Pop Junctions: Reflections on Entertainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Litera ([syndicated profile] henryjenkins_feed) wrote2025-07-04 10:14 pm

Frames of Fandom: An Interview on Fandom as Audience (Part Three)

Posted by Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

SEE PART ONE SEE PART TWO
BUY FRAMES OF FANDOM

books 1 and 2 in the frames of fandom series

Through both books the examples of fandom used are a mix of primarily North American fan cultures along with mentions of non-Anglophone ones, such as k-pop. While this mix certainly accomplishes the goal of showing the diversity of fandom spaces/objects/practices, how does the series also accommodate adequate consideration of the differences between them and the role of conflict in contemporary fandom communities? (Specifically, Book 2's overview of kinds of fans and their relationship to both each other and media texts/industries mentions the idea of fandom being where fans of marginalized identities can “appropriate” texts and refashion them to their own ends. There is also a side-bar that discusses the different ideas of appropriation and their complications, which is well taken. How does this discussion of audiences and their motivations interface with work on fandom spaces that has highlighted the roles racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc continue to play in fandom communities and their reworkings of media texts?) 

Henry: These are questions we’ve struggled with as we have been writing these books. The past decade has seen thorough and evolving critiques of fandom studies on the basis of race in particular, and we want to do the best we can to acknowledge those critiques and factor them into our considerations. We do so with an awareness that there is going to be a tension between the importance of representing a broad range of perspectives on these topics and also recognizing that as two white Anglo-American authors, this is not necessarily “our story to tell.”

All I can say is that we are trying to find our balance within this shifting terrain, and one way we do so is by highlighting the work of fandom scholars of color across all of these volumes and representing these debates through the insights they provide us. Fandom as Audience includes discussions of racebending Harry Potter, for example, that include the interpretive and expressive work of Black fans doing fan art and fan fiction to illustrate Stuart Hall’s notion of negotiated readings. Our book on Fandom as Subcultureforegrounds the example of a Black Disney bounder, considers the case of hijab cosplay, discusses the ways Black fans work around their marginalization in the mass media texts that inspire much of cosplay practice, and much more.  Fandom as a Public situates the recent discussions about “toxic fandom” or racism in fandom in the larger context of Nancy Frazier’s critique of Habermas’s claims about the “equal access to all” offered by the public sphere that emerge from his idealized understanding of the early modern European coffee houses. We show that contradictions about inclusion and exclusion surround the notion of the public from the start, and that we should not be shocked, though it is critical to understand, that fandom often falls short of its utopian ideals about creating a safe space for all who share passion for the same object.

One of the challenges, then, with trying to represent the broadest range of different perspectives and experiences through the books is that we can only represent the work that is already out there, and thus we are doomed to reproduce some of the blind spots in the existing literature. Our hope is that in mapping the field, we make the strengths and limitations of this work visible to emerging scholars, so they can focus their energies in ways that allow them to make original contributions.

Something similar can be said about the shift of fandom studies to encompass diversity on a transnational or transcultural, if not yet global, scale. My own current interests include supporting and amplifying work on fandoms in East Asia, particularly China.  I have started a research network that is bringing together a mix of researchers based in the United States, China, Korea, Japan, and beyond to do collaborative and comparative work together. This research group has two special issues of journals under development, one for the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and one for the Shanghai-based journal Emerging Media.We include such perspectives in every book in the series, but we also focus on it more explicitly in the Fandom as a Force of Globalization and Fan Locations books.

There and elsewhere, we pay attention to the tensions between pop cosmopolitanism/transcultural fandom (forms that connect across national borders) and fan nationalism (conflicts that seek to align fandom to national interests and to police borders between cultures). This is one of the key conflicts within fandom today, and to understand it, we may need to try to keep multiple and seemingly contradictory insights in mind at the same time. We signal the potential mobilization of fandom and fan-like structures by global strongmen in Defining Fandom, and we explore other forms of “toxic” or conflictual forms of fandom throughout all of the books. Our forthcoming book on Fandom as Public discusses some of the research on QAnon that has emerged within fandom studies, but we also look at ASMR fandom as a space where a more healing or therapeutic function emerged during the pandemic lockdown. We talk about the ways that the Chinese state encourages an entanglement between fandom and the national interests that restricts what can be said but also requires the performance of nationalism. But we also discuss how the free speech and participatory ethos of the Archive of Our Own struggles to deal with the structural and systemic racism that make it a sometimes uncomfortable space for fans of color.

We certainly have our own biases as researchers and mine includes a framing of the opportunities for cultural and political participation that fandom affords that is more optimistic than that of scholars drawn from critical theory and political economy. We also want to provide an overview of the field as a whole and that includes citing critiques of fandom and fandom studies. 

I appreciate your acknowledgement of the ways we discuss appropriation. From the start, fandom studies has centered on the ways diverse audiences appropriate and rework resources from mass culture as the basis of participatory culture. This has included the ways that groups marginalized in the source text speak back to media producers and re-story the media. Yet, we also have to acknowledge that there are ongoing critiques of cultural appropriation which have rendered that term problematic. How do we reconcile the two? Writers like Mikhal Bakhtin tell us that all cultural expression involves appropriation – the language we use does not come pristine from a dictionary but from other people’s mouths. Rather than a simple dismissal of appropriation, which would be inconsistent with other aspects of the field, we should ask harder questions and offer more nuanced accounts of the ethics of appropriation. When is it appropriate to appropriate?

I am not sure we have the answers to this question yet and perhaps not even the best framework for asking it, but at least we are acknowledging the problem here and considering some ways people are trying to address it. In Defining Fandom, there is a similar section where we consider the metaphor of consumer tribes and tribalism as it has been developed in consumer culture research and critique it from perspectives drawn from indigenous studies.

Biographies

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

Pop Junctions: Reflections on Entertainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Litera ([syndicated profile] henryjenkins_feed) wrote2025-07-02 12:02 pm

Frames of Fandom: An interview on Fandom as Audience (Part Two)

Posted by Henry Jenkins

BOOK 2: FANDOM AS AUDIENCE

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

BUY FRAMES OF FANDOM

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

SEE PART ONE

what is a ‘fan’?

I'm curious about the conceptualization of what a “fan” is. Does that definition change between books? 

Rob: We took special care to define what we mean by “fan,” “fanship,” and “fandom” early in the series, and we did this not because we thought the terms were unfamiliar, but because we found that they were being used inconsistently, even by experts. Sometimes “fandom” referred to an individual’s enthusiasm, for instance, but at other times it described a collective entity. We needed to have that conceptual clarity to move forward with the other work we wanted to do in the series. So, although the definition does not change from book to book, it does develop, and we add nuance to its various elements. We build on them, return to the definition, even challenge it from different angles—but, fortunately, the foundation holds.

Our distinction is rather simple, yet essential. Fanship is a personal, passionate relationship between an individual and a fan object. It’s an orientation, an emotional and cognitive investment in a piece of culture: a team, a singer, a show, a brand, a game. Fandom, by contrast, is what happens when that fanship becomes social. When fans affiliate with others, when they participate in shared rituals, critique, creativity, or community, they enter into fandom. Fandom is thus always a collective formation of some kind. It includes norms, histories, values, and practices that are produced, shared, and sometimes contested by its members.

We think this distinction is powerful because it travels. It works across domains—music, sports, fashion, theme parks, politics, celebrity, brands. It respects solitary fans who have never set foot in a forum or a fan con, while also giving us language to talk about the intense collective energies that swirl around franchises like BTS, Formula One, Taylor Swift, and the UFC. It helps us map different kinds of involvement without being forced into ranking them. It also allows us to develop and accommodate the many digital advances that have altered the terrain, trajectory, and capacities of fans and fandoms, most notably those involving social media.

We also emphasize that fandom is not a static identity. It moves, changing through our lives and across our different activities. Fans shift in and out of fandoms over time. Their levels of involvement change. Our framework accommodates that fluidity, offering something more than a typology, and less than a rigid model. It’s a way to think about how people organize meaning through the passionate cultural engagements they form both alone and together.

So no, the definition doesn’t change. But it does get tested, elaborated, and put to work. That was the point. We didn’t want to assume we already knew what fandom was. We wanted to build a foundation strong enough to support fifteen books and flexible enough to grow with them. 

Henry: Each frame allows us to see things we would not see otherwise. Star Trek surfaces in almost all of the books because it was the starting point for both of us and because it has been so foundational for both media fandom and fandom studies. Other fandoms, such as those around Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, K-pop and Harry Potter, appear often across the books. Each time they surface, though, we add some new depth as we look at them from another vantage point. We may discuss how Black fans of Harry Potter explore the possibilities of a mixed-race Hermoine in Fandom as Audience and fan responses to J. K. Rowlings’ transphobic comments in Fandom as Activism.  Other examples are more local – we consider how Netflix has built Wednesday to address multiple audiences in Fandom as Audience or how a public sphere about gender and sexuality issues surfaces around the comic books Sex Criminal and Bitch Planet in Fandom as Public or how Good Omens inspired an online exploration of spirituality issues in Fandom as Devotion.

In terms of the purpose of these books, at one point you mention that you hope the series will help practitioners – marketers, brand managers – to interact with fan communities on the principle of “do no harm.” How does this work within contemporary fandom spaces which are increasingly polarized and where “harm” can be conceptualized very differently by different fan groups? Is there a consideration of ethical issues facing fandom researchers and practitioners? Is there a space for discussion of toxicity in fandom? 

