Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities: Thinking Through Feels (Palgrave Fan Studies) 3031324498, 9783031324499

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PALGRAVE FAN STUDIES

Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities Thinking Through Feels Jessica Hautsch

Palgrave Fan Studies Series Editors

Louise Geddes Adelphi University Garden City, NY, USA Lincoln Geraghty University of Portsmouth Portsmouth, UK

This book series represents the interdisciplinary field of fan studies. It considers the different ways in which fan studies exists at the intersection of media (old and new), cultural studies, and reception studies and as a result, rethinks the production of the fields of literature, art, philosophy, theater and performance, film and television, and beyond. The series welcomes a diverse set of methodological approaches including Marxism, race theory, gender studies, affect theory, the history of print, convergence theory, digital studies, material culture, and participatory culture, as well as geographies, historical periods, and disciplines. The aim of the series is to showcase how fan studies can offer new theoretical frameworks for understanding significant artistic, literary, historical, and cultural movements, and in turn, how these innovative approaches to representing contemporary culture and media theory have expanded the Humanities.

Jessica Hautsch

Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities Thinking Through Feels

Jessica Hautsch Humanities New York Technical Institute Old Westbury, NY, USA

ISSN 2662-2807     ISSN 2662-2815 (electronic) Palgrave Fan Studies ISBN 978-3-031-32449-9    ISBN 978-3-031-32450-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32450-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Credit line: traffic_analyzer / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Steve, who stood by my side as I wrote this book, and Madeleine and Bronte, who sat on my lap.

Acknowledgments

This book is about community, and it would not have been possible without the community that I’ve had supporting me throughout this journey. I would like to begin by thanking the Palgrave publishing team, all of whom have been incredibly supportive during the publication process. Thank you to Dr. Louise Geddes for your generosity with your time and feedback as you helped to conceptualize my project as a book and helped me perfect my proposal. And thank you to Ms. Sujatha Mani, who as project coordinator, answered dozens of emails and countless questions. Thank you for your patience and prompt responses. Thank you to the faculty members who served as my advisors as I developed this project, Drs. Amy Cook, Peter Khost, Elyse Graham, and Francesca Coppa. Thank you for all your feedback, for challenging me to refine my thinking and strengthen my writing, and for the generosity of spirit in which your comments were offered. And special thanks to Francesca for your continued faith in and excitement about my approach to fan studies. And to Amy for guiding me, pushing me, and reassuring me—and for knowing which of those I needed at each stage in this process. Thanks, too, for collaborating with me and for your willingness to learn about feels and ships, fic and vids, and the world of fandom. Thanks also to my colleagues in Stony Brook University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric, the faculty and staff of the Stony Brook English Department, and to Stony Brook’s EOP family. And thank you to my

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colleagues at Suffolk County Community College, especially, Dr. Douglas Howard, for always taking the time to chat and for encouraging me; Dr. Greg Bruno, for all the collaboration on pedagogy; and Dr. Ray Disanza, for being an extroverted conference buddy and a great travel companion. Thank you to the fans in the communities I belong to and study. Without your intelligence, creativity, generosity, and wit, this book could not have happened. Thanks for making me laugh, cry, and think with your amazing vids, metas, gifsets, and fanfiction. Thank you to new friends and old. I am very fortunate to have a group of wonderful friends from my graduate program, whose love, advice, and laughter, helped me to get through the toughest days of the program and the pandemic and without whom this book would not be finished yet. Special thanks to my Dungeons & Dragons Crew: Jon (AKA Tubby Bongwater) for being my twin and reading countless first drafts; Brian (AKA Susan Dyffryndraig nee Elf) for helping me finalize my chapters and being the best role-playing boyfriend a sorcerer could hope for; Julia (AKA Solstice Nightbreeze) for being the only (sort of) stable member of the ongoing Chaos Crew campaign and for commenting on my introduction; Sara (AKA Kathra of the Ungart Clan) for all of the movie nights, cross-­ time zone early morning chats, and a bounty of snacks—including celery; Sarah (AKA Mala Meltlar) for being a loving friend, and for sharing my enthusiasm for dressing up your adorable son in cowboy and vampire costumes; and Caitlin (AKA Prince Carrion Mordate) for being my co-­ screenplay writer, co-DM, and one of my favorite collaborators to create, scheme, compose, karaoke, and play with—I am so fortunate to have found an IRL friend to fangirl, ship, squee, and goblin with (so many feels). I’d also like to thank the friends who have been with me the longest, Emily and Michela, who I am so lucky to have met as an undergrad and am even luckier to still be friends with, and Alyssa, who’s been my friend since diapers. Thank you for all of the amazing girl weekends, puzzles, and cheese. Finally, I’d like to thank my family. Thanks to my partner, Steve, to whom I owe everything, because without his love, faith, support, patience, reassurance, and cooking, this book would not have been possible. And thank you for putting up with my fangirling and insisting that characters are going to kiss (even though my ships almost never do). And thanks to

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my dad, Rowland, for reading over my undergraduate papers and always believing in me; my mom, Patricia, for reading The Chronicles of Narnia and so many other wonderful stories to me as a child—I can trace this book back to those first steps through the wardrobe and into the magical world beyond; and Ryan, who I miss so much, and who I know would be proud of me and, at the same time, would think I was one of the biggest nerds in the world (he would be right).

Contents

1 Introduction:  Body, Feeling, Community, and Cognition  1 Rewriting Stories and Bad Readers   6 4-E Cognition  10 Cognitive Linguistics  11 Emotions  15 Embodied Cognition  19 Extended and Distributed Cognition  22 Critical Closeness  25 A Note on Methodology  28 Chapter Overview  29 References  32 2 Catching  Feels: Fan Feelings, Bodies, and Communities 39 Fan Feelings  41 Conceptualizing Feels  50 Metaphors We Feel By  55 Conclusion: You, Me, Fandom, and Feels  64 References  66 3 Living  through Gifs: Embodied Cognition and Emotion 71 An Embodied Understanding of Gifs  74 A Feeling of Community  79 The Bodies that Launched a Thousand Ships  84 Conclusion: Casting Bodies  98 References 100 xi

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4 Actors,  Characters, and Blending107 Conceptual Blending Theory and Compression 109 Bodies That Matter 114 Haunting Bodies across AUs 126 Conclusion: Communal Contexts 132 References 133 5 Reframing Vids139 Communal Ways of Thinking 142 Blending Stories 146 Embodied and Embedded Rehearsal 154 Cutting Together Crossovers 160 Conclusion: Performing Community 164 References 165 6 Casting,  Counterfactuals, and the Communal Construction of Characters171 Knowing Characters through Conceptual Blending 174 Casting AU Fics 181 Thinking through Stories 192 Conclusion: Cognitive Flexibility 201 References 202 7 Epilogue207 References 211 Index213

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5

Tumblr post by natsui illustrating embodied experience of reading fic 45 Conceptual Blending Model 110 Actor as character blend 112 Casting and character blends 113 Edited fanart (original artwork by merwild) demonstrating the difficulty of imagining characters 116 Monk and the mountain riddle blend 147 Generating different relationship dynamic 152 Remixing Taylor Swift and The Witcher159 Jon Snow frames, entailments, and roles 187 Mapping Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey 195 The Princess Bride/Game of Thrones casting ecology 197 Casting Cersei as Buttercup: Constructing connections, shifting frames, changing roles 198 Reframing characters through casting 199

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Body, Feeling, Community, and Cognition

It is 5:03 a.m. and I am stretching before I head out for a run. I check my email. There are messages from the fanfiction1 site Archive of Our Own (AO3), letting me know that readers have left kudos and comments on the fic I am currently posting: a story that inserts Jon Snow and Sansa Stark— characters from HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019)—into the narrative of “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” changing the original fairy tale’s white bear to a white wolf and adding a whole bunch of bed-sharing smut. I quickly type out replies to the comments, before opening up my phone’s Tumblr2 app and scrolling through gif sets3 of Geralt of Rivia and Jaskier from Netflix’s The Witcher  (2019–). There is also a Buffy the Vampire 1  Though there is debate among fan studies scholars about what exactly “counts” as fanfiction (also referred to as “fanfic” or “fic”), I will be using the definition outlined by fan studies scholar Francesca Coppa in her introduction to The Fanfiction Reader (2017); she categorizes fanfiction as fiction “created outside of the literary marketplace” (2) “that rewrites and transforms other stories” (4), specifically “stories currently owned by others” (6), “within and to the standards of a particular fannish community” (7). Fanfic, as I use the term, is communal, noncommercial, transformative, affectively driven, and character focused. 2  Tumblr is a social media microblogging platform launched by David Karp in 2007, which is used by many fans and fan communities; it was purchased by Yahoo in 2013 and was later acquired by Verizon and then Automattic in 2019. 3  Gif sets are groupings of two or more animated gifs, taken from extant material, and arranged together in a single composition.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Hautsch, Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32450-5_1

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Slayer (1997–2003)  fanvid4 focused on the characters Buffy and Spike, which I play with the volume on low so as not to disturb my partner, who is still asleep in the next room. I see fanart that readers have created in response to the most recently published book in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015–) series and a pic set5 featuring the characters from the STARZ’s Black Sails (2014–2017). As I look through Tumblr, I stop to peek at the comments and reaction gifs that other fans have left on art, gif sets, and fanfics, and I feel pleasure at what these other fans have posted, the fact that they think and feel the same way that I do about characters, plotlines, and ships.6 Why do I do this? Why, when I have free moments in my day, do I hop onto Tumblr or AO3? Why do I experience pleasure from looking at gif sets, from watching fanvids, from reading fic, from writing stories about characters from preexisting texts, putting them into new roles, settings, and narratives? Why do I feel gratification knowing that other fans have the same desires and that we think and feel the same things about stories, characters, and ships? Because fanworks are distributed across various websites and platforms—fanfic, for example, is posted to large multifandom sites like AO3, FanFiction.net, Wattpad, Quotev, and Tumblr, as well as to fandom specific archives—it is difficult to quantify fan activity and creative production. But the numbers we do have demonstrate the very large scale of fan engagement. AO3, for example, has exceeded three million registered users (“The Archive” 2020), and fans there have posted over eight million fics, which receive tens of millions of daily views. Fandom represents a 4  Fanvids edit together clips from media texts, pairing them with music—often popular songs. 5  Pic sets are collages consisting of a number of images that have been arranged to evoke an atmosphere, reflect a character, or create a narrative. 6  The term “ship” refers to a romantic or sexual character relationship. It can be used as a noun to refer to the relationship, or as a verb indicating a desire to see and an emotional investment in the characters’ relationship. “Shippers” are fans who theorize about and desire to see characters become romantically involved. Much of my book focuses on shippers and shipping communities. Ysabel Gerrard (2021) argues that the term “shipper” is sometimes used as a pejoratively gendered term (2), noting that shipping is seen by other fans as a “feminized” and unacceptable reading practice (8–9). In my discussion of fans as effeminate readers, I am attempting to trouble the binaristic views of thinking and feeling assumed by this hierarchical assessment of reading strategies.

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massive and ever-expanding world of reading and writing, of thinking and creativity, that consists of millions of members spread across these rhizomatic networks. Fandom is popular, powerful, and can function as an exemplary model for thinking about how we read, experience, and respond to texts. Fan creative works—like gif sets, fanfic, and fanvids—constitute what I refer to as “critical closeness,” a mode of thinking and reading that is deeply physical, emotional, and social. Throughout this book, I build on work in the cognitive humanities arguing that our experience of texts are embodied, emotional, and communal. Whether students analyzing Frankenstein (1818), scholars revisiting Hamlet (1602), book clubs discussing Gone Girl (2012), or fans reading fic, we feel when we read. Our experience of language and stories is anchored in and through our bodies, our understanding of narratives embedded in the social and material environments we encounter them in. The act of reading is a performance that leaves bodily and emotional traces. These traces comprise an integral part of our cognitive experience of texts, but they are often ephemeral and invisible; we are not always aware of or attending to the role that our feelings, bodies, and communities play in our engagement with stories. But fan culture leaves a record of the way we think and feel about and through texts, scaling up, making visible, and drawing attention to how our reception practices are social, embodied, and emotional. The bodily and emotional traces of fan reception can be tracked through the fanworks posted to sites like Tumblr, YouTube, and AO3. Fic, gif sets, and vids are not evidence of thinking, but acts of thinking. These fanworks form part of the cognitive system of fandom; when we read fic, look at gif sets, and watch vids, we are not just looking at examples of what other fans have thought, but are invited to participate in a dynamic exchange, encouraged to think with and through these fanworks. Thinking is not something that happens in the disembodied mind of the individual fan, but is an embodied, emotional, and communal act that emerges from fans’ interactions with media texts, technological interfaces, and fan collectives. By posting fanworks, by commenting on and reblogging7 them, fans form 7  Tumblr has a feature that allows users to reblog content, thereby posting it to their blog’s homepage with a link to the original creator.

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networks, create and engage with communities,8 and generate and shape the cultural environments in and through which they think. Research in the cognitive sciences—arguing that our minds are extended, embodied, and distributed—can help us to understand how fans construct communities of practice and rehearse critically close strategies for reading and responding to texts. While these theoretical cognitive frameworks were not developed to discuss the creative works that fans post to digital platforms like Tumblr and AO3, they provide a productive vocabulary for describing the visual, literary, and embodied traces of fans’ reception and composition practices, a way to see thinking as occurring in the bodies of fans and through interactions with their textual, technological, and social environments. New insights into fans’ emotional, communal, embodied, and creative thinking about media properties emerge from using this vocabulary and analyzing the creative, artistic, and interpretative work of fan collectives from these alternative perspectives. In this way, my work builds off of that being done in the cognitive humanities by scholars who draw on research in cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science and philosophy to interrogate how we make meaning from theater, literature, and art. Amy Cook (2018, 2020), for example, takes up theories from cognitive linguistics, particularly conceptual integration networks, to frame her explanation of how we construct characters through casting. Barbara Dancygier (2016) and Laura Seymour (2016) build off of work on conceptual metaphors to interrogate the role of language, objects, and the body in how we create meaning from performances and plays. Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton (2011) explore how the Elizabethan theater functioned as a social and material cognitive system, thinking distributed throughout the company 8  I use the terms “community” and “collective” to refer to the loose networks that fans form through digital platforms. My definition is similar to Paul Booth’s (2010), understanding a community as “the social grouping of individuals with shared interests, joined together through some form of mechanism of membership—the self-selected organization of a group of fans who both enjoy an extant media object, and who create additional content about that extant media object” (25). Membership to a fan community is not formally structured through a fan organization, but rather about engagement by posting, commenting on, reading, or reblogging fan content in digital spaces. These collectives are loose, porous, and shifting and formed through emotion, engagement, and practice. I use a transitive form of the verb “cohere” to capture the way that these collectives are formed through and around texts.

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of players and the environment. Marco Caracciolo (2018) and Naomi Rokotnitz (2017) discuss the physical and emotional resonances of literary imagery. Vera Tobin (2018) delves into the cognitive science behind our love of a good plot twist. Ellen Spolsky (1996) and Guillemette Bolens (2012) draw from theories of embodied cognition to analyze how we perceive the bodies of characters in the visual arts and literary texts. And Hannah C. Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese (2011) argue that research in neuroscience suggests that we understand literature through neurological simulation. This list is only a small sample of the scholarship being done at the intersection of the humanities and cognitive sciences. In this diverse field, scholars are approaching the question of how we understand performances, literature, and art with different sets of assumptions and investments, working with different theoretical explorations and empirical studies. What their research has in common, though, is that it provides us with different ways of thinking and talking about texts. However, very little of the existing work touches on fan communities. By focusing on digital fan collectives, I both draw on and add to the scholarship already being done in the cognitive humanities by analyzing the reception, creation, and meaning-making practices of this specific reading community. This book also adds to existing conversations within English Departments about the roles that our bodies and feelings play when we make meaning of texts. The work of affect theorists has sparked a renewed interest in the emotional and embodied dimensions of reading: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2003) calls for reparative rather than paranoid reading; Lauren Berlant’s (2011) analysis of our affective attachment to delusional and ultimately self-destructive optimism; Sianne Ngai’s (2007) focus on negative “ugly feelings”; Sara Ahmed’s (2004) investigation of collective affects and the “cultural politics of emotions”; and Rita Felski’s (2009, 2011) theorizing of art and literature as a “mood-altering substance,” exploring their “ability to inspire intense responses, inchoate emotions, quasi-visceral passions, working and worming their way into our minds and bodies” (2009, 31). These scholars are refocusing our attention on how emotion shapes texts and our responses to them, and in this way, my work aligns with but diverges from theirs. I am interrogating some of the same questions that they do, but from a different theoretical vantage point and with a distinct vocabulary and approach. My hope is to enrich these conversations about reading and emotion by examining fans and their vibrant communities of affect, reception, and

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creation from the perspective of cognitive science and performance studies. By focusing on a reading collective that foregrounds the role of the body, feeling, and community in meaning-making, I draw out and make visible the embodied, emotional, and communal dimensions of our engagement with stories—whether reading for pleasure, research, or class. The digital traces of fans’ critically close reception and creation practices— their interpretative, imaginative, affective, and creative cognition—provides a model for exploring how we think and feel with and through communities, bodies, and texts.

Rewriting Stories and Bad Readers Reframing fanworks not as the product of thinking, but the act of thinking, requires that we rewrite existing stories about both what the mind is and what fans do. We’ve all heard the old story that separates mind and body, elevating reason above the fleshy body and all of its messy emotions. We’ve seen this story in sci-fi images of floating brains in glass jars, consciousnesses downloaded into computers—ways of preserving the mind and the self without the need for bones, muscle, or skin. Some of these stories separate mind and body completely; others allow that the mind is in the brain, which functions as a cybernetic control center, figuratively and literally above the meat of the body. The body is the wetware; the mind is the software, the operating system processing what it perceives and telling it what to do. They might work together, but are ultimately separate: the rational, transcendent mind versus the fleshy animal body. Western thinkers have been telling this story about the mind for centuries—perhaps, best exemplified by René Descartes’s proclamation “I think, therefore I am”—and we accept the mind–body split as self-evident common sense. This perception of mind and body as separate and disconnected has far-reaching implications for how we think about reason and emotion. Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio (1994) notes that he, like many of us, “had been advised early in life that sound decisions came from a cool head … had grown up accustomed to thinking that the mechanics of reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude” (xii). The cool reason with which we are supposed to approach thought requires us to isolate the mind from the emotional body. This separation introduces a binary; one where reason and the mind—associated with masculinity and whiteness—is elevated

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above feelings and the body—associated with the effeminate9 and the Other (Kelley 2021, 15). But fans are not cool in their reason; rather, their bodily feelings are often actively foregrounded as they respond to, discuss, and interpret stories, drawing our attention to the role of emotion and embodiment in our reception of texts. The story that we have been told about mind and body contributes to the way that fans have been received and portrayed in media outside of their communities. We’ve heard these pervasive cultural narratives as well: Effeminate fans are bad readers. They are too emotional, too obsessed, too crazy, too horny. In their work on “emotioned literacy” and fanfiction, digital culture scholar Brit Kelley (2021) notes that “Emotions have often been relegated to the realm of the feminine or the other (sometimes racialised, sometimes not)—the weak. To be emotional is to be unprofessional, irrational, and unreliable” (15). Fans are “bad readers” because they allow emotions to “cloud” their judgments of texts. It is true, as media scholar Paul Booth (2015) explains, that “we all feel emotions in response to media, and we all act on these emotions, even if those actions are as simple as deciding to watch NCIS instead of CSI. Fans simply do it more so. It’s a matter of degree, not type” (45). But the degree of our emotional engagement matters, because it is these reading practices that mark fans as effeminate, irrational, unruly, and bad. This characterization of fans’ effeminate reading practices aligns and overlaps with the stigmatizing and feminizing of other—historical and 9  Much fans studies scholarship has been done, notably Henry Jenkins’s early work, linking fan reading practices to the ways that women are socialized to read (see Textual Poachers (1992) and Fans, Bloggers, Gamers (2006)). While I recognize that surveys have shown that fan writers and creators disproportionately identify as women, there is also a sizable percentage of genderqueer and trans fans (see, e.g., the Three Patch Podcast’s 2016 gender and sexuality study of fandom). In order to avoid language that erases these fans and that risks reinforcing gender binaries, I have opted to employ Robyn R. Warhol’s (2003) term “effeminate” to describe these readers’ approaches to texts. The benefit of this term, Warhol argues, is that “effeminate affect is not the exclusive provenance of heterosexual women, or women per se” but is “available within popular culture to women of any sexual orientation—and to gay and straight men as well” (6)—and nonbinary and genderqueer readers. Not only is the term “effeminate” more inclusive, it has no direct opposite (9), which helps to disrupt some of the binaries conventionally associated with sex and gender. In addition, Warhol notes that “women are seldom called effeminate, probably because the culture still takes it for granted that women are already automatically characterized by the ‘weakness and excessive refinement,’ particularly in the realms of feeling” (9) associated with effeminacy. By employing this term, then, I am drawing attention to these assumptions, and the old ways of thinking about the mind that underpin them.

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contemporary—“bad” readers: the lovers of romance novels and Book of the Month Club members interviewed by Janice Radway (1984, 1997), the readers of sentimental novels discussed by Faye Halpern (2013), the viewers of tearjerkers and soap operas studied by Robyn R. Warhol (2003), and the Janites explored by Claudia L. Johnson (2012) and Deidre Shauna Lynch (2000). In each case, these readers are “bad” because their reading strategies don’t align with dominant cultural expectations. They, literary critic Merve Emre (2017) explains, focus on “readerly identification, emotion, action, and interaction” (3), not distant, rational aesthetic appreciation. These readers, as Tyler Bradway (2017) puts it, “affectively and corporally relate to the text,” reading to “get lost in reverie, to identify passionately, and irrationally” (xxvii), practices that get them “labeled queer, stupid, or ill-mannered” (xxviii). Fans are a part of this long tradition of “bad” readers, who are considered unacademic, silly, effeminate, and out of control because of their social, emotional, and embodied engagement with texts. Since the earliest work in fan studies, scholars have pointed to the ways that fans are stigmatized and pathologized in more mainstream media and culture for their effeminate, “bad” reading practices. Media scholar Henry Jenkins, for example, notes that the term “fan” is derived from the word “fanatic” and that it has “never fully escaped its earlier connotations of religious and political zealotry, false beliefs, orgiastic excess, possession, and madness” (1992, 12). In Adoring Audiences (1992), edited by Lisa A. Lewis, Joli Jenson observes that “fandom is seen as excessive, bordering on deranged, behavior,” taking the form of “the obsessed individual and the hysterical crowd” (9). Her use of the word “hysterical” is pointedly gendered; it is not just the emotion but the feminized body that makes these fans threatening. More contemporary fan scholars have continued to interrogate representations of the effeminate fan, the way that depictions of fan practices draw attention to fan desire, emotion, and the body. Gendered discourses around the “groupie,” “fangirl,” and “shipper” persist—in and outside of fandom—as a way to mock and police effeminate engagement with texts (Gerrard 2021, 2). Mel Stanfill notes that fans— and especially female fans—continue to be disparaged for their “uncontrolled, socially unacceptable desire” (2013, 118), and Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz (2010) analyze the use of “Victorian era gendered words like ‘fever’” and ‘hysteria’” to discuss mostly female Twilight fans (6). These terms pathologize and

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“disparage female pleasure” in fandom by drawing attention not only to fans’, but their “fevered” and “hysterical” bodily enactment of it (6). The problem with fans—what makes them “bad” readers—many of these critiques seem to imply, is their bodily and emotional excess, the fact they aren’t distant, disembodied, cool in their reasoning about texts. Fan and performance studies scholar Francesca Coppa (2006), for example, offers a close reading of The Brunching Shuttlecocks’ “Geek Hierarchy.” The Brunching  Shuttlecocks put “Published Science Fiction/Fantasy Authors and Artists” at the top of the hierarchy. At the very bottom are “People Who Write Erotic Versions of Star Trek Where All the Characters are Furries, Like Kirk is an Ocelot or Something and They Put a Furry Version of Themselves as the Star of the Story” (in Coppa 2006, 232). In this hierarchy the more embodied the act of creation, the further down it goes: Coppa explains that “The move down the hierarchy therefore represents a shift from literary values (the mind, the word, the ‘original statement’) to what I claim are theatrical ones (repetition, performance, embodied action). As we descend, we move away from ‘text’ and toward ‘body’” (231). Erotic fanfic is lower in the hierarchy than nonerotic because it foregrounds characters’ bodies. Self-insert fanfic draws our attention to the body of the fan, so it is even further down. The more anchored a fan activity is in the effeminate body, the more inferior it is believed to be and the more culturally disparaged it is. The  Brunching Shuttlecocks’ hierarchy demonstrates the distinction drawn between “good fans” and “bad fans,” the way in which fans discursively construct and what counts as appropriate fan behavior along lines of rational mind and emotional body. As fan studies scholar Kristina Busse (2017a) notes, “If fans judge other fans by their lack of commitment and affect, they also do so when that emotional investment seems too intense” (191). Fans police each other’s behavior through what Stanfill calls “intra-­ fandom stigmatization” (2013, 129), and Ysabel Gerrard explains that fans employ discursive practices “as a way of maintaining boundaries and designating other fans as controversial” (2021) if they engage in reading practices that are too emotional, too effeminate, or that draw too much attention to the body. These representations of fans and fandom, Booth argues, have been taken up by and reiterated in the media, noting that films and television shows “Contrast dominant readings of ‘bad’ fandom (excessive, transformative, feminine) with dominant readings of ‘good’ fandom (appreciative, supportive, commercial)” (2015, 75–76). These modes of fandom align with “so-called reasonable ways to be viewers (controlled,

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rational, distanced) and irrational ways to be viewers (emotional and hyperintensive)” (85). “Good fans” are “good readers,” measured, rational, critical, and disembodied in their engagement with media properties. Drawing this distinction between good and bad fans not only creates a binaristic distinction between kinds of fandom, but reinforces old hierarchies of mind and body, reason and emotion, masculine and feminine. Attempts to downplay fan emotions and bodies have also been reinforced by early work in fan studies through a focus on fans’ intellect and analysis. For example, in Textual Poachers, Jenkins favorably compares the analytical work being done by fans to that of scholars, arguing that “[f]ans often display a close attention to the particularity of television narratives that puts academic critics to shame” (1992, 88). More recent fan studies scholars have continued this tradition of emphasizing the critical, analytical, academic-adjacent work done by fans. Katherine McCain (2015), for example, uses the language of the academy to discuss fanfic, observing fic contains “theses, arguments about the canonical work(s) that are akin to those found in academic papers” (81). For this reason, Veerle Van Steenhuyse (2009) calls fanfic “fictional essays” (55). Fans are “good” readers because they actually do things that we in the academy value, this approach to fan studies argues. In my previous scholarship, I’ve made similar arguments about the intellectual and academic merits of fan practices (Hautsch 2018), but now I want to propose a different way of conceptualizing what fans are doing, because rehabilitating fan reception practices by employing the discourse of the academy ultimately ends up reaffirming existing hierarchies and binaries, which obscure the role of feelings, body, and community in our—fans and academics alike—experience of texts. These hierarchies and binaries are informed and enabled by the old story we have been telling about the mind and body. But what if there was a different story? What if instead of trying to fit fans into the old story we do what fans have been doing all along, and tell a new one that reframes and reshapes our ways of thinking?

4-E Cognition During the past forty years, cognitive scientists and philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have started to rewrite and revise the stories that we tell about our minds and bodies, our thinking, and ourselves. Rather than a unified theory, the term “4-E cognition” refers to a constellation of approaches that conceptualize the mind as embedded, embodied, enacted,

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and extended beyond the brain to the body and the physical and social environment in which it is situated. While there is disagreement among these theories about what exactly constitutes thinking and where we locate cognition, they are grouped together because they question traditional Cartesian understandings of the mind that tend to individualize and abstract it, separating it from the body, emotion, and social and physical contexts. Approaching fan communities and practices from the work being done in this field helps us to tell different stories, to shift our understanding of what fans are doing, to conceive of their thinking about texts as embedded within and enacted through bodily, emotional, and environmental networks. These new stories are sometimes difficult to tell because we don’t always have the vocabulary to do so. Our way of talking about thinking, feelings, the mind, and the body poses limitations in realigning our understanding of what cognition is. As cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson (2007) explains in The Meaning of the Body, “what we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘body’ are not two things, but aspects of one organic process, so that all our meaning, thought, and language emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of this embodied activity” (1). The linguistic separation of “mind,” “body,” and “emotions” makes it difficult to discuss them as “one organic process” because it reinforces a Cartesian separation. But, as Johnson notes, because we do “not have the appropriate vocabulary for capturing the primordial, nonconscious unity of the human person” (7), we have to make do with what we have. For this reason, when I use phrases like “embodied understanding,” “distributed cognition,” and “emotional experience,” my adjectival use of these terms is not to suggest that there are other kinds of thinking or being that are not embodied, distributed, or emotional, but rather to highlight the role that our bodies, context, and emotion play in the way that we perceive, think about, and think through the world. Cognitive Linguistics In the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (2007) explain that cognitive linguistics does not understand language as a separate mental phenomenon, but approaches “language as embedded in the overall cognitive capacities” of human beings and our interactions with the world (4). Cognitive linguistics focuses on the importance of context, environment and interpersonal

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interaction in “what constitutes shared meaning” (Rohrer 2007, 26, emphasis in original). The meaning that we construct from language is not the result of abstracted referentiality, but is embedded in social interactions, physical environments, and bodily experiences (28). As cognitive scientist Mark Turner (1996) explains, “Meaning is not a deposit in a conceptcontainer. It is alive and active, dynamic and distributed, constructed for local purposes of knowing and acting” (57). I adopt and adapt some of the theoretical concepts that cognitive linguists have developed to explain our meaning-making operations—like conceptual metaphors, schematic structures and  cognitive frames, and conceptual blending theory—to explore how fans and fan communities construct and share meaning. For example, fans talk about their feelings—which many call “feels”— through the shared verbal and visual conceptual metaphors that link members of their affective communities together. In their 1980 Metaphors We Live By, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and Johnson propose that “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (3). Unlike literary metaphors, which draw attention to themselves, conceptual metaphors are a conventionalized part of our everyday language use, so that they often don’t register as metaphorical expressions. When I say “I am overwhelmed by feels,” I’m drawing on the LACK OF CONTROL IS DOWN10 metaphor (15). If I gush that I’ve “fallen in love with a character,” I am using the EMOTIONS ARE A CONTAINER metaphor (32). Because they have become so much a part of our cultural, conceptual, and linguistic system, we don’t think of these statements as metaphorical, but they are. These metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson argue, are anchored in “our physical and cultural experience,” in our bodies and social interactions (1980, 14). The physical and social grounding of these metaphors enables us to make sense of abstract concepts (61). My understanding of the EMOTIONS ARE A CONTAINER metaphor is based in my knowledge of how my body interacts with the world, how it moves things and itself inside and outside of the various containers I encounter every day (Tupperware, yes, but also things like houses, rooms, cups, cars, bags, and the body itself). This conceptual metaphor, like many of the ones discussed by Lakoff and Johnson, makes use of what are called schemata: 10  I am following the convention of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and other scholars who have written about conceptual metaphors of using all caps to indicate when I am discussing metaphors and schemata.

