Interviews

During her interview, Aria argues that fanfiction authors often approach writing fanfiction, specifically fanfiction that explores queer subtext, as “I’m going to tell the story you didn’t,” demonstrating fans’ active defiance of creators’ intentions as they claim ownership over the canon. She and the five other fanfic authors — three who wrote The Legend of Korra and three who wrote Game of Thrones fanfics — share their experiences writing these fics, their perspectives on the fan community, and the ways in which they think about race, gender, sexuality, and/or culture in their fan engagement.

This interactive portion allows you to explore different angles of the fan authors' interviews. You can read each fan author's interview transcript, learn more about the fan author, read their fanfic that I interviewed them about, explore themes that occur across the interviews, learn about the qualitative coding process. The transcribed interviews and demographic information have been published with each writers’ explicit consent through Northeastern University's IRB (19-11-05).

Learn About Each Critical Fan

The six authors each provide unique experiences with writing, fandom engagement, and analyzing the canonical text. They each provided self-identified information about their age, gender, race, sexuality, and pronouns, which they agreed to have published on the site.

Each interview with the fan authors has been qualitatively coded (learn more about qualitative coding and my process here). The bolded font in each author's answer are the coded texts. On the interview transcripts, you can click the bolded words to see how they were coded. Underlined text is also coded, but the code is specific to mentions of power and identity.