Henry: We do not have a separate book on fan ethics – perhaps we should. But I’d like to think that ethical issues – for researchers, for practitioners, and for fans – surface across every book in the series. The goal of creating a conversation between fandom studies and consumer culture research is not to teach industry how to better “exploit” fans but to help them to understand the richness and complexity of fandom as a site of cultural experience within the context of a consumer economy. To serve those ends, we often include passages that show points of friction between fans and industry – for example, book 2 includes a discussion of the concept of fans as surplus audiences, how Alfred Martin has taken up the concept of “surplus Blackness” as a means of critiquing the racial assumptions guiding contemporary franchises, and the ways that “queer baiting” has been critiqued within fandom studies. In Fandom as Co-Creation, we dig deep into the literature on fan labor and explain why many existing industry practices that claim to “honor” fans actually exploit them. We link this work to the debates around the Paramount guidelines on Star Trek fan cinema and a larger consideration of intellectual property law, transformative works, and fair use.  

We definitely will be taking up sites of conflict between different groups of fans, including reactionary backlash by white male fans against women and fans of color, and we definitely deal with the growing literature on so-called “toxic” fan cultures, especially in Fandom as Public. I am sure we will face criticism on the balance of different perspectives here. Even with the large canvas this book series provides us, we will not be able to discuss everyone and everything, and our own blindness and privilege will be on display. But in creating this framework, we will create something that other scholars can push against and call attention to what is still missing in a field of research that for too long was shaped by presumptions of whiteness and Anglo-Americanness.

Rob: Yes, “do no harm” is a principle we offer to practitioners, but we don’t mean it naively. We’re fully aware that harm, like toxicity, is a contested category. What one fan sees as righteous defense of their values, another sees as overreaction or harassment. What a marginalized fan calls a reasonable and direct critique, a showrunner might experience as outlandish abuse. And from the point of view of an authoritarian government, even playful remix culture or satire can read as dangerous thought crime. So when we talk about harm in fandom spaces, we’re talking about something that always has to be contextualized socially, culturally, and politically. 

Fandom gives people a channel for strong feelings. Love, anger, grief, obsession, loyalty, and betrayal: fan communities are pulsing with these emotions. In an age when formal institutions often fail to reflect people’s values or listen to their concerns, fandom has become one of the few arenas where people feel like they can speak together about and maybe even back to power, or act to reshape culture in their own image or into forms that suit them better. That’s why governments monitor fan spaces. That’s why platforms struggle to manage fan conflicts. That’s why brands court fans and fear them at the same time.

We’re not trying to sanitize that energy, though. We respect it, and we are doing our utmost to try to understand it. Across the series, we return to the idea that fandom is a passionate form of cultural participation, not a passive state of appreciation. It’s not neat, and it’s not always polite. Sometimes it’s defiant. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s cruel. But it is always meaningful to those within it. And when that passion becomes collective—when it organizes, critiques, remixes, or revolts—it forces industry and institutions to listen. That’s not toxicity. That’s power and culture being built and rebuilt.

Of course, there are behaviors that cross lines. There are moments when fandom mirrors or reproduces structural harms—racism, misogyny, queerphobia, nationalism. We don’t make excuses for those things, of course, but we also don’t believe you can understand or engage with fandom by labeling entire communities as “toxic” from the outside. Those elements, like racism and misogyny, are not particular to fandoms or fans–they are all around us, and some fans express them, as one would expect. There is a bigger picture, however, in the study of how norms are negotiated within fan cultures, how boundaries are drawn, how accountability functions—or fails to. Those are interesting and important discussions to have, beyond simply labeling this or that phenomenon or behavior as “toxic” or “inclusive.” We think this sort of intellectual elaboration happens alongside viewing fandoms not only as expressive publics, but as moral economies, with their own forms of justice, solidarity, and exclusion.

Ethics, in that sense, is not a separate topic in the series. It runs through every volume, because we are always asking what these relationships—between fans and brands, fans and each other, fans and society—require and demand. We don’t claim to have the final word. But we hope the series opens space for that ongoing conversation and models the kind of respect and critical generosity that we believe fandom itself, at its best, embodies.

 More to come in Part Three.


Biographies

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

Organization for Transformative Works ([syndicated profile] otw_news_feed) wrote2025-07-01 03:57 pm

Five Things Rhine Said

Posted by Caitlynne

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with Rhine, who volunteers as a volunteer manager in the Translation Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a Translation volunteer manager I mostly deal with admin work that surrounds the work our translators do – be it talking to other committees about things that are to be translated, preparing English texts for translation, making sure our version of the text is up to date, or getting texts published once they are translated – along with more general personnel stuff like recruiting new translators, keeping a clear record of who is supposed to be working on what and who is on break, checking in with translators and how they feel about their work, that kind of thing. Having been in this role for some time now, I also help with mentoring newer volunteer managers in how to do what we do, at the scale we do it.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

There isn’t one singular stereotypical week in this role, but some different modes with different focuses that are more or less typical for me:

  • Going on-call for a week: Translation volunteer managers work from a shared inbox that serves as a first point of contact for all inquiries related to the Translation Committee. Each week, one or two volunteer managers go on-call as the ones primarily responsible for making sure everything gets actioned and squared away as needed. This usually means spending a couple hours each day working through everything in the shared inbox, including but not limited to assigning tasks to translators, checking on translators who were on hiatus, triaging translation requests from other committees, and responding to any questions translators may have in the course of their work.
  • Working on a bigger project, like a series of high-visibility posts (e.g. membership drive, OTW Board elections), opening recruitment, or internal surveys: When Translation does a committee-wide thing, it’ll by necessity involve most or even all of our forty-some language teams, each with 1–8 members. Coordinating all that takes some organisational overhead (and some love for checklists and spreadsheets, along with automations where feasible), which typically means sitting down for a few hours on three or four days of the week and chipping away at various related tasks to keep things moving, including but not limited to asking other people to double-check my work before moving on to the next step.
  • Working on smaller tasks: When I want to have a more relaxed week while still being active, I’ll sit down on one or two afternoons/evenings, and take care of a task that is fairly straightforward, like scheduling and leading chats to check in with translators or train people on our tools, creating a template document with English text for translation, drafting and updating our internal documentation, asking others to look over and give feedback on my drafts, and giving feedback on others’ tasks, drafts, and projects.
  • Weekly chair training/catch-up chats: We have a regular weekly meeting slot to sit down and talk about the few chair-exclusive things in the Translation Committee, as part of chair training.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I actually started volunteering at the OTW as an AO3 tag wrangler back in 2020, when lockdowns were on the horizon and I felt like I could pick up some extra stuff to do. Growing up bilingual and with some extra languages under my belt, I ended up hanging out in some of the spaces with lots of OTW translators. Then I found out that I could internally apply as a Translation volunteer manager, and the rest is pretty much history. At that point I was missing the feeling of doing some volunteer management and admin work anyway!

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

On a high level, I’d say it’s striking a balance between the expectations and the reality of the work the Translation Committee does, including the sheer scale. On a more concrete level, it’s like this: Being a translator in the Translation Committee is, by default, a relatively low commitment, with a number of optional tasks and rosters that we encourage people to take on, if they have the time and attention to spare. Part of how we ensure that is by dealing with as much of the overhead in advance as we can, as Translation volunteer managers.

This means that for instance, when the English version of a text is updated – which may take about two minutes in the original text – we go through each language team’s copy of the text, make the changes as needed in the English copy, highlight what was changed, and reset the status in our internal task tracker so that it can be reassigned to a translator. This way the changed part is clearly visible to the translator, so they can quickly pinpoint what they need to do and make the corresponding changes in the translated text.

For both the author of the original English text and the translator, this is a very quick task. On the admin side, on the other hand, it’s the same two-minute process of updating our documents repeated over and over, about 15 times on the low end for frequent news post series that we only assign to teams that consistently have some buffer to absorb the extra workload, and almost 50 times on the high end for some of our staple static pages that (almost) all teams have worked on, meaning it’s something that takes somewhere between 30 minutes to almost two hours even when it’s a tiny change and you’re familiar with the workflow.

(And that’s before getting to very last-minute changes and emergency news post translations with less than two days’ turnaround time, where we manually track everything across around thirty teams, usually. Each time that has happened, everyone’s dedication has blown me away. Thank you so much to everyone who answers those calls, you know who you are!)

What fannish things do you like to do?

I like to read, especially if it’s something that plays around with worldbuilding or other things that were left unsaid in canon. I wish there were more hours in the day so that I can pick up some of my creative projects again. I suppose some of my coding projects like my AO3 userscripts and my AO3 Saved Filters bookmarklet also count as fannish?


Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you’d like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Fanhackers ([syndicated profile] fanhackers_feed) wrote2025-06-30 06:27 pm

Joy: The Interdisciplinary Edition

Posted by fanhackers-mods

I am always on the lookout for academic works that talk about the kinds of joy that I feel are characteristic of fandom. There are a lot of books about art, literature, music, etc. but their analysis doesn’t often take into account the pleasures of those activities (Barthes notwithstanding.)