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general, skeletal conceptual structures into which we unconsciously slot information. For example, the CONTAINER schema entails an ­INSIDE/ OUTSIDE orientation, movement between these states, barriers, and possibly a lid. Schemata function as basic cognitive tools through which we organize information and experiences. They are based in our bodily, social, and cultural interactions and it is through these experiences that we conceptualize and make meaning of the world. As Lakoff and Johnson explain, “we typically conceptualize the nonphysical in terms of the physical” (59). Our conceptualizations and language, then, are embodied. Without a body, the metaphors we use would fundamentally shift—and so would our thinking. Schemata and metaphors are not just a part of our linguistic system, but our conceptual one as well, shaping the way that we perceive, think about, and understand the world (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 3). For example, Lakoff and Johnson discuss the RATIONAL IS UP; EMOTION IS DOWN metaphor: “The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane. We put our feelings aside and had a high-level discussion of the matter. He couldn’t rise above his emotions” (17, emphasis in original). This orientational metaphor brings with it certain entailments, existing within a larger conceptual system where GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN (16) and HAVING CONTROL OR FORCE IS UP; BEING SUBJECT TO CONTROL OR FORCE IS DOWN (15). The metaphor, then, conceptualizes rational as good, as being in control, while emotion is bad, something that we are subjected to. Another concept from cognitive linguistics that is helpful in talking about fans’ creative works is that of cognitive frames. Cognitive linguist Seana Coulson (2001) explains that frames11 are skeletal cognitive structures that help us to understand words, sentences, images, and situations. Frames provide the background knowledge about roles, contexts, and events necessary to make use of language and make sense of the world (267). We are not consciously aware of the fact that we are conceptualizing events and ideas through these cognitive frames, but they structure and shape our thoughts, expectations, and actions. 11   The term “frame” is sometimes used interchangeably with “schema” or Erving Goffman’s (1956) theory of social “strips.” However, as I am using the terms, frames, while still skeletal, are more specific in their structure than schemata. For example, Coulson discusses the restaurant frame (2001, 86). We know the structure of going to a restaurant and it provides background knowledge that we can slot specifics into, but it is less general than something like the CONTAINER schema.

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While Coulson’s work is focused on linguistic expression, I extend her discussion of frame-shifting to apply it to gif sets, fanvids, and fanfic. “Frame-shifting” refers to the “reanalysis process” (Coulson 2001, 3) that occurs when “additional context can necessitate reinterpretation of existing message-level representation” (35). As we read or listen to a person talk, words provide additional context that prompts us to change the frames through which we understand the utterance. Coulson notes that one-liner jokes clearly demonstrate this phenomenon. For example, when we say that Game of Thrones’s Joffrey Baratheon “has the heart of the lion and a lifetime ban from the local zoo,” we, initially, understand the first clause to be metaphoric, an expression of his bravery. However, the second clause provides additional context and requires us to shift our framing of the first half of the sentence; we realize that we’re discussing a literal, physical lion heart. We aren’t saying that Joffrey is noble and brave, but violent and vicious. In their creative works, fans shift the frames that structure our perception and conceptualization of characters, their interactions, and their relationships. By recontextualizing character interactions, by slotting characters into different roles, frames shift and different stories emerge and are circulated throughout fan collectives. By shifting the frames through which we structure our understanding of characters, we are also encouraged to return to the source text, to reassess and reanalyze the narrative we construct from it. The mental operation that cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Turner (2002) refer to as “Conceptual blending,” can also help us to make sense of how fans construct characters and blend together stories. In The Way We Think, Fauconnier and Turner argue that we construct meaning by networking together different mental spaces. Fauconnier defines mental spaces as “partial assemblies constructed as we think and talk for purposes of local understanding and action” (2007, 352). Mental spaces are structured and organized through cognitive frames and connected to both general schemata and specific personal experiences and interactions within social and physical environments (352). As we think, we create connections between mental spaces, and it is through these links that meaning emerges. We are not consciously aware of these mental operations, but they nevertheless play a fundamental role in how we “produce our conscious awareness of identity, sameness or difference” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 18). Fauconnier and Turner (2002) refer to the integration of different mental spaces to produce new meaning as “conceptual blending” or

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“conceptual integration networks.” Part of what makes blending powerful, Fauconnier notes, is that “[i]t is a general property of mental space configurations that identity connections link elements across spaces without implying that they have the same features or properties” (2007, 353). As a result, we can draw analogies, compress time, identity, and cause and effect, and entertain counterfactuals. Take, for example, what Fauconnier and Turner refer to as “the skiing waiter”: the evocative advice a skiing instructor might give to a client to “imagine that he was a waiter in a Parisian cafe carrying a tray with champagne and croissants on it and taking care not to spill them” (2002, 21). This visual is meant to provide the new skier with a sense of how to hold and move his body, but as Fauconnier and Turner note, “The instructor is not suggesting that a good skier moves ‘just like’ a competent waiter” (21). Rather, “we have the construction of ‘matches’ between ‘waiter’ and ‘skier,’” which are used not for “analogical reasons” but an “integration of motion” (21–22). This integration produces a movement that is not present in either of the input spaces; it emerges only through their integration into a new blended space. Conceptual blending theory can help us to see not only how fans construct an understanding of fanvids, conceptualize characters, and entertain and explore the counterfactuals in Alternate Universe (AU)12 fic, but also the communal cognitive pleasure that emerge within the creative collectives that form through and around fanworks. Emotions In Metaphor and Emotion, Zoltán Kövecses (2000) details the different conceptual metaphors that we use to talk about and understand our emotions, many of which conceptualize feelings as things happening to the mind and body. Emotions are states that we fall into; they are physical and natural forces that overwhelm us, knock us down, wash over us. They are an opponent that we grapple with. Feelings are conceptualized in terms of captive animals and hunger, madness and disease, burdens, and physical damage. In many of these metaphors, emotions are represented as 12  Alternate Universe, alternative universe, or AU fanfiction refers to fanfiction that takes characters from an existing media property and places them in a new story. Canon Divergent AUs follow the events of the source text, but extrapolate how the story might be altered if something different had occurred. In other AU stories—like modern AUs, historical AUs, apocalypse AUs, etc.—fans take characters from existing stories and put them into different worlds, different genres.

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irrational, dangerous, something that happens to us and that is out of our control that we need to either bear, cure, or fight against. These conceptual metaphors underpin representations of fans as overcome by their emotions, unable to tame them or get them under control. However, recent work in the cognitive sciences has challenged the understanding of emotion as something that happens to us, arguing instead that we play an active role in conceptualizing and constructing our experiences of emotion. This reframing of emotion is informed by affective neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s (2017) theory of constructed emotion. In How Emotions are Made, Barrett argues that recent scientific studies attempting to understand emotions suggest that “your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts …. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that emotion” (2017, xii). Emotions, Barrett asserts, do not have a distinctive fingerprint—we cannot point to a particular facial configuration or physical sensation and say “this is anger”; there is a lot of variety in how we construct and perceive anger, so there is variety in what anger is. However, that does not mean that emotions are not real or that our physical experience of them is somehow imagined. Rather emotions are culturally developed concepts—part of a “social reality”13 (39)—that helps us to make sense of what we are feeling. In order to account for variations of sadness or anger or pleasure or joy, Barrett suggests that emotions are concepts through which we categorize our experience. Emotion concepts, though, are not abstract ideas, separate from the body; they are rooted in the body and anchored in the social and material world. We create connections between our cultural and material environment, our bodily experience, and our concept of that emotion (2017, 92). In his groundbreaking 1884 study of emotions, psychologist William James rejects the “Common sense” understanding that bodily  Barrett explains that a “social reality” is a socially constructed agreement about the world that influences how we perceive and understand it. Social reality is the reason why some plants are flowers and others are weeds (2017, 132), a muffin is breakfast but a cupcake is desert (39), and we can buy things with pieces of paper that have no intrinsic value of their own (133). Social reality is reality because of cultural consensus, so emotions are real, but that they are not “perceiver-independent categories,” because they are culturally constructed and dependent (131). 13

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states result from emotion, that “we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival and strike” (1884, 190). In contrast, he posits that what we feel in the body constitutes our emotional experience: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble” (190). Because I have an emotion concept for anger, when I feel my face heating, my muscles tightening, my heart rate increasing, I categorize what I am feeling as anger, because those bodily sensations in that context constitute anger for me. If I don’t have a concept for anger, though, I can’t perceive myself feeling angry; I will understand my embodied sensory experience through a different concept. Because each “instance of emotion” is constructed through a different physiological and contextual experience (Barrett 2017, 39), anger or fear or sorrow doesn’t have to look or feel the same in order for us to perceive ourselves experiencing it. This process is done unconsciously, though, so that “no matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or experience yourself constructing” them (26).14 You don’t perceive yourself categorizing your anger; you just perceive the anger. This theory of emotion is radically different from the classical view of emotions as something that happens to us. Changing the way that we think about emotions—shifting our stance from passive recipient to active creator—has substantial implications for how we talk about emotion within fan communities. If we understand emotions as concepts that we use to perceive and make sense of our bodily and mental experiences, then we need to ask ourselves how fans conceptualize and categorize their feelings, how this understanding generates emotional experiences, and how collectives cohere through this shared cultural understanding of emotions like “feels.” Fans might represent themselves as overcome or overwhelmed by feels, but that experience of emotion is socially constructed, based on a collective conceptualization. In this way, we might think of feels and other fan emotions as akin to fanworks–a user and community generated experience that reflects back on and shapes the fans engagement with the source text.

 In contrast to appraisal theories of emotion (see LeDoux (1996) for a discussion of various appraisal theories), I am not suggesting that there is an additional step where we intellectually assess what we are feeling. We don’t need to. The context and culture in which our bodies are embedded is part of the cognitive process, and it is through that system that we perceive what we feel. 14

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The other significant challenge to our classical understanding of emotions is the way recent research in cognitive science and philosophy has demonstrated that thinking and feeling are part of the same cognitive system. Going all the way back to Plato, the “internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilization. It helps to define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast” (Barrett 2017, xi)—or an out of control fangirl. Fans have been disparaged and stigmatized for their engagement with texts because it seems overly emotional and therefore irrational. But work in the cognitive sciences suggests that this story about reason and emotion is not reflective of how the mind actually works: Emotions are based in and are a part of the cognitive system (2). In the aptly titled Descartes’ Error, Damasio (1994) asserts that “reason might not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks” (xii). Emotions inform our conscious experience of the world. As Johnson reminds us, “once we stop thinking about concepts as abstract, disembodied entities and see them rather as bodily processes of discrimination and relation, we can recognize the crucial role of emotions in the meaning of situations, persons, objects, and events” (2007, 68). Our emotions are not a response to our interpretation of a situation; they are an interpretation; they are part of our analyzing, thinking, and reasoning, integral to how we make sense of the world. Simply put, “There is no cognition without emotion” (Johnson 2007, 9). For this reason, I want to add to the work of fan studies scholars focused on fan emotion (Hills 2002; Wilson 2016, 2021; Kelley 2021; Busse 2017b; Stein 2015; Swan 2018; Lamerichs 2018, among others) by inviting us to not only explore the intensity of fan emotion and its role in community formation, but to expand the discussion of how these emotions are an integral part of the cognitive system through which we make meaning. Meaning is “always bound up with affect on multiple levels” (Jenkins 2006b, 24), because it is part of the embodied and collective cognition of the fan community. The digital traces of fandom make visible the role of emotion in our meaning-making systems, but it is true of all readers. Our responses to texts are not emotional in addition to being analytical and interpretative, but rather our emotions are analytical and interpretive; we can’t make meaning without feelings.

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Embodied Cognition A hoard of young women lusting after pop idols from The Beatles to The Backstreet Boys to BTS.  Middle-aged mothers obsessing about  the Twilight  Saga (2008–2012)  and drooling over Robert Pattinson. The pleasure that fic writers and readers take from fics about fictional characters having steamy, kinky sex. As we have seen, popular accounts of fans draw attention to the effeminate fan body, and other fan studies scholars have discussed the embodiment and bodily practices of fandom. Notably, Nicolle Lamerichs (2018) has published on fandom, affect, embodiment, and cosplay, and Anna Lee Swan (2018) has looked at how fan reaction videos foreground the body and emotion. In addition, Brit Kelley’s (2021) Loving Fanfiction addresses how fans’ and characters’ bodies contribute to “emotioned literacy” of fandom—Kelley’s term for the deeply affective process through which fans understand texts. And a number of scholars, including Busse (2017b) and Joanna Russ (1985), have discussed the queer and erotic bodily pleasure of sexually explicit fic. When I talk about fan practices being “embodied,” though, I am using the term in a different way from these previous scholars; I am talking specifically about the thinking that fans do with and through their bodies. The body is not only the object of fan thought, but is constitutive of thought. Cognitive scientist Tim Rohrer (2007) defines the embodiment hypothesis as “the claim that human physical, cognitive, and social embodiment ground our conceptual and linguistic systems” (27, emphasis in original). The body is integral to how we think and feel. The mind of a brain floating in a jar would be a very different mind from what we experience; we likely would not recognize it as a human mind at all. That is because, as cognitive philosopher Alva Noë (2009) puts it, “you are not your brain … the brain is not a thing inside of you that makes you conscious” (7), because consciousness is a “living activity” that your body does in interaction with the world (7). The brain is part of the story of how we think, but not the whole story. In The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), neuroscientist Francisco Varela, psychologist Eleanor Rosch, and philosopher Evan Thompson highlight the connection between cognition and the body, arguing “that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural

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context … sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition” (172–173). We access the world through our bodies, but it is also through our bodies that we make meaning about the world. The body is not an unthinking machine that the brain operates or the mind pilots. It is an integral part of how we understand the physical and social world, how we move through, interact with, and make sense of it. We often are unaware of the role that the body is performing as we make meaning. This oversight, Johnson (2007) explains, is because “[w]e don’t have to work to ignore the workings of our bodies. On the contrary, our bodies hide themselves from us in their very acts of making meaning and experience possible” (4). Johnson and other cognitive scientists and philosophers often use the metaphor of “transparency” to convey the fact that we often don’t “see” thinking that we do with and through our bodies. But the use of this conceptual metaphor (SEEING IS UNDERSTANDING) does not fully capture the role of the body in how we make sense of and meaning from the world around us; this is another instance where our existing linguistic system fails to fully capture the cognitive phenomenon we are discussing. Our embodiment is deeper than the visual—and potentially ableist—metaphors, like “transparency,” which scholars have used to talk about this approach to thinking about the mind. When we are talking about embodiment and cognition, the term is being used differently from how it is employed in cultural discourse. For Black fans, trans fans, genderqueer fans, disabled fans, and female fans, the body is socially, politically, and phenomenologically visible in a way that it is not for white cis male nondisabled fans—who have the privilege of their bodies “disappearing.” And fans who are living with gender dysphoria, chronic pain, and other disabilities are often consciously reminded of their body; their body is not as “transparent” as it is for other fans. However, embodiment, when it comes to cognition, goes beyond our “body image”—the way that we perceive, experience, understand, and feel about our bodies (Gallagher 2005, 24–25). While the social, cultural, and phenomenological experience of the body plays a role in our cognitive processes, because they are part of the environment in which our thinking occurs, the role that our body plays is deeper than that. Our awareness of our body—its visibility—is not what cognitive scientists mean when they say that our mind is embodied. When cognitive scientists and philosophers talk about the mind being embodied, what they mean is that our human body “plays a central role in

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structuring experience, cognition, and action” (Gallagher, 2005, 136). Embodiment is not a quality of thinking, but how we think: the way that we understand the world uses the body. And, very often, these processes are what cognitive philosopher Shaun Gallagher (2005) refers to as “prenoetic,” occurring outside of and before our conscious awareness (2). When scientists and philosophers talk about the body being “transparent,” they are referring to the way that “the body anticipates and sets the stage for consciousness” (2) outside of our conscious processes and awareness. Our human body “shapes our mind” in ways that we cannot “see” (1), because our body is an integral part of our cognitive system. This is not a theory that only works for a small fraction of human beings; our perception, experience, and understanding of the world is anchored in the prenoetic workings of the body. According to cognitive humanists Rhonda Blair and Cook (2016), embodied cognition “does universalize the experience in so far as the biologies of the agents are more similar than they are different” (2). So while the intersectional identities of our bodies affect our thinking, because they shape our cultural experiences and environments, the cognitive systems that underpin how we make meaning share “significant similarities in neural, cognitive, and kinesthetic operations” (2). We might have different experiences of our bodies, but we use our bodies in similar ways to make meaning. Take, for example, the way that we understand other people’s facial configurations and bodily movements. Much attention has been paid to fans’ interpretation of subtext in character interactions; the way that a lingering gaze or a brush of the hand is perceived as suggesting romantic or sexual attraction. But what has often been unaddressed is the embodied process of that interpretation, the way that we make sense of characters’ bodies through our knowledge of our own. Gallagher (2020) theorizes that we don’t need to mentalize to figure out the secret inner workings of a person’s mind; we understand those around us “not by puzzling about their mental states, but, for example, by catching their glance, noticing their expression, seeing what they are doing, listening to what they are saying, and how they are saying it” (98). Our understanding of others is not abstracted but embedded within social and material contexts and anchored in our embodied experiences. Literary critic  Spolsky (1996) attributes this understanding to our “kinesic intelligence”: Our experience of our bodies informs our understanding of others (160). As cognitive theorist Giovanna Colombetti (2014) argues, we “sense in” and “live through” the bodies of others, so that we feel, and thereby perceive, their

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excitement, their fear, their tenseness through our bodies (174–75). As I watch one character look longing at another, I sense and live that desire; my understanding of it is not the result of cold interpretation, but embodied feeling. Our bodily interactions with the world and the other bodies who inhabit it are what cognitive philosophers refer to as smart. Gallagher explains that “direct social perception, without any extra-perceptual processes involved, can grasp more than just surface behavior—or to put it precisely, it can grasp behavior as meaningful” (2020, 132). When a character looks longingly at another, I do not observe the tension of his lower eyelid, the slight creasing of his brow, the parting of his lips, the relaxation of his cheek muscles, and then draw an inference that he is in love. Rather I perceive, and feel, his romantic desire directly. The additional step of inference or interpretation is not necessary. As Gallagher explains, “Part of what makes smart perception smart is that it is always contextualized; I perceive actions with their circumstances, and other bodily comportments, such as facial expressions, in their context” (2020, 132). My understanding of the character’s love and desire does not require that I consciously parse or interpret the semiotics of what his body is doing, because I already have a contextual and bodily understanding of them. In perceiving the scene, my body is making sense of his without requiring conscious theorization or analysis. As fans watch scenes from films and television shows, we use our phenomenological and social experience of bodily interactions to determine that the way a character looks at another feels romantic rather than brotherly or platonic. This perception of romantic attachment leads to the development of shipping subcommunities, building a new cognitive environment in which images from media are received and our understanding of them reinforced. In these communities, we construct new contexts through which to understand characters, creating love stories that run counter to the canon narrative of the show, but nevertheless feel right to us. Extended and Distributed Cognition Now that we have seen the new stories that are being told, which cast the mind and body as not distinct entities but part of the same cognitive system, I want to extend our understanding of the mind beyond the brain or body to see cognition not as something that happens within the isolated

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individual, but as an activity that emerges through our interactions with physical and social environments. Rather than view gif sets, fanvids, and fic as artifacts or evidence of fans’ cognitive and interpretative practices, I argue that they are fan thinking, shaped by the community in which they are created and shared. Fandom functions as a cognitive context; through exchanges with other fans, communal practices, and technical interfaces, fans extend their cognition—new modes of thinking emerging through these interactions. Fan cognition is not located in the individual fan but is extended through the interfaces and communities they interact with. Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) have argued that understanding cognition requires that we move beyond “the boundaries of skin and skull” to consider how thinking emerges through our interaction with the world around us (7). When we use a pen and paper to figure out calculations, when we make a list to help us to remember what we need from the store, we are relying on “environmental supports” (8). However, it is not just that the environment supports our thinking, but that our interactions with the environment constitute our thinking: as Clark and Chalmers explain, “the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right” (8). Cognition, then, is not contained in the individual brain or body; it extends out into the world through our interactions with it. One of the ways in which we can see our cognition as extended, embedded, and enacted are through the affordances we make of our environments. James J. Gibson (1983) explains that affordances are how we make sense and use of our environment through our interactions with it in specific situations. A chair, for example, might have a variety of affordances: It is a place to sit, to store a bag, hang a coat, a thing to stand on in order to reach something high, and it can also be used to barricade a door or wielded as a weapon. As I think with and through my environment, I perceive these different affordances based on my needs, abilities, and the circumstances in which I find myself. The affordance is not present in the organism, my environment, or my situation, but emerges through the cognitive system constituted through their interaction. And this environment is not just physical, but social, textual, and technological. Gallagher (2020) notes that “affordances can also be social and not just physical … other people afford a variety of interactions. A certain cultural practice affords the possibility of learning a skill, or earning a wage” (10). In thinking about fandom, then,

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it is productive to consider the different kinds of affordances that emerge through the culture constructed within fan communities, different ways of thinking, feeling, and creating. It is not just that, as Booth explains, “new technology both enables and constrains fan creative potentials” (2016, 20), but that technologies and interfaces are integrated into fan cognition, as we think and work with and through them. Instead of thinking about fans’ minds as locked away within individual brains, I draw on scientific and philosophical work that suggests that fan cognition is dispersed throughout and entangled with the cultures they construct and communities they form. As cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald (2006) argues, “Human cultures can be regarded as massive distributed cognitive networks, involving the linking of many minds, often with large institutional structures that guide the flow of ideas, memories, and knowledge” (4). Fandom is one of these cultures, cognition distributed across fans, technologies, texts, and social structures—thought and creativity enacted through their interaction (7). In this way, fan communities function as what Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton (2011) refer to as “cognitive ecologies” (94). As they explain, “Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments” (94). Fans’ cognition is embodied, dynamic, extended into the world, emerging through physical and social interactions. Telling these new stories about the mind allows us to see what fans are doing in different ways. As many fan studies scholars have noted, fans do not think, write, or read in isolation, but in the specific fan collectives that form through fan practices of reception and creation. These communities are fluid, cohered around and through forms of social, intellectual, and affective engagement. They are communities of practice and performance, sharing ways of perceiving, responding, creating, and thinking. Jenkins (2006a) has adopted Pierre Levy’s 1994 theory of collective intelligence to make sense of the networks of knowledge that form through fan communities: “None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills” (4). Jenkins notes, “What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties” (54). I want to build on this idea, by analyzing what fans are doing not in terms of

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“knowledge,” but “cognition”: the culturally embedded and embodied process of meaning-making—the act of thinking, rather than the product of it. It is not just that fans are acquiring and combining knowledge, rather they are developing ways of thinking, reading, and creating. I am interested in how thinking is enacted through fan interactions with the source text, technological interfaces, communal genres, practices and expectations, and each other.15 My focus is not on what fan communities think, but how they think, how they socially and technologically extend and distribute their cognition through the collectives and environments they form.

Critical Closeness Drawing on this research in the cognitive sciences, I argue that what has been disparaged as the “bad” reading of fans is merely drawing attention to the integral role that body, emotion, and environment play in our cognitive system. In their approach to texts, fans practice what I am calling “critical closeness”—an interpretative, emotional, and embodied process, a mode of reading embedded within the cognitive ecology of a community, the activity through which we feel, know, live, and understand texts. Critical closeness offers us an alternative way to think about our engagement with stories, distinct from critical distance, the approach to texts advocated for in William  K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s 1949 “The Affective Fallacy” and which largely persists in academia. Critical distance is predicated on a cool, disembodied, rational approach to reading and textual analysis that attends little to readers’ emotions and bodies, which appears to be a markedly different approach to reading than what we observe in fan communities. As Felski (2009) explains, “Becoming a critical reader means moving from attachment to detachment and indeed to disenchantment” because “intellectual rigor is equated with deft acts of defamiliarization, rebuttals of evident or obvious meanings, rehearsals of the self-undermining and self-questioning movements of language” (30). We might enjoy—love even—the texts we study but critical distance, as it is practiced in the literary classroom, is about a certain degree of analytical detachment, about not being emotionally involved in or carried away by the text. As digital media scholars Cécile Cristofari and Matthieu J. Guitton 15  In thinking about what contributes to the networks of meaning constructed by fan communities, I am indebted to Busse and Stein (2017) and their work on the limits that enable fans’ creative play (originally published in 2009).

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(2016) demonstrate, there is a perceived contrast between academic and fannish modes of engagement: As academic engagement with texts is often predicated on “critical distance, professional language, rationality, intellectual orthodoxy, individual authorship and accountability (the name of the author is primarily attached to the study), analyses that comment on a given content rather than transforming it,” while fans assume a stance of what I have termed “critical closeness,” “more readily associated with proximity rather than distance, amateur or nontechnical language, emotional engagement, unorthodox or marginal forms of knowledge, authorship by communities rather than individuals, appropriation and transformation of content” (3–4). Distance, discipline, rationality, and individual authorship, they argue, are generally—and erroneously—viewed as what differentiates fannish from scholarly reading practices. But as we have seen, mind, body, and feelings cannot be separated; they are part of the same cognitive meaning-making system. Rationality as proposed by critical distance is not possible, because we cannot think, cannot reason, without bodies and emotions. Critical distance, as an ideal, fails to reflect how we actually engage with texts (Felski, 2009, 30–31). Fan studies scholars like Roberta Pearson (2007), Alan McKee (2007), and Cristofari and Guitton (2016) have challenged the idea that academics are actually all that distant in their criticism, and the recent interest in affect theory has renewed scholarly focus on the roles that emotions and the body play in our reading experience. As Felski reminds us, “affect cannot be separated from interpretation” (2009, 32), and our choice of what texts to study is often motivated by affective engagement, preference, and passion (2011, 585). Our reading is always contextual, emotional, embodied, and close. Effeminate fans are culturally disparaged because their performance of bodily and emotional excess draws attention to our embodiment, which gives the lie to the myth of critical distance. Fans assume a posture of critical closeness—they lean in toward both texts and the communities that cohere around them. Rather than uphold traditional binaries—reason/ feeling, emotion/analysis, body/mind—fans’ critically close engagement with texts disrupts and deconstructs them, providing a model for us to think about reading and response, analysis and engagement. Understanding the mind as embodied, emotional, and distributed allows us to reframe

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reception and creative practices, conceiving of them as “critically close”— close to the body, emotion, the text, and the community. Fans feel the text and they know the text, because the feeling and the knowing are inseparable: To know is to feel, to feel is to know. Fans are also “bad” readers because their reading strategies are not just about understanding the text but generating a community. Fans are reading toward a networked collective of other readers. Membership to this community shapes our performance as a reader and creator, how we engage with and respond to texts. Our cognition about texts is smart, in the way that Gallagher (2020) uses the term, because it is enacted through an adaptive network of texts, practices, and readers. By adopting a critically close orientation toward the text and the collective, fans align themselves with a huge community of those who have adopted a similar position. Our understanding of films, television shows, and novels does not emerge from only the text or our individual brains or bodies, but is distributed across and enacted through interactions with other fans. The reception and creation practices of fan communities constitute the cognitive ecology in which fans think and feel, read and write. As we write fanfiction, watch fanvids, look at gif sets, our understanding of and pleasure in them emerges from, is distributed across, intertextual and intracommunal cognitive interactions. Membership to these communities shapes how our thinking and emotions are performed; these strategies are developed by the fan community and constitutive of it. For this reason, I look at fanworks in terms of “performance,” in John L. Austin’s (1962) sense of the word. They are not evidence of fan thinking but acts of thinking: not an archive, but a repertoire (see Taylor, 2003). Gif sets, fanvids, fanfic, these genres create ways of thinking about actors, characters, and stories. They store and pass on fan communities’ embodied and emotional ways of feeling, thinking, reading, and being; they rehearse these strategies and invite a critically close engagement with the body, the text, and the community. Critical closeness is my attempt to respond to, rewrite, and transform old stories about reading and analysis and reason and emotion, to rehabilitate the “bad” reading practices of effeminate reading communities not by pointing to the ways in which they mirror the critically distant analytic ideals of the academy, but by showing the value and power of thinking about our engagement with texts as embodied, emotional, and communal.

