willietheplaidjacket:

This might be the dorkiest thought I’ve ever had, but I think it’d be kinda cool to have a submission blog like those that exist for fan fic and fanart prompts but instead it’s for essays. So like a fandom related essay title(s) is posted at the beginning of the month with a word limit and then people can attempt to write an essay answering it/them. 

E.g., ‘Discuss the use of colour and lighting as a tool for visual storytelling in Sherlock (directly reference at least 3 episodes)’, or ‘Explore the theme of ‘trust’ in specific relation to the character of John Watson’

I would read the shit out of this.

10 ways in which fans rewrite their favourite television shows:

themirrortribble:

jakathine:

1) Recontextualization – the production of vignettes, short stories, and novels that seek to fill in the gaps in broadcast narratives and suggest additional explanations for particular actions.

2) Expanding the series timeline – the production of vignettes, short stories, novels that provide background history of characters, etc., not explored in broadcast narratives or suggestions for future developments beyond the period covered by the broadcast narrative.

3) Refocalization – this occurs when fan writers move the focus of attention from the main protagonists to secondary figures. For example, female or black characters are taken from the margins of a text and given centre stage.

4) Moral realignment – a version of refocalization in which the moral order of the broadcast narrative is inverted (the villains become the good guys). In some versions the moral order remains the same but the story is now told from the point of view of the villains.

5) Genre shifting – characters from broadcast science fiction narratives, say, are relocated in the realms of romance or the Western, for example.

6) Cross-Overs – characters from one television programme are introduced into another. For example, characters from Doctor Who may appear in the same narrative as characters from Star Wars.

7) Character dislocation – characters are relocated in new narrative situations, with new names and new identities. 

8) Personalization – the inserted of the writer into a version of their favourite television programme. For example, I could write a short story in which I am recruited by the Doctor to travel with him in the TARDIS on a mission to explore what has become of the Manchester United in the twenty-fourth century. (However, as Jenkins points out, many in the fan culture discourage this subgenre of fan writing.)

9) Emotional intensification – the production of what are called “hurt-comfort” stories in which favourite characters, for example, experience emotional crisis.

10) Eroticization – stories that explore the erotic side of a character’s life. Perhaps the best known of this subgenre of fan writing is “slash” fiction, so called because it depicts same-sex relationships (as in Kirk/Spock,etc.)

– Henry Jenkins Textual Poachers pg 162-177

I still have that book. It probably was one of the first academic studies that took fandom seriously.

hannza-pie:

meariver:

racethewind10:

romanimp:

I can’t wait for the days where scholarship has to muddle through ff.net and ao3 pseudonyms like “guys, I have evidence to believe that starfucker69 was a pseudonym for one of our landmark literary figures of the 21st century and that they in fact first began their writing career with filthy sinful Steggy smut.”

As an academic and a fan I both want and fucking dread this day because academics trying to tackle things like A/B/O, magic!cock, g!p, mpreg, rule 63, sex pollen like… the language academia is going to have to invent my god  

#this makes me happy#in a deep deep place in my blackened soul

…to be a fly on the wall of those discussions…