One book that I like a lot for the way in which it conceptualizes joy in collectivity is William H. McNeill’s Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.  McNeill says something that, to me, is obviously true but rarely said: that people like to move together! The book is about the emotional bonding that happens when people move, together, in time: McNeill’s two examples are dance and drill (by which he means military drill - so Beyonce gives us a two-fer with Formation! ) Obviously this is a pleasure familiar to anyone who likes dance of any kind, or synchronised swimming, or drum circles, or marching bands, or yoga or tai chi, or participating in church services, or cheerleading, or doing the wave. I used McNeill in my Vidding book–but I also think of fandom’s love of a good power walk on any TV show! (For a great example check out the last few beats of the Clucking Belles’ Vid “A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness”, below - power walks are the subject of the last section.)

Some orienting quotes from the start of the book: 

Reflecting on my odd, surprising, and apparently visceral response to close-order drill, and recalling what little I knew about war dances and other rhythmic exercises among hunters and gatherers, I surmised that the emotional response to drill was an inheritance from prehistoric times, when our ancestors had danced around their camp fires before and after faring forth to hunt wild and dangerous animals…. (p.3)

The specifically military manifestations of this human capability are of less importance than the general enhancement of social cohesion that village dancing imparted to the majority of human beings from the time that agriculture began.  Two corollaries demand attention. First, through recorded history, moving and singing together made collective tasks far more efficient. Without rhythmical coordination of the muscular effort required to haul and pry heavy stones into place, the pyramids of Egypt and many other famous monuments could nnot have been built.  Second, I am convinced that long before written records allowed us to know anything precise about human behavior, keeping together in time became important for human evolution, allowing early human groups to increase their size, enhance their cohesion, and assure survival by improving their success in guarding territory, securing food, and nurturing the young. (p.4)

Our television screens show continuing pervasive manifestations of the human penchant for moving together in time. American football crowds, South African demonstrators, patriotic parades, and religious rituals of every description draw on the emotional effect of rhythmic movements and gestures. So of course do dancing, military  drill, and the muscular exercises with which, it is said, workers in Japanese factories begin each day. Yet, so far as I can discover, scientific investigation of what happens to those who engage in such behavior remains scant and unsystematic. (p. 5)

Pop Junctions: Reflections on Entertainment, Pop Culture, Activism, Media Litera ([syndicated profile] henryjenkins_feed) wrote2025-06-30 09:13 am

Frames of Fandom: An Interview on Fandom as Audience (Part One)

Posted by Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

BUY FRAMES OF FANDOM

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

henry jenkins and a furry fan

The books (esp. book 1) straddle autobiography and autoethnography. In your minds, is there a separation between the two (and does there need to be?) and how does your own personal background affect the books?

Henry: It would be hard to exclude the autoethnographic/autobiographical voice from a book on the field of fandom studies. As we discuss in Fandom as Subculture (not yet published), the aca-fan stance has been a founding and defining trait of fandom studies. We pay tribute there to the work of Angela McRobbie, whose influence I have come to see as absolutely foundational to my own work in Textual Poachers. In her “Settling Accounts” essay, she calls out the male researchers at Birmingham who were writing about various British subcultures without acknowledging their own involvement with them. She advocated a feminist standpoint epistemology as the intellectually honest way to approach such terrain. I would say the passages in the books where we write about our experiences as fans are a fulfillment of those principles.

I have often been reluctant to go full autoethnography in the past when writing about, say, female fan fiction writers in Textual Poachers, for fear that as a male scholar I would be taking up too much space or redirecting attention away from the feminist/feminine project of fan fiction. But, here, I can tap my own participation in, say, the monster culture of the 1960s as we examine the ways it deployed a range of domestic technologies and practices – from monster models to my mother’s eyeshadow, which I appropriated for monster make-up, to a super-8 camera or a Disney record of haunted house sounds or the photocopier from my dad’s company – to encourage and enable new forms of participatory culture.

Our use of the first-person is also a challenge to the anonymous voice with which most textbooks are written and the reason why such “nonhuman” prose becomes deadly to read. We often use first person to call attention to the forms of association between people that shape our scholarship, seeing scholarship as emerging through conversations, debates, and even confrontations between human beings. This is something I never got from a textbook: understanding here who our mentors were, who our students were, who our collaborators are, to help readers grasp the collaborative nature of scholarship. We don’t like the mind/body split implied when we focus exclusively on ideas without acknowledging the people behind them. 

Rob: There is a distinction between autobiography and autoethnography, and it’s a meaningful one, although perhaps it is not always a hard and fast boundary. We certainly do straddle it in Defining Fandom and across the series, and we do that very intentionally. Autobiography, traditionally, is about self-expression and narrative coherence, where the telling of a life, or a slice of it, foregrounds the personal and the idiosyncratic because it is interesting and entertaining in itself. Autoethnography, on the other hand, takes that personal slice and uses it for a purpose–it refracts it through conceptual lenses and asks, “What does this story help us understand about culture, media, society, technology or something else? What frameworks does it offer to us, which does it challenge, which does it expand upon?” 

Our series, and especially the first book, mobilizes autobiography in the service of autoethnography. So we are not just telling stories about our youthful engagements with Batman, Gilligan’s Island, or Pogo comics because we think they might be charming tales or nostalgic trips down memory lane (which, sometimes, they might be). We're using them to get at some of the finer conceptual points of fandom, to calibrate, through the lens of our own experiences, its meaning across personal, cultural, commercial, sacred, and other territories. 

This requires a kind of careful attunement. We are aware that who we are—our backgrounds, identities, affiliations, fascinations, values, emotional repertoires, and much more—shapes how we understand fandom, and even what aspects of fandom we consider meaningful. But rather than bracketing that influence, we try to make it central. Positionality in qualitative research doesn’t eliminate subjectivity (that is inevitable in all research) but it does seek to make it visible so that we can make it count in our interpretations. It acknowledges that who we are shapes what we see, how we interpret, what we choose to write down and leave out. Like I tell my students when I teach qualitative research methods, positionality isn’t a bug: it’s a feature of cultural inquiry. By placing our subjectivities in full view, we treat them not as something which distorts or “biases” our perspectives but as instruments that can be adjusted for, cross-checked, and interpreted in light of their specific strengths and limitations–something we are doing constantly behind the scenes as we write this book series and try to adjust for our mutual blind spots. 

That said, although we have some key similarities, we don't speak from a single unified voice. Instead, we use our two voices to emphasize the divergences between us—our different relationships to religion, for example, or to particular genres (like sports, videogames, and music), or even to what counts as “serious” academic work. These differences aren’t obstacles to understanding; they actually are our understanding. We are modeling through our voices and their perspectives what it looks like to build theory in dialogue, across perspectives, with attention to friction and resonance.

That’s also why our approach embraces a diversity of fan practices, motivations, and intensities, just as we show our own attachments as uneven, sometimes ambivalent, and always transforming. The personal becomes meaningful when it is not only deeply felt but also when it is analytically situated as a formation we can use to ask better questions about how people form attachments, how meaning circulates, and how cultural structures shape affective life.

In this way, the autobiographical and the autoethnographic come together for us as complementary modalities. One provides raw material we enjoy writing and feel passionate about, while the other encourages us to be judicious and consider its processing into a more conceptual form of understanding. One brings the reader closeness and the specificity of particular examples; the other offers some degree of distance and a space for abstract reflection and considerations. Our books use both, not to collapse the personal into the scholarly, but mainly to explore how one can clarify and deepen the other. 

Can you discuss what impact you want the books to have? Why these topics for the fifteen books – how did you come up with those, why not others? They are semi-academic, semi-personal; they are short, but still longer than (say) the Fandom Primer series; they are built around the two of you, but tell stories of fandom across a spectrum of ideas. How should readers “place” the books in their categorization of books about fandom?

Rob: The impact we hope for is both intellectual and practical. We want these books to help reframe how fandom is understood and approached across multiple fields. That means deepening the conversations already happening in cultural and fan studies while also extending them into marketing, consumer research, and communication studies. We want the work we’ve each done separately to meet here, in dialogue. Not fused into some hybrid middle but sharpened through contrast and coordination. These books aim to do that work out in public, so to speak.

The initial goal was modest. We needed a textbook for our Fan(dom) Relations course at Annenberg. But very quickly, the project expanded. It became an intellectual voyage, one that it seems we could only take together. The idea of “frames” gave the whole notion structure as well as depth. Each book would examine a different paradigm for understanding fandom: Fandom as Audience. Fandom as Subculture. Fandom as Activism. The frames overlap, they build on one another, and sometimes they even conflict with one another. That’s okay; we actually wanted that level of complexity and depth. This wasn’t a master theory of fandom we were putting together. It was always meant to be a way for us to think about and across fandom’s many multiplicities.

Fandom today is multifarious—it is strong, great, and numerous. We think that, for better and worse, has moved from the margins to the center of culture, economics, identity, and politics. We wanted to write books that reflected that shift. These books had to find a balance between being focused, teachable, grounded in prior thinking, up-to-date, future forward, and conceptually rich. The books are short but not light. They are accessible but not simplistic. And yes, they’re personal. We appear in them because we believe that theory is better when it’s situated, when it has a voice, a history, and a perspective. 

