces within language or
texts.
In fan fiction, hegemony can represent the
television series producers or novelists who struggle to
uphold intellectual authority and textual interpretation of
their works—texts that attempt to influence, reflect, and
commoditize culture.
Resisting passive reception of texts
are fan fiction writers, who introduce heteroglossia
through their re-writings and modifications of texts.
However, within the discourse of fan fiction itself,
there exists a second hegemony and heteroglossia.
Expert
fan writers and readers become the hegemonic gatekeepers
who influence or reinstate accepted fan interpretations of
characters or texts or unify the language and style in
which the prose is written.
Meanwhile, other fans
introduce heteroglossia by challenging accepted fanon
82
(e.g., fan-defined facts or characterizations) or by
experimenting with storytelling much in the way Modernists
defied literary traditions in order to create innovative
works.
83
CHAPTER THREE
THE DISCOURSE OF BUFFY
THE VAMPIRE
SLAYER:
GATEKEEPERS AND THE POWER OF HEMEGOMNY
In this chapter, I will explore the power of gatekeeping in fan fiction discourse by analyzing fan writers'
and readers' approaches to such issues as audience
awareness, canon facts, grammar, and feedback.
As I will
show, the supposedly democratic genre of fan fiction is
actually replete with centripetal and centrifugal forces
that determine who may enter the discourse, what they may
write, and who may stay and speak.
My focus on the centrifugal hegemony within fan
fiction may seem counterintuitive, given that previous
research has explored the dialogic play of fan writers and
the heteroglossia created by fan voices (Penley 1997;
Jenkins 1992; Scodari and Felder 2000; Woledge 2005; Lee
2003; Bacon-Smith 1992; Heinecken 2005; Pugh, 2005; Woledge
2005; Thomas 2006; and Black 2007).
This celebration of
dialogic voices and the heteroglossia they create reminds
me of rhet/comp's focus on alternate or hybridized
discourses (Bizzell 2002; Dobrin 2002; Fox 2002; Elbow
84
2002; Long 2002; Borkowski 2004; Beech 2004; Lindquist
2004; Tannen 2006; Maybin 2006).
However, as Sidney I.
Dobrin (2002) warns composition scholars, "we may be
risking silencing and neutralizing a good number of
discourses when they interact with academic discourse,"
since such institutional discourses "appropriate
nonacademic portions of the hybrids with little effort"
because of their socio-political power as gatekeepers (pp.
54-55).
Likewise, fan fiction and its surrounding discourse
involve more than a celebration of dialogic voices; some
writers are silenced and neutralized when they interact
with the fandom's gatekeepers.
Therefore, I have chosen to
analyze how gate-keeping operates in reviews instead of
studying the dialogic nature of fanfic in general.
After
all, the dialogical response of fans to their beloved texts
is underscored by a discourse that requires hegemonic savvy
to enter.
Although fans appropriate texts as they read,
subverting the power supposedly held by the author(s) or
producers, power is re-inscribed by members of the fan
community through policing of characters' portrayals,
accuracy of canon facts, and standard grammar.
However,
some writers who should be silenced by this policing still
resist by creating their own space at the edge of the
85
discourse.
Because of their forced isolation, these
writers do not necessarily challenge, change, or expand fan
traditions, but their dialogic resistance to centripetal
forces is still obvious.
To make this argument, I will provide background
information about Buffy
the
Vampire
creator/writer, and its fan fiction.
Slayer,
its
Then I will outline
the demographics of the fan writers from the sites I
analyzed, which were All About Spike, the BtVS Writers'
Guild, and the Buffy
section of Fanfiction.net.
I chose
the former two sites because they are owned, maintained,
and moderated by Buffy
fans who decide which stories and
authors to post; this provided me with focused insight into
the fans' acceptance and rejection of writers.
I chose
Fanfiction.net because it is the most famous umbrella
website and is not moderated by site owners or content
editors.
Therefore, this website gave me insight into how
reviewers can act as moderators.
Next, I will discuss the entrance of new fan writers
into the discourse community.
As they attempt to gain
acceptance, these new writers meet the gatekeepers, who are
established readers and writers who police their
style/storytelling mechanics, grammar/spelling, canon and
knowledge (i.e., categories that I coded during my
86
research).
The expert writers in the community offer
specific advice to new writers in these areas, and story
reviewers comment upon, ignore, or even harshly criticize
new members who do not follow the standards, rules,
"jargon," and traditions of the discourse.
The responses
of these experts reveal powerful centripetal forces in this
supposedly democratic genre.
To consider this phenomenon,
I will turn to M. M. Bakhtin's terminology of
heteroglossia,
hegemony,
centrifugal,
dialogic,
and centripetal.
the purposes of this argument, dialogic
For
is defined as the
relationship between voices in a discourse, with the
implication that many voices are interacting in an
utterance.
Centripetal
forces are authoritative and
unifying movements that create hegemony,
unified voice.
Centrifugal
which is a single,
forces are stratifying and
diversifying movements that create heteroglossia,
a chorus of multiple voices.
which is
With that in mind, I will
argue that hegemony is maintained by the fan fiction
community as the centripetal forces surrounding "good
fanfic" clash with the dialogical and centrifugal nature of
fan fiction itself.
In addition, I will analyze audience awareness and
audience behavior, arguing that the Buffy
discourse
community, like other fan fiction communities, divides
87
along the axis of age and writing maturity.
As result, two
sub-communities exist within the discourse, one with
centripetal power and the other refusing to be silenced
even when not fully accepted.
Finally, I will analyze which challenges to the
fandom's discourse are accepted or denied by fans, showing
that fans do appropriate and challenge the canon text.
However, most established fan writers do not tolerate fans
who try to revise the foundation of the Buffy
such as changing the nature of vampires.
universe,
At the same time,
some fans are beginning to enter the discourse by reading
fan fiction instead of by watching the show, which is
perhaps the purest essence of the dialogic—voices entering
and challenging the discourse successfully without having
to achieve the status of "expert" first.
In other words, a
maximum amount of heteroglossia is achieved in the
discourse because some voices which are successfully
entering, speaking, and competing in the discourse are
doing so from a nontraditional (i.e., non-expert) position.
After this discussion, I will draw my conclusions,
which include the discovery that centripetal forces uphold
a hegemony concerning canon knowledge, grammar, and jargon
and therefore restrict writers in the Buffy
community.
discourse
Readers and writers are acting as gatekeepers
88
who, although they appropriate the texts they read, still
dictate what will be accepted and rejected in their
discourse community.
However, as mentioned above,
dialogical and centrifugal forces are still at work within
the community because some fans are beginning to enter the
discourse through fan fiction and fanon instead of entering
with the prerequisite canon knowledge.
I. The Show, the Fans, and the Fandom
The History of Buffy
Background:
Buffy
the
Vampire
Slayer
the
Vampire
Slayer
was a supernatural/fantasy
television series created by Joss Whedon, who had
previously sold a movie script of the same name. Coming to
television as a mid-season replacement, the series ran from
1997 to 2003, building a cult following among people of all
ages despite the fact its target audience was teens and
young adults.
line of Buffy
The series was sold into syndication, and a
novels and comics were licensed, although
they are not considered official canon by either Whedon or
the fans.
Most recently, however, Whedon has commissioned
a canon Buffy
the
Vampire
Slayer:
Season
8 comic series
which fans seem to be taking seriously.
Because of the series' success, websites, forums, fan
art, fan music videos, poems, and stories inundated the
internet.
As a result, Buffy
has countless websites
89
dedicated in part or whole to archiving its fan fiction,
including sites such as All About Spike and the Buffy the
Vampire Slayer (BtVS) Writers Guild.
In addition,
Fanfiction.net, which is an "umbrella" site that archives
fan fiction for hundreds of fandoms, has over 33,000
fanfics for Buffy,
not counting the fanfics for Buffy's
spin-off series, Angel,
which has over 7,700 itself.
On
these sites and between these sites, a discourse of fan
fiction has arisen—one that polices grammar, acceptable
content, fan etiquette, and entry into the discourse.
Discourse Communities: Who Writes Fan Fiction?
In the 1970s and 1980s, most fan fiction writers were
women in their thirties and forties (Jenkins 1992, 2006;
Bacon-Smith 1992).
However, since the emergence of
internet-based fan fiction, Thomas (2006) and Jenkins
(2006) have observed, as Jenkins states, that "older
writers have been joined by a generation of new
contributors who found fan fiction surfing the Internet and
decided to see what they could produce" (p. 178).
broad analysis of the Buffy
In a
writers' ages, I found through
reading authors' biography pages and author interviews on
All About Spike and Fanfiction.net that fan writers mostly
consist of two groups:
those roughly between the ages of
fourteen and twenty-four, and those roughly between the
90
ages of thirty-four and forty-four.
People between the
ages of twenty-five and thirty-three seem to be either
underrepresented or silent about their ages.
Buffy
Of the twenty
authors who mentioned their ages on the sites I
analyzed, five were in their teens, four in their early
twenties, four in their mid-thirties, and five in their
forties.
In addition, the ages of many other authors can be
deduced from a number of factors, including the amount of
internet-speak employed (e.g., "this is sooooo kewl! X D " ) ;
references made to school work; and references to children,
spouses, jobs, or graduate work.
As a result, I found that
people in their mid-thirties to mid-forties—the age group
earlier research found to be fan fiction writers—is still
present; however, a growing number of teens and twentysomethings are posting fan fiction as well, a fact
supported by Thomas's (2006) and Jenkins's (2006) recent
research.
Buffy
Therefore, it is not surprising to find that the
fan fiction community consists of two distinct
generations that can be loosely referred to as the "older"
and "younger" generations.
It is between these two
generations that centripetal and centrifugal forces are at
play and a discourse community arises.
91
Patricia Bizzell (1997) explains that discourse
communities form when "Groups of society members . . .
become accustomed to modifying each other's reasoning and
language use in certain ways.
Eventually, these familiar
ways achieve the status of conventions" (366).
However, in
his discussion of discourse communities, David Russell
(1990) notes that the use of the word community
several implications:
carries
"First, community implies unity,
identity, shared responsibility.
Second, it implies
exclusion, restriction, admission or non-admission" (53).
This tension between unity and exclusion is immediately
evident in the Buffy
community because older and/or more
experienced fan fiction writers often assume the role as
gatekeepers for the community—gatekeepers who enact
initiation rituals or standards for newcomers.
An example
of this tension can be seen in this review left for a young
writer on Fanfiction.net:
OH THANK GOD FOR LITTLE TEENAGERS LIKE YOU! . . . AND
THANK GOD YOU ARE SUCH AN EXPERT AT WRITING IN SUCH
TERRIBLE SCRAWL THAT WE CAN UNDERSTAND EVEN YOUR GRADE
SCHOOL THOUGHTS. I MEAN WHAT THE HELL DID THE REST OF
[US] DO FOR THE LAST THIRTY SOME YEARS BEFORE YOU
ARRIVED WHILE WE WERE WRITING OUT FANFICTION! HOW DID
WE SURVIVE! LITTLE DID ANY OUS [sic] REALIZE THAT WE
WOULD FINALLY HAVE A SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD . . . SHOW UP
AND SUDDENLY BRING THE LIGHT OF [OUR] ISOLENCE TO US
IN SUCH A FLAGRANT AND DISRESPECTFUL MANNER.
92
The all caps in this review indicate "yelling" bygeneral rule of internet etiquette, which means the
reviewer intends to insult and/or intimidate the writer.
While there is no direct indication of the reviewer's age,
the attitude itself reflects the frustration many older or
long-term members of the discourse community feel over
younger or newer members.
As a result, the community
reveals a complex cross-section of hegemonic and dialogic
forces.
The broad fan fiction community itself exists as a
heteroglossia because it introduces dialogic and
centrifugal forces into the production of novels,
television series, and video games.
As multiple scholars
have noted (Jenkins 1992, 2001; 2006; Bacon-Smith 1992;
Buckingham 1993; Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1995; Penly
1997; Alvermann and Heron 2001; Williams 2002; Knobel and
Lankshear 2002; Gwenllian-Jones 2002; Pugh 2005; Heinecken
2005; Thomas 2006; & Black 2007), fans of all ages can show
extreme savvy and agency in their readings of popular
culture; pressure producers into plot or characterization
changes; and produce answering works of fan art, video,
fiction, or commentary that provide sometimes harsh
critique of their favorite shows.
In fact, many scholars,
including Henry Jenkins (1992), have noted multiple
93
dialogic interactions with canon texts in fan fiction, such
as recontextualization, expanding the series timeline,
refocalization, moral realignment, genre shifting,
crossovers, character dislocation, personalization,
emotional intensification, and eroticization (pp. 162-175).
Because of this agency, fans create a centrifugal force
that works within and against authors and producers.
Such centrifugal activity as rewritten endings,
refocalization, and moral realignment are encouraged in the
Buffy
fan fiction community, with fifteen percent of the
sampled reviews commenting on a story's success or failure
in these endeavors.
For example, the story "Dawn's Tea
Party" by Original Dark Angel drew a mixed review
concerning her attempt to show how the character Dawn—who
was inserted into the "Buffyverse" via magic as Buffy's
sister in season five—would have fit into earlier seasons.
Reviewer Alan Pitt comments, "Not so sure Spike would have
draw the line at children—remember his * finding the kid
hiding in the coal scuttle' story—but . . .I've often
wondered how Dawn would have *fit' into the continuity
retroactively."
Even when they draw critique, such
rewritings and re-imaginings are encouraged in the fandom.
However, against these dialogical forces and
celebrations of heteroglossia are homogenizing forces.
94
Of
the authors who engaged in a voluntary interview on the fan
archive All About Spike, one hundred percent chose to
answer the question "What advice would you give to new fie
writers?"
All but one of these established writers were
quick to give specific advice to newer, younger writers,
providing a standard by which initiates should abide.
The
three areas most often mentioned by interviewees and story
reviewers alike are style/story mechanics,
grammar/spelling, and canon issues.
II. Inclusion and Exclusion:
New Writers in the Fandom
Thus far, I have reported the ages represented in the
Buffy
fan fiction community and noted the division of the
community into two age groups:
teens and traditional
fanfic writers (women in their thirties and forties).
I
noted that the new, teenaged writers are sometimes met with
exasperation, and yet experienced and/or older writers are
quick to offer advice to those wishing to enter the
discourse.
This tension between exasperation and a
willingness to offer advice can lead to the most
significant division in the discourse.
When those who are
exasperated gain more power than those who offer help, new
writers trying to enter the community find themselves
policed or rejected by the discourse's gatekeepers, who use
95
initiation rituals that include policing how they use such
things as canon knowledge, fan fiction jargon, and grammar.
Before I proceed with examples of this phenomenon, I
must define what I mean by the acceptance
writers.
and rejection
of
Most, although not all, fan fiction websites have
the review function, i.e., an electronic bulletin board
attached to each story where readers may leave feedback.
Other readers can read the review board, and some readers
even read the review board before the story to see if a
story is getting good reviews, much like a novel reader may
read a critic's review of a novel before purchasing it.
a writer is accepted
If
into the discourse community, the
writer receives multiple positive story reviews and builds
a base of readers who will read all her stories.
a writer has been rejected
Likewise,
if her stories are ignored or
given mostly negative reviews.
The negative reviews can
become hateful and sarcastic, while the lack of reviews
implies a tacit rejection by refusal to vindicate the
writing with positive feedback.
This rejection does not
mean the writer cannot continue to post stories to the
website—unless, of course, the website has a moderator who
steps in and locks the writer's account.
However, in some
cases, the writer will keep posting despite the total lack
of positive feedback.
96
With these definitions in mind, let us return to the
three categories that experienced writers and reviewers
most comment upon:
style/storytelling mechanics,
grammar/spelling, and canon issues, which are three issues
gatekeepers use to judge whether a writer should be
admitted to the community.
If writers display expertise in
these areas over a given time, they are granted expertstatus in the fandom and accepted in the dominant
discourse.
In addition, I will consider the phenomenon of
mass posters.
I will be using percentages to discuss these
trends; however, I acknowledge that my use of these
percentages is descriptive and not necessarily
statistically significant.
Style and Storytelling Mechanics
Of the stories my study analyzed, fourteen percent had
reviews that focused on setting, plot, or stylistic issues
such as phrasing, alliteration, or word choice.
For
example, "Lost Luggage" by Spikedru drew the comment "I
enjoyed your attention to details: 'out-moded grey uniform,
. . . 'manicured nails gained scraped nail polish' . . . I
was also amused by your play on words."
Reviewers
commented on a wide range of storytelling mechanics, such
as linguistic rhythm, poetic prose, character voice,
characterization, dialogue, story climaxes, story endings,
97
and description.
