Interview with the Fan: a dialogue between myself as a fan and myself as a researcher

(1) Julia Neugarten

(1) Department of Arts & Culture Studies, RICH: Radboud Institute for Culture & History, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands - julia.neugarten@ru.nl (ORCID)

Abstract:

This text uses the affordances of creative writing to explore some of the tensions inherent in conducting academic research on fan culture as a cultural and literary scholar with close personal ties to fan communities. It is structured as an informal interview or dialogue between two parts of myself: the fan and the researcher. The dialogue explores some of the different viewpoints, considerations and values associated with these differing positions and authorial voices, particularly when it comes to their relation to the privacy and perception of fans and fan practices. The aim of this text is to contribute to the ongoing academic discussion within fan studies and elsewhere in academia about the positionality and subjectivity of the researcher.

Keywords: creative-critical writing, fan culture, fanfiction, research ethics, auto-ethnography

Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest: No conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) through the Dutch Research Council (NWO), as part of the Anchoring Innovation Gravitation Grant research agenda of OIKOS, the National Research School in Classical Studies, the Netherlands (project number 024.003.012).

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Preface 

In conducting the research for my PhD-dissertation about fanfiction, I struggle with the divide between two competing parts of myself: the fan and the researcher. Throughout the ongoing process of researching and writing, these two want different things, value different things, and believe different things. The genre of scholarship and the form of the dissertation require me to write from the perspective of a unified authorial voice, and in practice the researcher often ends up drowning out the fan. This fictional interview – a more creative, experimental piece of writing – explores some of the tensions that underly that voice. As such, this interview also contributes to the ongoing academic discussion within fan studies and elsewhere in academia about the positionality and subjectivity of the researcher.

The Interview

Fan: What first made you want to study fanfiction?

Researcher: When I was doing my masters in Literary Studies, I became increasingly frustrated with my objects of study, the literary texts of the Western canon. I read all these alarmist accounts of the decline of reading, especially among younger generations who spend lots of time online.  Meanwhile, I had to read War & Peace for a course, but I could hardly squeeze it in with all the fanfiction I was reading in my free time.  And because of that fanfiction, I knew that huge groups of young people were engaged in practices of reading and writing on the internet, and I could see that they were honing their skills of text interpretation, vocabulary, English fluency, media literacy and who knows what else in the process. I thought these communities and those texts that I loved were worthy of academic attention. So, my interest in fan studies emerged from my experiences as a fan and as a student. What first made you want to read fanfiction?

F: It’s like… when you fall in love with a person, you have this desire to be around them, and to learn more about them, and to sort of… drink them in. But when you fall in love with a story, what are you going to do? You can’t go on a date with a story. You can’t hold its hand or ask it about its childhood or its hobbies. A story doesn’t love you back. 

R: Except in fanfiction, it kind of does.

F: Exactly! I would always fall heart-wrenchingly in love with stories and then my feelings had nowhere to go. To me, finishing a story was always a kind of heartbreak, a loss. Fanfiction lets me explore the characters and the settings and the storylines that I fell in love with. It lets me wallow in the story, question it but also celebrate it. And eventually when that wasn’t enough anymore, I started writing fanfiction, to make a place for myself, for my own perspective, in the stories I love.

R: How does it feel to be an object of study?

F: I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, when I read about people doing fan studies, I feel this intense curiosity. I want to know: am I normal? Are my fan behaviors like the ones of others in my community? But also: why are we like this? Why do we have this seemingly bottomless capacity to care about stories and characters and music and whatever else? Some people just leave the cinema when the credits roll and never think about the movie again. Is there a fundamental difference between them and us? 

So I am curious about everything that’s happening in fan studies. But I’m also a little skeptical and a lot protective. I worry that analysis of what fans do will eventually be used to monetize our attachments, or that the people studying us are judgmental and that their judgement is distorting their scholarship.

R: Distorting it in what way?

F: I think there is a tendency in the discourse around fans, and sometimes within fandom as well, to think of us as uncritical consumers. True fandom, according to fans who think this way, is idolatry; expressing criticisms about favorite celebrities or things is a kind of treason to the community. And this idea that fandom is unconditional matches portrayals in popular media of fans being crazed, silly, overcommitted, obsessed. 

