The Design of Printed Fanfiction: A Case Study of Down to Agincourt Fanbinding

In this paper, we examine the design process of fanbinding, through which physical, printed copies of fanfiction works are created and shared. These are often bespoke, samizdat, singular objects that cannot usually be mass-produced, and include unique hand-bound objects for the designer’s own affective, aesthetic pleasure. Fanbinding suggests durability and preservation, and printed objects can be transformative works in themselves: designed, typeset, and perhaps featuring artwork, maps or other specifically created front/back matter and illustrations. Readers of these born-digital works may produce these in reaction to the fact that texts are published purely in digital, intangible forms, finding themselves craving the tangible, haptic properties of books. There are many design decisions involved in curating fanworks in a beautiful physical form, and we are interested in how fans go about making affective, aesthetic, practical and iterative design choices. For our case study, we chose the work-in-progress fanfiction series Down to Agincourt, currently four novels long, which takes as its critical starting point a single episode of the long-running television series Supernatural (2005-2020). Down to Agincourt occupies an unusual context by being highly literary in structure; its deliberate layers of complexity are designed to invite rereading and discussion. Its fans may be trying to possess an innately ephemeral thing: to encompass and annotate the text, to seek a more intimate relationship with it, or perhaps to memorialise the intimacy of the relationship they already have, a book being a beloved signifier of something less stable, more slippery. We report on a survey and interviews of Down to Agincourt fans investigating fanbinding conventions and preferences, in order to learn how fans discursively practise this highly affective art form

Approaching whiteness in slash via Marvel Cinematic Universe's Sam Wilson

This essay articulates the privilege of being a white writer within fandom and addresses the importance of Sam Wilson as a specifically black character in considering the author's own status as a disabled queer woman

"Everybody hurts: Transitions, endings, and resurrections in fan cultures," ed. Rebecca Williams

Review of Rebecca Williams, editor. Everybody hurts: Transitions, endings, and resurrections in fan cultures. Ames: University of Iowa Press, 2018, paperback $80 (260p) ISBN 9781609385637; e-book$80 ISBN 9781609385644

"Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures," ed. Rebecca Williams [book review]

Review of Rebecca Williams, editor. "Everybody hurts: Transitions, endings, and resurrections in fan cultures." Ames: University of Iowa Press, 2018, paperback $80 (260p) ISBN 9781609385637; e-book$80 ISBN 9781609385644

Danmei and/as Fanfiction: Translations, Variations, and the Digital Semiosphere

Since the late 1990s, Chinese internet publishing has seen a surge in literary production in terms of danmei, which are webnovels that share many of the features of Anglophone fanfiction. Thanks in part to recent live-action adaptations, there has been an influx of new Western and Chinese diaspora readers of danmei. Juxtaposing these bodies of literature in English in particular enables us to examine the complexities of how danmei are newly circulating in the Anglophone world and have become available themselves for transformative work, as readers also write fanfiction based on danmei. This paper offers a comparative reading of the following three such texts, which explore trauma recovery through the arc of romance: Tianya Ke, a danmei novel by Priest; Notebook No. 6 by magdaliny, a novella-length piece of fanfiction based on Marvel characters; and orange_crushed’s Strays, a fanfiction based on the live-action drama that was, in turn, based on Tianya Ke. The space described by Lotman’s semiosphere offers an additional model in which these texts reflect on one another; furthermore, along the porous digital border between fanfiction, danmei in translation, and fan novels based on danmei, readers and writers negotiate and vex contemporary culture

Toward a queered and/as affective theory of fandom

Wittgensteinian propositions are used to investigate whether there is some benefit from thinking about objects of fandom and their vectors via affect theory and queer theory as an inverse analytical approach: fandom as something that is not text specific but rather affect or even body specific

Toward a Queered and/as Affective Theory of Fandom

Wittgensteinian propositions are used to investigate whether there is some benefit from thinking about objects of fandom and their vectors via affect theory and queer theory as an inverse analytical approach: fandom as something that is not text specific but rather affect or even body specific

Approaching whiteness in slash via Marvel Cinematic Universe's Sam Wilson

This essay articulates the privilege of being a white writer within fandom and addresses the importance of Sam Wilson as a specifically black character in considering the author's own status as a disabled queer woman

The Design of Printed Fanfiction:A case study of Down to Agincourt fanbinding

In this paper, we examine the design process of fanbinding, through which physical, printed copies of fanfiction works are created and shared. These are often bespoke, samizdat, singular objects that cannot usually be mass-produced, and include unique hand-bound objects for the designer’s own affective, aesthetic pleasure. Fanbinding suggests durability and preservation, and printed objects can be transformative works in themselves: designed, typeset, and perhaps featuring artwork, maps or other specifically created front/back matter and illustrations. Readers of these born-digital works may produce these in reaction to the fact that texts are published purely in digital, intangible forms, finding themselves craving the tangible, haptic properties of books. There are many design decisions involved in curating fanworks in a beautiful physical form, and we are interested in how fans go about making affective, aesthetic, practical and iterative design choices. For our case study, we chose the work-in-progress fanfiction series Down to Agincourt, currently four novels long, which takes as its critical starting point a single episode of the long-running television series Supernatural (2005-2020). Down to Agincourt occupies an unusual context by being highly literary in structure; its deliberate layers of complexity are designed to invite rereading and discussion. Its fans may be trying to possess an innately ephemeral thing: to encompass and annotate the text, to seek a more intimate relationship with it, or perhaps to memorialise the intimacy of the relationship they already have, a book being a beloved signifier of something less stable, more slippery. We report on a survey and interviews of Down to Agincourt fans investigating fanbinding conventions and preferences, in order to learn how fans discursively practise this highly affective art form