Calling all fans, acafans, and anti-fans!
I’m currently wrapping up a draft of my thesis that looks at the way intertextuality functions in the monster mashup. I argue that it revives the past in a very specific (and monstrous) way, while at the same time having wider implications for studies in historical fiction, adaptation, and remix culture more broadly. More on that later.
At this exact moment, I’m looking for your help in researching my next chapter. This chapter will examine the way remix culture, with special focus on the monster mashup, deconstructs the relationship between fan, superfan, and antifan. What, exactly, is the distinction, and how do both individual fans and corporations capitalise on these categories? Any relevant sources or information you have on any of these topics would be much appreciated. You can send them to me here in a comment, on Facebook or Twitter, or by e-mailing me at DeBruinMJ@cardiff.ac.uk.
The premise is this. Contemporary culture, we are told, is obsessed with the remake and the reboot. There is nothing new or original to be found. Remix takes this idea and runs with it, creating new objects explicitly out of old ones, and blurring the borders between the original and the derivative. The recent popularity of this creative trend has interesting implications for fandom and fan studies, which has long been concerned with the things fans create (products, communities, artworks) around the intellectual property of others. Beyond questions of legality, what distinguishes fanart from homage, or a fan from a superfan (professional fan), in this context?
Take these t-shirt prints, and the above poster print. Qwertee.com capitalises on specific types of fandom, and targets specific kinds of fans. In addition, the company assumes a positive, even fan-like stance (right down to in-jokes in the copy) in order to sell these t-shirts.
Using examples from the world of monster mashup (suggestions welcome!), in my next chapter I hope to explore how the language of fandom is employed in discussions of artistic appropriation in twenty-first-century popular culture. Monster mashups – in which fantastical monsters run amok in historical texts and contexts – range from actual fan productions to big-budget projects cashing in on fan aesthetics and interests. These texts often construct themselves as the figurative monsters of the creative world, and are marketed as revolutionary responses to copyright law and big industry, or even as anti-fan productions.
In the case of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for example, a marketing campaign that started off from an anti-fan perspective (‘making the classics less boring’) was quickly transformed into one that sold Seth Grahame-Smith and Quirk Books as ‘true’ fans (‘the book underscores what we all originally loved about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice’). I’m hoping to argue that in the monster mashup, and in remix culture more broadly, the line between fan, superfan, and anti-fan is a fine one.
Thanks in advance for your help and suggestions!