What can youth writing do in fandoms?

Abstract

We investigated experiences of young individuals who share literary fictions in digital fan communities aiming at unveiling the potential of texts production that are decentralized from social orders echoing in school didactics. For this research, we adopted cartography and mapped activities whose consumed and produced contents follow transmediation that drives the convergence culture. However, along this journey, these young individuals change their ways of thinking, relating, and learning within a network, acquiring multiliteracies and formulating what is understood as collective intelligence. As a result, we anticipate that collaborative textual elaboration paves the way for a form of cooperative learning, in which the collaborative spirit and non-stratified power relations prevail.

Keywords
cartography; text production; multiliteracies; convergence culture; collective intelligence

Resumo

Investigamos experiências de jovens que compartilham ficções literárias em comunidades digitais de fãs na intenção de desvelar o potencial da produção de textos descentralizada de ordenamentos sociais que ecoam na didática escolar. Para esta pesquisa, adotamos a cartografia e mapeamos atividades, cujos conteúdos consumidos e produzidos seguem a transmidiação que movimenta a cultura da convergência. Porém, nesse percurso, esses jovens alteram seus modos de pensar, de se relacionar e de aprender em rede, adquirindo multiletramentos e formulando o que se compreende por inteligência coletiva. Como resultado, antevemos que a elaboração textual em coautoria abre passagem para um tipo de aprendizagem solidária, em que prevalecem o espírito colaborativo e relações não estratificadas de poder.

Palavras-chave
cartografia; produção de texto; multiletramentos; cultura da convergência; inteligência coletiva

Introduction

Writing has the power to treat what I call “wound-marks.” I am referring to marks of experiences that produce in us a state of weakening of our power to act that exceeds a certain threshold, a kind of intoxication. A mark of this type remains a carrier of a poison that can, at any moment, spread and contaminate everything. As an instrument of thought, writing can penetrate these marks, nullify their poison, and make us recover our power.

(Rolnik, 1993, p. 247)

The title of this article questions the power of writing, and the introductory quote shows one of its many possibilities. That is why the highlighted excerpt inspired our arguments during the investigation of the creative processes of amateur literature in digital fan communities, spaces known as fandoms or fan domains.

The term amateur is appropriate for the textual productions we come across, as its etymology comes from the Latin amatorem, i.e., someone who does something for love, for pleasure, as is the case of young people who live on digital platforms created for the exchange of literary experiences between fans.

Regarding digital communities, two Brazilian multifandom platforms together had a collection of over one million productions by January 2023, indicating the relevance of writing as a recreational activity for notably young users since many indicate their ages in the registration field of their profiles. Furthermore, in the comments section, there are more clues about the alleged youthful condition, given some excerpts of conversations about school, college, sharing a room with a sibling, and starting classes.

As we immerse ourselves in youthful experiences of textual elaboration that are far removed from school writing models, we consider the cartography method¹ to be the most suitable for investigating the creative processes of amateur literature because these aesthetic movements are much more charged with forces and intensities than with rules and techniques.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1995), producing any map of life is done while paving existential paths or seeking to find paths traveled. Therefore, cartography investigates processes of subjectivation, especially when they provide experiences with the power to resist redundancy, the repetition of rules and conventions that sometimes castrate other ways of feeling and living.

Given the vast theoretical repertoire that constitutes the cartographic method, we consider it sufficient to map the reported activities supported by the concepts of molar, molecular, and lines of flight and those of root, radicle, and rhizome. We also use the understanding of territory, desiring machines, and smooth and striated spaces, all of which will be discussed later. For now, we will discuss school procedures for reading and producing texts, introducing the reader to criticism and the repetition of the status quo in formal learning environments.

Fictional literature is commonly used in early childhood and elementary schools to support improving reading and writing skills and personal development.

The imaginative language brought in fairy tales allows for experience and meaningful contact with different realities, feelings, and situations and externalizes the needs of the child’s internal universe. Storytelling in childhood works as a stimulus for subjectivity and is a fruitful source for imaginative language.

(Kielb & Silva, 2023, p. 14)

However, upon reaching high school, playfulness in youth learning is repressed by the overload of technical writing, when poetry and literary fiction are replaced by argumentative dissertations, an outline of adult writing based on the discrimination of “imaginative language” in favor of meeting specific curricular orders.

However, immersing ourselves in the collection of young fans as educators, we come across collaborative writing and reading practices that are far away from the teaching methods of many Brazilian high schools, where individual reading and competitive writing activities predominate, for which students’ textual productions are seen as adversaries, dependent on the logic of learning ranking required mainly by the National High School Exam (ENEM).

Fan fiction writing experiences already expose the power that co-authored texts have to shake the habit of social competition, a stance linked to exclusionary attitudes that leave “wound-marks” in society and produce in us, according to Rolnik (1993, p. 247), a “state of weakening of our power to act that exceeds a certain threshold, a kind of intoxication.”

To map these experiences, we selected the collections of the multifandom platforms² Spirit Fanfic e Histórias and Nyah! Fanfiction is designed to publish fiction based on original works, especially animations, films, or books. In this context, we also selected fan writers who appreciate Japanese cultural productions, known among them as otakus. This choice allowed us to move away from Western entertainment, a type of consumption that still dominates Brazilian leisure.

