Fanfic Forensics

'Fanfic Forensics' is Nele Noppe's Ph.D project at the Japanese Studies department of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. The aim of the project is to conduct a semiotic comparison of narrative and visual elements occurring in Japanese and English-language fanwork derived from the same original work ('Harry Potter'). I focus on fanwork dealing with Severus Snape, because this character appears to inspire the most diverse and interesting textual and visual fan interpretations. Most posts here are mirrored from my main project website.

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Three months just got sucked into the vortex of cultural week organisation hell. Now it's over and done, and I managed to submit art for Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays a day before the November 16 deadlines too, so I can finally focus on research again.

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Moar kittehs!

During the following month I will translate two manga ('One Piece' 13 and '20th Century Boys' 15) and an academic article, mastermind a week of various cultural and academic activities involving a couple of hundred people from six different countries (including two dozen university professors) causing mayhem in about five different locations at the same time, finish pics for Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays whose designs are getting more complicated by the day, finish two abstracts, prepare a junior class on Japanese culture every week, make an appearance at a con, and select the final fanfic samples for my research from thousands of candidates. One or two instances of relaxed social interaction with friends are also scheduled. Judging from the strange bobbles growing on the inside of my elbows and knees, I should probably squeeze in "defeat bubonic plague" sometime this week. I wonder if it's a good thing when the to-do list is so absurd that it just makes you laugh and laugh and laugh and want to read PhD Comics instead of worry.

In other news, the number of new undergrads starting Japanese Studies at my university has gone up by forty percent since last year. Forty percent. It's very nice to know we're popular and the new group seems to contain a lot of interesting people, but crazy increase in student numbers + no increase whatsoever in staff numbers = frayed tempers. Hats off to the Japanese language teachers who are bravely coping with the worst of the extra workload.

All right. I'd been meaning to do a write-up of all the ethics questions relevant to my research project for quite a while, but the Surveyfail trainwreck suddenly makes the need for a write-up feel a lot more pressing. Fortunately, others have written quite extensively on how to study fandom while not being offensive and using a sound methodology. See, to name just a couple, theorynut, Kristina Busse's post on research ethics, and of course the AOIR guide. I try to follow these good examples, and the rest of this text explains how, in long and excruciating detail. I'll be tacking a link to this at the top of my main research site and its LiveJournal and InsaneJournal mirrors.

( Did I mention this is really, really long? )

PG, Snarry. Based on this giggle-worthy drabble by alisanne .

( Strip gobstones under cut )

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I'm still working through the batch of over a hundred new Snape-as-a-main-character Harry Potter dojinshi I bought in July, but once more, it seems all of them are yaoi. Now, I didn't do this on purpose. Really. I specifically went looking for het HP dojinshi with Snape in them in Toranoana and other shops that cater to a male clientele, because I know there are het HP dojinshi out there. I've seen them on the net. They weren't in the shops. Not anymore, the friendly sales clerks said. The female-oriented shops still had shelves and shelves of HP dojinshi, the vast majority of them yaoi.

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

In 2015, after Charles Xavier confesses to having used his powers to attack all mutants and then all other humans, Peter Parker writes an op-ed in the New York Times on the mutant "problem".

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The Snarry Games have started posting, which is productivity-impairing yet so many kinds of awesome. And look, I made a drawble for the Opening Games free-for-all -'Graveyard Book' Snarry :)

Reading notes on Slightly Out of Character: Shonen Epics, Doujinshi and Japanese Concepts of Masculinity by Megan Harrell.
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“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission", or so says a company that's developing biomass-eating robots with funding from the Pentagon.

The data sets that (will) contain all info extracted from dojinshi and fanfic samples are now publicly available; updates made to them will show up at once. These sets will be the basis for a comparison of Japanese and English-language fanworks later on. Links are in the right-hand menu on the main site.

The data sets are being compiled using Zoho Creator, a spiffy online database application that's easy to use and tweak for non-experts. It also has a good mobile interface, allowing ridiculously easy data input while on the go. ( Read more... )

Via @tinkerbill on Twitter: an organization in Wisconsin is trying to remove a book about a gay teenager from a library and literally burn it, on the grounds that it is "explicitly vulgar, racial [sic] and anti-Christian". Impressive. These concerned citizens clearly have a great deal of experience at speaking out against the racialiminosity that still pervades our culture.

Elsewhere, Avalon's Willow describes how total ignorance about other cultures causes people to completely miss instances of whitewashing and other forms of racism.( Read more... )

'Lunch and other obscenities' is a delightful Star Trek reboot fic that focuses on how roommates Uhura and Gaila learn to cope with their rather substantial cultural differences. Gaila's portrayal feels incredibly sympathetic and real. She's outgoing, confident, and looks forward to living in a society that's entirely new to her. Soon, the realities of dealing with a set of vastly different customs get to her, and she becomes terribly lonely until she and Uhura figure out how to respect each other.

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Two years after signing up and then losing interest after a day or so, I finally found a use for Twitter -recording all the small, maybe-insignificant, not-thought-through-in-the-slightest research ideas that come dropping out of the sky every day but are way to insignificant to blog about. I can never seem to blog about anything unless I have a lot of free time and manage to convince myself that I can say something intelligent and relevant about the topic at hand, circumstances that seem to coincide relatively rarely. Anyone interested in hearing five to ten random thoughts of dubious relevancy about Harry Potter dojinshi per day is very welcome to follow me here.