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A Note on Methodology As I develop this project, I find myself at the intersection of different schools of thought: cognitive theory, theater and performance studies, and fan studies. For this reason, I think of my orientation as, to use phenomenological film theorist Vivian Sobchack’s (2004) positioning, “undisciplined” (1). While these fields all offer insights into narrative and reception, they are approaching the problem from different perspectives and speaking to different audiences. My formulation of critical closeness helps us to find places where they might be put into conversation. By doing so, I propose a framework through which we might consider practices of reading, interpretation, and creation in fan communities and beyond. I am interested in the practices of fan communities, and where I discuss specific fanworks, it is meant to be not merely an explication of an individual text, but an example of a phenomenon, the principles I discuss generalizable to other fandoms and other creative works. I am bringing together these different theories from a position where I, too, am at an intersection. As I discuss these texts, I do so from the vantage of the two different cognitive ecologies: academia and fandom. Following the convention of fan studies scholars, I am drawing on my ethos as a fan, writing as an “acafan” (Jenkins 1992) about fan communities to which I currently belong or have been a part of in the past: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead (2010–2022), Game of Thrones, Black Sails, The Witcher, and A Court of Thorns and Roses. Because fans are writing for an audience of other fans, they are working from a presumed basis of shared knowledge (see Pugh (2005); Jenkins (1992); Busse and Stein (2009), among many others). To fully “get” what fans are doing generally requires familiarity with the source text and the norms of the fan collective that nonfans do not have. While there is value in outside observation of fandom, given my focus on how fans’ responses to texts are embedded within a specific community, I have decided to embed myself as well. My research is also phenomenological and draws on my experience as a fan. Following the work done by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1965), which has been taken up by film critics like Sobchack (1992, 2004) and Jennifer M. Barker (2009), among others, my work focuses on the lived, bodily experience of fandom. When I talk about the fan body, I am not discussing an abstracted body of an anonymous person, but rather am drawing, in part, from my own embodied and emotional experience as a fan. These

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embodied and emotional experiences have necessarily informed my thinking—indeed, they are my thinking. Still, in my account of the body, of my body, I am aware that all of the ways in which the white, middle class, cis-­ het, nondisabled body that I live in and as is privileged, how this body shapes my experience of the texts I read and the communities through which I think.16 For this reason, while my bodily experiences remain an important part of my own critically close engagement as a fan and scholar, I acknowledge that they are far from universal.

Chapter Overview Each chapter of this book focuses on and highlights a different part of the emotional, embodied, and communal network of fans’ critically close reading practices: emotion (Chap. 2), embodiment (Chap. 3), networks and blending (Chap. 4), context and ecology (Chap. 5), and community (Chap. 6). These different parts of our cognitive system are entangled, and in presenting my chapter breakdown in this way, I am not suggesting that they can be pulled apart or extricated from one another. As I will show throughout these chapters, emotion, bodies, and communities are woven together through processes of meaning-making, so that it is difficult to talk about one without the other. While attempting to separate them is helpful for organizational purposes, it is impossible to follow one thread without finding it tangled up with others. In Chap. 2, I take up the role of emotion in fans’ reading practice, particularly the ways in fans’ conceptualization and perception of feels crafts a network of feelings between the individual fan, works of art, and the other members of the fan collective. Putting existing fan studies scholarship in conversation with Warhol’s (2003) discussion of effeminate reading practices, I posit that fans’ experience of emotion is not cathartic, but anti-cathartic; it is not oriented around the Aristotelian closure that comes from releasing an emotion and moving on, but is about repeating and rehearsing it. Fans want to gasp, sob, and squee,17 and they want to do so again and again and again—often about the same characters, relationships, 16  See Kelley (2021) for a discussion of the way in which bodies are policed in fan communities, and Rukmini Pande’s Squee from the Margins (2018) and her edited collection Fandom, Now in Color (2020) for essays detailing and analyzing the experiences of Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and international fans and the problem of whiteness in fandom and fan studies. See also Stanfill, 2018. 17  “Squee” is a term used to mark fannish pleasure, excitement, or delight.

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and scenes. Drawing on Barrett’s (2017) theory of constructed emotion, I argue that Urban Dictionary contributions for the word “feels” and the gifs representing fannish emotion function as not only a way to describe or communicate the perceived experience of the feeling, but work to conceptualize and constitute it as an emotion concept shared within the social reality of fandom. In my close reading of definitions and gifs, I analyze the role of the body and the use of conceptual metaphors in how fans’ construct, depict and perceive feels and how this understanding of fan emotion informs and shapes fans’ meta-emotional pleasure in their perception of being overwhelmed by feelings. In discussing their feels, fans are not only expressing their excitement or grief, they are connecting to each other through an understanding of their emotional, social, and embodied critically close engagement with the text. Whereas Chap. 2 focused on the conceptualization of emotion within the community, Chap. 3 turns our attention to our embodied perception of others’ emotions. Drawing on the work of Gallagher (2005, 2020), Colombetti (2014), and Spolsky (1996), I discuss the pleasure of reaction gifs, and how fans perform spectatorship and repeat emotion through them. Our perception of gifs is smart—embedded within a specific embodied and social context through which we make meaning. Reaction gifs are performative; it is not just that they depict affect, but that they invite us to rehearse emotions through our embodied reception processes, thereby generating a sense of communal and shared feeling. This chapter also explores how fans create community through their perception of bodies, performances, and subtext in the source text. By looking at fan gif sets on Tumblr, fans’ embodied understanding of actors’ performances invites them to slot characters into new cognitive frames and new stories, affecting their perception of character interactions. Through gifs, these stories are reaffirmed by and repeated through the community, fans using them to manage their grief by repeatedly, nostalgically living through them. In Chap. 4, I take a different approach to bodies, exploring how actors’ bodies are integrated into the networks of meaning and association through which our conceptualization of characters and narratives emerge. Framing my analysis in terms of what Fauconnier and Turner (2002) call compression, I begin by examining how casting shapes fans’ understanding of characters, arguing that fan collectives, through the practice of dreamcasting, use the bodies of actors to cohere a sense of community and shared understanding texts. I analyze fan discussions of the histories and entailments of the bodies they cast into different roles, as well as the

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cultural biases about race, gender, disability, and body type that influence our understanding which actor fits each part. Through racebending, fans practice what Cook (2018) has referred to as counter casting, casting bodies into parts that they are not traditionally associated with in order to reveal and challenge our assumptions about who fits or is right for what role. In the second part of this chapter, I continue to think about bodies and compression through an investigation of AU fan vids. In these vids, actors are ghosted and possessed by characters, and through them, fans exercise their strength over and claim their ownership of the source text by playing with, deconstructing, overburdening, and overextending the bodies of individual actors in service of the counternarratives the community desires. In Chap. 5, I consider the role of context in how we make sense of fanvids. First, I argue that fandom functions as a cognitive ecology, a dynamic meaning-making cognitive system in which the individual fan is embedded. Fans think with and through the communities in which they receive and create texts, and we can view vids as not just artifacts of fan thinking, but performances of it. Rather than merely archival, fanvids are part of what Diana Taylor (2003) calls the “repertoire,” the embodied practice and performance of cognition, which is passed down through its rehearsal within fan communities. Within the vids themselves, fans recontextualize clips from film and television shows in relation to each other and to popular music, which creates new emotional and narrative contexts in which scenes, characters, gestures, expressions, and relationships are perceived. Drawing on psychological research about music, facial expressions, and context, I argue that the recontextualization of clips changes our “smart” perception (Gallagher 2020) of them, shifting the cognitive frames through which we structure our understanding of characters and their relationships. Understanding our perception and meaning-making as embedded in social and narrative contexts can help us to make sense of how in cross-over vids, we can integrate clips from different sources into narratives that transport characters into a shared fictional space. While the importance of fan collective is evident in each chapter, the final one focuses on how fans collaboratively generate understandings of characters, thereby also creating a sense of community. Building off of what Fauconnier and Turner (2002) and Cook (2018) have argued about how we cognitively construct an understanding of characters, I examine how fans within communities collectively conceptualize characters as possessing stable personalities and traits, forming around, reinforcing, and

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solidifying understandings of characters. One of the ways that they do this is through fanfic, which, I argue, is performative: Fic not only reflects our understanding of characters, it generates it. In AU fics, fans write counterfactual narratives about the characters, embedding them into different narratives, structuring them through different frames, and casting them into new roles; through these stories, the community tests, strains, and reaffirms their conceptualization of characters by determining which roles they fit and which they don’t. In fusion fics, a similar process happens, as fans cast characters into existing stories, creating connections between the characters and understanding them in terms of each other. The casting of fics is ecological, so that as fans determine which character fits which role, their casting choices are informed not only by the traits of the individual characters, but the fan collective’s understanding of the characters’ relationship to each other.

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Van Steenhuyse, Veerle. 2009. Canon, Fantext, and Creativity: An Analysis of Pamela Aidan’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman as Fanfictional Response to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. MA Thesis. Ghent: Ghent University. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press. Warhol, Robyn R. 2003. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Wilson, Anna. 2016. The role of affect in fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures 21. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2016.0684. ———. 2021. Fan fiction and premodern literature: Methods and definitions. Transformative Works and Cultures 36. https://doi.org/10.3983/ twc.2021.2037. Wimsatt, W.K., Jr., and M.C. Beardsley. 1949. The Affective Fallacy. The Sewanee Review 57: 31–55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537883. Wojciehowski, Hannah, and Vittorio Gallese. 2011. How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology. California Italian Studies 2. https://doi. org/10.5070/C321008974.

CHAPTER 2

Catching Feels: Fan Feelings, Bodies, and Communities

On the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3), the Jonsa1 fandom has, at the time of writing, posted 883 stories tagged2 “fluff,” 885 “angst,” and 366 “slow burn.” These stories are categorized by the emotions experienced by characters and perceived3 by readers over the course of the fic: “Angst” refers to negative feelings and stories that focus on emotional and romantic conflict; “fluff” refers to sweet, feel-good, happy narratives; and “slow burns” frequently incorporate both fluff and angst, as well as what psychologist Richard Gerrig (1993) calls the “anomalous suspense”4 of waiting for characters to fall in love and finally admit what they feel (79). These tropes and genres within the folksonomy of AO3 are  Fans who want to see Jon Snow and Sansa Stark—from HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) and George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–)— in a romantic relationship. 2  The metadata categorization system of AO3. 3  Throughout this book, I draw on Barrett’s (2017) vocabulary for talking about emotions. When I am talking about the general idea of an emotion, I use the terms “emotion concept” or “emotion category.” When I talk about our experience of emotion, I avoid using words like “recognize” in favor of “perceive” (39), and I also do not refer to emotions as “triggered,” “emotional reactions’ or “happening to you” (40). This vocabulary is a departure from how we are accustomed to thinking and talking about emotion and using it emphasizes our active role in constructing our emotional experiences. 4  Gerrig (1993) uses the term “anomalous suspense” to refer to the feeling of uncertainty or suspense you experience even though you have knowledge of the outcome of a story. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Hautsch, Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32450-5_2

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categorized by feeling, defined by the emotions we perceive as we write and read (Busse 2017a, 2017b; Wilson 2016). Fans seek out these stories because they desire the emotional experiences associated with them. This chapter focuses on fans’ construction and conceptualization of emotion, but to discuss emotions, we also need to talk about the body. We understand, feel, and communicate our emotions through our bodies. Although reading is not an activity we tend to conceptualize as physical, fans’ critically close reading strategies draw our attention to bodies and feelings and their roles in the reception and creation process. When I respond to a post with a reaction gif, when I complain that a plot development hurt my heart, I am acknowledging the thinking, feeling, and interpreting that my body does by attending to and recording my embodied, emotional5 experience of the text. By posting responses like these, fans cohere collectives of shared cognitive practices that emphasize body, feeling, and community in the construction of meaning. Focusing on the way that fans discuss what they refer to as “feels,” this chapter interrogates digital records to consider how fans craft a network of emotion between the fan, works of art, and the other members of the fandom through a shared perception of feeling. Anna Lee Swan (2018) notes that fandoms are “[p]hysically dispersed, but affectively connected” (549). In the emotional collectives of fandom, fans craft stimuli for one another through which emotions can be shared, spread, and amplified—feelings functioning as a site of convergence and connection. By analyzing the verbal and visual conceptualization of these emotions, this chapter explores fans’ affective and embodied experience of texts and the ways that, despite geographic separation, fan communities are created and maintained through the repeated production and consumption of literature and art that generates a perceived experience of shared feeling. Drawing on the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017), I discuss how fandom creates a social reality in which fans construct emotion concepts and through which they perceive physical sensations and feelings—the performance of feels constituted by and a marker of fannishness. Barrett argues against the idea that emotions happen to us, asserting, instead, 5  As I explain in my introduction, by using the adjectives “embodied” and “emotional” here, I am not suggesting that we have experiences or modes of thinking that are unemotional or not embodied. Rather, I am drawing attention to the way that emotion and the body are an integral part of our cognitive system.

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that we construct them by mapping our perception and experience of our bodies and contexts onto culturally created concepts of emotions. This view of emotions has implications for how we understand the fan phenomenon of feels. The term “feels” functions not only to communicate an experience of emotion, but generates a way of feeling. In addition to indicating an emotional connection to the text, feels mark membership to the culture of fandom, connecting fans to each other through an understanding of their emotional, embodied, and social critically close engagement with the text. In this way, feels can be thought of as a fanwork—constructed and understood within and constitutive of the fan community. Reading is embodied—we all feel when we read, experiencing narratives in and through our bodies—but though the experience of reading leaves traces in the body, there is often no accessible record outside of it. However, fans foreground their perception of their bodies and their emotions, leaving digital records of feelings as they perceive, repeat, and relive their emotional experiences of texts. Rather than focus on what fans are feeling, my interest is in what the discursive practices of fandom reveal about how fans conceptualize, represent, and perform those emotions within their bodies and their communities. To this end, I don’t analyze isolated instances of feeling, except for how they contribute to, what Warhol (2003) refers to as, “patterns of affect” within fan communities (7). I am interested in the repetition and reiteration of fans’ emotional performance and discourse and what these suggest about how fans conceptualize and create emotions, how they feel about them, and how they use them to cohere a sense of community.

Fan Feelings When I talk about the body’s role in reading, I am not just talking about how we see with our eyes and scroll with our fingertips. I am not just thinking about how I fling my legs over the arm of the chair I am sitting in or curl up in bed. When we read books and fic, watch films and television shows, we not only require our bodies to access texts, but our language, how we tell stories, and our ways of experiencing fictional spaces and characters are also anchored in the body. We don’t often think about reading or spectatorship in terms of our bodies, but researchers, philosophers, linguists, and literary critics working in the cognitive sciences have pointed to the ways in which our experiences of language and texts are

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embodied. Not only is our language built from a conceptual system based in the body, but when we hear or read language, we experience it and understand it in and through the body—though most of this meaning-­ making occurs outside of our conscious awareness. But even when not attending to our bodies, we still feel with them, still experience and understand stories through them. Because it occurs prenoetically—outside of our conscious awareness—we do not attend to how our body structures our understanding of narrative, but the body, nevertheless, plays an integral role in how we make meaning from our interactions with texts and the world. In thinking about the role of the body as we engage with narratives, I am taking a number of cues from Warhol (2003) and her work Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms. In her study, Warhol investigates what it feels like to read, what the body experiences as we flip the pages of sentimental novels, watch romantic comedies, tune in to our daily soap operas. She is interested in the way in which our body physically registers the reading experience: “the constriction of the throat and the dampness of the eye that signal the sentimental response, or the acceleration of the pulse that comes with excitement or apprehension, or the tension that accompanies suspense, or that arching in the back of the throat that heralds the yawn of boredom” (7). We are often not consciously attending to all the ways—especially the more subtle ones—that our bodies experience narratives; in fact, as Warhol notes, “we are hardly aware of their repeated, familiar existence” (ix). As I read a piece of fluff, I might not be consciously aware of my silly smile, as I read angst I might not be attending to the tightness in my chest, but these physical stimuli are essential to how I experience and interpret these stories. Indeed, my physical experience of the text is how I think about it. Fandom is especially invested in bodies: those of actors, those of characters, those of fans. Fans belong to a reading community that focuses on the bodily sensations we experience as we engage with texts: We attend to and comment on what the body is doing and feeling when we read. While the act of reading is always embodied, fans’ reception practices draw our attention to the body in a way that other readers do not. In discussions of their textual experiences, fans’ bodies are brought to the fore, an integral part of the process and discourse of their critically close reception and creation practices. For fans, understanding the text is inseparable from perceiving emotions and the body.

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Fans often express their fandom in and through their bodies—bodies that are frequently seen as out of control or overly emotional.6 Defining media fans—differentiating them from casual viewers of a show or even those who tune in every week but do not consider themselves “fans”— often relies on affect, emotion, or feeling. Since the earliest studies of fans, like Henry Jenkins’s (1992) Textual Poachers and Lisa A. Lewis’s (1992) Adoring Audiences, scholars have characterized fans in terms of strong emotions. In Lewis’s collection, Lawrence Grossberg (1992), for example, contrasts casual viewers’ engagement with texts and the “sensibility” with which fans approach them, arguing that it is fans’ affective investment media that marks them as fans of it (57). Later definitions of fandom have also emphasized the role of emotion as central to understanding fans and the communities they form.7 Scholars like Louisa Ellen Stein (2015, 14), Rebecca Williams (2015), Paul Booth (2015), and Brit Kelley (2021) have all discussed the extended emotional investment, “collective affect” (Stein 2015, 14), and “emotionality” (Booth 2015, 239) of fans, the “obsession, anger, indignation, love, comfort, or even shame” associated with their textual engagement (Kelley 2021, 207). Like these other scholars, my work also recognizes the importance of emotion in fandom, but I argue that by helping us to see how these emotions are conceptualized, research in the cognitive study of emotion and cognitive linguistics offers us different ways to view how fans embody, construct, understand, and perceive their feels. My departure from the previous scholarship on fan emotion can, perhaps, most clearly be seen in how my work responds to Matt Hill’s (2002) foundational research on the subject. Taking issue with many early fan studies scholars’ focus on the intellectual—rather than emotional— engagement of fans, Hills advocates for attending to and analyzing fan affect and emotion. To this end, he theorizes fans’ “affective play” (60), understanding it through the psychoanalytic lens of secondary transitional objects (77). Hills’s emphasis on affect and emotion remains an important intervention in a field, but over the course of this chapter, I offer an alternative to his psychoanalytic lens; instead, I view fan emotional engagement through theories of cognition that understand the mind as embedded, 6  See Coppa (2006); Busse (2017a, 2017b); Jenkins (1992, 2006); Jenson (1992), Pinkowitz (2011); Lamerichs (2018); Kelley (2021); and Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs (1992) or this book’s introduction for more about stigma, emotion, and the fan body. 7  Jenkins (2006), Booth (2015), and others have analyzed the way that corporations have recognized the power of fan devotion to texts and tried, literally, to capitalize on it.

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enacted, and embodied. This research in cognitive science provides us with different conceptual metaphors for and different understandings of emotion and the body than those of a more psychoanalytic or psychosocial approach. Whereas psychoanalysis operates mainly from a metaphor of ventilation and release, I argue that fan communities discursively represent and conceptualize feeling in terms of repetition and force. The 4-E theories of cognition necessitate different ways of looking at and understanding the connection between fans’ bodies, texts, and communities. Fans use their bodies to perform an emotional spectatorship and embodied reception of media—their critically close approach of texts—and the connections between body, feeling, and fandom have also been explored by a number of fan studies scholars. For example, Nicolle Lamerichs (2018) and Ellen Kirkpatrick (2015) study cosplay,8 and Swan (2018) analyzes reaction videos to interrogate the bodily nature of fan emotional, narrative, and social engagement. Kelley (2021) argues that the “emotional literacies,” which structure how fans read and write fic, are “embodied-emotional practices that are situated in time, space/place, and social relationships” (205). They assert that fans’ engagement with fic is informed not only by their emotional connections to source texts and fan communities, but also through intersectional—specifically the racialized, gendered, and classed—bodies of the characters and themselves. In addition, Anna Wilson also highlights the body’s role in the reception and creation of fic, noting that “modern fan fiction is a literature of embodied experiences, both those of the fictional characters and those of the authors, who cultivate somatic responses like tears or arousal in their readers” (2021, 4.1). In my work, I add to these scholars’ observations about the fan embodiment by emphasizing the way in which our bodies and feelings are inseparable from our cognition and analysis; fan engagement makes visible these usually invisible and ephemeral aspects of reception and creation. In fanfiction comments, Tumblr posts, and fanart, fans represent and reflect on the role of the body in their critically close experience of narrative, angst, fluff, and smut. For example, on Tumblr and other social media sites, fans have circulated a cartoon image, by the user natsui (2014),9 of a young woman, propped up by pillows, holding her phone (Fig. 2.1). In the top picture, her body is relaxed, her facial configuration 8  An abbreviation of “costume play,” cosplay refers to the fan practice of dressing up as characters from media texts. 9  On Tumblr, fans often use pseudonyms, like this one, as usernames.

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Fig. 2.1  Tumblr post by natsui illustrating embodied experience of reading fic

neutral. This image is juxtaposed with the bottom one, in which she has curled into herself, her chin dipped down, her hand over her mouth, lines around her indicating movement. The top image is labeled smut—sexually explicit material—the one beneath it is labeled fluff. The picture is captioned, “how come i can keep a poker face on when reading aggressive fricking but i end up a gooey mess when there are cute nose boops and shy kisses and shit” (natsui). This idea is repeated in a number of different posts, including one by irritated-cinnamon-roll (2017), which expresses a similar embodied experience of reading: me, reading fluff: toes curling, biting lower lip, softly whimpering, has to stop every few minutes to scream internally. me, reading smut: nothing. Literally nothing. Could be reading it over sunday breakfast with family.

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The joke, of course, is that these readers have a more intense, a more uncontrollable, bodily experience of fluff than they do to kinky, sexually explicit material. This is not, though, to suggest that fans do not have an embodied reaction to reading smut. In fact, Lindsay Mixer (2018) found that nearly 50% of fic readers reported masturbating while reading erotic fanfiction (52), and many fans record their considerable, even orgasmic, bodily engagement with smut through comments expressing the heat of a chapter or asserting the need for a cold shower. What I find interesting about natsui’s and irritated-cinnamon-roll’s posts is not their assertions about smut, but the way they attend to and record the experiences of the reading body, documenting a perception of bodily feeling and emotion during the textual experience of fanfic. Angst, fluff, hurt/comfort,10 crack,11 smut, these stories are experienced in and through the body. They function as what Warhol (2003) calls “technologies of affect,” genres “providing structures of feeling in the daily lives of their devotees” (7). In her study, Warhol examines ­melodramas, romantic comedies, and soap operas: genres that are often viewed as emotionally manipulative and inauthentic because of their repetitive, formulaic nature. But she contests the idea that the emotions we perceive when sobbing through the melodrama of Love Story (1970)—or an especially angsty fic—are somehow less “real” than what we feel watching a performance of Othello (1603) or King Lear (1606) (32). Instead of stigmatizing these genres as exploitative or manipulative, Warhol (2003) analyzes the embodied, emotional experience that readers and viewers perceive as they engage with these texts. She theorizes that readers construct “affective patterns” through their experiences of stories (8), arguing that “[n]arratives mark readers’ bodies with these effects, and if the cry, the laugh, the gasp, the yawn is only ephemeral in any given instance, certain genres invoke these physical responses in predictable formulaic patterns” (7). These patterns of emotional experience are inscribed on the bodies of readers: As devotees of popular-cultural genres repeat their reading performances, they reengrave the genre’s affective patterns on their bodies while reexperi10  Fanfiction in which one character is physically, psychologically, or emotionally hurt, and another character attends to, cares for, and comforts them, generally leading to increased emotional, and often physical, intimacy between the characters. 11  Humorous or absurdist fanfiction, often with intentionally improbable pairings or scenarios.

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encing its conventional narrative moves. Written over and over again with the genre’s somatic effects, the reader’s body is subject to patterns of feelings that carry strong connotations of class and gender. Figuratively speaking, those patterns mold the body’s plasticity, leaving the marks and shapes of characteristic feelings their genres typically bring up. (8).

Like the genres studied by Warhol, fan works tend to follow “conventional narrative moves” and reuse tropes and story structures. Rather than diminishing the perceived emotional experience of these stories, the repetition of these narrative structures functions to strengthen them. Fans of these genres repeatedly watch tearjerkers, reread sentimental novels, view their daily soaps, perceiving “bodily sensations of pleasure” from the repeated narrative structures of these texts (123). I argue that fans’ engagement with fic, vids, and gifs is not unlike what Warhol describes in her study. By watching fanvids that reuse and replay favorite scenes, viewing gif sets that endlessly loop character interactions, reading stories that recycle tropes, fans construct bodily and communal “patterns of feelings” (8) through repeated rehearsals of emotion. Fans seek out, return to, and share emotional experiences again and again, and fan studies scholars have long noted the role of repetition in fan consumption of and pleasure in texts. Not only do fans repeatedly view their favorite films or television shows (Jenkins (1992), Sandvoss (2005), Williams (2015), Klinger (2010), Booth (2010), Lancaster (2001)), but fan texts—fics, vids, gifs—also invite fans to construct, repeat, and relive emotional experiences. Both Sheenagh Pugh (2005) and Williams (2015) argue that fanfiction is one way that fans maintain their emotional involvement with a text even after its completion (Pugh 47; Williams 185). When fans read fanfiction, they do not experience their favorite characters falling in love, admitting their feelings for one another, and consummating their relationship only once and then move on; we do so again and again and again, perceiving the same butterflies and same goofy smile each time it happens. Fans rewatch YouTube clips of our favorite scenes—leaning forward, grinning, heart fluttering, stomach tightening—and each time we repeat and relive these feelings, these physical sensations are reinscribed in and on our bodies. Warhol (2003) notes of her own viewing experience “the relative familiarity or newness of a text seems to have no bearing on my response if the text happens to be one that ‘gets to me’” (34). Increased familiarity with a text does not negatively affect the intensity of my emotional experience of it. In fact, for fans the opposite might be true; the

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more that we rewatch scenes, read fic, look at gif sets, view vids, the better our bodies are positioned and structured to perceive the “pattern of feeling” that we experience through our critically close engagement with these texts (8). Fan genres, structures, and stories are conventionalized and repeated. For this reason, Francesca Coppa (2006) argues that fic is better understood as a dramatic rather than a literary genre, the repetition of stories and tropes akin to different enactments of the same play (236). She notes that “there’s no assumption that the first production will be definitive: in the theatre, we want to see your Hamlet and his Hamlet and her Hamlet too” (236, emphasis in original). Indeed, part of the pleasure of going to the theater is in seeing the same story told and characters performed, but in different ways. In theater, as Marvin Carlson (2003) explains, we expect “The retelling of stories already told, the reenactment of events already enacted, the experience of emotions already experienced” (3). Like watching different versions of Hamlet, when reading fic, I repeat the same love story over and over again, and though each version slightly alters its narrative performance. I want to read your fake-dating friends-to-lovers modern AU,12 his fake-dating friends-to-lovers modern AU, and her fake-­dating friends-to-lovers modern AU. Part of this pleasure in reading the different versions of the same story comes from the perception of repeated emotion. Popular emotional registers and tropes are “effective in evoking predictable patterns of feelings” (Warhol 2003, xvi). When I read a fake-dating modern AU, I want to repeatedly perceive the tingling pleasure as the characters’ first realize feelings, the angst as they mutually pine for one another, the breathless, heart-­ pounding nervous excitement when there is only one bed, the goofy-grinning bliss when they realize that their feelings are reciprocated. I don’t perceive pleasure in spite of these repetitions but because of them; I want to have “the experience of emotions already experienced” (Carlson 2003, 3). My perception of these emotions is not a release, but a rearticulation. Warhol (2003) rejects the Aristotelian and psychoanalytic emotional 12  Fake-dating is a common fanfiction trope where characters pretend to be in a relationship. Friends-to-lovers refers to stories in which the characters begin as friends and end up developing romantic feelings for each other. A modern AU is a story in which characters from a source text with a historical setting are transported into a story set in the twenty-first century.

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models of catharsis and the idea that we use art to help us vent or discharge our feelings (15–17)—a view of emotions that suggests that emotions are independent objects or entities that could be in some ways expelled from the body instead of an experience that we construct in and constitute through it. A “ventilationist” approach to emotion would argue that I rewatch certain episodes or moments from shows knowing I will cry, that I read angst knowing that my body will squirm and my heart will ache, because I need to expel those emotions from my body and then move on with my life (17). However, as psychologist Carol Tavris (1982) explains, despite the widespread “belief that to discharge one’s feelings is beneficial,” there is little research to indicate that is the case (129). In fact, studies have demonstrated the opposite; perceiving an instance of emotion helps to construct, define, perform, and reinforce the emotion concept, and, rather than diminish, can actually increase the intensity of our feelings (139). “Talking out an emotion doesn’t reduce it,” Tavris writes, “it rehearses it” (139, emphasis in original). It maps our experience onto the emotion concept and practices the categorization and construction of that emotion. Fannish repetition of emotion is not about getting rid of a particular feeling, but the desire to experience it again and again. For this reason, Warhol (2003) argues that effeminate genres of reading, like sentimentalism—and, I would add, fanfiction—are “pointedly not cathartic in that it does not vent or drain emotions, but that it rather encourages readers to reinforce the feelings” that they perceive through their engagement with the text (18). Fans’ repeated viewings of scenes, their preferences for fluff or angst or slow burns or smut, their pleasure at replaying vids or viewing the looping animation of gifs, also suggests an anti-cathartic stance toward media. Sara Gwenllian Jones (2002) argues that “the repetitive structure of cult television series and the repetitive viewing structures of fans facilitate the series’ lack of closure” (120–121). Fans are not looking for closure so that they can expel emotions and move on; they are looking to relive stories, to repeat and “reinforce” perceived “patterns of emotion” (Warhol 2003, 8). Though each of the dozens and dozens of fake dating friends-to-lovers AUs I have read ends in a climax (emotional and often sexual), my engagement is not over; I don’t experience closure, because I am already looking for another fic to read so that I can feel that tingling pleasure and those vicarious butterflies again. This experience of emotion is not about what is expelled from the body, but the traces that feelings leave in it as they are repeatedly constructed, perceived, and rehearsed.