With the growth of the global distribution of oriental products, mainly through digital means, otaku communities are increasingly emerging in Brazil, as are fans of manga (comic book), anime (cartoon), and their characters. Regardless of the consumption format, fans of a specific content have a strong chance of meeting in multifandom to enjoy and discuss stories and characters.

During these meetings, they create their own stories and collaboratively learn to produce fan fiction (fanfiction, fanfic, or fic), fan art (fanart), and fantasy clothing (cosplay) with the support of different technological devices and multi-language modes, which is why we reflect on literary leisure practices and learning under the contribution of the concepts of multiliteracies (Rojo, 2012, 2017), convergence culture (Jenkins, 2009), and collective intelligence (Lévy, 1997).

Based on the above, this text is organized by the theoretical concepts that support our arguments. It introduces the reader to the young writers, what they elaborate on, and what we can learn from their collaborative writing experiences and ways of living in digital territories. However, before that, we detail the expanded meaning of territory for those who adopt cartography inspired by the philosophy of difference.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1997), territory is a form of expression that delimits a space, a culture, and even something or someone, subject to changing processes and open to becomings. Because territory is not a fixed or static concept but a plane of experimentation and composition, creativity can emerge at any moment. Therefore, every territory is a field of possibilities, which, in the case of the textual productions mapped in this article, point to opportunities for resistance to learning subordinated to social competition.

The territory is made of decoded fragments of all kinds, which are borrowed from the milieus but then assume the value of “properties”: even rhythms take on a new meaning (refrains). The territory makes the assemblage. The territory is more than the organism and the milieu, and the relation between the two; that is why the assemblage goes beyond mere “behavior” (hence the importance of the relative distinction between territorial animals and milieu animals).

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1997, pp. 192-193)

As a field of possibilities, territories encourage thought to select information by encountering it with our intimate repertoires or our premeditated images, to feel it and reflect on it, calling on intelligence to create other meanings, other signs for the same information because, according to Deleuze (2003, p. 95), first come the signs, the images, the representations in thought and then intelligence: “It is good when it comes after.”

Deleuze (2003, p. 4) discussed this process and reflected: “Everything that teaches us something emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs.” However, there is no learning when thought keeps signs in a state of representation, reproduction, and mimicry.

To be sensitive to signs, to consider the world as an object to be deciphered, is doubtless a gift. But this gift risks remaining buried in us if we do not make the necessary encounters, and these encounters would remain ineffective if we failed to overcome certain stock notions.

(Deleuze, 2003, p. 25)

In Proust and Signs, Deleuze (2003) showed that literature is a form of thought that enables the creation of signs capable of expressing the singularity of the world. Because it is singular and projected from a “thought without image.”³ Literature, therefore, as an artistic manifestation, is a form of knowledge production because it also creates concepts, signs, and images, just like science and philosophy. However, the act of thinking is not instantaneous; it flows through motivations and pressures: “It is always through an intensity that thought comes to us.” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 144)

Also, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (2006) argued about the relationship between thought and creation, culminating in a series of questions, emphasizing the problematization of the act of thinking itself. In the author’s terms, thought does not occur exclusively within a person but is produced by a movement involving the relationship between thought and the outside. In this sense, the act of thinking is not a solitary activity, as it happens in collaboration with the world, with signs, with what already exists or is already represented. However, learning about something requires that thought create other signs and images, demanding, for this purpose, the right to refuse truths embedded in signs in predetermined images.

It is no coincidence that we chose to map processes of literary creation qualified as an amateur due to the intensity that this adjective carries: doing something for love, for enjoyment, an opportune activity to abandon predetermined signs, to surrender to the unknown of the senses and to invent other signs through creative thinking, producing knowledge; an experience that synthesizes what we want for the education of youth.

Like the reality to which it is glued, education is open and multiple. Therefore, it is necessary to seek thoughts that are faithful to becoming, with the capacity to think about difference without representing it a priori, because becoming in its pure form is insubmissive to the mediating bonds of representation since it does not represent itself. At the same time, its chaotic nature does not inform it of an image that remains at our disposal in stillness to be recognized.

(Vitorino & Felix, 2021, p. 2)

Thus, we expose relevant movements of thought during encounters between external and internal signs, material and immaterial images, and senses combined by existential lines responsible for who we are at each moment.

Thought crossed by marks of life

we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesies, tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature. We said that we are composed of lines, three kinds of lines. Or rather, of bundles of lines, for each kind is multiple. We may be more interested in a certain line than in the others, and perhaps there is indeed one that is not determining but of greater importance … if it is there.

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1996, p. 70)

This quote helps us to understand that it is on the invisible plane of our intimacy that the arrangements of lines of life that compose us take place, lines that come from outside, invade the being, intertwine with lines already ingrained in us, and (re)shape us. Cartography allows us to draw maps of life experiences through the movement of these lines, which are distinct, complex, and tangled but can be grouped into three types: hard as millstones, called molar lines; molecular, with a flexible structure and more open to the unusual; and flight or rupture, capable of modifying our composition by formulating other marks, creating other signs for life.

