1. Introduction
[1.1] Louisa Ellen Stein (2016), in her discussion of Tumblr, GIF sets, and fan mixes, describes the "endless scroll" that the platform offers: Tumblr "conveys a sensation of limitlessness; no need to click on an arrow or the word 'next' to see what else fans have created, just keep scrolling and the Tumblr posts keep coming." In contrast to other social networking sites or platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, where fannish attachments may be played out, Tumblr offers an often bewildering display of images, GIFs, text posts, video clips, and music files for fans to negotiate. As Stein points out, "The interface limitations of Tumblr are many, and can make it feel very opaque and confusing to newcomers." However, this very limitlessness can offer opportunities for fans to cope with disruptions to their attachments to objects or texts and present a space for fannish mourning. Tumblr's opacity and impenetrability may actually work to allow those who identify as lone or individual fans a space to engage in private acts of working through such disruption without needing to actively interact and engage with other fans. Tumblr thus offers a space for "ordinary fans who do not tend to be textually…and only spasmodically enunciatively productive" (Sandvoss and Kearns 2014, 102).
[1.2] Tumblr's endless scrollability offers opportunities for comfort and affective working through when presented with moments of fissure or termination in the fan experience. Here, in an analysis of my own responses to the ending of a favorite television series, NBC's Hannibal (2013–15), I consider how Tumblr's repetition—that is, the platform's sense of infinity, which is engendered by the fact that fans may see the same thing repeatedly reblogged and repeatedly turning up on their dashboard (also known as a dash)—can be understood as a potential tool for coping with instances of affective disruption. In particular, Tumblr users frequently post GIFs—"web-based graphics that contain a series of frames" that "can be used to create graphics in the form of looped moving images" (Gursimsek 2016, 330)—from favorite series. GIFs in general comprise single looped images, but fans often create more complex GIF sets, which are "sets of images, sometimes animated, sometimes not, arranged in a grid of sorts to communicate as a whole" that have "evolved primarily on Tumblr, where the interface allows for easy juxtaposition of multiple animated or still gifs" (Stein 2016). The dominance of this use of GIFs and GIF sets on Tumblr takes narrative moments out of time and out of their place in a narrative. They are instead replayed and looped in ways that can change meaning or render visible moments that were hidden until images or sequences were slowed down and reworked in the GIF format. Tumblr's modes of reblogging and the infinite scroll means that the constant repeat viewing of the same content can be therapeutic as a result of the physical act of repetition. Such viewing works to assuage fannish anxieties, helping fans cope.
[1.3] I have three key aims here. First, I aim to show that Tumblr's modes of looping and repetition (especially via the circulation of GIFs) offer a potential source of comfort during moments of fannish disruption. Second, I advance previous studies of fan responses to the ending of fan objects by exploring how use of one specific platform can "make more visible how fans respond to the absence, rather than the presence, of fan objects" (Williams 2015, 205). Although the GIF sets themselves function as fan-created objects, their use takes place in a period of postobject fandom, which "refers to fandom of any object which can no longer produce new texts" (Williams 2015, 16). However, fan attachment does not necessarily end in the postobject period, and fans often create their own texts and transformative works (such as GIFs and GIF sets as well as fan fiction or fan art) to continue their engagement with a text. Third, I consider the experience of the lone fan, a figure too often overlooked in fan studies even though "many viewers and readers who do not actively participate in fan communities and their textual productivity nevertheless derive a distinct sense of self and social identity from their fan consumption" (Sandvoss 2005, 30).
[1.4] Although my own engagement with Hannibal fan blogs on Tumblr involved reblogging the posts of others, which could be viewed as form of participation within a fan community, I did not engage in any conversation or reciprocal posting and reblogging with any other fans. In this, I acted as a lone fan—that is, someone who does not engage in dialogue with other fans in fannish spaces, even though such fans may visit such sites and recirculate content created by others. To address these fan practices and behaviors, it is useful to approach fan engagement and attachment via the Freudian concepts of repetition and working through ([1924] 1956). These concepts have been usefully expanded by others to attempt to understand the relationship among repetition, trauma, and the wider media (Lee 2016; Meek 2011; Sturken 2007). By building on these areas of study, it is possible to better understand the specific appeal of a platform such as Tumblr, particularly its use as a mechanism for reassurance in the face of moments of rupture, and how the transformative potential of GIFs and GIF sets can function as a mode for fannish coping during trauma.
