Fandom and the Transtext

Abstract

The multiplicity of fan works coalesce into a transtext that is immense, flexible, and powerful, if contradictory and contentious. For many viewers, fan-created transmedia works-including fan fiction, fan art, fan videos, cosplay, fan musicals, role playing games, gif sets, poetry, and web series-define their understanding of a storyworld, of characters, and of a narrative landscape, arguably more so than the “official” source text (what fans have traditionally termed “canon”) (Stein and Busse 2009, 195). This chapter will examine three instances of generative fan-authored transmediascapes to consider their breadth and flexibility and the way this might alter our understanding of the source text/fan text (or, in fan terminology, canon/ fanon) relationship (Mittell 2012, 41). The diverse texts produced by fandom make up the web of what Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse have called the “fantext” (Hellekson and Busse 2006, 7). The ever-shifting fantext thrives on a contradictory multiplicity; in Hellekson and Busse’s words, “the community of fans creates a communal (albeit contentious and contradictory) interpretation in which a large number of potential meanings, directions, and outcomes co-reside” (Hellekson and Busse 2006, 7).

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