1. Introduction
[1.1] Wherever fans converge to share their experiences with a fan-object, there is a platform that makes these encounters possible. Platforms provide places and spaces for the formation of fan communities, the sharing of and engagement with fan works, the presence of fan conversations, and the preservation of fan histories. Or, we could say, echoing early platform studies scholars Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost (2009): platforms are foundations.
[1.2] But where Montfort and Bogost (2009) theorize the platform as the foundation of digital media—supporting the code, form and function, interface, artifact operation, and audience reception built atop it (145–47)—platforms occupy a similar, yet not fully synonymous, position for fandom writ large. In both functional and conceptual terms, fan activity of various kinds is built upon and through specific spaces, technologies, and the cultural norms that develop there. In this case, then, platforms are both foundations and even actors.
[1.3] Glimpses of this idea are visible throughout fan studies scholarship. For example, it is widely acknowledged that fans are early adopters, both of new technologies (Jenkins 2006; Horbinksi 2018) and also of the media texts that emerge there (Coppa 2006). Additionally, fans often migrate from one platform to another, when controversial new policies or features jeopardize fannish participation in particular spaces (Dym and Fiesler 2018; Schwedel 2018). Today, research on fans and fan works increasingly depends on case studies centered on specific platforms (Willard 2017; Ramdarshan Bold 2018; Abidin and Lee 2023) and considers the impacts that platform-specific affordances have on fan works hosted there (Fathallah 2018; Sapuridis and Alberto 2022). Meanwhile, adjacent work encompasses research on online literature platforms (OLPS) (Kraxenberger and Lauer 2022) and online community networks (Cheng and Frens 2022). There has also been an increase of cultural studies work on platforms used heavily by fans, such as recent monographs on Tumblr (McCracken et al. 2020; Hannell 2023). But despite their foundational role, platforms qua platforms are not always deeply theorized as such in fan studies scholarship, and platform studies remains underutilized as a methodology (Alberto 2020; Willard and Scott 2021).
[1.4] This focus on platforms feels especially important now, in a moment where we are watching multiple platforms undergo radical transformations, many for the worse—a process that Cory Doctorow has aptly termed "enshittification" (2023). Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter and its rebranding to "X" took place during our work on this issue. So did the rise (and sometimes, the tapering off or even fall) of alternative spaces such as Pillowfort, Bluesky, and Mastodon. Then, mere days before we entered final production, Tumblr announced that it would be selling user data to OpenAI and Midjourney (Notopolous 2024).
[1.5] We are also seeing drastic changes from a more cultural angle. News platforms are being gutted from within, with io9 (Gizmodo), Vice, and Vox Media just some of the venues firing journalists and removing content in the name of cutting costs—and as a result, decimating lead voices and important coverage of popular culture. Video streaming platforms like Disney+ and Hulu also continue to remove content, while HBO Max and others suppress creative works from being released at all; yet despite these precarities, media companies and retailers alike discontinue physical media sales in favor of streaming. And, just a few months after this issue is published, the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election will almost certainly see platforms being used and weaponized to mobilize, misinform, and radicalize large swathes of US voters.
[1.6] In the face of such drastic changes—and the increasingly central and coercive role platforms play in them—we hope that even a small shift in our collective understanding of and attention to platforms, can help light the way toward better futures.
2. Articles
[2.1] As the guest editors, we are delighted by the robust roster of platform-focused scholarship that this special issue drew. Given the sheer breadth and range of these works, we have grouped the articles into three categories: architecture, community, and power. These categories are intentionally broad and often exhibit productive overlaps.
[2.2] Our first category of articles is "architecture." The texts here all explore the affordances and structures of various platforms and how they affect community, relationships, creation of fan works, and more. This category also includes work that focuses on particular fandoms and fan works, as well as their emergence and existence due to specific platform affordances.
[2.3] First, in "'Imagine a Place': Power and Intimacy in Fandoms on Discord," David Kocik, P. S. Berge, Camille Butera, Celeste Oon, and Michael Senters construct a primer of the affordances and sites of inquiry on Discord, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and messaging platform increasingly used by fan communities. These authors focus on three levels of power structures and intimacies visible on Discord: individual servers, cross-server subcommunities facilitated by Discord subscription service Nitro, and the platform Discord itself. Each level centers specific features, and the fan practices that result shape the communities made possible and the behaviors encouraged on Discord. Finally, as these authors also contend, Discord represents broader shifts in relationships between platforms and fandoms, necessitating further attention and research.