But in recent years, I think cancel culture and fan purity culture – critiquing ‘problematic’ ships [1] or tropes or characters or shows or creators – has become more and more central to fan communities. The appearance of explicit community norms of political correctness and morality in fandom aligns fans instead with the stereotype of the ‘Tumblerina’ or social justice warrior, someone who uses the language of cultural theory to criticize or supposedly educate others.

R: Okay, so there are opposing accounts of what fans are. As a researcher, how should I position myself in relation to those?

F: I don’t know, really. I guess the best you can do is just be aware that these prejudices exist and be as descriptive as possible in your analysis, so you don’t end up perpetuating any stereotypes of fans that you don’t have enough evidence for. Do you worry about fans reacting negatively to your research?

R: Sometimes, yes. I think fandom and academia have widely differing ethical norms. In academia, your trustworthiness as a researcher is built on transparency: you have to cite your sources and explain your process. In fandom, anonymity is valued above everything else. So I am torn, for example, between needing to cite the stories I am analyzing and needing to protect the privacy of the people writing those stories. Whichever choice I make, I can imagine fans reacting negatively to it.

F: That’s tricky, yeah. Has that ever happened?

R: I decided early on in my dissertation research that I was going to ask for authors’ permission whenever I did close analysis of a text. After all, my research might call attention to a story from audiences outside of fandom, and I want to be careful about that. I ask for that permission by leaving a comment on Archive of Our Own. Once, an author responded to this request kind of defensively. They gave permission, but I think they were worried that I would misrepresent the practices of fanfiction communities. This made me very aware that fans can also have preconceptions about academia, and perhaps academia’s tendency to shortchange or stereotype fans. I tried to reassure the author, and I even felt the need to mention my own fannish background when I did, so they’d know I was sensitive to their concerns [2].

F: So your experiences as fan and as an academic inform each other?

R: Absolutely. In my research, I am keenly aware that I am personally invested in my object of study. That I have stakes. For example, I want to show people how lovely it is to be in fandom, and of course there’s the risk that that desire will influence my research. Like you say, that’s an idealized image of fandom that I risk perpetuating in my work, or reading into my data, without having sufficient evidence for it.

But also, as a researcher out in the world, I am aware that your objects of study influence how you are perceived, and of course I am aware of this dominant idea that fans are uncritical consumers of media. That makes me worry whether people will take me seriously as a researcher, and whether they will take my research itself seriously.

F: That’s interesting, because one of the things I love about being in fan spaces is that I can completely let go of that worry. Of course no one is taking this stuff seriously. It’s meant to be silly and playful.

R: I know. That’s also something the author who wrote to me wanted to emphasize, that their story wasn’t necessarily meant seriously. And I’m not sure whether my worries about people taking me seriously are specific to being a researcher of fandom. Lots of academics have imposter syndrome. I imagine it has little to do with their discipline.

F: Sure! And there are also fans who take their fandom very seriously.

R: Yes. And that’s cool, too. I think taking fandom seriously is important, in the same way it’s important to value anything else that gives you pleasure and playfulness and creativity.

F: And how has becoming an academic influenced your fandom? I used to be the only Julia in this conversation, you know. All fandom and no scholarship for almost ten years.

R: I think since I began engaging with fan practices academically, I’ve tried to cultivate a more detached approach, and it’s sometimes difficult to let go of that when I am being fannish in my spare time.

F: That makes sense, yeah.

R: But I’ve always been kind of analytical. So back when I was only engaged fannishly, I would spend a lot of time thinking about: why do I like this? What am I getting out of this? To what extent it this escapism and to what extent does it feed into the real world? That’s the curiosity about fan practices you mentioned before. And now I have a set of theoretical concepts and methodologies to tackle those questions. And I hope I have also placed these questions in a community context and turned more towards their societal relevance, away from their self-obsessed inflection.

F: Are you calling me self-obsessed?

