Contemporary Fanfiction as Decoupled Participatory Sensemaking

Donate to CA

The free access to this article was made possible by support from readers like you. Please consider donating any amount to help defray the cost of our operation.

 

Contemporary Fanfiction as Decoupled Participatory Sensemaking

Mingxi Xu and Christian Kronsted

 

Abstract
Within the last fifteen years, a new form of community-driven literary practice has developed on the internet, namely fanfiction. Fanfiction is unlicensed community-authored writing about established intellectual property, made for fans by fans. In this paper, we provide an overview of contemporary fanfiction circulated on the most popular fanfiction platforms (Wattpad and Archive of Our Own). We also bring in recent cognitive science studies on creativity and art, where there is an emerging consensus that creativity is not a product of an individual mind that imposes its intentions onto a static object. Instead, creative processes tend to be co-emergent between agents, materials, and constraints. Our research adds to the growing embodied and distributed creativity literature. We argue that the distributed nature of author, community, and intellectual property interactions in fanfiction can be modeled as a decoupled, participatory, sensemaking system.

 

Key Words
affordances; creativity; digital literature; group creativity; fanfiction, participatory sensemaking; women’s writing.

 

1. Introduction

Within recent years, widespread access and democratization of the internet have led to a new form of community-driven aesthetic practice, namely fanfiction. Fanfiction is unlicensed, community-authored writing about established intellectual property (IP) made for and moderated by fan communities. In this paper, we will analyze the creative and cognitive processes involved in the making of fanfiction: how is fanfiction made, and why it is made that way.

Within recent cognitive science, there is a growing consensus that creativity is not the product of an individual mind imposing its intentions onto a static object. Instead, creative processes tend to be co-emergent between agents, materials, and constraints.[1] We add to the growing embodied and distributed creativity and aesthetics literature through our analysis of fanfiction as an emergent aesthetic type. Specifically, we argue that Interactions between author, community, and IP interactions can be modeled as a decoupled, long-term, participatory sensemaking system.[2]

We will demonstrate that the affordance space available to the fanfiction writer is always impacted by the fluctuations of IP developments, community interactions, and reader expectations. Our model of creativity in fanfiction directly breaks with mainstream cognitive science, which claims that creativity (especially writing) is internal and individualized.[3] In other words, while it is sometimes stereotyped that fanfiction is created by “loners living in their mom’s basements,” fanfiction is actually a highly social, interactive, dynamic, and co-creative aesthetic endeavor.

As an aesthetic type, the way fanfiction appeals to its audiences is through affective engagement. Put differently, when fans choose to read fanfiction, they are typically not looking for a thoughtful commentary on current social cultural and philosophical issues; fanfiction is not meant to be deep. Rather, the aesthetic value of fanfiction lies in its power to affectively engage readers with their favorite fictional characters and to provide them with a platform where they can contribute to the fan community.[4] The aesthetic value in fanfiction is dependent on how well the fiction motivates the two processes above, and also how well it plays with community conventions without falling completely outside those conventions, which is sometimes referred to as going OOC, or out of character.

We start by providing an overview of contemporary fanfiction through analysis of the most popular online fanfiction platforms (Wattpad and Archive of Our Own). Then we outline how we can think of fanfiction creation and fanfiction engagement in the context of ecological psychology. We go on to demonstrate how these affordance-based practices form a participatory sensemaking system—in this case, a mostly decoupled and distributed participatory sensemaking system.

2. What is fanfiction?

Fanfictions are fan-written stories about fictional characters from an already existing media franchise.[5] Fanfictions are typically authored by amateur women writers and often draw on characters from large entertainment franchises such as TV shows, movies, anime, video games, and more.[6] Fanfictions are primarily not-for-profit and are posted on online, self-publishing platforms with open access to the fan community. Popular platforms include Wattpad, Archive of Our Own (also known as AO3), Tumblr, and Lofter (which primarily targets the Mandarin-speaking fanfiction community). In terms of content, fanfiction often engages extensively with LGBTQ+ themes and often is sexually explicit.[7]

A staggering amount of fanfiction is published and accessed each year. From February 1 to August 1, 2021, 1,048,575 fanfictions, written in 74 languages, were posted on Archive of Our Own alone. Of all 1,048,575 works, 217,070 were still being completed by the time our data was collected. Out of the sampled data, 207,096 works were “canonical” (based on the canon of original intellectual property). At the time of sampling, the works on AO3 have been accessed a total of 104,528,869 times.[8] Behind each of these works is a booming sub-community of fanfiction authors and readers: bonding, discussing, and critiquing over the love for a franchise and its characters. Such interaction happens on AO3 as well as Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, and most other social media platforms.

