Fans, fandom, and fan practices

What precisely is a fan? This is a question often raised by my students when I introduce them to the concept of fan fiction for language learning. Do you have to write fan fiction or spend hours debating disputed plot points in the latest science fiction blockbuster on internet forums to be a fan? Can you still be a fan of a novel if all you have ever done is read it 12 times? What about only twice?

Although this chapter focuses primarily on fans and fan fiction for different types of media (e.g. books, music, graphic novels, movies, etc.) fans exist for a wide range of public figures and social or cultural practices, with sports fans possibly being the most visible group. Within the field of fan studies, a subfield of media studies which explores fans and fan cultures, what it means to be a fan has been defined in different ways. Booth (2010) describes a fan as someone “who invests time and energy into thinking about, or interacting with, a media text: in other words, one who is enraptured by a particular extant media object” (p. 11). This is a relatively neutral definition, but the term fan has not always held a positive connotation as evidenced by its use to also refer to “fanatics, spectators, groupies, enthusiasts, celebrity stalkers, collectors, consumers, members of subcultures, and entire audiences” (Cavicchi 1998, p. 39). From a commercial perspective or even from a common perspective within society more broadly, the term fan is often used to indicate that someone is an avid consumer of a product, thus equating fan groups with consumer groups (Duffett 2013). However, such a consumerist definition of fan fails to account for the many non‐consumerist practices that fans engage in. At the other end of the spectrum, some non‐consumerist definitions of a fan instead place fan creation and production at the forefront of what it means to be a fan:

One becomes a “fan” not by being a regular viewer of a particular program but by translating that viewing into some kind of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a “community” of other fans who share common interests. For fans, consumption naturally sparks production, reading generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable (Jenkins 2006, p. 41).

However, the following definition provided by Duffett (2013) encompasses both consumption and production perspectives and is therefore most relevant for this chapter's exploration of fan fiction for informal language learning: “a fan is a person with a relatively deep positive emotional conviction about someone or something famous…driven to explore and participate in fannish practices” (p. 18).

For many fans, the cultural activities and fannish practices they engage in also draw them into a larger community of fellow fans, or fandom. The use of the term fandom can be found in late‐nineteenth‐century news publications to refer to enthusiasts of a sport (see, for example, the record for fandom on the Oxford English Dictionary's science fiction word site). The use of the word fandom to refer to groups of popular media enthusiasts has been shown to coincide with technological innovations in film and television (e.g. the introduction of sound in film in the late 1920s, and the transmission of television service in the late 1930s) (Booth 2010). Because the term fandom to refer to these groups has often implied negative connotations of excessive, overwrought, often immature behavior, it has not always been embraced by all who engage in fan practices; this can be seen, for instance, in the tendency for many admirers of the private detective Sherlock Holmes to eschew the label of fan in favor of words like enthusiast (Pearson 2007).

It is not necessary, however, to identify as a fan or as part of a fandom or even to take part in communal and shared enthusiasm to engage in fan practices. Such was the case with early fans of Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s whose engagement with the Sherlock Holmes stories included the writing of fan letters not only to the author, Conan Doyle, but also to his fictional characters, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (Brombley 2017). The writing of fan letters represents one type of independent fan practice, but other common fan practices are less literary. In fact, it has been argued that the “primary practice of media fandom is simply consuming the text or engaging with the performance – listening, watching, thinking and feeling, finding yourself through its gestural embrace” (Duffett 2013, p. 166). This was, for example, the case for many who were the subject of Cavicchi's (1998) ethnographic work on Bruce Springsteen fans, whose primary fan practice was listening to Springsteen's music and deriving personal meaning from the songs at different stages of their lives.

However, many other fan practices are more collaborative, creative, literary, or even linguistic and have also been explored by researchers interested in their educational benefits. For some of these fan practices in particular, the proliferation of digital and information communication technologies has facilitated the growth of different types of fan practices and fan communities (Thorne et al. 2015) among a wider range of language learners and language users. What follows in the remainder of this section is an overview of several fan practices along a spectrum of media responses, from fan practices that primarily celebrate popular media to fan practices that critique and transform the media into new creations, including fan fiction.

