The Slow Burn that Lasts Forever: Bookbinding Transformative Fiction

Abstract

Fan studies and transformative fiction studies are still relatively new areas of scholarship. Fan studies also lacks focus on transformative fiction (“fanfiction”) of stories with transcultural roots, such as anime and manga fanfiction. Finally, although existing fan scholarship studies fanfiction from several perspectives—including areas such as English and communications, anthropology and ethnography, media, film, and television, psychology, and law (Hellekson and Busse)—there is focus on fanfiction’s past and present, rather than its future. In this project, I write long-form fanfiction that transforms two anime and manga franchises (Haruichi Furudate’s "Haikyuu!!" and Kyoto Animation’s "Violet Evergarden") and use the work as material to bind into a case-bound, hardcover book. In doing so, I argue for fanfiction’s right to existence in a permanent, physical form, in opposition to its current, ephemeral existence online, thus preserving fanfiction’s transcultural, queer feminist, and folkloric nature.