While the reviews varied in their use of
the specialized language employed by creative writing
instructors, novelists, and editors, readers and readerwriters alike clearly rewarded what they considered solid
writing.
In addition, of the experienced writers interviewed on
All About Spike, thirty-seven percent gave stylistic or
storytelling advice.
For example, Doyle told new writers
to simply "Try lots of . . . styles," while HarmonyFB
advised them to "Read your dialog out loud and listen to
it."
Hold_that_thought suggested that new writers should
not "get stuck in ruts (stylistically, plot-wise,
character/pairing-wise)."
So the community's dialogic
forces remain, as can be seen by Spikedru's comment that
she enjoys "Playing with characters, trying to get inside
them so that you manage to surprise people with their
behaviour whilst staying within character."
However,
simultaneously, readers and reader-writers employ
centripetal forces that uphold authoritative stances on
what dictates "good" writing, such as natural-sounding
dialogue, authorial voice, and consistent characterization.
Writers who abide by these hegemonic rules and expectations
achieve the status of "expert," meaning they amass a fan
98
base of their own who gives them positive feedback on their
writing.
While experimentation with point of view or
storytelling seems well-tolerated, stories with basic
problems such as lack of a climax or an abrupt ending
received complaints.
As a result, the readers, whether
fellow fanfic writers or not, acted as collective creative
writing instructors for the writers, bringing the fan
fiction community closely in line with a more academic and
hegemonic conception of "good" prose.
Such a phenomenon
not only explains the growing interest of Literary Studies
in studying fan fiction (LaChev 2005; Pugh 2005), but it
also reveals the valuing of traditional conceptions of
writing in a new literacy medium.
Grammar, Spelling, and Typos
Just as rhetoric and composition scholars have
analyzed the role of grammar in the composition classroom
(Meyer & Flint-Ferguson 1990; Conners 2000; Elbow 2002;
Meyers 2003), the experienced fan writers seem most
concerned that new writers have good grammar and spelling,
and as a result, the hegemony surrounding standard English
is upheld by the more successful and popular writers of the
Buffy
fandom.
For example, forty-seven percent of the
writers interviewed on All About Spike counseled new
99
writers to pay special attention to their spelling,
grammar, punctuation, and typos.
established Buffy
In her interview,
fan writer Spikedru explains it as
follows:
Learn the basics of grammar and punctuation. Language
is a means of communicating the ideas in your head to
other people's heads and misuse of grammar and
punctuation is a hinderance [sic] to that ideaexchange. Yes, fanfic is not paid, it's just for fun
etc etc but you want people to read you, so take your
use of the language seriously.
Another popular Buffy
writer on All About Spike, Jingle,
provides similar advice in her interview:
. . . and please, for the love of the baby Jesus, get
a beta. The biggest turn-off for many readers is not a
crappy plot or even mediocre writing — it is poor
grammar, spelling, and sentence structure.
The call for proper mechanics is overwhelming among
experienced writers, with almost fifty percent of the
experienced writers mentioning grammar, so it is clear that
poor language mechanics are high on the list of readers'
pet peeves.
It would seem the centripetal forces that
uphold standard English at the national and even
international level are equally powerful in fan fiction
communities.
However, despite this preoccupation, of the stories my
study focused upon, only three percent received reviews
that commented upon the good or poor grammar of the writer.
100
At first this seems surprising, but the attitude of some
established fan fiction writers might shed light on the
issue.
For example, writer Ariel-D notes in an online
discussion of fan fiction and reviewing that "Even if the
story you're reading is the worst thing you've ever laid
eyes on, give constructive criticism to help them get
better or keep your mouth shut.
somewhere."
Everyone has to start
Responses to her comment indicated that some
experienced writers choose not to respond to terribly
written fanfics because they can find nothing positive to
add or cannot phrase the criticism in a constructive way.
This is an interesting possibility, and while it is outside
the reach of my observational-style research, further
interview-based studies into this attitude would be of
merit.
However, despite the low incidence of specific
grammatical reviews in the Buffy
aware of this issue.
fandom, new writers seem
Some new writers specifically ask for
patience over their poor grammar.
On her author biography,
writer randoml91 said, "I know that my stories are quite
bad.
Sorry.
I am only fifteen, so my grammar/style [sic]
hasn't developed."
This request was honored, and reviewers
did not mention her grammar.
Similarly, writer
SerenityCasada said on her author biography, "I love to . .
101
. write (although I am just starting out writing so give me
a break if i am bad, i'll improve.
Aventually)
Her one reviewer responded with classic advice:
[sic]."
"It wasn't
bad for your first fanfic, but I think if you get a BETA
(someone to read over your work and correct grammar, etc.),
it could help."
In this case, the reviewer did not exclude
the new writer from the discourse because of her poor
grammar, but she still acted as a gatekeeper by trying to
induct the writer into the discourse.
She did this by
giving the new writer two pieces of information concerning
the discourse—that a beta reader would be helpful and an
explanation of what a beta reader is.
If the new writer
accepts the advice, then the centripetal forces surrounding
grammar have been upheld because the beta reader (peer
reviewer) will strengthen her grammar, a phenomenon noted
by multiple scholars (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992; Pugh
2005). In addition, using a beta reader and acting on her
advice is part of the community's initiation ritual.
Showing a willingness to improve writing and/or mechanics
will help a writer be accepted into the dominant discourse.
The irony of this hegemonic treatment of grammar and
spelling cannot be lost on a rhet/comp scholar.
At the
same time some academics are calling for inclusion of
nonstandard Englishes in the classroom (e.g., Elbow 2002)
102
and alternative, multi-genre essays (Bizzell 2002; Dobrin
2002; Fox 2002; Long 2002; Borkowski 2004; Beech 2004;
Lindquist 2004), fan fiction writers—who are often seen as
fringe writers—are upholding standard American English and
standard modes of creative expression.
Black (2007) has
noted that even teenaged reviewers will leave reviews that
focus on grammar and spelling, although they "apologize for
taking up the author's time with . . . feedback rooted in
school-based discourse" (pp. 127-128).
Still, the fact
remains that the authoritative, centripetal discourse
surrounding proper grammar and spelling are re-inscribed in
fan fiction communities by both the younger and older
generation of writers/readers.
Canon Knowledge
As many scholars have noted (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith
1992; Pugh 2005; Black 2007), another major source of
rejection or policing for new fan writers is severe
violation of the canon, which is seen as an affront to the
discourse.
In other words, centrifugal forces that
tolerate and support rewritings of season endings or
alternate universe stories do not extend to basic lack of
canonical knowledge, which means that all fans are expected
by the discourse community to have expert knowledge of the
fandom.
New writers who err in canon facts are censored,
103
and these "facts" range from hair and eye color of
characters to character behavior and style of speaking.
Sixteen percent of the authors interviewed on All About
Spike specifically warned new writers to keep their canon
facts straight and/or uphold canonical characterization.
Likewise, of the stories my study focused upon, twenty-two
percent of the stories received reviews that focused on
canon issues, either from the reviewers complimenting the
writer's canonical accuracy or chastising writer's errors.
Concerns included factual accuracy about the Buffyverse,
characterization, and use of canon scenes or dialogue.
For example, new writer LetsGetTheseTeenHeartsBeating
on Fanfiction.net was severely critiqued for her lack of
canonical knowledge.
The writer, henceforth called
LetsGet, wrote a disclaimer for her story in which she
admitted to having only read the Buffy
not considered canon by Buffy
television series.
patience.
novels, which are
fans, and not having seen the
She specifically asked her readers for
Reviewers, however, responded in anger,
complaining that she had gotten the character Dawn's eye
color wrong and that Dawn behaved OOC (out of character).
LetsGet apparently had little writing experience and little
ability to judge what her audience would receive well.
She
only had enough awareness to beg them to overlook what they
104
could not accept.
In response to the reviews, LetsGet not
only deleted the story but also her entire account, causing
her to fail her initiation into the fandom.
In short, the
centripetal forces surrounding the portrayal of canon facts
worked to run the new writer out of the discourse because
the experienced readers acted as gatekeepers for the
community.
Such a reaction is unsurprising, for as Pugh
(2005) has noted, fan communities tend to ban stories that
commit unforgivable sins such as getting canon facts wrong
and portraying characters as acting out of character (40;
65), all of which may cause writers to fail initiation into
the dominant discourse.
However, not all stories that receive complaints over
errors in canon facts are rejected.
Granted, of the
reviews that mentioned canon issues, forty-eight percent
praised proper or witty use of canon facts and twenty
percent harshly critiqued errors through entirely negative
reviews.
Still, twelve percent of the reviews provided
mixed feedback:
these reviewers pointed out the error or
chastised the writer but still gave positive comments for
other aspects of the story.
For example, the story
"Becoming" by Jessie received this review:
were spot on.
too reflective.
"Some things
Some I'm not too sure about . . . it's a tad
Spike doesn't strike me as a reflective
105
person . . . That said, this is actually written quite
well."
Here, the reviewer points out a perceived error and
explains why it is an error (e.g., "He says himself that he
lives in the moment"), yet she still provides positive
feedbacks on other aspects of the story (e.g., "your
statement that there are too many *bad ass' or *sappy'
Spikes is so right").
from two sources:
These mixed reviews seem to stem
one, fan disagreements over preferences,
which can be seen here by the reviewer agreeing with the
author concerning an abundance of Spike stories where he is
portrayed as "bad ass" or "sappy;" and two, literary
interpretation of events or characters, which also can be
seen here in the reviewer's comment "Spike doesn't
me as
. . ."
(emphasis added).
strike
In short, readers may
disagree with each other concerning whether any given story
is accurate in its characterization, but obvious violations
of set canon facts (e.g., that vampires cannot enter a
house uninvited) are harshly critiqued because such facts
cannot be debated.
Mass Posters
Among fan fiction writers, there is another clear
example of rejection that does not fall under the category
of violation of canon facts:
mass posters—i.e., new
writers who inundate a fan site with several stories at
106
once in a short period of time.
completely ignored.
Mass posters are
They do not receive negative reviews
or feedback; they receive no feedback, the internet
equivalent of forcing someone out of a conversation by
refusing to acknowledge they have spoken.
In short, the
fan fiction community resists the sudden swamping of the
discourse because newcomers are expected to enter the
community with one or two stories at a time, giving readers
time to consider their work and see where their voices fit,
not overwhelm them with what can amount to a sudden
outburst of babbling.
This is a fourth law of initiation,
which governs not the content of the stories but rather how
the stories are posted.
In addition, most readers are
suspicious of mass posters because writers who post one or
two stories a day every day generally spend little time on
them and therefore produce poor writing.
On Fanfiction.net, MHParry illustrates this well.
posted nine Buffy
He
stories in six days, and none of them
have received reviews.
MHParry, who identifies himself as
a twenty-year-old named Mark, also violates fan traditions
and canon facts:
he has posted his legal disclaimer on his
author page instead of in his stories, and he has uninvited
vampires entering a house.
Readers of MHParry's stories
will find the stories neither in script format nor story
107
form, but rather unintelligible scenes.
However, is poor
quality, unintelligibility, or canon violations alone
enough to stop readers from reviewing?
Certainly not.
Non-mass posters with bad stories are flamed or receive
mixed reviews.
Therefore, it is likely that MHParry's mass
posting is seen as both a sign of poor writing and an
attempt to flood the discourse with one's stories.
Lest the phenomenon be considered one particular to
Buffy,
I will take time here to note that the mass posters
receive the same treatment in the Star Trek:
Series
discourse community.
Trek
The
Original
writer AMS2662 posted
four stories, all of which were 15,000 plus words long, in
the span of one day and has yet to receive any reviews.
Trek
writer and reviewer Blingalicious Midnight speaks to
this issue directly when she informs new writer Earthling
that posting a 15,825-word story at once does not work:
"I
think you scared off reviers [sic] by posting a ton at
once. Maybe the next story you write you could post it a
chapter a a [sic] time."
Overall, then, the trends present in the feedback
given by popular fanfic writers and by readers reveal that
centripetal and centrifugal forces are both at work in the
Buffy
the
Vampire
Slayer
fan fiction discourse community.
The community encourages and rewards writers who explore
108
different points of view in a scene, rewrite season
endings, or recast romantic relationships, thereby
expanding possible story ideas and also challenging the
canon text.
However, simultaneously, these readers and
reader-writers introduce centripetal forces that centralize
around standard English grammar and storytelling mechanics
such as dialogue and plot shape.
The result is a school-
influenced discourse on grammar, syntax, and creative
writing.
Writers who engage both centrifugal and
centripetal forces in their writing—e.g., challenge or
expand upon the canon while using good grammar and
storytelling skills—receive positive reviews and generate a
fan following, thereby earning the status of "expert."
Writers who enter the discourse but fail to abide by the
centripetal forces at work in the community are critiqued,
criticized, or flatly ignored.
Ill. Audience Awareness and Behavior
Reaction to Audience:
Writers Speak Back
Thus far I have analyzed how "expert" writers, who are
often older writers, create a centripetal standard
concerning style, grammar, and canon knowledge through
advice and feedback to newer and/or younger writers in the
fandom.
As noted by Black (2007), this school-influenced
discourse is also used by teenagers when critiquing each
109
other, which lends further force to the hegemony
surrounding writing and mechanics.
However, through their
author's biography pages and their author's notes, writers
can speak back to the reviews, critiques, and advice they
receive.
Therefore, despite the centripetal forces bearing
down upon them, writers can exert some agency by, in
essence, reviewing their reviewers.
As a result, conflict
can arise.
The issue of conflict within the fan fiction community
has often been ignored, with early researchers presenting a
mostly Utopian view of fanfic writers (Jenkins 1992; BaconSmith 1992; Penly 1997; & Pugh 2005).
More recent research
has focused on the centrifugal nature of fan fiction and
its dialogic ability to answer back to a text or even
pressure producers to change storylines or character
representations (Scodari & Felder 2000; Jenkins 2001; Pugh
2005; Heinecken 2005), but only a few researchers have
considered how fan fiction writers are caught and still
repressed by answering centripetal and hegemonic forces
from producers (Hills 2002, & Jenkins 2006).
Little
attention has been paid to the conflict within the fan
fiction discourse community itself.
In fact, traditional
conceptions of discourse theory have presented communities
as unified, although Harris (1990) argues that these
110
conceptions ignore conflict (263-264).
Buffy
My analysis of the
fan fiction community, where readers strike at
writers and writers—especially teenaged ones—sometimes
strike back, supports Harris' theory.
On many websites, whether they are the fan-driven
archives like All About Spike or umbrella sites like
Fanfiction.net, most reviews are simple:
story."
"cool" or "great
Occasionally more in depth reviews arise on both
types of sites, but once again the content is similar on
both, with comments on the accuracy of character portrayal
or the way the fanfic fits into the canon.
However, an interesting difference arises concerning
the emotional maturity of the writer responses to reviews.
More specifically, younger writers, who tend to populate
Fanfiction.net, seem more likely to publically resist
centripetal forces that aim to censor content or critique
writing mechanics or story quality.
While the older
writers are not always above giving immature responses,
younger writers sometimes take offense and respond publicly
to complaints.
Of the authors with biography pages, seven
percent used their page to publically quote and then rebuff
a review they were angered by and seventeen percent used
the page to state general review feedback or questions.
All of these writers either stated their age or revealed it
111
through their level of internet speak or references to
school, revealing that they were without exception either
high school or traditional college students.
For example, a fifteen-year-old writer pen-named Dana
had this to say:
"I like me some slash.
don't like it, then don't read it.
[. . .]
If you
I don't want people to
review if they're only gonna say that's sick or messed up
or something.
I'm glad we cleared that up."
It seems that
the writer (and many like her) sees no problem with venting
her frustration at her entire audience since she posted
this comment to her main author page.
While she is aware
she has an audience, she does not seem to consider how
various members of the discourse community will perceive
her behavior or how her angry comments could discourage
more reviews than just those who complain about slash
stories.
This behavior is not condoned by the expert
writers in the fandom.
Of the authors who were interviewed
on All About Spike, forty-two percent gave advice on how to
solicit or handle feedback.
her comments:
Shadowlass was the bluntest in
"don't get bent out of shape if someone
gives you thoughtful criticism-they're doing you a
kindness.
And frankly, it makes you look like a tool."
There is a second dimension to what I have deemed
emotional immaturity and lack of audience awareness in
112
writers who lash out at their reviewers.
While emotionally
mature writers will accept legitimate criticism of their
work and immature ones will tend to become angry, it is
also possible that the younger writers are rejecting the
centripetal forces that govern character portrayal and
story mechanics.