In acknowledgment of the intense commitment of fanfiction writers, fanfictions are often sourced by intellectual property (IP) owners as input. Video game companies, writers, screen writers, and other professionals often use fanfiction for insight into audience perspectives on their characters, storylines, and fictional worlds. In addition, professionals will often draw inspiration by seeing where fanfiction “lore enthusiasts” anticipate the official plot will go. In fact, sometimes franchises publicly recognize and reward fan creations. For example, Hoyoverse, a Shanghai-based tech company, holds online HoYoFairs and annual New Year’s programs that curate fan-created short videos and performances.[9] Printed fanfictions and merchandise are also exchanged or sold at licensed conferences such as Comic Con.

In current internet culture, fanfictions statistically tend to deploy a female gaze projected onto fictional male characters. This often takes the form of homoerotic content (see Figure 1). For instance, a study conducted by pop-culture news source The Daily Dot found that on the Archive of Our Own platform (AO3), works labeled male on male (M/M) make up a striking 45.5% of all works submitted.[10]

 

Online fanfiction communities are divided into fandoms, and each fandom is dedicated to a specific franchise or IP. Prominent examples of fandoms include Harry Potter, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Star Trek, Animal Crossing, and others. Within each fandom, the works are further sorted according to the characters they mainly address and their relationships (typically homosexual, heterosexual, platonic, and so on). Each character relationship pairing is rigorously tagged, with each tag commonly referred to as a ship. For example, a fanfiction about a homoerotic romance between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy would fall under the Harry Potter fandom and be “shipped” with the tag “#Drarry” — a hyphenated version of the characters names in order of who is more dominant within the story.[12]

The original storyline of intellectual property is considered canon, which contrasts with the fan-created storyline referred to as fanon. While canon and fanon are generally supposed to be mutually consistent, on occasion fanon deviates so severely from canon that fans label the story out of character (OOC). Being OOC is typically a negative assessment that fanfiction writers want to avoid.  However, there are rare cases in which authors deliberately label their works OOC to signal their creative endeavors as being only very loosely based on canon.

Commercial distribution of fanfictions is often limited and unofficial due to copyright concerns. In addition, much of the LGBTQ+ content in fanfiction restrains it from circulating in countries with strict censorship laws (China being one prominent example). In many countries, it is common for fanfiction to be stereotyped as a porn-centric subculture and its content unnecessarily pornographic. Nevertheless, fanfiction still enjoys wide popularity across languages and cultures, and sometimes makes its way to mainstream media. In fact, there are several famous examples of fanfiction that are later adapted into mainstream media. Fifty Shades of Grey, an adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, was originally a fanfiction named Master of the Universe, written by Snowdragons Icequeen (aka E. L. James).[13]

Readers of fanfiction tend to value fanfiction for its affective ambiance. Readers use the highly organized categorization scheme of fanfiction to pick out fandoms, characters, and scenarios that fit their affective preferences. This differs from many forms of fiction in which the work is meant to instill or provoke a certain set of thoughts. Fanfiction reading is frequently about the reader using the fiction, either to amplify and externalize their current emotional and affective states or to recreate the feeling of being embedded in their favorite fictional world. Much fanfiction writing is not about content depth, since fanfiction typically does not make deep philosophical contributions. Rather, much fanfiction is about capturing a certain affect or aesthetic from the original IP, for example, reliving the atmosphere of being a wizarding pupil at Hogwarts without necessarily having to reread the Harry Potter books.

In her 2016 article, The Role of Affect in Fanfiction, Anna Wilson demonstrates that the fanfiction community is bonded together through shared affect and feelings of love. According to Wilson, when a community member comments, “I have an unhealthy amount of love for these two [characters],”[14] one professes an affective investment in these fictional characters. This affect is shared throughout the fan community as an essential driving force for fanfiction creation, and allows for community members to take a step back from the real world to spend time with their beloved fictional characters. Wilson concludes by calling this affective engagement with fiction an ‘affective hermeneutics.’[15] As Wilson writes in her empirical analysis of a fanfiction tradition known as the Yuletide Letters:

The affective discourse of fandom (that is, excited conversations and expressions of love) is inextricable from the production of fan fiction; fan fiction does not emerge in isolation only on the basis of shared knowledge of a text with a recipient but also out of a shared love, something emphasized and reiterated in the Yuletide letters.[16]

As we see from Wilson, fanfiction is a highly interactive artform—a point we will return to as we discuss fanfiction as participatory sensemaking. For now, we summarize the creation and circulation of fanfiction in terms of three prominent features. First, the authors don’t own their characters, but create narratives based on franchise-copyrighted canon. Second, fanfictions are typically posted on online platforms and are sorted through highly specific tagging mechanisms. Third, fanfiction is created through dialogues between authors, IP holders, specific fandoms, ships, and the broader fanfiction community. Also note that the tags in fanfiction are operated by groups of authors, illustrators, and readers. When we discuss community interactions, we focus on discussions within single tags, bracketing more complicated inter-tag dynamics.

