As more young girls write stories online thanks to the increased amount of publishing platforms, their fiction becomes a means to explore if they are offsetting prescribed practices of patriarchy in their gender constructions. Often, young women interrogate gender and recontextualize their experiences by writing fanfictions. In the age of transmedia storytelling, various online fan communities are rich data sources, as transnational female fans prolifically write fiction featuring icons from music and movies belonging to another country. We examined how young Indian girls frame gender roles and power dynamics in their fanfictions of BTS, the South Korean boyband, on Wattpad. To know if conventional gender frames are upheld or challenged in fanfiction stories revolving around non-Indian celebrities, we performed a textual analysis on forty-four BTS fanfictions. We found that in these fanfictions, existing gendered tropes used to depict masculinity and femininity are mostly normalized, with minor alterations reflecting a power imbalance typical in Indian patriarchal households. A subversion of tropes was found in framing men as emotionally expressive, arguably drawing from the soft masculinity projected in the home country of BTS–South Korea. Grounding these findings in self-categorization theory implores us to situate the construction of gendered identities within the socio-cultural conventions of fanfiction writers.

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Animated content is primarily included in the children’s shows category in India. As a result, young adult and adult Indian anime fans are affected by this categorization. To explore their sociocultural experiences in Indian society, fan responses to three questions – posted on Quora, an online question and answer (Q&A) platform – were critically analyzed using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis. The three Quora questions selected for the study were What is it like being an anime fan in India? What is it like to be a manga and anime lover in India? And, why most of the people in India think that anime is for kids? The analysis revealed infantilization of Indian anime fans, mostly young adults or adults. Findings disclosed marginalization of and discrimination against Indian anime fans by the conservative older generation who look at any East Asian popular media from a racially biased lens. Invisibilization, mystification and stereotyping marked the discourse on Indian female anime fans who may not participate extensively in the male-dominated anime fan community on the online fora but consume anime by subversion and negotiated readings.