1. Ten years of Transformative Works and Culture
[1.1] This issue marks TWC's ten-year anniversary: after the Organization for Transformative Works was founded in 2007, we set to create an academic journal with a focus on fan works and fan communities—but, true to our fannish ethos, we wanted it to be Open Access with a Creative Commons copyright, online only, multimedia, and interdisciplinary. After finding a publishing platform with Open Journal Systems and soliciting an editorial board of international fan studies scholars, our first call for papers came out in early 2008. The first issue was published on September 15, 2008.
[1.2] In the ten years that followed, we've published 28 issues with nearly 400 essays covering diverse fan texts, communities, and activities, from multiple different methodologies, disciplines, and approaches. These essays have contributed to the overall scholarship of fan studies; many of the essays have gone on to become frequently cited standards in the field. In these ten years, we've seen TWC's authors and volunteers finish graduate school, get jobs, write important books, and get tenure. In turn, they have sent their own students our way. In the meantime, fan scholarship has exploded with new books, essay collections, conferences, and fannish and academic scholarship online. The University of Iowa Press has a dedicated fan studies line (https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/search/browse-series/browse-FANCUL.htm). We've watched as fans and fandom have exhibited the convergence culture we were anticipating in 2007 and 2008; it now dominates fannish interactions and acafannish research.
2. Ethics at the 10-year mark
[2.1] With these changes and expansions has evolved a renewed need for methodological awareness and ethical guidelines. When we started TWC, we basically extrapolated from ourselves, our online fannish friends, and our acafannish peers: our 2006 coedited volume, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, was written by, about, and to a degree for our online friends. Our responsibilities to the communities seemed pretty easy and suggested a clear respect for our fan sources. Our Author Guidelines at the time read, "TWC strongly recommends that permission be obtained from the creator for any fan work or blog post cited in a submitted article." We expanded on these ethical guidelines (Hellekson and Busse 2009; Busse and Hellekson 2012) and continued to encourage authors to follow our own guidelines of protection of fan sources and informed consent as well as the Association of Internet Researchers' (AoIR) updated notes on "Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research" (2012).
[2.2] Yet even as we remained committed to this fans-first approach (as we termed it), others began to challenge this methodology; some even outright rejected it (Musiani 2011; Larsen and Zubernis 2013; Jamison 2015). At the same time, more scholars began to seriously contemplate the ethical issues at stake (Whiteman 2012, 2016; Freund and Fielding 2013; Davisson and Booth 2016; Jensen 2016; Jones 2016; Kelley 2016; Nielsen 2016). Many, however, returned repeatedly to the conundrum we had been facing when we first started contemplating these questions: how to remain part of a community and respect its members while simultaneously documenting and analyzing it accurately and honestly. We'd only ever "strongly recommended" that fans be informed because we knew that methodologies and situations differed, and that not all researchers could or even should obtain permission. In fact, as fannish platforms and expectations of privacy have changed, as fandoms age and their members withdraw or disappear, and as fan studies has finally begun to confront its less pleasant aspects (Proctor and Kies 2018; Spacey 2018; Click 2019; Pande, forthcoming), there are more reasons than ever to not always demand permission from researchers. (For an expanded version of this argument, see Busse 2017.)
3. The future of fan studies
[3.1] If the last ten years of TWC, the last twenty-five years of fan studies, and the last fifty years of media fandom have shown us anything, it is something we already knew: some people will continue to love stars, films, music, TV series, and books to a point where we want to collect them, talk to others about them, join communities dedicated to them, and create material about and derived from them. Further, there will always be someone who will find this excess affect and its products fascinating and worthy of study. Joanna Russ (1985) reading fan zines and discussing their utopian and feminist potential, Anne Kustritz (2008) offering a close reading of two popular fan fictions in the first issue of TWC, Francesca Coppa (2017) collecting fan fiction with minimal interpretive framework in a pedagogical anthology—all of them loved the texts, the communities, and the insights both offered.
[3.2] Anniversaries mark a past event; but they also force us to look to the future. What will TWC look like in ten years, fan studies in another twenty-five, media fandom in fifty? What platforms and interfaces will we use to share our love and thoughts and works? What fannish texts will be popular, and how will fans express their fascination? How will fans and producers engage, or will these divisions have become meaningless? Many responded to our call for papers on this anniversary issue, The Future of Fandom, and we are proud to present one of our biggest issues yet.