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The rest of this chapter focuses on how fans conceptualize and perceive these repeated emotional experiences. An analysis of the ways in which fans construct and represent their feels reveals that the metaphors they use to communicate their emotional experiences are largely operating within a conceptual structure that departs from that used in both psychoanalytic theories of repression and release and Aristotelian understandings of catharsis. Rather than view emotion as something that needs to be purged from the body, fans conceptualize emotion as a repeated violent force, an attack happening to the body, either assaulting the body with feels or hitting it in the feels. In either case, emotions are represented as not inside but outside of the body, which suggests that, rather than a pressure that needs to be vented, emotions are constructed as a repeated force that cannot be escaped. Though these gif and definitions present emotions as external, this metaphoric abstraction is used to conceptualized how they feel in and what they do to the body. The looping, repetitive nature of gifs visually reinforces this idea; as we watch, we perceive—we feel—the assault playing over and over and over again. This understanding of emotion is also deeply embedded within this community of critically close readers. “Feels” is a fan concept, part of the social reality of fandom: a fanwork that results from fans’ collective constructing—rewriting—their emotional experience. Perceiving feels, then, is not just how fans make sense of their situated bodily sensations, but also a way of cohering a sense of community. Through feels, fans mark their membership to a collective of readers with an awareness of and allegiance to an embodied and emotional experience of stories.

Conceptualizing Feels When a beloved character dies, when an OTP finally admits their feelings for one another, I experience what fans categorize as “feels.” The term “feels” does not indicate a precise emotion, but rather conveys an intensity of feeling, indexing a physical experience while not naming what the emotion is. “Feels” refers to the perception of an emotional experience that resists linguistic definition and, in many ways, can only be articulated and understood through embodiment. Fans conceptualize feels as something that must be physicalized, a way to cohere a community of affect that organizes itself through this bodily, emotional, and social critically close experience of media. Feels are written on and constituted through the body of the fan, an act of emotion that marks them as a member of this community.

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Drawing on Barrett’s (2017) theory of constructed emotions, I argue that the terms and images that fans use to define feels are important because how these emotions are conceptualized influences the ways that they are perceived and experienced. This theory of emotion challenges a number of our preexisting assumptions about what emotions are and how they operate. In reviewing scientific data on emotion, Barrett argues that emotions are not entities “triggered” by stimuli, but are constructed by the person feeling them. Emotions are embodied, neurological, and social: “They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing which provide the environment” (Barrett 2017, xii). Fans perceive feels because the community and context of fandom is part of the social reality in which emotion concepts—culturally created categories of emotion—are understood and felt. Feels are a fanwork created by the collective—a transformative rewriting of emotion that is constructed through and inscribed on the body of the fan. Analyzing the definitions of “feels” that fans have contributed to Urban Dictionary and the gifs that they use to represent the perceived intensity of their emotional experiences reveals the conceptual metaphors that underlie fans’ construction and understanding of emotion and enables us to interrogate what those metaphors suggest about fans’ meta-emotional pleasure as they construct and experience fannish feeling. As of writing, Urban Dictionary has cataloged 40 definitions for the word “feels,” many also including examples of its colloquial usage. The website crowdsources entries, allowing users to submit their definitions for various words and phrases; the top definitions are decided by communal vote. On Urban Dictionary, users attempt to explain what the word means and to articulate what “feels” feel like. Not surprisingly, many of these definitions connect the word “feels” to fans, fandom, or fan culture, both explicitly in the definition and implicitly in the usage examples. Urban Dictionary contributor Peetaluvscats (2012), for example, states that “feels denotes the intense emotion of a fandom” (‘feels’ 4), providing usage examples for the term: “OH MY GOD MY FEELS KATNISS AND PEETA JUST KISSED” and “FINNICK DIED ALL MY FEELS” (Peetaluvscats ‘feels’ 4). These examples reference characters and events from Susan Collins’s The Hunger Games series (2008–2010) and illustrate the positive and negative emotional valences of feels; we can categorize both our joy at characters becoming romantically involved and our sorrow at popular character’s death as “feels.” The intense experience of fans’

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powerful emotions is conveyed typographically through the use of all capital letters. According to this definition, and the examples provided, what matters for feels is not what the fan is feeling—the butterflies, the anguish, the erotic desire—but the power of the emotion; it is a concept of intensity, not type. It is the powerful emotion of feels that renders them difficult to explain and perhaps impossible to define. In several of the definitions on Urban Dictionary, fans assert that ‘feels’ cannot be fully verbalized. The top definition, for example, explains that feels are “A wave of emotions that sometimes cannot be adequately explained” (KissTheDragon 2012). Harrysgravy69 (2012) defines them as “the feelings you get when you watch or look at some sort o[f] picture of video, most times of a celebrity, where you cannot place what you are feeling (usually feelings of the sexual variety).” KonnCX (2013) explains that an “unidentificable [sic] emotion is described by the word ‘feel.’” Or as Hannitalover (2015) states feels is “[u]sed to describe when there is not any way to describe.” The term “feels” and the use of gifs are fans’ attempts to communicate that which is indescribable and unexplainable, a communal emotion concept that can only be enacted, perceived, and understood through the fannish body. Perhaps the indescribable and inarticulatable nature of this feeling is why many of the attempts to define “feels” turn to physical descriptions of the body. TheYam (2012) defines “feels” as “[f]eelings you get when something you read/see/hear/etc is just so touching and perfect that you can’t help but make sounds, curl into a ball, and never stop thinking about said thing that made you this way.” YourregularDirectioner (2016) explains that feels are “quite delightful at first, but soon turn on you and you feel as though your hear[t] is being ripped out but still smile through the pain.” And PsychODirectioner (2013) asserts that, whether in response to a television show or a celebrity, “You hate them and you love them at the same time and they make you want to scream and laugh and freak out and cry,” though according to Hannitalover (2015), “A common follow up to the feels is curling into a ball, and giggling uncontrollably.” Youtubebabeyyy (2014) suggests that “feels” are the body’s attempt to cope with the intensity of the emotional experience with “small sounds, body convulsions, moaning, or curling into a ball and crying.” Other “side effects” may include “crying, shaking, inability to breathe, odd squeaky noises, squealing, spasms, etc.” (fanflgirl2.0 2017). These definitions understand ‘feels’ in and through the body, conceptualizing the emotion in terms of the bodily sensations associated with it.

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Fan definitions and discussions of feels work to create what Barrett (2017) refers to as the “social reality” of fandom (39). She explains that emotion concepts are part of a socially constructed agreement about objects, ideas, and categories that shape our understanding and experience of the world. What our body feels—the pounding of our heart, the tears in our eyes, the tightness in our gut—“becomes an emotional experience only when we, with emotion concepts we have learned from our culture, imbue the sensations with additional functions” (39). These emotion concepts are how we construct an understanding of our feelings, categorize and make sense of our bodily sensations, and account for the variety of our emotional expression. She argues that “we don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems,” including body, brain, culture, and environment (40, emphasis in original). We don’t realize that we are categorizing our sensations, matching them with an emotion concept, because this construction is prenoetic and instant, our experience of emotion emerging through our body, our environment, and our culturally created emotion concepts (92). Understanding emotions as constructed has tremendous implications for how we discuss fans’ experiences of feels. In order to construct an understanding of an emotion, we need to have a concept for it (Barrett 2017, 104). When we are children, our parents and culture teach us “anger,” “sadness,” or “happiness,” so when we ball our hands up into fists, catch a sob in our throat, or smile widely, we perceive ourselves as experiencing those emotions. Fandom teaches us “feels.” Fan discourse and our interactions with other fans establishes “feels” as a category and helps us to map connections between our concept of “feels” and what our body is feeling and doing. If I don’t have a concept for “feels,”13 however, I can’t understand myself as feeling them. When a character I am fond of dies, I might sense my eyes welling up with tears and my chest aching. When a couple that I am rooting for gets together, I might feel butterflies in my stomach. But I won’t perceive these bodily stimuli as “feels,”  It is important to note that a concept is different from a word. As Barrett (2017) explains, I don’t need the word “feels” to construct an understanding of my intense reaction to media, but I do need a concept for it (105). 13

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because I don’t have a category to construct my experience through; my sensory experience of my body and environment wouldn’t change, but I’d categorize it a different way and understand myself as feeling a different emotion. “Feels” is a no less valid, less real, emotion category than “anger,” “sadness,” or “happiness.” As Barrett (2017) explains, “Fear and anger are real to a group of people who agree that certain changes in the body, on the face, and so on, are meaningful as emotions” (133, emphasis in original). Feels are part of the social reality of fandom; because fans agree on a general understanding of what feels are—even if part of that agreement is the difficulty of verbally defining or explaining them. As a result, they become real within our communities. But understanding emotions as constructed, doesn’t mean that we don’t experience, don’t feel, emotions in and through our bodies. As Barrett explains, “If people agree that a particular constellation of facial actions and cardiovascular changes is anger in a given context, then so it is” (135). In this way, the physical experiences described in the definitions above are not the result of experiencing feels; they are how we conceptualize and construct feels. It is those bodily sensations and actions that I map onto my understanding of feels, and through which I categorize and perceive an experience of them. The experience of feels, then, is a form of emotional and embodied engagement through which fans mark themselves as belonging to a community of readers oriented around feeling. This is not, of course, to say that the term “feels” has not been taken up by other subcultures and found its way into mainstream language use. However, it remains a term specific to fan cultures, used as an expression of fan feeling and persists as a marker of fan identification. As one fan on Tumblr notes, “Feels are the currency with which you buy your right to fannishness” (notbecauseofvictories 2013). I might comment that a fic gave me feels, but it is likely not something I would mention during a PhD seminar or after seeing a production of Hamlet—unless purposefully marking myself as a fan.14 Through feels, fans perform fannishness and mark their critically close engagement with communities and texts.

14  See Matt Hills (2018) for a discussion of cultural hierarchies and “problematic cultural limits to discourses of fandom when it comes to ‘high culture fandom’” (477).

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Metaphors We Feel By Feels are felt in and mark the body, but this is not the only role that embodiment plays in how they are constructed by fan communities. The body is also an integral part of the conceptual metaphors through which fans express and understand feels. In Metaphors We Live By (1980), cognitive linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain that in contrast to literary metaphors, conceptual metaphors are figurative expressions that have become so much a part of our language that we no longer even recognize them as metaphors. They are, as Lakoff and Johnson assert, “conventionalized,” an “automatic, effortless, and generally established as mode of thought among members of a linguistic community” (55), becoming “basic,” or “conceptually indispensable,” so that to change your conceptual metaphors would be to fundamentally shift the way that you think about yourself and the world (56). When I tell my students that they need to “defend their claims” in an argumentative essay, I do not realize that I am speaking metaphorically and that in using the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor I am positioning academic writing as hostile and combative (4); or when I complain that I “spent” or “wasted” too much time reading fic, writing my Dungeons & Dragons character’s backstory, or scrolling through Tumblr, instead of grading papers, I am employing TIME IS MONEY, which affects the way I conceptualize time and how I “budget” and “spend” it (7–9). Because they are basic and conventionalized, we do not think of these phrases as metaphors, but they are, and Lakoff and Johnson (1980) explain that they are an integral part of our “conceptual system,” which means that “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (3). Our bodies are an indispensable part of this conceptual system; they function as the source domain,15 the physical and the concrete, through which we understand the target, the abstract ideas, concepts, and emotions. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that “[w]hile our emotional experience is as basic as our spatial and perceptual experience, our emotional experiences are much less sharply defined in terms of what we do with our 15  As Kövecses (2010) explains, “The conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions to understand another conceptual domain is called source domain, while the conceptual domain that is understood this way is the target domain …. The target domain is the domain that we try to understand through the use of the source domain” (4, emphasis in bold in original).

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bodies” (58), but when we speak and think about our emotions using embodied metaphors, it invites us to “conceptualize our emotions in more sharply defined terms” (58). We fall “in” love or “into” depression, conceptualizing these feelings through the metaphor EMOTIONS ARE CONTAINERS (30–32). Depending on our mood, we feel “buoyant” or “low,” understanding emotion through the HAPPY IS UP; SAD IS DOWN orientation metaphor (15). In addition, as Zoltán Kövecses (2000) notes, figurative language communicates, conceptualizes, and accounts for “various aspects of emotion concepts, such as intensity, cause, control” (4). We are hot, either “burning with desire” or “boiling with rage,” and “cold,” feeling “numb” to the shock or the pain, in which case we are using an INTENSITY OF EMOTION IS HEAT/LACK OF EMOTION IS COLD metaphor (42)—a metaphor also employed when we talk about “cold, hard facts” or “cool reason.” By considering conceptual metaphors, we can see the ways in which attempts to describe the experience of feels are based in the body, not just by describing physical sensations, but by conceptualizing emotional experiences through embodied metaphors.16 The often-used fan expressions “My feels!” or “I have so many feels” draw on a commonly used conceptual metaphor: EXISTENCE OF EMOTION IS POSSESSIONS OF AN OBJECT (Kövecses 2000, 36). Kövecses (2000) argues that this conceptual metaphor, found in expressions like “I hope you find happiness” or “try to let go of some of that sadness,” is used almost universally to discuss emotion (36). The fan laments of “so many feels,” “all the feels,” or “too many feels” conceptualizes emotion as a material object that the fandom or the individual can possess. This phrasing also seems to employ an INTENSITY OF EMOTION IS AMOUNT/QUANTITY metaphor as seen in the phrasing of “she has a lot of anger” or “give you all of my love,” so that the more ‘feels’ someone has the more overwhelming the feeling is (41). Returning to the definitions of “feels” on Urban Dictionary reveals other metaphors that fans use to discuss and conceptualize their experience of emotion, and the ways that they draw on other common 16  Eve Sweetser (1990) argues that how we talk about emotions often follows the MIND IS BODY metaphor (28). I resist using that metaphor here because of the way that it discursively separates the mind from the body. When I say that the mind is the body, I do mean it in a metaphoric sense, suggesting that we conceptualize the mind in terms of the body. Rather, when I say that the mind is the body, I mean that they are part of the same cognitive system, that thinking occurs in and through the body.

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metaphorical structures to construct this emotion concept. Although fans use a number of different metaphors, I want to focus on two conceptual metaphors that are repeated in fan definitions of ‘feels’ and the gifs they use to represent them: EMOTIONS ARE A PHYSICAL FORCE and EMOTIONS ARE A NATURAL FORCE. These are, Kövecses (2000) notes, two commonly evoked metaphorical structures, which nearly all emotions use as source domains. He writes that “the idea and image of a natural or physical force (like wind, storm, flood) seems to be present in the conceptualization of many emotions. When in an emotional state, we often describe ourselves and others as being overwhelmed, engulfed, swept off our feet, and so on (especially in the case of the ‘strong’ emotions)” (37, emphasis in original). Kövecses’s second parenthetical is of particular interest to a discussion of feels. If the experience of feels is understood in terms not of kind but intensity of emotion, then the use of these metaphorical structures, generally employed to conceptualize strong feelings, is consistent with other cultural conceptual systems of emotion. In the definition by KissTheDragon (2012) cited above, for example, “feels” are described as “[a] wave of emotions.” fanflgirl2.0 (2017) uses nearly identical language in her definition of “feels” as “a wave of uncontrollable and indescribable emotions.” This similarity in language is not merely coincidental, but rather speaks to the embodied and culturally embedded conceptual systems that fans are bringing to their emotional experiences of media and the social reality of feels within fandom. “Feels” are also conceptualized by the community as a PHYSICAL FORCE. Although Kövecses (2000) acknowledges that it can be difficult to parse the difference between a PHYSICAL and NATURAL FORCE, he explains that PHYSICAL FORCES “include such physical phenomena as heat, attraction of bodies, abrupt physical contact between bodies, and the like” (37). The metaphor EMOTIONS ARE A PHYSICAL FORCE includes expressions like “That was a terrible blow” (25), “She knocked me off my feet” (29), or “I was staggered by the report” (33). On Urban Dictionary, EdgarNonsense’s (2018) definition of “feels” as “A way for a person to describe their emotion/ something that hits their heart, not physically” offers another example. This definition draws attention to its metaphorical nature by expressly stating that the physical force hitting your heart is not literal. What hits you, then, according to this metaphor is not an exterior physical object, though it may be conceptualized as such, but the bodily sensations we perceive as an instance of emotion.

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Fans also play with these metaphoric conceptualizations of emotion through the gifs that they use to express and demonstrate “feels.” Unlike reaction gifs (discussed in Chap. 3) which construct, depict, and convey emotion through the iconographic representation of human (or anthropomorphized) expressions of feeling, these gifs don’t rely on facial expressions or gestures to convey an emotion. Rather they use conceptual metaphors to communicate the overwhelming, physical experience of emotion implicit in “feels.” Fans appropriate visual material from Marvel movies, anime, and cartoons, casting themselves and their feelings into visual enactments of the conceptual metaphors EMOTIONS ARE NATURAL FORCE and EMOTIONS ARE A PHYSICAL FORCE. These images are either paired with a caption like “right in the feels” or the different parts of the gif are labeled, so that a swarm of bees, an ocean wave, or thrown daggers are cast into the role of “feels.” In doing so, fans both illustrate and conceptualize the embodied and cultural experience of feels. They attempt to communicate the physical sensations they perceive happening in the body by representing the experience as happening to it, conceptualizing feels as either a part of them that is under physical attack or an external entity doing the attacking. As in the definitions of “feels” that I consider above, gifs also use the metaphor EMOTIONS ARE A NATURAL FORCE to conceptualize fans’ emotional experiences. “Feels” are represented as a “wave” that washes over you, pummels you, and sweeps your feet out from under you. In one gif, for example, we see an image of Kaonashi from the anime Spirited Away (2001),  being battered by a large wave labeled with the words “feels.” The force of the wave demonstrates the power of an emotion so intense that the body can hardly withstand it. This gif draws on our experience of the force of ocean waves as they crash down on us in order to communicate the overpowering experience of this emotion concept. However, gifs do not just make use of dynamic or moving water; feels are also an endless sea you float in, a pool you sink to the bottom of. These gifs invite us to think of feels not only as a NATURAL FORCE but a NATURAL PHENOMENA. Building off of Kövecses’s (2000) observation that we understand emotions in terms of WAVES, FLOODS, STORMS, and FIRES, Ayako Omori (2008) proposes NATURAL PHENOMENA as a source domain for emotion, arguing that this domain allows us to account for expressions like “sea of grief” (134–135). While this sea may be turbulent—its waves knocking us down—it doesn’t necessarily need to be forceful; we might be engulfed by or wallow in it. When

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it comes to water metaphors, Omori’s quantitative assessment reveals that large bodies of water are represented far more than smaller ones. She observes that conceptualizing emotions in terms of large and moving bodies of water communicates the intensity of our emotional experiences, the ways in which we are “unable to control it” as it “dominates” us “intermittently and repeatedly” (138). We conceptualize intense emotions in terms of waves, surges, and swells, not splashes, drops, and drips; we float a sea of grief, not a puddle. Thinking about ourselves “in a sea of grief,” while still representing emotions as water, shifts conceptualization to include what Kövecses (2000) identifies as the STATES ARE LOCATIONS metaphor. He explains that when we say that we are “in” a mood, a rage, or love, we employ this metaphor; we conceptualize ourselves as “in an emotional state” (52, emphasis mine). So, when I see a gif of a character drifting in an ocean with the caption “sea of feels,” the water metaphorically represents the emotional state— the vast and boundless experience of feels that dominates and subsumes us, an emotion that is overpowering not because of its force, but rather because of its expanse. Other gifs, however, do not leave us adrift in the ocean, but drowning in a pool. Here, too, emotions are represented and conceptualized as locations, engulfing containers that we are unable to escape from. Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins frantically, desperately, emerging from a rock-enclosed spring, Tetsuya Kuroko from the anime Kuroko’s Basketball (2012–2015) as he does a dead-man’s float, both of these gifs are captioned with the phrase “Drowning in Feels.” In these gifs, we see that STATES ARE LOCATIONS elaborated to LOCATIONS ARE CONTAINERS (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 29–30). Our embodied understanding of locations and containers functions as a source domain through which we conceptualize our emotional experience, seeing ourselves contained by feels, no more able to get out of them than we are to stop the waves of emotion that pummel and pound and overwhelm us. In addition to casting feels as water that we float in, that we drown in, and that sweeps over us, fans often use animated gifs to conceptualize feels as a PHYSICAL FORCE, an attack on the body; they punch you in your gut, pierce you through your heart, elbow you in the ribs, hit you across the face, kick your butt, and knock you on your ass.17 These gifs 17  The fact that so many of the gifs end with the character experiencing feels on the ground would seem to reflect the RATIONAL IS UP; EMOTIONAL IS DOWN orientation noted by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 17).

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conceptualize emotions in terms of physical harm done to the body; we feel the physical pain of an emotion in our bodies, just as we feel the pain of physical assault. We describe an insult as a “slap,” bad news as a “gutpunch,” romantic disappointment as “heartache.” To have an intense emotion, to perceive feels, is to feel it in the body, an experience that these gifs communicate and conceptualize through images of physical assault and pain, and which become integrated into our communal understanding and perception of the emotion concept. These gifs draw from and are composed of the different, but interrelated, conceptual systems that we use when talking about emotion. One, for example, is what Kövecses (2000) identifies as EMOTIONAL EFFECT IS PHYSICAL CONTACT, which we see in expressions like “I was touched,” “it hit me hard,” and “That was a terrible blow” (83). This conceptual metaphor is closely connected to EMOTIONAL HARM IS PHYSICAL HARM, which conveys the effects of violence entailed by EMOTIONAL EFFECTS ARE PHYSICAL CONTACT (83). Kövecses argues that EMOTIONAL HARM IS PHYSICAL HARM is most often seen in shame and pride, through phrases like “you hurt his pride” or “his ego was bruised” (30); however, we conceptualize other negative emotions in this way as well. For example, Kövecses offers the phrase “I was shattered” as an example of shame, but it can also be employed to conceptualize grief or, to use another EMOTIONAL HARM IS PHYSICAL HARM metaphor, “heartbreak.” We see the entailments of these different conceptual systems working together, the force of emotion and the pain that constitutes it. In these gifs, feels are conceptualized as an assault, as violence being done in and to the body. By labeling the elements of the gif, fans cast themselves as the victims of this onslaught of emotion. They are Captain America thrown backward after taking a laser blast to the gut or Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–2008) being harassed by a bird. As fans visually elaborate this metaphor, they fill a number of different slots in the FORCE schema, including antagonists and action (Kövecses 2000, 63). The emotion itself is often cast as the antagonist18; it is the feels 18  Kövecses (2010) also identities EMOTIONS ARE AN OPPONENT as one of the ways that metaphors of emotion elaborate on EMOTIONS ARE A FORCE, conceptualizing emotion as a “struggle,” specially “the struggle is an attempt for emotional control” (69). However, in these gifs, although emotion is pictured as a physical assault, there is no chance to attempt to fight back. If the gif does use the conceptual structure EMOTIONS ARE AN OPPONENT, feels are clearly an opponent against which we are outmatched.

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that are perceived as doing the crushing, the slapping, the kicking, the harassing, the throwing off a cliff, and the fan who is the victim of the assault, their body experiencing the intensity of feeling. While these gifs are consistent in their representation of EMOTIONS ARE A FORCE, where they locate that emotion operates on two different conceptual systems. Some of these gifs are captioned with the phrase “Right in the feels,” a commonly used expression to indicate an intense emotional reaction. This phrase frames a gif from Assassin’s Creed III (2012)  of Ratonhnhaké:ton shooting a redcoat in his heart and two gifs of Captain America, one of him taking a laser beam to the stomach, another depicting a robot slamming into his gut head first, both of which send him flying backward. If this emotional assault is hitting fans “right in the feels,” then feels, it seems, are conceptualized as located in the heart or the stomach, two areas of the body we tend to associate with strong emotions. This also aligns with KonnCX’s (2013) definition of “feels” on Urban Dictionary: “The feel substance lies in the inner of someone’s heart and it contains all sorts of possible feelings.” Both these gifs and this definition conceptualize feels through the metaphor PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL STATES ARE ENTITIES WITHIN A PERSON (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 50), specifically locating them in the stomach and the chest. Other gifs, however, locate feels as exterior to the body, conceptualizing them as EMOTIONS ARE AN ASSAULT BY A FOREIGN OBJECT. In these gifs, emotions are fists and knives thrown at us; they are boxes that fall on us and barrels that knock us off our feet; they are an elbow to the side and a kick in the butt. They are external to the body, and yet when we look at the gif, we draw on our experience of our feelings, our bodies, and our cultural conceptions of emotion to understand the metaphor and the experience of feels that the gif constructs and conveys. We feel the violence being done to the body in these gifs, and we map it onto the ways in which emotion is felt through, experienced in, and constituted by our own. Whether we are conceptualizing feels as located in the heart or stomach, or as a wave or swarm of bees or a punch to the gut, looking at the gif, and understanding the metaphor,  is an embodied experience. The metaphors that are used here are effective because we feel them, we understand them, in and through our bodies. When we look at the gif of Kaonashi being overwhelmed by the wave, we know what his body is feeling, in part, because we feel it in our own. When we see Tangled’s (2010) Flynn Rider slam into a wall labeled “feels,” we feel that punch in the gut.

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Looking at the gifs, we understand the experience, the feeling, that it is communicating, because we feel the violent force of them in our bodies. The prevalence of EMOTION IS A NATURAL PHENOMENA, EMOTION IS A NATURAL FORCE/PHYSICAL FORCE, and PHYSICAL ASSAULT BY A FOREIGN OBJECT metaphors in fan verbal and visual discourse about feels has implications for how fans conceptualize and construct their emotions. These metaphors conceptualize emotions as “happening to us” (Kövecses 2000, 42), rendering the person—the body—having the emotion as passive in its experience. Kövecses (2000) argues that the EMOTIONS ARE FORCES metaphor affects the way in which we understand our emotional experiences: “The object affected by the natural force can’t help but undergo the impact of the force; in the same way, a person experiences emotion in a passive and helpless way. This is the single most important property of emotion in folk theory” (72). By conceptualizing emotions as force, whether natural or physical, fans perceive themselves as the passive recipients of emotions; feels are something that happen to us, an assault we can’t fight off, an overwhelming force we have no chance of standing against. This EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE OTHER-PROPELLED MOTIONS metaphor conceptually positions the cause of emotion outside of the fan’s body and control (58). They are out of our power, something that films, television shows, fics, and OTPs do to us, while we passively receive this emotional experience.19 Fans are known for their “shared passion” (Booth 2010, 239), their enthusiasm for the media that they love, and, as Kövecses reminds us, “the word passion, originally meaning ‘suffering,’ a kind of passive experience” (42). The metaphors that fans use to express their emotion, their feels, conceptualizes them as violent, painful, and overwhelming, that passive suffering connected to and inextricable from their passion—even as fans are actively constructing them within these terms. Unlike discourses that pathologized fans as overly emotional, sensual, and embodied, this conceptualization of ‘feels’ has been constructed by fans, rather than imposed on them by outsiders. Stein (2015) observes that millennial fandom is “no longer dominated by fears of the excesses of the unruly fan, one that instead embraces personal investment, performativity, emotion, and excess within the context of shared digital creativity” 19  Barrett (2017) draws a distinction between what she is theorizing, and what we feel, noting that even in her experience of emotion, “no matter what I know about emotions as a scientist, I experience them much as the classical view conceives them” (xiii).

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(15). I am arguing that fans’ perceptions of their emotional experiences are not only embraced, but actively created and curated by fans. They are a transformational, collective rewriting of how we perceive our feelings within the embodied context of the fan community. Despite the conceptual metaphors we use, emotions are not an external force operating on the body, they are—often without our conscious awareness—constructed by us through our perceptions of our bodies and interactions with the environment. Fans experience feels because fandom as a cultural context supplies us with an emotion concept for them, which we use to categorize and structure our experience of bodily sensations. This understanding of emotion suggests that if fans do feel their emotions as a physical assault that they are passively subjected to, it’s because that’s how fandom has conceptualized feels and how fans make sense of and construct individual instances of emotion within the larger culture and context of fan communities. And while the way that feels are conceptualized, downplays our agency, fans actually do, to a large extent, control our rehearsal of emotion. For though fans conceptualize themselves as passive, they often actively seek out a rehearsal of feels through repeated viewings of scenes, watching fanvids, reading fic. In gifs, we see the looping wave nearly knocking Kaonashi off his feet, Captain America repeatedly shot in the gut, Flynn Rider endlessly swinging into that wooden beam. The repetition inherent in the medium of the gif reflects fans’ repetition and rehearsal of the force of their feels, the way we repeat experiences as we rewatch scenes, create and curate animated gifs, and search for fics tagged fluff, angst, or slow burn. Fans’ experiences of feels, like the gifs that represent them, are on an endless loop. Fandom is not about catharsis or release so that we can be purged and move on, but about repetition and rehearsal of emotional construction. Like the readers of sentimental novels and viewers of tearjerkers, fan communities collectively seek out negative and emotional experiences that they perceive as overwhelming. Mary Beth Oliver (1996) explains that the reason why I, and so many other fans, enjoy angsty stories is because we take pleasure in the experience of constructing and rehearsing these emotion concepts; we want to perceive the way that our chests constrict, our stomachs twist, our hearts hurt. She explains that we experience emotions on two different levels: the first is our emotional level, the feeling itself; the second is a meta-emotional level, our feeling about the feeling (318–319). When I read angst, Oliver’s theory would suggest, I feel good that I feel

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bad, because “the experience of sadness itself is perceived as gratifying” (319). Fic readers enjoy the experience of angst, of fluff, the perceived loss of control and overwhelming intensity of feels, in part, because it connects them to a community of other readers who feel the same. The meta-emotional experience of feels, then, could be one reason why, despite the fact that these emotions are conceptualized as overwhelming and violent, fans rewatch episodes, view fanvids, read angst, seek out feels and “embrace” them (Stein 2015, 15). Although the fans construct an understanding of themselves as being dominated by emotions, they repeat them, an endless loop, much like the gifs that are used to represent them, because they take meta-emotional pleasure in the collective feeling of feels and this rehearsal of emotion intensifies rather than releases it (Tavris 1982, 139). I elect to do these things, because I perceive pleasure in the emotional intensity of feels, the way that the rehearsal of feels is perceived through and “marks” my body (Warhol 2003, 7) and connects me to a community of viewers who feel not just the same thing, but in the same way.

