Annihilating love and heterosexuality without women: Romance, generic difference, and queer politics in "Supernatural" fan fiction

Abstract

This essay examines the differing generic tropes and sexual politics evident in Supernatural slash and in J2 fan fic. We argue that while some stories within Supernatural fan fiction provide happy endings to the characters that are denied them in the show's canon, dark!fic instead focuses on the intensity and exclusivity of Sam and Dean's love, thus illuminating dangers at the heart of the one-true-love trope. We also argue that RPS written within the Supernatural fan community demonstrates greater adherence to conventional romance tropes and normative sexualities, and thus reveals important ideological constructs of heteronormativity.

Big data meets storytelling: using machine learning to predict popular fanfiction

“…The growing volume of online fanfiction has been the subject of numerous studies, either from the perspective of text mining by using Natural Language Processing or through a qualitative lens via a manual examination (Table 1). We contribute to these efforts by using classifiers to determine the popularity of fanfiction stories regarding the show Supernatural, chosen for the large available corpus size as well as extensive scholarship, ranging from articles such as Åström (2010), Flegel andRoth (2010), Tosenberger (2008), Herbig and Herrmann (2016), Zubernis (2021) to the thesis of Guirola (2023) and edited volumes by Taylor and Nylander (2019), Macklem et al (2020), andWilkinson (2013). We show that it is possible to accurately predict whether a story is popular in four out of five times based on high-level features.…”

“…This contrasts with the tumultuous relations between fanfiction authors and writers in other shows (Michaud Wild 2020), or even the framing of fanfiction as a subversive act (Wang 2019). Due to the massive number of stories, engagement across platforms and interplay with the show creators, many scholarly works have been devoted to both the Supernatural show (Gonçalves 2015) and its fanfictions (Åström 2010;Flegel and Roth 2010;Tosenberger 2008;Herbig and Herrmann 2016), as well as edited volumes (Taylor and Nylander 2019;Macklem et al 2020). Focusing on Supernatural thus allows us to contribute to an existing body of literature while leveraging a sufficient volume of data to use modern text mining techniques.…”

Fanfiction and the Author

“…If a queer perspective and methodology is the first hallmark of recent slash theory, the second is scepticism towards anything 'inherently' resistant-feminist or subversive in slash (see especially Scodari 2003;Flegel and Roth 2010;Booth 2015, pp. 131-135).…”