The fifteen topics we chose reflect a kind of mapping exercise. They trace out the dominant ways scholars and practitioners have tried to understand fandom. Some frames, like Fandom as Participatory Culture or Fandom as Co-Creation, reflect well-established paradigms. Others, like Fandom as Desire, Fandom as Devotion, Fandom as Technoculture, or Fandom Relations, push into less charted territory that we think is important or will be. But every book tries to say something new. We are trying to use these books to develop a novel perspective, not just report on or overview existing ones. 

We’re aware that this series doesn’t fit easily into existing categories. It’s not quite academic publishing, but it’s also not a fan primer or how-to. These are conceptual books written by researchers, who are also fans, and by fans, who are also researchers. We’re building on decades of work that has argued—we think correctly—that fandom is not a deviation from everyday life, but a powerful and productive mode of engaging with culture. That argument has been made and what we do here is trace in a variety of new ways its implications for scholars, students, managers, and certainly for fans themselves. 

Where should these books be placed? Maybe in the space that doesn’t yet exist: a shelf for works that take fandom seriously as a global social form. That speak across disciplines. That engage theory without detaching from lived experience. That are willing to argue, to speculate, to build, and to risk being wrong. This, as I see it, is the Frames of Fandom series. 

Henry: Our initial discussions on the project centered on the high costs of textbooks and especially student frustration when only small portions of books are used. Most students have not yet learned to think of books as long-term investments not restricted to the benefits to be gained within the context of a particular class. But what if we could deconstruct the textbook, allowing people to, in effect, buy chapters a la carte, paying for only the portions they need? This question is what started us down the path towards self-publishing.

As we got into it, our idea of selling a book chapter by chapter evolved into the concept of short-ish books focused around a single frame but looking at that frame from a number of different angles, thus incorporating a broad array of different literatures.

Revision of Hall’s ENCODING/DECODING MODEL

So, the book on fandom as an audience largely foregrounds how the approach grew out of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, but it also considers some other parallel developments from consumer culture research, reader-response theory, or formalist film theory, each of which taught us things we needed to know to understand fandom. We hit the big names, but we also are reintroducing writers who have often dropped out of the conversation about fandom within fandom studies, considering for example Dorothy Hobson’s advocacy on behalf of the audiences for soaps or Martin Barker’s potential contributions as a critic of fandom studies methodology.  

When John Fiske asked me to write a book about fans in the early 1990s, he wanted a grand theory of fandom, which was not something I could write given the state of research on fans then. Textual Poachers became a study of a relatively discrete set of fans – the women who wrote and read fan fiction – though there are mixed signals throughout as it tends to universalize these fans or incorporate material from research on other kinds of media audiences. Many of the criticisms writers like Matt Hills directed against the book locate contradictions, uncertainties, inconsistencies, and hesitations that emerged from those competing ideas about the book’s project.  

Now, we are at a place where there is a massive body of scholarship on fans, and so we can begin to map this as a field while, at the same time, constantly pushing for a more inclusive understanding of what fandom studies might learn from other adjacent bodies of literature. Simply bringing consumer culture research and fandom studies together, which is at the heart of our initial vision, is a large contribution. Trying to keep up with the writings about fandom beyond the Anglo-American world, say, requires active searching and careful contextualization of the similarities and differences that emerge. Debates within fandom require us to go back to intellectual roots, to consider roads not taken, works not read or discussed, that might allow us to expand our research in productive new directions.  

Often as we are writing these books, we have in mind a reader being introduced to the field for the first time, someone in graduate school who is searching for where they might make their ‘original contribution.’ We are leaving many, many breadcrumbs here. But also, as a scholar in my, erm, late 60s, I am trying to trace my own journey through this space, consolidate ideas developed in scattered publications, weigh ideas to see how I might modify them if I were writing these works today, acknowledge old debates and heal old wounds. I have made many different contributions to fandom studies at different phases of my career, as has Robert, and these books function as introductions to our body of scholarship as well as maps of the field more broadly.

One challenge, though, is that these books are coming out on a rolling basis. The core of each book is drafted, so we can point to what topics will surface in what book, but we are also adding and reflecting as we prepare them for publication. About a third of the content or more comes at that stage. We are writing as if the whole project had been completed, including pointers to what’s in the books not yet published. We hope people will be patient since all of this apparatus will be helpful once the project is completed. I also worry that people will get upset because we did not include a person or topic in book 2 that was always planned to be discussed in book 10. So, bear with us…

More to come in Part Two.

Biographies

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

Organization for Transformative Works ([syndicated profile] otw_news_feed) wrote2025-06-28 05:27 pm

TOS Spotlight: Commercial Promotion

Posted by xeno

The Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is responsible for enforcing the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS). To help users better understand the TOS, we’re posting a weekly spotlight series about the TOS and our policies. We’ll also be reading comments and answering questions on this and our other spotlight posts.


For our last post in this series, we’ll be talking about our non-commercialization policy. AO3 doesn’t allow users to engage in commercial promotion of any type, which includes everything from paywalls to tip jars, and quite a lot in between. In this post, we’ll discuss why AO3 doesn’t allow commercialization, what kinds of activities are considered to be commercial promotion, and what to do if you see commercial promotion on AO3.

Don’t go looking for things to report.

Please do not start searching for works to report after reading this post. We know that commercial promotion frequently appears on AO3. However, when people deliberately search for works to report, we end up getting a lot of duplicate tickets about works that have already been reported. Every ticket we receive is reviewed by a PAC volunteer, so we only need one report in order to investigate an issue. We know it seems like sites only respond to mass reports, but on AO3, duplicate and mass reports increase the time it takes our volunteers to investigate.

What is commercial promotion?

Commercial promotion covers all references or links to commercial sites, monetized features of non-commercial sites, and anything else that makes it clear someone is asking for or has received financial contributions.

On AO3, you can’t encourage anyone to give other people money, or talk about anyone having given people money in the past. This applies whether you are promoting yourself or a friend, or even if you’re collecting donations for other people or causes. If there is money changing hands, then it likely violates AO3’s TOS.

AO3 is a non-commercial space.

AO3 was created and is managed by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization committed to the defense and protection of fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenges. The OTW is entirely staffed by unpaid volunteers, and AO3 is itself entirely non-commercial. No one involved in AO3’s creation or management profits from it. The site is made available free of charge to all fans who wish to share their works with other fans and fan communities.

We understand that many people today choose to monetize their creative activities. However, in order to keep AO3 as the non-commercial space it was designed to be, users are not permitted to engage in any commercial activity on the site.

When you use AO3, you agree to follow our Terms of Service, which includes the non-commercialization policy. This applies to all parts of the site, whether you’re posting a work based on an existing source or creating content entirely original to you.

AO3’s non-commercialization policy applies to the entire site.

Real-world commercialization is banned everywhere on AO3. This includes:

  • Profile pages
  • Usernames, pseuds, and pseud descriptions
  • Works (including all tags, beginning or end notes, chapter notes, summaries, and titles)
  • Series (including titles, summaries, descriptions, and notes)
  • Bookmarks (including tags and notes)
  • Comments
  • Prompt memes, gift exchanges, and other collections
  • Any other part of AO3

It’s okay for fictional characters in fanworks to talk about fictional monetization. For example, it’s fine if a character has a fictional OnlyFans or Patreon within the story, as long as that commercial reference doesn’t direct the reader to a real-world OnlyFans or Patreon account for the work creator or anyone else.

What are some examples of commercial activities?

There is a wide variety of things that are not allowed under AO3’s non-commercialization rules.

Links or references to any commercial site or service. A “commercial site” is any site whose primary purpose is to facilitate the transfer of money. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Storefronts like Amazon or Etsy
  • Crowd fundraisers like Kickstarter or GoFundMe​​
  • Tip jars or membership subscriptions like Ko-Fi or Patreon
  • ​​Payment platforms like PayPal or Venmo

Links or references to the monetized features of non-commercial sites. This covers any site that has features you can enable or opt-in to earn revenue, but the primary purpose of the site is social media, sharing artwork, or anything else that isn’t inherently payment-focused. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Paywalls or early-access content like Wattpad Paid Stories or Webtoon Canvas
  • Storefronts like DeviantArt Shop or Instagram Shop
  • Tip jars or membership subscriptions like TikTok Donation Stickers or Twitch Prime

Previews and other promotions for paid content. This covers situations like excerpts or teasers shared in an attempt to entice people to purchase a book or become a paying subscriber. It also includes references to paywalled or early-access content (e.g. “Patreon subscribers get the new chapter one week early before I post it on AO3”).

Advertising content or services involving an exchange of money, such as buying merchandise, collecting donations, offering paid commissions, or selling published works.

Any other language which one might interpret as requesting or having requested financial contributions, whether for yourself or others. This covers indirect references, euphemisms, or other language intended to get around the TOS. Some examples of this include:

  • Thanks for the coffee!
  • My ☕ username is the same as my username here
  • This chapter is brought to you by my patrons
  • You know where to find me if you want early or bonus chapters
  • Check out my Twitter to learn how you can donate to me since I’m not allowed to discuss it here
  • If you want to hear more about my ideas, talk about fandom, or find more of my stuff for a coin, visit my Tumblr

Solicitation is not allowed, whether it’s for yourself or on behalf of someone else.

Commercial activity is not permitted on AO3. It doesn’t matter if you’re promoting yourself or a friend, or even if you’re collecting donations for other people or causes.

