Air castles built of granite: a combination of research and artistic strategies in the practice of fandom creativity

The article attempts to show how members of fandom communities combine research and artistic strategies in their work, using the examples of fanfiction texts, comments on them and other materials related to fan communities. The analysis made it possible to identify the following characteristics of the "research" strategy of members of fandom communities, in its relationship with the "artistic" strategy. 1. The lack of a common border between "addition" and "change". The ficwriter can fill in the "gaps" of the canon, and then start directly contradict it. 2. The existence of a kind of "research ethics", which consists, in particular, in the pursuit of "purity of experiment", that is, the search for the minimum transformation of the canon necessary to achieve the goal. 3. The presence of "research methodology", that is, the characteristics of fan fiction, recorded in the annotation. These conditions describe fanfic as an artistic text (genre, size, characters, etc.), but are also a convention between the author of the fanfic and the readers regarding conditions, within which (and through) the world of canon is explored. 4. A varying degree of confidence in the existing "documents": the author-creator can be perceived as a not quite reliable chronicler. The world of canon and the text of the original work representing the description of this world are separated in the fandom consciousness. 5. The specific attitude to the world of canon, which, on the one hand, going beyond the limits indicated by the creator-author, acquires an "ontological" status, which makes it possible to explore it as the real world, and on the other hand, this world is fundamentally variable and accessible to interpretations. 6. The lack of a single "paradigm", as well as a consensus on whether such uniformity can be achieved: on the one hand, the community often demonstrates tolerance to different opinions and interpretations, on the other hand, some members of the community can defend their position as the only correct one. 7. The "scientific search" of fandom communities as a whole does not seek to be cleansed of subjectivity, and the fandom "researcher" does not try to take an external position in relation to the text. On the contrary, subjectivity and involvement are fixed as a social norm (although, at the same time, some members of the community may strive for objectivity, as they understand it, and insist on it). 8. Research and artistic strategies are combined and give rise to a gaming strategy, a "what if" strategy, when a transformed version of the canon world is explored. This allows community members to meet specific needs, but this does not mean that they are completely free from the need to create an artistic text. The selection of these characteristics leads to the conclusion that fanfiction is a clear illustration of the processes occurring in modern science and culture. Refuting binary oppositions, it blurs traditional boundaries, including the boundaries between the objectivity of scientific research and the subjectivity of artistic creation, but at the same time lends credibility to individual experience and verifies the individual boundaries built by members of fandom communities.

Keywords

Authors

References