Conclusion: You, Me, Fandom, and Feels I want to conclude this chapter by looking at one more gif, another search result when looking for “feels gifs.” It uses footage from Disney’s animated film Mulan (1998),  and in it, three figures charge, waving unsheathed swords, toward a very large enemy horde rushing to meet them from the background of the image. The three soldiers stop for a moment, and then turn to run away, back toward the foreground they came from. This gif labels the enemy force as “feels” and the three men rushing to meet them and then running away from them as “Fandom: Me and You.” In fandoms, collectives form around love for the fan object and the intensity of fans’ attachment to it—their feels. Fans might first encounter texts in isolation, but through their engagement with the emotional ecology of fandom, they generate additional feelings, understandings, and meanings; as Booth asserts, “Fans use digital technology not only to create, to change, to appropriate, to poach, or to write, but also to share, to experience together, to become alive with community” (Booth 2010, 30). By posting gifs, vids, and fics, fans share with and invite each other to live through their emotional experience of texts, the community, thereby, brought to life.

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Together, fans rush to experience feels, and they do so again and again and again. They construct an understanding of this emotion concept and create stimuli and cognitive and affective environments for one another in the forms of fanfiction, fanvids, and gif sets, repeating feelings and sharing them with other members of their social, emotional, and embodied collective. They create posts in which they talk about, conceptualize, depict, rehearse, reinforce, and intensify their emotions with other members of the community (Tavris 1982, 139). They live through their feelings and those of fans who are having and sharing similar emotions, replaying their experience through repeated engagement with the source text, the repetition of fanfiction tropes, the sharing and spreading of reaction gifs. In doing so, they not only repeat their experience of the text, but they also perceive the experience of others. The experience of fan emotion is not “separate and contained” but rather, as Amy Cook (2011) argues, “porous and seeping” (77). As a member of a fan community, I am not alone in the perception of my feelings, rather instances of emotion are shared within the loose collectives formed on platforms like Tumblr and felt in and through the bodies of those who gather there. Fan communities are built through the repeated, anti-cathartic, conceptualization of emotion, through the reblogging of content and looping of gifs. We seek out these experiences not for closure, but for repetition, reiterative emotional perception that is shared and reinforced through the community. Fans communities form not just through this repeated experience of emotion, but also how that emotion is conceptualized and perceived. Through the definitions that fans write and the conceptual metaphors they employ, they develop a concept of feels that is deeply embodied and embedded with a community of feeling. In doing so, they create an emotion concept, one shared within the culture of fandom. In this way, the experience of feels becomes a fanwork, a rewriting of a feeling within the context of this collective social, textual, and emotional engagement with stories. This does not mean that “feels” can and hasn’t been appropriated by those outside of fandom; as the term has entered wider parlance, we have seen more mainstream uses of the word. And that is what makes the indefinability, the verbal inexpressibility of feels so powerful. Feels are the lived experience of perceiving intense emotion, community specific, and deeply embedded and embodied within the culture of fandom. They are generalizable; it doesn’t matter if a fan perceives butterflies in their stomach, an emotional punch to the gut, excitement, lust. What does matter is

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the mode of reading, the allegiance to an emotional experience of fiction. As notbecauseofvictories (2013) observes, “Our reaction to a society that dismisses emotion as baseless is to crank that shit up to eleven and make it the gate through which you must pass to enter the community.” Fan collectives cohere in and around feels; they are part of the critically close reading practices of fans, part of the physical, emotional, and communal ways that fans approach texts.

References Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2017. How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Boston: Mariner Books. Booth, Paul. 2010. Digital Fandom 2.0, Revised edition. Bern: Peter Lang, 2016. ———. 2015. Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Busse, Kristina. 2017a. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ———. 2017b. Intimate Intertextuality and Performative Fragments in Media Fanfiction. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 2nd edition, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C.  Lee Harrington, 45–59. New York: New York University Press. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cook, Amy. 2011. For Hecuba or for Hamlet: Rethinking Emotion and Empathy in the Theatre. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25: 71–87. https:// doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2011.0021. Coppa, Francesca. 2006. Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 225–244. Jefferson: McFarland. EdgarNonsense. 2018. feels, 37, Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feels&page=6. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs. 1992. Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun. In Adoring Audiences: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 84–106. London: Routledge. Fanflgirl2.0. 2017. feels, 36. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=Feels&page=6. Gerrig, Richard J. 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Boulder: Westview Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. Is There a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 50–65. London: Routledge.

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Hannitalover. 2015. feels, 27. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=Feels&page=4. Harrysgravy69. 2012. feels, 8. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=Feels&page=2. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. ———. 2018. Implicit Fandom in the Fields of Theatre, Art, and Literature: Studying “Fans” Beyond Fan Discourses. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 477–494. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. irritated-cinnamon-roll. 2017. Me Reading Fluff. Tumblr. https://irritated-­ cinnamon-­r oll.tumblr.com/post/150604726499/me-­r eading-­f luff-­t oes-­ curling-­biting-­lower-­lip. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Routledge, 2013. ———. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. Jenson, Joli. 1992. Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization. In Adoring Audiences: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A.  Lewis, 9–29. London: Routledge. Jones, Sara Gwenllian. 2002. The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters. In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 116–130. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. Originally published in Screen 43 (1): 79–90. Kelley, Brit. 2021. Loving Fanfiction: Exploring the Role of Emotion in Online Fandoms. London: Routledge. Kirkpatrick, Ellen. 2015. Toward New Horizons: Cosplay (re)imagined Through the Superhero Genre, Authenticity, and Transformation. Transformative Works and Cultures 18. https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/ article/view/613/502. KissTheDragon. 2012. feels, 1. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=Feels. Klinger, Barbara. 2010. Becoming Cult: The Big Lebowski, Replay Culture and Mal Fans. Screen 51: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjp055. KonnCX. 2013. feels, 19. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=Feels&page=3. Kövecses, Zoltán. 2000. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Reprint. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Lamerichs, Nicolle. 2018. Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Lancaster, Kurt. 2001. Interacting with Babylon 5. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lewis, Lisa A. 1992. Introduction. In Adoring Audiences: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 1–6. London: Routledge. Mixer, Lindsay. 2018. “And then They Boned”: An Analysis of Fanfiction and its Influence on Sexual Development. MA Thesis. Arcata: Humboldt State University. Natsui. 2014. How Come I Can Keep a Poker Face. Tumblr. https://natsui.tumblr.com/post/73500887249/how-­c ome-­i -­c an-­k eep-­a -­p oker-­f ace-­o n-­ when-­reading. notbecauseofvictories. 2013. “Ok one more Thing.” Tumblr. https://notbecauseofvictories.tumblr.com/post/43704982765/oh-­okay-­one-­last-­thing-­ before-­i-­get-­off-­the. Oliver, Mary Beth. 1996. Exploring the Paradox of the Enjoyment of Sad Films. Human Communication Research 28: 357–371. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-­2958.1993.tb00304.x. Omori, Ayako. 2008. Emotion as a Huge Mass of Moving Water. Metaphor and Symbol 23: 130–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480801944277. Peetaluvscats. 2012. feels, 4. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=Feels. Pinkowitz, Jacqueline Marie. 2011. “The Rabid Fans that Take [Twilight] Much Too Seriously”: The Construction and Rejection of Excess in Twilight Antifandom. Transformative Works and Cultures 7. https://doi.org/10.3983/ twc.2011.0247. PsychODirectioner. 2013. feels, 20. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feels&page=3. Pugh, Sheenagh. 2005. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press. Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stein, Louisa Ellen. 2015. Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Swan, Anna Lee. 2018. Transnational Identities and Feeling in Fandom: Place and Embodiment in K-pop Fan Reaction Videos. Communication Culture & Critique 11: 548–565. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcy026. Sweetser, Eve E. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tavris, Carol. 1982. Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion. Revised Edition. New York: Touchstone, 1989. TheYam. 2012. feels 2. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=Feels. Warhol, Robyn R. 2003. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

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Williams, Rebecca. 2015. Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-­ Narrative. London: Bloomsbury. Wilson, Anna. 2016. The Role of Affect in Fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures 21. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2016.0684. ———. 2021. Fan Fiction and Premodern Literature: Methods and Definitions. Transformative Works and Cultures 36. https://doi.org/10.3983/ twc.2021.2037. YourregularDirectioner. 2016. feels, 29. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feels&page=5. Youtubebabeyyy. 2014. Feels, 21. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=FeelsPage=3.

CHAPTER 3

Living through Gifs: Embodied Cognition and Emotion

As I scroll through Tumblr, I come across a gif set of Geralt of Rivia, played by Henry Cavill, from Netflix’s The Witcher (2019–). In one gif, Geralt moves toward the camera, his eyebrows drawn low above his eyes, his muscles tense, the veins in his neck standing out as he stares unblinking, breathing heavily. In another, he furrows his brow and presses his lips into a thin line. In a third, his eyes shine with tears, his mouth slightly parted, his jaw tight. This gif set is captioned with “WiTcHeRs DoN’t HaVe eMOtiOns” (Shangschi 2020). The caption is mocking 1 part of the world building of the show’s first season: the often-repeated conceit that the mutations that the monster-hunting Witchers undergo in order to gain supernatural strength and speed also excise their ability to experience emotion.2 The gifs in this set are meant to demonstrate that rather than not experiencing any emotions, Geralt feels a great deal. As I look at the looping animation, I perceive Geralt’s rage, his annoyance, his fear and concern, his grief; I understand Cavill’s performance as giving the lie to any claims that Witchers are without emotion, because I understand—I feel—his emotions in these gifs. 1  In digitally mediated discourse, the alternating capitalization of letters is a typographical indication of derision. 2  In the show’s second season (2021), the text of The Witcher begins to more explicitly question Geralt’s supposed inability to feel.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Hautsch, Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32450-5_3

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Other Tumblr users have reblogged or commented on this gif set, agreeing that what The Witcher’s first season tells us about Geralt does not match our phenomenological experience of Cavill’s body and performance. “My boi emotes like a motherfucker,” writes one fan (tee-aitch-official 2020), and another observes that “those eyes tho, he feeling all types of shit” (rowena-heap 2020). Other users have responded with gifs of their own, including the widespread “Sure, Jan” gif taken from 1995’s A Very Brady Movie (julie-yard 2021); Marcia (Christine Taylor) side-eyes the camera, her eyebrows raised, before her eyes shift over and down, her head tilting away, a small, tight smile on her lips. As I look at the gif, I perceive Marcia’s incredulity, her condescension, her snide skepticism. We don’t consciously parse the meaning of the individual elements of actors’ facial configurations in these gifs. We don’t need to. As we observe their faces and bodies, we directly perceive their anger, fear, annoyance, contempt, and disbelief. Rather than argue that we understand others by theorizing what they are thinking and feeling or by imagining how we might think and feel in their position, scholarship being done in cognitive science and philosophy asserts that we directly perceive the intentions and emotions of others through embodied, intersubjective interactions. Shaun Gallagher’s (2005, 2020), Giovanna Colombetti’s (2014), and Ellen Spolsky’s (1996) work, for example, offer insights about the role of the body in our reception practices that are particularly helpful for understanding the importance of animated gifs within fan discourse. This research reveals that our experiences of and cognition about intersubjective interactions and our engagement with art is deeply embodied; we rely on our bodies to make sense of what others are thinking, feeling, and doing. While we understand animated gifs through their rhetorical and cultural context, our experience of them is deeply embodied—not just because they depict human bodies, but because we make sense of them in and through our own. Understanding our reception of gifs as embodied underscores the role of the body in fans’ critically close approach to texts, in how they engage with both stories and the communities constructed around them. When I look at a post on Tumblr, I scroll through the reaction gifs that other fans have posted in response. By doing so, I am able to reiterate and rehearse an emotional experience—not the experience I had when looking at the

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original post, but the pleasure of “living through” the feelings of others (Colombetti 2014, 175). Through their use of gifs, fans construct, perform, and reinforce emotional experiences, thereby generating a sense of shared feeling. Fans enact their critically close reception practices through their embodied engagement with texts from within these communities of feeling, rehearsing emotion concepts and creating a network of feels. Our embodied reception of texts also plays a role in the way that communities form around romantic character ships. By posting gif sets from the source text to platforms like Tumblr, fans isolate, repeat, and rehearse character interactions. These gifs are often of moments that are important to the fan community, evidence that these characters are in love—despite what the canon of the source text might try to tell us. As we look at gifs, we draw on our phenomenological, social, and cultural experience of bodily interactions to determine that their exchanges feel romantic rather than familial or platonic. Theories of embodied cognition can help us to explain why we are certain that these bodies reveal what characters are really feeling, even—or, perhaps, especially—when those feelings are denied canon actualization. The fan communities that form around specific understandings of actors’ performances reinforce our perceptions by creating a new social and emotional context in which our bodily experience of the text is embedded. Fans also actively engage with the bodies present in the source text, using them to create counternarratives by recontextualizing and reframing their relationships and interactions, thereby creating, reiterating, and reinforcing them. Collective consensus and pleasure forms through and is bolstered by this repetitive living through of actors’ performances. These stories are reaffirmed by the repeated engagement of the community but become counterfactual3 when they aren’t actualized in the canon. Gifs sets demonstrate the critically close approach of fans to texts—the way that their bodies, emotions, and collectives shape their understanding of characters and their interactions.

3  Fauconnier and Turner (2002) adopt the term “counterfactual” as a way to discuss our ability to reason about, create hypotheticals concerning, and imagine situations or scenarios that run counter to our knowledge about and experience of the world (230). Although I recognize the power of individual and collective fan interpretation of the source text and the difficulty of determining what exactly counts as “canon,” I refer to stories that run counter to or are never actualized or explicitly recognized in the official narrative as “counterfactual.”

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An Embodied Understanding of Gifs A man gazes into the camera, tears trickling down his cheeks as he forces a tight smile. A woman looks down at the floor, closes her eyes, and then leans her head back against the wall she is standing against. A man, his eyes closed, presses his fingers hard against his temple and then, as he grimaces with tears, he leans his face into his hands, his nose crushed against them. Another woman’s mouth forms a “Whooo,” and she jumps up and down, her smile wide, as she shakes her head. These gifs come up as a result of doing a search for “feels” on Giphy, a site that functions as a repository for animated gifs. As I look at these gifs, I feel one woman’s exhaustion, the other’s excitement. I perceive variations of sadness as I look at the men crying, constructing an understanding of them—even if I can’t verbalize the exact difference of feeling. Fans enact emotion through what are commonly referred to as reaction gifs. They use these gifs to rehearse experiences of feelings and feels, communicating, constituting, and sharing emotions that may defy verbal articulation. We may not be able to define or fully explain our feels, but we can use an animated gif to perform them. When I use the term “perform” to describe gifs, I am using it in the sense that John L. Austin (1962), Victor Turner (1980), and Richard Schechner (1985)  uses it—to indicate something changing or being brought about. As Amy Cook and I (Hautsch and Cook  2021) have argued, reaction gifs function as a form of “performative spectatorship”: for us, it is not that gifs are a “performance of spectatorship,” but rather that by posting them, we “enact change” (76). When we use a reaction gif, it does something. It is constitutive of a response rather than just a depiction of it: an act in addition to a representation. Gifs “are performative in that they constitute actions: they think, or, more accurately, they are the act of thinking” (Bernstein 2009, 70). They are, what Robin Bernstein (2009) refers to as, “scriptive things” (69), inviting an embodied rehearsal of emotion. Posting a gif does not just convey what we feel but reinforces it, leaving a trace in the body. And through that embodied experience, we construct a community. For this reason, Cook and I suggest that gifs function as what performance theorist Joseph Roach (1996) refers to as “effigies”: “actors, dancers,…celebrities, freaks,” etc., through whose performances society and culture repeats itself (Roach 36). Gifs, too, are “a contrivance that enables the processes regulating performance—kinesthetic imagination, vortices of behavior, and displaced transmission” (Roach 36).

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The bodies in gifs are surrogates through which fans constitute, repeat, and pass on their critically close engagement with the community and the text. Thinking of reaction gifs as performative is a departure from much of the existing research on them, which focuses primarily on how gifs depict an emotional experience rather than constitute it. Jackson Tolins and Patraway Samermit (2016), for example, suggest that people post gifs to “demonstrate their stance toward a prior text” (78). Michael Newman (2016) describes gifs as “distillations of pure affect” and John Savery Madden (2018) characterizes them as a “delivery mechanism” of emotional content (10). Jialun “Arron” Jiang and his colleagues (2018) observe that they are used to convey “nuanced ideas and emotions” (Jiang, Fiesler, and Braubaker, 80:7). Kate M. Miltner and Tim Highfield (2017) argue that “the reaction GIF acts as a proxy for, or expression of, emotion and/or affect” (5), asserting that they are a “performance of affect” (2-3). Their use of the word “performance,” though, refers to the representation of emotion or affect, not the enactment of it. These scholars assert that reaction gifs are incorporated into text-mediated conversation to communicate emotion; I am positing that gifs do not just depict emotion but perform it, generating it in and through the body of the viewer. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s (2017) theory of constructed emotions—which argues that rather than having a distinctive “fingerprint,” emotions are conceptualized and constituted through a variety of bodily sensations (16)—can help us to understand the appeal of gifs, whose popularity is partially due to the fact that we use them to perform a wide and nuanced range of not only different emotions but variety within emotions. They communicate and enact the subtle distinctions in the kind of sadness or joy or excitement or annoyance or amusement that we feel. Although we tend to think of emotions in terms of stereotyped facial configurations, an emotion concept, Barrett explains, “does not have a single expression but a diverse population of facial movements that vary from one situation to the next” (11, emphasis in original). This variety is because “an emotion is not a thing but a category of instances” (15). Fear, anger, joy—these emotions concepts are not felt or constituted in only one way. The experience of each instance of emotion varies depending on the individual and the context (15). If there is no single expression of these emotions, then part of the pleasure of gifs is that they reflect and enact this variety of feeling. When we look for a “happy,” “excited,” “feels,” or “sad” gif, we are searching within that emotion category and then selecting the animation that we feel best performs our perception of our happiness or excitement or sorrow. Our

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choice of gif is not just about what emotion it constitutes, but how it is performed, how we perceive it and want it to be perceived by others. The theories of embodied cognition can help us to make sense of our perception of reaction gifs and how we construct an understanding of the emotion that they perform. Gallagher (2005, 2020), Colombetti (2014), and Spolsky (2016) argue that we can only know another person through their body and our own. We perceive what other people are thinking, feeling, and intending, through our embodied, intersubjective interactions with them. We do not read their minds; we perceive their bodies and understand them through our own (Gallagher 2005, 227). As Gallagher explains, “this kind of perception-based understanding is a form of ‘body-­ reading’ rather than mind-reading. In seeing the actions and expressive movements of the other person, one already sees their meaning, no inferences to a hidden set of mental states (beliefs, desires, etc.) is necessary” (227). A person’s mind is not concealed, locked away within their skull, but rather is perceived in and communicated through the body.4 This body-reading is possible, in part, because we recognize the other as a subject: an entity with cognition, affect, and intention. Colombetti (2014) explains that “when in the presence of another’s body, I ‘sense-in’ his bodily sensations, the way his body feels to him” (174). Through the process of ‘sensing-in,’ we differentiate subject from object. If I am having a drink with a friend, as I look at her hand resting on the table, I perceive it differently than I do the cocktail beside it. I recognize the hand, as Colombetti and Steve Torrance (2009) explain, “as a locus of awareness with its own field of sensation” (508). When we watch a film or television show or look at an animated gif, we also “sense-in” those bodies, perceiving them as subjects distinct from the objects that accompany them on the screen. When we look at another person—in the world or on a screen—we perceive their feeling by ‘sensing-in’ their bodily sensation, rehearsing it in our own bodies. Or, as Colombetti (2014) argues, we “perceive the  Answering the questions about how we use our bodies to process information has generated considerable debate, and different theorists have asked different questions, offering different scales and types of evidence. One theorization of the embodied experience of film has been offered by neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese and film theorist Michele Guerra (2020) in their collaboration The Empathetic Screen. They argue that theories of embodied, neural, simulation can help us to understand the ways in which we use our bodies as we watch and make meaning of film. Gallese and Guerra’s explanation draws from work on mirror neurons, a contested area within neuro- and cognitive sciences (see Hickok (2014); Heyes and Catmur (2022)). Other film critics like Jennifer M. Barker (2009) and Vivian Sobchack (1992, 2004) offer alternative explanations for understanding our embodied reception of film, considering the phenomenological experience of film. 4

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other’s lived emotions in facial, bodily, and vocal expression” (176). We perceive the tension in facial muscles as we observe someone frowning, feel the force of their shaking or nodding head, feel the tightness around their eyes. Colombetti explains that “I do not just see the other’s hand and judge that it is tense, rather I experience the tenseness in the other’s hand …. My experience of the other’s subjectivity is primordial (it is my experience as I live through it), but the other’s subjectivity is given to me nonprimordially. Thus when I see the other’s tense hand, I ‘live’ the other’s tenseness but do not feel ‘primordial tenseness’ myself” (174–175, emphasis in original). When we look at gifs of people laughing, we “live” their laughter and understand what it is like, rehearsing it and constructing an understanding of it in and through our bodies, but we do not confuse these feelings, these experiences with our own (175). This ability to understand other’s bodies through our own, demonstrates what Spolsky (1996) calls “kinesic intelligence.” She explains that Human kinesic intelligence is our sense of the relationship of parts of the human body to the whole, and of the patterns of bodily tension and relaxation as they are related to movement. Kinesic knowledge is also our sense of the muscular forces that produce bodily movement and of the effect of that movement on other parts of the body and on objects within the environment …. Kinesic sense is also a spatial understanding of the relation of limbs to torso-their relative lengths and bulk and their relative extension and natural orientation. (159)

Kinesic intelligence is our knowledge of our bodies, which includes our proprioception, our ability to sense the way that we move through and interact with our environments and how those interactions will feel in and through our bodies.5 And it is through this knowledge that we are able to 5  Our kinesic intelligence is constructed from our experiences of our own bodies—but no matter what body we live in or as, disabled or nondisabled, we use the same embodied cognitive strategy to perceive and understand the bodies of others. Kinesic intelligence, for example, is the reason why wheelchair users who watched Glee (2009–2015) found non-disabled actor  Kevin McHale’s performance as Artie Abrams  (a character who uses a wheelchair) “inauthentic” (Kociemba 2010, 1.2). As these fans sensed into his body, they drew on their lived kinesic experiences of their bodies—how their bodies move with their wheelchairs—and determined that his movement “‘feels’ wrong” (Strukus 2011, 95). As Wanda Strukus (2011) explains, “McHale’s performance of Artie might fit the imaginative experience (a kind of empathy) of a nondisabled viewer, in the sense that McHale experiences the wheelchair the way any nondisabled person would, but for a ‘real’ wheelchair user, the performance is kinesthetically and experientially ‘wrong’ or inauthentic because the performers use their muscles and body structure in a way that an actual wheelchair user would or could not” (95).

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live through the bodies of others, and in doing so, perceive how they feel, what they intend. As we construct an understanding of emotion, knowing and feeling the expression of another person becomes indistinguishable from the emotion itself. When we look at a gif of someone smiling or crying, we perceive what that person is feeling based on our embodied experience of the facial configuration and the social and cultural context in which the expression is embedded. Our understanding of emotion is tied to bodies; whether in our own bodies or the bodies of others, we have difficulty separating physical sensations and the emotion we perceive them as constituting. As Ludwig Wittgenstein observes, when we look at a man’s face, “We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe the face immediately as sad, radiant, bored” (quoted in Hobson 2009, 245).6 We do not parse facial configurations to determine emotion, rather we directly perceive it. Part of the reason why we are able to directly perceive emotions, Gallagher (2020) argues, is that our perception of them is smart (132): our understanding of others’ emotions is entangled with the narrative and environmental context in which their bodies are embedded. As Gallagher explains, direct social perception, without any extra-perceptual inferential processes involved, can grasp more than just surface behavior—or to put it precisely, it can grasp behavior as meaningful …. Part of what makes smart perception smart is that it is always contextualized; I perceive actions with their circumstances, and other bodily comportments such as facial expressions in their context … informed by my prior experience. (132)

As we look at the bodies of others, we do not need to analyze or interpret their posture, facial configuration, and movements. Rather we perceive what people are feeling based on our experience of our bodies, our cultural norms, and the context in which they are encountered. Our 6  It is worth noting, as Colombetti (2014) does, that this understanding of the body and emotion does not mean that we cannot hide emotion or fake emotion—after all, actors do this all the time (see also Cook 2011). But when watching the performance of an actor, we perceive the actor’s facial configuration as indicative of what the character is feeling—even if we know that the actor might not actually be experiencing that emotion. In addition, sometimes “faked” emotion is unconvincing, because the smile, for example, doesn’t feel “right”as we sense into and live through it.

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perception of the world, Gallagher asserts, is “a complex, dynamical process at a subperson, sensory-motor level—but these processes are part of enactive engagement or response of the whole organism, rather than addition, extra-perceptual, inferential, or stimulative process” (133). When we talk about perception being smart, we are recognizing that perception isn’t just taking in sensory data, but is already making meaning of it from within an embedded and embodied context. When we look at animated gifs, we do not individually evaluate the posture and movement of the body, the contortions of the face, the context in which we encounter, but rather we directly perceive the emotion concept the gif performs.7 We might not even be able to define or put into words what that emotion is or verbally articulate the nuanced variety of emotion that each gif rehearses. But we understand it, perceiving what the pictured body is doing, and as it resonates through our bodies, we map the sensations onto an emotion concept (Barrett 2017, 140). We don’t need to parse peoples facial configurations to understand what they are feeling, because our perception of them is smart: culturally, socially, textually, bodily, and communally embedded.

A Feeling of Community As I scroll through Tumblr, my feed is populated by gifs. Tumblr’s micro-­ blogging platform, designed by David Karp and launched in 2007, promotes multimodal communication.8 While some fans do post long textual-based theories and fanfiction, most blogs are populated primarily by images of fanart, stills from television shows, and animated gifs. In their research on affective exchanges on Tumblr, Elli E. Bourlai and Susan Herring (2014) found that multimodal forms of communication are especially important within fandoms and that posts that included images and gifs conveyed “more emotion than textual communication, greater intensity of emotion” (4). Although Tumblr posts can incorporate a variety of multimodal communication—still images, YouTube videos, and animated gifs—Bakhshi et al. (2016) found a strong preference on Tumblr for gifs over other post forms (575). Users felt that gifs were more dynamic 7  This experience might be slightly different for neurodivergent fans. However, additional research is required in this area of study (see Heyes and Catmur 2022). 8  See Stein (2015), Hillman, Procyk, and Neustaedter (2014b), DeSouza (2013), Cho (2015), Bourlai and Herring (2014), Perez, (2013), Petersen (2014).