2. Freud and fandom
[2.1] Although I draw on approaches that utilize Freudian psychoanalysis to understand fan communities and identities as well as the wider media, I am aware, as Sandvoss (2005) has pointed out, that Freudian thought is currently outmoded; certainly it may seem strange to return to his ideas to understand a modern fan platform such as Tumblr. Indeed, Freudian analysis of fandom has been limited compared to approaches that draw on the work of Melanie Klein (1952) (see Hoxter 2000) or D. W. Winnicott's (2005) object relations work on transitional objects (Hills 2002, 2013). Those studies that do draw on Freudian psychoanalysis tend to highlight the importance of libidinal pleasure for fans in the production of sexually explicit slash fiction (Penley 1991) and in fan fantasies (Sandvoss 2005). More recently, Mel Stanfill (2013) has explored intrafan practices of stereotyping, drawing on "psychoanalysis not because fans are a psychic anomaly…but because they illuminate processes of all identity" (129), whereas Judith Fathallah (2011) has discussed the Freudian fort-da theory ([1920] 1995) in her autoethnographic discussion of hurt/comfort fan fiction.
[2.2] However, as Sandvoss (2005) notes, the "hesitation of fan studies to adopt psychoanalytic perspectives to explain fans' actions and experience is understandable" (67). Such approaches have been argued to potentially pathologize fans (Hills 2002, 95) because they are "associated with the troubled psyche and therefore…suggest that it springs from a kind of inner unhappiness" (Duffett 2013, 113). Stanfill (2013) has cautioned against studies that draw on psychoanalysis and "extrapolate from their own experience to make claims about the inner workings of the fan psyche" because of the risk of "rendering the fan experience unrecognizable through analysis" (129). Such approaches have also been accused of disempowering fans, rendering them passively in thrall to hidden drives and desires and characterizing them as lacking the agency to self-reflexively construct their own fannish connections or emotions. The construction of fans as rationally unable to explain their own fandom is also often maintained by theorists themselves, who, it has been argued, are permitted "a privileged insight into the experiences of their subjects that is not available to the subjects themselves" (Fiske 1990, 90). Psychoanalytic approaches have therefore been accused of being theoretically and ethically limited because they explain away fan emotional ties from the position of the skilled researcher who is able to uncover the unconscious motivations behind fans' attachments.
[2.3] However, despite such critiques, psychoanalysis is not "an integrated, homogenous point of view" (Mitchell and Black 1995, 206) that can be easily dismissed in its entirety. Thus, to critique the entire discipline as ethically dubious does a disservice to the useful insights into culture (and fandom) that such approaches can provide. It is not my intention here to pathologize fans; nor is it my argument that all fans using Tumblr for fannish practices respond in the same way. Rather, I want to highlight the importance of trauma and repetition by using Freudian psychoanalysis in order to consider the rationale for using Tumblr in particular, with its unique modes of communication and its imbrication in fan practice. Tumblr was the place I went when I sought to cope with the rupture of the ending of a favorite show, along with the resultant feelings of loss and mourning.
[2.4] The use of ideas derived from Freud can allow us to "help us investigate individual fandom as a reflection of each individual's personal psychology" (Duffett 2013, 120) and help us begin to understand the responses of those like me who engage as lone fans, as individuals who may feel a sense of membership of a fandom but who eschew active interaction with fellow fans. As Sandvoss (2005) notes, "only a minority of fans participate in textual production" (29). Thus, a Freudian approach explains the process I went through as I sought to make sense of my own individual responses, and how the repetition and recirculation of images engendered by Tumblr enabled a form of working through my affective reactions to the ending of what for me was an important fan text.
3. Repetition, fannish trauma, and working through
[3.1] Writing about responses to trauma, Freud ([1924] 1956) argued that some patients repressed moments of severe shock or trauma: "The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He produces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it…not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force" (150–51). As Meek (2011) summarizes, Freud argues that some shocks are so sudden and profound that "they could not be assimilated as an individual experience in this way. Instead they could only be 'worked over' retroactively through the process of psychoanalysis and if this did not occur the victim was doomed to a compulsive repetition of the traumatic experience" (95). The compulsion toward repetition, which Freud called Wiederholungszwang—the need "to re-experience the event involuntarily"—"is both the problem and the path to a solution, since the repetition may serve the healing by allowing the creation of a proper response to the event and by producing a proper memory" (Breithaupt 2003, 76). According to Freud, then, repetition is often a necessary step toward recognizing and dealing with trauma.