I also did a partial overhaul of the main website. ( Read more... )

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Cross-posted from the Let's Manga blog. Online store J-List is offering English and French translations of dojinshi by Linda Project (link definitely not safe for work), a circle famous for erotic works featuring, among others, characters from Bleach and Street Fighter.

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Late last year I came across a call for papers on fan culture from the most excellent anime and manga research journal Mechademia. It was a bit early in the project for paper writing, but I couldn't resist and wrote up my current theoretical framework and preliminary results on Harry Potter dojinshi and fanfic anyway.

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Had two interesting discussions today, one extremely vexing exchange about depictions of women in the media and another far more constructive talk about race (on the ways in which white Japanese Studies researchers may be influenced by their white privilege while studying the Japanese people). Since I'm busy getting a much-needed education about both feminism and racism right now, I ended up revisiting Audre Lorde's "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House" speech. It's still mind-blowing and I still can't believe I managed to spend so many years in so-called 'higher education' without ever being introduced to anything even remotely like it. The part that speaks to me the most today:

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance, and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.

Yes. This. This.

My apologies for the lack of a cut in the last post. It's an automated post from Diigo, and while this is a great service usually, it screwed up that post enough to make it resistant against all attempts at inserting a cut. Won't happen again.

• The classification for 攻め[seme] and 受け[uke] « Japanese words of anime fans, by anime fans, for anime fans

  Tags: boys_love, dojinshi, terminology

• terri_testing: The Keeper of the Keys: Harry Potter meta

  Very interesting analysis of Dumbledore's motives, starting from why he sent Hagrid to introduce Harry to the Wizarding World instead of a more dependable and level-headed faculty member. Unlikely that this is how JKR envisioned it, but the analysis makes so much sense and is so well-supported by canon evidence that it sounds far more likely than JKR's own interpretation of Dumbledore. Gives a whole different meaning to 'creating a monster': the author's idea of the character seems far less reasonable than the readers' here, and it's not pretty.

  Tags: dumbledore, narrative, characters, hagrid, snape, harry_potter

• Bring Forth the Best Robes

  Looks at Snape from a very emphatically religious perspective. Not sure what to think of that, personally, but it may give me some good ideas. To buy.

  Tags: books, snape, characters, religion, to_buy

• Re-read The Sorcerer's Stone Today! An Unauthorized Guide

  Has some fun parts/theories, but fans have gone much farther. Will probably just read parts online.

  Tags: books, narrative, harry_potter, to_read

• Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter

  Looks very interesting. Buy instead of hurt eyes staring at screen.

  Tags: to_buy, harry_potter, snape, morality, religion

• Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan

  by David Leheny, on views of/communication about sexuality in Japan

  Tags: academic, books, enjo_kosai, sexual_content, media, manga, law, children

• mary_j_59 - 19th-century Mores (yay!)

  Tags: harry_potter, snape, race, motherhood, foreigners

  • Snape is the head ot Slytherin house, and that house has a foreign taint; while all the other founders of Hogwarts have good Anglo Saxon names, Salazar Slytherin shares a Christian name with a Portuguese dictator. Naturally, Slytherin must be the “evil” house. Then there are the foreign students who participate in the tournament in GOF.
  • Worse yet, they have no compunction about "cheating" humans, and have, it seems, started several wars. This picture of the goblins combines several of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes.

• Snapedom - If we carry through on the racism/prejudice equivalency...

  Tags: harry_potter, snape, race

  •   Is that part of what James meant when he said it was that Severus existed?  He added "if you know what I mean", which is the nod-nod, wink-wink of a racist, roughly equivalent to the loaded statements characters in Seinfeld used to make about homosexuals

• Snapedom - Still Further Thoughts on Prejudice in the Potterverse and Snape's Worst Memory

  Tags: snape, lily, race, harry_potter

  • 
    Severus was being ABUSED. TORTURED, for crying out loud. Severus broke. And Severus later tried to make amends, only to be kicked while he was down. It is just amazing to me that so many people cannot or will not see that this matters in the moral calculus. And it is a perfect example of why we need to stop viewing this scene solely through the filter of "racism" and all the connotations and baggage that holds for each of us: The prejudice against Severus, based on class, appearance, House affiliation, and so on, exhibited in this scene is just as morally and ethically objectionable as the prejudice against Lily based on her circumstances of birth.
    
    I refuse to blame the young man for breaking under torture.
  • To see Lily alone as right and Severus alone as wrong is to miss the bigger picture of multiple bigotries that interweave and permeate the social and relational dynamics at Hogwarts and in the larger wizarding world--and in our own. Racism, sexism, classism, status-ism, affluence-ism, beauty-ism: It's all connected.

• Snapedom - October Challenge: Severus and the Marauders

  Tags: snape, harry_potter, bullying

  • Linguistic violence is never so manifest as in all the corrections, momentary or long-lasting, to which dominated speakers, in a desperate effort towards correction, consciously or unconsciously subject the stigmatized aspects of their pronunciation, their vocabulary (with all the forms of euphemism) and their syntax; or in the confusion which makes them `lose their means', rendering them incapable of `finding their words', as if they had been suddenly dispossessed of their own language.
    (bolding mine)
    
    This is exactly what happens to Snape.
  • According to Bourdieu (from the same source as the quote above):
    
    Quote:
    Symbolic domination really begins when the misrecognition (méconnaissance) implied by recognition (reconnaissance) leads those who are dominated to apply the dominant criteria of evaluation to their own practices
    (bolding mine)
    
    Snape succumbs.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of fanfic forensics group favorite links are here.