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than still images, and more effectively communicated emotion or ideas, while doing so silently, using little bandwidth, and requiring only a small time commitment (579). If, as we saw in Chap. 2, feels are difficult to verbally articulate, then fans turn to gifs to perform, share, and spread their emotional experiences of texts, to construct and rehearse feels, and to create a sense of communal emotion. This preference for visual communication is a result of the affordances enacted through  users’ engagement with Tumblr’s design. As a social media platform, Tumblr provides an environment with specific technological affordances with which fans interact and through which they think. The term “affordance,” as explained by ecological psychologist James J. Gibson (1983, 2014) and cognitive scientist Anthony Chemero (2003), refers to the way that we make sense and use of the environments in which our thinking is embedded. Affordances are perceived through—and emerge from—the interaction of the organism, environment, and situation and the cognitive system they form. While Gibson and Chemero’s work focuses on our physical and material environments, we also make affordances of the technological interfaces through which we communicate and create. Line Nybro Petersen (2014), for example, observes that “Tumblr is organized in a certain way and operates by a particular grammar, and this enforces a particular manner of communication … affordances are both the possibilities and constraints that structure conversation” (90). As numerous scholars note, the visual orientation of Tumblr’s design explains users’ preference for images and animated gifs over textual communication (Stein 2016; Hillman, Procyk, and Neustaedter 2014a; DeSouza 2013; Bourlai and Herring 2014; Perez 2013; Petersen 2014). However, this design not only structure modes of communication, but  through our interactions with this  digital  environment we  enact cognition. The platform’s design and functionality make it relatively easy for fans to post gifs and create gif sets (Stein 2016) that introduces new ways of thinking and feeling and enables new understandings of characters and narratives as fan cognition is shaped by and extended through the visual content fans post. One of the affordances that fans have made of Tumblr’s visually oriented design is the use of reaction gifs to share their perceived emotional experience of a particular scene, idea, or post with the rest of the fan community. When we watch a play, a film, or a show together, we are influenced by the emotions we perceive in those around us. Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson (1994) note that feelings are spread and shared through our perception of each other’s bodies, and this, what they call, “emotional contagion” is the reason why people tend to

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rate comedy specials that depict audience laughter as funnier than those that do not (58). When we watch a sitcom with a laugh track or a comedy special that cuts to shots of audience members enjoying the show, we are perceiving and catching their feelings and enjoying the jokes more. As Cook (2011) explains, emotional contagion theory suggests that “we are not separate and contained individuals; we are porous and seeping” (77); she observes that when in the theater, the spectators share emotions with  not just the characters on the stage, but also the other audience members (83). However, fans, who are engaging with texts asynchronously and in dispersed geographic locations, are unable to perceive and feel a collective experience of spectatorship and emotion. When fans discuss their feels and post gifs to illustrate, perform, and embody them, they are sharing feelings in order to create a sense of communal emotional reception. Louisa Ellen Stein (2015) argues that “feels culture thrives on the public celebration of emotion … emotions remain intimate but are no longer necessarily private; rather, they build a sense of an intimate collective, one that is bound together precisely by the process of shared emotional authorship” (156). Digital fan spaces, like Tumblr, become platforms for rehearsing feelings. Through testimonials of their emotions and animated gifs, fans share and repeat their feelings, performing emotional spectatorship within the semi-public space of the fan collective. Stein asserts that “feels culture combines an aesthetics of intimate emotion—the sense that we are accessing an author’s immediate and personal emotional response to media culture” (158). By posting reaction gifs, fans constitute not just feelings but a community that recruits fans’ bodies to construct and perform a sense of collective emotional spectatorship—and the affordances of Tumblr make it especially well-­ suited for this enactment of shared feeling. Fans on Tumblr make use of another of the site’s affordances—its reblog function—to spread posts and cohere a community by sharing and rehearsing emotional experiences. Tumblr’s platform design promotes “reblogging” posts, so that they appear on a user’s page with an attribution of its source and a link to the “OP” (original poster). Reblogging can be easily done from users’ dashboard, without interrupting what Stein (2016) calls the “infinite scrolling” of Tumblr’s interface, which allows users to reblog a large number of posts in a relatively short amount of time (see also DeSouza 2013; Perez 2013). Unlike other social media platforms, which allow fans to join designated groups, fans’ interests and identities on Tumblr are established largely through curation by reblogging content

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(Hillman, Procyk, and Neustaedter 2014a, 778; Perez 2013, 149; DeSouza 2013, 27). When material is reblogged, it not only shows up in the user’s blog, but the engagement is also registered in the post’s “Notes,” which tracks comments, reblogs, and likes, which Stein (2015) argues “celebrates shared, collective passion” (156). In addition to reposting content, reblogging allows users to add comments—textual or multimodal. This affordance enables fans to respond to posts with their own gifs, creating a thread of comments, visuals, and emotions, so that the “reblogged and additively transformed post makes visible communally shared emotion, registered through asynchronous authorship” (Stein 2015, 156). This technological affordance, then, enacts a collective experience of emotional spectatorship as fans post, read, and feel animated gifs, enabling fans to think and feel with each other. As I scroll through my Tumblr feed, these posts constitute the collective feels of the fan community, allowing me to replay and relive my pleasure, sorrow, or anger through my embodied reception and rehearsal of gifs. The affordance of reblogging creates an emotional ecology, through which fans generate the repeated pleasure of experiencing the community’s collective feels in and through their bodies. As posts are spread and shared, the users who reblog them repeat and rehearse their performance of emotional spectatorship, reinforcing patterns of feeling and establishing an emotional collective. While this is not identical to the emotional contagion discussed by Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson (1994) and Cook (2011), by reblogging these gifs, fans enact a collective and embodied emotional experience. Through the use of gifs, fans not only express and rehearse embodied understandings of their emotions, but invite others to perceive, live through, and perform those feelings, as well. For example, I perceive and experience this repeated pleasure, when I view a Witcher gif set posted by gaybuckybarnes (2019): two gifs of a slow pan up Geralt’s bare and very muscular thighs. I experience pleasure as I gaze at the gifs’ looped lingering on Cavill’s body, and when I look at the comments, I see that other fans have replied with gifs indicating their shared appreciation of the Witcher’s physique. Sometimes these gifs are accompanied by comments, like mahvaladara’s (2019) who posted the text “Them legs baby! Thick daddy thighs!” with a gif of Rita Hayworth from Gilda (1946), pursing her lips, raising her eyebrows, and looking to the side, or p8tn0lish (2019), who wrote “Love me a hairy dude and those legs, dammnnnnnnnnnn he can get this,” accompanied by a gif of the Tinkerbell from Disney’s animated Peter Pan  (1953), clutching a

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blanket to her chest, leaning forward and nodding. Other times, replies are just gifs, like star-spangled-man-with-a-plan (2019), who replied to the gif set with Emma Roberts as Chanel Oberlin from Scream Queens (2015-2016), tapping her foot and jostling her head or 21st-century-daydreamer (2019) who responded with an animation of Link Neal chugging an entire glass of wine to literally represent metaphorical thirst.9 As we look at these gifs, we live through and map the movements and expressions of all of them onto the emotion concepts of lust, desire, and sexual and visual pleasure; within this specific rhetorical and communal context, they represent the variety of this emotional experience (Barrett 2017, 43). As Barrett (2017) demonstrates, we perceive the same facial configuration as constituting different emotions in different contexts. She notes that faces are never decontextualized but are accompanied by “surrounding details” that “cue your brain to use particular concepts to simulate and construct your perception of emotion” (43). The post and other gifs that reaction gifs reply to provide the “surrounding details” that shape our understanding and perception of the bodies in them. While in other circumstances, we might perceive the gif of Chanel as indicating impatience or annoyance, in this context, though, we categorize it as a bodily invocation of a whiney “I want it,” a small tantrum at the unfairness of not getting him. In this way, our perception of these gifs is smart; they are embedded with the context of the post and the larger fan community, which shapes our perception of face, body, and emotion in gif. When we look at the comments and reaction gifs that accompany posts, it is not about repeated engagement with the original content. We are not looking at Cavill’s barely covered body, but rather at how other fans perceive and perform their bodily engagement with the looping image of his thighs—the various ways in which they conceptualize, depict, and perform their emotion, their gaze, their erotic spectatorship and sexual desire. These gifs offer a repetition of desire, and as we look at them, we live-through these different constructions of emotion. We get to experience the pleasure of the repeated perception of erotic spectatorship, seeing how other fans experience desire, and reigniting our own as we do so. This repetition, this interactive interplay, encourages an emotional rehearsal from fans while also creating a sense of community by constructing and passing on a fannish mode of effeminate pleasure and desire. As we look at the gifs, they enact not only desire, but demonstrate how to desire. They 9

 A slang term for sexual desire.

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invite us to perceive, perform, relive, and rehearse those feelings of spectatorship as part of an intimate and emotional collective. Fans make an affordance of gifs not just to react to posts, but as a form of emotional performance and embodied community creation. When fans post a reaction gif on Tumblr, I argue, they do more than just communicate what they are feeling. Reaction gifs are a performance—one that is rehearsed in and marks the body of the spectator as we sense-in and live through the body in the gif. Gifs constitute and script different ways of perceiving and enacting happiness and sorrow, pleasure and excitement. As we live through the gifs posted by other fans, we experience the variations in emotions, sharing the feels of other members of the collective as a means of constructing and passing on modes of fannish feeling. And this embodied, meaning-making process is one of the ways in which fan communities are formed: the performance of emotional spectatorship as it is enacted in and through the body and embedded within the culture and community of fandom.

The Bodies that Launched a Thousand Ships On Tumblr, aknowsnothing (2019) posted gif of Jon glaring at Sansa during one of the council meetings that took place during Season Eight of Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Sansa has just told Daenerys Targaryen, the Dragon Queen, that their armies need to rest before marching south to take King’s Landing and claim the Seven Kingdoms in Dany’s name. As Jon looks at her, his mouth closes, jawline tightens. His eyebrows are lowered and there is tension around his eyes. “I find this very interesting coz this is the exact look I give my family or friends when I want them to stop talking in front of people, whom we do not like or trust,” writes aknowsnothing. “This is basically Jon telling Sansa ‘Keep quiet, Sansa dear. Let’s not antagonise this dragon lady. Or else she’ll come for you and our family.’” Other fans responded to the gif with similar readings, including charlie-x (2019), who writes, “I agree, that is a ‘please shut up for your and my sake’ look, not a ‘don’t speak negatively about my queen’ look.” As fans comment on the gif set, they reaffirm a collective perception of Jon’s facial configuration, which becomes part of the affective reality of that community. Creating consensus about what the expression means is important to the fan collective because depending on what Jon’s look says— “please shut up for your and my sake” or “don’t speak negatively about my queen”—fans write different stories about his character, loyalty,

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motivations, and true love. In short, depending on the emotion we perceive, we construct a different version of the character around which the fan community is formed. My interest is not in what Jon’s face means, but how theories of embodied and enacted cognition can help us to understand how fans perceive, reinforce, tell stories through, and form communities around actors’ bodies and performances. When we watch a film or a television show, when we look at reaction gifs and gif sets, we understand bodies through our own. In the first part of this chapter, I analyzed how fans use reaction gifs to communicate, spread, and share emotional experiences; building on this framework, I now consider how fans use gifs and gif sets made up of material from the source text to not only understand characters’ interactions, but to recontextualize them, developing counternarratives that invite viewers to experience character relationships in different ways and cohering a sense of community through a shared perception of characters’ feelings. Like our understanding of reaction gifs, this critically close meaning-making and community-building process is also embodied and smart—fans perceive the bodies and performances of actors, the emotions, motivations, and dispositions of characters through the phenomenological lens of their own bodily, social, and narrative experiences. Through repeated viewings of this looping animation, fans do not just see these interactions, they feel them; part of the pleasure of looking at gifs is in “living through” (Colombetti 2014, 175) them and the emotions perceived, the counternarratives invited. This reiterative pleasure is not only individual, but communal: through a critically close approach to media, fans develop counternarratives, which are repeated and reinforced by the community and in the bodies of individual fans, often becoming more important to the collective than the canon of the source text. Gif sets as a mode of textual, communal, and bodily engagement emerges from the technological affordances of Tumblr and culturally based understandings of visual storytelling. Louisa Ellen Stein (2016) explains that as a medium, gif sets “evolved primarily on Tumblr, where the interface allows for easy juxtaposition of multiple animated or still GIFs.” Through fans’ interactions with the affordances of Tumblr’s design, this new medium of fan engagement emerged and developed during the 2010s. Fans make affordances of these sets to create their own narratives—selecting and repeating key scenes, overemphasizing and drawing attention to moments that resonate as romantic within the body of the fan and the fan collective.

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While I am focusing on the embodied aspect of meaning-making, it is important to note that our cognition is also embedded within larger cultural contexts. These social and textual environments are integrated into our cognitive system and are integral to how we think about  and think with gif sets. For example, fans’ experiences with film conventions shape how they make meaning of and through actor’s performances. Fan creators make affordances of cinematic editing techniques—much in the same way that professional editors and fanviders do—to generate new narratives, performances, and understandings through gif sets. Indeed, as they construct these sets, fans perform a role similar to that of a film editor, which is why Francesca Coppa (2022) refers to gif sets as “six-celled cinema” (197). In addition, these sets rely on and reinforce, a shared understanding of performance conventions. We know what a character in love looks like—and what our bodily reception of it feels like—because we’ve experienced it in films, television shows, vids, and gif sets before. The facial configurations that we associate with love and longing are stereotyped, so that we see them repeated as a representation of that emotion category—which comes to shape how we conceptualize the emotion category itself within our social reality. As we use our bodies to make sense of these gifs, we do so from a position in which our cognition is embedded within and distributed through technological and cultural networks of meaning. Before gifs, fans built these communities through fanvids, fanfiction, and fanart, and while those older modes of textual engagement are still a vibrant part of fandom, gif sets afford specific ways of constructing narratives, generating meaning, and creating a collective by providing alternative ways to think about and think with texts. My approach to thinking about the minds and bodies of characters adds to the work of previous fan studies scholars. Serena Hillman, Jason Procyk, and Carman Neustaedter (2014a), for example, observe that fans post gifs “for discussion, creation, and adaptation,” a way of “comparing character development over time, pointing out a specific show detail that might have otherwise been missed by other users, and re-watching key scenes in order to add analysis or express emotion around that scene” (5). Scholars have already pointed out that gifs function as a tool of interpretation, argumentation, and affect, a way to “annotate, appreciate, and recirculate objects of interest” (Newman 2014, 128). They allow viewers to isolate and reread moments in the text, focusing on actors’ gestures, expressions, and other subtextual cues, what Henry Jenkins has described as the “nonverbal dimensions of performance” (1992, 228). Fans notice minutia

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of the “mise en gest” 10—to use Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s term—and these observations are spread by sharing or reblogging gifs until they become part of the community’s collective perception of characters. I am adding to the work of these scholars by drawing on the theories of embodied cognition that can help to explain the “body reading” (Gallagher 2005, 227) that fans do as they look at animated gifs, positing that characters are understood and analysis of them performed in and through fans’ bodies, as they live through characters’ movements, touches, glances, and facial configurations. Work done by cognitive philosophers and scientists can help us to understand how fans perceive the subtext as they look at gifs, why they understand the exchange of a look as obviously romantic, how we can feel like we know what characters are thinking or feeling. In her discussion of fans’ focus on and interpretation of subtext, Sara Gwenllian Jones (2002) notes that “fans don’t really ‘know’ the interior works of characters’ minds and hearts in any absolute sense because those minds and hearts have no actuality; the television series furnishes only surface indications of these ultimately ungraspable depths. It offers clues, some subtle and some explicit, to interiorities that have no objective existence, no facility for final confirmation or denial” (124). Despite the fictionality of television characters, we understand them as though they were real, using the same cognitive tools that we employ in daily intersubjective interactions to understand them11; characters do not have minds, but we construct them as though they do. While Jones is right that we can’t “know” what characters are thinking or feeling, we also don’t know the interior workings of the people we interact with on a daily basis, but their thoughts and feelings are not any more “hidden” than those of characters. We do our best to construct an understanding of them through our perception of “surface indications,” 10  Ana Hedberg Olenina and Irina Schulzki (2017) explain that “Eisenstein’s term ‘mise en geste’ is defined in his 1948 notes on directing, completed a few months before his death, where he describes the actor’s quest for a precise gesture to convey the subtext of a narrative situation and suggests that the actor gives a scene its dramatic charge by embodying—in the literal sense of the word—the conflicting motives driving the character.” 11  Theorists of social cognition argue that one of the benefits of literature is that it allows us to practice understanding the minds of others and practice empathy. For example, see David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano (2013), Raymond Mar and Keith Oatly (2008), and Jessica Black and Jennifer L. Barnes (2015), and Suzanne Keen (2010). We understand characters as if they are real, and that’s part of what makes fiction powerful.

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often without getting “confirmation” of thoughts or feelings. If my friend is frowning or crying, I do not  have to ask her “are you feeling sad?” Rather I perceive her sadness and behave accordingly. Theories of embodied cognition, like those put forth by Gallagher (2005, 2020) and Colombetti (2014) argue that it is only through this “surface,” through the body, that we perceive the emotional experiences of others—whether fictional or real—and helps to explain how we can know what characters even as we know that they aren’t real. As we look at the performing bodies of actors, we live through and rehearse movements and expressions, drawing on physical and social experiences of our bodies to perceive movements and facial configurations as meaningful within a specific narrative. As Vivian Sobchack (2004) explains, “the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies. Which is to say that movies provoke in us the ‘carnal thoughts’ that ground and inform more conscious analysis” (60). When I watch the Game of Thrones episode “Winds of Winter” (2016), for example, I understand Jon’s interaction with Sansa on the battlements of Winterfell as romantic because I experience—I feel—the tender way he cups the back of her head, leans in, kisses her forehead, his lips lingering for a moment too long, the direction of his gaze as he looks at her lips. I rehearse the movements, these expressions in and through my body, and they don’t feel platonic or familial to me; they don’t map with my concept of familial love (Barrett 2017, 89). I directly perceive—I feel—romantic tension between the characters, even if that romance is not explicitly confirmed in the text of the show. “Armadas of ships,” psychologist and self-identified fangirl Kathleen Smith (2016) notes, “have been launched from a single glance or hand brush between characters” (118). These ships form, I argue, because we live through that glance or that brush of the hand or that smile, and through our embodied experience of the text, we perceive it to be romantic through a culturally embedded, embodied meaning-making cognitive system. The body does not only ground our analysis but is an integral part of how we understand character interactions. As a medium, gifs afford us the ability to zoom in on, linger over, share, and repeatedly live through specific moments of a film or television show and to develop a collective understanding of character subjectivities. If early theorization of the cinema criticized the medium because it promoted “distracted” engagement and did not allow viewers to sit in and contemplate particular moments and movements (Benjamin  1935, 17–18), an affordance of gifs is that they allow us the space to do so. For

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example, in contrast to the scene’s original framing of a medium shot in the Game of Thrones episode “The Door” (2016), a series of four gifs posted by Shipperobsession (2020) present Jon in close-up, focusing on his facial configuration as he looks down at the cloak that Sansa has just given him. The gifs are also slowed, so that we can closely attend to the changes in his facial configuration as he moves his head to look down, his customarily solemn expression relaxing for just a moment as the muscles in his face shift into a small, close-lipped smile, which then falls as his eyes flick back up and in the direction that Sansa just departed. By slowing down and narrowing in on Jon’s face, these gifs allow fans to “focus on the microexpressions” of his facial configuration (Williams 2018, 6.4), and invite us to linger in and live through the nuances of Harington’s performance in a way that we are not able to when watching the show. If we think of our perception of emotions—in ourselves and others—as constructed, it can help to explain differing interpretations of performances: Not everyone understands the same characters as having romantic feelings for one another. Due to the nature of serialized storytelling, actors’ performances are often intentionally ambiguous and open ended, containing a multiplicity of meanings. As a result, the performance feels different to these fans; as different viewers attend to different aspects of the performance, they categorize the characters’ emotions, intentions, and interactions in a variety of ways. As Barrett (2017) explains, “Emotions have no fingerprints, so there can be no accuracy. The best you can do is find consensus … we can compare our categorizations to the norms of our culture” (140). When I watch scenes between Jon and Sansa, I categorize it as clearly romantic; other fans view it as definitely familial. Neither perception of the characters and their relationship is wrong; “each construction is real” (140). There is no objective, right answer, because our perception of how others are feeling is “‘correct’ only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree what concept to apply” (195). We can’t ask Jon what he is feeling, and although fans on Tumblr frequently wonder if that’s how Harington thinks siblings look at each other, when filming Season Six, he didn’t know where his characters’ story would ultimately end. So in order to experience a sense of consensus—of rightness—fan communities cohere around their perception of characters’ emotions, creating narratives that fit with our understanding of how it feels to us.

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For members of fan communities, the pleasure of our embodied meaning-making is not enjoyed individually; it is spread throughout a collective of fans that perceive character interactions the same way, creating a communal understanding of what they mean. As I look at gif sets, part of my pleasure is in repeating and reliving moments between characters, but my enjoyment also comes from looking at the comments that other fans have left on them and the consensus they generate. In response to Shipperobsession’s (2020) gif set, for example, Schnoogles (2020) reposted two still shots from the gif captioned with “wow Sansa is good wife material ( )” and “good WIFE material? ( ),” articulating the realization of romantic interest that they perceive in Jon’s shift in facial configuration. Through comments like these, I am reassured that it is not only me—an entire community agrees with and has cohered around a shared perception of Harington’s performance and the counternarrative it encourages: Jon is actually very much in love with Sansa. These comments reaffirm my perception of Jon and Sansa’s relationship as romantic, the community collectively constructs an understanding of their interactions by slotting them into different cognitive frames. Frames are skeletal cognitive organizational tools through which we structure and understand information (Cerulo 2001, 6–7). They are, Karen A. Cerulo (2001) tells us, “models that allow human beings to represent stereotyped interactions or situations … creating a structured set of expectations within which new situations are evaluated” (7). When we are watching a television show, we organize and understand characters, their interactions, and relationships through frames: the enemies frame, the siblings frame, the friends frame, the lovers frame. Because of our lived cultural experiences, we know how characters in those roles are supposed to interact with each other. However, sometimes when we are watching a film or television show, we perceive something in the actor’s performance—a gesture, a look—that doesn’t fit the frame’s slots; it doesn’t feel like the way an enemy looks at his nemesis, it doesn’t feel like the way friends’ hands casually touch, it doesn’t feel like the way a brother would kiss his sister’s forehead. “Right,” Shipperobsession (2020) wryly captions the post, “That’s the look you have when your sister gives you a gift.” Jonsa shippers perceive something in Jon’s expression that doesn’t feel brotherly or familial, that doesn’t match cultural and phenomenological experiences of the sibling frame, and for them, Jon and Sansa’s interactions are slotted into a lover frame instead.

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In short, as I and other Jon/Sansa shippers look at gifs like these, we construct a new narrative through which we understand the characters, one that runs counter to the source text, but feels right based on our perception of the characters. Gallagher (2020) explains that narratives provide powerful contexts in which our understanding of the actions and bodies of others are embedded; they are integrated into the enacted and embodied cognitive system through which we make sense of the world and the people around us. Narratives shape our perception of behavior, because “[t]hrough narratives we gain a shared knowledge about roles and rules in our common world,” through which we form our expectations for how we and others “ought to behave in various circumstances” (Gallagher 2020, 168). But this can cause a problem when the way that we perceive an actor’s performance doesn’t match the character’s narrative frame; as Gallagher notes: Whatever is going on in the brain correlates not simply to features of action and expression (and the subjectivity of the other person) but to the larger story, the narrative scene, or the circumstances of the other person, and how features of action and expression match or fail to match those circumstances. If the emotional character of the other person is not in character with the narrative framework it is difficult to understand that person, the story, or both. (2020, 164)

If I attempt to understand Jon and Sansa’s behavior through the sibling frame, the performance and emotion that I perceive doesn’t make sense. Based on my embodied, phenomenological understanding, that’s not how a brother looks at his sister, so the characters don’t fit into the slots of that frame, don’t work in that story. What I, and other members of the Jonsa shipping community, do in response, then, is slot them into a new frame, cast them into new roles, create a new narrative: Jon gazes at Sansa like that because he is secretly pining away for her. If we understand them as lovers, rather than siblings, these new roles and the stories they suggest help us to make sense of what we are seeing, the narrative context reinforcing my perception of the characters’ emotion. As a result, it is not just that we interpret their relationship as romantic rather than familial, rather they don’t look like siblings but lovers to us. Once we have started shipping characters, organizing their interactions through the lovers frame and slotting them into the new roles it entails, our desire for and emotional investment in this new narrative shapes the way that we understand the characters’ interactions, providing a new

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affective and narrative context through which we understand their smiles and glances. Fans recognize the bias in their perception through phrases like ‘shipping goggles,” which suggest that the embodied, emotional experience of shipping provides a specific lens through which the text is understood, a frame that the characters are being slotted into.12 If we believe that characters are in love, want them to be in love, and surround ourselves with other people who want it too, we perceive them differently because of the narrative that the shipping community has constructed about their relationship and the emotional environment in which we are embedded. As cognitive film theorist Noël Carroll (2003) notes, our emotions “organize perception” (66), so once I am emotionally invested in a ship, I am predisposed to perceive character’s interactions as romantic. Wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing-as” is, I think, helpful in understanding how frames and narratives not only reflect but shape our perception of character interactions. David Z. Saltz (2006) explains “seeing-as” in terms of Wittgenstein’s famous duck/rabbit illusion: Depending on how we look at the picture, the lines are either a duck’s bill or rabbit’s ear. Saltz questions, “What exactly changes when one switches from one interpretation to the other? Certainly, Wittgenstein notes, not the actual lines on the page. Still, the change is not merely in what the lines signify. The image looks different depending on whether one regards it as a duck or as a rabbit. One’s visual experience itself undergoes a transformation” (207, emphasis mine). We might similarly ask what happens when one views a text through shipping goggles. The text and performances don’t change, but, like the duck/rabbit, the interactions between look different if we watch the show from a perspective where their interactions are understood, “seen-as,” as romantic rather than familial. Our perception of the show, of the characters’ storyline, is “transformed,” even as the actors’ performances stay the same. The social and cultural context in which we encounter these gifs also affects our perception of them. As Gallagher (2020) explains, our understanding of the actions, intentions, motivations, and feelings of others is contextualized by background knowledge that is “widely 12  Any time we approach a piece of medium, it is through a specific frame, which shapes the lens through which we approach it: “quality television,” “Netflix Original,” “J.J.  Abrams produced,” “horror film,” “summer blockbuster,” “MCU,” “trashy romance novel,” or “a good background watch.” These frames shape our expectations and experiences of the media we consume. Shipping goggles are another frame, but one that fans are consciously aware of and draw attention to.

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embodied and embedded in practices that are not only physical, but are social and cultural and normative” (173). Our interactions with them are embedded within a specific community of practice and feeling. Encountering a text within a shipping community also influences how fans perceive and understand actors’ performances and characters’ interactions. Attending to different aspects of performance, decontextualizing and repeating specific moments, and reaffirming certain interpretations, shipping communities not only shape how we read the story of the source text, but constructs counternarratives that, for these collectives, can become more powerful than the canon of the show. Shipping communities “shape” the way that we read texts by providing strategies and directing attention, reinforcing these interpretations by attending to, isolating, and spreading specific moments of interaction between characters. Research has demonstrated that much of our ability to understand facial configurations relies on the “social-emotional context” in which we encounter them (Marian and Shimamura 2012, 371); when we see the same facial configuration in different contexts we perceive it differently. When we look at animated gifs on social media platforms, the faces, expressions, and gestures they repeat have been removed from the context in which they originally appeared and put into a new one.13 Nistasha Perez (2013) notes that fan gifs are “not always the climax of a story; often the artist highlights bits of dialogue or moments in the story deemed especially amusing or particularly heartfelt” (151) and Leigh Alexander (2011) argues that they depict “tiny movements” that “become almost precious when isolated by themselves.” Within a shipping community, the same scenes that are collectively perceived to be romantic tend to be repeated. By repeatedly encountering these moments on their Tumblr dashboards, endlessly reliving them in the looping form of the gif, these interactions gain narrative importance, not only for the story of the show, but also for the counternarrative that shippers construct through the selection, curation, arrangement, and repetition of scenes. One of the ways that fans reinforce communal interpretations and articulate counternarratives is through the creation of gif sets, arrangements of multiple gifs. Stein (2016) explains that when creating a gif set, fans “select particular moments from the source text … and recontextualize them among one another, in so doing revealing or establishing new visual and 13  See Chap. 5 for a discussion of how fanvids employ a similar practice to meaning-making and create narratives.

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thematic patterns, offering distilled readings or new meanings born of new contexts and juxtapositions.” Fans select and decontextualize moments from media properties to pair and contrast, to construct a new context in which characters’ expressions and interactions are lived through and understood. Tumblr user thelawyerthatwaspromised (2019) declares that “There’s a reason Jonsa’s see their relationship the way we do, These moments in isolation have romantic vibes. Stacked again and again, it becomes an established pattern.” Gif sets are a way to bring these moments out of isolation and to visually stack them and establish—or create—the pattern. These sets rely on our ability to fill in information in order to confirm a story we want told, a ship we perceive in the text and want to see explicitly consummated by it. The counternarratives established by these sets then reflect back on our collective understanding of the show, reaffirming that there is something between these characters. These gif sets extricate the characters from the canon of the show, from the existing story and frames that characters are slotted into by it, further encouraging the counternarratives that fans construct. They invite us to feel and perceive character bodies and interactions in new way, making it easier to construct a new narrative about and through it—especially when put into visual conversation with other, similar moments. When we look at gifs, we don’t forget who Jon and Sansa are, or what happens in the show, but seeing the gif outside of the show’s narrative and in a new context can change how we perceive the bodies of the actors in it. Gifs remain, as Katherine Brown (2012) notes, “indexical,” but their decontextualization from their source invites us to feel and understand gestures and expression in new ways (8). Or as Booth (2010) puts it, gifs are recontextualized within alternate narratives, “while still remaining tethered to the diegetic reality of the original” (36). Understanding our perception of these gifs as smart helps us to see how, though the story of the source text is never completely forgotten, removing the gif from its original context, from the frames of the characters and their relationships, and recontextualizing them through different narratives invites us to live through and perceive those interactions in different ways. Through gif sets, fans use the bodies and performances of actors to construct counternarratives, inviting the viewer to create a story that diverges from the canon of the source text. Aureliacamargo (2021), for example, posted an eight gif set, most of them of Jon looking at Sansa. The pining that Jonsa shippers perceive in these gifs does not match the show’s official story of Jon falling for Daenerys Targaryen, but as we look

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at these gifs, recontextualized in relation to each other, we construct a narrative of Jon longing for Sansa and hoping that maybe she’ll eventually notice how he feels and return his affection. As we look at the set, we hold two stories—the love story we feel in the gifs and the canon we got—in our mind, integrating them into a network, so that we see both at the same time. The counternarrative generated through these gifs projects back onto the source text, and it affects how we perceive Jon and Sansa’s interactions there, so that we see the romance of these interactions even more strongly when we rewatch these scenes. The embodied experience—and pleasure—of living through these counternarratives affects my enjoyment of the show’s outcomes. When my ship isn’t endgame14 or one of the characters gets together with someone else, it feels wrong. And it feels worse because I have such a clear picture of what might have been. Or as one disappointed fan commented on a gif set of Jon and Sansa’s farewell, “Were we just seeing what we wanted? I’m just so bitter about this potential fictional pairing not happening” (ladyeliamm 2019). Fans weren’t just seeing what they wanted, but what they wanted did affect what they perceived, what they felt, and the story they constructed. And when a series ends or a character dies or is given a different romantic interest, the narrative fans wrote becomes a counterfactual,15 incompatible with the story of the source text. Cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002) note the very real grief that counterfactuals can elicit, citing the phenomenon of people suffering from “lottery depression” after their numbers didn’t come up in the drawing. Their experience of depression was similar to “those of people who had suffered severe loss,” even though they had not actually lost anything—they just hadn’t won (231). However, psychologists speculate that these people actually had lost something, though it only existed in fantasy: “the two weeks or so between the purchase of the ticket and the drawing for the winner, these victims had fantasized, consciously or unconsciously, wittingly or unwittingly, about what they would do upon winning” (231). When they didn’t win, they lost all of the things 14  A term used by fans to indicate the ultimate destination of the source text’s narrative telos. 15  Any time we “pretend, imitate, lie, fantasize, deceive, delude, consider alternatives, make models, and propose hypotheses”—in short, any time we “operate mentally on the unreal”— we are creating a counterfactual (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 219).

