Disrupting and restorying horror tropes through fan engagements with the interactive video game Until Dawn

Abstract

Until Dawn is a popular horror video game critiqued for its perpetuation of pervasive horror stereotypes around gender, race, and mental illness. Drawing from methods of multisited affinity space ethnography, we followed a group of cosplayers as they live streamed Until Dawn together before cosplaying characters from the franchise at New York Comic Con. Tracing uptake across fans' live streaming interactions and cosplaying encounters as well as across digital texts like social media posts and fan fiction in the wider fandom, we explore the extent to which fans collectively disrupt or restory problematic elements from the video game. We found extensive engagement with gender and mental illness across communities, contexts, and modalities, with some critique of Indigenous appropriation. This analysis reveals both cohesive trajectories of uptake around communal restorying with respect to certain problematic aspects of the source text as well as complex and varied possibilities for critical interpretation across fan work modalities.