Fan fiction as a vehicle for meaning making: Eudaimonic appreciation, hedonic enjoyment, and other perspectives on fan engagement with television.

Abstract

Fan fiction has received minimal attention from psychological researchers. To begin to fill that gap, we analyzed fan fiction about the TV show Mad Men to investigate how fans use fan fiction to make meaning from the source text. A sample of fan fiction stories was coded for the presence of eudaimonic and hedonic story components, the emotions expressed in the stories, the perspectives adopted by the fan writers, and plots that function as wish fulfillment. Findings indicated that fan fiction writers' motivations were more eudaimonic than hedonic, the stories often contained mixed or negative emotional content, the writers frequently took the perspective of a female character in their stories, and in some cases the stories enabled characters to achieve positive resolutions denied them by the source text. Taken together, the results point to the many ways in which fans engage with and make sense of a popular TV show. Future psychological research on fan fiction of additional popular culture texts would be valuable for understanding the ways fans grapple with various elements of those texts.

The diamonds and the dross: A quantitative exploration of integrative complexity in fanfiction.

“…As Vinney and Dill-Shackleford (2018) explained, "fan fiction uses the settings, plotlines, and characters of a source text, such as a movie, TV show, or book [or the lives of real people], to create new narratives" (p. 18). According to Coppa (2006), fanfiction originated in the science fiction fanzines of the 1930.…”

“…However, these limitations do not negate the importance nor the impact of these two studies. As previously discussed, fanfiction as a research topic has been a largely ignored by researchers and scholars outside the qualitative humanities' scholarship, and only a few studies focus specifically on examining and understanding the underlining psychology of fanfiction, most notably Vinney and Dill-Shackleford (2018). Alongside that article, these studies begin filling this particularly research gap and provides a strong foundation going forward.…”

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Vinney and Dill-Shackleford (2018) applied linguistic analysis to the study of the psychology of fanfiction. This article builds upon this previous research through two studies that individually score and compare the integrative complexity, a linguistic variable, of a sample of paragraphs from 45 popular fanfictions and 45 unpopular fanfictions.

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“…Public Policy Relevance StatementFanfiction is a central aspect of the majority of fan experiences; however, few studies have used psychological theory to explore and study fanfiction. Building on Vinney and Dill-Shackleford (2018), the present research uses integrative complexity to examine linguistic differences between popular and unpopular fanfictions and adds new information to our understanding of fanfiction as a cultural and psychological phenomenon.…”

Strange new worlds: Social content in popular Star Trek fanfiction versus commercial novels.

“…To our knowledge, only two studies have used quantitative methods to systematically explore the characteristics of fanfiction. Vinney and Dill-Shackleford (2018) assessed 52 Mad Men fanfiction stories using a combination of human coding and the automated software Leximancer to show that fanfiction tended to be eudemonic rather than hedonic, demonstrating fanfiction writers' motivations to seek insight into the deeper truths and meaning of life. This study also found that fanfiction contained negative or mixed emotional content, often took the perspective of female characters, and sometimes offered happy endings that did not exist in the source text.…”