For the reader’s convenience, we have provided a quick glossary of important fanfiction terms (see Table 1 below).

 

 

Term	Meaning
Fandom	A community of fans of a single franchise.
Canon     IP     Fanon     Ship(s)	The official settings, characters, and storylines of a given franchise that are used as the basis of fanfiction.   Intellectual Property (For example, Harry Potter).   Mainstream fan interpretations of a canon.     One or more character-relationship pairings; two (or more) characters depicted in a (frequently romantic) relationship.
Tag	A label assigned to sort ships, characters, or story categories (for example, “vampire” or “hurt/comfort”).
AO3	Archiveofourown.org; the most popular online fanfiction posting platform.
OOC       Zine     Lore Dump	“Out of character.” Fanfiction readers typically judge a fanfiction to be “OOC” when it portrays characters inconsistently with mainstream interpretation of canon.   A publication of curated fan-created content (typically not licensed by IP holders).   When the owner of the intellectual property decides to release a large swath of material that adds to the existing canon.

 

2.1 A brief note on fanfiction ontology

So far, we have seen three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a work to be considered fanfiction. Condition one is that the work is based on already-existing intellectual property (IP). Condition two is that readers must be allowed to interact with the author about the content of the fiction, which means that readers can impact the future directions of the work. Condition three is that IP holders cannot create fanfiction, because as owners of the IP, they are not fans.

Here are a few examples. Banana Republican, though starring Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, is not considered a Great Gatsby fanfiction because it only fulfills condition one. Excessively stretching condition one will even cause works like Antigone to become a Seven against Thebes fanfiction, as Sophocles uses the same characters as Aeschylus. Similarly, a work that only fulfills condition two is not fanfiction. Famously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle changed the plot line to the Sherlock Holmes series after reader outrage about the death of Holmes. Works after The Reichenbach Fall do not count as Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite the fact that it responds to reader input. It fulfills condition two (the participatory condition), but not condition one.

Additionally, we draw a distinction between published fanfictions and fanfiction still in flux online. Fanfiction ceases to be a participatory aesthetic type once it is officiated: published, put on a stage, or handed over to a new copyright holder. The process is similar to how a record of a live band performance differs from the live performance itself. For an online fanfiction, once the thread is archived and the editing process is complete, it gets converted into a record of fanfiction. This ontological shift is key to our definition of fanfiction as a participatory aesthetic type. We see that fanfiction functionally does something different from literature and performance art. Fanfiction is performance-esque. Ontologically speaking, the fanfiction is a process grounded in ongoing interactions between the author and their readers. In this paper, we highlight the process instead of the finished object.

Scholarly literature on fanfiction is scarce. So far, research mostly addresses feminism, gender roles, and power structures.[17] While we take interest in these facets of fanfiction research, we approach fanfiction as an example of interactive aesthetic practice—a non-traditional type of aesthetic appreciation—and focus on the cognitive processes involved in the making of these community-geared texts.

3. Affordances and fanfiction

We model the fanfiction creative writing process as a decoupled, participatory sensemaking system. However, before we can understand participatory sensemaking, we need to understand the concept of affordance and how it relates to creative art making processes, in this case fanfiction writing. Traditionally, an affordance is defined as a possibility for action that exists between an agent and the agent’s environment.[18] For example, for an animal with the right body and the correct skills, say a very agile cat, a kitchen counter affords “jump-ability.” Similarly, for the cat, a small kitchen shelf affords scale-ability and rest-ability. However, for a human, the shelf affords neither, since humans are too large and not sufficiently nimble to accomplish such actions. Due to the structure of human hands, sticks, rocks, and other objects afford grip-ability. Similarly, because of our highly specialized sensorimotor capabilities, cars afford drive-ability, pans afford cook-ability, keyboards afford type-ability, and so on. The point is that, ontologically speaking, affordances are dispositional relationships for action existing between specific-skilled, enculturated agents and specific features of the environment. For fanfiction writers, the environment is mostly digital.[19]

Importantly, affordances are social and cultural.[20] Human agents live in highly culturally sophisticated ecological niches, and through enculturation we become highly attuned to a wealth of social affordances.[21] For example, through caretaker guidance, children growing up in North America learn that when meeting someone for the first time, an outstretched hand affords a handshake. However, children growing up in other parts of the world will learn that meeting someone new affords a small bow. Similarly, pedestrians might learn that escalators afford standing on the right and walking on the left. Through guidance, agents are molded into acting skillfully within specific “forms of life.”[22]

Fanfiction is no different in this respect. Although mostly digital, fanfiction communities and sub-communities develop explicit and implicit conventions for how to interact, evaluate, and most importantly write fanfiction—digital forms of life. The successful fanfiction writer learns the affordances that are specific to their sub-community’s form of life. For example, conventions in the Dishonored video game fandom differ drastically from how to discuss, evaluate, and write material about the Harry Potter franchise, despite magic being central themes in both franchises.