Consider the case of Stab.Me.With.Spike.,
who received the following review to her nine-chapter-long
fanfic "Rearview Mirror":
i seriously can't believe i got through all of this,
it made absolutely no sense, not even the ending, i
was confused the whole way through, and the characters
sound nothing like themselves, sorry, i don't think
i'll be reading anything else from you.
The writer posted this response on her main author page and
not in a review reply to the reviewer, leaving the backlash
open for all to see:
As for you who ^couldn't believe they managed to get
all the way through it, and won't be reading anything
more from me', I just have to say, if you hated it so
much, why bother reading it all? Haha moron. But
everyone else was very nice so thank you! Sorry if
the characters seemed not at all like themselves, I
didn't think they were any different, but oh well. My
bad.
Her response, while perhaps showing emotional
immaturity, also sends another clear message:
I have an
interpretation of these characters that I stand by, and I
do not care if you feel they are 00C (out of character).
The accusation that she did not capture the essence of the
113
characters in her story did not deter Stab.Me.With.Spike.,
who has continued to write more stories.
Therefore, while younger writers are denied entry into
the dominant discourse because their resistance to
centripetal forces surrounding grammar and canon knowledge
keeps them from attaining the status of "expert," which
effectively means they failed the initiation ritual, many
younger writers still create their own space at the fringes
of the discourse by not only posting to the unedited or
non-moderated Fanfiction.net but also creating networks of
friends and reviewers among those of their own age group or
writing level.
One example of this is fifteen-year-old
randoml91, who receives very few reviews of her work.
On
randoml91's author page, she thanks Tibbar Sabertooth for
helping with her writing, and Tibbar responds to her story
"Back and Forth":
Heya Ed, :P
1.) I'm sorry I haven't been on the internet... My
computer decided to do a time warp thing and land it
self in the stone age...
2.) Stone age = No internet... ;'(
3.) Lurved the fie! ;)
.::Tibbs::.
So despite the small number of reviews, many such stories
show this pooling of support, and one must wonder if these
younger and inexperienced writers are even aware they are
being shunned by the powerhouse writers of the fandom.
114
If younger/inexperienced writers are not gaining the
popularity and support that older/experienced writers have,
then in essence they are not holding positions of power in
the discourse community.
"Expert" writers command a
majority of the readers' attention and are often requested
as beta readers.
At the same time, in the Buffy
younger writers make their own space.
fandom,
Forced inclusion of
the younger or inexperienced writers' stories at the
fringes of fanfic discourse means a proliferation of badly
written stories.
At the same time, centripetal forces are
working to uphold standard English and "good" writing or
storytelling mechanics.
This hegemony challenges even the
most resistant poor writers to improve so that they may
receive more reviews, especially positive ones.
Some
younger writers look upon the success and skill of the
older writers and hope to mimic them, and this desire is
sometimes bluntly revealed in reviews which read "I hope I
can write as good as you do someday."
Interestingly, my finding of division in the discourse
along the lines of age and writing experience is in direct
opposition with luminal fan fiction researcher Henry
Jenkins' (2006) findings about the Harry
Potter
fandom, in
which teen writers who have hidden their ages are mentoring
new writers twice their age and webmistresses comment that
115
" x In many cases, the adults really try to watch out for the
younger members . . . [and] The absence of face-to-face
equalizes everyone a little bit'" (p. 178). Clearly,
neither Jenkins' nor my findings can be universally applied
to every fan fiction website in every fandom.
since the target audience of Harry
Potter
9-14, and the target audience of Buffy
Perhaps
was children ages
was high school and
college students, the fandoms foster a different set of
attitudes toward younger members.
Another possibility is that the size of the fandom
plays a role in the dynamics:
expansive as the Harry
Potter
not all fandoms are as
fandom, for which a writer
could endlessly search for a community until she found one
that fit her needs and desires.
The fan fiction website
studied by Angela Thomas (2006) is a good example of this
because it was created by teens and drew mostly other teen
female writers looking for a voice in the androcentric
genres of fantasy and science fiction.
Thomas notes that
fan fiction provides "a supportive community for many young
people (in this instance, many adolescent girls) to express
themselves and play with the texts they enjoy without fear
of negativity or exclusion because of issues such as
gender" (p. 235). Of course, a website populated almost
entirely by adolescents would not show divisions along the
116
lines of age.
So perhaps the smaller the fandom is—or
rather, the smaller the fandom's representation in fan
fiction—the more powerful the dynamics, especially when the
audience of the websites of that fandom includes a broad
cross-sampling of different generations and levels of
writing experiences.
Future studies into this aspect can
shed more light onto the issue.
IV. Heteroglossia: Challenges and Reactions
Thus far, I have discussed how critiqued writers may
answer back to their reviewers and how expert writers
advise new writers to handle criticism.
Also, I have noted
how angry reactions toward the centripetal forces in the
discourse are often limited to younger writers.
Now I
shall turn my attention to the issue of readers' power and
appropriation of television series, showing how
readers/writers resist the canon text and how those same
readers/writers react to each others' resistance.
Resistance to Canon:
Hegemony from Outside the Community
Scholars have long debated the type and amount of
agency readers of popular texts possess (Buckingham 1993;
Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1995; The New London Group
1996; Stephens 1998; Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Street 2001;
Williams 2002; Knobel and Lankshear 2002; Dyson 2003;
Heinecken 2005; & Jenkins 2006) .
117
As Pugh (2005) notes in
The Democratic
Genre,
fan writers resist attempts from
authors or producers to tell them how to decode—in other
words, what the text should mean or even how the characters
should be read (220) .
This resistance to hegemony can
become a site of struggle between fans and producers, and
one clear example of this resistance to canon hegemony in
Buffy
is the fan reading of Buffy's relationship with
Spike.
The fans saw the relationship as positive, while
Joss Whedon and the writers saw the relationship as harmful
and pushed the issue by adding a near-rape scene into a
late episode in season six (Whedon 2002; Heinecken 2005).
Many fanfic writers responded to these developments with
revisionist writing that makes Spike's behavior more loving
or shows the relationship as mutually harmful, either by
having Buffy rape Spike or by underscoring the ways in
which Buffy sexually and emotionally used Spike in canon
(Heinecken 2005) .
Another canon issue that fans resisted was the
revision of who sired the vampire Spike.
In season two,
Spike says Angelus/Angel sired him, but this was later
changed to Drusilla.
Since Angelus sired Drusilla, the
change was explained as Angelus being Spike's grandsire
instead.
Some fan writers accept the change when they
write, and others reject it.
At the beginning of her story
118
"A Thin Line," Evil Willow states her opinion explicitly:
"Author's Notes, round one: Angel is Spike's sire. I refuse
to listen to Joss on this matter. At least, not to his
retraction of the fact that ANGEL IS SPIKE'S SIRE!"
By referring to the creator/producer by his first
name, this fan writer underscores her sense of agency in
the matter; she sees the producer as a person—a writer—who
can be disagreed with and challenged.
This demonstrates
what Jenkins (1992) means when he claims that the
rereadings of canon texts result in rewritings, which
allows fans to challenge the notion of what it means to be
a consumer (278-280).
In addition, Evil Willow's
resistance to the change in canon facts is a clear case of
heteroglossic answering back to the text, in this case with
a resounding "no."
Within the fan fiction community itself, many ideas
are challenged or revised, such as having Buffy return to
being Angel's girlfriend after the series concludes or
"fixing" character behavior, such as having Buffy treat
Spike more kindly during seasons five and six.
Likewise,
writers have rejected Spike's redemption and mark their
fanfics as "non-redemptive" or have rejected the concept
that Spike needed a soul in order to be redeemed (i.e.,
"redemptionist" fics).
In fact, sixteen percent of the
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interviewed authors on All About Spike specifically
indicated that they began writing fan fiction out of pure
anger at what was happening in Buffy.
explains:
Writer Lesley
"I was so pissed off with BTVS and especially
the behaviour of the title character.
I knew the show and
the abusive treatment of the demons I loved wasn't
satisfying me, so I thought I'd see what I could do."
Likewise, the ability to challenge or revise canon is
cherished by fans, as writer Jingle explains in her All
About Spike website interview:
"Things never quite go the
way I want them to in my favorite television shows and
movies.
I like to tell the untold stories about the way
things should
have
happened."
This act of filling in gaps
or expanding the canon was cited by forty-seven percent of
the interviewed authors as their reason for writing fan
fiction.
This heteroglossic resistance to the canon is what fan
fiction has always been hailed for, prompting Pugh (2005)
to call it the democratic genre.
This is the same sense of
agency Williams (2002) observed in his study of how
students critique the television shows they watch.
This is
also the level of engagement students will need in order to
question the discourse in their academic field and find
gaps in the research.
It is the transition of this agency
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from popular culture to the classroom that we need to
study, and I will explore the issue more thoroughly in my
final chapter.
Revision Rejected:
Canon Upheld
While challenges to the canon are accepted, revision
of the canon's basic lore is not.
On the Fanfiction.net
forums, writer MrBillyD put forth this idea for discussion:
According to the Theology found in Angel and Buffy,
Vampires are dead people, animated by demons. They
have the person's personality, memories and feelings,
but in reality, they are demons.
I challenge that Theory.
In my Angel/Buffy crossover story titled "Some of
God's People Got Fangs", I present the "heretical"
theory that vampires are not demons, and that they
have free will. I base that challenge on the concept
that demons are spirits, and according to Jesus' words
in the Gospel of John, "A spirit has not flesh and
blood"; but vampires have both.
As of yet, no one has responded to the forum post.
There
are only three reviews to his 18,686 word story, and they
are all similar to reader Son of Evil's review:
"Okay...this story is...well, I'm not sure how to put
it...its [sic] different. It seems a little...well, the
plot is a little lacking, and its...well, its [sic]
different."
Fan interpretations, opinions, and reactions play a
vital role in the discourse, but revision to the fandom's
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basic structure are not tolerated.
Academic discourse
shares this tendency by allowing for new research that fits
into the gaps of existing literature, but scholars must
stay within the parameters of their field.
Perhaps this
similarity can also be used to help students transition
from popular culture to academic culture.
Accepted Challenges:
A Change in World Order?
Anik LaChev (2005), in "Fan Fiction:
A Genre and Its
(Final?) Frontiers," notes an interesting change in the
relationship between fan fiction and its writers:
fans are
now sometimes entering fandoms through fanfic instead of by
watching or reading the canon text.
This new type of
reader/writer relies on fanon (i.e., fan traditions) to
understand the stories they read or write (85).
Historically, this approach to entering the discourse would
have been impossible since fans have been required to have
extensive canon knowledge gleamed from multiple rewatchings or re-readings of the canon text.
As Jenkins
(1992) notes, fans' critical power is generated by multiple
rereadings of the text, and introduction into a new fandom
requires not only these rereadings but "rehearsal of the
basic interpretive strategies and institutional meanings
common" to the fandom (69, 72). Yet the discourse
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community shows signs of adaption in allowing people to
enter the community through the fan fiction itself.
One such accepted writer is wiseacress on the fan
archive All About Spike, who began writing fanfic for
without having much knowledge of canon.
Buffy
In her self-posted
interview on All About Spike, wiseacress explains why she
began writing fan fiction and what she enjoys about it:
My ex and I broke up, and I knew I had to do something
positive to deal with the situation, so I started
drinking and reading Internet porn. And somehow I
stumbled over BtVS stuff, and I'd seen the show a
couple of times, found it funny and smart and
entertaining, and figured it was something I could
probably do. It's a lot easier than writing original
fie, at least for me. The playground's all set up--I
just get to bounce on the trampoline.
Wiseacress's deep ambivalence toward canon is evident
throughout her interview.
When answering what her
strengths and weaknesses are as a fanfic writer, she
responds:
"Well, one weakness is that I don't know much
about canon, but I work around that by just making shit up.
I hang the
x
Disabled' thingie on the rear view mirror and
park where I want. So that's no big."
Perhaps the ultimate revelation of her unconventional
entry into fanfic is her advice to new writers.
Of the
nineteen All About Spike writers who chose to respond to
the site's interview, she is the only one who has no
advice:
"I have no idea. Um, write what you know? Set
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aside some money each month for retirement? Do weightbearing exercise? Floss?
Honestly, I have no clue."
Her
semi-advice to "write what you know" is definitely ironic
given the circumstances.
Despite her entry into the fandom with little
knowledge, she has been accepted with excellent reviews,
such as those for her story "Beggars Would Ride."
Bosie
responded by saying, "This is brilliant. It's well-written,
it's sorrowful, it's sweet, it's.... terribly human."
Zandra posted this praise:
"As always you capture the need
and melancholy in Spike. I am (with a flourish) your
devoted fan."
It would seem, then, that her reviewers do
not find her stories out of character or in violation of
canon facts despite her lack of experience with the series.
How did wiseacress mange to accomplish what fan
studies scholars would consider impossible by entering a
fandom cold?
Perhaps because all her stories are slash,
almost exclusively rated R or NC-17, and written in good
prose.
In short, grammar and punctuation do not inhibit
readers, and the genre and pairings are appealing to
readers.
Slash readers have been known to admit to
endlessly searching for new stories for their favorite
couple, even to the point of begging people to write new
stories on fan forums.
For example, CharmedAngelicAngel
124
asks in the Fanfiction.net Buffy
forum:
"My favorite slash
fics are Buffy/Willow/Tara. Not many out there that I can
find. So I was hoping for your guy's help. Just post a
reply on this board pis."
This desire in the fan fiction
community may indeed have opened the door for wiseacress.
This odd entry into discourse without significant
canon knowledge is perhaps the purest essence of
heteroglossia—voices entering and challenging the discourse
successfully without having to achieve the status of expert
first.
This implies any voice that speaks has the
possibility of being heard.
Perhaps this exact desire in
composition instructors—the desire to allow minority voices
to be heard prior to achieving expert status—is the driving
force behind alternate discourse and its new multi-genre
ways of knowing and learning.
A noble cause, to be sure,
but because of the centripetal forces surrounding grammar
that I mentioned above, it is likely that some standard and
hegemony must and will always be maintained.
Conclusions
In this chapter, I have discussed the centripetal
restrictions found in the Buffy
discourse community as it
concerns canon knowledge, grammar, and jargon, proving that
significant hegemonic force is placed on new writers
through the requirement for proper grammar and canon
125
knowledge.
Yet, in contrast, some fans are beginning to
enter the discourse through fan fiction and fanon—in other
words, they enter the community without the prerequisite
expertise.
Based on my research, such entry has only been
achieved thus far by slash writers with excellent grammar,
suggesting that sexual dynamics and commentary plays a
significant role in the discourse, as previous scholars
have noted (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992; Penley 1997;
Pugh 2005; Heinecken 2005).
However, above all, I have
discovered that the supposedly democratic genre of fan
fiction is not completely democratic within itself:
in
other words, although the fans are appropriating the texts
they read, they still act as gate-keepers for their own
community and dictate what will be accepted and rejected.
126
127
CHAPTER FOUR
STAR
TREK AND ITS SISTER
THUNBERBIRDS:
HEGEMONIC POWER DISPLAYS AND EXCLUSIVITY
In this chapter, I will first explore how a discourse
community is affected when the fan writers are not only
from two different generations, as in the case of Buffy
Vampire
Slayer,
but also are comprised of "original" fans
and newer fans of an older television series such as
Trek:
the
The Original
Series.
Star
This added dimension of
"original" fandom, I will argue, means heteroglossia is
almost nonexistent because of forty years of established
fan traditions and taboos and the status of fan writers who
saw Star
Trek
when it first aired.
As mentioned in chapter
three, fan fiction and its surrounding discourse involve
more than a celebration of dialogic voices; some writers
are silenced and neutralized when they interact with the
fandom's gatekeepers.
Therefore, I have chosen to analyze
how gate-keeping operates in reviews instead of studying
the dialogic nature of fanfic in general.
This gate-
keeping, I found, plays an even'more significant role in
128
the reader-writer interaction in the Star
in the Buffy
Trek
fandom than
fandom.
Just as in the Buffy
discourse community, the
Trek
writer-readers focused on grammar, style, and canon issues,
which were categories included in my coding.
However,
while canon knowledge and proper canon portrayal were the
greatest concerns of the Buffy
reviewers, writing style or
writing finesse was the greatest concern of the
reviewers I analyzed.
Trek
In addition, while writers'
interaction with fanon and/or engagement in re-envisioning
of plots or characters was the second greatest issue
Buffy
reviewers mentioned, canon facts and correctness was the
second greatest topic in Trek
reviews.
Next I will revisit the issue of the generational gap
in fan writer-readers to facilitate the analysis of how
exclusivity in older, expert fan writers can lead to either
the silencing of new fans or to younger writers creating a
space of their own. In order to enrich this discussion, I
will compare the centripetal power dynamics of
Trek
discourse with the even more brutal exclusiveness of the
Thunderbirds
community, which I chose because
Thunderbirds
was also a 1960s science fiction show aimed at younger
audiences.
