“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 Misérables (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. AbrégéL'univers et les créations des fans s'inspirant des médias contemporains ont un impact considérable sur les habitudes de lecture et de critique de millions de fans à travers le monde.Les communautés des fans sont uniques dans leurs pratiques d'adaptations et de formes de création communautaire.Les systèmes de valeurs et motivations des fans-créateurs sont différents de ceux des grands médias publics : ces fans créent, pour eux-mêmes et leurs communautés, des médias d'évasion, qui dépeignent simultanément leurs vies uniques et un monde imaginaire ou utopique leur offrant un sentiment de bien-être, de libération, et une catharsis.En tant qu'initié aux univers des fans, je suis bien positionné pour décrire ce pratiques culturelles.De précédentes études ont amplement démontré comment les systèmes racistes issus de la culture dominante sont adaptés par les fans au sein de leurs communautés, mais peu d'études se sont attardées sur les cas où les fans élargissent intentionnellement la portée de la représentation dans leurs communautés, lorsque ces derniers édifient les utopies basées sur celles qu'ils voient en les médias.Dans ce mémoire de maîtrise, j'utiliserai une nouvelle méthodologie pour retracer ces pratiques à travers différents types d'œuvres conçues par des fans de 2010 à 2019s, en se concentrant sur les univers des fans entourant Les Misérables, Hamilton, et Hadestown, qui interprètent les créations des fans dans le but de décrire un processus créatif sous-jacent de la cohérence du World Ain't Ready, un exemple d'œuvres de fans qui ne ressemble pas à son matériau d'origine. For Bea Egger AcknowledgmentsThis thesis is the product of years of hard work and dedication from an interconnected group of friends, mentors, and inspiring strangers, just like any creative work.Thanks to everyone who knows me for putting up with my constant ramblings about fan culture and poststructuralism.I would like to thank my adviser, Lloyd Whitesell, for supporting me through a research project very different from what he probably envisioned when I became his advisee.Thanks, Chip, for your insightful and useful comments on each of the dozens of drafts I left in your inbox.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".