Power the Dark Lord Knows Not: The Fractal Serialities of Fanfiction
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines contemporary fanfiction as a special type of engagement with popular serial narratives. It proposes the concept of fractal seriality as a lens through which to gauge the proliferation and popularization of fanfiction as a potentially fruitful strategy for critiquing fiction: part of fiction’s persuasiveness inheres in an author’s ability to consciously or unconsciously set the rules of the fictional world in ways that reinforce the author’s message and their vision of the real world, while fractal seriality allows fanfiction authors to change the focus and reorient stories in ways that will engage readers of the original series while refusing to circulate key aspects of the initial worldbuilding and moral values. E. J. Lomax’s boy with a scar builds on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series not by continuing it chronologically but branching off from it in a series of “what-ifs” that broaden and deepen the wizarding world by focusing on characters, events, and circumstances that the original series has elided, oversimplified, or otherwise treated in ways that Lomax finds inadequate. VeroniqueClaire’s Volée , meanwhile, expands the action of three scenes from the Phantom of the Opera stage play into 25 chapters, realizing the potential for transformative justice already inherent, but unfulfilled, in the original.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it