Engaging with different media such as novels or video games teaches us about the personality of the characters in that media. Coming to know the personality of a particular character affords writing certain kinds of narratives or narrative events.[23] For example, Zell from the video game Final Fantasy 8 is characterized as a hot-headed, fist-throwing, friends-and-family-oriented dimwit. Knowing this character well affords writing specific reactions to various scenarios that might be requested on a fanfiction forum or when answering an online prompt.[24]

Human beings are fully cultural social beings; most of our cognitive capacities and actions are scaffolded and permeated by sociality and culture.[25] Hence, the field of available affordance for any agent is always impacted by multiple, nested layers of social influence, in particular:

• The hermeneutical background.

• Behavior settings.

• Interpersonal interactional histories.

First, on a broad scale, agents are always moving in and out of various contexts (what is sometimes called the hermeneutical background), which on its own adjusts the various available affordances.[26] Second, on a narrower scale, the physicality of environments such as buildings and institutions, plus the traditions and norms embedded within them, come to function as behavior settings.[27] Behavior settings in their physicality and their socially enforced norms highly constrain agents’ available field of affordances. Furthermore, on a more minute scale, the long-term and short-term history of interaction between specific agents also governs which affordances are available to each agent.[28] Again, for any given agent, their unique field of affordances is always a product of multiple, nested layers of overlapping influence: the hermeneutical background, behavior settings, interactional history with specific agents, and the agent’s skillset.[29]

Such nested layers of normativity can also be found in the case of fanfiction writing. For one, canonical settings for each fandom generate and constrain narrative possibilities. The community behind each fandom, through commentary, upvotes, downvotes, and more, enforces the norms of the fandom in accordance with its canon. Thus, community-enforced canon provides boundaries for fanfiction authors to get creative, requiring them to utilize the available affordances to construct their spin-off stories. We must remember that in virtue of being derivative, fanfictions are expected to not wander too far astray from canon settings and storylines. Through comments, upvotes downvotes, retweets, and so on, the fan community imposes constraints on narrative affordances.

Conforming to community restrictions and expectations starts with proper tagging etiquette. If the IP is historical, for example, set in the “modern” period, then any import of fantasy elements requires additional clarification such as additional tags like “Vampire AU.” For example, when writing in the Dishonored video game fandom, the author must stick to a Victorian and steam-punk aesthetic and therefore cannot introduce spaceships, smartphones, laser blasters, and the like. We must remember that fanfiction authors do not want to be judged as going OOC. If an author introduces characters that are not included in canon, then he or she will need to add the tag OC (original characters) when posting the work. Through the ebb and flow of comments, upvotes, downvotes, tagging, and more, an ecology of online affordances develops, which dictates available affordances for the writer within each fandom.

Once a fanfiction is posted and accepted by the broad fan community, it establishes new norms within the community. These new norms are different from canon, though based on canon. The newly generated norms do not simply rephrase the canonical story; they also create new information about the various character’s relationships. With each new story, community norms develop or morph and, in doing so, constrain and enable writing affordances.

 

When one fanfiction author produces a significant and widely-embraced work, it is common for other writers to get more cautious when touching on similar topics to avoid treading on “claimed terrain.” In terms of fanfiction audiences, when the community starts talking about, for example, “that cyborg AU of Haikyuu!” or “that ‘what if’ spinoff of The Last of Us with a happy ending,” the community articulates and generates “fanon.” Fanon, in turn, becomes an integral part of what the audiences conceive as the established story of the “ship,” again shaping and reshaping the field of available writing affordances. Due to the ongoing communication, ranking, tagging, and discussing of fanfiction across platforms and time zones, the constraints and affordances available to fanfiction writers dynamically change across fast and slow time scales. In the case of fanfiction, affordances are culturally determined and volatile. Fandom etiquette, tagging rules, fandom trends, and more all dynamically constrain and enable the author’s field of affordances.

For any given fandom, affordances are dynamically volatile and constantly in flux. For example, one often sees a surge of fan-created content after a major “lore dump” in the original franchise (see Figure 2).[31] The figure above illustrates how a significant addition to the BBC Sherlock Holmes franchise leads to a significant surge in fanfiction postings within the BBC Sherlock Holmes fandom. The spike in the graph reflects significant fan participation in fiction writing in response to new seasons of the TV series going on air. Sudden “lore dumps,” while volatile, also come with a wealth of new affordances for writers to exploit—much like in music or dance in which happy accidents or surprises from one’s partner can generate sudden creative affordances. Sudden lore dumps from a software company, an author making a press statement, a show dropping a surprise episode, and so on can all create sudden, strong fluctuations in the landscape of affordances that authors must respond to, typically resulting in high writing activity.[32]

Another example of this volatile dynamic is video game drip-marketing—continually releasing small pieces of content for an IP. For example, the Dark Souls franchise’s drip-marketing makes its storyline unfold slowly. With each release comes new character development, which subsequently affords new writing possibilities for fanfiction authors. In such cases, the affordances can change radically throughout the year. The franchise develops, and authors adapt by responding sensitively to the affordances of the shifting sands.