[3.2] Such ideas have been used to understand the broader media and how contemporary society deals with moments of trauma. For example, in discussion of the use of repetition in the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York, Toby Lee (2016) gives examples of the media loops that are shown to visitors:
[3.3] One of the first we encounter in the exhibit is a 40-second clip from that morning's Today Show broadcast, showing the moment when Matt Lauer first interrupts their scheduled program to report breaking news of the attacks. In the next gallery, overhead speakers play a 60-second sound loop of voice messages left by a man on a top floor of the South Tower for his wife on their home answering machine, just a minute before the tower was hit. A 12-second video loop shows the plane crashing into the tower, and further down the timeline, a 15-second looped projection shows the tower's collapse.
[3.4] Lee (2016) argues that the "glitchy repetition of the looping media and visitors' insistence on multiple viewings" are reminiscent of Freud's ideas in "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through" ([1924] 1956). However, the re-viewing and looping of moments from the traumatic global event of September 11, 2011, allows the working through of the trauma because "repetition can be a central part of the processing of a narrative of trauma" and can offer "a means through which cultures process and make sense of traumatic events" (Sturken 2007, 27). I am not suggesting that the collective trauma experienced by those who witness an event like 9/11, either in person or on television, is equivalent to the emotions experienced by fans when a favorite object comes to an end. However, the arguments proposed by Lee (2016) and Sturken (2007) do offer a way to extend Freud's ideas to understand contemporary media and to begin to understand how the concept of repetition, as well as its encouragement via a platform such as Tumblr, may work for fans.
[3.5] Mark Duffett (2013) argues, "Locating fandom in relation to [Freud's work] is difficult because fans have not shared any obvious trauma which they have in common" (96). However, fans' shared reactions to moments of fannish rupture often results in processes of grief and mourning that are shared collectively within the fan culture. My own reactions to Hannibal's cliffhanger ending offers one example, but as I note elsewhere, a range of "moments of separation and detachment for TV fans, such as the departure of favoured characters, the replacing of actors or moments where the return of a show is uncertain" (2015, 2), can cause a sense of trauma. Perhaps the clearest example of this, however, is fans' responses to the deaths of actors "when fans are often left to deal with grief for both the character and the actor who portrayed him/her" (48) or celebrities. Duffett goes on to say, "To describe fandom as the acting out of a 'repetition compulsion' in the Freudian sense would seem questionable because fans are not trying to quell anxieties by repeatedly restaging traumatic moments. Instead they are interested in exploring their connections and rediscovering joys they have found in the text" (96). However, fans do engage in acts of repetition, such as the rewatching of episodes or scenes. In such acts, "pleasures can come from new details every time." In addition, "they can also come from being able to rerun engaging scenes or from being able to predict what will happen as the text unfolds" (Duffett 2013, 96). Fans may not be trying to deliberately restage traumatic moments, but they are able to use the common practices and pleasures of fan engagement (the rewatching of episodes or scenes) to understand and come to terms with events such as the endings of shows, or character or actor deaths. Tumblr's infinite sharing and recirculation of images, GIFs, and clips permits fannish repetition; such repetition can be a source of comfort and security in the face of the ending of a beloved fan object.
4. Tumblr, lone fandom, and the end of Hannibal
[4.1] I joined Tumblr in August 2015, shortly before the final episodes of Hannibal. The series was designed by creator Bryan Fuller as a way to tell the story of author Thomas Harris's fictional serial killer and cannibal, Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), before his incarceration. Fuller's Hannibal ran for three seasons on NBC; the final episode aired on August 29, 2015, with a literal cliffhanger that saw FBI investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Hannibal fall from a cliff top after defeating serial killer Frances Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage). Despite continued calls from fans, production personnel, and the show's cast for the production of new episodes, the series ended there (see Williams, forthcoming).