129
Thunderbirds
is a perfect complement to Star
this study because like Trek,
Thunderbirds
Trek
for
generated a
Hollywood movie many years after its cancellation that
caused a sudden influx of newer, younger fans into the
fandom.
As a result, both Trek
and Thunderbirds
experience of the composition student:
mirror the
teenaged writers in
the two fandoms, like teenagers in the freshman composition
course, are trying to enter a longstanding discourse that
began long before they were born.
Most experts in the
respective fields are acknowledged authorities with gatekeeping powers.
Those experts may choose to either help
the new community member learn the discourse or punish the
new member for errors.
In both cases, the difference
between encouragement and punishment causes the teen in
question to tag himself or herself as an incapable or
capable writer.
In addition, I will consider the dreaded fan fiction
genre called the Mary Sue, which historically means that
the author inserts herself into the story as a talented,
flawless love interest for a canon male character.
The
Mary Sue battleground has become a site of centralized
hegemonic forces at work, but as I will show, the discourse
will allow senior members of the community to break this
longstanding ban against original character (OC) females
130
without penalty, thus proving that status within a
discourse community can prove more powerful than fan
traditions and taboos.
Finally, using Bakhtin's theory to explain the complex
ways in which readers engage with the discourse surrounding
a text, I will also explore the emergence of a parallel or
sub-discourse community in the Trek
fandom—one comprised
almost entirely of males mostly in their twenties and early
thirties.
This parallel or sub-discourse community
violates all the traditions and rules of the established
mostly female community that has existed since the 1970s,
and it calls attention to the power of the internet to give
space and voice to those who purposefully or even
accidentally resist hegemony.
I. The Show, the Fans, and the Fandom
Background:
Star
Trek
The History of Star
Trek:
or Trek)
The Original
Trek
Series
(henceforth called Star
aired from 1966 to 1969 after creator Gene
Roddenberry sold his second pilot to NBC.
cancelled after its third season, Star
Although
Trek
attracted a
cult following who rallied around it and never gave up hope
that Captain Kirk and his crew would return.
After a
second run of the show failed in production in the 1970s,
Kirk and crew moved to film for Star
131
Trek:
The
Motion
Picture,
icon.
sealing the series' fate as a science fiction
Ten movies and four spin-off series later, the
fandom remains strong, as does its fan fiction readers and
writers.
Star
Trek
fanfic began as a fanzine phenomenon of
mostly female writers in their thirties and forties
(Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992) and was bolstered in the
1970s when the series ran in syndication.
Bantam books
capitalized on the phenomena by publishing two collections
of fan stories—Star Trek:
The New Voyages
even had to cite a fanzine story, and Star
Voyages
2 (1977).
(1976), which
Trek:
Bantam also published Star
The New
Trek
before Pocket Books, which continues to publish Star
novels today.
novels
Trek
Despite the official licensing by Paramount,
the novels retain a fan fiction-like status in the fandom
because Paramount does not endorse them as canon by
incorporating any of their plots, events, or new characters
into episodes or Trek
guidebooks.
The fans, however, enjoy these novels, many of which
have been written by authors who began (and sometimes have
continued) to write fan fiction.
Likewise, many other
amateur and professional writers produce fan fiction for
all five Trek
series.
However, in this study, I am
focusing on the original Trek
for several reasons:
132
one, I
Trek,
have the most canonical knowledge of the original
giving me more insight into issues of 00C writing and
stories that violate the canon; two, previous studies of
Trek
fan fiction have almost exclusively focused on fan
'zines and not the internet; and three, I wish to compare
the status of writers who watched the show when it
originally aired and who are longtime writers of
Trek
fanfic to those new writers who had not been born when
aired and were only in elementary school when Star
The Next
Generation
Trek
Trek:
went off the air.
II. Status, Abuse, and Hegemony—Star Trek:
The Original Fan
David Russell's (1990) commentary that the use of the
word "community" to describe discourse "implies unity,
identity, shared responsibility [and] implies exclusion,
restriction, admission or non-admission" (53) was proven
true for the Buffy
community.
the
Vampire
Slayer
However, it is perhaps twice as true for the
discourse community surrounding Star
Series,
fan fiction discourse
Trek:
The
Original
which is neither the paradise of fans supporting
one another's efforts, as it has been portrayed in previous
studies (Pugh 2005; Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992), nor a
simple gate-keeping community that chastises those who
portray the characters badly or do not know canon facts
about the Trek
universe (Pugh 2005; Bacon-Smith 1992).
133
While the Buffy
fandom could conceivably be described
as a gate-keeping community with initiation rituals, the
Trek
community supersedes such a simple term because its
discourse community is a battleground.
The centripetal
power displays by older and/or experienced writers and
readers can be described as exclusive or even meanspirited, and in some cases the intention of the reviews is
clearly to silence the younger and/or inexperienced
writers.
Concerning academic discourse, Joseph Harris
(1990) argues that conceptions of the community have
portrayed it as devoid of conflict (263-264).
studied Trek
If Harris
fan fiction, he would find such sufficient
evidence of conflict that one wonders why anyone would
attempt to enter the discourse and can easily see why a
writer would be unable to do so.
Conferral of Status
Before we can contemplate the divide in the
Trek
discourse community, we must first consider the difference
in the writers' ages.
internet, Star
Trek
With the growing popularity of the
fan fiction moved online, gaining a
broader age range of writers—a tendency mirrored in the
Buffy
fanfic community.
In fact, a survey of the fan
writers on the Trek Writer's Guild shows that of the 101
writers who specified their age, fifteen were in their
134
teens, thirty-eight in their twenties, twenty-eight in
their thirties, twelve in their forties, and seven in their
fifties.
Not only does this information suggest that the
average fan fiction writer is now in her teens or twenties,
a finding supported by Jenkins (2006) and Thomas (2006),
but it also shows an interesting split in the fan writers
of Star
Trek:
older, "original" fans who watched the show
when it aired in the 1960s or ran in syndication in the
1970s, and younger writers who have recently become fans
through reruns or exposure through friends or family
members.
This divide in ages sets up the immediate
potential for a dialogic conversation between the two
generations that younger fandoms such as Buffy
Potter
would not have.
or
Harry
However, one sees a centripetal
power display by the older, "original" fans—an axis of
power not present in the Buffy
child-driven fandom of Harry
fandom, much less in the
Potter
with its older fan
writers who act like "den mothers" toward the thousands of
children participating through fan fiction in J.K.
Rowlings' world (Jenkins, 2006, p. 178).
As previously noted in chapter one, Pugh's (2005) only
complaint about fan communities is that they have the
unfortunate tendency to restrict writers by asking them to
135
pigeonhole their writing into preset categories or genres
(129).
However, Pugh does not consider how "democratic"
the fan writing communities he discusses in The
Genre
may or may not be.
Democratic
In other words, other than his
nod to fan taboos, Pugh doesn't consider what hegemony may
exist in the fan fiction community or what voices are
silenced.
What I have found in my study is an immense
silencing of younger fans and/or inexperienced writers by
older, "original" fans and/or expert writers.
The older, "original" fans typically identify
themselves as such, conferring upon themselves the power of
the discourse by drawing attention to their status.
Of the
authors studied, twenty-one percent drew attention to their
long association with Trek
and Trek
fan fiction, with
forty-three of them indicating or directly stating that
they were aged 40 years or older.
For example, on the
Kirk/Spock Archive, writers TGuess, CatalenaMara, and Elise
Madrid state in their story blurbs that their work has been
previously published in fan ^zines.
To explain the
significance of this, allow me to clarify:
on every fan
fiction website I have visited, the story title is followed
by a brief summary or blurb of the fanfic, enabling readers
to decide if they want to proceed with reading the story.
This is where most of the fanfic jargon tends to be,
136
labeling the story (e.g., het, slash, hurt/comfort, or
mpreg).
However, these summaries and lists of labels do
not generally include the statement that "this story was
previously published in X famous fanzine."
That is, while
writers must state that work has been previously published,
they are not required to do so in blurbs.
Hence by doing
so, TGuess, CatalenaMara, and Elise Madrid are declaring
status.
In essence, the writers—whether they intend to or
not—are almost daring readers to leave negative feedback
and demanding acknowledgement and respect for their
achievement since they have already been published.
On Fanfiction.net, Ster J. also identifies her status
on her author's biography page:
"I saw my first episode of
Star Trek the summer of 1968. It was a rerun of *The
Trouble With Tribbles.'"
Ster. J's identification of
herself as an "original" fan conveys her authority.
Likewise, Pat Foley explains her status as an "original,"
published fan on her author's biography:
"First published
in the 80s in the classic Trek zine Masiform D, Pat . . .
has won multiple FANQ and other writing awards."
Here, the
writer refers to herself in the third person as though she
is writing a professional biographical blurb and even
mentions publications and awards in order to underscore her
status.
137
In calling attention to their status as "original"
fans and/or published fans, these writers establish
themselves as the creme
de creme
of the Trek writers,
tipping the power of the discourse in their favor, and
proceed to post numerous well-received stories.
For
example, Ster J., like several other "original fans," has
posted over 170 stories to Fanfiction.net and has many
loyal readers and reviewers.
After reading multiple
stories by Ster J., I can say this cannot be explained by
superior writing technique because her stories are not
outstanding in their style, literary technique, or
characterization.
Yet she is much hailed by the community,
which suggests power through status and an elitist attitude
in favor of "original" fans.
In fact, she occasionally
mass-posts several ficlets (i.e., 800 words or less) in a
single day without being shunned or ignored, which suggests
that status may be more powerful than traditional fan
values since mass posters are generally ignored.
On the other end of the fan writing spectrum from
"original" Trek
fans like Pat Foley are inexperienced teen
writers such as Crentali, Bingalicious Midnight, and
Betazoid Fire Escape.
In a mirror of the Buffy
discourse
community, these writers confer no status upon themselves
and are completely ignored by the powerhouse writers of
138
Trek
discourse.
Also like Buffy,
these teenaged writers
create their own fringe sub-community in which they support
one another, a concept I will further discuss below.
Still, they receive chastisement for grammar, style, and
canon errors from reviewers.
Grammar and Abuse of Feedback
The tension over grammatical mistakes and other errors
seems to run higher in the Trek
community than the
community, most likely because Trek
Buffy
is patrolled by highly
critical writer-readers as well as flamers or trolls (i.e.,
people who patrol websites, leaving random hateful posts in
order to start fights and hurt feelings).
This emphasis on
grammar generates a hegemonic force within the fandom as
well as introduces hegemonic forces acting on the fandom
from without.
These centripetal forces all focus on the
hegemonic upholding of standard English grammar and
spelling.
Within the fandom, nineteen percent of the studied
Trek
reviews mentioned poor or excellent grammar, compared
to the mere three percent of studied reviews in the
fandom.
Buffy
For example, young writer sfordcar received this
review for "The Mad Captain":
"you capitalize a lot of
random words in the middle of sentences."
Many fan writers
and readers apparently believe such reviews involve school-
139
based discourse because they mention grammar, and
therefore, as Black (2007) notes, some reviewers apologize
for drawing on such so-called ^school-based' terminology to
offer critique.
For example, Matchboxcars received this
review on "it could not last [sic]":
"you used ^you're'
when you meant to use the possessive form ''your.'
EK!
I've been paying to [sic] much attention in English class
again!
HEELPP!"
Not all reviewers leave disclaimers or temper their
criticism with diplomacy.
Some are inordinately cruel and
leave reviews that could run some less stalwart souls from
the fandom.
One example of such reviewers is the two
readers calling themselves Critical Appreciation Pt 1.
They identify themselves as follows:
"Critical
Appreciation Pt 1 is an established body of reviewers,
[sic] dedicated to helping young writers reach their full
potential.
Messers Peter Melchett M.A (Hons), & John
Dennis Ph.D Eng.Lit."
Dennis and Melchett left this review
for self-identified college student Firewolf on her story
"Quest II":
From one Trekkie to another (Or do you regard yourself
a Trekker?) Here [sic] are some points for your
meditation:
"He light the small candle" - Shouldn't this be 'lit'?
"He said smiling rather sadly." - I've always enjoyed
140
clown references in Star Trek literature - brings in a
sense of tragic reality.
"It was not planned. I had a meeting canceled at the
last minute so I beamed over for the festival. It has
been years since I was able to attend. " he looked
away for a moment at he floating lanterns." - 'he'
should have a capital 'H' as in a capital 'H1 for
'Holo-deck'. [. . .]
Live long and prosperHere' s a bit of trivia for you - Did you know that not
once during Star Trek TOS, did Kirk ever say 'Beam me
up Scottie'? Despite many non-believers in the Star
Trek universe constantly mis-quoting this.[sic]
Scottie was in Engineering never really in the
Transporter Room. If Kirk did want to get the hell out
of a difficult situation he would say something to the
effect of 'Two to beam up'.
While the grammar points are accurate, the review is
condescending (and the comments ironically contain
grammatical errors of their own). The final unrelated
remarks on Trek
trivia assume the writer knows little about
the fandom, although the story indicates otherwise.
Although they are acting as hegemonic gatekeepers, the
members of Critical Appreciation Pt 1 present themselves as
the execution squad in the community.
(For a more
extensive look at the abuse of feedback and flamers or
trolls in the Trek
community, please see Appendix III).
This power display, which mostly focuses on the hegemony
surrounding standard English grammar and punctuation,
attempts to silence the writer altogether; in short, the
reviewers seem to want to humiliate the writer into leaving
141
the website.
This is nothing like a "democratic genre";
this is a mafia-style assassination genre using a grammar
rifle. Critical Appreciation Pt 1 aim less to initiate
writers than to humiliate them.
Canon Facts, Character Portrayal, and Hegemony
Star Trek
fans have long been stereotyped as insane
fanatics, earning them the derogatory nickname "Trekkies,"
which they've recast as the positive slang "Trekker."
Between this stereotype and the knowledge that fans are
concerned about canonical correctness in fan fiction, one
could easily assume that reviewers would mention issues of
canon more than any other aspect in a Trek
fanfic,
especially since previous research has revealed that fans
are preoccupied with canonical accuracy (Jenkins 1992;
Bacon-Smith 1992; Pugh 2005) and a survey of Buffy
reviews
showed that reviewers mentioned canon more often than other
concerns.
Surprisingly, however, Trek
reviewers mention
writing style/mechanics most often. Still, seventeen
percent of reviews studied did mention canon issues.
Of
those reviews discussing canon, seventy-seven percent
complimented the writer on good use of canon facts, sixteen
percent offered mixed reviews that critigued canon errors
but complimented other aspects of the story, and seven
percent only chastised the writer for errors.
142
Interestingly, most reviewers used positive reinforcement
for writers who kept to the canon, while only a handful
(seven percent) used punishment for writers who violated
the canon.
A classic example of positive reinforcement comes from
a review of "silence [sic]" by matchboxcars:
"it's so like
Spock to worry about Kirk's well being before his own."
Meanwhile, Ster J—one of the powerhouse writers in the
fandom—offers this mixed review to EclipseKlutz's first
Trek
story:
"Okay, you want an honest review?
I thought the story had a lot of promise.
Here it is.
Chapel was a
little TOO ditzy for my taste, but the rest had a good
balance of humor and drama.
That's not easy to accomplish,
especially your first time out."
For an example of a more
critical review, Allergic-to-Paradox critiques a story by
fourteen-year-old Shonobi Tsukiko Nomiya for both grammar
and canonical accuracy, saying "why didn't Spock fight
back?"
All three examples quoted here centered on the
character's behavior—in other words, if they were acting
out of character (00C) or not.
This was the primary
canonical concern for the stories studied:
seventy-seven
of the reviews that mentioned canon issues specifically
commented on the accuracy or lack thereof concerning
character's behavior and speech patterns.
143
Clearly, strong centripetal forces surround the
portrayal of canon characters.
Granted, expansion upon a
character's past or future—and therefore past or future
motivations—is allowed, creating gaps in the fandom for
heteoglossic and centrifugal forces to push, question, or
re-imagine characters.
Five percent of reviewers remarked
on expansion or re-imagining of the canon, and all such
reviews were positive.
For example, established writer
Firewolfe gives this review for new writer Kitara Manoru's
prequel story:
"Interesting piece and it gives a vialble
[sic] reason why Spock might be more inclied [sic] to join
Star Fleet."
However, centripetal, unifying forces still coalesce
into a hegemony surrounding character portrayal, policing
those who write the characters acting or speaking in noncanonical ways.