[2.4] Next, in "'It's Not Your Tumblr': Commentary-style Tagging Practices in Fandom Communities," Kimberly Kennedy investigates the use of expressive "commentary tags" (a subset of tags that prioritize creative and descriptive elements) across platforms commonly used by fans, particularly the Archive of Our Own (AO3). Kennedy analyzes both fan commentary on tagging and fan-created tagging guides in order to explore this practice, how fans leverage it, and what they think of its usage. Overall, Kennedy finds that expressive tags actually expand the functionality of online tagging practices and add six specific kinds of value that can enhance information discovery.
[2.5] In "#web-weaving: Parallel Posts, Commonplace Books, and Networked Technologies of the Self on Tumblr," Axel-Nathaniel Rose examines "parallel posts," a rich literary meme format emerging from Tumblr. These collages of decontextualized and collected quotes, Rose maintains, engage platform-specific norms of bookishness and exemplify tensions between the consumption and the cogitation of texts. Rose theorizes parallel posts in relation to transtextuality, commonplace books, "dark academia," and Foucauldian technologies of the self, then turns to two case studies in order to conduct close readings and analyses of this meme format. While the format is deeply tied to the technological and cultural affordances of Tumblr, Rose notes, it can also spur questions about digital readership more broadly.
[2.6] In "Using the Murdoch Mysteries Fandom to Examine the Types of Content Fans Share Online," Sam Binnie explores how fans of the Canadian TV show Murdoch Mysteries use a range of social media platforms to participate in fandom in different ways. Using thematic content analysis and samples of social media posts, Binnie finds that Murdoch Mysteries fans use Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit for distinct activities unique to each platform: primarily, Twitter for engaging with show cast and producers, Tumblr for transformational activities, and Reddit for troubleshooting how to locate and watch the show. Binnie also identifies this project as one of the few cross-platform surveys of a single, long-running fandom during a constrained time period.
[2.7] In "How Covid-19 Has Affected Fan-Performer Relationships within Visual Kei," Gamze Kelle explores how the musical genre of visual kei, once a primarily Japanese subculture, embraced digital platforms in order to recreate a sense of the "liveness" crucial to the genre during the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing on the indie visual kei band ACME as a case study, Kelle considers how the usage of specific platforms (TwitCasting, YouTube, and Fanicon) and platform-enabled events (limited-time-only performances, gaming hangouts, and hybrid events) created new experiences of authenticity and "liveness" once available mainly through tours, live houses, and local concerts.
[2.8] Finally, in "The Expression of Sehnsucht in Japanese City Pop Revival Fandom through Visual Media on Reddit and YouTube," Rhea Vichot explores the revival of Japanese city pop music and the new fandom that emerged around it in the late 2010s, despite being disconnected from the initial time and place of the music's production. Vichot conducts thematic analyses of related visual media and of fan conversations on Reddit and YouTube, then utilizes findings from this work to suggest the German sehnsucht as an alternative framework to more common forms of nostalgia. Sehnsucht, Vichot theorizes, can describe fans' relationships with media that does not depict their lived experience, cultural roots, or personal and familiar past(s) but that may be presented to them via platform expansions and algorithmic affordances.
[2.9] Our next category focuses on "community" and the ways in which platforms allow for and/or limit the creation and cultivation of fan communities, discourses, practices, and labor(s) online.
[2.10] Welmoed Fenna Wagenaar opens this next section with "Discord as a Fandom Platform: Locating a New Playground." Wagenaar draws on observations and conversations garnered from longitudinal fieldwork (specifically, ethnographic immersion) on two fan Discord servers. Wagenaar builds on the frameworks of polymedia and play theory to consider how Discord offers a "playground" for fans: one structured by rules and movement between them. Discord spaces, Wagenaar notes, come with affordances that can be used to model fannish values and distinguish between forms of discourse; these possibilities become especially important for fans with niche interests in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) topics and materials. Wagenaar also observes that Discord is unusual in that fans tend not to "migrate" there, fully replacing their previous platform usage, but instead are more likely to add Discord to existing networks of commonly used platforms.
[2.11] Next, in "Leveraging Community Support and Platform Affordances on a Path to More Active Participation: A Study of Online Fan Fiction Communities," Sourojit Ghosh and Cecilia Aragon consider the quintessential fandom figure of the "lurker," or the silent community member who consumes fan works without commenting or creating their own. Drawing on empirical interviews with former lurkers, Ghosh and Aragon explore how various platforms and their affordances enable the fandom practice of lurking as a valuable mode of participation. From a common theme among research participants, Ghosh and Aragon theorize the notion of "incidental membership," wherein active community members can, knowingly or unknowingly, inspire lurkers to become more active participants themselves.