Fan practices that celebrate

Fan practices which primarily celebrate media include collecting (a practice common among many of the aforementioned Bruce Springsteen fans who collected his music) and participating – what Duffett (2013) describes as “enjoyment through engagement” (p. 178) – at a level beyond passive consumption or reception. Fan participation and its relationship to language learning has received attention in the applied linguistics literature, particularly with regards to participation in anime and manga fandoms and Japanese language learning (e.g. Fukunaga 2006; Williams 2006). In these case studies of US university learners of Japanese, interest in Japanese language media motivated their interest in learning Japanese to deepen their understanding of and ability to enjoy and engage with anime and manga. In addition, their participation in anime and manga fandom provided them with Japanese linguistic and cultural knowledge that they could draw upon in their language classes.

Another more digital fan practice that celebrates the media and which has also been explored for its relationship to learning and literacy development is that of fan website design. This was explored in case studies by Lam (2000, 2006) of two different English language learners who were fans who developed websites for their objects of admiration (the Japanese pop singer Hirosue Ryoko and Japanese anime respectively). The creation of and the correspondence around these websites in international English fandoms facilitated not only English writing development and linguistic self‐confidence but also the formation of new identities as users (not merely learners) of English and knowledgeable experts in international fan spaces that had not been available to them in formal educational contexts.

Fan practices that analyze

Fan practices that analyze the media include the writing of analytical materials, both in print and online. Pre‐internet, this included the compilation of fanzines, independent fan publications produced by single fans or fan networks and which might include drawings, photos, news, announcements, ads, analysis, interviews, and fan fiction (Duffett 2013). Because of their many different forms and sections, fanzines essentially provided a space for fans to celebrate, analyze, and transform the media of which they were fans. In particular, fanzines functioned as the pre‐internet home for the speculative and analytical discussions of characters, storylines, motivations, and intertextual references that later appeared in online blogs and discussion forums on fan sites.

Once fan publishing went digital, such analysis became more public and more globally accessible, opening up these fan conversations to a much wider audience of fans with more disparate opinions and experiences and a desire to engage in often vigorous debate and discussion. Thus, a common analytical fan practice – debating – supported by Web 2.0 technologies can be seen in the comments section of blog posts or in entire discuss forums on fan sites. Online debating in forums and the accompanying practice of moderating them has also been the subject of research on the academic and digital literacy development of a 13‐year‐old fan of the young adult dystopian novels The Hunger Games. Curwood's (2013a) case study revealed that her focal participant's involvement in discussion forum‐based debates and discussions about the novels required that he develop literacy skills similar to those found in academic contexts. This could be seen, for instance, when he was prompted by other fans into providing direct quotes with page numbers from the books to support his contributions to a discussion and index about the characters in the text.

Another fan practice that draws heavily on analysis is that of spoiling, defined as “the purposeful discovery of crucial developments in the plot of a fictional story of a film or TV series before the relevant material has been broadcast or released” (Duffett 2013, p. 168). Although spoiling can also include the discovery of non‐literary elements or narrative components of media (e.g. the casting of a famous celebrity, the undisclosed filming location of the next season of a reality television program), spoiling often asks fans to draw upon some degree of literary and intertextual analysis to make sense of what the spoilers suggest about the greater storyline. Such was the experience with Steevee, a German fan of the British television series Sherlock, who was heavily involved in collecting and speculating about spoilers gathered during the filming of the show in 2013 and which she shared via her social media networks and via a fan podcast dedicated to spoilers (Sauro in preparation). Engaging in spoiling required that Steevee develop linguistic and critical analytical skills to fact‐check and share information, sometimes constrained by Twitter's then 140 character limit, to a wide international audience of fans (Sauro 2017).

