You Can’t Just "Fix-It": Reclaiming Game Narratives in Fan Fiction
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
| Academic Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | You Can’t Just "Fix-It": Reclaiming Game Narratives in Fan Fiction |
| Commentator: | Brianna Dym |
| Date(s): | September 2018 |
| Medium: | Live presentation |
| Fandom: | Video games |
| External Links: | https://qgcon.com/qgcon-2018/talks/you-cant-just-fix-it-reclaiming-game-narratives-in-fan-fiction/ https://www.twitch.tv/videos/319645559 |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
You Can’t Just "Fix-It": Reclaiming Game Narratives in Fan Fiction was a presentation by PhD student Brianna Dym at the 2018 Queerness and Games Conference in Montreal, Canada. The talk grew from Dym's exploration of the "Fix-It" tag on Archive Of Our Own.
Topics discussed
- Romance options and narratives in the canon of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Mass Effect series, Life is Strange, and Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Tag usage on Archive Of Our Own
- Findings from the upcoming paper "theyre all trans sharon": Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction
- Varying motivations for reading and writing fanfiction
- How fanfiction is "the written version of modding a game"
- Different aspects of canon that are fixed in fix-it fics. From a displayed list of top ten video game fandoms found in the "Fix-It" tag, an audience member guessed that most authors were changing romantic pairings from the source material, but Dym revealed that most fix-it fics are fixing character death and betrayal. "Fix-it almost has nothing to do with romance, which I think is so interesting."
- Graphing over time the number of Star Wars: The Old Republic fics posted on AO3 with non-M/F pairings, in relation to the dates when new game expansion content was released.
- "Do people write more queer fanfic if there is already a queer narrative in the game? I can't answer that yet, but that would be a cool question to look at. [...] All I really do have is questions, because there's so much that should be done with this community and with this data."
- "My [research] participants [...] they can't necessarily go into Barnes & Noble and buy romance novels about transgender men, but they can find it on AO3 really easily, and their parents can't really stop them from doing it."