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they had fantasized about, the narrative of instant wealth becoming incompatible with the reality they were living in. When Game of Thrones ended without Jon and Sansa getting together, shippers also experienced a loss; the loss of the love story that the community had constructed, had “lived in,” and had spent considerable time and energy developing. As a result, we were more disappointed with what actually happened because the writers had a beautiful love story right there and wasted it. Fan communities who feel dissatisfied with a texts’ outcome, often use gif sets as a way to live through counterfactual narratives that the story foreclosed. As Rebecca Williams (2018) argues, “In the case of GIFs and GIF sets, this becomes a form of shorthand, allowing fans on Tumblr to reencounter such moments through the scroll of their dashboard” (6.6). Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Wilson (2013), Booth (2015) argues that gif sets are one of the ways that fans express and experience their nostalgic connection to the text. Wilson asserts that the nostalgia of fandom “dissolves the pain of the past in the memory of its beauty” (2013, 49). This memory, however, is often of a story that was never actually told; it is of a “non-existent” but “imaginarily real” (45), a counter narrative more reflective of our desires than of what actually happened. Booth adds to this understanding, noting that “Fan nostalgia, however, is not just about a historic memory but also about the affective connection between an imagined ideal fan text and the initial experiences of the fan” (19). Through gifs, we relive our engagement with the text, not just “working through” our relationship with it (Williams 3.4), but living through it— bodily, emotionally, and socially. Game of Thrones ends with Jon in exile and Sansa alone, but by looking at gifs, I not only witness, but live through the “beauty” (Wilson 2013, 49) of the moments when I feel that there is something between these characters. I not only remember how those moments felt, I can repeatedly experience the pleasure  of feeling Jon’s kiss on Sansa’s forehead, their reunion hug, her beaming up at him during a feast. Gifs, then, as Kelli Marshall (2015) explains, “reproduce an experience,” enact nostalgia, and fulfill the desire to go back and once again live through these moments in the text. But more than that, the nostalgia that I experience when I look at gifs is for the counterfactual narrative that the shipping community has created through them—an imaginary text that is incompatible with the show’s canon, but that we long to return to regardless. If, as Williams (2018) suggests in her psychoanalytic reading of gifs, nostalgia is a form of mourning (6.5), then, by looking at, creating, and sharing gif sets, the fan collective is mourning,

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not only what happened in the narrative of the show, but also the loss of the counternarrative that they cohered around, yet never became canon. Through gif sets, fans collectively repeat and embody these counternarratives; they return to these moments in the text in order to relive a narrative that was not part of the official story but that nevertheless feels right. Part of the pleasure of looking at gifs, and the counternarratives we construct through them is the pleasure of the repeated living through the characters’ bodies, gestures, expressions, stories. As I scroll through Tumblr, I see iterations, the same gifs of the characters I ship, over and over and over again. I see these same scenes repeated, reblogged, and each time I stop my scrolling, taking a moment to feel them, to live through them, to enjoy them. I dwell in those moments, linger over them, feel them, as they repeat, a never-ending loop that denies closure. Hampus Hagman (2012) notes that when we look at a gif, “By virtue of its looped repetition, movement is displaced from the circumscribed meaning it had in its original context and never reaches its narrative telos.” The loop, the repetition never ends—and neither does the story. As we look at gif sets, we can live through these moments, experiencing the repeated pleasure of feeling and understanding, in and through our bodies, the gaze, the touch, the romance of their interactions and the story they tell in and through our bodies. The fan collective has curated these gifs, sharing and commenting on them, and through each repetition, the community frames and reaffirms my embodied understanding of these interactions and the counternarratives they invite and we long to experience. In their posting and creation of gifs and gif sets, fans highlight the bodies in film and television, living through these bodies with their own. Fans’ reception of gifs are embodied, communal, and emotional— the meaning that they make enacted through the interaction of bodily, social, and affective contexts. Fan communities cohere around and reinforce fans’ perceptions of characters and their interactions, developing counternarratives through which to understand the characters. Once fans develop these narratives and put on “shipping goggles,” they perceive characters’ emotions and interactions differently—community, narrative  context, and feeling shaping their understanding of texts. As fans live through the bodies and performances of actors, they also live in the counternarratives that the community has constructed. This narrative becomes more important than the story of the source text, and when it does not come to pass, fans bodily and collectively relive their communal counternarratives through their

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engagement with the looping repetition of the source text. For shippers, nostalgia is not for the story they actually got, but the story they collectively generated through their embodied, emotional, critically close reception of the text.

Conclusion: Casting Bodies In their denial of closure, gifs invite us to repeat and relive our embodied experiences of bodies, communities, and texts. As I have argued in this chapter, through reaction gifs, we rehearse emotional variations, performing the same emotional concept, though with a difference. As we look at gifs, we experience them in and through our bodies, performing and repeating spectatorship. This repetition coheres fans’ emotional responses, creating a sense of communal and shared feeling. Fans also use the gif sets they construct to create a collective understanding of the source text and to reinforce the counternarratives developed by the fan community. By repeating the same moments over and over and over again, fans live through bodies, interactions, and facial configurations that reinforce their understanding of the text. When I look at a gif set, it is not just the animated bodies in the gifs that are an important part of understanding actors’ performances and the stories that they generate; I cannot understand the bodies of others without my own. In gif sets, as we tell new stories, we also cast characters into new roles, providing them with new scripts to follow and new narratives to tell. As we decontextualize gifs, we recontextualize them in relation to each other, understanding them through our bodies and the communities that have developed around social, embodied, and emotional reception practices. These gif sets provide us with fragments of a text, and we create and reinforce a narrative, slotting characters into new frames and casting them into new roles within a counternarrative that we create and that becomes a counterfactual when the ship never becomes canon. Shipping communities pick out patterns that feel romantic. They create gif sets that are then shared throughout the community, inviting other members to cast these characters into these new roles, seeing them as rabbits rather than duck. This work of interpretation, storytelling, and filling in gaps is done in and through the body—the body of the actor, the fans, and the communities they form. When we use reaction gifs, we recast not characters, but ourselves. Cook and I (2021) have argued that as we post reaction gifs, “We

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experience the repeated pleasure of casting ourselves into the looping body of another” (85). And through that casting, “we are saying something about who we are, and who we aren’t. We choose them to perform for us because of the ways in which their reaction is similar to ours, as well as the ways in which it is different” (81). There is a pleasure in the variety that gifs provide, in our ability to cast ourselves into different modes and performances of spectatorship, to enact different forms of feels, excitement, grief, laughter, and lust. As Cook and I posit, “We could post pictures of our own bodies reacting to the attractive semi-nude celebrity” but we’d rather “use the bodies of others as placeholders or prosthetic feelers so that we can join the community of those who find that body attractive, help to constitute that community, and give the community another opportunity to feel what that desire feels like” (85). There is more pleasure in casting ourselves into the body of the another, in feeling what that body is feeling, in the emotional variety of gifs, than in putting our own bodies on display. There is power, too, in our invisibility. As performance theorist Peggy Phelan (1993) reminds us, “There is real power in remaining unmarked” (6). By casting themselves into the bodies of others, fans avoid the “trap” of visibility (Phelan 1993, 6), able to express feels, squee, grief, and desire without judgment of their effeminate experience of bodily pleasure and emotional excess. But when we think about gifs in terms of casting, we also need to consider which bodies we are casting to represent our emotions, whose bodies we are making more visible in order to conceal our own, and the implications of that visibility. Scholars like Joshua Green (2006) and cultural critics like Lauren Michele Jackson (2017) and Naomi Day (2020) have identified and analyzed the phenomenon of digital blackface, specifically appropriation of black bodies to do emotional labor for white people. As Jackson notes, “White and nonblack users seem to especially prefer GIFs with black people when it comes to emitting their most exaggerated emotions. Extreme joy, annoyance, anger and occasions for drama and gossip are a magnet for images of black people, especially black femmes.” Cook and I (2021) discuss the use of these gifs as a form of emotional tourism, a performance of “extreme” and “exaggerated” emotion that reinforces cultural and racist stereotypes about the animated, hypervisibility Black body. This hypervisibility enables the white user to remain invisible, a “performance of the self, but not as the self” (Hautsch and Cook 80). We use images of Black bodies as Roach’s (1996) “effigies”: the gif “fills by means of surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of the original”

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(36). By casting ourselves into these borrowed bodies, our pleasure and power of our invisibility—the absence of our bodies—comes at the expense of decontextualizing and dehumanizing Black bodies as the effigies through which networks and collectives of fannish emotio and embodied spectatorship are built and shared.

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Perez, Nistasha. 2013. GIF Fics and the Rebloggable Canon of SuperWhoLock. In Fan Phenomena: “Doctor Who,” ed. Paul Booth, 16–27. Bristol: Intellect Books. Petersen, Line Nybro. 2014. Sherlock Fans Talk: Mediatized Talk on Tumblr. Northern Lights 12: 87–104. https://doi.org/10.1386/nl.12.1.87_1. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Roach, Joseph R. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Rowena-heap. 2020. WiTcHeRs DoN’t HaVe eMOtiOnS. Reblogged post, originally posted by Shangschi, 2020. Tumblr. https://rowena-­heap.tumblr.com/ post/190745003358/witchers-­dont-­have-­emotions-­requested-­by. Saltz, David Z. 2006. Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance. In Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, ed. David Krasner and David Z.  Saltz, 203–220. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schnoogles. 2020. Right. That’s the Look You Have. Reblogged post, originally posted by Shipperobsession, 2020. Tumblr. https://schnoogles.tumblr.com/ post/638590147571630080/jonstarks-­estherruth-­jonsatrash. Shangschi. 2020. WiTcHeRs DoN’t HaVe eMOtiOnS. Tumblr. https://shangschi.tumblr.com/post/190435651356/witchers-­d ont-­h ave-­e motions-­ requested-­by. Shipperobsession. 2020. Right. That’s the Look You Have. Tumblr. https://shipperobsession.tumblr.com/post/624006933507145728. Smith, Kathleen. 2016. The Fangirl Life: A Guide to All the Feels and Learning How to Deal. New York: TarcherPerigee. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Durham: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkley: University of California Press. Spolsky, Ellen. 1996. Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures. Poetics Today 17: 157–180. https://doi.org/10.2307/1773354. star-spangled-man-with-a-plan. 2019. “ackeviddlestan-gaybuckybarnes-henry-­ cavill,” Reblogged post, originally posted by gaybuckbarnes, 2019. Tumblr. https://star-­spangled-­man-­with-­a-­plan.tumblr.com/post/189777406989/ ackeviddlestan-­gaybuckybarnes-­henry-­cavill-­in. Stein, Louisa Ellen. 2015. Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ———. 2016. The Limits of Infinite Scroll: GIFsets and Fanmixes as Evolving Fan Traditions. Flow. http://www.flowjournal.org/2016/01/the-­limits-­of-­infinite-­ scroll-­gifsets-­and-­fanmixes-­as-­evolving-­fan-­traditions/.

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Strukus, Wanda. 2011. Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25: 89–105. https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2011.0022. Tee-aitch-official. 2020. WiTcHeRs DoN’t HaVe eMOtiOnS.  Reblogged post, originally posted by Shangschi, 2020. Tumblr. https://tee-­aitch-­official. tumblr.com/post/619728014257897472/witchers-­dont-­have-­emotions­requested-­by. thelawyerthatwaspromised. 2019. Jon x Sansa- Eye contact. Reblogged post, originally posted by a thimbleful, 2018. Tumblr. https://thelawyerthat waspromised.tumblr.com/post/182299835451. Tolins, Jackson, and Patrawat Samermit. 2016. GIFs as Embodied Enactments in Text-Mediated Conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49: 75–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2016.1164391. Turner, Victor. 1980. Social Dramas and Stories about Them. In On Narratives, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, 137–164. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Rebecca. 2018. Tumblr’s GIF Culture and the Infinite Image: Lone Fandom, Ruptures, and Working Through on a Microblogging Platform. Tumblr and Fandom, Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, ed. Lori Morimoto and Louisa Ellen Stein, 27. https://doi.org/10.3983/ twc.2018.1153. Wilson, Elizabeth. 2013. Cultural Passions: Fans, Aesthetes and Tarot Readers. London: I.B. Tauris.

CHAPTER 4

Actors, Characters, and Blending

In March 2021, Hulu announced that Ronald D. Moore and Sarah J. Maas would be developing an adaptation of Maas’s fantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACoTaR)  (2015–). Fans immediately began debating who should play each character, creating a new subreddit r/acotarhulu to post the casting speculations and suggestions that had begun to overwhelm the main page for the novels. “I would LOVE to see Michael B Jordan as Cassian,” writes one fan (u/OxleyReno 2021), while another asserts that “Lucien can be none other than Tom Hiddleston” (u/underwaterbananas 2021). They suggest “Regé-Jean Page as Azriel” (u/blueberry-236 2021) and Justin Baldoni as Rhysand (u/listless_epitaph 2021). On this Reddit, there is plenty of disagreement about casting choices: One fan proposes “Literally Luke Eisner as Tamlin … that is all ” (u/Anika_skywalker 2021), while another advocates for Hollis W. Chambers (u/sarahsunda1125 2021), and another still suggests “Cody Fern as Tamlin? In my mind it would literally be the perfect cast!” (u/jvwhyte1 2021). There is a pleasure in casting different actors into these roles, creating community consensus about who fits and who doesn’t  by debating who should play Tamlin, Cassian, Azriel, and Rhysand and who definitely shouldn’t. But there is anxiety, too. u/ohjackie91 (2021), for example, in a post titled “Nervous about the casting ,” writes “I hope they do a great job at the casting!” Other fans respond, agreeing that “The casting could make or break the whole series for me” (u/tarot_and_tea 2021). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Hautsch, Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32450-5_4

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In this chapter, I explore why casting is important to fans, why they speculate about who should play the romantic lead of a beloved novel and why ACoTaR readers are nervous about whose bodies are going to be cast as their favorite characters. These bodies matter to fans, because casting plays an important role in character creation and community construction. Amy Cook (2018) has argued that casting generates characters, actors’ bodies becoming part of the network of meaning through which we conceptualize them (2). As cognitive film theorist Murray Smith (1995) observes, we recognize people through their bodies, anchor our understanding of them in their bodies (21, 114), so it is not surprising that, within fandom, bodies become a shorthand for accessing and understanding, writing and transforming characters (Coppa 2006, 229). Drawing on research in the cognitive sciences and performance studies, I argue that fans use bodies to construct characters, stories, and meaning; they claim ownership over media through bodies, building counternarratives and communities by engaging with, intervening in, and expanding from the bodies in the source text. Fans’ perception of bodies and the stories those bodies tell is critically close—embodied, communal, powerfully emotional, and erotically charged. For fan collectives, the actor’s body becomes a site around which they cohere and through which they form a consensus about who the character is. Central to my argument that fans make meaning by casting and extending the bodies of actors is what Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002) call Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT). CBT refers to the unconscious process through which we link together and integrate different mental spaces—packets of concepts and information—in order to imagine, conceptualize, and understand new words, identities, and ideas (40). It is through this mapping, linking, and blending that meaning emerges. Meaning is not stable or passively received, but dynamic and actively constructed; it is generated through the integration of mental spaces into a network from which it emerges (Turner 1996, 57). My focus is on the networks of meaning that fans construct as they cast actors into roles, compressing identities, histories, and bodies within the critically close reading communities they have formed. Whereas in my previous chapter I looked at our embodied reception of actors’ performances, in this one, I draw on Cook’s (2018, 2020) work to explore how the act of casting itself is performative, bringing characters into being, adding to her research by arguing that fan communities demonstrate how this phenomenon is not individual but collective. The

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bodies of the actors bring with them a network of meaning and casting one actor rather than another changes our understanding of a character (Cook 2018, 12–13). Through casting, fan collectives generate versions of the character that the community coheres around and that they want to see on screen, thereby laying claim to characters in the story. If casting does not match fans’ desires and expectations, the character will feel miscast—a disappointment to the fan community because it is at odds with their understanding of who that character is. And once cast, actors’ bodies are used to create counternarratives, stories that the community constructs, yearns for and repeats. In theater, Colette Conroy (2010) explains, “The real bodies of real actors are the materials with which we play” (58). In fandom, too, we play with real actors real bodies, generating and elaborating characters through these bodies. Once cast, these bodies are, to use performance theorist Marvin Carlson’s (2003) term, “ghosted” by the characters they perform. In Alternate Universe (AU) fanvids, fans play with the bodies of actors, taking advantage of the lingering presence of characters on actor’s bodies outside of the performance space to construct counternarratives. In addition, AU vids demonstrate our ability to compress characters across multiple bodies, so that they not only haunt the actors who played them, but possess others, integrating these new bodies into the network of meaning through which the character is conceptualized.

Conceptual Blending Theory and Compression Bodies are crucial for building and understanding characters and narratives. But, when we look at a screen, stage, or animated gif, how do we understand the bodies moving and speaking as belonging to characters, not just the actors who play them? How do we make sense of an actor as a character and how do we know whether or not that casting “works”? How can fans view texts from a position of critical closeness, where they are both deeply emotionally invested in stories, characters, and ships, while still being aware of their fictionality? Scholarship done at the intersection of performance studies and cognitive science—particularly Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT)—can help us to understand the mental operations that undergird our experiences of watching a play, a film, or a television show and through which we conceptualize actor and character.

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Fig. 4.1  Conceptual Blending Model

In The Way We Think (2002), Fauconnier and Turner theorize the “highly imaginative” often “invisible, unconscious” activity that goes into meaning-making (18). This process, which they refer to as “conceptual blending” or “conceptual integration,” is the means by which we project, combine, and network different “small conceptual packets,” called “mental spaces,” integrating them to create a “blended space” from which new words, concepts, and understandings emerge (40). These blended spaces, they theorize, are created by establishing matches between the input mental spaces and selectively projecting them to form a new, emergent space (Fig. 4.1).1 According to Fauconnier and Turner, “one of the central benefits of conceptual blending is its ability to provide compressions to human scale of diffuse arrays of events” (30). Compression makes concepts more manageable, more understandable, which is why we compress time, cause and effect, and identity. As Cook (2018) explains, compression is a 1  I am modeling the layout of these charts on those created by Fauconnier and Turner (2002). It should be noted that these charts are necessarily a simplification of an incredibly complex prenoetic mental process.

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powerful cognitive tool, because “we compress what is complicated and diffuse into what is focused and essential in order to decrease the cognitive load, increase associations, and facilitate memory” (38); it allows us to hold these concepts in our minds, to think about them in different ways, and to make connections that we might otherwise not. Whenever we watch a television show, film, or play, we rely on compression to make sense of the actors we have cast and the narrative roles they perform. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) explain the cognitive operations that underpin our ability to see an actor as a character: Dramatic performances are deliberate blends of a living person with an identity. They give us a living person in one input and a different living person, an actor, in another. The person on the stage is a blend of these two. The character portrayed may of course be entirely fictional, but there is still a space, a fictional one, in which that person is alive. In the blend, the person sounds and moves like the actor and is where the actor is, but the actor in her performance tries to accept projections from the character, and so modifies her language, appearance, dress, attitudes, and gestures. (266)

In this passage, Fauconnier and Turner are speaking specifically to the live theatrical experience, but much of what they say can be generalized to other forms of performance. When we watch a film or television show, we are not in the presence of a living body, but a recording of one. Still, film and television actors “accept projections from the character”— wearing costumes, adjusting gestures, and altering accents—and when we watch them, it is through blending that we understand that the body of the actor both is and is not the body of the character. This understanding of actor and character suggests that when we watch a performance, we are not passively receiving characters, but are engaged in the cognitive operations necessary to construct them. Cognitive theater scholar Bruce McConachie (2008) argues that “spectators are active agents in the process of combining actors and characters into blended actor/characters” (44). These operations are often performed outside of our conscious awareness or attention, but we are the ones who mentally compress—and decompress—the identities of the actor and character. While some actors disappear more into their roles than others, they are never entirely invisible, “never wholly subsumed by the identity of the character” (Cook 2018, 23). Sometimes we see more of the actor, sometimes we see more of the character, but we are always aware of both;

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even when we “‘live in the blend’ of the fictional world, looking directly on its reality,” we never entirely forget that we are viewing a performance, a fiction (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 266). When I watch Game of Thrones (GoT) (2011–2019) I understand that I am watching  Kit Harington, Jon Snow, and the blend in which Harington performs Jon. And once I’ve compressed them, I cannot see Jon without seeing Harington, and when I look at Harrington, I also see the character he plays. When an actor is cast into a role, we compress actor and character so that our understanding of the actor is integrated into our construction and conceptualization of the character (Fig.  4.2). Cook (2018) enumerates the various inputs that might be incorporated into character blends: Characters … do not exist in the world: we create them to make sense of our perceptions. We build character through a dynamic interplay between a number of conceptual spaces: the body (age, race, gender, physical attributes);

Fig. 4.2  Actor as character blend

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textual information (actions taken or lines said about or by the character); what we know already or anticipate based on historical information, personal information about the character, and the actor portraying it; and what we know about the other roles the actor’s body has taken on. (38)

Once cast, actors’ bodies and histories are integrated into the network of meaning through which an understanding of character emerges; the blend of character and actor creates a version of the character with elements not present in either input space. This, Cook argues, is the reason why casting is active, performative, and generative (2). Casting is not just an act of representing a character, but of creating a character; it functions to “control the spectator’s expectations about them” (Cook 2018, 30), because different actors bring with them different networks of associations that are incorporated into the blend. The act of casting Ryan Gosling into a role creates a different character than casting Rahul Kohli, Jesse Eisenberg, or Michael B.  Jordan, because the bodies of each of these actors brings different histories, expectations, and possibilities; each body tells a different story (Fig. 4.3). This networked character creation is part of the reason why fans of novels are so deeply invested in which actors are cast as their favorite characters. Adaptations that cast actors who clash with fans’ expectations challenge fans’ understanding of who that character is.

Fig. 4.3  Casting and character blends

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In their critically close reading of texts, fans use the bodies of actors to generate the versions of characters they communally desire and want to see on screen.

Bodies That Matter In 2013, casting for the highly anticipated film adaptation of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) was announced, revealing that Charlie Hunnam would play the role of Christian Grey. Many fans were upset by this casting choice (@ZAYNCESS 2013; Zuckerman 2013b), and a petition was launched, because as @ ZAYNCESS, its creator, explained, Matt Bomer is the PERFECT DESCRIPTION OF CHRISTIAN GREY AND ALEXIS BLEDEL IS THE PERFECT ACTRESS TO REPRESENT ANASTASIA STEELE and if THEY ARE NOT, NOBODY WILL BE And I read the whole trilogy and I can assure that Matt is the perfect actor for this movie and Alexis too. So please PLEASE, all of the GREYsessed and Bomerettes in the world NEED those actors. They always will be for us the Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele.

The petition garnered over 92,000 signatures, demonstrating fans’ commitment to their ideal casting for the Fifty Shades leads. These fans shared an understanding of the characters constructed through their casting choices. Bomer and Bledel were “perfect” because they had already been cast, not officially, but in the minds of the fan collective. Though Bomer and Bledel were never attached to the project, Hunnam eventually departed and Christian was recast; Jamie Dornan accepted the role, and fans, for the most part, accepted Dornan. “He’s no Matt Bomer, but he’s pretty sexy! I think I see some CG in him,” wrote one fan, and another commented “Way better then Charlie. Still not Matt Bomer but way more excited to see the movie now” (quoted in Zuckerman 2013a). Dornan was also not ideal casting (as comedian John Oliver (2015) emphatically stated on his show, Last Week Tonight  (2014–), “#NotmyChristian”), but the fan community was more receptive to his body in the role than Hunnam’s; fans could see some Christian in Dornan and some Dornan in Christian, at least enough that the decision was met with less backlash than the initial casting provoked. The fan community’s response to the casting of Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrates the importance put on the bodies cast as characters and the

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role that this casting plays in the fan collective. For many readers, the body of Christian Grey is erotically charged, a site of sexual fantasy and desire, and the body that performs that fantasy on the big screen matters. Fans preferred their fantasy of Bomer-as-Christian to the ones they got—to Hunnam-as-Christian and Dornan-as-Christian. And it was not just the fantasy of the individual fans that was at stake, but those of the community that had cohered around and through an understanding that, as one fan who signed the petition put it, “matt is the only christian grey.” Bomer’s body, for these 92,655 fans, had not only come to represent the character, but generated their shared understanding of him. Casting a different actor—Hunnam or Dornan—brings a different network of associations to the role, creates a different version of the character, a different Christian than what fans had communally imagined, but one that they would need to collectively accept if they were going to enjoy the film. More than that, though, casting Dornan in the role outlasts the film, potentially shaping the community’s shared understanding of and fantasies about the character beyond the movie’s runtime. Through casting, fans not only understand characters, but form communities. Bomer’s body matters; not only is it how the individual fan accesses the character, but the casting is shared within the community, anchoring a collective understanding of him. “We know who these characters are,” Francesca Coppa (2006) writes, “because we know the actors who play them” (236). Her use of the plural first is important to note, because fan collectives form around and through this shared knowledge and understanding of bodies and characters. Through dreamcasting, fans imagine different actors in different roles, creating different versions of the character, and constructing a sense of community through this critically close reception practice. The bodies of the actors function as a touchstone, a shared visual for the fan community, one that novels and book series alone do not provide. In What We See When We Read (2014), Peter Mendelsund argues that, “Even if an author excels at physical description, we are left with shambling connections of stray body parts and random detail. … We fill in gaps. We shade them in. We gloss them over … make up a body type, a hair color” (19). We know from Maas’s writing that ACoTaR’s Rhysand is beautiful and that he has violet eyes, short, dark hair, a very muscular chest, arms, and abs, lots of tattoos, and, occasionally, leathery black wings. But what is the exact shade of his eyes, style of his hair? What is his nose like? His jawline? These questions are not addressed by the text, so, to answer

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them, the reader needs to fill them in. As a result, when I read ACoTaR, the Rhys I imagine is different from the Rhys other fans do. And sometimes, as u/jocelynforreal’s (2022) humorous post on r/acotar suggests, those gaps can be difficult to fill in at all (Fig. 4.4). Titled “Is this how everyone pictures Rhys in their head, or just me?” the post contains two popular pieces of Rhysand fanart that have been edited so that his facial features are removed, leaving just smooth skin. Other fans agree noting, “I have a very clear view of his shape and hair but he has no facial features in my mind” (u/devdarrr 2022) and “I have a hard time picturing ANYTHING when I read. I rely so much on fanart lol” (u/ xAkumu 2022). Both fanart and dreamcasting provide fans with a body

Fig. 4.4  Edited fanart (original artwork by merwild) demonstrating the difficulty of imagining characters

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to fill in the gaps of character description and construct and anchor an understanding of the character. Once the actor is cast, their presence in the film, their body on screen, also fills in the gaps left by the text, as through casting “characters come to life” (Cook 2018, 2). Casting also necessarily alters our shared understanding of who those characters are and can be; the body on stage or screen is compressed with, anchors, and becomes the character—and the character becomes the actor. McConachie (2008) argues that the way that we imagine and understand characters changes once we see an actor perform the role: “A spectator … might imagine what a character looks and sounds like in his ‘mind’s eye’ (and mind’s ear) and empathize with that imagined body, but once inside the playhouse the former reader becomes an active spectator and the blend of a flesh-and-blood actor with the author’s character always takes the place of the imagined figure in the reader’s mind” (55). Once the play or film is over, the body stays with us, integrated into the network of meaning through which the character is constructed and understood. For this reason, when we talk with other fans of shows and movies about characters, we can assume that they are also likely picturing and understanding the characters as the actors. This shared understanding of character, anchored in the actor’s body, Coppa (2006) posits, is one reason why although fanfiction exists about stories in every medium, fans of films and television shows tend to generate the most of it (229). Though fans were certainly writing GoT fic before the HBO adaptation, once actors had been cast in the roles of Jon and Daenerys the amount of fic increased substantially. Coppa speculates that this increase is, at least in part, because casting allows fans to have a shared understanding of the characters through actors’ bodies. This phenomenon accounts for why fanfiction often includes little physical description; fans come to fic with “extratextual knowledge” of “character’s bodies and voices” (235). Readers already know the character in and through the bodies that perform them so they don’t need lengthy descriptive passages. Fan collectives cohere around the fact that we are all picturing the same bodies, that we all share a fantasy of what these characters look like and an understanding of who they are. Thinking about the role of casting in community formation helps us to understand the fan practice of what we call “dreamcasts” or “fan casts”— fan’s ideal cast for adaptations of our favorite novels. Even before news of an adaption is announced, fan communities debate and collaborate to

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decide which actors should play which roles, creating a collective understanding of characters anchored in and conceptualized through the bodies of actors. There is a pleasurable play that occurs as fans suggest different actors, building the character again and again through the bodies of different handsome men and beautiful women. The casting of different actors is transformative, creating new versions of the characters, each actor enacting a new fantasy for fans—some of which they are more receptive to than others. Through this play, fans explore nuances of characters, collectively generating an understanding of who that character is by working toward a consensus about what body best fits each role. On the website MyCast, for example, fans propose different casting choices, and other fans vote “yes” or “no” in response. By voting on actors, fans play with and develop their conceptualization of the character. For example, when it comes to fan casting for ACoTaR (marvelglimmer 2019), fans seem receptive to the version of Rhysand we would get were Evans Nikopoulos (65 yes to 32 no) cast into the role, split on Paul Forman (61 to 48), Matthew Daddario (74 to 95), and Ben Barnes (55 yes to 63 no), and fairly certain that they do not want Timothée Chalamet (2 yes to 15 no), Robert Pattinson (5 to 16), or Jake Gyllenhaal (1 to 14). There is pleasure in imagining these different handsome actors playing the part of an already erotically charged male character, and the voting on this site encourages the fan community to test different versions of the character, enjoying the communal play of experiencing these variations while also determining who works and who doesn’t within their collective construction of Rhysand. Even if the community doesn’t unify around the body of a particular actor, they generate an understanding of what versions of Rhys they like best and the type of actor that should be cast in the role to fit their expectations and desires. Disagreements among fans about who would be “perfect” for each character are rooted in different perceptions of the character. Cook (2018) observes that discussions of “casting generally centers on ideas of believability or what is ‘right for the part,’ as if what the part called for was self-evident” (5), as if reading the book reveals who is “perfect” to play Christian Grey (@ZAYNCESS 2013) or Rhysand. Yet, fan opinions about who is “perfect” can differ drastically. As one fan on Tumblr asks, “Do you ever see a fan cast and wonder if you and that person read entirely different books??” (thereyouareivebeenlookingforyou 2019). This complaint recalls Stanley Fish’s (1980) theory of “interpretive communities,” which provide readers with norms, contexts, and reading strategies and influence and

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“shape” how texts are read and understood (171). Fish maintains that members of different interpretive communities construct and understand the text in different ways, so much so, that we might “be tempted to complain … that we could not possibly be reading the same poem” (169). Such a complaint, Fish suggests, “would be right” because “each of us would be reading the poem we had made” (169). As different fans cast different actors into the same role, and it might not seem like they are talking about the same character, because they aren’t; they are each talking about the character they have made. Although gender, race, age, and other aspects of physical appearance certainly contribute to how fan communities cast actors, other components, like previous roles, are also integrated into the network through which we construct characters. Cook (2018) asserts that the actor’s “history is always on stage with the character” (13). Carlson (2003) refers to the presence of this history as “ghosting,” the way that the bodies of actors are haunted by their previous performances so that they will “almost inevitably in a new role evoke the ghost or ghosts of previous roles if they have made any impression whatsoever on the audience, a phenomenon that often colors and indeed may dominate the reception process” (8). When we watch actors perform roles, we bring with us our knowledge of their previous work and those older characters are integrated into the network through which we understand new ones.2 This networked meaning-­ making explains why sometimes casting just feels wrong. The actor might match the physical description of a character and yet something about the casting feels off, though we cannot always verbally articulate exactly why it is a bad choice. Our history with and reading of the actor’s body—as well as our interpretation of the character—determines the character that is constructed from and emerges through the casting process. Fans are invested in who plays Rhys because of the role that his body plays in their collective understanding of the character and their emotional, embodied engagement with the text. But their explanations of their dreamcasting choices often go beyond just the physical appearance of actors to consider the network of meaning that ghosts their bodies. Who 2  Smith (1995), Cook (2020), and Carlson (2003) note that the bodies of actors are also haunted by their celebrity personas. The history of the body of the actor off of the screen affects the way that we read the body and the character, on the screen: Consider how different it is to watch a film or television show starring Kevin Spacey now that his history of sexual assault is public knowledge.

