Trolls in Fanfiction
- Morien Raeymakers
- 6 feb 2016
- 2 minuten om te lezen
Whitney Phillips gave a clear expression of who, why and how trolls are prevalent. Paraphrasing her work this practice can be defined as...
Troll = a person who likes to disrupt content on the internet by taking nothing seriously and using aggressive language and ideas to get frustrations of others
Trolls in the Fanfiction community
Philips states that trolls are not exceptional at all. Therefore it is not unlogical to find them on Fanfiction platforms too, also an contemporary, hypernetworked digital medium. As trolling is never a unified action of one sort, I want to make a mention of two distinctive occurences.
First of all, there is the "regular type of trolls" that can be found reviewing on Facebook, news sites, 9Gag, etc. With harsh language, antagonistic complaints against the writers, sarcastic comments they often fill one of the most important features of the Fanfiction community: the reviews, mocking the place for negotiation and cooperation (see Blogpost "Fanfiction as a participatory culture").
Second, Fanfiction fora fight a particular kind of trolls: the ones that create their own content (like in the Jenkem example). By amplifying or inventing scraps of the original content and making it too sensational, outraging or anti-cannonical they provoke fans into angry comments, a vulnerable public for trolling by their commitment to their beloved stories.
As Philips says, trolling has a blurred boarder (with online aggression and cyberbulling). For her the issue of identification is essential. In the Fanfiction community they are trying to make that explicit too in listing Troll Fics.
The Fanfiction community as trolls
Some of the stances original content writers take, leave Fanfiction writers in the same category as trolls. (Ab)using their content, fans pseudonymous contributes to the stories could be regarderd as provoking, disruptive and not taking original writing/content seriously.
The goal of the Fanfiction is opposite to trolls: they want to enlarge the content of the original framework by taking their favorite elements really serious and using their imagination to feel fulfilled.
Commentaires