The rhetoricity of GIFs on Tumblr is analyzed by using the Supernatural (2005–) fan community as a case study. Tumblr's platform design, which encourages visual communication and content sharing, allows users to assert their identities as fans and their memberships to fan communities through the production and curation of visual content. Supernatural fans on Tumblr make affordances of GIFs from the show and its extratextual materials, putting them to various rhetorical uses, including emotional expression, transformative storytelling, inside jokes, and argumentation. Tumblr's platform, which facilitates the spread of content through its reblogging function, allows GIFs to be shared among various interpretative communities for whom the images contain different connotations and meanings. Because of their decontextualization, recontextualization, and intertextuality, GIFs offer a complex and rhetorically layered mode of communication on Tumblr.

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Fans' creative works are not evidence of thinking but acts of thinking, forming part of the cognitive system of fandom. Work in cognitive science and philosophy can provide a useful theoretical framework for exploring the mental, embodied, cultural, and ecological networks through which fans read and create, as well as the cognitive operations by which understanding is generated. Pic sets from the Game of Thrones Jon Snow/Sansa Stark fandom serve as a case study to illustrate fans' creative, embodied, and distributed cognition and provide insights into how fans make meaning with and through images, texts, characters, narratives, and communities.

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