For example, reviewer mkyla chastises
writer Carlotta's Twin:
matched up with TOS."
"I'm not sure Kirk's vocabulary
In this sense, the fans police their
fandom, hoping to insure that their beloved characters are
represented well.
Within this hegemony, however, exists a
further centrifugal force:
not all writer-readers
interpret the characters the same.
This disagreement over interpretation is typified in
the reviews for "Sunset" by Tavia.
144
Two of her ten
reviewers compliment her characterization of Spock:
"very
in character" and "You capture the character well."
However, another reviewer remarks, "I must say it's hard
for me to imagine Spock actually crying for any reason, but
I guess it's a matter of opinion whether you think he would
or not."
itself:
Several things are interesting about the review
the reader acknowledges that the character is open
for interpretation, which is an unusual rhetorical move,
and the reader fails to account for the fact Spock cried
twice in canon, although he was not in his right mind one
of those two times.
Overall, though, the contradictory
reviews and the disclaimer made by the dissenting reviewer
reveal that a heteroglossic undertow moves within the
hegemony surrounding appropriate characterization.
III. Style and Storytelling: Textual "Poachers" Must Still
Write Well
Although I, like Angela Thomas (2006,) resist the
pejorative designation of "textual poacher" to describe fan
writers, it is useful to remember Michel de Certeau's
words:
"Far from being writers . . . readers are
travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone
else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did
not write" (as qtd. in Ahearne, 1995, p. 171). However,
even poachers and thieves must practice their art well, and
145
fan writers are no different.
Of the reviews studied,
nineteen percent mentioned excellent or poor writing style,
description, setting, plot, or phrasing.
As a result,
writing style/mechanics slightly outdistanced canonical
accuracy as the reviewer's greatest concern.
Many stories receive vague writing compliments:
"the
writing is very beautiful" or "so perfect, so tragic and
inspiring and beautiful."
Others are more specific:
"The
platitudes and cliche [in this parody] where [sic] spot on
and were written wonderfully" or "the last paragraph was
like a lead weight.
It sank the whole story.
Why don't
you try to tighten up the last paragraph and repost it?"
Although the reviewers varied in their amount of
specialized vocabulary, they clearly rewarded solid
writing:
"You draw them so vividly, down to the hot dust
of the Vulcan desert," "Your prose is more like poetry in
parts," or "I appreciated your economy of words when
describing the characters' feelings or the setting."
Those
who experimented with point of view were also rewarded if
the readers felt they did well, even though an overwhelming
majority of fan fiction is in third person:
you for making it first person!
"and kudos to
I'm abysmal at that."
Such reviews support the centripetal forces that
vaguely define "good" writing:
146
conciseness, description,
poetic phrasing, and proper use of POV.
Other reviews
mention plot, for example this review for JackHawksmoor's
"Letters":
"I see a lot of NC17 stories as just an excuse
to write out sex scenes, but this was more.
In addition, reviews critiqued story pacing:
bit rushed at the end."
Well done."
"it seemed a
The characterization of original
characters was also addressed:
"I would caution, I
suppose, to not let your villain be too typecast.
Cural
should have *some* motivation that might be construed as
sympathetic."
Within these reviews, whether they consist
of critique or positive reinforcement, a centripetal force
surrounding the qualities of "good" writing emerges, with
readers clearly encouraging writers to refine their work
toward professional standards or retain their finesse if
the readers feel they have achieved professional standards.
For example, senior fan Ster J compliments fellow senior
fan matchboxcars by saying "There is something so
sophisticated about this story, as if written by a pro
writer."
Conversely, poor writing was critiqued.
Writer
sfordcar received extended complaints and advice on her
choppy, sparse story "The Mad Captain."
The comments on
her story, which was her first for the fandom, ranged from
cruel to helpful.
Sareks Little Angel complained, "This is
147
a dry chapter with no feeling to it whatso ever [sic].
One
gets the feel [sic] that yu [sic] cut the characters out of
cardstock . . . Very sad first attempt."
Bingalicious
Midnight, apparently in an attempt to help, remarks that
"this chapter could use a few more details.
The idea is
interesting, but it happens so suddenly, and with so little
explanation, that the reader is left wondering, "What...?"
Other details, simply to better show the action of the
scene, might help."
Longtime Trek
fan writer
Schematization tries to make her advice more specific:
have to agree with Bingalicious here.
"I
You do need to put
some more work into it . . . adding actions and such
instead of just the speaking parts."
As the story progressed, Bingalicious Midnight offers
more encouragement with her critique, beginning with the
positive:
"the characterization in this chapter seems
closer to the canon characters."
suggestions:
detail.
Then she offers her
"I think the story could still use a little
It's mostly dialogue, and I think it would read
more smoothly if it were filled in a little bit more."
She
ends her review by saying "Keep writing!"
In this case, the centripetal forces surrounding
"good" writing worked to chastise, advise, and encourage
sfordcar.
While one reviewer lashed out at the writer and
148
effectively told her to stop writing, other reviewers gave
her writing tips and told her to keep writing. The
centripetal forces that also work within a writing
classroom are mirrored in the fan fiction community.
Although researchers have noted that fans value different
aspects of fiction than an editor would, such as character
interaction over plot (Pugh 2005), fans still educate and
police each other on a variety of writing techniques and
concepts.
IV. The Purview of the Expert: Exclusiveness in Fanfic
The Great Age Divide
Thus far, I have discussed how fan writers confer
status upon themselves and attain positions of authority in
the discourse.
in the Trek
the Buffy
I have also explored the abuse of feedback
fandom, a phenomenon that is not an issue in
fandom.
In addition, I have analyzed how
"original," older fans create a hegemonic discourse that
not only acts as a gatekeeper for younger and/or
inexperienced writers but also occasionally brutally
attacks them.
The centripetal forces at work create a
unified, hegemonic vision of writing style, grammar
mechanics, and canon knowledge.
For the most part, the Great Age Divide exists in the
Trek
community just as it does for the Buffy
149
fandom, and
this divide in fans keeps the interaction between the older
writers and the younger (usually teen) writers minimal.
Occasionally younger writers will review older writers, and
vice versa, but feedback usually remains group-exclusive,
with teen writers creating a fringe space at the
discourse's edge.
Of the writers who specified their ages,
forty-six percent were older, "original" fans who are
powerhouse writers in the fandom, and thirty-six percent
were younger, newer fans who were severely critiqued or
even bashed by reviewers.
Only eighteen percent managed to
cross categories, all of them younger writers who had
managed to earn the "original" fans' respect because of
their writing skills.
From this behavior, one can see that new writers—
whether young or old, experienced or not—are accepted into
the community at some level.
However, with little
exception, their placement in the discourse will depend on
their fan status ("original" or older fan versus new or
younger fan), which I found from reading stories and
author's biography pages is often but not always in line
with their age, and their writing finesse.
For many teen
writers, this placement means they exist at the edge of the
discourse, with only fellow teen writers offering feedback
150
and critique to help them improve their writing or canon
knowledge.
For an example of how the newest fans/writers seem
most likely to receive help from teen fans, consider the
interaction on the Fanfiction.net forums.
Newcomer The
Weird Story Tellers Gang posts the following:
guys know all of those episode names? . . .
"How can you
Sorry, I am
quite new at all of this Star Trek stuff. I really just got
hooked onto it this week. Can you fill me in with the main
character [sic] and what they do?"
The comment was ignored
for an entire year until young writer Crentali finally
responded:
Sure, that's what we're here for! Well, the main
characters are Captain James T. Kirk(the most main
character), he's the Captain; First Officer Spock(half
human half Vulcan),he's also the science officer;
Doctor Leonard H. McCoy, Doctor who bugs Spock about
being a 'pointy eared hobgoblin. Those are the three
main characters in The Original Series(TOS), OK?
Needless to say, The Weird Story Tellers Gang has not
responded to the reply, having likely given up hope long
ago, and also has not posted any stories in the
fandom.
Trek
Yet Crentali, when she found the plea for
assistance, saw it as her duty to help.
This sense of
fringe-group solidarity suggests that as in the
fandom, the teens in the Trek
Buffy
community are either unaware
or indifferent to their exclusion from the dominant
151
discourse and create their own sub-community.
both Buffy
and Trek
Perhaps in
fan communities, this creation of space
is an example of Joseph Harris's (1990) claim that "one
does not step clearly and wholly from one community to
another, but is caught instead in an always changing mix of
dominant, residual, and emerging discourses" (266).
These teens, unable to enter completely into the
discourse or clearly pass the community's initiation
rituals, are caught in transition between two discourses—
that of new, casual fan and experienced, knowledgeable fan—
and are creating an emerging discourse complete with
support for other new writers.
This finding is at odds
with previous studies that found established fan writers
helped newer writers enter the discourse (Jenkins 1992;
Bacon-Smith 1992).
For example, Jenkins (1992) explains
that traditionally fans' critical power is generated by
multiple rereadings of the text, and introduction into a
new fandom requires not only these rereadings but
"rehearsal of the basic interpretive strategies and
institutional meanings common" to the fandom (69, 72).
That is clearly not the case here.
lies in the change of demographics.
Perhaps the difference
In 1992 when Jenkins
and Bacon-Smith published their findings, most fanfic
writers were white, middle class women in their thirties
152
and forties.
They had much in common with each other and
had no trouble sitting new fans down and showing them the
entire series on VHS, providing commentary along the way
(Bacon-Smith 1992).
However, the age gap between the two
generations most represented in fanfic now is substantial,
giving the two sets little in common and separating them
occasionally by entire continents.
So while it is possible
for a graduate student in the U.S. to coach a new fan in
Finland, at the same time little face-to-face instruction
in the discourse can occur.
V. The "Original" Fan:
How Status and Hegemony Can Destroy Discourse
Thus far, I have analyzed how younger and/or
inexperienced writers cannot fully enter the discourse
because of centripetal forces maintained by older,
"original" fans and how, consequently, these younger fans
have created sub-discourse communities in which they
support one another's writing.
To corroborate these findings and to strengthen the
relation of my data to research in rhetoric and
composition, I also examined a third fandom, looking
specifically for evidence of a similar split between
younger and older fans.
I chose the Thunderbirds
community because it is similar in age to Trek
153
discourse
and would
allow me to best watch interaction with older, "original"
fans and younger, new fans.
What I found was that the
elder writers/fans treat the younger ones viciously,
sometimes regardless of their mastery of prose.
To provide some background, allow me to explain that
Thunderbirds
was a science fiction British
"supermarionation" (puppet) show which aired in the 1960s
and ran in syndication in the 1970s and 1980s.
The show,
set in the 2020s, detailed the rescue efforts of the Tracy
family, who had built space, naval, and air ships to rescue
humankind from various natural or mechanic disasters.
In
2004, Hollywood produced a live action movie based on the
characters which was well-received by children and teens.
As mentioned earlier, Thunderbirds
for Star Trek
provides a mirror
in this study because of the sudden
introduction of newer, younger fans into an established,
older fandom.
Therefore, both Trek
and Thunderbirds
can be
seen as metaphor for the experience of the composition
student:
teenaged writers in the two fandoms, like
teenagers in the freshman composition course, are trying to
enter a discourse maintained by adults.
Many of those
recognized as experts in the respective fields are gatekeepers who administer initiation rituals.
In addition,
the difference between encouragement and punishment in
154
composition and fan fiction can cause the teen in question
to tag herself as an incapable or capable writer.
The 2004 Hollywood Thunderbirds
movie created more
than a sudden wave of young writers; it also resulted in
new writers who submitted stories for the movie-verse
and/or the tv-verse.
The "original" fans and "purists"
resented the perceived intrusion, especially since the
movie altered canon facts like the ages of the Tracy boys
and even switched who piloted which Thunderbird.
This
alteration of facts between the television series and the
movie led to a "canon fact war."
As a result, extreme centripetal forces arose in the
discourse concerning various canon issues, including
characterization.
In fact, a set of exclusive writers
arose surrounding "original" fan Samantha Winchester, who
reveals in her author's biography that she watched the show
as a child when it aired in the 1960s.
Winchester created
an elite fanfic archive entitled The Tracy Island
Chronicles in which she exclusively controls whose stories
may be posted.
Of the core writers on the site, all but
one is at least in her mid-thirties, and most specify
having watched the show as a child.
These same writers
(e.g., Winchester herself, Skywench, Cathrl, and Claudette)
155
rule the discourse on Fanfiction.net's Thunderbird
section,
policing the other writers.
Canon:
There May Only Be One Interpretation
Granted, like most fandoms, the Thunderbirds
fanfic
community receives a large number of reviews that simply
read "What a fun story!" or "great story and keep up the
good work."
However, many readers still leave comments
concerning canon, style, or grammar.
Of the reviews
studied, twenty percent praised or chastised writers for
their portrayal of canon.
Of those reviews, sixty-eight
were purely praise, sixteen percent were purely censure,
and sixteen percent combined compliments on other story
elements with chastisement for canon errors.
What is of interest is the level of malice directed
toward those who make errors, with sixty percent of the
negative reviews being what one can only term as "acidic."
For example, the canon battle of the Tracy boys' ages can
be seen is this review of Bluegrass's story "Road to
Recovery":
Goldpen: I was just wondering if you knew some facts
about the thunderbirds that miss use [sic] drives me
up the wall. [. . .] 1 The ages are wrong Virgil is
not second oldest it goes Scott then John then Virgil
then Gordon then Alan. 2 Gordon wouldn't be there
because he mans thunderbird 4.
156
Here, Goldpen upholds the centripetal forces
surrounding the canon facts of the original series versus
the movie, leaving the writer an entirely negative review.
However, this review is tame compared to others.
Consider
senior gatekeeper Cathrl's response to new writer Magical
Cthulhu:
I'm sorry, what's scandalous about this? Alan's
gay...and?
The main problem I have with it is that all your
characters sound like sixteen year old boys including Jeff, father of five who must be pushing
forty even in the movieverse. I can't imagine a
successful businessman talking like this, I just
can't. Or, for that matter, a loving father. Decent
parents don't tell one son that another annoys them,
even if it's true. [. . .] Why would Jeff refuse to
speak to Alan for weeks anyway? This isn't scandalous,
it's just implausible. Who are these unpleasant
people? They're certainly not the Tracys.
It does need a bit more work technically - and for you
to realise that a big chunk of the readers in this
fandom are adults. We're not going to be shocked, and
to impress us you'll have to do a whole lot more than
just randomly make one person gay and the others mean.
You'll have to have a storyline beyond one plot
device, and some characterisation which isn't
completely out of character.
While other readers may agree with Cathrl's assessment
that the characters are 00C, the amount of spleen directed
at the writer is extreme.
Instead of offering support,
advice, or suggestions for improvement, the writer-reader
lambasts the new teenaged writer for his mistakes.
157
In
addition to the hegemonic force behind her complaints on
characterization, Cathrl also uphold the hegemony of the
older, "original" fans by bluntly stating "a big chunk of
the readers in this fandom are adults. We're not going to
be shocked, and to impress us you'll have to do a whole lot
more than just randomly make one person gay and the others
mean."
Far from offering new members of the discourse
support and instruction as reported in early fan fiction
studies (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992), the older
Thunderbirds
writers actively punish new members to the
discourse and offer no suggestions for improvement.
Interestingly, thirteen percent of the writers—especially
the teenaged ones—publically responded to being lambasted
just as some teens in Buffy
did.
Magical Cthulhu, for
example, posted a reply to the aforementioned stinging
review by Cathrl by writing it directly to his review board
instead of using Fanfiction.net's private messaging
service.
Grammar, Spelling, and Mechanics
Of less concern overall were the rules governing
standard English.
In fact, the most mentioned issue in
reviews was writing style (e.g., plot, description,
setting, and action), with twenty-five percent of reviewers
commenting on good or poor writing.
158
Only five percent of
reviews mentioned mechanical errors, although,
interestingly, one hundred percent of those reviews were
chastisements, while in Buffy
and Trek
writers at least one
reviewer complimented a writer on good grammar.
Again, the
amount of pique behind the phrasing removes most of these
reviews from the concept of "suggestions for improvement"
to "brutal complaint."
For example, senior fan-writer
Tikatu admonishes new writer Bluegrass, "And, for the
record, the man's nickname or whatever is ^Brains' not
^Brain's.' Please fix it."
using the word please
first sentence:
The mild nod to politeness by-
is overpowered by the tone of the
"for the record."
Likewise, in the midst
of her searing review of Magical Cthulhu' s story, senior
fan-writer Cathrl comments, "It also really needs a good
proofread and edit.
A
At the moment you have nonsense like
Alan turn when he heard foot steps decanting form the
upper level.'
That just doesn't _mean_ anything."
Granted, Cathrl is correct.