This means that if you paid an artist to create artwork for your fanfic, you’re not allowed to mention that they have a Patreon or use any other language that suggests people should also commission or donate to them. If you like a book by a particular author, you are certainly welcome to gush about what a great book it is, but you can’t link to the Amazon page where it’s for sale or encourage others to buy it.

What is the difference between a commercial site and a non-commercial site that has monetization features?

As mentioned above, a commercial site is a platform that is first and foremost intended to facilitate the exchange of money. For example, while you can use Ko-Fi as a blog, the site’s primary purpose is to encourage people to give each other money. Ko-Fi’s social features are secondary to its purpose as a donation and paid membership platform. This means you cannot link to or mention your or anyone else’s actual Ko-Fi on AO3 whatsoever.

An example of a non-commercial site that has monetization features is DeviantArt, an art gallery that is mainly intended as a place to share artworks. DeviantArt also allows its users to opt-in to additional monetization features, such as the DeviantArt Shop. Because DeviantArt’s paid features are both optional and not the primary reason people use the site, you can talk about or link to DeviantArt on AO3 – as long as you aren’t directing anyone to a paywalled post or referencing DeviantArt’s paid features in any way.

Can I link or mention a social media site where I talk about making money or collecting donations?

You’re allowed to link or mention social media like Tumblr or personal websites like WordPress, even if you sometimes post about commercial activities on those sites. However, you cannot reference commercial promotion on AO3 itself, nor may you link, mention, or give instructions for finding an account, page, or post that is solely promoting paid content.

Statements such as “Follow me on social media” or “Check out my Linktree” are fine. Directing people to an Amazon author page or to the Ko-fi link in your Twitter bio would not be allowed. This includes things like “Check out my Linktree to learn how you can support me” in cases where you are clearly referring to monetary support.

Can I post a fanwork created for a charity drive or for-profit zine?

While you cannot promote, solicit, or otherwise ask for donations on AO3, you are allowed to add your work to a collection or otherwise briefly mention why you created a fanwork, as long as you do so in a non-commercial manner. This means you can say “This was created for [Event]” or “Originally Written for [Name of Person/Zine]” as long as you do not directly link to a donation page or ask others to donate to them.

Keep in mind we also do not permit mentions of monetary transactions, regardless of when they occurred. A note such as “This was a $100 bid for Fandom Trumps Hate” would still be considered commercialization.

I’ve seen authors say their works are commissions. Is this allowed?

You are allowed to gift your work to someone else or otherwise briefly mention why you created a fanwork, as long as you do so in a non-commercial manner. Because not all commissioned fanworks were created for pay, we do permit usage of the word “commission” as long as there is no indication that a monetary transaction was involved in the creation of the work or that you are available to create other paid commissions.

For example, phrasing like “This is a commission for X” is acceptable, but “Commission for my Gold Tier Patron, Julie” or “My client agreed to let me post the first chapter of their commission” isn’t. The context makes it clear that both “patron” and “client” are references to a paying sponsor.

I’ve seen others ask for donations or advertise paid commissions. Why can’t I?

As our TOS FAQ explains, we don’t review content until it’s reported to us. You may have seen somebody else mentioning their paywalled content or otherwise engaging in commercial activities on AO3, but that doesn’t mean that it’s allowed. All it means is that nobody has reported that content to us yet, or that we haven’t finished processing the report.

What will happen if I get reported for commercial promotion?

First, we’ll review the reported work to confirm that you violated our TOS by engaging in commercial activities on AO3. If we determine that you did, we’ll send you an email telling you to remove the violating material.

If your work can be edited to fix the issue, you’ll be asked to edit the work. Your work may be hidden from other users until you do. If you choose not to edit the work, or if your work cannot be edited into compliance with the TOS, it will be deleted.

PAC will only ever contact you by email, and only after we’ve determined that your work violates our Terms of Service. We will never comment on your work or contact you through social media. Please make sure to keep your account’s email address up to date and check it regularly (including your spam folder), or else you may miss our warning email.

If you repeatedly post works that violate our commercial promotion policies, you may be temporarily suspended. Continuing to violate the TOS will result in your being permanently banned from AO3. You can learn more about warnings and suspensions in our TOS FAQ.

What should I do if I encounter commercial activity on AO3?

You can give the creator a heads up by politely commenting on their work and linking to the TOS FAQ or this post. Alternatively, you can report the work to us.

What about spam comments?

The best way to deal with spam comments, commercial or otherwise, depends on whether the comments are from registered accounts or guests.

How do I report commercial activity?

Although we ask that you do not deliberately seek out commercial promotion to report, if you come across commercial activity while browsing, you can report it using the Policy Questions & Abuse Reports form, which is linked at the bottom of every page on AO3.

Please don’t report more than one user at a time or submit multiple reports about the same user. When reporting multiple works by the same user, please submit only one report with links to each work you’re reporting, so that all information about that user is in the same place.

Please tell us exactly where in the work the commercialization is. The best way to do this is to give us a description or short quote that we can search for in order to immediately find the content. If you are reporting multiple works by the same creator, please group all the works into one report and provide this information for each work.

For example, a report of commercial promotion might look like this:

Link to the page you are reporting: https://archiveofourown.org/works/00000000

Brief summary of Terms of Service violation: Commercial promotion

Description of the content you are reporting:
This work by USERNAME advertises a ko-fi in the end notes of chapter 3.

If you are reporting additional works, please include all relevant links and other information in your report description:

Description of the content you are reporting:
This work by USERNAME advertises a ko-fi in the end notes of chapter 3.

Some of their other works also contain commercial promotion:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23456789 encourages readers to purchase their book on Amazon: “If you’re curious what else I’ve been working on or want to support me elsewhere, check out my new short story on Kindle Unlimited!”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/34567890 contains an embedded image with a Patreon watermark. Underneath, the sentence “If you want more like this, click here” takes you to their commissions price sheet.

You can add more details if you like, but this example provides the basic information we need:

  • Who posted the commercial promotion: Tell us their username or if the work is anonymous or orphaned.
  • Where we can find the work(s): Enter one URL in the “Link to the page you are reporting” field, and (if applicable) include links to any other violating works in the description of your report.
  • What violates the TOS: Explain why you think commercial promotion has occurred, for example by including a quote and/or providing context for a comment exchange. A brief description of the situation is fine; you don’t need to be very detailed or quote an entire TOS or FAQ section.

You’ll receive an automatic email confirming that we received your report, and our volunteers will investigate when they get a chance. Please be patient and do not submit another report about the same work. While PAC investigates every report we receive, it can take several months for us to process a report, and not every report will receive a reply.

What if I have more questions about commercial promotion?

PAC follows a strict confidentiality policy. Therefore, while you are welcome to ask general questions in the comments of this post, we will not give information on specific cases, publicly rule on a work, or update you on the status of a report you have already submitted. Comments on this post that discuss specific works or users will be removed.

If you think you’ve found commercial promotion on AO3, or if you want to know whether a particular work contains commercial promotion, please report the work to us as described above. For more information, you can read our TOS FAQ on Commercial Promotion.

If you are still uncertain, you can comment below or submit a question through the Policy Questions & Abuse Reports form.

Organization for Transformative Works ([syndicated profile] otw_news_feed) wrote2025-06-27 02:23 pm

AO3 Releases 0.9.409 – 0.9.413: Change Log

Posted by choux

In May and June, we made some security additions for user accounts by adding email notifications when an account’s username or password is changed. We also made some improvements around tag sets and challenge signups. As one more security change, we also permanently disabled image embedding in guest comments.

A special thank you to our new contributors Ashley Tan, dismayonnaise, Grayson von Goetz, Jen Mann, kitbur, and ryelle!

Credits

  • Coders: Ashley Tan, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Connie Feng, dismayonnaise, EchoEkhi, Grayson von Goetz, Hamham6, Jen Mann, kitbur, marcus8448, ryelle, Sarken, Scott, slavalamp, weeklies
  • Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, james_, lydia-theda, redsummernight, slavalamp, Sarken, weeklies
  • Testers: Bilka, Brian Austin, choux, Deniz, Eskici, LilyP, Lute, lydia-theda, Maine, megidola, Runt, Sam Johnsson, Sarken, Scott, Tal, Teyris, therealmorticia, wichard

Details

0.9.409

On May 11, we deployed some improvements to tag sets and added an email notification whenever the username on your account is changed.

  • [AO3-5513] – Admins can now successfully create and rename media tags without running into 500 errors or caching issues.
  • [AO3-5714] – When a canonical fandom and a non-canonical character or relationship were added to the same tag set, the non-canonical tags were automatically listed under the fandom. However, this is just how the tags were displayed in the tag set. They weren’t really connected to the fandom, which meant they weren’t included in autocompletes and couldn’t be used in challenge sign-ups. We’ve stopped automatically listing the non-canonical tags under the fandom and will instead only do it if the tag set moderators set up an association (which will also make the non-canonical tags usable in sign-ups and help ensure they appear in the autocomplete).
  • [AO3-5919] – We updated the code for kudos emails to avoid using a method that wasn’t particularly efficient.
  • [AO3-6757] – When an admin hides a comment, any embedded images in the hidden comment will now be replaced with the image URLs.
  • [AO3-6844] – We fixed a whole bunch of display and page structure issues on pages that list the tags in a tag set.
  • [AO3-6977] – We’ve started spam checking edits to comments from new users and stopped spam checking any comments a work creator leaves on their own work.
  • [AO3-6981] – To improve account security, we now send you an email when you (or someone logged in to your account) change your username.
  • [AO3-6984] – Our dependency updater bumped our version of net-imap to 0.5.7. It’s not something we use, but keeping dependencies up to date is good.
  • [AO3-6988] – We started caching the package installs involved in our automated tests, making each test run faster.
  • [AO3-6990] – We bumped our version of the rack gem to 2.2.14 to get the latest security fix.