[2.12] In "Fandom and the Ethics of World-Making: Building Spaces for Belonging on BobaBoard," Paul Ocone offers an in-depth look at BobaBoard, an in-development social platform designed specifically for fans with niche interests in sharing and exploring various aspects of sexuality and sexual fantasy. Drawing on digital ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with the platform's founder and several users, Ocone documents the anonymity-first design, core ethos of anti-censorship, and social responsibility that characterize BobaBoard, as well as some tensions these features have engendered. Such innovations become particularly key during what Ocone terms the current "fandom sex wars," and they also render BobaBoard a promising space of belonging for many fans.
[2.13] Closing out this section is Amber Moore's article "Analyzing an Archive of Allyish Distributed Mentorship in Speak Fan Fiction Comments and Reviews." Drawing on fan fiction responses to the YA novel Speak and building on Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis's concept of distributed mentoring, Moore theorizes the term "allyish distributed mentorship" to describe a phenomenon of modeling support and feminist consciousness around topics like sexual trauma, rape culture, and personal testimonies of the same. Moore collates and analyzes all extant, English-language reviews of Speak fan fiction on the Archive of Our Own (AO3) and FanFiction.net (FFN), identifying four common themes: celebration, criticality, vulnerability, and pedagogic discourses. Moore discusses how these findings exemplify readers of Speak fan fiction providing support, care, and validation related to sexual assault and trauma.
[2.14] Our final category of article in this special issue centers around ideas of power in relation to platforms. Articles here approach topics such as platform governance and censorship, labor hierarchies, and user-producer relationships.
[2.15] First, in "Censorship on Japanese Anime Imported into Mainland China," Jionghao Liu and Ling Yang take the Chinese video platform Bilibili as a case study with which to examine the censorship of Japanese anime in Chinese contexts. Liu and Yang identify three interrelated sites of censorship impacting imported anime texts: the purchaser or video/streaming platform, the viewer or platform user, and the "supervisor" or related governmental entity. Drawing on primary data they collected, Liu and Yang contend that censorship is not a simple top-down, oppositional process here. Instead, those three subjects and their various interests in imported anime texts result in a constantly evolving process of negotiation and cooperation.
[2.16] Next, in "Boys' Love in the Chinese Platformization of Cultural Production," Lin Zhang investigates how boys' love (BL) content, particularly live-action adaptations of BL web novels, occupies a fraught position in Chinese popular culture, which is further exacerbated by platformization and governance. Zhang identifies media megacorporation Tencent's innovative "pan-entertainment" approach as a major driver of this phenomenon: Tencent's acquisitions, expansions, and governmental ties create structural changes underlying the production and circulation of BL content. To demonstrate, Zhang tracks the development of BL in China, analyzes the live-action drama The Untamed as a "platformized" BL text, and maintains that platforms have begun monopolizing access to BL. This monopoly of access, Zhang contends, disadvantages Chinese fans of BL significantly, placing them at the mercy of vague platform governance policies, the shifting legalities of BL itself, and the illusion that these fans retain their own power and autonomy in BL consumption.
[2.17] Next, Matt Griffin considers the platformer video game A Hat in Time (2017) as a case study in nostalgia, ideology, and (re)construction of community values in "Platforming the Past: Nostalgia, Video Games, and A Hat in Time." Synthesizing platform studies approaches with fan studies counterparts, Griffin analyzes the game as a text, its marketing as a nostalgic artifact, and its rich library of fan-made modifications, or mods, that reference 1990s–2000s popular culture. Griffin contends that the use of disparate platforms—Steam for mods, Discord for discussion and events—blurs the role(s) of players and producers, complicating established understandings of media production sites and even of nostalgia itself.
[2.18] Finally, in "Players, Production, and Power: Labor and Identity in Live Streaming Video Games," Irissa Cisternino positions video game livestreaming as a novel form of fan production and considers the extant literature on streaming in order to locate critical gaps in the scholarly conversation. Focusing on research that considers streamer identities, lived experiences, and power dynamics, Cisternino calls for more intersectional and methodologically diverse scholarship. Broader frameworks, Cisternino maintains, will enable scholars to better locate and analyze the reproduction of hierarchies of power on streaming platforms, in the labor of streaming, and in streaming at large.
3. Symposium
[3.1] The symposium section of this issue opens with an academic dialogue between Yvonne Gonzales and Celeste Oon as they grapple with the interactions, or lack thereof, between their online selves and real-life selves. Gonzales and Oon explore the differences and similarities between public versus private fandom and what effect, if any, various platforms can have on those identities.
[3.2] Next, Dawn Walls-Thumma dips into J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium and the concept of fading, particularly as Tolkien's elves face this as an inevitable fate. Walls-Thumma then maps the timelines of archives and social media sites used by Tolkien fans, including one that she herself built, to understand how internet fandom has changed and what that has meant for fan communities.