R: I don’t know, are you? You’re literally interviewing yourself. All joking aside: this is one of the things that fascinates me about fandom. On the surface, it always appears to be totally about the external thing: not the fan, but the object of fannish love. But there must be something highly individual about you, the fan, that felt attracted to that object. Just like there is something highly specific about the object that made it appeal to you. Sometimes when we study fans, I worry that we’ll gloss over the uniqueness of that connection – all the different ways fandom is about the self – because those are almost impossible to grasp.

F: Maybe that’s part of my worry, in being an object of study. I don’t want to be reduced to some trend or statistical pattern.

R: And I have this idealistic hope that because I am a fan myself, I can do justice to the individuality of the fannish experience. There are my stakes again. In the end it all comes together. I am just one person after all: an aca-fan or a fan scholar [3] or whatever you want to call it. I’ve also been struck recently by how similar academic study and fandom are.

F: Really?

R: Yes. When you think about it, both a fan community and an academic community is a group of people geared towards the appreciation and analysis of a set of cultural objects. In both cases, the community context affords acceptance of idiosyncratic interests, a shared language for describing and exploring encounters with cultural objects, and both communities have space for creativity and originality when interpreting the object.

F: But surely there must be big differences, too?

R: Of course there are. Fannish engagement requires less formal schooling than scholarly engagement, although fandoms often have clear processess of acculturation as well. And overall, I think fan communities are more geared towards appreciation, while scholars tend to focus more on analysis and try to distance themselves from their attachments.

F: Do you try to distance yourself from your attachment?

R: Like I said, I do try. But I don’t think it’s really possible, at least for me. You and I are still the same person. Given that, I think the most transparent way to conduct research is to at least own up to my stakes and attachments. That’s kind of the point of this interview.

F: Yeah. And we’ve never written a Mary Sue [4] before, so that’s kind of cool.

Footnotes

1. ‘Ship’ (noun) is short for ‘relationship.’ ‘Shipping’ (verb) is wishing for or supporting a fictional romantic relationship. Some shippers want their ship to become canon – meaning part of the officially published and sanctioned cultural object. Others just read or write fic about it. ‘Problematic ships’ are those ships deemed unethical for some reason, such as a large age difference.

2. For more on this interaction and its ethical implications, see Neugarten, Julia, et al. ‘The Powers That Scrape: Ethical Considerations in Using Fan-Generated Data in the Digital Humanities’. Panel discussion at DH Benelux, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.15600729.

3. Hills, Matthew. Fan Cultures. 1st ed., Taylor and Francis, 2003.

4. A Mary Sue is an original character in a work of fanfiction – so a character who does not originate from the source material– who is presented as a self-insert of the fanfiction author. 

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Comment 1

This piece is an engaging article that brings the inner dialogue into the open as too often academic writing enacts a limiting framework. This piece captures the very real emotional labour of being both embedded in a community while practicing creative writing and an expected to maintain scholarly distance.

Clarity of expression

The text is highly readable and accessible beyond fan studies. It communicates its ideas with humour and invites the reader into a space of interior negotiation and vulnerability. The conversational format dissolves academic distance and lets the reader witness the tensions and self-doubt that shape research from the inside.

Originality and insight

The internal interview is a clever way to explore positionality. It offers real insight into how research on something you love and appreciate impacts both your scholarly lens and your personal relationship with the subject.

Connection across fields

This work creates an unexpected bridge between fandom and academia. It recognises both as communities that make meaning together, and gently questions who gets to define valid knowledge. 

Engagement and resonance

Often in research spaces of liminal knowledge production outside academia are seldom prioritized and I can imagine this piece sparking rich discussion in reading groups or classrooms. There is also a subtle opportunity to name fanfiction more explicitly as a space of cultural literacy and informal learning, which could further strengthen its position as a form of knowledge creation.

Contribution to Radical Creativities ethos

It embodies the journal’s spirit by loosening the constraints of academic voice and celebrating subjective, affective, and playful forms of knowing and expression. It expands what counts as scholarship rooted in care and plurality of voice.

Constructive suggestions

A few small additions as suggestions:

The reader could benefit from one brief example of an ethical tension they faced in the research and how they navigated it. It could be powerful to name the emotional weight of juggling these two identities to further deepen understanding that could resonate with other scholars/writers.

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