In sum, the ever-changing norms, gatekeepers, internet squabbles, and trends in the fanfiction community create a dynamic ecology of creative affordances, despite fanfiction being decoupled over space, time, and time zones. To better illustrate this point, we have outlined the dynamic flow of affordances involved in fanfiction writing (see Figure 3).

 

4. Fanfiction as decoupled participatory sensemaking

To better model the fanfiction creativity cycle, we map our affordance-based interpretation of fanfiction onto the framework of participatory sensemaking. Participatory sensemaking originally was a theoretical framework for modeling social cognition—that is, how people make meaning together and understand each other.[33] Since its inception, this framework has been used to model a range of human cognitive activities including improvisational performing arts.[34] One consequence of understanding fanfiction as participatory sensemaking is that each fiction is a co-emergent product rather than a truly single-author product. Each fiction emerges from a network of community influences, IP constraints, new IP releases, and much more. In order to better comprehend the creative process in fanfiction, there are four key aspects that we must understand about participatory sensemaking: affordances, synchronization, agency, and self-organization.

Importantly, while most analyses of participatory sensemaking have covered directly coupled systems typically between agents who are face-to-face, we take the literature in a different direction by modeling the creative process in fanfiction as decoupled participatory sensemaking. The online nature of fanfiction means that agents are rarely interacting in the same place or at the same time. However, despite its decoupled nature, the flow of interactions involved in the making of fanfiction still follows the participatory sensemaking formula.

4.1. Agency and self-organization in fanfiction

Participatory sensemaking moves away from a cognitivist model of social cognition, for example, simulation theories or theory-theories.[35] For participatory sensemaking, understanding other people is to interact. Put differently, the interaction itself is the understanding of other people rather than an externalization of some inner state of understanding.[36] Therefore, meaning is not found in the heads of each individual and then later externalized via speech or the shaping of material objects. Rather, what we call ‘meaning’ is the activity of the whole system. Here, ‘the system designates the communicating interlocuters embedded within a shared environment. In standard cases of participatory sensemaking, the literature covers people talking face-to-face who share a physical space. In our case, however, we deal with fanfiction writers and readers interacting in a shared digital environment and having close-to-real-time information exchanges. Furthermore, participatory sensemaking utilizes the ubiquitous phenomenon of “self-organization.” As Feiten and colleagues succinctly explain:

A self-organizing system is a system that exhibits regularities that arise without a plan or leader but emerge from the interactions of the parts of the system. The posit that human action is self-organizing began the recent resurgence of interest in dynamical systems models in psychology… Dynamical systems models work by assuming that thinking, experiencing, acting humans are self-organizing systems that comprise portions of their brains, bodies and tools. Self-organizing systems have their organization without a plan or controller.[37]

Participatory sensemaking sees human interaction as emergent joint systems that function through the process of self-organization across various timescales. For example, when humans interact face to face, their bodies rapidly begin to move towards higher degrees of synchronization. Examples include gestures, posture, heartbeats, breathing, neuronal activity, gaze patterns, and more.[38] When interacting, human bodies align across various embodied processes so that interactions become more fluid. Ongoing synchronization across time creates a meta-stable self-perpetuating system.

Fanfiction writing cannot self-organize around embodied processes in the same way as face-to-face communication. However, in fanfiction, writing self-organization still takes place. The millions of stories posted, comments, up-votes and down-votes, reviews, and so on create a self-organizing digital ecosystem of topics, trends, language, humor, and so on. This ecosystem of online-mediated interaction ebbs and flows without a centralized plan or control. Any fanfiction writer is always at the mercy of the emerging trends from the entire online fanfiction ecosystem.

However, human interactions do not infinitely self-perpetuate; they are meta-stable by nature. They often need agents to assert new energy back into the system or else the system will dissipate.[39] Put differently, conversations between people often ebb and flow and will sometimes die out, unless one of the interlocuters introduces a new topic or utters the next sentence. This is why many first dates can feel awkward. The people on the date typically do not know how to keep the interaction going so the system as a social interaction might quickly dissipate unless one of the people finds something to talk about.

In the decoupled case of fanfiction, the communicative system is perpetuated by writers rhythmically, and often across time zones, through posting, replying to comments, tweeting about their newest releases, and so on. This form of rhythmic turn-taking takes place on a rapid timescale in face-to-face communication, and on a slower time scale in fanfiction—again, mediated via posting on various online platforms across time zones. Below is an example of how such rhythmic author-reader communications can occur in the comment section (see Figure 4). The fanfiction in question is a 96,951-word story posted as eleven chapters over time, and the screenshot comments take place shortly after the second chapter is released. The reader expresses some early-stage worries about unclear places in the fanfiction, and the author responds with clarifications, providing additional information to assist in the reader’s future comprehension process.