The molar ball is formed by orders that govern us, such as laws, beliefs, and conventions, producing guiding marks of thoughts and attitudes. “ They are lines maintained by control and capture mechanisms, always available for recognition, for moral valuations” (Costa & Loureiro, 2019, p. 918). Like the root of a plant, molar lines originate from a single central point, expand linearly and vertically, and have a fixed structure responsible for the rigidity of social relations and established knowledge.

The weaving of molecular lines takes us to the middle of the existential field, in an in-and-out of disciplined or more accessible experiences. “The changes and movements caused by these lines are, for the most part, imperceptible to language or even to the eye” (Costa & Loureiro, 2019, p. 921). These lines spread in several directions because they do not follow a fixed and hierarchical structure. They can connect different elements, opening paths to other forms of thought and action. Given this, Deleuze and Guattari (1995) related them to the radicle, the embryo of a root that, when broken, loses its unique shape and branches out with varied complexions, just like a story enjoyed by a fan, which unfolds the root work into endless contents.

However, lines of flight or rupture produce creative marks when we open our thoughts to the unusual aspects of life, to the difference that is never within us. This happens when, at a (un)certain moment, linear, continuous, and inevitable flows disturb us to the point of generating new ways of being. This is when “the balance of this new current figure is thus broken, its contours tremble” (Rolnik, 1993, p. 242). Lines of flight, therefore, “are vectors that radically challenge the a priori captures of methods, categorizations, classifications, and moral judgments.” (Costa & Loureiro, 2019, pp. 922-923).

Resulting from lines of flight, the rhizome, a botanical species with horizontal growth and unorganized and unpredictable branching, corresponds to a deviation from dominant structures and an opening for new trajectories and connections. With an undirected expansion, the rhizome sprouts in unexpected places, like the grass that follows the crack in a wall or a fan writer who invents their fiction when touched by a work.

In short, the relationship between root, radicle, and rhizome with molar, molecular, and lines of flight is a way of understanding different modes of organization, expansion, and deviation in knowledge, power, and subjectivity. If roots, originating from molar lines, aim at stabilization and fixation; radicles, constituted by molecular lines, expand multiplicity and complexity; and rhizomes, created by lines of flight, escape repetition and create unusual experiences, lived in the same territory through which the other lines circulate, which always intertwine or overlap.

Thus, the more a person surrenders to the strangeness of incessant linear connections, the more chance they have of affirming their existence according to the power of this delivery of wave-like effects, as it affects the senses that influence thought, which in turn stimulates intelligence. Therefore, if we only become different through the marks arising from encounters (between humans or between them and material and immaterial objects), if they are the ones that constitute us through the insistence of thought, intelligence is also moved by the power of marks upon marks.

Furthermore, there is no way to ignore the visible plane of our intimacy (Rolnik, 1993), which corresponds to life in society, nor should we understand the molar, molecular, and lines of flight through the dualisms of good and evil, fruitful and sterile, better and worse, as we will discuss later, since the intention is to highlight how much these lines subjectify us, i.e., they make us who we are being, since, despite having a single body, we are coupled to everything that surrounds us and marks us, and for this reason we are plural.

By reasoning about the lines that outline our inner self and connect us to society and nature, Deleuze and Guattari (2010) argued that our body is, at the same time, an organic and social desiring machine and only works because we desire it. Therefore, this desire is the fuel that drives the machinery of life. However, for the two philosophers, it is common for desires not to be ours but subjectivized by the capitalist machine that operates society.

These authors understood that the process of producing bodily, political, aesthetic, and social desiring machines is based on the capitalist regime, which found in money the most effective mechanism for its maintenance through the reinvention of its uses, enjoyments, and desires. The currency was launched into preexisting codes and opportunely remodeled society, which always needs to be reinvented in an endless cycle.

Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode and rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.”

(Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 54)

Therefore, the capitalist system is the great factory of universal desires. Its functioning depends on the three types of lines that weave life: molar lines help maintain the social status quo through rules and consensus because when everyone wants or accepts the same decision, it becomes valid and accurate, like the rule that learning must have a grade from zero to ten and whoever meets the prescription of the maximum grade will be considered a leader among the others.

Molecular lines, in turn, allow for a certain degree of flexibility and help those who do not meet leadership requirements to endure social determinisms. Despite shaking up society with unruly behaviors or ideas, lines of flight are also conducive to the capitalist machine, which sees in novelty a monetary opportunity to expand the scope of desires. In this case, the machine captures the novelty and transforms it into a consumer product or even another behavioral rule.

Therefore, it is impossible to pre-establish which lines are affirmative, castrating, or destructive since there are both lines that order conduct that preserves life and the right to exist, and there are lines of flight that put life at risk. However, in any circumstance, the plot of these lines creates a singular map of the body (of man and society), with cartography that is sometimes predetermined by orders, open to becoming the unusual. In any case, there are always questions: “What are your lines? What map are you in the process of making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price, for yourself and others?” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1996, p. 71).

