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"She's a fan, but this was supposed to be scientific": Fan misunderstandings and acafan mistakes
Abstract
I here reflect on my first forays into fan studies, two separate projects on fans' reactions to Tom Hiddleston's short-lived relationship with Taylor Swift. After discovering live tweets of my 2018 Fan Studies Network presentation that included yet-to-be-published survey research I collected on post-Hiddleswift fannish behaviors, some fans turned to the Anonymous Ask feature of a Hiddleston-focused Tumblr blog to interrogate the results, an article I had recently published, and me. I highlight this experience as a way to reexamine my methodological choices going forward when working with fan populations while writing for academic audiences. Ultimately, I realize future misinterpretations might be prevented by transparency as an acafan on Tumblr and more consistent interaction with fans across social media platforms.
Media fandoms highlight the power nonhuman actors have to move, shape, and perhaps even possess us. In stating, “I am a fan of this thing,” we have already signaled a new state of being for ourselves rooted in a deep investment with something nonhuman. However, despite the foundational nonhuman entanglements of fandom, fan studies as a field has yet to engage in a sustained, comprehensive dialogue with posthumanism. In this article, I propose a theoretical vision for posthumanist fan studies, outlining how this framework would both compliment and complicate existing fandom scholarship and explicating an emergent, intra-active view of fandom. I then offer two potential methodologies that would prove useful in posthumanist fan studies research.
What this paper seeks to do is examine the pedagogical reach of online visual effects tutorials and how this has further blurred the binary of fan and creator, through looking specifically at how online instructors teach Blender, a free, highly thought of 3D Modelling software. Taking an autoethnographic approach, this paper will engage with these issues from a personal approach. As an academic and fan of visual effects, I will attempt to learn from a series of YouTube Blender Tutorials from a channel called BlenderGuru, “in order to understand the cultural experience” of learning visual effects online. (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011, p. 273). I also hope to interview the instructor BlenderGuru, aka. Andrew Price, a Brisbane based 3D artist, to ascertain the methods he uses to teach fellow creatives how to use Blender.
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