Core Post 3 -- Digital Fan Fiction

Henry Jenkins exists as a kind of end-all be-all authority on fan cultures within media studies (in my imagination he exists this way at least). I’ve encountered Jenkins in previous work on fan fiction and slash fiction, and I am extremely compelled by his claims of textual poaching, and specifically the female fans ability to transform texts from space operas to soap operas. Reading this essay again, I was struck by an inspiration of an extension of the fan participant experience. As Jenkins was writing mostly within the realm of fanzines (which I interpreted as leaning heavily into fanfiction), I wondered where digital media interpretations could fit in. It’s an unclear line between adaptation and fan media fiction, but I wonder where web series like The Lizzie Bennett Diaries or my personal favorite Carmilla falls under fan participation. 

To focus on the latter, Carmilla is a short Canadian web series ~loosely~ inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. While I’m unsure as to whether the authors of the web series were “fans” of the text in Jenkins’ sense, the appropriation of a masculine genre (fantasy) to a more female oriented web series strikes me as similar to the “genre switching…rereading and rewriting of,” in this case fantasy, vampire fiction (back when it was still very male dominated) “as an exotic type of romance” (482). Here the exotic type of romance is akin to the slash fiction of Kirk/Spock as the main romance of the series is between the two characters of Laura and Carmilla, and the story has been updated to a contemporary college student Laura, who must navigate college and supernatural life.

 Here the genre switching is taken a step further to a kind of medium switching, as the traditional fan fiction route is now updated to a web series and digital medium of fan participation. What makes it even more interesting is the cult following the series Carmilla has garnered, inspiring its own fan art, fictions, and fan interactions over the series itself. Now, there exists an almost palimpsest of fandom, where the original piece exists in traces of the newly worked fan creation, but the fan creation has taken authority as the central text, which new fandom circulates around instead of the original novel.