Considering that cartography is engaged with the creative possibilities of unusual encounters as a tactic for the symmetry between the rights of existence and the affirmation of life, the becomings matter in investigating the crossing of lines. In the case of this investigation, we invest in the becoming-writing as a process of healing wound-marks by believing in the agencies of fans through the collective writing of their amateur fiction since they put meanings, thoughts, and intelligences into the circuit. In the same way, writing is the result of marks, being the visible record of the invisible.

However, above all, writing invents marks when it develops through fantasy, creating unique ways of seeing and feeling the world, experiences that, based on all the understanding exposed, transform thought into a storehouse of sliding becomings and open the way for the institution of healing marks, solidarity signs, arising from learning in co-authorship through the sharing of knowledge.

The trait that the various processes of singularization have in common is that their differential becoming rejects capitalistic subjectivation. It can be felt in a warmth of relations, in a certain way of desiring, in a positive affirmation of creativity, in a willingness to love, in a willingness simply to live or survive, in the multiplicity of these willingnesses. It is necessary to open up space for this to happen. Desire can only be lived in vectors of singularity.

(Guattari & Rolnik, 1996, p. 47)

We consider that the creative process of fan writers is one of these “vectors of singularity” and externalizes the concepts of the three existential lines since molar lines flow through it, which are embedded in amateur literature as roots, just like the ethics of fidelity among fans for the maintenance of characters or excerpts of an original work. Even when creating fiction rooted in a canon, there are always holes caused by molecular lines that allow for the unexpected and create different contours, according to the rootlets of fanfics, stories originating from original content and created by fan writers, called fanfiction writers (Lima, 2020).

However, the agencies investigating the two digital platforms proved so influential that these fans became capable of producing their fiction when they left the condition of simple consumers. Just like rhizomes, their texts sprouted from singular lines of flight, the ones most likely to shake determinisms.

Considering that our cartography focuses on fictional writing in digital environments, technological tools, and multimodal languages used in the cybernetic context, their impacts on thought processes and textual creativity cannot be ignored. This field of study has vast scientific production, from which we selected the concepts of multiliteracies, convergence culture, and collective intelligence.

Creativity driven by digital technologies

Affected by the digital contemporaneity in which we live, we are immersed in the multimodality of technological devices, in which we appropriate content and also produce it, according to the concept of multiliteracies (Rojo, 2012, 2017). Therefore, even without realizing it, we construct meanings mediated by digital artifacts and increasingly rely on different languages, whether to meet determinisms, to understand current communication formats, or even to make ourselves understood.

Thus, learning to read and write developed in this context is understood as a literacy process whose correlation between the self and the other, manifested in diverse and plural environments, especially in digital environments or those strongly dependent on multimodal technologies gave rise to the concept of multiliteracies supported by Rojo (2017, p. 4):

Multiliteracies are practices for dealing with contemporary multimodal or multi-semiotic texts – primarily digital but also printed – that include procedures (such as gestures for reading, for example) and reading and production skills that go far beyond the understanding and production of written texts. They incorporate the reading and (re)production of images and photos, diagrams, graphs and infographics, videos, audio, etc.

However, we adopted the concept of multiliteracies without the intention of prescribing teaching models since our objective is to reveal possibilities of resistance to the capture of creative experiences that escape from reproductive curricula and didactics, to hinder the process of formatting the adapted young person, as expressed in one of the objectives for secondary education promulgated by the Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education (Law No. 9,394, 1996, our emphasis): “II – the basic preparation for work and citizenship of the student, to continue learning to be able to adapt flexibly to new conditions of subsequent occupation or improvement.”

Escaping from reproductivism is an attempt at a “molecular revolution” or “daring to singularize” (Guattari & Rolnik, 1996, p. 45), of moving from one state of being to another through the collective composition of another way of feeling and acting.

The attempt at social control on a world scale through the production of subjectivity clashes with considerable factors of resistance from processes of permanent differentiation that I would call the “molecular revolution.” But the name is not important.

What characterizes the new social movements is a resistance against this general process of serializing subjectivity and an attempt to produce original, singular modes of subjectivation, processes of subjective singularization.

(Guattari & Rolnik, 1996, p. 45)

In this case, we consider the pedagogical idea of multiliteracies a “daring to singularize” because its main foundation is the belief in the power of resistance to the reproduction of significant subjectivity through the existence of different codes of life, even though they are always intertwined with dominant signs. This happens because “Meaning makers do not simply use what they have been given: they are fully makers and remakers of signs and transformers of meaning” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 175).

Based on the understanding of “ remakers of signs,” we created a map of multiliteracies to highlight the process of remixing literacies, which is the reuse or customization of original digital content, whose potential is defended by Silva (2022, p. 82):

with its ability to destabilize stagnant perspectives and multiply points of view, literacy through remix is undoubtedly the critical point of participatory literacy. We believe this aspect can also be understood as a component of network collaborative learning.

The map was formulated during our journey in the two multifandoms, whose hyperlinks provided by one or another fanfiction writer transported us to blogs (digital portals commonly managed by amateurs) and to various social networks, i.e., we follow transmediation. This action integrates the Culture of Convergence (Jenkins, 2009), which emerged around collective intelligence (Lévy, 1997).

Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and audiences. Convergence alters the logic by which media industries operate and by which media consumers process news and entertainment.

(Jenkins, 2009, p. 43)

Within the context of convergence culture, transmediation refers to an intentional and organized action for distributing stories or events articulated by different media and strategies, structuring and acting through a flow of cooperative knowledge. Furthermore, stories distributed and expanded through the marketing use of transmediation are called transmedia narratives, which can be understood as rootlets because they are linked to the roots of an original story.

Transmedia narratives, however, are not complements to an original work, as they present their totality and singularity, according to Lima (2020, p. 37): “The narrative present in each media can be consumed individually, as its construction must present characteristics of the narrative universe, but have a story that can be understood if consumed individually.”

The distribution of the same content across different media and stories is part of a transmediation plan, such as the Japanese game Pokémon from the 1990s, which was transformed into an anime with over a thousand episodes, had a narrative told in a movie, has several digital games with its theme and countless fanfics all over the world.

Premiering on Japanese TV on April 1, 1997, on TV Tokyo, the cartoon basically followed the script devised by the game, although some aspects of the game that could have been used were left out. Even so, the main elements were represented: the fictional continent, its cities, the gym leaders, and the 150 little monsters that made the game successful.

(Pokémon, 2013)

Regardless of the commercial content and digital reach, otaku leisure goes beyond ordinary consumption. In this regard, Ishida (2010) was interested in discovering when and how young people in Finland in the Internet age became fans of anime, manga, and Japanese rock since, initially, when such products arrived in the country, they were perceived as “dangerous commodity which should be kept away from children” (Ishida, 2010, p. 71). The researcher concluded that sharing fans’ opinions and their unfolding content on the network were the primary triggers for another way of perceiving this entertainment in the country.

Saniyah’s research (2011) with young Indonesians also focused on fans’ relationships with manga and anime. According to him, what differentiates a simple consumer from a fan’s reading is the transformation of this action into experiences, one of which is integrating communities for appreciation and shared activities around this material and all the commercial developments produced by the cultural industry.

In Brazil, Urbano (2018, p. 111) highlighted the strength of otaku meetings through digital means, currently the primary vehicle for narratives and characters in these contents, given the low circulation of anime on open and paid channels and the decline in sales of printed manga, in which she pointed out:

high importance in the constitution of a highly productive and structured circuit – managed and mediated by fans – located on the internet, with a considerable range of communities and virtual discussion forums dedicated to Japanese series(s) and other products of Japanese pop culture (URBANO, 2013). Through digital networks, it has become possible to participate in these discussion forums, consume the latest releases on the market, and even become more involved with Japanese pop.

These contents, distributed outside the mainstream entertainment culture of each country, instigate experiences that are sometimes transgressive but which, within the scope of transnational digital communities, are commonplace. Thus, cultural and social distancing seems to insert the fan into an intense state of fantasy, providing the opportunity to invent an other-self constructed by the collective of fandoms. In these arrangements, the fans feel stimulated because they are not alone, as many like them desire a different way of seeing, feeling, and acting in the world.

Domestically remixed anime and manga are an example of how much fans have contributed to the deconstruction of the root commercialization model, whose vertical and single-direction consumption, from producer to consumer, was redirected to multiple-entry networks, to the point where the original content lost its protagonist status and the unfolded content, reformulated by an incalculable portion of amateur producers, was distributed freely, without formal authorship, at which point knowledge became collective and circulating.

Lévy (1997) studied these productions and concluded that the underlying knowledge was not limited to the level of the other’s idea but to something greater, in the greatness of collective intelligence, which we call a kind of digital heritage of humanity, whose collection of ideas, practices, behaviors, and tensions can only be archived when the technical standard identifies the authorship only by et al. In fact, this heritage was not created to be archived but to be free and distributed since the “base and objective of collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of people” (Lévy, 1997, p. 29).

It is possible to see that the concepts discussed are based on knowledge sharing and the consequent transformation of customs and hierarchies naturalized as true and immutable. Consequently, they are combined with the concept of multiliteracies, which contains three basic characteristics (Rojo, 2012):

• a) they are interactive or collaborative, as they bring together cultures and languages during the consumption and production of digital content;

• b) transgress power relations by appropriating patented content or ideas;

• c) they are mixed or hybrid, as they are multimodal.

Regarding the power of collaboration corresponding to paragraph (a), apparently, the primary motivation of young writers in fandoms is the continuous encouragement for each post of an excerpt from their stories, which begins with a synopsis of the work, in addition to likes from readers, which are the digital record of appreciation for the post; comments and suggestions in the conversation spaces available below the synopsis or published chapters; and even by including writers, by invitation or request, to co-author the proposed story. Authors and readers never consume or produce cultural content alone on a smaller or larger connection scale.

The force of the transgression of vertical power relations, set out in paragraph (b), is present in the creative developments carried out by fans in original productions, whose modus operandi has become global, informally elevating fanfic narratives to a literary genre, which are not considered plagiarism because copyright holders have concluded that their consumption and production have no financial purpose, that the circulation of these secondary products is free advertising and, perhaps, because it has become almost impossible to control this distribution in cyberspace, an unsustainable situation for the finances of publishing companies (Jenkins, 2009).