[4.2] Aware that the show, which had become a source of comfort and reassurance as well as providing fannish pleasures of interpretation and identification, was coming to an end, I sought out spaces where I could prepare for the ending of the series. After the finale, I was devastated by this potentially tragic—or at the very least ambiguous—ending for the characters, and I turned to Tumblr to see how other fans were responding and how they were expressing their feelings about the final episode. As noted above, I was not (and am still not) an active member of the online Hannibal fan community, preferring to enjoy my fandom as an ordinary fan, to use the term of Sandvoss and Kearns (2014). My own mode of engagement echoes the fact that although "for some fans…the communal context of their fandom, or even their own textual productivity, form the true core of their fandom,…for others, their fandom is driven more by an idiosyncratic bond with their object of fandom" (Sandvoss 2005, 10). My lone fandom, however, meant that I had nobody with whom to share my responses to the final episode of the series. I thus joined Tumblr because I was well aware of its prominence as a platform for fannish expression, and I began following a range of Hannibal fan blogs.
[4.3] Tumblr's connections with fan cultures are well documented (Bury et al. 2013; Deller 2015; Hillman, Procyk, and Neustaedter 2014; Newman 2014; Stein 2015, 2016; Thomas 2013; Willard 2016). Fan connections on the platform are more loosely defined than membership of fan communities in other online spaces, such as fan message boards or forums, because "fans primarily find one another through tags rather than through the linear and more formal threads of a message board or forum." Indeed, "Tumblr allows for fluidity of engagement and a community with no clear boundaries to define membership" (Deller 2015, ¶3.6). As I discovered, Tumblr offers a more open space for membership of fandoms because users can simply start to search through tags and follow blogs relevant to their interests. Relatedly, on the site,
[4.4] "belonging" to a fandom [is] a fuzzy concept. Unlike Facebook, Tumblr users do not get accepted to groups. Instead, they are part of the fandom when they feel they are. Participation entailed following posts with hashtags associated with a TV show, following posts by users who posted about a show, or posting about a show, regardless of whether others read the posts. (Hillman, Procyk, and Neustaedter 2014, 4)
[4.5] This casual ability to join a fandom can be useful for those fans who seek out Tumblr but are initially confused by how to navigate the platform or are unclear about the rules of membership and engagement. This can mean that some "struggle to become part of a fandom community, question when and if they are a part of a fandom, [and] are unclear of the size of the community they are a part of" (Hillman, Procyk, and Neustaedter 2014, 6). However, for others, Tumblr's size, relative anonymity, and lack of clear boundaries offer a space for unique forms of expression, such as intertextual references between different fandoms, the best example of which is the Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–) Sherlock (2010–), and Supernatural (2005–) fan crossover fandom of SuperWhoLock (Booth 2016).
[4.6] In my case of dealing with the ending of a beloved TV program, the platform offered a place for me to safely negotiate and work through my affective responses. Although the concept of a safe space may seem at odds with the porousness of fandoms on Tumblr, the site has long been viewed as a place where users can freely express themselves politically and personally (Bell 2013; Connelly 2015; Oakley 2016). However, the platform's opacity can also work to allow individual fans who do not wish to actively interact with others to remain hidden. The "social network in Tumblr is unidirectional" (Chang et al. 2014, 21) and does not require the reciprocity of being accepted as a friend or follower, or any expectation of being followed back (as in other platforms such as Facebook or Twitter). This, coupled with the site's relative sprawl of fan blogs and connections, facilitates a space where lone fans can negotiate and express fannish identities via reblogging and sharing posts without needing to interact directly with anyone.
[4.7] Although I joined Tumblr to see what other fans were posting about Hannibal, I assumed the status of a lurker (Bury et al. 2013, 316), and despite not actively participating in organized fandom, I considered myself a loyal fan. As Harrington and Bielby (1995) point out, a focus on fan production and creation "obscures an important dimension of fanship, the acceptance and maintenance of a fan identity…[because] fanship is not merely about activity; it involves parallel processes of activity and identity" (86–87). At first I intended to simply see what other fans were saying and posting about Hannibal, but this soon led to infrequent sharing and reblogging content from other fans. This mode of engagement may seem to challenge my definition of lone fandom because it involves recirculating content created by other fans while not creating my own. This was enabled by the fact that "the connections in Tumblr do not require mutual confirmation" (Chang et al. 2014, 21). I was able to follow Hannibal fan blogs without the requirement of reciprocity.