Fan practices that transform or critique

The final group of fan practices, those that transform or critique, include a wide range of creative activities. The first of these is cosplay, in which fans dress as fictional characters from their favorite media and often interact with others as the character (Duffett 2013). Some fans who cosplay do so not only to transform themselves into the character, sometimes through makeup and extensive prosthetics, but also to challenge themselves to develop the skills necessary to build or sew their various costume parts to authentically replicate the character's actual costume. Other cosplayers prefer instead to transform the costume in some way, for instance, by representing the character as a different gender or incorporating a theme into the costume (e.g. Goth Harry Potter).

A second group of creative activities focus not on personal transformation and embodiment but on transformation within and across different media (i.e. visual art, music, and video). The first of these is the creation of fanart, which as the name implies, involves creating 2D or 3D artwork. Fanartist engage in a wide range of media creation including digital and traditional: They may illustrate scenes from their favorite books, crochet characters from their favorite television show as dolls, or create objects and accessories that other fans can wear or use. Fans with a more musical bent may engaging in filking, which includes the singing of popular tunes with the lyrics rewritten to reflect their fan interest or even the creation of original music about or from the perspective of their favorite characters. Finally, fanvidding, is a fan practice in which fans edit and transform shows and movies to, for instance, focus on minor characters or subplots or to tell entirely different stories through editing of different source material together.

A third set of fan practices but which are more linguistic in scope are fan translation practices: these include scanlation, the fan translation of printed material such as manga or graphic novels (Valero‐Porras and Cassany 2016), and fansubbing or fan subtitling of anime, movies, television shows (Zhang and Cassany 2016) and even digital games (Vazquez‐Calvo 2018). Recent case‐study research on individual fans engaging in fan translation practices have documented, for instance, one fan's use of multilingual resources, online networks, and intercultural knowledge during the translation of Japanese manga from a second language (English) into the fan's first language (Spanish) that drew upon the fan's emerging knowledge of Japanese and Japanese storytelling norms (Valero‐Porras and Cassany 2015, 2016). In a related vein, another case study has examined the language and literacy practices of a fan who is an active gamer and second language user who translates retro‐video games – games from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s – into Spanish, a language for which no commercial version is available (Vazquez‐Calvo 2018). This case study provided a detailed account of a Catalan gamer's techniques in using digital tools to figure out the best translation of English idioms into Spanish, and his negotiation of feedback from peers regarding his translation choices. In a related article, a case study of three Catalan‐Spanish bilingual fan translators (one of video games, one of anime, and one of fan fiction) carried out interviews and screencast video observations to document the translation process and the informal language learning across these three different types of media (i.e. video games, anime, and fan fiction) from either English or Japanese into Spanish or Catalan (Vazquez‐Calvo et al. 2019). In addition to documenting the workflow and extensive time the three fans regularly devoted to translation (up to four hours a day), this study also captured the preparation, revision, supplemental materials development to help with future translations, and feedback process each fan engaged in.

The final transformative fan practice, fan fiction, encompasses literary transformation and critique. Of all fan practices that have been investigated in the literacy and language‐learning literature, it is fan fiction that has received the greatest attention.

Fan fiction and reading

Although fan fiction itself naturally invokes writing skills, I begin by looking at fan fiction and reading skills since many fans (though not all) in the digital wilds come to fan fiction writing first through reading, whether it be the reading of a particular source text they are a fan of or the reading of fan fiction written by other fans. Research on fan fiction and its connection to reading skills can be divided into two main areas: reading for the purpose of writing; and reading for the purpose of giving feedback to support others' writing.