4. Theory
[4.1] Paul Booth opens the section with his study of local independent fan stores in "Framing Alterity: Reclaiming Fandom's Marginality." Especially against the background of fannish mainstreaming and media convergence, he argues, face-to-face engagement offers an alternative discourse that recalls fan marginality and challenges more dominant fan studies discourses. David Peyron's "Fandom Names and Collective Identities in Contemporary Popular Culture" also addresses fannish identity by looking at the way groups declare their tastes and beliefs through performative naming. The essay studies in particular the tension between fans and industry generated by and played out through competing naming procedures.
[4.2] Eric Andrew James's "Using Rhetorical Criticism to Track Twitch Plays Pokémon Fans' Attachment to Sacrifice" and Bonnie Ruberg's "Straight-Washing Undertale" continue the exploration of fan identities, and they do so within the context of video game reception communities. James uses rhetorical criticism to study the particular interactions within collective gaming controls on Twitch.tv. Focusing on one particular gaming event, he suggests that audiences created interpretations as they needed to explain but also mythologize the collective experiences of their game play. Ruberg's essay confronts the discourses surrounding the popular game Undertale. Although hailed as LGBT friendly, many users nevertheless quickly and easily recast the game to make it more traditional and mainstream, thus suggesting that transformative revisions need not be either progressive or subversive.
[4.3] Sarah Elizabeth Lerner's "Fan Film on the Final Frontier" looks at the 2016 court case Paramount/CBS v. Axanar Productions Inc. and Alec Peters to interrogate questions of transformation, ownership, and fair use as well as fannish ethos, gift giving, and commercial industrial filmmaking. All these essays use focused analyses to make larger statements about fan identities, communities, and their interactions and beliefs, as well as the often complicated interactions between fans and industry.
5. Praxis
[5.1] Many of the Praxis essays continue the preoccupations and themes raised in the Theory section. Where Paul Booth studies face-to-face interaction in fannish independent stores, Naomi Jacobs explores how the convention industry explores supplementing face-to-face interaction with digital technologies. "Live Streaming as Participation" studies the simultaneous virtual and embodied con experience, but more importantly it explores how such commercial enterprises affect the fan community, both positively and negatively. Like Eric Andrew James's study of Pokémon and Twitch, Sky LaRell Anderson uses rhetorical analysis to study the role online communities play in the collective interpretation and imagination of video games. "Extraludic Narratives" focuses on Dark Souls and the way players work with and against the play's mythology to establish their own personal game narratives.
[5.2] Meanwhile, Melissa A. Hofmann looks at intracommunity meta discourses surrounding the John/Sherlock pairing in "Johnlock Meta and Authorial Intent in Sherlock fandom." She argues that the close readings in support of a slashy interpretation of the series run counter to the supposed showrunners' intentions, thus raising questions of literary theoretical approaches and the role of authorial intention in TV shows. Finally, Dorothy Lau's "Donnie Yen's Star Persona in Amateur-Produced Videos on YouTube" offers a close reading of two videos featuring Rogue One actor and Chinese film star Donnie Yen to illustrate how remixes can recreate not just fictional narratives but also star texts, thus challenging while contributing to commercial media properties.
6. Symposium
[6.1] The Symposium section in particular received a number of essays exploring this issue's theme. Casey Fiesler opens the section with "Owning the Servers," in which she uses the Archive of Our Own (https://archiveofourown.org/) as a case study to explore the technological and legal affordances of fan-friendly platforms and their futures. Nicolle Lamerichs also looks at the future of technology and fandom in "The Next Wave in Participatory Culture." She imagines how new technologies, in particular nonhuman entities, may affect media corporations as well as fan communities.
[6.2] Whereas these two essays examine the impact of technologies, the ones that follow address issues of age inside and outside fandom. Bridget Kies's "The Ex-Fan's Place in Fan Studies" looks at the intersections between fan, antifan, and ex-fan and how that affects scholarship. Brianna Dym and Casey Fiesler explore fannish generations and media platforms in "Generations, Migrations, and the Future of Fandom's Private Spaces." Drawing from long-term studies, they address the role of public and private spaces, including generational changes. Finally, Shannon K. Farley shifts the discussion to the next generation proper. In "Further Future Fandom," she transcribes and summarizes her conversations with several middle school–age fans to reveal the concerns and practices of younger fans.
