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Fan producers engaged in monetization, or what Suzanne Scott has termed “fantrepreneurs,” struggle with legal mechanisms for brand-building given the limitations of both copyright and platform moderation. These challenges have been amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has fundamentally changed the way that cosplayers, or fans who dress up as characters from their favorite television shows or movies, market themselves in an increasingly online space, as opposed to their initial public platforms of conventions. Restricted by digital platforms and their various moderation and monetization methods, cosplayer fantrepreneurs have developed new, multi-platform methods for sustaining their content and community connection. One prominent platform significant to this turn is OnlyFans, which is billed as a “peer-to-peer subscription app,” and allows users to “Sign up and interact with your fans!” Through a sample analysis of 50 cosplayers, this case study considers the approaches of cosplayers on integrating OnlyFans as part of a multiplatform struggle for economic viability. When we contextualize this platform labor in the history of cosplay, we note the hypersexualized labor that has always been central to monetization in this space, and the media franchise exploitation that profits from that labor at the expense of the fan producer, demonstrating the fundamental, gendered exploitation of the trend toward a patronage economy.

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Reader comments appended to online fan fiction stories provide benefits as close reading and critical analysis tools. Fan fiction provides a space where fans can develop literary analysis skills and literacy through their interactions in comments. This multimethod study combined the interview of a fan author with various digital humanities methods to closely study the value of comments. A web scraping tool was used to collect comments, and documentary, textual, and terminological analyses were performed alongside topic modeling to assess the frequency of words associated with learning. The co-occurrence of certain words was studied to understand the assessments and analyses that readers were performing in their comments. The study found that fan fiction readers apply strategies of literary analysis to their pleasure reading.