A common feature of two of the case studies that have explored fan fiction and reading for the purpose of writing is their focus on second language learners of English who struggled with their English writing in schools. The first of these was a case study of Nanako, a Chinese speaker who emigrated to Canada when she was 11‐years‐old (Black 2006). Although struggling with her coursework and with making friends at school, she discovered anime‐based English fan fiction online and became an avid fan fiction reader. Two years after arriving in Canada and after much time spent reading online fan fiction, she began writing her own fan fiction in English. Nanako's involvement the international online fan community and her reading of fan fiction also meant she was influenced by the writing of other fans and users of global English, whose fan fiction served as a model for her own English fan fiction writing (Black 2009b).

Similarly, Yin, a Hmong refugee from Thailand in the United States, struggled to develop writing skills in English despite taking English as a second language (ESL) classes in school (Li 2012). Yin's eventual friendship with other immigrant children led her to manga, of which she became a fan, as well as to becoming a reader and eventual writer of fan fiction. Her earliest fan practice, however, was copying the English fan fiction that she read so that she could then illustrate it. Over time, this reading and illustration were replaced by writing summaries of these stories and later by writing her own original stories that were inspired by the ones she had read. In this manner, Yin's reading of fan fiction scaffolded her emergent ability to write two very different kinds of texts: summary which conveyed understanding of plot, theme, and character elements; and narrative which required her own plot, theme, and character innovations that built upon what she gleaned from other narratives. As Li (2012) reports, after two years of reading, summarizing, and writing of fan fiction, Yin began to identify as a good writer of English.

For both Nanako and Yin, the reading of fan fiction, but not school texts or textbooks, successfully served as input and scaffolding for their own future writing development, thereby leading to increased confidence in their ability to write in English (Li 2012) and even in their self‐image as competent or substantial and meaningful writers of English (Black 2006).

However, it is not just second language learners of English who have found the reading of fan fiction to be helpful in furthering their language and literacy skills. In their exploration of adolescents' use of technology for different literacy practices, Chandler‐Olcott and Mahar (2003) studied two US middle school students who wrote fan fiction which they shared with friends and family as a kind of pleasurable stress relief. Both girls were found to engage in a high degree of hybrid reading practices in order to write their fan fiction. For instance, in order to write fan fiction about anime, the two fans needed to gather information from a wide range of online sources, not all of which were available in English. This meant that they needed to draw upon their knowledge of anime and multimodal resources to make sense of these sources.

In addition, sophisticated intertextual reading practices were required for certain types of fan fiction that they wrote. For instance, when it came to writing crossover stories, the two fans needed to gather information and read from more than one type of source text to combine into their stories. In the case of writing fan fiction that dealt with minor characters, they also had to do further research and deeper reading to better understand and integrate this character into their fan fiction. Thus, although both fans wrote fan fiction for pleasure and stress relief, the reading they found themselves doing to write this fan fiction called upon research and analytical skills in order to merge stories and better understand lesser known characters.

This ability to read, analyze, and extrapolate character features and motivations from a selection of books in order to compile evidence to write certain kinds of fan fiction was also seen in the fan fiction writing of Cassie, a 16‐year‐old fan based in the US who took part in a fan fiction‐based challenge that merged the Hunger Games books and the Harry Potter books (Curwood 2013b). As part of this challenge, fan fiction writers were assigned a character from the Harry Potter series and were tasked with writing a story with multiple outcome options in which the character either survived or died in the Hunger Games. As a result, Cassie needed to do something of a scavenger reading hunt through all 10 novels to develop a clear understanding of her character's motivations and skills as well as the survival options and deathtraps of the Hunger Games that aligned with this character's motivations and skills in order to tell a story that would be engaging, compelling, and believable to fans of both source texts.

The second and smaller category of research on reading fan fiction looks at reading for the purpose of giving feedback to support others' writing, in other words, the development of critical reading skills similar to those supported by peer review practices found in classrooms. In this area, Lammers (2013) explored how an online fan fiction space for the Sims video game worked as a pedagogical space that facilitated teaching and learning. Part of this fan space was a forum where fans could share fan fiction for feedback and or read fan fiction for the purpose of giving feedback to support others' writing. While this particular forum hosted contests and challenges for fan fiction writing, it also hosted fan fiction critique training that guided fans through the use of constructive questions to help readers provide feedback that encompassed praise, evaluation, and suggestions. Such training therefore guided fans in how to read fan fiction to identify both strengths and weaknesses (both linguistic and literary) for the purpose of constructively supporting other fans' fiction writing and thereby increasing their awareness of different features of creative writing and how to discuss these.