Thus, without (almost) any ownership power, remixed content breaks hierarchies and contracts. Its developments become unique products, appreciated according to their reconfiguration – open to the aesthetics of amateur writers, loaded with an ethical positioning agreed upon by the inhabitants of the fandoms themselves, and marked by a history of struggle between the entertainment industry and fans in terms of convergence culture.

Regarding the mixture of multiliteracies, paragraph (c), we observe the intertwining of different languages providing multiplicity, the “conjunction of heterogeneities” referred to by Deleuze and Guattari (1995, p. 14), composing multiliteracies without isolating themselves from classical aesthetic expressions, such as painting and drawing, or even from their most primitive locution, the body, territory of creativity and externalization of feelings, such as that of the young fan of the protagonist of the French-Japanese anime Ladybug, who draws (fanart) the work initially created for digital distribution and embraces the product of her heroes wearing fantasy clothes (cosplay) (Figure 1).

Figure 1
Graphic and body multiliteracies

Fanart, cosplay, and fanfic are combined products, as one commonly inspires the creation of the other. While cosplay is used in face-to-face situations, fanart and fanfic build a single narrative, coupling text and image to mainly support the synopsis of the work, as presented below.

Fans, fanfics, and lines of flight

Textual multiliteracies of fans create literary maps with production that is not limited to fiction, as it is free to be crossed by the actual manifestations of followers that emerge from the edges and can have enough strength to change the course of unfinished narratives, as occurred with the fanfic Ladybug: the Radio Rebel (Figure 2), a hybrid narrative of the anime Ladybug with the Western film Radio Rebel, created by Clarasdasideias and Cherry on the Nyah! Fanfiction platform, creative amateur writers active in various digital territories.

Figure 2
What a fan can do

In the opening notes of Chapter 10 – Putting it to the test (Claradasideias & Cherry, 2021), one of the authors recorded how much a follower’s request, a flexible line that reactivates desires, left its mark on the two writers to the point of encouraging them to resume the text:

claradasideias: Cherry and I disappeared for a while, right? It was practically agreed that we would abandon the story or take a long time to finish it. That’s because now I’m posting original stories on Wattpad, and she’s posting JATP AUs on Twitter. He he he… However, someone special came to ask us to continue, and we accepted the challenge. We are eternally grateful for you following this story and contacting us :D.

The fantasy-reality flow can be reversed and run freely between reality and fantasy, as happened with the fan of the anime and manga Naruto, Choientist⁴, who, inspired by the Libras subject offered in her Pedagogy course, was touched by the theme and decided to create a fanfic to repudiate the exclusion and prejudice against deaf people over time.

The writer kept the Naruto setting in her plot, feudal Japan, and researched the history of deaf education in the Japanese context, creating the fiction Gestualistas on the Spirit Fanfic e Histórias platform, in which she recorded in notes how the story was slowly formed after the Libras class. However, it took months to be fictionalized – lines wanting to break, marks overlapping the before and disturbing thought, an enormous desire to create a becoming-other for the history of deaf people, which is why “marks are always the genesis of a becoming” (Rolnik, 1993, p. 242).

With little material to guide her thinking, Choientist decided to embrace fantasy without renouncing social engagement, enlightening readers about the condition of deaf people.

I couldn’t find much material about how Sign Language developed in Japan. However, everything leads me to believe that there were people who supported the Gestualistas and those who supported the Oralistas. I know that until 1970, they were considered mentally disabled and had almost no rights as citizens, and it was only in 2011 that Nihon Shuwa was officially recognized.

Scumbags have always existed, so in ancient times, it must have been like in the rest of the world: they forced people to be something (to speak) just out of prejudice, thus invalidating the entire culture and uniqueness of individuals and making them suffer.

(Choientist, 2020)

From the brief account, we consider that the emotion of indignation caused to Choientist created lines of flight that inspired a story of overcoming. If, for the writer, the real world is perverse (“scumbags have always existed”), fantasizing about the actions of ninja characters brought her comfort, and she invented a better world for deaf people by transforming strong warrior characters into sign language children. Physically, the two ninja warriors become fragile, but their fighting spirit remains. Given over to fantasy, Choientist showed us a type of healing writing full of supportive signs.

Still, on existential lines, we must remember there is no way to establish values for which lines are good or bad since their marks are not pre-formatted stamps, and each person uniquely internalizes them. For example, even the reality of a tragedy can spark inspiration and produce authorial fables.

Collaborative fiction produces even more unlikely maps through self-insert fanfics, in which writers and followers become characters in the plot, entering the fantasy world as the story unfolds and as volunteers request participation in the comments section.

There are also interactive stories in which volunteers, managed by a mentor writer, take on the commitment of building the plot according to the profile adopted by each participating fan, such as the experience of the fic Tudo menos quarentena⁵, created from the canon of the manga and anime Knights of the Zodiac (KoZ) and having as context the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

The initial chapters were written only by TOTOROamigo, the fic’s mentor, who selected a few characters from KoZ. As the fiction unfolded, four volunteers developed more characters, totaling 41 by January 2022, the posting date of the 29^th chapter.

