1. Introduction
[1.1] For our submission to the Fan Studies Network North America Conference 2023, we decided to use the multimedia poster as an opportunity to expand upon the ideas in our presentation, making creative use of format to engage attendees with some of the themes in our work. The poster takes the form of an interactive game in which players themselves participate in the phenomenon we are exploring, that collaborative, communal storytelling around a shared object of fandom can build emotional resonance and affect, even when the object of that fandom doesn't exist.
[1.2] The game, built upon the Twine platform to create a text-based adventure, introduces the world of Blow the Man Down (BTMD). This nonexistent television show was invented as ancillary media for an alternate reality game (ARG) of the same name, developed in relation to and within the fandom of the very real show Our Flag Means Death (2023). The creator(s) of the ARG seeded the game with canon details of BTMD and then provided opportunities—and rewards—for fans to collaboratively improvise the fan works that would have existed if the show were real.
[1.3] In our presentation, we reveal also an alternative title we considered for our poster: "I gonched so hard I made a new blorbo, and I love them." Using Spearpoint Theory (Walton 2004), we theorize that phenomena like Goncharov (a spontaneously generated Tumblr fandom; see Chen 2023) and BTMD provide lessons for giving emotional depth and engagement with multimedia and multifaceted storytelling.
2. Multimedia
Visit the website: https://users.wpi.edu/~kjcrighton/projects/Faking_and_Re-Making_the_Fandom_Spear.html