Tag: romance

With the popularity of the Fifty Shades trilogy and commercial romance publishers wanting to build on the trend, I suspect there are more serial romances available to [commercial romance] readers today than there were in 2008. Fan fiction stories continue to be produced as works-in-progress or works in a series, as they always have. Fan fiction also continues to deal with source-texts that change and complicate the character relationships fans are interested in. However, fans can track these updates much more easily than ever with Archive of Our Own subscriptions or by following specific Tumblr tags. Does this mean that serials are more available to fans as well?

From Fandom Then/Now: Romance & Fan Fiction

What do you think? Share your thoughts at Fandom Then/Now.

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Fandom Then/Now presents research conducted in 2008 and uses to facilitate fan conversations about fan fiction’s past and future. In my last round of posts I was focusing on things I noticed as I read different works of fan fiction and commercial romance. So far, I’ve touched on narrative arcs and world building and character relationship development (p1, p2). The last story elements I noticed were trends regarding seriality and narrative instability (p1, p2).

Here are some of the differences I’ve been noticing in ways that commercial romance and fan fiction “do” seriality. What do you think?

Three: Seriality & Instability (p3)

I wonder about how [seriality] plays out in fan fiction and commercial romances today. Even when there’s a larger story world with a serial narrative, many of today’s popular commercial romance stories still focus on one relationship per-book. (For example, Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changeling series strikes a fascinating balance between one couple per book and a much larger serial arc focused on a world on the brink of social collapse.) With the popularity of the Fifty Shades trilogy and commercial romance publishers wanting to build on the trend, I suspect there are more serial romances available to readers today than there were in 2008. Fan fiction stories continue to be produced as works-in-progress or works in a series, as they always have. Fan fiction also continues to deal with source-texts that change and complicate the character relationships fans are interested in. However, fans can track these updates much more easily than ever with Archive of Our Own subscriptions or by following specific Tumblr tags. Does this mean that serials are more available to fans as well?

What do you think, does fan fiction feel any more serial to you today than it did in past years?

What do you think of my findings? Read the full write up on fan fiction and romance here. Share what you think about this on the Fandom Then/Now website or respond here using the #fandomthennow tag.

[In 2008] the commercial romance stories I read seemed to focus more on creating a series of linked stories set in one story world. For example, at the time J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series was very popular. In this series, the stories focus on one couple at a time, one book at a time. This ‘series’ more than ‘serial’ approach seems to convey a stronger sense of stability and permanence to the relationship each book focuses on. Even if the characters appear again in a later story, their reappearance often takes the form of an update, rather than an entire revisiting of the relationship. The more serial works of fan fiction I read provided a significant contrast to this approach. Many of these stories returned again and again to the same set of protagonists, constantly building and rebuilding their relationship based on what challenges the source-text might throw at fan authors.

From Fandom Then/Now: Romance & Fan Fiction

What do you think? Share your thoughts at Fandom Then/Now.

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fandomthennow:

Fandom Then/Now presents research conducted in 2008 and uses to facilitate fan conversations about fan fiction’s past and future. In my last round of posts I was focusing on things I noticed as I read different works of fan fiction and commercial romance. So far, I’ve touched on narrative arcs and world building and character relationship development (p1, p2). The last story elements I noticed were trends regarding seriality and narrative instability (p1).

Here are some of the differences I’ve been noticing in ways that commercial romance and fan fiction “do” seriality. What do you think?

Three: Seriality & Instability (p2)

Although the serial is seeing a rise in popularity in commercial romance today, this trend wasn’t as visible to me when I was reading popular commercial romances in 2008. At that time, the commercial romance stories I read seemed to focus more on creating a series of linked stories set in one story world. For example, at the time J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series was very popular. In this series, the stories focus on one couple at a time, one book at a time. This series more than serial approach seems to convey a stronger sense of stability and permanence to the relationship each book focuses on. Even if the characters appear again in a later story, their reappearance often takes the form of an update, rather than an entire revisiting of the relationship. The more serial works of fan fiction I read provided a significant contrast to this approach. Many of these stories returned again and again to the same set of protagonists, constantly building and rebuilding their relationship based on what challenges the source-text might throw at fan authors.

What’s your take on the different types of serial storytelling we see in commercial romance and fan fiction? 

What do you think of my findings? Read the full write up on fan fiction and romance here. Share what you think about this on the Fandom Then/Now website or respond here using the #fandomthennow tag.

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fandomthennow:


Fandom Then/Now presents research conducted in 2008 and uses to facilitate fan conversations about fan fiction’s past and future. In my last round of posts I was focusing on things I noticed in 2008 as I read different works of fan fiction and commercial romance. So far, I’ve touched on narrative arcs and world building and character relationship development (p1, p2). The last story elements I noticed were trends regarding seriality and narrative instability.