[4.8] In so doing, my mode of participation lay between the acts of creating content (textual production) and its consumption—a liminal space of engagement that lies somewhere between production and consumption. The act of sharing and recirculating GIFs, fan art, or commentary is not an act of production in itself, but it is more involved than simply scrolling through Tumblr and viewing the work of others. Despite this, the lack of active engagement with other fans meant that I continued to identify as a lone fan despite my minimal foray into Tumblr's Hannibal fan spaces. Indeed, the lack of mutuality engendered by Tumblr's functions offered me a space for mourning and working through that was unencumbered by the need to share my feelings or interpretations with other fans. Although some find such collective mourning useful (Williams 2015, 58–61), my experience as a lone fan meant that I was anxious about entering into fannish debate with other posters or potentially having my own interpretations of and responses to the series finale challenged. The opportunities to work through and deal with my responses to the end of Hannibal were thus uninhibited by the potential constraints of conflicting views or the norms of a collective fandom that I was not an active, visible member of. Of course, I can only reflect here on my own experiences and use of Tumblr as a mode of coping with the end of a fan object. However, as I have argued throughout, exploring how individuals deal with such moments of loss allows consideration of how "lone fans may have very different reactions in the post-object period" after a favorite fan object ends and "how they continue to interact with fan objects in individual contexts" (Williams 2015, 202).
5. Tumblr, GIFs, and the recirculation of images
[5.1] As I explored Tumblr, I quickly realized that more common than fan posting of interpretations or responses was the circulation and recirculation of visual images such as screenshots and GIFs from the final episode. This reliance on the visual should not have been surprising, given that "Tumblr is especially known for its use of reaction GIFs: short clips of movies and television shows that communicate emotions ('feels'), reactions, and everyday events" (Bourlai and Herring 2014, 171). Thus, Tumblr's potential as a safe and hidden space for lone fans is also linked to the fact that it differs from other social media and microblogging platforms in its reliance on images rather than words. Indeed, "the rapid method of posting and re-circulating content is convenient for Tumblr bloggers because the dynamic flux of images, videos, and GIFs is valued over composing and reading lengthy passages of text" (Gursimsek 2016, 334). Users have
[5.2] their own individual blog(s), on which they can post new content or "reblog" content posted by other Tumblr users. Users can choose among seven rebloggable types of posts: text, photo, link, audio, video, chat, and quote. Tumblr also has a Private Messaging (PM) feature that lets users reply to messages received either privately or publicly. (Bourlai and Herring 2014, 171)
[5.3] When users reblog a post, they have the option to add their own comments to it, and if several users engage in this way, a conversational thread can be formed, with different Tumblr users either talking to one another on a post, or a sequence of subsequent, different users making comments. However, because a comment is not a prerequisite for sharing Tumblr images and GIF sets, users can reblog without ever needing to directly converse with the original poster or reblogger. Thus, as noted above, fans on Tumblr can thus also be rendered invisible via the platform's emphasis on the visual, participating as lurkers who do not have to engage in reciprocal relationships with other fans in order to post and share content.
[5.4] In relation to the Hannibal finale, images such as those in figures 1 and 2 were commonly reblogged on Tumblr (note 1).
Figure 1. Image of Hannibal and Will's embrace on the cliff top in the 2015 series finale of Hannibal.
Figure 2. Dual image of Hannibal and Will's embrace, with dialogue added in captions.
[5.5] As Hannibal fans on Tumblr began to create, post, and reblog GIFs, especially those from the final scene of the series, it became clear that these blogs were being used as sites to transformatively "annotate, appreciate, and recirculate objects of interest" (Newman 2014, 128). The GIF sets of the final scene, where Will and Hannibal share an intimate moment of connection regarding their pleasure in having killed Dolarhyde, or their subsequent fall from the cliff, became endlessly looped reminders of the moments that had had such an emotional and affective impact on me when I watched the episode (figures 3, 4, and 5).
Figure 3. GIF of Hannibal and Will embracing on the cliff top.
Figure 4. GIF with dialogue text of Hannibal and Will sharing an intimate exchange.
Figure 5. GIF with dialogue text of Hannibal and Will.
[5.6] Moreover, fans also worked to remove those moments from the narrative and create new meanings. They began to rework the images they posted, adding text or changing the context of the scenes. These moments of transformative creativity, endlessly returning to my dashboard, highlighted how other fans were responding to the final episode by selecting "particular moments from the source text…and recontextualiz[ing] them among one another, [and] in so doing revealing or establishing new visual and thematic patterns, offering distilled readings or new meanings born of new contexts and juxtapositions" (Stein 2016).