0.9.410

On May 16, we added an email notification whenever the password of your account is changed. We also made a number of small improvements all around the site.

  • [AO3-5712] – Under certain circumstances, it was possible to sign up for a challenge using a character or relationship that wasn’t permitted by the challenge’s tag set. Now you’ll get an error if you try to do that.
  • [AO3-6267] – If a draft chapter was added to a work in your History, your History would lie to you and say an update to the work was available. Now it will only tell you an update is available if a new chapter has been published since you last accessed the work.
  • [AO3-6627] – Whenever a site admin tried to update the roles for a user who already had roles outside the admin’s purview, those existing roles would be removed. (For example, when a Tag Wrangling admin gave the tag wrangler role to a user who had the Open Doors archivist role, the user would lose their archivist role.) We’ve fixed it so any existing roles will stay in place.
  • [AO3-6994] – We fixed an issue that was causing our spam checker to run on comments from accounts with recently changed email addresses.
  • [AO3-6005] – We used feature tests somewhere we should’ve been using unit tests, so we changed them over.
  • [AO3-6975] – At some point the admin setting for how long to keep around unactivated accounts had become disconnected from the code it was meant to control. We fixed this so the setting once again affects the right piece of code.
  • [AO3-6970] – When the Policy & Abuse committee hides a work, you get an automatic email to notify you. To prepare for some future changes, we’ve updated the email text to allow for multiple works in the same email.
  • [AO3-6973] – Another account security enhancement: you’ll now get an email when you (or someone accessing your account) change or reset your password.

0.9.411

On May 24, we deployed an improvement to word counts for multichapter works on the Statistics page. We also took steps to fight abuse in guest comments by preventing them from ever displaying embedded images.

  • [AO3-3818] – On some specific browsers on certain devices, leaving comments or submitting support tickets would result in an error. We’ve now fixed that.
  • [AO3-4190] – Every time invitations were sent, the log on the site settings page updated to say the settings had been modified. We’ve fixed it so it will only say the settings have been updated when an admin updates them.
  • [AO3-7000] – One of the external links in the Creating a Skin help pop-up pointed to a site that had been taken over by a crypto magazine, so we’ve replaced it with a new resource for learning about CSS.
  • [AO3-6995] – In a previous release, we tried to drop an unused database column. Unfortunately, we had to put it back when it turned out Rails was still looking for the column due to caching. We’ve now made a code change that will let us drop the column for real after a future release.
  • [AO3-5270] – The yearly word counts on your Statistics page will now only count words written in chapters posted in that year. That means if you add a chapter to a WIP you started last year, the words you wrote last year will still count toward 2024’s total instead of being added to 2025’s total.
  • [AO3-5347] – The notification you get when someone cites your work as a related work has now been prepared for translation.
  • [AO3-6092] – A while ago, we unintentionally fixed a bug where the chapter title didn’t display in Entire Work mode if the work only had one posted chapter. Now we’ve added an automated test to make sure we don’t unintentionally break it again.
  • [AO3-6684] – The close button on the banner we use for sitewide announcements uses an ×, which typically makes sense if you’re looking at the page, but which gets read as “multiplication sign” if you’re using a screen reader. That was confusing, so we’ve made sure screen readers will now say “hide banner” instead.
  • [AO3-6967] – We’ve added a second save button to the top of tag edit pages to make things a little more convenient when the page is long and a wrangler is just changing something at the top of the form.
  • [AO3-6987] – Under certain circumstances, we strip embedded images from certain fields. We used to just show the image URL when we did that, but now we show all of the HTML.
  • [AO3-6991] – As a safety measure, guest comments with embedded images will always show the HTML instead of embedded images. (This includes existing guest comments.)

0.9.412

On June 5, we deployed a small release with some bug fixes.

  • [AO3-6166] – If you knew the ID of an unrevealed work you could access a few subpages of the work, such as the collections page, and find out the title of the work that way. Since that’s meant to be unrevealed, we’ve changed these pages so you can no longer access them if the work is unrevealed.
  • [AO3-6937] – We changed the browser page title on inbox pages to a format that matches other user pages: “username – Inbox | Archive of Our Own.”
  • [AO3-6953] – We made sure you’ll get an error message if you attempt to clear your History and it fails.
  • [AO3-6993] – The Edit Multiple Works page will no longer display a bunch of unusable options when you don’t have any works. Instead, it will simply tell you you don’t have any works.
  • [AO3-6550] – When displaying work titles, we used to call a function on them that had already been called. We’ve stopped doing that since it’s redundant.
  • [AO3-6948] – We added some code to enable us to monitor the performance of the job that sends invitations to people in the invitation queue.

0.9.413

Our June 16 deploy added the ability to embed media from audio.com in works.

  • [AO3-6515] – We fixed an error 500 that occured when a work with end notes was marked as published, but only had draft chapters.
  • [AO3-6912] – We changed the browser page title for unrevealed works to include the site name at the end.
  • [AO3-6437] – We removed some unused database tables.
  • [AO3-6996] – We finally dropped that unused database column and removed the code we added to make that go smoothly.
  • [AO3-6235] – Admins from the Policy & Abuse committee can now turn invitation requests on and off from the site settings page.
  • [AO3-6588] – Admins from the Open Doors and Support committees can now give users the role that disables password reset emails for their account.
  • [AO3-7003] – You can now add embeds from audio.com to your works.
Organization for Transformative Works ([syndicated profile] otw_news_feed) wrote2025-06-24 09:35 am

OTW Signal, June 2025

Posted by callmeri

Every month in OTW Signal, we take a look at stories that connect to the OTW’s mission and projects, including issues related to legal matters, technology, academia, fannish history and preservation issues of fandom, fan culture, and transformative works.

In the News

The Conversation’s article “The lore of ‘lore'” explores how fandom fueled the reinvention of a 1,000-year-old word:

Now essential online slang, [“lore”] can be traced back to Old English, where it referred primarily to learning, as in the act of teaching or being taught. Over time, lore came to be associated with more informal knowledge, passed on through word of mouth … [but then it] largely slipped out of common usage … So, how did “lore” come to hold such contemporary relevance?

“Lore” still carries shades of its original meaning, but just as fans expand and transform canon, modern usage reimagines it. Oxford University Press—which shortlisted “lore” for their 2024 word of the year—explains:

In recent years, people have been using “lore” in different ways and in new contexts. For example, they might now talk about the lore surrounding a particular celebrity, or a character in a book or film, or even refer to their own personal history as their lore. Online cultures and social media have seen the emergence of new kinds of celebrities and highly-engaged fandoms, and the word has been applied much more widely.

From its popularity in K-pop to the semi-eponymous Fanlore, the rise of “lore” is a great example of how fans build cultural meaning through shared language and creative reinterpretation.


The Geekiary’s article on fandom holidays speaks on how fans mark time within their communities. Be it May the Fourth (Star Wars Day) or Destiel’s confession anniversary, fandom holidays are not an uncommon phenomenon. Some humorous, some profound, these unofficial yet widely beloved holidays are often tied to moments from canon (such as a character’s birthday or an in-universe event) and serve to foster community building.
These observances turn the ordinary calendar into a timeline of shared emotion and meaning. As an act of tradition, they become ritual anchors that give structure to the fan’s calendar, offering a sense of comfort and familiarity in an ever-changing world. The article notes how this act of building new traditions and creating opportunities for community bonding forges a sense of cultural memory for fans.

In her book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Abigail De Kosnik describes how “Memory has gone rogue in the sense that it has come loose from its fixed place in the production cycle. It now may be found anywhere, or everywhere, in the chain of making”. Celebrating holidays online or by digitizing photographs/experiences allows these memories to be accessed later on, rather than be fixed to just a specific person or place. It lets our fandoms live outside of us as individuals.

Like lore, fandom holidays demonstrate how participation itself becomes a form of authorship—each contribution adding another thread to the tapestry.

OTW Tips

Fandom is global, and many amazing fanworks are written, drawn, or subtitled in languages other than one’s own. Whether you’re tagging fanfiction in your native language or collaborating with international fans, your efforts enrich fandom’s diversity and inclusivity.
The OTW is recruiting for Tag Wrangling Volunteers (Russian), Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution Volunteers, and Support Volunteers (Chinese).
Consider volunteering for one of the OTW’s teams to support and celebrate global fan participation!


We want your suggestions for the next OTW Signal post! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or news story you think we should know about, send us a link. We are looking for content in all languages! Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in an OTW post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Organization for Transformative Works ([syndicated profile] otw_news_feed) wrote2025-06-23 12:33 am

2025 OTW Elections Candidates Announcement

Posted by Caitlynne

Candidates Announcement

The Organization for Transformative Works is pleased to announce the following candidates for the 2025 Election (in alphabetical order by given name):

  • C. Ryan S.
  • Elizabeth W.
  • Harlan L.B.