Here are a few core tendencies I noticed as I read:

Three: Seriality & Instability (p1)

In 2008, I noticed a heightened feeling of seriality in the popular works of fan fiction I read, particularly when compared to the popular romance novels I was comparing them to. Many of the works of fan fiction I read had sequels or were part of a larger series. Reading these stories, it felt as if the characters were part-way through a larger journey. This felt different from many of the commercial romances I was reading, which often stood alone and had a clear sense of closure at the end. This may be influenced by the medium itself. As I’ve already discussed, an individual work of fan fiction feeds off of a larger story-world that keeps changing. From season to season, a television show will introduce new plot developments or characters to challenge it’s protagonists. These changes continually introduce new obstacles for a fan writer to deal with. This environment may facilitate a greater sense of seriality within fan fiction.

However, as a reader I didn’t only experience this feeling of seriality when I read fan fiction from fandoms where the source-text was still being produced. Irregardless of the fandom, many of the fan fiction authors I was introduced to were working on extensive follow-ups to their initial stories. A work of fan fiction contributes to much a larger body of fan work, a network of stories being continually produced by fans. An individual story joins both this broader network of stories, as well as potentially being affected by a source-text that may still be developing its own version of the story. These larger networks of stories work together to reinforce the sense of a continually changing story-world, one always filled with the potential for new conflicts. Essentially, even if one individual work of fan fiction ends with a happy couple, there is always a layer of instability within a fandom’s larger story world. This deeply affects the sense of finality fan fiction readers may get from an individual story’s happy ending. It may also drive fan authors to keep revisiting characters and working to restore them to a moment of stability and happiness.

What do you think about this idea that fan fiction often tends to feel more serial? Do you notice anything like this when you read commercial or fan romances today? Does fan fiction feel any more serial to you today than it did in past years?

What do you think of my findings? Read the full write up on fan fiction and romance here. Share what you think about this on the Fandom Then/Now website or respond here using the #fandomthennow tag.

Negotiating between the private and public, the past and the present, Hollywood romantic comedy seeks to shape coherent perspectives on love from the contradictory utterances that compose it. Conceptualisations of love may be constantly in flus – along with broader configurations of romance, sexuality, gender identity and marriage – but the genre routinely celebrates it as an immutable, almost mystical force that guides two individuals who are ‘made for each other’ into one another’s arms.

Frank Krutnik, “Conforming Passions?: Contemporary Romantic Comedy” (138, in Neale’s Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, 2002)

Never simply a personal or interpersonal affair, romance is a multifaceted cultural formation that comes to us through a bewildering array of texts, voices and discourses. The struggle against love involves wrestling not just with the poetics of individual attraction, but also with the complex inheritance of received opinion that defines amorous relations. Hollywood itself has played a crucial role as part of the apparatus of intimate culture, its widely disseminated fictions translating affairs of the heart into accessible conceptual and emotional forms.

Frank Krutnik, “Conforming Passions?: Contemporary Romantic Comedy” (138, in Neale’s Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, 2002)

As transformative work, fan writing always, in a sense, begins in the middle of a relationship, a conflict, or a world. Even in fan fiction where the story depicts characters meeting for the first time, those characters have a pre-existing relationship in the source-text and in the minds of readers.

Within commercial romance, a similar process occurs. In commercial romance, genre archetypes also serve as pre-existing types of characters and worlds for an individual story to build on. As with all literary genres, each romantic hero or heroine’s story leans a little on the ones that came before it. Like fan fiction, commercial romance sub-genres are also organized around common story-worlds and motifs (the regency, the paranormal, the contemporary western, etc.). Both commercial and fan authors rework these archetypes and storytelling traditions, contributing their own ideas about romantic conflict and their individual voices into these larger connected pools of stories. In this way, both styles of writing engage in the practice of remixing and transforming pre-existing work.

From Fandom Then/Now: Romance & Fan Fiction

What do you think? Do you buy the idea that the production process for commercial romance has such similar properties to the production of fan fiction/transformative work? Comment at Fandom Then/Now.

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Fandom Then/Now presents research conducted in 2008 and uses to facilitate fan conversations about fan fiction’s past and future. In my last two posts I’ve been talking about some of the different tendencies I’ve noticed between fan fiction and romance novels. Now I want to talk a little more about some of the overlap.

What do you think of my findings? Read the full write up on fan fiction and romance here. Share what you think about this on the Fandom Then/Now website or respond here using the #fandomthennow tag.

Here are a few core tendencies I noticed as I read:

Two: Character & Relationship Development (continued…)

Commercial and fan romances both play with different types of encounters and different levels of dramatic tension. [While a charged first meeting may be more common in commercial romance,] many works of fan fiction also rewind back to a first meeting and re-develop the protagonists’ relationship from the beginning.In particular, alternative universe stories often require more traditional romance elements to introduce the characters to each other, develop the new story-world, build conflict, etc. There are also many commercial romances where two characters simply meet again after years apart or learn to see each other in a new way. Today, as the serial becomes increasingly popular with romance readers, many popular romance serials return again and again to the same set of characters and story world, similarly building on pre-existing worlds and characters.

Ultimately, these [examples of similarities], coupled with the serial’s rising popularity across media, underscore the links between fan fiction and commercial romance as two modes of writing particularly interested in exploring romance, partnership, and sexual attraction. 

What do you think? Do you notice this overlap between relationship-focused fan fiction and commercial romance too?