“I Need You to Pretend to Date Me” Tracing Fanwork from Source to its Furthest Extreme
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary media fandom and fanwork have a significant impact on the reading and critical habits of millions of fans around the world.Fandom is unique in its adaptational practices and community-based forms of creation.Without a profit motive, fan creators have different priorities for their works, exploring personal issues and even utopian ideals.As an insider in fandom, I am well positioned to describe these cultural practices.Previous studies have amply discussed the racist systems fans have transplanted from mainstream culture into their communities, but few have focussed attention on when fans intentionally expand the scope of representation in their communities, when fans construct utopias based on the ones they see in the media.In this thesis, I will use a novel methodology to trace these practices through different types of musical theatre fanwork during the 2010s, focussing on the large and creative fandoms surrounding Les Misrables (1985), Hamilton (2015), and Hadestown (2019), interpreting fanwork to describe the creative process underlying the coherence of World Ain 't Ready (2014-15), an example of fanwork that bears very little resemblance to its source material.In this thesis, I will follow the development of a set of ideas from the source musicals through many pieces of fanart to World Ain't Ready.This will support a discussion of fanwork as an inherently communal, rather than individual, product, and act as an introduction to this kind of fanwork for non-fan scholars.I hope that this thesis will help contribute to discussions of race, gender, and sexuality in fandom by showing how fan creators can engage in radically inclusive representations of diverse people, as well as show a methodology that promotes easy understanding among readers unfamiliar with the fandoms in question. AbrgL'univers et les crations des fans s'inspirant des mdias contemporains ont un impact considrable sur les habitudes de lecture et de critique de millions de fans travers le monde.Les communauts des fans sont uniques dans leurs pratiques d'adaptations et de formes de cration communautaire.Les systmes de valeurs et motivations des fans-crateurs sont diffrents de ceux des grands mdias publics : ces fans crent, pour eux-mmes et leurs communauts, des mdias d'vasion, qui dpeignent simultanment leurs vies uniques et un monde imaginaire ou utopique leur offrant un sentiment de bien-tre, de libration, et une catharsis.En tant qu'initi aux univers des fans, je suis bien positionn pour dcrire ce pratiques culturelles.De prcdentes tudes ont amplement dmontr comment les systmes racistes issus de la culture dominante sont adapts par les fans au sein de leurs communauts, mais peu d'tudes se sont attardes sur les cas o les fans largissent intentionnellement la porte de la reprsentation dans leurs communauts, lorsque ces derniers difient les utopies bases sur celles qu'ils voient en les mdias.Dans ce mmoire de matrise, j'utiliserai une nouvelle mthodologie pour retracer ces pratiques travers diffrents types d'oeuvres conues par des fans de 2010 2019s, en se concentrant sur les univers des fans entourant Les Misrables, Hamilton, et Hadestown, qui interprtent les crations des fans dans le but de dcrire un processus cratif sous-jacent de la cohrence du World Ain't Ready, un exemple d'oeuvres de fans qui ne ressemble pas son matriau d'origine.Dans ce mmoire de matrise, je suivrai, travers des creations de fans sur World Ain't Ready, le dveloppement d'un ensemble d'ides provenant de plusieurs comedies musicales.Cette mthodologie permettra de soutenir une discussion sur les oeuvres de fans en tant qu'lment communautaire inhrent, et non en tant objet individuel, et permettra aussi ce mmoire de matrise d'offrir une introduction aux oeuvres des fans pour les chercheurs ne se considrant pas come fans de ces dernires.J'espre que cette recherche contribuera aux discussions sur la race, le genre et la sexualit dans l'univers des fans en montrant comment les fans-crateurs peuvent faire les choses correctement, ainsi qu'en proposant une mthodologie qui favorise une comprhension intuitive pour les lecteurs qui ne sont pas familiers avec les univers de fans tudis tout au long de cette recherche.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.014 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".