Because we have 2 seats to be filled and 3 candidates, the 2025 election will be contested – that is, the members of the OTW will vote on which candidates fill the seats.

The Elections Committee is excited to introduce the candidates to all of the members of the OTW! Included in this post are links to short Bios and Platforms written by the candidates. This post also marks the beginning of our Q&A period, during which we invite the public to submit questions for the candidates. Additionally, we will be holding a series of live chats – dates and times for those are to be announced based on candidate availability. Information on the voting period and how to vote will also be posted shortly.

In the meantime, there is a timeline of Elections events available here for your reference. Read on to learn more about our candidates and how you can submit questions for them!

Platforms and Bios

We asked each candidate to provide us with a Bio that sums up their professional and fannish experience, as well as to write a Platform about their goals for their term on the Board by answering the following questions:

  • Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?
  • What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?
  • Choose one or two goals for the OTW that are important to you and that you would be interested in working on during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?
  • What is your experience with the OTW’s projects and how would you collaborate with the relevant committees to support and strengthen them? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.
  • How would you balance your Board work with other roles in the OTW, or how do you plan to hand over your current roles to focus on Board work?

You can read both the candidates’ answers to these questions and their bios by following the links below.

Question & Answer (Q&A)

To better accommodate the time constraints of the election and the workload for candidates, we are asking voters to limit to one question per message. Additional questions in the same message will be discarded. Limit of three questions per person.

Anyone may submit questions via the Elections form. Please submit all questions by 11:59pm UTC on June 29 (what time is that where I live?). All candidates will answer each question submitted, subject to the following restrictions:

  • Questions must be a maximum of 50 words long.
  • Any submitted questions repeating what is already addressed on Platforms will be ignored. This is to allow candidates to dedicate more time to answering new questions.
  • Similar questions will be grouped together to avoid candidates giving repetitive answers. Elections volunteers will decide which questions are similar enough to group.
  • If you have a follow-up to a Platform question, please specifically mention it is a follow-up so Elections volunteers know not to treat it as a repeat.
  • One question per message. Additional questions in the same message will be discarded.
  • Maximum of three questions per person.

The posting date for answers will be chosen depending on the number of questions received. Posts will be spread out, arranged by topic, to make it easier for voters to read all the answers.

Fanhackers ([syndicated profile] fanhackers_feed) wrote2025-06-22 10:49 am

 Acafannish Sampler: Otherwise Titled, “Three Things Make a Post”

Posted by fanhackers-mods

Below find excerpts from three essays in A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, edited by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa 2021). These essays are on subjects that, to my mind, are under-researched: fan art, Black cosplay, and quantitative approaches to fandom:

“Unfortunately, while fan studies scholarship boasts a growing stack of books, chapters, and journal articles on fan fiction, fan art remains comparatively understudied. The extant writings tend to focus on specific instances of fan art creation instead of considering fan art more broadly or theoretically. This seems like a strange oversight, as the explosion of fan art has occurred alongside that of fan fiction, taking advantage of many of the same social media spaces, technologies, and fan communities. Fan art is a social practice, a frequent means of transcultural communication, an engaged response to media, a visual text, and sometimes a physical object. By studying fan art, we can learn a great deal about the fan communities who produce and share it. 

An important characteristic of fan art as a genre is that it is generally designed to be read, that is, for a viewer to recognize and understand what it is meant to represent and reference. Iconography is a key tool for understanding how much of this readability functions. Art historian Erwin Panofsky defined iconography as that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form. This chapter considers the role of iconography in making fan art readable, as well as looking at how this iconography can develop and what these iconographic choices can tell us about fans and fandoms.”  

–EJ Nielsen, “The Iconography of Fan Art”

~ ~ ~

“In this chapter, I shed light on the activities of Black cosplayers usually rendered invisible because of their racialized performance of cosplay. The performance and skill of Black fans tend to go unheard, so I focus on the Black cosplayer movement, where Black cosplayers attempt to be seen by the general public and each other. The focus on Black cosplay provides a deeper understanding of identity performance in fandom and cultural studies more broadly. I begin by summarizing what cosplay is and the work done in the fandom studies field that can help us understand how Black fans interact with cosplay and the struggles they face. I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the tweets and images posted since 2015 under the hashtag #28DaysOfBlackCosplay. This movement shows how the online Black fan community uses cosplay to resist the hierarchical structure in fandoms and gain visibility.” 

–Alex Thomas, “The Dual Imagining: Afrofuturism. Queer Performance, and Black Cosplayers”

~ ~ ~

“Fan studies has always been robustly interdisciplinary. Its methodological and epistemological diversity should be celebrated and expanded. This chapter attempts to do both by presenting a case for the increased role of quantitative and computational tools and methods and for the kind of data-informed approaches to fandom and fanworks they make possible. Such approaches have struggled to find any real purchase in the field, which is somewhat puzzling given content industries’ increasing emphasis on the “datafication” of media audiences in general and fannish audiences in particular. Fan studies will need to engage with this trend and its ramifications, as well as with the algorithmic culture of which they are both cause and effect. The value of quantitative and computational tools and methods is hardly confined to this one area. On the contrary, when thoughtfully applied to data generated by and about fans, fandom, and fanworks, these tools and methods are very likely to make visible patterns, trends, relationships, networks, and (dis)continuities therein that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to discern.” 

–Josh Stenger, “The Datafication of Fandom: Or How I Stopped Watching the DC Arrowverse on The CW and Learned to Mine Fanwork Metadata”

Organization for Transformative Works ([syndicated profile] otw_news_feed) wrote2025-06-21 07:42 pm

TOS Spotlight: Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement

Posted by xeno

The Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is responsible for enforcing the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS). To help users better understand the TOS, we’re posting a weekly spotlight series about the TOS and our policies. We’ll also be reading comments and answering questions on this and our other spotlight posts.


In today’s post, we’ll discuss two categories of TOS violations that have a lot of overlap: plagiarism and copyright infringement.

Don’t go looking for things to report.

Please do not start searching for plagiarized or infringing works to report after reading this post. We know that plagiarism and copyright infringement can happen on AO3, as on any site. However, when people deliberately search for works to report, we end up getting a lot of duplicate tickets about works that have already been reported. Every ticket we receive is reviewed by a PAC volunteer, so we only need one report in order to investigate an issue. We know it seems like sites only respond to mass reports, but on AO3, duplicate and mass reports increase the time it takes our volunteers to investigate.

AO3 is for transformative fanworks

AO3 is an archive for fanfiction and other transformative fanworks. Transforming a work means that you are adding a new expression, different purpose, or alternate perspective to the source work. A transformative fanwork doesn’t copy the original source; instead, it uses the characters, setting, or other inspiration from an existing work to make a new, distinct creative work.

Transformative fanworks can be posted without requiring permission from the creator of the original work. When considering whether a work is transformative, we apply the same standards to fanworks as to professional works. This means that a fanwork based on another fanwork is allowed, just as much as a fanwork of a professionally published novel is. You are allowed to write a story or create fanart about someone else’s original character, or to use the same general ideas, tropes, or story structures as someone else. Two works can share the same premise, setting, and plot while still being transformative.

However, replacing names, swapping out words for their synonyms, or making other superficial changes to the source work is not considered transformative. A transformative work needs to have a large amount of creative expression that is original to you.

Plagiarism vs copyright infringement

Plagiarism occurs when a person reproduces large portions of someone else’s work or very heavily bases their work on another without adequately transforming it, and doesn’t credit the source. This lack of credit makes it appear as though the copied work is entirely their own original, unique idea and expression.

To avoid potential issues of plagiarism, you can cite your source by linking back to the original, for example by using AO3’s Inspired By feature. However, just because you provided credit doesn’t mean you’re automatically okay: your work may still be in violation of our other policies, such as copyright infringement.

Copyright infringement occurs when a work reproduces large portions of a different work, whether verbatim or with very little alteration (i.e. not in a transformative manner), without the authorization of the copyright owner. Even if you credit the source, reproducing too much of someone else’s content is still a violation of their copyright unless you have the copyright owner’s explicit permission.

Permission is not required for short quotations. Use a limited amount that’s reasonable for your purpose, such as:

  • 2-3 lines of lyrics per song
  • 2-3 lines of text per short chapter of a novel
  • 10 minutes of screentime per TV episode or movie

If you want to include longer excerpts, you will need the copyright owner’s permission. This applies regardless of whether the original work is a fanwork or published professionally.

Permission to reuse fanworks

Some fan creators will give other people permission to reproduce larger portions of their works than would ordinarily be permitted by copyright laws alone. They may do this by granting blanket permissions for particular uses (for example, “Anyone can translate or podfic my work, but I don’t allow reposts or nameswaps”) or by applying an official license (such as Creative Commons) to the work, which grants various permissions based on terms specific to the exact license.

If permission to reproduce the work is accompanied by specific terms, then you must follow those terms. For example, a creator may say, “You can translate my fic so long as you link back to the original.” In that case, if you post your translation without providing a link, you’re violating our policies. In order for your translation to be allowed, you would need to include the link as requested.

Common types of infringement

Unauthorized reposts

If you want to upload someone else’s work to AO3, you need to have their permission. It doesn’t matter how difficult it might be to contact them: even if the original creator posted their work a decade ago and then vanished from the internet, they still have copyright over their own work.