6. Repetition, fannish trauma, and the infinite image
[6.1] As I began to understand the importance that viewing these recirculated images was having on my response to the end of the series, I began to question why such repeated moments within the "river of images" (Newman 2014, 127) of my Tumblr dashboard were helping me cope. It is here that Freud's work on repetition and working through offers a useful theoretical approach for understanding why the moments of repetition offered by Tumblr's GIF culture help fans cope with moments of rupture or ending. Such ideas allow for consideration of how "it is often the compulsive repetition of a narrative that allows for someone to feel some form of agency over the story of his or her own trauma" (Sturken 2007, 27).
[6.2] Tumblr is predicated on forms of reblogging and recirculation in a way that is less dominant on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter (despite the prevalence of the practice of sharing or retweeting). Tumblr encourages a form of spreadability (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013) via its own tools and via the ease of sharing content among one's own followers or to other fandoms. As Deller (2015) notes, this enables "easy sharing within and across communities, which can then lead to particular approaches, be they humorous, aesthetic, or linguistic, spreading between communities in much the same way in which online memes and jokes do" (¶3.5). The phenomenon of reblogging has been mapped by Chang et al. (2014), who analyze how reblogs travel across the site: "Once a blog is posted, it can be reblogged by others. Those reblogs can be reblogged even further, which leads to a tree structure, which is called reblog cascade, with the first author being the root node. The reblog cascade size indicates the number of reblog actions that have been involved in the cascade" (26). Within fandoms, this reblog cascade appears infinite, with various Tumblr fan blogs sharing and resharing images and GIF sets. Although Chang et al. (2014) determined that "social celebrities, who are the major source of contents, reblog a lot more compared with other users" (26), this was not necessarily the case among the Hannibal fan blogs I was following. Instead, those with high numbers of followers and lesser known blogs were both equally likely to reblog content, leading to a combination of both more immediate cascades and longer-term recirculation of visual material from the finale.
[6.3] The frequency with which images of scenes and moments from the finale of Hannibal that had initially upset me reappeared on my Tumblr dash became a source of comfort and a locus for working through and dealing with my fannish grief. For instance, the final scene of the series had initially brought me to tears and was followed by the experience of mourning for the loss of the show and characters. However, as these originally upsetting moments of narrative trauma (such as Hannibal and Will's tumble from the cliff in figure 6) and corresponding affective fannish response became more familiar via the recirculation of GIFs and images, their meanings became abstracted. The images began to function more as artifacts that provided comfort and a means of coping with these feelings.
Figure 6. GIF of Hannibal and Will's fall from the cliff top in the final moments of the series finale.
[6.4] The ability to rewatch these moments via the GIFs recirculated on Tumblr allowed a shift from sadness and grief to a refocus on analyzing the smaller moments that make up this scene. For example, because GIFs slow down the scene, it was possible to focus on the microexpressions of the characters and their interactions with each other. Given the presence of fans who supported a romantic relationship between Hannibal and Will in the series (referred to by the portmanteau term "Hannigram"), the presence of repeated GIFs moved the final scene from one of upset to a moment where one could read the interactions between the characters as supportive of Hannigram. In these potentially transformative moments, fan edits and uses of GIFs helped refocus the final moments of the series from a potentially tragic reading to one of romance—a reading that often becomes more pronounced with the cessation of a series because it offers the last chance for that ship to become canon (Williams 2011). As fans of Hannibal, and in particular Hannigram, began to recut and circulate GIF sets that emphasized the romance inherent in the ending of the series, my own responses were able to move from grief and mourning toward a sense of satisfaction that the ending could be read as endorsing the Hannigram ship.