 

Within Figure 4, since the comments are posted hours to days apart, the communication process is inevitably decoupled and without real-time physical interaction. However, Figure 4 still shows how fanfiction constitutes a participatory sensemaking process in terms of both content and timescale. Content-wise, the reader is outspoken about confusions and worries regarding the fanfiction chapter, and these confusion and worries are promptly addressed by the author. This is unlike traditional literary practices. In fanfiction, readers can talk to the author while the work is in progress, thereby influencing the work. In traditional literature, readers typically only talk to authors after the work is complete, if they get to talk to the author at all. Timewise, although the conversation in the comments happens across time zones, the feedback time for each comment is still short enough for both the author and the reader to feel directly addressed. Questions, explanations, and promises are exchanged in almost “live” conversations, and both the author and the readers are actively engaged in the creative process of fanfiction writing.

We see then that whether in face-to-face communication or in decoupled online fanfiction environments, interacting agents take turns asserting their agency onto the communicative system when making meaning together. The speaker or writer regulates the system while the listener or reader is being regulated. Then the agency switches. The listener or writer now speaks.[40] In this fashion, each agent uses their agency to insert new “energy” into the self-organizing system, thereby perpetuating that meta-stable system.

4.2 Affordances, synchronization, and fanfiction

In the previous section, we focused on the direct affordance-exchanging interactions between writers and readers. In this section, we focus on how fanfiction is coordinated by and emerges from the various parties involved in the participatory sensemaking system.

In regular coupled participatory sensemaking, the meaning-generating, turn-taking scheme happens through social affordances. Each agent asserting their agency onto the system, again typically through speech and gesture, also simultaneously provides the other agent with social affordances for a response.[41] For example, in a conversation, Basil might say, “Want to go grab some chicken?” and point to the local chicken joint. This embodied act comprised of sound, gesture, posture, gaze direction, and more constrains the range of responses available to the interlocutor and “affords” a food-related response. Given this affordance, Merlin answers, “We ate chicken for lunch yesterday; how about sushi?” In such a response, Merlin is now asserting agency back onto the system by constraining the range of food options and the range of appropriate responses afforded.

With each assertion of agency onto the system, each agent becomes more synchronized with each other, which in turn creates more nuanced affordances for further interaction. In other words, emergent complex, self-organizing, dynamical systems such as human interactions have historicity. Again, think back to the first date example. When first going on a date together, interactions might be awkward and seem stumbling. As the persons get to know one another, however, a certain comfort and fluency develop in the interaction, and there is now a history of interaction between the agents that makes their future actions more fluid. In other words, as we get to know one another better, our interactions also become easier. With the ease of interactions also comes the possibility for deeper conversations.

Despite its decoupled nature, fanfiction works no differently. Affordances are still exchanged between writers and readers simultaneously constraining and enabling responses and the creative process.[42] The core difference between typical face-to-face participatory sensemaking systems and fanfiction is that the environment is digital, interactions are slightly slower, and affordances are primarily generated through text, images, and video, rather than sound, gesture, facial expressions, and the like. However, we must remember that for humans, words, symbols, icons, and so forth also generate affordances.[43]

When we look at fanfiction as a participatory sensemaking system, we see that each fiction is a co-emergent product created from multiple streams of community influence, IP constraints, new IP releases, and much more. Where in face-to-face participatory sensemaking, the physical, cultural, and social environment constrain the agent, fanfiction also has a rich constraining online environment. While the fanfiction environment is tightly communally constrained, these are creatively enabling constraints.[44] It is exactly the existence of a network of constraints that brings affordances into existence, allowing the agent to act on the creative affordances.[45] This is consistent with the growing empirical and theoretical literature, which argues that constraints enable creativity.[46]

We see then that in fanfiction, self-organization, affordances, and agency are all constantly at play in the nonlinear unfolding of interactive meaning making systems. Online fanfiction is a large, complex, nonlinear, joint meaning-making system, in which each creative product cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts—a hyper-distributed and emergent form of creativity and aesthetic practice.

5. Concluding remarks

Given the highly dynamic and communal nature of fanfiction, scholars will miss much of the richness of fanfiction by evaluating it as individual static artifacts. As we have shown, fanfiction is an inherently communal and participatory practice and artform. The aesthetic experience of fanfiction lies not only in its production and reading but also in the commenting, evaluating, responding, upvoting, downvoting, tweeting, and re-tweeting within the fan community. From this perspective, future research would be well suited to investigate fanfiction as a case of highly distributed cognition.[47] Fanfiction holds an interesting space in the world of aesthetic practices in that it is a novel way of aesthetic interaction mediated by the totality of our media technologies: video games, comics, movies, TV shows, music, and so forth. Given its distributed nature across space, time, and media forms, contemporary fanfiction presents an exciting new avenue for aesthetics and cognitive science.

