Journal of Fandom Studies, The - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2016

This article performs textual analysis of works from two slash manip artists – Tumblr’s wandsinhand and LiveJournal’s mythagowood – to argue that the form can be understood as a fannish form of ‘readymades’. I perform a comparative analysis of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the use of the toilet as a central sign in wandsinhand’s practice. The works of mythagowood are then examined. I use excerpts from various interviews with the artist to explore his practice, its connection with the Supernatural canon and his unique construction, ‘Sammy’. I compare his practice to that of figurative painter Francis Bacon and the statements his art makes on meat, beasts and sexuality. Framing my reading of the oeuvres of wandsinhand and mythagowood around Duchamp’s concept of ‘readymades’ and Bacon’s representation of meat demonstrates the potential for slash manips to explore the instability and malleability of the male sexed body, highlighting these objects’ aesthetic, artistic and cultural significance.

Regendering, where fan creators change the gender of an existing character as part of the adaptation, offers a deconstruction of gender via the simultaneous examination of the original character, and the manifestation of gender performance in the regendered cipher. It also highlights and then occupies the absence of non-male characters, an absence being identified by researchers and fans as endemic to mainstream media. An examination of elements in commercial and non-commercial fanworks and paratexts, and the fannish engagement with those texts, reveals the methods and the motivation behind the regendering as a sort of praxis situated in the conflicts and complexities of the feminist theory and politics. It is also a manifestation of subversion and dissatisfaction – theorized by Jenkins and Sandvoss – with Butlerinfluenced understandings of gender performance and oppositional heterosexuality. This analysis and overview provides the foundation for a theory of how regendering works both with and against the hegemony of the media depiction of women, sexuality and sex.

One-sixth scale action figure fans complicate existing fan studies models, which emphasize cultural or social capital over economic capital, and which minimize or erase fan activities involving potential profit to focus instead upon gift economies. One-sixth scale action figure customization and other material fan practices offer productive examples of how multiple fandoms incorporate both pleasure and profit, use-value and exchange-value, into their fan practices, and how they explain or justify such practices to those within and outside their fan communities. Customizers emphasize their creations’ use-value over exchange-value in three specific ways. First, customizers create items not offered by any company. Second, they create affordable alternatives to expensive official merchandise. Third, their projects remedy inferior aspects of officially licensed merchandise. Customizers modify existing products or create their own if they cannot find or afford desired items of appropriate quality. These justifications offer insights into how multiple other fandoms likewise frame any commercial efforts as emphasizing use-value over exchange-value. Such constructions of fan practices ward against legal and ethical complications of using licensed texts, characters, and/or merchandise as a base or inspiration for one’s own creative efforts.

The fan cultures surrounding manga and anime in Japan, associated with ‘otaku’, continue to draw popular and academic interest around the world. This article focuses on the Comic Market (also known as Comiket or Comike), one of the largest fan gatherings in the world. The Comic Market brings together 35,000 artists selling self-published work, mostly manga books featuring characters from established series, which are purchased by the over half-a-million people that attend the event. This article, based on fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2004, argues that the Comic Market provides a space of self-affirmation, which keeps fans participating in the event even when it is physically exhausting and costs them money to do so. In contrast to approaches that imagine communities of fans communicating with one another about shared interests, this article argues that, at the Comic Market, it is not communicating with others that allows one to limit encounters with difference and affirm one’s self as a participant. Through a study of Comic Market participants, we can examine the state of self and communication in contemporary Japan and beyond.

The current investigation examined the number of teams fans list as rivals of teams they follow closely, moderately and casually. It was hypothesized that there would be positive correlations between the level of identification for a team and the number of teams listed as rivals, and that evaluations of rival teams would be most negative for teams followed closely, followed by teams followed moderately, and then teams followed casually. Further, we expected negative relationships between identification and evaluations of the rivals. The final two hypotheses concerned predictors of estimates of the likelihood of watching rivals’ games: participants would report being more likely to watch rivals of closely followed teams and that identification would account for a significant proportion of unique variance in desire to watch rival games. Students from several universities completed a questionnaire packet assessing identification for and perceptions of rivals of teams they follow closely, moderately and casually. The results indicated strong support for the hypothesized patterns of effects.

The Hasbro Company’s My Little Pony franchise began as a toy line marketed specifically to young girls; however, with the 2010 franchise reboot under the new title My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, an unanticipated and vocal following of adult men terming themselves ‘Bronies’ emerged as fans. As a focused subset of the brony community, ‘Military Bronies’ are challenging traditional expectations of masculinity and radically moving towards accessing formerly proscribed designations of innocence. The Military Brony phenomenon generates a sense of masculine innocence through the refutation of traditional cultural limitations on heteronormative masculinity.

This article interprets two key concepts in movie marketing (marketability and playability) through an empirical examination of the effects of commercial interpellation of audiences for a Hollywood ‘blockbuster’ fantasy film, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012). The article reports results of two online surveys of Hobbit audiences, one in November 2012 in the weeks preceding theatrical release, and one in February–June 2013 among post-viewing audiences, employing a mixedmethods approach that includes Q sorting and a questionnaire. We identify and describe five main pre-release and five main post-viewing audience groups, showing that the film had greater marketability than playability. Three of the pre-release audience groups expressed a high degree of anticipation to see the film, but only one post-viewing audience group expressed a high degree of enjoyment, while the others expressed various degrees of disappointment. We discuss the attributes of the film that most affected the film’s marketability and playability for each of the audience groups during the interpellation process from prefiguration to reception.

Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games, Paul Booth (2015) New York and London: Bloomsbury, 247 pp., ISBN: 9781628927446, p/bk, $28.45