[6.3] Robin S. Rosenberg and Andrea M. Letamendi's "Personality, Behavioral, and Social Heterogeneity within the Cosplay Community" presents an exploratory study of nearly 1,000 cosplayers that looks at aspects of extraversion. Bri Mattia's "Rainbow Direction and Fan-Based Citizenship Performance" discusses the activism group Rainbow Direction and its effects on general awareness of LGBT+ One Direction fans. Harry Potter's final volume is over a decade old, but the fandom continues unabated. Megan Vaughan's "Theater Criticism, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Online Community" compares professional and fannish responses to the play and finds many similarities. Where Vaughan's critics study Rowling's own transformative expansions of her universe, Deborah Krieger looks at one minor character and the transformative and interpretive extrapolations he affords Jewish fans in particular in "Jewish Identity, Fan Representation, and Yehuda Goldstein in the Potterverse." The final Symposium contribution moves away from media studies: Cody T. Havard looks at sports rivalry and calls for new avenues of research in "The Impact of the Phenomenon of Sport Rivalry on Fans."
7. Book reviews
[7.1] The books reviewed in this issue model, thematize, and engage the future in various ways. Alexis Lothian's Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, reviewed by Melanie E. S. Kohnen, most clearly engages with futures as she studies fictional and real utopias and their intersections with fans and fandoms. In contrast, both Francesca Coppa's The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, reviewed by Lorraine M. Duboisson, and Participatory Memory: Fandom Experiences across Time and Space, by Liza Potts, Melissa Beattie, Emily Dallaire, Katie Grimes, and Kelly Turner, and reviewed by J. Caroline Toy, model fan studies engagements for the future. Coppa's fan fiction anthology not only argues for the value of fan fiction as a subject of analysis and pedagogy but also illustrates how such literary encounters can happen in the classroom without losing the communities who are indispensable in understanding fan texts. Likewise, the collaboration of professors and grad students in exploring various fan sites offers a model for teaching both contents and methods. Toy cites the authors as they suggest that "these students, and others like them, hold the future for work as fan scholars and scholar fans." If, as we've argued throughout this editorial, fan studies is expanding and growing, then a renewed focus on pedagogy is crucial.
[7.2] Rounding out this anniversary issue is a slightly different form of book review. 2018 saw the publication of two substantial fan studies anthologies: Paul Booth's A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies and Melissa Click and Suzanne Scott's The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom. The two collections feature established acafans, but they also introduce a number of newer fan scholars. In fact, Henry Jenkins (2018) uses his blog as a platform to generate a conversation among these scholars to showcase the new directions and ideas they offer to the field. Louisa Ellen Stein turns to the editors in a roundtable, using their particular experiences to discuss the state of fan studies twenty-five years after its de facto founding and fifty years after the moment we often declare as the birth of original media fandom.
8. Acknowledgments
[8.1] The following people worked on TWC No. 28 in an editorial capacity: Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors); Cameron Salisbury and Francesca Coppa (Symposium); and Louisa Ellen Stein and Katie Morrissey (Review).
[8.2] The following people worked on TWC No. 28 in a production capacity: Christine Mains and Rrain Prior (production editors); Beth Friedman, Mara Greengrass, and Christine Mains (copyeditors); Claire Baker, Sarah New, Rebecca Sentance, and Gabriel Simm (layout); and Rachel P. Kreiter, Amanda Retartha, Latina Vidolova, and Karalyn Dokurno (proofreaders).
[8.3] TWC thanks the board of the Organization for Transformative Works. OTW provides financial support and server space to TWC but is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.
[8.4] TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well as the additional peer reviewers who provided service for TWC No. 28: Kevin Ball, Sarah Boyd, Lucy Busker, Edmond Chang, Tanya Cochran, Lauren Collister, Megan Condis, Katie Gillespie, Ben Judkins, Bridget Kies, Joseph Nguyen, Ashley Polasek, Mafalda Stasi, Gregory Steirer, Amandelin Valentine, Veerle Van Steenhuyse, Abby Waysdorf, Benjamin Woo, and Kimberly Workman.