 

Mingxi Xu
Mingxi.Xu@uga.edu

Mingxi is a Ph.D. student at University of Georgia. Her research focuses on metaphysical causation, contemporary aesthetics, possible worlds, and creative processes. She is also an active researcher in aesthetics of fanfiction and women’s writing.

 

Christian Kronsted
kronstedc@merrimack.edu

Christian is an assistant professor of practice at Merrimack College. His research focuses on embodied cognition, group and crowd interaction, and dance aesthetics.

Published January 20, 2025.

Cite this article: Mingxi Xu & Christian Kronsted, “Contemporary Fanfiction as Decoupled Participatory Sensemaking,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 22 (2024), accessed date.

Acknowledgement: We are really grateful for the insightful comments from both reviewers. Especially, the comments about fanfiction ontology were really helpful, and inspired us to think about future directions for this research.

 

Endnotes

[1] Tim Elmo Feiten et al., “Constructive Constraints: On the Role of Chance and Complexity in Artistic Creativity,” Possibility Studies & Society 1, no.3 (2023): 311-323; Michael Kimmel and Camilla Groth, “What Affords Being Creative? Opportunities for Novelty in Light of Perception, Embodied Activity, and Imaginative Skill,” Adaptive Behavior 32, no. 3 (2023): 225-242; Christian Kronsted, “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop–an Enactivist Model of Tarantism,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2023): 1-25; Vicente Raja and Manuel Heras-Escribano, “Behavior Settings, Enabling Constraints, and the Naturalization of Social Norms,” in Places, Sociality, and Ecological Psychology: Essays in Honor of Harry Heft (New York: Routledge, 2023): 86-98.

[2] Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 4 (2007): 485-507, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9.

[3] Margaret A. Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (London: Routledge, 2003); Catrinel Haught and Philip N. Johnson-Laird, “Creativity and Constraints: The Production of Novel Sentences,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 25 (2003); James C. Kaufman and Ronald A. Beghetto, “Beyond Big and Little: The Four c Model of Creativity,” Review of General Psychology 13, no. 1 (2009): 1-12; Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart, “The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms,” in Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 3-15.

[4] Wilson, “The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction.”

[5] Some fanfictions do exist of historical or even currently living people. This, however, is less common than the fanfictions based on fictional characters.

[6] According to an internal study by fanfiction.net, 78% of FanFiction.net members self-identify as women (2010).

[7] Alice M. Kelly, “Female Homoeroticism and The Rescue’s ‘Lesbian Context,” in Decolonizing the Conrad Canon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022): 41-74.

[8] Data retrieved from AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/18804, 10/15/2023).

[9] For examples of this, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DbzTDsxiZ4.

[10] Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, “Unpacking the Unofficial Fanfiction Census,” The Daily Dot, July 15, 2013, https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/fandom/fandom-fanfiction-ao3-tumblr/.

[11] Data retrieved from AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026854, 10/15/2023).

[12] Natalia Samutina, “The Care of the Self in the 21st Century: Sex, Love, and Family in Russian Harry Potter Fan Fiction,” Digital Icons 10 (2013): 17-46.

[13] While the rest of our paper focuses on the mechanics of creativity in fanfiction production, we believe that the demographics of the fanfiction community is important to understanding the nature of fanfiction. The prevalence of eroticism in fanfiction content is also central to the social significance of this artform. We are currently preparing another paper that offers a deeper discussion on this topic.

[14] Wilson, “The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction,” 11.

[15] Ibid., 3.

[16] Ibid., 8.

[17] See, for example: Samutina, “The Care of the Self”; Wilson, “The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction.”

[18] James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 2014).

[19] Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009); Anthony Chemero, “An Outline of a Theory of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology 15, no.  2: 181-95. doi:10.1207/S15326969ECO1502_5.

[20] Harry Heft, Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism (New York: Routledge, 2016).

[21] Erik Rietveld and Julian Kiverstein, “A Rich Landscape of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology 26, no. 4 (2014): 325-52, https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2014.958035.

[22] Jelle Bruineberg et al., “Metastable Attunement and Real-Life Skilled Behavior,” Synthese 199 (2021): 12819-12842, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03355-6; Rietveld and Kiverstein, “A Rich Landscape of Affordances; Ludger Van Dijk and Erik Rietveld, “Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2017): 1-12, https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01969.

[23] Joerg Fingerhut, “Enacting Media. An Embodied Account of Enculturation Between Neuromediality and New Cognitive Media Theory,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 1151, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.635993.