[6.5] However, GIFs' function as a source of comfort was not limited to links to the Hannigram ship. The final moments of the episode can obviously be read as depicting the potential deaths of both Hannibal and Will. Such a reading, however, is complicated by the inclusion of a postcredit coda that indicated that at least one of the lead characters had survived the fall from the cliff, as well as by subsequent ongoing discussion by the cast and crew about a return of the series (see Williams, forthcoming). Thus, although this ending may have been a particular source of sadness, given the potential character deaths, I and the majority of other fans on Tumblr did not view the finale in this way. GIFs, instead of serving as a way to mourn and commemorate dead characters, instead became a mode of analysis to consider how the characters may have survived such a fall, functioning as a form of "forensic fandom" (Mittell 2007, 128), with evidence that needed to be scrutinized for answers. GIFs depicting the moments before the characters fall from the cliff can be examined in order to determine factors such as the distance that they might fall, the angle at which they disappear, and the subsequent probability of their survival. In this case, the repetition of GIFs allowed "the process of getting over a loss or painful experience. In this extended sense, mourning is an example of working through, since it involves the piecemeal recognition that the lost object is no longer available in a host of contexts in which he was previously a familiar figure" (Rycroft 1972, 179). The constant stream of repeated images could be analyzed so as to allow for a process of coming to terms with the possibility of the characters' deaths, but it could also be analyzed so as to open up readings for endings where characters instead survived, as further encouraged by the postcredit scene and the producers' comments.
[6.6] The opportunity to review moments from other episodes across the series offered the pleasures of familiarity and comfort, functioning like the rewatching of entire episodes as "reassuring, therapeutic, cheering sessions with familiar guides and confidantes" (Brooker 2007, 161). The ability to revisit favorite scenes or moments from texts via recordings (DVDs or DVR'd content) may offer the chance for "scenes, characters and dialogue [to] be burned into the viewer's memory, becoming signature aspects of meaning and pleasure" (Klinger 2010, 3–4). In the case of GIFs and GIF sets, this becomes a form of shorthand, allowing fans on Tumblr to reencounter such moments through the scroll of their dashboard, providing a sense pleasure and a safe return to a beloved text.
[6.7] Tumblr's position as a prominent site for representing fannish identities, as well as its users' posting of GIFS as a primary mode of communication, allows short snippets, images, and lines of dialogue to be endlessly replayed, reflecting elements of what Barbara Klinger (2010) calls replay culture and what Newman (2014) refers to as quotation culture. In so doing, the platform offers opportunities for what Freud refers to as working through ([1924] 1956) via repetition of key narrative moments (figure 7), allowing for lone fans to negotiate and cope with the ending of a beloved fan object.
Figure 7. Image showing the frames most commonly used in GIF set sequences of Hannibal's final scene.
7. Conclusion
[7.1] Tumblr's specific modes of communication, such as its "use of animated GIFs to express opinions and reactions" (Bourlai and Herring 2014, 171), the ease of sharing material, and its "engagement with multiple sources" (Thomas 2013, ¶2.3), engender repetition and recirculation that echo Freud's ideas about repetition and trauma, as well as subsequent uses of his work to understand contemporary media forms. Freudian psychoanalysis is here informative in enabling us to understand elements of the fan psyche and the fannish experience. Such analysis helps us broaden our understandings of the endings of fan objects in terms of working through in order to consider the use of various platforms and to better understand how individual fans respond, particularly for lone fans. As Bury et al. (2013) note, "We, as fan scholars, tend to overlook non-participatory fans, and this leads us to think that we do need to do more work on non-participatory fans/lurkers" (316). Freudian analysis is particularly well suited to turning our attention to fans for whom "the significance of their fandom is constituted primarily through their bond with, and affective attachment to, their fan object, rather than an association with fellow fans" (Sandvoss and Kearns 2014, 97), and who may engage in sharing the content of others but refrain from conversation or engagement with them. Those who identify as lone fans may have quite different responses to moments of loss or rupture. The use of platforms such as Tumblr, as well as the transformative modes of repetition that it offers, allows modes of working through periods of fannish mourning that are not as reliant on interaction and communication with other fans as those who actively participate in organized fandom. Of course, the way that other online spaces such as Twitter, Facebook groups, or online fan message boards offer opportunities to respond to the endings of fan objects may be different than Tumblr. Future research could profitably investigate how fans use these other sites. However, Tumblr, my focus here, has unique modes of scrolling, with a frequent return of the same images or GIFs to the user's dashboard and a sense of infinite scroll—all important to permit a lone fan to engage in Freudian working through.
[7.2] Exploring practices such as reblogging and repeated sharing of images and GIFs—as well as the transformative potential they offer for changing both meaning and fannish response—thus enables closer examination of how lone fans make use of modes of repetition within fan culture. This in turn helps us better understand the uses of a specific media platform such as Tumblr, and its distinctive modes of communication and expression, as fans deal with moments of ending or potential fan trauma.