One of the chapters was delayed because the mentor went to her sister’s house, who didn’t have a computer. However, the desire to invent guided the fan, and she looked for a solution: “Ok, why didn’t the chapter come out? Because I’m STUPID, and I didn’t know how to write on my cell phone, but I finally learned” (TOTOROamigo, 2020).

Despite only 12 years old, the girl considered herself incompetent because she did not master the cell phone functions used to write texts. However, she was comforted by a follower of the same age, who showed solidarity with her outburst⁶.

[Sra. Misty de Lagarto writes to TOTOROamigo]

It’s ok, my angel! I understand you! Do everything in your own time; you are one person and need time to do your homework, care for your nephews, and write new chapters. I’m waiting for the next one!

What happens in Libra’s house stays in Libra’s house! It’s like the saying: Don’t wash your dirty linen in public. Have you already heard of it? (I feel so old for saying a really old saying at only twelve years old. LOL) Kissees!

While we detected self-taught experience in multiliteracies (writing texts mediated by features available on cell phones), we also found roots of the still dominant pattern of winners, given the intense self-criticism of the fanfiction writer (“I’m STUPID”), for not meeting the idealized model of success in advance. We also noticed that interactive fanfics have become much more of an opportunity to make friends, perhaps one of the reasons why TOTOROamigo has not finished the story, which is marked “in progress,” like friendships that never end.

The highlighted records indicate that the characteristics of multiliteracies present in the collective processes of fan fiction – interactivity, transgression, and mixture – are potential reshapers of beliefs and behaviors and are essential for the leveling of smooth spaces, even if they are established between striated spaces, concepts theorized by Deleuze and Guattari (1997), to reflect on power disparities and exclusion mechanisms. While smooth space favors the reciprocity of coexistence relations, striated spaces favor rules and hierarchies for maintaining the status quo.

Smooth space and striated space — nomad space and sedentary space — the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus — are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. Furthermore, no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture.

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1997, p. 157)

We find striated and smooth spaces between the productions of professional and amateur writers since a copyrighted product depends on authorization to be handled. As much as its author aims for the reader’s contemplation, the relationship between both is subordinated to editorial commercialization rules. However, various technological possibilities have allowed fans other ways of contemplation through digital appropriation and reuse of the original work, transforming it into a work et al.

While this type of appropriation generates controversy, amateur writers in fan communities intend to expand the possibilities of the canon that motivated them, according to the intensity of the relationships of other fans with the reformatted original work since its development into fanfic is almost entirely dependent on community interaction, one of the many motivations of amateur fans to continue writing. In addition, meeting with other fans to share remixed content promotes friendships and supportive emotions.

The strengthening of relationships during the remixing of an original work and the amateur writer’s desire for company are examples of smooth spaces of coexistence, and we find them when following the testimony of an administrator of the Spirit Fanfic platform and the interaction between fans in the comments section of A Lua e o Bonbori (KimiHina)⁷, written in the poetic style of haiku⁸ and created by the writer, who uses two nicknames⁹: Sennin and Uchiha_Sasuke. The fiction involved the kidnapping of characters from the manga and anime Naruto. As of this article’s writing, 154 readers followed it, and 28 comments were received.

In this fiction, highlighted by administrator @3tangfei, Uchiha_Sasuke created verses forming the acrostic KimiHina forever, an amalgamation of the names of the characters Kimimaro and Hinata, whose mastery of language and poetic creativity touched the administrator, who said: “fall in love with the work and the worker through a story told in verse, structured with care and with a wealth of feelings that anyone who loves literature as an art reads and feels completely overflowing”¹⁰.

When responding to one of the many comments, the writer shared his emotions about creating the work with his follower HeyMistyS2¹¹:

This was one of the works I enjoyed writing the most, one of the most daring at the time (considering that I brought Kimimaro and Hinata together, something that had never been done before, ha ha ha ha) – from there I went on a rampage toward life’s heresies, always trying to create some peculiar narrative (a poem, an anagram, etc.). I love playing with words, their meanings, their sounds, their contexts. I love it. I had much fun writing this poem – and I hope you noticed the sentence formed by the letters in bold, ha ha ha ha!

The gap between relationships, which moves fantasy, and the desire to invent collectively create a smooth space through which intensities slide, becoming a type of relationship composed of pleasure/bliss of Barthes (1987, p. 8) on reading a text, since “It is not the reader’s ‘person’ that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game.”

According to Barthes (1987), some readings generate pleasure for the reader, but not all lead to bliss. Bliss occurs when the reader takes possession of a text that is not theirs, internalizes it, and shakes its core until it becomes theirs. In the case of fan fiction, this movement goes a little further because texts are commonly externalized, circulated, shaken, and transformed into ours in terms of Collective Intelligence (Lévy, 1997).

While the author of an editorial work also wants their text to connect with the reader, their pleasure is generic and impersonal: “You address yourself to me so that I may read you, but I am nothing to you except this address; in your eyes, I am the substitute for nothing, for no figure” (Barthes, 1987, p. 10). Thus, the original work has an end for the author or the publisher, while fan fiction is an unpredictable process that provides opportunities for unusual experiences and, consequently, learning.