However, once again, in
her efforts to join other reviewers of the story in
upholding the centripetal forces surrounding standard
English, Cathrl metaphorically slaps the teen writer and
offers no suggestions, even the simplest advice to secure a
beta reader.
As a result, these reviewers—who have pointed
out multiple problems with the stories—seem to be trying to
159
shame the new writers out of the fandom.
For example,
Pepsemaxke, a non-English speaker who failed to identify
herself as such at first, received this review for her
story "Maybe":
Oh dear - this is so mawkish and sentimental, without
having any bearing upon Thunderbirds at all. But what
makes it especially bad are the spelling and
grammatical errors that render this little piece
practically unreadable. You have lots of stories on
this site, all with the same terrible errors in
grammar and composition. Yes, I am aware that English
is not your native language, but you have made no
perceptible progress and your story ideas are juvenile
and unreal. [. . .] Oh, and it has nothing to do with
Thunderbirds. Absolutely nothing.
Here the reader lambasts the writer's entire collection,
offers no support or advice on how to fix the problems, and
implies the writer should stop writing, especially for the
Thunderbirds
fandom.
Therefore, the centripetal forces
which support standard English and the quality of the
fandom are brutally applied, creating an "us versus them"
elitism and hegemony that surpasses mere gate-keeping.
In
essence, the gatekeepers have created an impossible
initiation.
From the perspective of Cultural Studies, this
behavior would be classic for a disenfranchised subculture
(women in their thirties and forties) who have managed to
forge a world of their own.
However, from a Rhet-Comp
perspective, the effect of their behavior is to create an
elite club that denies younger writers any chance to
160
improve their craft or to participate in a now-global
enterprise.
Fanon
Thunderbirds
that neither Buffy
carries an additional centripetal force
nor Trek
revealed.
In a reversal of
what others have often noted concerning fanon in other
communities (Pugh 2005; Jenkins 1992), writers are punished
for attempting to build fanon facts into the canon.
Of the
reviews studied, five percent mentioned fanon issues and
always in an overwhelmingly negative light.
For example,
writer MCJ was slammed for siding with popular fanon
instead of adhering to the canon of a television show that
contained very little characterization or character
development.
As Pugh (2005) explains, fans build accepted
myths about their characters that have not been established
by the canon, e.g., a general fan consensus that a
character was sexually abused in the past (41). However,
Tikatu, one of the ruling members of Thunderbirds
fan
fiction discourse, responds to MCJ's story "Tales of a
Grandmother" as follows:
It's fanon that Jeff "rejects" any of his boys. From
the authorized biographical information: "Intelligent,
kind
(emphasis mine) and with a sense of humour, Jeff
also exhibits the ability to be decisive and stern
when the situation
demands
(emphasis mine)." The World
of Thunderbirds, By Chris Bentley and Graham Bleatham,
Marks and Spencer, 20.
161
Not only does Tikatu chastise MCJ for aligning with fanon,
she uses quotations from a Thunderbirds
source book to make
her point—a clear centripetal move intended to silence any
argument to the contrary.
Of further interest is the fact
that MCJ is not a "teenie" or a "newbie", but is rather a
fan who admits on her author biography page that she
watched the series during its first run in syndication in
the 1970s.
This suggests an extreme division within the
fans along the lines of "original" fans who adhere strictly
to tv-verse canon and everyone else.
In the meantime, top
writer for the tv-verse—longtime "original" fan and archive
owner Samatha Winchester—received hordes of gushing reviews
such as follows:
yveybevy:
[This is the] *standard* for any T/bird
fanfic writer anywhere on the web. [. . .] I have
been asked by your 30 fans here in London, England
(must be thousands more out there) to thank you for
continuing with one of the most perfect of T/bird
stories on ff.net.
As can be seen from these reviews, classic shows such as
Thunderbirds
and Star
Trek,
which have older, longtime
fans, can produce violent hegemonic exclusiveness and gatekeeping toward younger, newer, and/or inexperienced writers
as well as older and more inexperienced writers who vary in
their interpretation of the canon.
The war in the
discourse supersedes mere questions of canon and quality
162
prose and vaults into favoritism, "original" fan egotism,
and even the unusual act of rejecting fanon.
older, "original" Thunberbirds
In fact,
writers even reject slash
stories about the Tracy boys as incest—despite the fact
that well-written slash of any kind, including incest, is
rarely rejected by the older writers in any fandom.
In reference to academic discourse, Sidney I. Dorbin
(2002) warns that "we may be risking silencing and
neutralizing a good number of discourses when they interact
with academic discourse" since such institutional
discourses "appropriate nonacademic portions of the hybrids
with little effort" because of their socio-political power
as gatekeepers (54-55).
In Thunderbirds
discourse, though,
the gate-keeping is so violent that no appropriation
occurs, and all newer or non-centripetal voices are
silenced.
Therefore, one can conclude that older fandoms
such as Trek
and Thunderbirds
carry additional hegemonic
forces unseen in newer fandoms—forces that do not consider
that any reader of a text, even a reader removed from the
text's date of publication by several centuries, may
appropriate the text with equal finesse and equal right.
In short, this elitist reaction to new fans is the
equivalent of Queen Elizabeth I traveling through time and
telling a new Shakespeare scholar that he has no right or
163
talent in interpreting or writing about Shakespeare.
that the new Trek
and Thunderbirds
Given
fans are only separated
from the original air dates by four decades instead of four
centuries, this implied argument is all the more extreme.
Essentially, the older, "original" fans are saying "It's
all mine, and you can't have it!
So get out!"
Interestingly, although a similar situation could
occur in the Buffy
fandom due to the Buffy
movie and its
differences in lore, no such battle is currently evident on
active fanfic sites, probably because the movie was
produced before the television series and was not a
blockbuster.
One must wonder, however, if the
Buffy
discourse community will eventually attain this level of
exclusiveness as the years pass, especially if Josh Whedon
or another producer ever choose to (or obtain the rights
to) create a second Buffy
movie.
As mentioned previously, Joseph Harris (1990)
critiques the use of the word "community" to describe
discourse and argues that discourse communities are often
erroneously portrayed as Utopias beyond both time and place
(263-264).
David Russell (1990) also critiques a Utopian
portrayal by pointing out that the use of the word
community
"implies exclusion, restriction, admission or
non-admission" (53). Harris and Russell are both supported
164
by the evidence I found in these fandoms, which are built
through powerful hegemonic forces. My findings from the
Star
Trek
and Thunderbirds
websites thus differ from
previous Utopian portrayals of fan fiction (Jenkins 1992;
Bacon-Smith 1992; Pugh 2005).
In particular, my research
shows instances of exclusion and restriction based on age,
time in the fandom, and perhaps even social networking
among older fans.
This exclusiveness also includes
rejection of fanon and slash from those without status,
thereby violating longstanding traditions in the fan
fiction community.
VI. The Black Sheep:
Rejection of the Discourse?
Androcentric Fan Fiction
Thus far, I have explored how the divide over age and
status in the discourse community of both Trek
Thunderbirds
and
has created violent silencing and exclusion of
younger and/or inexperienced writers who are new to the
fandom.
This hegemonic control of the discourse extends
beyond chastisement for grammar or OOC writing and attacks
anyone whose interpretation of the canon varies from the
accepted views of the queens of the discourse.
divisions and emerging trends in Star
Trek
However,
discourse can be
seen not only along the lines of age and status but also
gender.
165
Traditionally, fan fiction writers have been women
(Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins 1992; Penley 1989); however, in
the Trek
fandom especially, a growing number of men are
entering the discourse.
Among the Star
Trek
fan fiction
sites, the Trek Writer's Guild stands out as the black
sheep of its kind.
Created and run entirely by men, the
site hosts one hundred and sixty writers, one hundred and
thirty-two of whom are male, making the site the largest
gathering of male fan fiction writers in the Star
Trek
fandom.
Originally established by Michael Sweeney for "posting
spec scripts for submission to Paramount," the creators
tell visitors that "the purpose of the Guild widened, and
instead of simply being a forum for speculative scripts, it
also grew to encompassed [sic] fan fiction."
Now the site
claims it "has become more then [sic] just a place to house
and showcase quality Star Trek fan fiction, its [sic] a
hang out spot . . . [which] makes the main purpose,
promoting authors [sic] works, easier."
final statement:
Of interest is the
the site aims to promote authors' works,
not the usual reason praised by fanfic writers, who usually
cite fanfic as providing a place for readers to explore
their favorite series and characters, revise problematic
canon, explore socially unacceptable sexual issues, and
166
build a community of writers and readers.
In other words,
this intention and approach is entirely outside the
established Trek
discourse community and the wider fan
fiction discourse community in general.
Unlike most fan archives or even the umbrella site
Fanfiction.net, Trek Writer's Guild's submission rules make
no statements about grammar or punctuation, and the fiction
is not sorted by any of the familiar methods:
pairings, rating, or length.
genre,
Readers have no idea if they
will be coming across action or romance, slash or het,
rated PG or NC-17, a short story or a novel.
To members of
the fan fiction discourse community, this lack of familiar
organization is overwhelming, producing the same effect as
a person walking into a bookstore that shelves its books
alphabetically rather than sorting them by genre or target
age group.
Although one may sort the stories by spinoff series,
after that, all one finds is a list of the most recent
stories and a list of author names, all but five of which
are apparently the writers' real names, a fact which may
strike potential readers as pompous given the fan tradition
of using pen names.
In addition, the fanfic synopses do
not include any fan fiction jargon of any kind.
The site
is successful, however; it is ten years old and is active
167
and accepting new stories.
Currently, it has archived 1059
stories, a fact it is so proud of that its Explorer bar
reads "1059 Star Trek fan fiction stories-TrekFiction.com."
One is forced to wonder who the readers of the Guild
are both age-wise and gender-wise.
Unfortunately, the site
does not offer a review function, making a study of
audience reaction impossible.
In general, the success of
the website shows the rise of younger writers and male
writers in the discourse community, and a niche for a maleoriented approach to fan fiction, which apparently includes
no concern for marking stories with ratings and genres and
refusal to use the discourse's jargon.
It is possible that
the male writers are creating a separate, parallel
discourse community or a sub-discourse community similar to
but more powerful than the sub-discourse community created
by inexperienced teen writers on Fanfiction.net.
As more
time passes, perhaps this theory may be tested.
VII. Fan Community Discourse:
The Mary Sue Problem
Thus far, I have analyzed the emergence of a new
parallel or sub-discourse community in Trek
comprised almost entirely of young men.
fan fiction—one
This heteroglossic
force ignores all established fan fiction conventions, such
as jargon and story-sorting abilities.
Now I shall turn
our attention to a specific power play within the
168
established discourse community:
story.
that of the Mary Sue
The hegemonic resistance to Mary Sue stories has
become a site of dialogue, where centrifugal forces attempt
to stratify the definition of "Mary Sue" and centripetal
forces attempt to maintain the unification of the hegemonic
gatekeepers who censor such stories.
As Pugh (2005) explains, fan communities tend to ban
stories that commit unforgivable sins such as getting canon
facts wrong, portraying characters as acting out of
character, and Mary Sues (authorial insertion into the
story) (40; 65; 85).
The latter sin—that of writing a Mary
Sue—was one original to Star
Trek
originator of modern fan fiction.
given its position as the
"Mary Sue" refers
primarily to authorial insertion into the story:
the
author creates a perfection version of herself—pretty,
smart, popular, multi-talented, and adored by all the canon
male characters—and introduces her as the love interest of
the writer's favorite male character.
The term has
broadened over time to include any too-perfect female or
male original character, especially in a romance story.
The Star
Trek
fandom was initially rife with Mary
Sues, which quickly became seen as corny and annoying.
one wanted to read the adventures of the author's alter
ego, who was inevitably a size two blonde with blue eyes
169
No
and a 300 IQ.
The specter of Mary Sue is so powerful that
in many fandoms a female OC is automatically labeled as
Mary Sue even if she is a realistic, well-rounded
character.
Given how cliched Mary Sues are, one would
expect vehement attacks against female OC stories on
current Star Trek
fansites.
However, after inspecting over
three-hundred fifty romance stories and scouring the
reviews of all stories with original female characters as
love interests for the Enterprise men, I found this is not
so—at least on Fanfiction.net, one of the few places one
can review Star
Trek
fanfic.
Mary Sues and female OC
stories are generally ignored, or they are accepted by
inexperienced (in this case, almost exclusively teenaged)
writers.
In other words, the discourse maintains its
resistance toward Mary Sues through simple cold silence,
not vicious attacks.
However, the potential to be flamed for a Mary Sue is
still present, as is obvious by Schematization's warning to
new writer Ms.WrightingFantasy on her first fanfic "Can You
Feel It?"
Schematization, one of the established older
writers of Trek
fanfic, explains as follows:
And the other thing, be extremely carefulw ith [sic] a
new OC. A lot of people are going to be immediately
turned off becuase [sic] you have spock and an OC
female together in a story. People are particular
you'll find about whom Spock is meant to be with and
170
genreally [sic] the consensus is not with an OC of any
kind.
Given that Spock was and still often is a fan favorite of
women, Schematization's warning is quite apropos.
So even
though no nasty reviews have been leveled against any
recent writers on Fanfiction.net for Mary Sues, many fan
writers remember the decades-long flaming of Mary Sues,
and—if Schematization's words are to be believed—these
nasty reviews still occur, perhaps on other sites.
Once again, the issues in the Star
Trek
fandom can be
better understood by comparing and contrasting them with
the Thunderbirds
cult fandom from the 1960's.
Four percent
of reviews on this site specifically focused on the issue
of Mary Sues.
Therefore, writers in the
Thunderbirds
fandom—including those posting on Fanfiction.net—must be
especially careful about writing female original
characters, as the fan Bluegrass discovered while writing
"Road to Recovery."
From an excerpt of the 1072 word
review senior Thunderbird
fan-writer Skywench left for her
story, we can see the depth of the accusation:
. . . My fifth and final critique is in the area of
the "relationship" between Jenna and Scott. Oh, I also
wanted to mention here that although I admire Jenna's
spirit, you are seriously treading on the thin ice of
the dreaded Mary Sue. She is becoming a bit too "all
that," if you see what I mean. I believe that Jeff
would have welcomed her input to a point, but [. . .]
I can't see Jenna, as the newcomer, getting in the
171
middle of what is essentially a business discussion
without knowing the full history of IR or its standard
operating procedures.
Bluegrass was so exasperated by this extended, five-point
critique that she posted a 2796 word response, which is
excerpted below.
of the Thunderbird
In it, she describes the typical Mary Sue
fandom and outlines how her character
does not fit the description:
[On your] Fifth point: Not sure what thin ice I'm
treading on with Jenna to becoming a Mary Sue! Or what
you mean by, ^She's becoming a bit too ''all that', so
no, I don't see what you mean. Jenna does not fly a
Thunderbird, nor has she any desire to, she doesn't do
the jobs the boys do or believes she can do them
better.
The charge of Mary Sue is so serious, especially to a more
mature and committed writer, this author deemed it
necessary to respond in length and in public to the
extended, public critique of her story.
This open debate,
however, also proves that less experienced and/or younger
writers are not the only ones who will either flame writers
or respond to critiques in public, which was not
immediately evident in the Buffy
fandom.
Yet the most powerful writers in the
Thunderbirds
discourse are allowed to create original female characters
as romantic partners for the Tracy boys without negative
repercussions.
The same reviewer, Skywench, only offers
172
praise to the fandom's top writer, Samantha Winchester, on
her story "Secrets and Lies", as does reader Jules47:
The guys are both deeply in love and I have a feeling
that they are going to choose their girlfriends over
[International Rescue] because they deserve to find
love. Jeff has to see that in order to keep IT [sic]
going he needs to allow his sons to have lives of
their own.
What is interesting about "Secrets and Lies" is that it
offers two original OCs as love interests, and one is
blatantly shown as smart, attractive, professional, and
accepted by all the Tracys, to the point that she's either
hugging or kissing most of them.
This would usually
qualify her as a Mary Sue, but none of the reviewers are
complaining.
It would seem that Winchester's community
status as head of the discourse has exempted her from the
critique of her female OCs.
The dreaded Mary Sue is
apparently not so dreaded in all fandoms if the writer has
clout.
Conclusions
After considering these various aspects of the
Trek
Star
fan fiction discourse community, my study reveals that
there is a three-way tug-of-war between the newer,
inexperienced fan writers, the "original," experienced fan
writers, and possibly the emerging young male writers with
different foci and goals.
However, Mary Sues, which were
173
once one of the plagues of the Star
Trek
fan fiction
community, are now rare, mostly because the hegemonic rules
against Mary Sues have been enforced until writers feel
unable to include non-canon females in their stories.
