Fanfiction as a Participatory Culture

Morien Raeymakers
31 jan 2016
2 minuten om te lezen

"Unleash your imagination"

This motto says it all; fanfiction is a writing genre that takes plot elements or characters from existing media and lets fans create their own version of the story. It fits perfectly in Henry Jenkins' idea of Participatory Culture (2006).

I was, like Jenkins suggests, a teen when I surfed to my first FanFiction platform and started to engage in the play, the experiment. Because of the multitude and magnitude of these type of platforms (in languages and formats) the barrier has always been low to create these expressions.

Everyone

I was mesmerized by the endless possibilities of the Harry Potter story in particular to add extra plotlines or parallel universes as Jenkins calls appropriation. With a shared base and collective intelligence fans work together to fill in the gaps in the books as in collaborative problem-solving.

The affiliations, being a member in a community, is really educational. Writers use networking, negotiation and judgment by reviewing behorehand (bètareaders), ratings, reviews, etc. But it also involves simulation, because the Fanfiction world has constructed a lot of dynamic models of real-world processes, the literary world in particular: they have "canon stories", give 12+ labels, hand out literary awards, etc.

Everywhere

I still find myself surfing to this underground digital library sometimes. The work has different quality and quantity of course, but some of the greatest plottwists or reinterpretations I have ever read were in Fanfictions, which is a great prove of skillful performance.

It is always something else, they are shaping the flow of the media, “the circulations”, in different ways with transmedia navigation (or the combination of different ones by multitasking): written prose or poetry in every language possible, videos, songs, graphic novels, etc.