If you can’t get permission but you still want to save or share somebody else’s fanwork from another site, you can create an external bookmark that links to the work on that site, and add tags and notes to your bookmark so that other AO3 users can also find and enjoy the work.

Minor edits and adaptations

Making minor changes to a work doesn’t make the work original to you. If you’ve only changed the characters’ names and/or pronouns, or corrected the original author’s grammar or formatting, that isn’t transformative. You’ll need the creator’s permission to adapt their work like this and post it to AO3.

Too many quotes: transcripts and “character reaction” works

Transcripts (whether of TV episodes, movies, plays, video games, etc.) are protected by copyright. You cannot repost canon material on AO3, as this is typically a violation of our copyright infringement and/or non-fanwork policies.

If you’re creating a fanwork where the characters are reacting to another piece of media (such as by reading or watching the book, show, or movie that they were originally from), then that is allowed if and only if you don’t include too many quotes from the original source. Even if the lines of the original book or script are broken up by the characters’ reactions, you still can’t reproduce more than a few lines of the original text. If you’d like to post a work in which characters read or watch another work, then we suggest heavily reducing the number and length of your quotes, and/or briefly summarizing the events they’re reacting to instead of quoting directly from the original work.

Songfics with lyrics

Song lyrics are protected by copyright, which means you can’t reproduce large portions of lyrics without permission. This includes both songfics where the lyrics are interspersed throughout the story text and fics with characters singing songs as part of their dialogue. If the part of the song you want to highlight is more than a few lines, we suggest instead linking to a licensed source, such as the artist’s official YouTube channel.

Embedded artwork

Copyright doesn’t just apply to written text, but to all types of creative work regardless of the medium. In order to embed or upload someone else’s images, audio, or videos onto your AO3 account, you must have the original creator’s permission and credit them appropriately.

If you don’t have permission, or don’t know how to credit the original creator, then we suggest instead using HTML or AO3’s Inspired By feature to link directly to the creator’s own original post.

Unauthorized podfics & translations

If you want to podfic or translate someone else’s work, you need their permission to do so. According to United States law, audio recordings and translations are considered derivative, not transformative. AO3 welcomes fan-podficcers and fan-translators. However, your content must comply with U.S. law for us to be able to host it, which means that you must have the permission of the copyright owner in order to post your podfic or translation on AO3.

Infringing on orphaned works

Orphaning a work does not mean the original creator is giving up their copyright, even if their username is no longer displayed on the work. The only thing the original creator did when orphaning their work was agree to transfer that specific copy of their work to AO3’s orphan_account.

Just like with any other work, if you wish to podfic or translate an orphaned work, you will need permission from the original creator. This can come in the form of an author’s note on the work or an additional tag such as Podfic Welcome. If the work contains no such statement, and you don’t know or can’t find the original creator to ask for permission, then you may not podfic or translate the work.

If you plan on orphaning your works and you want to ensure that other users can continue to adapt or translate them, consider adding a permission statement to each of your works before orphaning them.

Posting public domain works

While public domain works are no longer protected by copyright, reposting someone else’s work is not transformative. AO3 is an archive for fanworks and for original works created in a fannish context. Therefore, you cannot upload other people’s public domain works to AO3.

However, as public domain works are not protected by copyright, some types of derivative works (such as your own translation) may be posted on AO3.

I’ve seen others post plagiarized or infringing works. Why can’t I?

As our TOS FAQ explains, we don’t review content until it’s reported to us. You may have seen somebody else posting an unauthorized translation or public domain work on AO3, but that doesn’t mean that it’s allowed. All it means is that nobody has reported that work to us yet, or that we haven’t finished processing the report.

What will happen if I get reported for plagiarism or copyright infringement?

First, we’ll review the reported work and any provided sources to confirm whether or not your work contains plagiarized or infringing material. If we determine that your work is in violation, we’ll send you an email telling you to remove the violating material.

If your work can be edited to fix the issue, you’ll be asked to edit the work. Your work may be hidden from other users until you do. If you choose not to edit the work, or if your work cannot be edited into compliance with the TOS, it will be deleted.

PAC will only ever contact you by email, and only after we’ve determined that your work violates our Terms of Service. We will never comment on your work or contact you through social media. Please make sure to keep your account’s email address up to date and check it regularly (including your spam folder), or else you may miss our warning email.

If you repeatedly post works that violate our copyright and/or plagiarism policies, you may be temporarily suspended. Continuing to violate the TOS will result in you being permanently banned from AO3. You can learn more about warnings and suspensions in our TOS FAQ.

What should I do if I encounter a work that contains plagiarized or infringing material?

You can give the creator a heads up by politely commenting on their work and linking to the TOS FAQ or this post. Alternatively, you can report the work to us.

How do I report a work for plagiarism or copyright infringement?

Although we ask that you do not deliberately seek out violating works to report, if you encounter one while browsing, you can report it using the Policy Questions & Abuse Reports form, which is linked at the bottom of every page on AO3. The copyright owner or their authorized legal representative can also file a DMCA claim, as explained on our DMCA Policy page.

In order for us to uphold a complaint, we need you to provide us with specific information about exactly what was copied and from where. Without these details, we may not be able to action your report.

If the work in question is no longer available online, but you have a copy of the work (such as a PDF), please say so. We may ask you to provide that copy to help us in our investigation.

Please be specific in your report. If you send us a link to an 80,000-word fic and say only “This work rips off mine!” without providing any details (such as a link to your own work), that’s not enough information for us to act on. We will need to email you back asking for more information, and if you don’t provide us with that information, we won’t be able to investigate. If we can’t verify the infringement for ourselves, then we won’t take any action.

Please don’t report more than one user at a time or submit multiple reports about the same user. When reporting multiple works by the same user, please submit only one report with links to each work you’re reporting (correctly matched up with the original source), so that all information about that user is in the same place.

If you give us a link to one work and say “All of their other works look like plagiarism too!” without giving us details about those works or their sources, that isn’t enough information for us to act on those other works. If you give us a jumbled or incomplete list of links, or if you report each work by the same user separately, this makes our volunteers’ work much harder.

For example, a report might look like this:

Link to the page you are reporting: https://archiveofourown.org/works/00000000

Brief summary of Terms of Service violation: Plagiarism

Description of the content you are reporting:
This work by Ernie is plagiarized from Bert’s work, “Fifty Shades of Oatmeal”: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23456789

The entire thing is copied, Ernie just swapped out Elmo’s name for the Count’s and changed some of the colors.

If you are reporting additional works, please include all relevant links and other information in your report description:

Brief summary of Terms of Service violation: Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement

Description of the content you are reporting:
This work by Ernie is plagiarized from Bert’s work, “Fifty Shades of Oatmeal”: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23456789

The entire thing is copied, Ernie just swapped out Elmo’s name for the Count’s and changed some of the colors.

Another of Ernie’s works plagiarizes from Big Bird’s “If You Give a Monster a Cookie”:

Ernie’s work (plagiarism): https://archiveofourown.org/works/34567890
Big Bird took down their fic when they published it as an original story. Here’s a link to the published version: https://www.monstercookiebooks.com/books/9876543210/if-you-give-a-monster-a-cookie

I also have a downloaded copy of the original fic I can give you if you need it.

The plagiarized section is in Ernie’s chapter 2, where it starts at “Every time that Cookie Monster goes to the store, he can’t resist going and picking up more chocolate chip cookies.”

This is plagiarizing chapter 3 of Big Bird’s work, which starts, “Whenever Cookie Monster went to the store, he couldn’t resist buying more chocolate chip cookies.”

The entire rest of the fic is like that, with only minor edits to each sentence. It’s over ten thousand words long!

Finally, this other work contains the full lyrics of “I Love Trash” as sung by Oscar the Grouch: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45678901

Here’s a link to the song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJekxVILnhw

You can add more details if you like, but this example provides the basic information we need:

  • Who posted the violating work(s): Tell us their username or if the work is anonymous or orphaned.
  • Where we can find the violating work(s): Enter one URL in the “Link to the page you are reporting” field, and (if applicable) include links to any other violating works in the description of your report.
  • Where we can find the original source material: Include a link to each original source and tell us what parts of the source were copied, for example by including chapter numbers or quotes from the relevant scenes.
  • What violates the TOS: Explain why you think each work you’re reporting is infringing and match each reported work to its original source. A set of links and a brief description of each work is fine; you don’t need to be very detailed or quote an entire page.

You’ll receive an automatic email confirming that we received your report, and our volunteers will investigate when they get a chance. Please be patient and do not submit another report about the same incident. While PAC investigates every report we receive, it can take several months for us to process a report, and not every report will receive a reply.

What if I have more questions about plagiarism and copyright infringement?

PAC follows a strict confidentiality policy. Therefore, while you are welcome to ask general questions in the comments of this post, we will not give information on specific cases, publicly rule on a work, or update you on the status of a report you have already submitted. Comments on this post that discuss specific works or users will be removed.

If you think you’ve found a plagiarized or infringing work, or if you want to know whether a particular work qualifies as plagiarism and/or copyright infringement, please report the work to us as described above. For more information, you can read our TOS FAQ on Copyright Infringement and Plagiarism.

If you are still uncertain, you can comment below or submit a question through the Policy Questions & Abuse Reports form.

ETA: Edited to improve wording