[3.3] In the next piece, Martyna Szczepaniak digs into the differences between the author's notes included in Harry Potter fan fiction, written in Polish, across both AO3 and FF.net. Building on Karl Bühler's organon model of language, Szczepaniak's analysis breaks down author's notes into the categories of author-centric, reader-centric, and other. Ultimately, Szczepaniak highlights how platform affordances are a major factor affecting these paratexts.
[3.4] Next, Muxin Zhang explores the link between the rise of K-pop fan cams in South Korea and the success of their use in North America during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Zhang argues that while fan cams have served different purposes, depending on geography and platform, their success largely relies on the idol's passivity.
[3.5] Finally, closing out the symposium section of this issue, Sabrina Mittermeier looks at the consequences of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes on fan labor. Given the wide support by fans for the strikes, discussions arose around fan labor and fan-creator relationships. In addition, Mittermeier argues for the importance of this labor movement to fan studies scholars and academics as a whole when it comes to the exploitation of labor.
4. Book reviews
[4.1] Francesca Coppa's Vidding: A History is reviewed by Sebastian F. K. Svegaard. Though Svegaard notes some weaknesses, such as the lack of music analysis, he recommends the monograph to those interested in fan history, fan vids, and fan editing.
[4.2] Laurel P. Rogers reviews Fandom, the Next Generation, an edited collection organized by Bridget Kies and Megan Connor. This collection, as Rogers puts it, "jumpstarts the scholarly conversation around transgenerational fandoms and fan relationships." Rogers notes a lack of focus on non-Western texts and sports fandom, as well as on race. Ultimately, though, Rogers sees this text as a strong introduction to considerations of transgenerational fandoms.
[4.3] Line Nybro Petersen's Mediatized Fan Play: Moods, Modes and Dark Play in Networked Communities is reviewed by Axel-Nathaniel Rose. Petersen's debut text centers around the idea that fans engaging with fandom are in a state of play. Rose, however, highlights that Petersen's text misses the mark in a few ways, including a misunderstanding of the fan studies field, a limited view of fans, issues of definition, dissonance between chapters, and a missed opportunity to address power dynamics in translation. Nevertheless, Rose emphasizes that the collection "excels as an account of the way fans communicate in fleeting, perpetual ways, driven by a desire for fun."
5. Multimedia
[5.1] We are also pleased to include two multimedia pieces that were shown at the Fan Studies Network North America (FSNNA) conference in October 2023. Following trends from previous years, the FSNNA committee invited all accepted presenters to prepare an asynchronous poster, alongside their talks.
[5.2] Katherine Crighton, Naomi Jacobs, and Shivhan Szabo's poster, included here, offers users multiple modes of engagement, across different platforms, in an exploration of Jo Walton's spearpoint theory and its application(s) in fandom and in storytelling.
[5.3] Meanwhile, Rachel Loewen's poster takes the form of a video essay; here, Loewen looks at moments of public engagement between Jodie Whittaker, who plays the 13th Doctor, and the Doctor Who fandom during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
6. Acknowledgments
[6.1] The following people worked on TWC No. 42 in an editorial capacity: Poe Johnson and Mel Stanfill (editors); Taylore Nicole Woodhouse and Tanya Zuk (assistant editors); Bridget Kies, Jennifer Duggan, Adrienne Raw, and Khaliah Reed (Symposium); and Melanie E. S. Kohnen and Regina Yung Lee (Review).
[6.2] The following people worked on TWC No. 42 in a production capacity: Christine Mains (production editor); Jennifer Duggan, Robin F., Beth Friedman, Karen Hellekson, M. Lisa, Christine Mains, A. Smith, and Vickie West (copyeditors); Claire Baker, Kristina Busse, M. Lisa, Christine Mains, Rebecca Sentance, and Latina Vidolova (layout); and Emily Cohen, Christine Mains, Aileen Sheedy, Latina Vidolova, and Vickie West (proofreaders). TWC would also like to thank sveritas for additional proofreading.
[6.3] TWC thanks the board of the Organization for Transformative Works. OTW provides financial support to TWC but is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.
[6.4] 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. 42: Maria K. Alberto, Lucy Bennett, P. S. Berge, Rebecca Carlson, Mark Duffett, Casey Fiesler, Mehitabel Glenhaber, Thessa Jensen, Brit Kelley, Kimberly Kennedy, JSA Lowe, Katie Morrissey, Jessica Pruett, Daniel Rosen, Agata Wrochna, Yidong Wang, and Lesley Willard.