Fan fiction and writing

As the previous section, “Fan Fiction and Reading,” has foreshadowed, when looking at informal language learning through fan fiction, there is a strong emphasis on writing practice and writing skill development. Studies which have looked at fan fiction and writing have uncovered examples of what would fit under the subcompetences of grammatical competence (e.g. knowledge of linguistic form) and discourse competence (e.g. coherence and cohesion across longer units of discourse) from Canale and Swain's (1980) framework for communicative competence. In addition, the communal and interactive nature of many fan fiction communities has also led to studies which have explored aspects of writing for an audience.

Studies that have looked at opportunities for the development of grammatical and discourse competence as a result of writing fan fiction have drawn evidence from in depth analysis of fan fiction and public interactions around and in response to fan fiction (Black 2009b). Others (Black 2005; Curwood et al. 2013) have also drawn upon fans' self‐assessment of their own writing practices and development as a result. Black's (2005) case study of ESL learners in the online fan fiction writing community fanfiction.net is a clear example of the former and drew upon a year of participant observation of fans' personal pages in the community, their fan fiction and each stories' accompanying author notes and comments from other fans. In a related study carried out on fanfiction.net, Black (2009b) examined the literacy practices of three English language learners and fan fiction writers based in Canada and the Philippines. Similarly, Curwood et al. (2013) reported findings from ethnographies of the writing practices and motivations of fan fiction writers in three online fan spaces for the following fandoms: The Hunger Games (young adult novels), Neopets (web‐based game), and The Sims (video game series).

On fanfiction.net, Black (2005) observed the practice of fans using beta‐readers, the fan term for proofreaders or editors, to provide feedback on literary and linguistic elements of fan fiction drafts including grammar, spelling, plot, and characterization. In addition, another common practice among writers who self‐identified as learners of English was the use of author's notes accompanying each of their stories in which they self‐identified as learners of English to either forewarn their readers of their writing level and to invite certain types of feedback on their stories by identifying certain issues they were struggling with in their stories (Black 2009b). Often the responses from readers contained positive feedback that encouraged the writers. In other cases, feedback was provided on specific forms or structures, including paragraph level examples to model for the writer the correct use of commas, subordination, and transition words (Black 2005). Furthermore, frequent story updates and postings meant that these developing writers received extensive feedback during their writing process, which they could then incorporate. As an example of this, over the course of the study, one of Black's (2009b) focal participants received 9400 reviews on her fan fiction from a wide range of readers from around the world.

Although the fans in Curwood et al.'s (2013) study were not positioned as second language learners of English, they too identified peer feedback as being significant for their writing. One fan reported on the importance of writing for community fan fiction competitions which exposed her writing to a larger audience and subsequently elicited more detailed feedback on her writing, which could help her improve. A by‐product of this peer feedback was not only writing skill development but confidence in writing ability. Another fan explained that writing in this fan space where she received feedback from peers not only helped her develop the skills to write creatively but also fostered confidence in her writing. Specifically, positive feedback and encouragement from her readers helped her develop confidence in her writing abilities despite her struggles with dyslexia, a confidence she had been unable to develop in school.

Black's (2005, 2009b) and Curwood et al.'s (2013) methods did not allow them to gather data regarding the influence of peer feedback on these fans' writing outside their fan fiction communities. However, Korobkova and Black (2014), who interviewed 24 international fans of the British musical group One Direction in an online fan fiction community on Wattpad, did do this. Although the fans in this community recognized distinct boundaries and differences between their freeform and expressive fan writing practices and adult‐mediated, institutionally sanctioned school writing practices, they acknowledged that the skills they developed in their online fan spaces did inform their academic skills. Specifically, fan fiction writers recognized the transfer of grammar and vocabulary knowledge and general writing ability from the fan fiction community to the classroom and acknowledged in particular that they had become better at spotting their own writing mistakes.