Overall, I have found that while fan fiction by its
very nature is centrifugal and dialogic, in both the
and Thunderbirds
Trek
discourse communities powerful centripetal
forces reach beyond Mary Sues and include "original" fan
exclusiveness, which has forced new writers to the fringes
and given rise to especially cruel audience feedback aimed
to silence and banish younger and/or less experienced
writers from the fandom.
Sadly, in some cases, those
efforts have been fruitful, and those fledgling writers may
have branded themselves incapable of writing.
Let us hope
that the flogged new fan writers will show perseverance in
the face of adversity.
174
CHAPTER FIVE
IMPLICATIONS FOR RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
In this chapter, I will discuss the implications of my
findings for rhetoric and composition within the framework
of popular culture texts.
Based on these implications, I
will discuss the potential impact on or use of fan fiction
in freshman composition courses via the study of fan
fiction discourse.
Authority, Discourse, and Pop Culture
In light of Rhetoric and Composition's extended
discussion of agency and appropriation in popular culture,
my research indicates a nearly contradictory finding:
within the dialogic of fan fiction, agency both does and
does not exist.
As stated from the beginning, fan fiction
has long been seen as an act of appropriation and has even
been hailed as "democratic" because the readers/viewers
reshape, rewrite, and refashion their beloved texts to
their own purposes.
Of course, fan fiction has also been
resisted by producers and authors, the most famous cases
perhaps being Anne Rice, who fought the existence of fan
fiction based on her work, and George Lucas, who resisted
175
Star Wars fan fiction and fan movies and then attempted to
control them by trying to contain them on his official
website.
However, despite these pockets of resistance, fan
fiction has retained its reputation as an act of
appropriation and agency within a theory that portrays
readers/viewers as mere passive masses to be fed and
controlled by producers/authors.
The truth, however, is more complicated.
(2005) noted that Buffy
Heinecken
producer Joss Whedon tried to
forcefully "correct" fans' reading of Buffy and Spike's
relationship by adding a near-rape scene in the final
episode of season six, meaning that the dialogue of fans to
producers also includes producer responses.
Likewise, in
the fan fiction community itself, the authority wielded in
the discourse is not merely a "democratic" exercise in
which teenagers can take positions of power and instruct
those twice their age (Jenkins 2006).
Within the
heteroglossia created by the inherent dialogic nature of
fan fiction is an answering hegemony.
True to Bahktin's
(1981) theory, hegemony and heteroglossia always exist
simultaneously.
How, then, do we define the power of the fan writer?
The internet makes it possible for even the most
undeveloped beginning writer to publish her work.
176
As I
noted previously, in both the Buffy
and Star Trek
fandoms,
groups of thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds will band together
to create a sub-community at the edge of a discourse
controlled by expert writers who invoke initiation rituals
by critiquing canon knowledge, writing style, and grammar.
Agency, therefore, both does and does not exist.
The young
writers are not technically silenced, because they read and
comment on each others' work and occasionally lash out at
harsh reviewers.
At the same time, they do not command the
power of The Gatekeeper—the expert writer who polices the
fandom and sometimes expels new fans from the community.
Through their silence or their critique, these experts
indicate who is to be accepted as a "good" fan fiction
writer and what conventions are to be upheld.
of Thunderbirds,
In the case
such gatekeeping activity can, in fact, be
verbally violent and abusive.
The net effect is that while
some young writers resist and remain—occasionally earning
comments such as "you are a crap writer who continuously
spews endless vomit into the fandom through your landslide
of pathetic stories"—other new writers withdraw their
stories and accounts and leave.
Considering how sensitive
some young writers are, this withdrawal may mark the death
of a proto-novelist.
177
Therefore, while it is not surprising that
older/expert writers would want to ensure canonical
accuracy, refined writing style, and standard grammar, it
is also true that some gatekeepers are not benevolent
elders who educate and induct new fans into the discourse,
as scholars first noted (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992).
Likewise, while some writers give advice to new writers in
their site-sponsored interviews or biographies, others lash
out at writers who do not meet their standards or the
conventions of the community.
Fan fiction, therefore,
contains a power hierarchy just as all discourse
communities do.
Hegemony and heteroglossia exist together.
The idealistic conception that in a democracy all voices
are given the chance to speak equally is tempered by
reality and history:
even in a "democracy," not all voices
are heard or allowed and not all people (writers, in this
case) have equal opportunity to rise to power and become an
expert or gatekeeper.
Pedagogy
The complicated and contradictory nature of fan
fiction discourse provides the composition instructor with
a unique opportunity to discuss, dissect, and analyze the
nature of discourse.
The value of fan fiction, despite the
power dynamics in its communities, is its dialogic nature
178
and its creation of a subculture.
Using fan fiction as an
example in the classroom can open a meaningful dialogue
with students about discourse in general and academic
discourse specifically.
The more transparent such
discourses become, the more easily students can interpret,
analyze, and engage with them.
Firstly, fan fiction, like academia, contains several
conventions that writers are expected to uphold by the
experts in the field.
In studying fan fiction and its
conventions, such as story-tagging "jargon" (het, slash,
H/C), instructors can broach the question of why
conventions are important.
For example, fan fiction
readers who wish to avoid stories that contain homosexual
pairings, rape scenes, or male pregnancy need the story
tags "slash," "noncon," and "mpreg."
Fans wanting those
same stories need the tags to find their desired reading.
A discussion of such fan fiction conventions can lead into
a discussion of academic conventions such as MLA, the
importance of the "tags" (i.e., in text citations), and the
value of the bibliography to the readers.
Further
discussion could explore what these authoritative discourse
conventions do in fan fiction and academia and what it
means for writers to accept, reject, or critique them.
179
Secondly, students can explore the dialogic nature of
fan fiction:
how fans engage in a dialogue with their
beloved texts and how writers within a community establish
a mixture of hegemony and heteroglossia.
In discussing how
and why fans reshape and rewrite popular texts, instructors
can draw parallels with the way students should interact
with primary and secondary sources in academic papers.
The
idea of engaging in a dialogue with their sources is often
lost on the composition student, who enters college
believing in the "regurgitation" version of research
writing.
Fans' boldness in engaging with texts they love
can help students see how to interact with ideas proposed
by experts.
In addition, the existence of gatekeepers in
fan fiction communities can open discussion concerning who
academic gatekeepers are and what role they play both in
the classroom and in academia at large.
Lastly, analysis of fan fiction communities and their
discourse can help students broach the topic of minority
and silenced voices both in academia and society.
Many
themes could be employed in this venture, including a
discussion of the rhetoric of science, the rhetoric of
"security/safety," and the rhetoric of propaganda
(historical or current).
This may also lead to discussions
of racism, sexism, classism, and ageism (historical or
180
current).
By indentifying what voices are marginalized or
silenced in the smaller world of a fan community, students
can gain insight that they can then use to analyze other
discourses, cultures, and communities.
Many possibilities are open to instructors who wish to
use fan fiction as an example of discourse or a bridge to
academic discourse, and I have created one such sample
course based on a pilot run in a Freshman Composition I
course (see Appendix IV). However, the centripetal and
centrifugal forces contained in a fandom's dialogue provide
a rich opportunity for both future research into the axis
of popular culture and writing and the use of popular
culture in the writing classroom.
181
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and practice
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14-
APPENDIX I
30.
"Quest II," by Firewolfe.
Schematization
2007-01-30
ch 1, reply
Ff.net.
3 reviews.
Very beautiful as always!! You
have Saavik so perfect in your
mind and seem to understand her
so well. And I love the way you
incorporated Sulu into this
instead of one of the more known
characters one would expect in
these situations. Spock or even
McCoy. This was so wonderful in
the idea of what it was conveying
and the emotions, as well as the
way you set it and placed it. But
then you always had that touch.
Critical Appreciation Pt 1 From one Trekkie to another (Or
2007-01-30
do you regard yourself a
ch 1, reply
Trekker?) Here are some points
for your meditation:
"He light the small candle" Shouldn't this be 'lit'?
"He said smiling rather sadly." I've always enjoyed clown
references in Star Trek
literature - brings in a sense of
tragic reality.
"It was not planned. I had a
meeting canceled at the last
minute so I beamed over for the
festival. It has been years since
I was able to attend. " he looked
away for a moment at he floating
lanterns." - 'he' should have a
capital 'H' as in a capital 'H'
for 'Holo-deck'. Also, my
collegue would like to add the
unnecessary space between the end
of 'attend' and the end of the
dialogue. He's a picky 'git'.
189
Live long and prosperHere ' s a bit of trivia for you Did you know that not once during
Star Trek TOS, did Kirk ever say
'Beam me up Scottie'? Despite
many non-believers in the Star
Trek universe constantly misquoting this. Scottie was in
Engineering never really in the
Transporter Room. If Kirk did
want to get the hell out of a
difficult situation he would say
something to the effect of 'Two
to beam up'.
Yours with the upmost respect
Critical Appreciation Pt 1
dennisud
2007-01-30
ch 1, reply
I know you 'connect' all your
stories together, i do that as
well on some, but if i can ask,
is this the non defined father
that we never knew, or is she
saying her goodbye's to Sarek?
dennisud
190
APPENDIX II
About Kalima
Tell us something about yourself: Where are you from?
Age/Gender? Hobbies? Anything you'd like to share.
I was born in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, grew up in
Denver, but have lived in Portland and Seattle off and on
for 25 years. Female, like most fie writersHow did that
happen? I'm a mother, a writer, playwright, theater
costumer and all-round sewing person.
How did you begin writing in general?
I wanted to write the story that went with the picture I'd
drawn. I was seven or eight I think.
What inspired you to begin writing fanfic?
When the Original Star Trek was cancelled. But I only did
it in secret, because I aspired to be a literary artiste
and no one could ever know my secret shame/guilty pleasure.
What do you enjoy about writing fanfic?
It's really good exercise for a writer. It's pure writing
for the pure joy of it. Usually.
Why have you chosen to write about Spike? What do you find
interesting about his character?
The moment he goes from boastful swaggering prick to
solictious, concerned lover in School Hard I went Wow,
there are layers and layers here and we may never get to
see how many. He's the vampire son I never had. He's the
trickster and the fool. He went staggering (sometimes
swaggering) down the double yellow line on the good vs evil
highway. He's pretty. Peter Pan had sharp little teeth too,
you know.
What other characters or relationships do you find most
interesting to write?
I love them all. But I have a soft spot for Tara. A young
woman who seemed so insecure and timid, and yet was strong
enough to leave Willow when that final line of trust was
crossed - well that's a woman with a tremendous strength, a
191
healthy survival instinct, moral conviction, and hidden
depths. I also love Dawn, and unlike many, found her to be
a pretty true depiction of a teenaged girl. It ain't easy
being a teenager.
Of the work you've written, which piece is your favorite?
Why?
Nicolette Says Jump. Because the dirty Scrabble game cracks
my shit up, and because I proved that fat chicks can not
only be sexy, but also evil in the most delightful ways.
Which piece was the most difficult to write? Why?
Daemons Luminati. Because the challenge was to make Spike
worthy of Buffy's love when I personally didn't think he
was. I love the guy, but that unworthiness and the striving
towards it, is part of what I love. Some people might argue
that she wasn't worthy of his love, but I don't think Spike
would agree. His famous words: "I know I'm a monster, but
you treat me like a man." To him, that alone made her
worthy of laying down his life. (Or unlife if you want to
get technical).
What are your strengths and weaknesses as a fanfic writer?
My strengths are dialogue and the inner monologue type
thing. I think. My biggest weakness is this constant battle
being waged between the goddess of impossible perfection
and the demon of "fuck it, it's good enough." It's never
perfect and it's never good enough. So, you know, fuck it.
Also, I still use too many metaphors and similes. If it
takes the reader out of the story - even if they're saying,
oh isn't that a lovely metaphor - get shun of it! If it
doesn't serve to illuminate the character or the action or
the plot, lose the simile. I rely on the repetetive,
rhythmic use of the word "and" too much.
Do you feel that your work has improved as time has passed?
If so, in what areas do you think you have improved the
most?
In BtVS fanfic, familiarity with the characters and their
backstory improved my writing a lot. In original fiction
I'm a thousand times better than I was when I tried my hand
at a novel the first time. Being in critique groups, taking
workshops helped me tremendously. People who know your
192
style and what you're attempting with a particular work can
guide you towards making it the best it can be. Fanfic
feedback is not the same thing at all, though it is very
nice and makes me happy.
What: do you find to be -the most difficult aspect of writing
fanfic?
Expectation. And the desire for feedback can be crippling
in a way. But I think (hope) I'm over that now.
What advice would you give to new fie writers?
If they are new fie writers who are serious about the
craft, using fie as a way to learn the craft, or to
exercise their writer's chops, or to experiment with form
and style and voice and POV and all that, then I say READ.
Read everything and anything (not just fanfic) so that you
at least have a feeling for how language and grammar work
(even if you don't know the technical terms). Also see my
weaknesses above. Use spellcheck for the love of God.
If you are a fanfic writer who just wants to write hot
porn, then please, have at least one sexual experience
under your belt before you venture there. We can all tell
if you haven't.
Also, don't be afraid to take your fanfiction and rewrite
it as original fiction. You get a lot of great ideas from
fanfiction.
193
APPENDIX III
The Great Flame War
The abuse of feedback in the Trek
fandom is far more
extensive than the hateful reviews of grammar I mentioned
in chapter 4.
The discourse community is being attacked
from the outside with "spam-flaming"—extremely long,
senseless reviews that take up pages and pages and often
contain foul language and sexually crude comments.
is exempt, regardless of age or talent.
of the writers have left the site.
No one
In response, some
The author page of
mzsnaz contains this message:
I'm sure many of you have noticed the flames that have
been directed at a number of authors and stories on
this site (specifically the Star Trek, The Original
Series section). Sadly, after reporting the abuses for
two weeks, I've seen no evidence that the operators of
FanFiction.net are responsive to the writers concerns.
Therefore, I'm in the process of removing my stories
from this site. I plan to put the stories on my own
website, and hopefully, if anyone is interested, it
should be easy to find once it's up and running. :)
Thanks to all - trust me, this wasn't what I wanted to
do, because I do appreciate everyone who took the time
to read and review my stories.
Currently, mzsnaz has no stories posted to Fanfiction.net.
Bingalicious Midnight's story "Hailing Frequencies"
shows a classic example of a review board being flamespammed.
Notice that most spam-flames are written in all
caps, which is the internet equivalent to yelling.
Word document, the twenty-one reviews fill 123 pages
194
In a MS
because of the endless repetition of each spam-flame.
Here, the spams have been cut down to one line a piece but
still bear quoting at length so that the writer's
frustration can be well understood:
Alot Of Labor Involved: HONEY YOU HAVE NO CLUE ABOUT
ANY OF THIS DO YOU? CHECK AROUND AND SEE HOW ** LONG
I'VE BEEN HERE! I'VE BEEN HERE! YOU AIN'T GOT ONE
CLUE!!
Boo To You: AW ALLYP IS SO WORRIED ABOUT YOU ** NAME
AIN'T IS SWEET! YOU 2 ARE REALLY MADE FOR EACH OTHER!
The Trash Man: OH CHOCOLATE FIEND!! NO WONDER YOU
ENJOY ** SO MUCH! INCORPORATING YOUR FAVORTIE TREAT
INTO THE ACTION SHOULD BE FUN. **!
Again and Again: ARE YOU HAVING YET WITH YOUR THREE
WAY ** PARTY WITH ALLYP AND TYROCAT?? YOU MUST BE GOOD
AT ** WITH THE WAY YOU GO!
Let Me Guess: AIN'T DAT SWEET? AFTER LOSING ALL THE
OTHERS YOU FOUND SOMEONE ELSE TO BE VICTIM IN YOUR **
BUSINESS!
LOVG
•k ~k
-k k:
MonoGr *
~k ~k
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
~k ~k
Yada Yada 1985: DID YOU LOSE YOUR TWO ** PLAYMATES?
GUESS YOU'LL HAVE TO FIND SOMEONE NEW TO ** WITH HERE
WON'T YOU MIDNIGHT **.
More and More: ANIMEFAN1989 AND B. MIDNGIHT ** IN A
TREE!! F-U-C-K-I-N-G!
Ambassador Gay of Tellarite: I'D SAY YOU'RE TOO DAMN
FUNNY, BUT YOU'RE TOO DAMN ** STUPID SO IT MUST BE
NATURAL, **!!