[24] Wilson, “The Role of Affect in Fanfiction.”

[25] Ines Hipólito, Daniel Hutto, and Shaun Gallagher, “Culture in Mind-An Enactivist Account: Not Cognitive Penetration But Cultural Permeation,” in Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Models, Applications, ed. Laurance Kirmayer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

[26] Shaun Gallagher, Action and Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

[27] Miguel Segundo-Ortin, Manuel Heras-Escribano, & Vicente Raja, Places, Sociality, and Ecological Psychology: Essays in Honor of Harry Heft (New York: Routledge, 2023).

[28] Hanne De Jaegher, Anssi Peräkylä, and Melisa Stevanovic, “The Co-Creation of Meaningful Action: Bridging Enaction and Interactional Sociology,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 371, no. 1693 (2016); De Jaegher and Di Paolo, “Participatory Sensemaking.”

[29] Rietveld and Kiverstein, “A Rich Landscape of Affordances.”

[30] https://fffinnagain.tumblr.com/post/107804736058/sherlock-fandom-over-time-on-ao3-fandom-culture. Retrieved on 10/15/2023.

[31] When the owner of the intellectual property decides to release a large swath of material that adds to the existing canon. For example, in an ongoing online multiplayer game, companies often release patches that include new “quests,” stories, and more, sometimes also in the form of seasons or DLC’s. This new addition to the canon must suddenly be taken into account by the fanfiction authors.

[32] Kimmel and Groth, “What Affords Being Creative?”

[33] De Jaegher and Di Paolo, “Participatory Sensemaking;” Ezequiel Di Paolo, Elena Clair Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher, Linguistic Bodies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018).

[34] Carolien Hermans, Of Movements and Affects: Dance Improvisation as a Participatory Sense-Making Ativity, in Embodiment in Arts Education: Teaching and Learning with the Body in the Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdamse Hogeschool Voor De Kunsten, 2015); Christian Kronsted, “An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Dance” (PhD Diss., The University of Memphis, 2021); Kronsted, “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.”

[35] Alvin Goldman, “Theory of Mind,” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science 1, Ed. Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, & Stephen Stich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

[36] Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Shaun Gallagher, “Can Social Interaction Constitute Social Cognition?,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 10 (2010): 441-47, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.009; Gallagher, “Action and Interaction.”

[37] Feiten et al., “Constructive Constraints.”

[38] Drew Abney et al., “Cooperation in Sound and Motion: Complexity Matching in Collaborative Interaction.,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 150, no. 9 (2021): 1760; Demos Alexander et al., “Rocking to the Beat: Effects of Music and Partner’s Movements on Spontaneous Interpersonal Coordination,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 141, no. 1 (2012), https://doi.org///dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0023843; Erwan Codrons et al., “Spontaneous Group Synchronization of Movements and Respiratory Rhythms,” PloS One 9, no. 9 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0107538; Pabel Goldstein et al., “Brain-to-Brain Coupling during Handholding Is Associated with Pain Reduction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 11 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1703643115; Scott Kelso, “The Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) Model: From Matter to Movement to Mind,” Biological Cybernetics 115, no. 4 (2021): 305-22; Daniel Richardson, Rick Dale, and Natasha Kirkham, “The Art of Conversation Is Coordination: Common Ground and the Coupling of Eye Movements during Dialogue,” Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 407-13, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01914.x; Joan Vickers, “Advances in Coupling Perception and Action: The Quiet Eye as a Bidirectional Link between Gaze, Attention, and Action,” Progress in Brain Research 174 (2009): 279-88.

[39] De Jaegher and Di Paolo, “Participatory Sensemaking.”

[40] Ibid.

[41] Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher, “Linguistic Bodies.”

[42] Feiten et al., “Constructive Constraints;” Raja and Heras-Escribano, “Behavior Settings.”

[43] Fingerhut, “Enacting Media”; Alvaro Monterroza-Rios, and Carlos Gutiérrez-Aguilar, “Enactivism and Material Culture: How Enactivism Could Redefine Enculturation Processes,” Philosophies 7, no. 4 (2022): 75; Rietveld and Kiverstein, “A Rich Landscape of Affordances.”

[44] Vicente Raja, and Michael Anderson, “Behavior Considered as an Enabling Constraint,” in Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in the Philosophy of Neuroscience (Cham: Springer, 2021): 209-232.

[45] Raja and Heras-Escribano, “Behavior Settings.”

[46] Feiten et al., “Constructive Constraints;” Kimmel and Groth, ” What Affords Being Creative;” Christian Kronsted, “Catching the Ghost: House Dance and Improvisational Mastery,” Contemporary Aesthetics 19 (2021): 1-8.

[47] Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); John Sutton et al., “The Psychology of Memory, Extended Cognition, and Socially Distributed Remembering,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 4 (2010): 521-60, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9182-y.