It is also common in multifandoms for registered fans to share information about their lives and desires on their profiles. Among these, we find records about the power of writing and textual fantasy as mechanisms for strengthening oneself, as m_lalalalisa explained¹² in her profile on Spirit Fanfic, “fiction: the ocean I dive headfirst into when I can no longer breathe in reality.”

Or, as Selene vented¹³ on Nyah! Fanfiction:

Hello! I’m an eighteen-year-old aspiring writer hiding under the pseudonym Selene Healer (SellyBee on Nyah!). I started writing when I was nine, and it’s a great relief to say that since then, I’ve learned a lot and improved in many ways. I dream of one day being able to publish my books and graduating in Law from UFPR (I actually want to be an actress, but my family won’t let me).

Still, in the section dedicated to information about the fan profile, we observe the presence of links that lead to other social networks to expand relationships beyond sharing fan content since some links lead to personal accounts or even professional production blogs. In this regard, we see lifelines of different natures driving the activities of these young people in cyberspace: sometimes they need to talk and make friends, sometimes the world demands survival, and they organize tactics to promote their services, in which the digital art service predominates, with fanart being one of them.

Final considerations

The analyzed productions pointed out some domestic paths of commercial entertainment transmediation consumer projects. They showed lines of flight from capitalist subjectivation when cultural content reaches the hands of consumers, according to the three characteristics of multiliteracies: collaborative, transgressive, and mixtures (Rojo, 2012). These lines, driven by the desire to fantasize, became entangled in the intimacy and coexistence of young people in fandoms and collaboratively produced fanart, cosplay, and fanfics, consonant with the concept of collective intelligence (Lévy, 1997), exposing marks of a becoming-other by recording, mainly in texts, desires to invent other worlds and other ways of relating and acting.

We conclude that playful activities involving the co-authorship of fictional texts are openings for the emergence of healing signs, powerful for giving way to processes of singularization, even if intertwined by molar lines that organize existential territories. However, if learning mediated by fantasy is a consolidated field of study and its practice is commonplace in early childhood and elementary schools, it is still foreign to the teaching methods of high school, a stage of basic education aimed at educating young people, a gap that encouraged us to investigate, through this cartography, what writing is capable of when elaborated by youth fantasy.

Given the power of the textual fables presented, we hope that more researchers will become interested in the relationship between youth-fantasies-collaborative learning in order to strengthen cognitive possibilities that are far away from competitive educational foundations, dependent on capitalist logic in which the individual desire for the accumulation of financial capital predominates, perhaps the leading cause of wound-marks.

• 1
  There is no consensus that cartography is a method. However, as we do not intend to delve deeper into this subject, we decided to use the term according to Guattari’s (1992) understanding, when he states that this type of investigative practice is not a “scientific indoctrination” because the “important thing is not the final result but the fact that the multicomponential cartographic method can coexist with the process of subjectivation, and that a reappropriation, an autopoiesis, of the means of production of subjectivity can be made possible” (Guattari, 1992, p. 23-24, our emphasis).
• 2
  Both platforms have fans who enjoy Western and Eastern entertainment, with access via https://www.spiritfanfiction.com/ e https://fanfiction.com.br/
• 3
  For Deleuze (2003), thought without image happens when the unknown invades us and breaks premeditated reasoning (image of thought), forcing us to think and create other images and signs.
• 4
  For information about the writer, see Perfil de choientist – Spirit Fanfics e Histórias (spiritfanfiction.com)
• 5
  Available at https://www.spiritfanfiction.com/historia/tudo-menos-quarentena-interativa-18838553. Accessed on January 22, 2024
• 6
  The post is available in the comments section, just below Chapter 5
• 7
  Available at https://www.spiritfanfiction.com/historia/a-lua-e-o-bonbori-kimihina-20319798..
• 8
  In romanized Japanese, Haiku is a Japanese poem composed of three verses in each stanza, and bonbori is a traditional lantern or lamp type.
• 9
  Nickname: denomination originally used by digital players as a replacement for the term pseudonym and adopted by fans registered on the Spirit Fanfic e Histórias and Nyah! Fanfiction platforms.
• 10
  Available at https://www.spiritfanfiction.com/historia/a-lua-e-o-bonbori-kimihina-20319798
• 11
  See the comments section, just below the single chapter of the fanfic A Lua e o Bonbori. https://www.spiritfanfiction.com/historia/a-lua-e-o-bonbori-kimihina-20319798/capitulos/20319820
• 12
  Available at https://www.spiritfanfiction.com/perfil/libernard
• 13
  Available at https://fanfiction.com.br/u/80035/

• Support and Funding:
  Decanato de Pós-Graduação (DPG) da Universidade de Brasília (UnB), Edital DPG Nº 0011/2022

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• Responsible editors:
  Editor Associado: Cesar Donizetti Pereira Leite https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8889-750X.
  Editor Chefe: Antônio Carlos Rodrigues de Amorim https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0323-9207.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  09 Dec 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  11 Aug 2023
• Reviewed
  01 Sept 2024
• Accepted
  29 Sept 2024