Fan fiction and additional language learning and use

This chapter's sections on reading and writing focused in particular on English or English as a second language. However, in all cases, English was the language of school instruction or a necessary requirement for success in school or successful integration into a society. However, in this same body of studies of informal language learning, we also see opportunities for the use and practice of additional or additive languages or styles of language that go beyond those required or valued by schools and the local community. A particularly noteworthy case was identified by Korobkova and Black (2014): one of the One Direction fans they interviewed used the fan fiction space to practice creative writing in his mother tongue, Malayam. Whereas at school he was required to use English and to follow structured guidelines for language and content that were not related to his passions, the online fan space allowed him room to write creatively in his mother tongue.

For other fans, however, the additional language they experienced and learned through fan fiction was not one with which they shared a heritage connection but was rather one which they encountered through reading fan fiction written by multilingual writers. Such was the case with readers of Nanako's fan fiction (Black 2006). As Nanako's English developed, she began to position herself less as a learner of English and instead foregrounded her Asian identity both through her use of Mandarin Chinese, her first language, and Japanese, another language she was also learning, in her fan fiction as well as through her author's notes; she did this to explain the Mandarin Chinese and Japanese elements of her story. Responses by her readers indicated that they felt they were learning elements of Chinese and Japanese as a result of reading her multilingual fan fiction and explanations.

Fan fiction and critical digital literacy

The final category of skills and knowledge that fans learned informally through fan fiction, critical digital literacy, may not at first appear to be an example of informal language learning. However, as informal learning in online environments brings language learners in contact with a much wider range of language users than would be encountered in an offline context, learners' ability to effectively negotiate the differences they encounter requires sophisticated communication skills which cannot be disaggregated from language learning and use. Digital literacy has been defined as “the modes of reading, writing and communication made possible by digital media” (Hafner et al. 2015, p. 1). However, critical digital literacy goes further and recognizes the need to understand and be able to work with the motivations and influence of disparate actors one encounters through the modes of communication made possible through digital media. The definition of critical digital literacy used here is based upon Brown's (2017) interpretation of UNESCO's Sustainable Goals for Education: “this cluster of socio‐political skills is discussed in terms of a critical digital mindset, which prepares individuals to be adaptable and versatile in the face of ongoing and potentially far‐reaching changes to the digitalization of societies – for better and worse.”

Accordingly, this example of fan fiction and critical and digital literacy development is that of understanding and negotiating culturally situated differences. This can be seen in Black's (2009a) examination of critical media literacy among fan fiction writers, where she revisits the experiences of fans from her earlier studies, including Nanako, the Chinese speaker who emigrated to Canada at 11 and became a successful and popular writer of English fan fiction after a few years. One challenge Nanako faced in her development as a writer of fan fiction for a global audience was gaining exposure to and negotiating very different responses to the content of her writing, which reflected vastly different cultural norms. One such challenge arose around a character's suicide in one of her stories and hinged upon differences between Western‐Christian and Eastern attitudes toward suicide. Nanako had drawn upon her own culturally situated values to tell a romance in which a character commits suicide after the death of a spouse and then arrives in heaven. What Nanako had intended as a tragic and beautiful conclusion to her story was critiqued by her readers whose Christian and Western beliefs about suicide meant they interpreted the ending as implausible and unacceptable since for them suicide was a sin that would preclude entry into heaven. As Black (2009a) reports, the ensuing discussion, although not changing the perspectives of those involved, provided both writer and readers with insight into cultural and religious perspectives different from their own and awareness of how responses to texts can differ as a result.