Sinner First Class: ** FOR DUMMIES. ** FOR DUMMIES **
FOR DUMMIES ** FOR DUMMIES ** FOR DUMMIES ** FOR
DUMMIES
195
Fun Gyrl X Two: WHY DON'T YOU GO BACK TO YOUR MYSPACE
** HOLE AND QUIT ACTING LIKE THE ** ** YOU ARE HERE!
YOU AIN'T NOBODY BUT ANOTHER TEENAGER TRYING TO BE
SOMETHING THAT YOU AIN'T BY A ** LONG SHOT **!
Witnessing this parade of mass immaturity, which is likely
the result of people who are either physically in their
teens or emotionally in their teens, it is easy to see why
mzsnaz left fanfiction.net.
For her story "Belt Buddies," Betazoid Fire Escape
received an even nastier set of spam-flames which included
this one.
Notice that the flamer pretends to be (or
perhaps is) an adult who hates the influx of teenage
writing on the web:
Sareks Little Angel: OH THANK GOD FOR LITTLE
TEENAGERS LIKE YOU! THANK GOD YOU COME AROUND AND FLEX
THOSE BALLS OF YOURS AND LET THE REST OF THE WORLD
KNOW THAT WE ARE ALL MEANT TO WRITE WHAT YOU WANT AND
CHARACTERS LIKE YOU THINK THEY SHOULD BE. AND THANK
GOD YOU ARE SUCH AN EXPERT AT WRITING IN SUCH TERRIBLE
SCRAWL THAT WE CAN UNDERSTAND EVEN YOUR GRADE SCHOOL
THOUGHTS. I MEAN WHAT THE HELL DID THE REST OF DO FOR
THE LAST THIRTY SOME YEARS BEFORE YOU ARRIVED WHILE WE
WERE WRITING OUT FANFICTION! HOW DID WE SURVIVE!
LITTLE DID ANY OUS REALIZE THAT WE WOULD FINALLY HAVE
A SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD AND SHOW UP AND SUDDENLY BRING
THE LIGHT OF ISOLENCE TO US IN SUCH A FLAGRANT AND
DISRESPECTFUL MANNER. I MEAN HOW COULD NOT BE SO
UNDERWHELMED BY SUCH A THICK HEADED PREJUDICED LITTLE
SKANK LIKE YOURSELF! A STORY LIKE THIS NEEDE TO SHARED
WITH ALL OF US IN THE GROUPS JUST TO KNOW THAT THE
FANFIC WORLD TRULY IS NOT SAFE IN THE HANDS OF MANY OF
YOU BRAGGADOCIO LITTLE GIRLS WHO HAVE THE DIFFICULTY
IN REVIEWING OTHERS SAVE THOSE THAT YOU CAN
CONFIDENTLY TEAR APART YOURSELF. TELL ME AGAIN HOW DID
THE REST OF THE FREE WORLD OF FANFICTION MAKE IT
THROUGH ALL OF THESE DAYS AND YEARS UNTIL YOU FINALLY
SHOWED UP ON THE DOORSTEP OF OUR WORLDS?!! PLEASE
196
PLEASE TAKE OUR OFFERING OF ROOTEN EGGS AND CHICKEN
LIVERS BEING HURLED AS OUR SHOW OF TOTAL LACK OF CARE,
INTEREST OR CONCERN OF WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE OR THE
FACT FOR A SUPPOSED HONOR CLASS CHILD YOU HAVE THE
TOTAL LACK OF ABILITY TO WRITE SIMPLE WORDS AS WELL AS
THE LARGER ONES, OR THE FACT YOU JUST SEEM TO OOZE
NAUSEATING IDEAS AND THOUGHTS. WE SIMPLY CAN'T FATHOM
HOW THE FANFIC OF ANY KIND EVERY TRULY EXISTED UNTIL
YOUR UNTIMELY ARRIVAL. AND MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON OUR
POOR SOULS BECAUSE OF IT. LACK OF ABILITY TO WRITE
SIMPLE WORDS AS WELL AS THE LARGER ONES, OR THE FACT
YOU JUST SEEM TO OOZE NAUSEATING IDEAS AND THOUGHTS.
WE SIMPLY CAN'T FATHOM HOW THE FANFIC OF ANY KIND
EVERY TRULY EXISTED UNTIL YOUR UNTIMELY ARRIVAL. AND
MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON OUR POOR SOULS BECAUSE OF IT.
This error-riddled paragraph was repeated thirty-two times
in the review, which was one of forty-six reviews.
On the
same story, she also received this "religious" spam, which
included 176 Bible verses from the book of Psalms:
Smarter than klingon bastar...:
LOL! Kewl!
And now,for those who write swear reviews and nonchristians too:
PSALM 119
1 Happy those whose way is blameless, who walk by the
teaching of the LORD.
2
Happy those who observe God's decrees, who seek the
LORD with all their heart.
3
They do no wrong; they walk in God's ways. [. . .]
176
I have wandered like a lost sheep; seek out your
servant, for I do not forget your commands.
Notice the spammer's careful avoidance of the
Fanfiction.net rule that usernames cannot contain curse
words and the irony of the curse-word user named matched
197
with the spam-flame against swear reviews.
The spam-
reviewer is apparently playing on the irony in order to
make the spam-flame as offensive as possible.
One has to
wonder, however, what vacuum of time the spam-flamer has
that he can type up 176 Bible verses with which to
terrorize fan fiction writers, provided that he didn't find
a full text copy of Psalms to copy and paste.
Yet even the
copy and paste nature of the spam-flames reveals a sad lack
misuse of free time that reminds one of William Shatner' s
humorous skit in which he tells Trekkies to "Get a life!"
Many of the younger Trek
writers beg readers in their
stories, blurbs, or on their author pages not to flame
them.
As one can imagine, this sparks flaming instead.
Others make outright statements concerning the behavior.
Firewolfe says, "flamers will be banned and ignored."
Fourteen-year-old Shonobi Tsukiko Nomiya explains in a
spelling-error-ridden statement that
Any flames, wil be use in my fireplace in my cabin,
and my hotair bollon for my trips. I even like the
flamers, cause anyone who flames is alone and needs
exciement for their lives that aren't working, so
Flammers go on and do ur stuff i'm not going to back
off writing because writing is a passion and i will
never stop for anyone!
198
However, older writer Schematization does not see the
flamers in quite the same light.
She comforts Shonobi with
this remark:
don't fret over these other boobs, they tend to try to
make a flashy entrance and then slink off to their
rocks again. You've done a great job with your stories
and shouldn't allow yourself to be concerned with what
these jerks saw whatsoever. You keep doing what your
doing and have fun with it! I think that's some of the
problem with these people. They don't like people
having fun at times esepcially [sic] if they are
having fun with what they are writing about and they
don't see whatever fandom it is in that light. You'll
find a amazing number of people out ther [sic] who
still believe in the diea [sic] you should write the
fandom the way I see it and if you don't then your the
idiot and I will make your life miserible [sic] . Which
says that the way they see it isn't generally popular
right now.
So do what you feel is what you want and like I said
don't worry about them. They seem to have closed shop
again and moved on. Keep writing and keep posting
people will always be here eager to read!
Clearly, Schematization feels that the flamers are fellow
Trek
fans who do not like the portrayal of the characters
or people who are anti-"fun writing."
Her answer to the
phenomenon was to write a story entitled "How to Reform a
Red Shirt with a Messaging Fetish"—an indirect attack on
the flamers.
The story received twenty-one reviews, some
of them praise and others spam-flames.
left personalized responses.
been removed.
None of the flamers
However, the story has since
In fact, all of Schematization's stories
were removed, apparently by the writer, and then later most
199
were reposted.
The removal of the stories did decrease the
number of spam-flames she has, although there is no
evidence that this was her motivation.
Still, of her
twenty-five stories, only one has spam-flames, among them
nonsensical posts by someone calling himself Literature
Flamethrower.
Conversely, she also received reviews like
this one from Outsidersluverl992:
still like this."
"YAY YOU REPOSTED! ok i
On her author's page Schematization has
this to say about the incident:
Any other stories that I did have posted here are now
at my Deviantart site, which the link is above for
those that care. For now, I simply plan on posting
chapters to 'So Close To Home' and plan on posting
nothing more save for 'A Conversation Between
Strangers' for the sake of 'So Close To Home', mostly
due to the fact, my heart is not into jumping into
anything new after making a fool out of myself over
something that I did with only good intentions but
backfired I guess. I'm not really sure any more.
Clearly there was a skirmish in the discourse over
Schematization and/or one of her stories, but there is
still not conclusive proof that "How to Reform a Red Shirt
with a Messaging Fetish" was the cause of the problem or
the mass deletion of her stories.
Schematization is not the only fan angered by the
spam-flamers.
Reader Akiyra was severely upset by the
"religious" flame review directed at Betazoid Fire Escape,
who identifies herself as a Christian on her aurthor's
200
page.
Akiyra uses the review board for Betazoid's story
"You Raise Me Up" to respond to the flame on the story
"Belt Buddies":
Though I'm reviewing here, I actually want to talk
about your Kirk's-pants-fell-down story and the
reviewer("s") who left those nasty messages. This may
be none of my business, but I was so incensed when I
saw the hatemail delivered to you that I had to speak.
I encourage you to report the trolls - ALL OF THEM
(though I'm sure it's the same person with a
ridiculous amount of screen names) to the
administrators. I once reported someone for
harrassment and nothing was done about it, but if
nothing is done then you can still block them. And
once you know whether or not the admins will do
anything about those trolls, you should delete the
hatemail. Whoever did that to you obviously has anger
issues and you don't deserve to have their immaturity
spamming your stories. I've been targetted on [sic]
for being a Christian also, and so has a friend of
mine. People are so immature. They call Christians
hypocrites but don't see it in themselves. I just
wanted to let you know you shouldn't let that troll
get you down, he's just a jerk with nothing better to
do than write stupid messages.
Here, teen and college-aged readers and writers are pegging
the immature behavior of others and rising above it with
encouragement and support.
Even the Star Trek
problems with flamers.
forums on Fanfiction.net have
Since the forum administrators can
delete posts, the flames are gone, but this message was
left in their wake:
"ATTENTION TO ALL POSTERS:
Any future
flames will be replaced with the words: 'I LOVE LITTLE
FLUFFY TRIBBLES'."
So far, no tribble-loving messages have
201
shown up, but the power of the administrator to delete
flames may have more to do with the silence than the
threat.
Still, the entire issue is obviously overwhelming,
especially for Star
Trek:
The Original
Series
writers.
Clearly, the flamers are attacking the discourse from the
outside using meaningless words and phrases to try to drive
people away from writing fanfic or at least from posting to
Fanfiction.net.
In mzsnaz's case, the ploy worked.
202
APPENDIX IV
A Fan Fiction Composition I Course:
General Overview
Theme
Instructors should consider a theme that creates a
course using fan fiction to help students better understand
issues of appropriation and discourse communities.
In
particular, the instructor would need to ground the
students in the ideas of appropriation of texts and
dialogue in discourse, and he or she would need to
structure the syllabus to reveal the act of bridging fan
fiction and academic discourse.
In other words, the
syllabus, class theme, and introduction to the course need
to all present fan fiction and academic writing as reader
appropriation and/or discourse communities.
Textbook
The course needs to employ a reader that that contains
articles that explore issues of appropriation and agency in
reading and writing text.
Preferably, the reader would
discuss literacy in popular culture and academic culture,
and it would be best if at least one article mentioned fan
fiction specifically.
market is A New Literacies
One possible reader currently on the
Reader.
Through these readings,
students could explore to what extent readers of texts
(print, televised, or internet) interact with, appropriate,
203
and resist texts.
This would generate class discussions of
the power and influence of popular culture texts and the
complex way in which readers do and do not resist and
appropriate texts.
Likewise, students would later
transition into discussing the academic community and the
extent to which scholars may resist and appropriate
academic texts.
In addition to discussing appropriation
and discourse, the textbook would add structure to the
course and legitimacy to the fan fiction assignment.
Assignments and Activities
In order to ensure that fan fiction discourse can be
used as a bridge for understanding academic discourse, the
instructor would need to dedicate all assignments and
activities to fan fiction, discourse, and academic writing.
I suggest the following assignments:
1. Analysis:
Students would pick a fan fiction
community such as Harry
Potter
or Lord
of
the
Rings—
whichever movie, book, or television series for
which they wanted to write fan fiction—and a website
that archives the fan fiction.
For the sake of
simplicity, I suggest that all students read on the
same website, an umbrella site such as
Fanfiction.net.
That way, the instructor can easily
locate the discourse community in question and check
204
on any problems the student finds.
For the
analysis, the student would read a minimum number of
stories and their reviews (perhaps twenty), and then
analyze how well the story fits the canon, how the
readers reacted to the story, and how the writer
reacted to the readers.
2.
Fan fiction:
Students then would write a fan
fiction and post it to the website.
Prior to
posting, scaffolding activities would need to
establish "jargon," audience awareness, and fan
fiction taboos; of course, instructors would also
need to teach the basics of fiction writing.
In
addition, a follow-up activity could analyze how
readers have reacted to the students' stories.
This
would be especially helpful for students who resist
the idea of being responsible to their audience or
who still fail to comprehend the concept of an
audience.
Furthermore, students who continue to
ignore their grammar or resist further instruction
on grammar (e.g., "I just was never good at
grammar!") will quickly discover upon posting that
grammar matters even in the most informal or
"amateur" of contexts.
205
3.
Annotated Bibliography:
Next, students would
consider the academic discourse community and begin
research into an academic debate—preferably one'
associated with their major.
Scaffolding activities
would draw parallels between terms and approaches in
the fan fiction unit and the academic unit.
For
example, reading the research articles would be
similar to reading the stories on the fan fiction
site.
Also, both communities employ "jargon,"
seniority, and taboos or conventions.
As students
research their topic and compile the annotated
bibliography (thus working on their MLA), they would
also begin their entrance into the academic
discourse community and analyze what that community
is.
4.
Literature Review:
Once the annotated
bibliography is complete, students could then
construct a short literature review.
Not only would
this introduce them to a new academic genre, but it
would also force them to further analyze the
discourse community and explore the concept of
appropriation and/or creating a gap in academic
writing.
206
5. Argument::
Finally, students would write an
academic argument, which would be presented in the
light of what they have learned about academic
discourse.
Instructors may wish to have students
post their essays online on a class website or even
construct the argument as a hypertext in order to
expand the discussion of online writing and,
specifically, academic online writing.
Potential problems with this approach to a composition
course are that students will not take fan fiction
seriously, fail to see the connection between fan fiction
and academia, or will feel that the fan fiction is just a
"dumbed down" creative writing assignment.
I know these
pitfalls from personal experience, which is why I have made
the suggestions I have.
However, in addition to my
previous suggestions, I also propose that the instructor
draw attention to the scholarly interest in fan fiction and
discuss the similarities and differences between fan
fiction and a traditional short story.
Finally, to offset
any technological problems, instructors will need to lead
students through the process of joining the fan fiction
website and posting their stories.
207
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME: Susan Ashley Wright
ADDRESS: 35 Mallory Ln.
Campbellsvilie, KY 42718
DOB: Clarksville, Tennessee - January 26, 1977
EDUCATION
& TRAINING: B.A., English & Psychology
Campbellsville University
1995-99
M.A., English
1999-2002
Ph.D., Rhetoric & Composition
2003-2009
AWARDS: Summa Cum Laude, Campbellsville University, 1999
Valedictorian, Campbellsville University, 1999
Ruby Curry English Honors Award, Campbellsville
University, 1999
PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES:
National Council of the Teachers
of English
Sigma Tau Delta
PUBLICATIONS:
"Reader Agency in the (Re)reading and
(Re)writing of Japanese Graphic Novels,"
Queen City Comics Conference, 2009
"Doll," Campbellsville University's
Russell
Creek Review,
2008
208
"Guns and Brothers," Campbellsville
University's Russell
Creek Review,
2008
"No Farewell," Campbellsville University's
Russell
Creek Review,
2007
"Dungeons, Dragons, and Discretion: A
Gateway to Gaming, Technology, and
Literacy," (co-authored with Stephanie Owen
Fleischer) , Gaming Lives
in the 21st
Century,
2007
"Invader," Low Implosions:
Body, 2006
Writings
on
the
"To Write, With Love," The Watson
Conference, 2004
"The Self-Righteous and The Sinner-Saint,"
M/MLA Conference, 2003
"Atlantis Corbijn," Campbellsville
University's Connections,
1999
"Our Lady of Love and War," Treasured
of America,
1999
"Rose of Sharon," Crossroads,
Poems
1998
"RSVP Continues to Analyze Local Sites for
Handicapped Accessibility," Elizabethtown's
The News-Enterprise,
1991
"My Pegasus," Creative
209
Kids,
1993

ProQuest Dissertations

Transcription

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