Transformative Works and Cultures - TWC (Organization for Transformative Works)
Not a member yet
852 research outputs found
Sort by
Discord as a fandom platform: Locating a new playground
No full textThe VoIP and instant messaging platform Discord has seen immense user growth over the past few years, including among fans involved with transformative works. Analyzing Discord from a framework of polymedia and play provides new insights into what Discord affords these fans and how they navigate the platform as part of their fan practices. It shows how the platform has been adopted and adapted in ways that facilitate fan play and allow for play moods to be created, strengthened, or maintained. Discord provides a suitable playground for fans, because it allows fans to negotiate closed online spaces where they can play freely, without outside disruption. These spaces can be organized in ways that distinguish between play and nonplay and maintain fannish principles of warning and consent. In addition, Discord provides an extra dimension to the experience of taking part in fan fiction exchanges, creating a compelling, collective mood in servers that people can continually come back to. Positioning this within a broader network of platforms and affordances that fans navigate shows how Discord fulfills particular needs and niches, especially with regard to Not Safe For Work material. More generally, this study provides a framework for understanding the reciprocal and dynamic relationships between users, affordances, rules, and structures in contemporary platform society
Playing King Alfred: Historical reenactment and cosplay of Alfred the Great
No full textPlaying King Alfred is indicative of a new form of practice-based research that not only explores but actively cocreates the meaning of the icon of Alfred the Great in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Rooted in two vastly different traditions—historical reenactment and cosplay—the fans playing Alfred blend elements of living history with their representations of visual culture. Their costumes are very similar from a design point of view, but there are fundamental differences in quality and production. The motivations for playing Alfred largely overlap, as fans from both groups mention their love for history, the sense of belonging, and a feeling of nostalgia. Combined, these motivations hint at a religious function of playing Alfred, similar to that of the passion plays. The simulacra produced in these practices, such as the Chi-Rho symbol, produce new meaning. By their rewriting of the texts and border-crossing performances, the fans playing Alfred create a space in between, where reenactment and cosplay collide
"Beyond the deck: Critical essays on Magic: The Gathering and its influence," edited by Shelly Jones
No full textShelley Jones, editor, Beyond the deck: Critical essays on Magic: The Gathering and its influence. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2023, softcover $39.95 (309pp), ISBN: 978-1-4766-8316-4; epub ISBN: 978-1-4766-4906-
"Since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game": Black horror podcasters as fans, critics, and creators
No full textBlack horror is often investigated within film and television studies, but there is a lack of further inquiry into how Black horror exists within fandom, audience, and podcast studies. Upon completing nine in-depth qualitative interviews in our ongoing project on Black-identifying horror podcasters, we investigate how they centralize their racial identity while negotiating and participating in horror fandom and podcasting, as well as how they navigate thematic interpretation and critique of the horror genre. We offer data from our interviews with Black horror podcasters in which we discuss Jordan Peele's film Nope (2022) to explore the ways in which Black horror podcasters embody the unique position of being Black horror fans, critics, and creators. Our investigation centralizes the voices of Black horror podcasters as they discuss experiences, feelings, and labor; such insight greatly contributes to a larger conversation about marginalized audiences' engagement with the horror genre that is often either neglected or exploited
Black fan evangelism and transactional fan participation space in the Hillman Bookstore
No full textThe Hillman College Bookstore, an online bookstore for a fictional college, operates as a fan transactional space created and supported by Black television fans in response to the scarcity of Black media retail merchandise that allows fans to have immersive experiences. Making a distinction between Black television audiences and Black television fans, a site analysis of the Hillman Bookstore website and Instagram account utilizing André Brock's method of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) examines how Black fandom constructs a media retail space. The arrangement of this Black fan space reflects Black fandom's understanding of visibility, immersive merchandise, and the attempt to establish a Black media canon. The Hillman Bookstore as a fan site seeks not only to make Black cast television and its fans visible but also to create an immersive experience that curates fan objects for role modeling Black social mobility
Putting forward platforms in fan studies
No full textEditorial for "Fandom and Platforms," edited by Maria K. Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Lesley Willard, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 42 (March 15, 2024)
How Covid-19 has affected fan-performer relationships within visual kei
No full textSince the spread of Covid-19 beginning in the year 2020, which led to global mass cancellation of in-person events, visual kei, a Japanese music subculture, has faced problems because the genre's main, and sometimes only, source of income relied on touring and organizing close-contact fan events. Visual kei performers therefore had to invent creative ways to find new modes of liveness, and fans had to find new ways to participate in these online events. Some bands adapted to online platforms, finding ways to enhance liveness and authenticity during these events. Ethnographic observations made at online and off-line events indicated creativity in planning events, with fans' seeing the pandemic as a chance to connect with other fans, thereby ensuring that visual kei bands were not only able to continue their activities during Covid-19 but also, depending on how skillfully they adapted, even expanding their fan base overseas. Although before Covid-19 the genre remained local to Japan, with its traditional notion of privileging liveness and avoiding mediatization during fan-band in-person events, after the pandemic, it embraced mediatization and online platforms, becoming available on both social media platforms and music streaming platforms
"Mediatized fan play: Moods, modes and dark play in networked communities," by Line Nybro Petersen
No full textLine Nybro Petersen, Mediatized Fan Play: Moods, Modes and Dark Play in Networked Communities. London and New York: Routledge, 2022, e-book $51.74 AUD (162p), ISBN 9781138545861
Predatory seduction: Scenting as a catalyst for power hierarchy in omegaverse fan fiction
No full textThis article expands on previous scholarship on the subject of social power in the Omegaverse fan fiction genre and how its often unequal distribution can be used as a metric for the various community perspectives on power. I examine how the wolfish trait of scenting (produced by extra olfactory glands) can be read to reinforce roles of predator and prey within the genre using examples from the popular Teen Wolf fandom. While some Omegaverse fics might use the animal traits, such as scenting, to manufacture predatory relationships for purposes beyond social commentary, there is overwhelming evidence in the more popular fics to support a more critical examination within the community of the power hierarchies they interact with
Motivations for nostalgia in the Nintendo fandom
No full textNintendo's presence in games culture is pervasive and influential, with a history of success in the Eastern and Western markets and a fanbase that spans different generations of players. While works about the fandoms of Nintendo-owned franchises exist, less is known about those who are fans of the company itself, without a necessary attachment to a particular intellectual property (IP). The theoretical lenses of game studies, fan studies, retro gaming, and nostalgia help explore the Nintendo fandom to uncover the nostalgic motivations that fans develop and maintain toward the brand and how they are interrelated. Through a narrative analysis of eleven in-depth interviews with self-identified fans of Nintendo, we find that these motivations are sentimental, historical, and personal, as well as hierarchical according to their ease of attainment by those outside of the fandom. Furthermore, retro gaming acts as a Nintendo company strategy that aids the development of these motivations