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is “right for the part” of Rhys depends not only on an understanding of the book and character, but also of the actor. For example, Nick Goodsell (2019) of the blog NJGentertainment makes the case for a popular casting choice for Rhys: Ian Somerhalder.3 “If anyone has watched The Vampire Diaries,” Goodsell writes, “Ian portraying Damon Salvatore is a dead ringer for Rhysand: same personality, same swagger, same inner turmoil hidden by smirks and wisecracks, and of course the same devilish good looks.” On Goodreads, 3cMonster (2017) also cast Somerhalder, because “I think that he also has this dark aura around him (probably from Damon Salvatore).” Somerhalder’s body is ghosted by his performance of Damon, so that when fans cast him, it is not only because of his dark hair, blue eyes, and “devilish good looks,” but his body remains ghosted by his previous roles. By casting him, these fans understand Rhys not only through Somerhalder, but also through Damon, the two connected by and compressed in the actor’s body. Whether or not this casting “works,” then, depends, at least in part, on our histories with the actor. If I haven’t seen Somerhalder in The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017), for me his body might not be associated with Damon, but rather by Boone Carlyle, his character on ABC’s Lost (2004–2010). Casting Somerhalder as Rhys works when the actor’s body is ghosted by Damon; he feels right for the part in a way that Boone does not. The characters that I have been discussing so far—Christian Grey and Rhysand—are romantic leads, erotically charged sites of desire for the fan collective. These bodies matter and fans would select certain kinds of bodies to perform these roles—and not others. On his show, John Oliver (2015) cheekily bemoaned that he wasn’t asked to audition as Christian Grey, that he was passed over for a role that called for “the epitome of male beauty.” But, he notes, “whenever you need a Caucasian foreigner or a cheerful weakling, suddenly my phone’s blowing up.” We see specific kinds of bodies as fitting certain roles. Clean-cut, classically handsome Bomer and Dornan work for Christian Grey, sexy and dangerous Somerhalder works for Rhys; Oliver’s body and persona don’t fit the erotic fantasies entailed by either. Some bodies seem right, others 3  As Somerhalder ages, he is less frequently proposed by fans as a  casting choice  for Rhysand. As one fan posts to r/ACOTARhulu “Young Ian Somerhalder as Rhys, i think he would’ve been perfect he’s just a little old now ” (One_Vehicle543 2021). A young Somerhalder might be “perfect,” but now that he is older, his body no longer fits with how fans conceptualize Rhysand.

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don’t—but, Cook (2018) argues, this says more about our perception and expectation of bodies than it does about the bodies themselves (83–84). Assumptions about who is “right for the part”—who can play what role—are often informed by and reflect negative cultural biases along the lines of race, gender, disability, age, and body type, and there are no shortage of stories about some members of fan communities reacting with racist and sexist outrage to raced and gendered bodies cast to play fictional characters. Whether it is because Zendaya was cast as Mary Jane in Spider-­ Man: Homecoming (2017), Halle Bailey as The Little Mermaid’s (2023) Ariel, Amandla Stenberg as the Hunger Games’s (2012) Rue,4 John Boyega as Finn in  2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens,5 or Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy as ghostbusters (2016), some fans take to forums and social networking sites, like Reddit and Twitter, to express their anger at these casting announcements; on these platforms, collectives cohere through these fans’ outrage at and opposition to the casting choices. In each case, these communities decided that the body of the actor didn’t work in that role, didn’t “fit,” didn’t belong. A portion of fans refused to conceptualize ghostbusters as women or little mermaids as Black and they maintained that Stormtroopers, like their uniforms, are white. Despite the fantastical, magical, science fiction, and supernatural elements of these series, this subset of fans rejected those bodies as those characters, insisting that the casting was inaccurate, unrealistic, wrong. In addition, some fans also attack each other for the roles that they cast themselves into through cosplay. Black fans,6 overweight fans, disabled fans, report being harassed by other fans for cosplaying usually thin, white,  The anger of this casting is especially interesting because of the way that Rue is coded as black in the novels. The outrage about this casting, then, is not based on anything “selfevident” in the text but the way that people read the text. Many readers, apparently, imagined a white body, and casting a Black actor disrupted that image and the default assumption of whiteness, causing some to complain that the character had been miscast (see Holmes 2012). 5  John Boyega spoke to GQ in 2020 about the racist backlash against his casting: “I’m the only cast member who had their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race … . Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, ‘Black this and black that and you shouldn’t be a Stormtrooper.’ Nobody else had that experience” (in Famurewa). 6  Websites like Black Girl Nerds have taken initiatives like #28daysofblackcosplay to celebrate and otherwise promote otherwise marginalized, and often stigmatized Black and racebending cosplayers. 4

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nondisabled characters, for casting themselves as characters that some fans do not believe their bodies fit because of their race, gender, body type, or disability (See joan miller (2020), Ellen Kirkpatrick (2019), Chaka Cumberbatch (2013), Keshia Mcentire (2017), Ryan Khosravi (2017), and Tiffany M. Hutabarat-Nelson (2017)). In these cases, a portion of the collective determined who these characters are by deciding which bodies could and could not play them—whiteness, maleness, thinness, nondisabledness, viewed as essential elements of the character, necessary inputs in their blend. Casting that challenges this exclusionary conceptualization of characters is met with some racist, sexist, and ableist rage and rejection, which can result in bullying and harassment. But the complaints that Black merfolk or female ghostbusters were “ruining their childhoods” reveal that these fans’ prejudiced reactions were not about protecting these characters at all. Rather, this outrage was about preserving the collectives that had solidified around and through the characters as previously cast and understood. Some fans saw the recasting of these roles as threatening to splinter or disrupt the identity of—challenging the exclusiveness of—their characters and communities. While I do not wish to downplay the rampant racism, anti-Blackness, sexism, and ableism that exists within some fan communities across the Internet, it is worth noting that many other fans reject “the idea that white skin is neutral and provides an all-access pass to all characters, all performances” (Cook 2018, 88). Through both their activism and their creative works, these fans promote diversity in casting, inclusiveness in the stories we tell and the bodies we use to tell them. For example, many fans pushed back against the casting of Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell (2017), Finn Jones as the titular Iron Fist (2017–2018),7 and Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One in Doctor Strange (2016), and they overwhelmingly panned M.  Night Shyamalan’s live action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2010), which cast white actors to play the Asian-coded characters. These choices were rejected by the majority of fans because of the way that they whitewashed characters, and in some cases, like Avatar, fan activists organized protests against the 7  The casting of Jones is an interesting reversal from some of the other casting controversies discussed here. In the comics, Danny Rand, the Iron Fist, is white, and his story is one of cultural appropriation. Fans saw casting Rand as a way to rectify the problematic racial and cultural elements of his story and were disappointed when Marvel selected a white actor to play the role (Bui 2016).

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erasure of characters of color (Gatson and Reid 2011, 4.10). Fans communities have made similar pushes for more diversity in casting, advocating for colorblind and color conscious approaches, challenging the idea that race is an essential part of characters. Ora C. McWilliams (2013), for example, describes how a group of fans organized to convince Marvel that “Spider-Man’s whiteness is thus not defining but merely accidental” (2.1). While these fans were unsuccessful at getting Donald Glover cast as SpiderMan in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), Spider-Man was eventually recast as Black in the comics; Miles Morales assumed Spidey’s costume, powers, and great responsibility in an alternate universe within Marvel’s canon, his story later adapted in the 2018 animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.8 These fan collectives work actively to reconceptualize characters, deciding on new ways to depict them—the community reshaped through an expanded understanding of who these characters are and who they can be. Through their dreamcasts, fic, and art, fans’ recast white characters with Black, Latinx, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Indigenous actors. As Elizabeth Gilliland (2016) explains, Tumblr users “frequently ‘fan cast’ (recast an established book, series, franchise, and so forth, with one’s own preferred choices) people of color into markedly white fandoms, and connect these pieces of artwork with the hashtag #racebending to unite across these fandoms into one shared community” (1.6). These dreamcasts, Gilliland asserts, not only address the lack of representation in Hollywood, but also “indicate a dissatisfaction with a society in which white is constructed as the unquestionable norm to which all other cultures must conform” (1.7). By casting these actors and bodies into roles that have traditionally been performed or imagined as white, this practice challenges fans to consider why white fans so often imagine characters as white unless it is explicitly stated otherwise, why whiteness is so often the default,9 and what it might mean if it weren’t. Some scholars have questioned the actual politics and power of racebending, which they compare to colorblind casting practices. In colorblind casting, actors are assigned roles without the consideration of race, but as 8  This recasting was not, however, universally accepted and embraced by comic book fans. McWilliams quotes the racist comments that one comic book store owner posted in response to the announcement of a Black Spider-Man (McWilliams 2013, 3.1). 9  Pande (2020) and Stanfill (2018) have also both challenged the structural whiteness of fan studies and have urged scholars to consider how default whiteness and systems of white supremacy structure the subjects they study and the approaches they take..

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Kristen Jamaya Warner explains (2015), this creates the “illustrative look of difference” (6), without actually representing diverse experiences or points of view. She explains that “if race is not written into the script after an actor of color is hired, the script will inevitably result in a normalization vis-à-vis the whiteness of the character” (155). Essentially, Warner suggests, this form of casting results in Black actors forced to ventriloquize whiteness. Likewise, Samira Nadkarni and Deepa Sivarajan (2020) assert that colorblind casting implies “ethnicities are interchangeable; any specific identity or experience is not part of the process” (122). They warn that the fan practice of racebending can have a similar effect when it does “not address or acknowledge specific change” (123). These are important critiques, and I agree with their concerns about universalizing a “shared human experience,” which often defaults to a white human experience (Nadkarni and Sivarajan 2020, 123). But racebending dreamcasts and cosplay do not have to be thought of in terms of colorblind casting, but rather as what Cook (2018) calls “counter casting.” Unlike colorblind casting, counter casting intentionally and deliberately puts bodies in parts where they generally aren’t conceptualized as belonging, as characters that we don’t often imagine as other than white. This approach to casting disrupts and draws our attention to our expectations; Cook argues that If the body playing the part matches what the spectator assumes it should be… then perhaps it is possible to fail to notice the modes of perception that integrated size and race into character building. If the body playing the part does not match the presumed race of the character… spectators learn protocols of reception that question the central importance, the normality, the invisibility of white bodies. (83–84)

Casting the Fourteenth Doctor in Doctor Who (1963–) as a Southeast Asian woman or drawing Harry Potter’s (1997–2007) Hermione Granger as Black10 focuses our attention to how whiteness is so often the default way that many fans imagine and conceptualize characters. Or as Gilliland (2016) puts it, “These pieces of fan art can inform discussions that may cause users to identify their own beliefs about the current whitewashing 10   See Essien (2019) for a discussion of the controversy caused by casting Noma Dumezweni, a Black actor as Hermione in the London Opening of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. See Seymour (2018) for a discussion of racebending specifically in the Harry Potter fan community.

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not only in film, television, books, and so forth, but also in their own practices” (5.2). There is power in casting that doesn’t match what we already have in our “mind’s eye” (McConachie 2008, 55), but rather encourages us to change our minds, craft different networks of meaning, integrate different inputs into our character blends, and conceptualize characters in new ways. Like Black cosplay, which joan  miller (2020) asserts is “inherently political” because it is “participating in a dialogue about the invisibility of Black characters in popular culture” (66), these dreamcasts are also making visible our culture assumptions about bodies, casting, and roles. These counter casting interventions invite other members of the fan community to question the bodies they had cohered their collectives around and to ask why those bodies are so often white, cis, het, and nondisabled. Casting always matters because bodies matter. Bodies are an integral part of the character blend, the networks of meaning that we integrate to construct characters. But casting matters to fans and fandom especially because the bodies cast in these roles generate and shape a shared conceptualization of characters throughout the fandom. Creating a community consensus through fan casting does the same. By deciding that Bomer is Christian Grey, fans cohere a sense of community around and through his body; we are all picturing Christian the same way, imaging the same face and eyes and version of the character when we read James’s novels or the fanfiction they inspire. The “bodies and voices of actors,” Coppa (2006) observes, are part of the shared knowledge with which fans approach fic, but more than that, these bodies are sites that are “precharged, preeroticized” for the reader (236).11 “Bodies in slash are never ‘just’ bodies,” Coppa (2018) argues, “they have complex backstories and known, elaborately articulated identities” (191). These bodies, the erotics, histories, and network of associations they bring with them are part of how fans read, write, and generate characters, part of their critically close methods of engagement. When we read or write fic, we know the bodies of the characters through the actors who play them and we can assume 11  Or not, in some cases, these bodies are not erotically charged. Despite alarmist concerns, like those voiced by Dominick Evans, that “more often than not, women see [Daniel Radcliffe] as Harry Potter, fantasizing about him as the character. This makes me wonder if they put Daniel’s eleven-year-old face to the eleven-year-old Harry Potter porn that is written” (quoted in Tresca 2013, 39), the casting of twelve-year-old Daniel Radcliffe and thirteen-year-old Tom Felton as Harry and Draco, respectively, actually resulted in a decrease in Drary fic, because their bodies were not erotic sites for viewers. In contrast, there was an increase in Snape-centric fic because Alan Rickman’s body very much was.

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that the other members of the fan community are imagining those same bodies as well. Even though our perception and interpretations of character might differ, a community coheres through the bodies that we all know. More than that, though, fan communities cast bodies to challenge what we know, what we assume, using the bodies of actors to imagine characters and the world in new ways.

Haunting Bodies across AUs Searching for “Jon Snow/Sansa Stark” on YouTube, I come across “Jon & Sansa | Do you still love me? (Modern AU)” (2020), a fanvid by AnneSoshi. Like other vids (discussed in Chap. 5), this one assembles existing footage, pairing it with music, recontextualizing characters’ facial configurations and interactions, and encouraging us to construct a new narrative. But unlike the other Jon and Sansa vids I’ve watched, this one is not set in the medieval fantasy world of Game of Thrones. While this vid encourages us to construct a narrative about Jon and Sansa, it doesn’t do so through clips of those characters. Rather, this vid edits together clips of the actors who play Jon and Sansa, Kit Harington and Sophie Turner, taken from other films they have been in—Harington’s Spooks: The Greater Good (2015) and The Death and Life of John F.  Donovan (2018), and Turner’s Barely Lethal (2015) and Another Me (2013)—compressing character and actor to tell the story of Jon and Sansa, not in the medieval world of Westeros, but modern London. This fanvid is an example of what we might call an AU (Alternate Universe) vid; or what, in her work, Kim Middleton (2010) who refers to as “ficvids” (117). She explains that in this subgenre, vidders create divergent narratives in which characters are “in situations that run far afield of the events and/or cosmic laws of the show itself” (118). My discussion of these vids expands on her analysis of this genre by considering the cognitive operations that underpin the crafting and viewing of these vids, theorizing that fans create narratives through compression, integrating clips from a wide variety of texts, playing with and extending the identities of characters. Fans use the haunted bodies of actors to construct AU vids about the characters those actors play, sometimes stretching the character beyond the boundaries of an actor’s body, so that the character doesn’t just ghost that body, but—to use another horror term— “possesses” others. We have an extraordinary cognitive ability to compress identity across numerous mental spaces so that names of actors and characters do not

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only conjure up individual identities, but an entire network that we anchor in the actors’ body. Characters, Carlson (2003) argues, ghost the bodies of the actors, even after their performance of them ends, the bodies of the actors continuing to evoke the characters when encountered in different roles and contexts (8). This mental phenomenon, of course, does not mean that were I to see GoT’s Sophie Turner walking down a New York City street I would think that I was seeing the medieval fantasy character she plays, but, in my excitement, I might say, “Oh my god! It’s Sansa Stark.” Or if I am recounting the plot of Another Me, in which Turner plays Fay Delussey, I might refer to her as “Sansa.” The integrated network formed by the identities “Sansa Stark” “Fay Delussey,” and “Sophie Turner” is anchored in Turner’s body, so that those names can be used interchangeably to refer to the same body—no matter which role it is performing at the time. The reincarnation narrative of “Jon & Sansa | Do you still love me? (Modern AU)” plays with the integration of multiple identities through the actor’s body. Editing together clips from GoT with those of Turner’s and Harington’s other work, AnneShoshi (2020) invites us to reflect on how their bodies are haunted by Jon and Sansa, drawing our attention to the conflation of past and present, of character and actor, to the way in which the medieval characters bleed into our perception of the modern ones. Through its formal elements—wipe cuts and fades, static and light leak transitions—the vid visually and stylistically reflects our cognitive experience of characters ghosting actors and haunting narratives. For example, in one section of the vid’s montage, we see a wide shot of Harington, in profile, wearing modern clothing standing at the edge of a river, a bridge and industrial barge in the background. A vertical light swipes across the scene, and as it passes over Harington, the image is replaced with one of him from Season Seven of Game of Thrones. He is standing on the cliffs of Dragonstone, looking out over the Narrow Sea, wearing the cloak that Sansa gave Jon before he left Winterfell. The second image is a visual echo of the first: Harington’s body is in the same position, facing the same direction, the curve of the cliff behind him mirroring that of the bridge. By using a match cut, AnneShoshi (2020) links these images together, visually mapping them onto each other, inviting us to understand a continuity of identity anchored in Harington’s body. The next clip in the montage is of Turner, wearing a denim jacket and hoodie, looking up from a camera. The editing of these moments together, invites us to understand that Sansa is experiencing temporal discontinuity as she sees

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Jon in the past and the present (Coëgnarts et  al. 2016, 115). Sansa’s experience here offers a representation—a literalization—of our own. When we see Harington, dressed in his brown coat and jeans, his body is ghosted by his performance as Jon, so that we perceive both the modern man and medieval one. And we understand them both as Jon, compressing them into a single character despite their different costumes and settings. At another point in the vid, we see a close up of Harington, which cuts to Turner, walking in a prep-school uniform. There is a quick matrix wipe 12— accompanied by the sound of static—to her wearing her Sansa Stark costume. This image lasts for less than a second before there is another matrix wipe back to her, still walking, in the same uniform. The final cut in this sequence brings us back to the close-up of Harington. The editing of the clips invites us to understand that we are seeing Sansa from Jon’s perspective—the quick cut to her as medieval Sansa, suggesting a flashback. But like the sequence described above, this one also speaks to our own perception of Turner’s body. The quick matrix cut between the images evokes this experience: Sometimes more of Sansa is blended in my understanding of the characters Turner plays, sometimes less, but the ghost of Sansa remains, haunting Turner’s body, a past incarnation that we cannot help but see. The sound design of the vid also plays with ghosting and compression. At one point in the vid, we see a clip of Sansa at a party; she is holding a pink solo clip and wearing a short black dress. We hear Jon Snow’s dialogue from “The Door” (2016), in which he asks Sansa if she is wearing a “new dress?” She responds with “I made it myself. Do you like it?” This dialogue is dubbed over modern Sansa. Her lips are moving, and we understand that she is speaking, though we recognize the dialogue as coming from the show—and her past self. In another sequence, we see modern Jon take a step forward, saying “trust me.” The vid cuts to modern Sansa, her hair sheared short, her mascara running down her cheeks, and then to past Sansa, in black and white, saying “I trust him” (“The Door” 2016). We then cut to short-haired modern Sansa again, as she blinks once, and then looks up. This editing invites us to draw on our knowledge of the source text, the rest of Sansa’s line: “Jon is Jon … . He’ll keep me safe. I trust him.” As we watch this video, “Jon is Jon,” past and modern. Or rather, 12  A matrix wipe is a transition in which one clip replaces the previous one through a pattern of shapes.

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Harington is Jon, ghosted by his previous performance, no matter what costume he wears. Jon is always there, part of the blend, integrated into the way in which we understand Harrington and the other characters he plays. This compression is part of the reason why some Jon/Sansa shippers are eager for Harington and Turner to star as romantic leads opposite each other: as one fan on Tumblr writes, “ooh I’d love to see them play a couple again” (woodswit 2021), and another agrees, saying “I’d love to see them in a period/historical piece or a romcom or in the 10 years later jonsa sequel movie of my dreams” (riahchan 2021). Fans’ desire for, what Tanya R. Cochran (2015) refers to as “hyperdiegetic casting,” relies on the rich network of character associations that we compress with and anchor in the bodies of the actors. For fans, Turner and Harrington’s bodies interacting romantically in other roles are ghosted by and can be mapped and projected onto Jon and Sansa, offering a chance, like we see in this vid, for the reincarnated versions of them to right the mistake made in Game of Thrones when they did not end up together. “Jon & Sansa | Do you still love me? (Modern AU)” invites us to compress the identity of characters through the bodies of actors; in “enchanted | bethyl [AU]” (2014) by Darcy Evans, we compress two different actors with a single character in order to create continuity of identity across bodies. Though the actors in the vid look, sound, and behave very differently, we understand them as the same person at different points in their life, “linked by an identity connector across temporal spaces” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 95). If as Carlson theorizes, the bodies of actors are haunted by the characters they play, in this vid, we see characters extending themselves by possessing a network of bodies, the vid inviting us to create a counternarrative about Beth Greene and Daryl Dixon from AMC’s The Walking Dead (TWD) (2010–2022) that begins long before the start of the show. The vid opens with clips of Lily Miska (Elle Fanning) and Dylan Mee (Colin Ford) from the 2011 film We Bought a Zoo (2011). The presence of these two bodies might confuse fans who found this vid by searching YouTube for “bethyl”—the ship name for TWD characters Daryl and Beth; these are not the actors we expect to see in a Beth/Daryl vid. The vid then presents us with a number of clips from which we construct a romantic narrative about these two adolescents: In one, we see the characters walking together; in another, she interrupts him as he is writing in a notebook, but he looks up and smiles slightly; in a third, they lay on the roof of a house, looking at the stars.

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However, about halfway into the vid, it cuts to a clip of Emily Kinney and Norman Reedus as Beth and Daryl from The Walking Dead. As the vid moves back and forth between the bodies of Kinney and Reedus and Fanning and Ford, it invites us to construct connections between them, reevaluate and reframe what we have seen so far, and integrate Fanning and Ford into our understanding of Beth and Daryl. We see Lily and Dylan—or rather young Beth and young Daryl—running together and then adult Beth and adult Daryl doing the same; we cut from the adolescents lying on their backs looking at the stars to the adults collapsed together in a field. The alternating clips encourage us to compress the identities of the characters across these different bodies, so that we understand that these are not two sets of different characters, but rather the same characters at different points in their lives, the identities of Beth and Daryl possessing the bodies of actors who never performed them. Throughout this section of vid, the clips of the children become increasingly desaturated, prompting us to perceive those moments as occurring in the past. The bodies that we were seeing at the beginning of the vid may have been unfamiliar, but as we continue to watch, we compress their identities with those of characters that we have an individual and communal emotional investment in. As this vid casts these actors—from a completely unrelated film—as younger versions of those that fans know from TWD, it encourages us to map similarities between them. We are invited to construct continuity, an analogy between Fanning’s wavy blond hair and Kinney’s, Lily’s sunny disposition and Beth’s, between Ford’s shaggy brown hair and Reedus’s, between the flannel worn by Dylan and Daryl, between Dylan yelling at his father for wasting their money and Daryl’s stories about his experiences growing up poor. Some elements of these different characters, different bodies, however, cannot be mapped and are excluded from the blend. For example, by creating a counternarrative in which Beth and Daryl were childhood sweethearts, the age difference between them—Daryl is somewhere in his late thirties or early forties in Season Four, Beth is eighteen—is dropped in service to the love story the community desires, a new version and understanding of the characters generated through the casting of their past selves. The counternarrative that emerges through the compression of these characters, actors, and stories, then, shifts our understanding of Beth and Daryl’s relationship. Toward the end of the vid, we see clips from Beth and

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Daryl in the episode “Alone” (2014) as they sit together at a table. The lighting is soft, and Daryl admits to Beth that he’s reevaluated his cynical view of humanity, that he thinks that there are still some good people in the world. She asks him, “what changed your mind?” and he looks at her intently. In the show, he never verbally responds; they are attacked by a zombie horde, Beth is kidnapped, and though Daryl searches for her she is killed just after they have reunited in Season Five. But many Bethyl shippers argue that he doesn’t need to verbally articulate what he is thinking, what he is feeling, because in his facial configuration we perceive the answer: What changed him was her. In the vid, though, Daryl’s feelings are explicitly put into words, as we cut to the younger version of him telling young Beth how much he loves her. By integrating this moment between Lily and Dylan into the one between Beth and Daryl, it reframes Beth’s “oh” and her smile, so that we understand it as not just a realization, but a memory. The narrative context of the vid invites us to perceive Daryl’s expression as not only a subtextual confession that he has fallen in love with Beth, but that he has never stopped loving her. The vid creates a shared past between them that encourages us to construct a new story through which to understand their canon interactions. The context in which we encounter the bodies of actors shapes the way that we receive, read, and understand them, think about and think through them. As we watch these vids, the characters that we generate emerge, in part, through the video’s narrative ecology; we perceive the meaning of the actors’ bodies in relation to each other. Cook (2018) explains that when we are watching a play or a film, rather than understand actors individually, all of their bodies and their histories are integrated into a network of meaning that informs our understanding of characters, relationships, and stories (105). Something similar happens when we watch these vids. Although Harington’s body is always haunted by Jon Snow, those associations are foregrounded through Turner’s presence in the vid. Fanning and Ford’s bodies are compressed with Beth and Daryl, because the clips of Kinney and Reedus invite us to understand those actors in terms of those characters. We make meaning of bodies in relation  to  each other; were they paired with different actors, within a different fan community, different identities might emerge. As we watch these vids, we employ the critically close reading strategies of fandom, the ecology of the vid and the community in which it’s received, shaping our understanding of what that body means, what stories it tells, and which characters ghost and possess it.

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Conclusion: Communal Contexts As we watch Game of Thrones, we understand that Harington is not really Jon Snow—he just plays him on TV. And yet, we bring these disconnected identities—Kit Harington and Jon Snow—into a temporary whole, anchoring them both in Harington’s body and integrating them into a network of meaning from which our understanding of actor and character emerge. As we watch the show, then, Harington is not Jon, but he is also “not not” Jon (Schechner 1985, 110, emphasis mine); we don’t have Jon, at least not the version of Jon that we got in this show, without him. And to some extent, Jon is also Harington, so that as we watch the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Henry V, our understanding of Jon ghosts our conceptualization of Harington’s Henry. Through dreamcasting, fans cast different actors into the same roles, and through this communal play, they explore the different versions of the characters that emerge through the networks of meaning and associations that actors bring to the role. This practice of fan casting is not just about the individual fan identifying the actor that they believe best fits the role, but the collective negotiating a shared understanding of the character. There is pleasure for the community in imagining different attractive actors in the role of their favorite characters, in determining who is right for the part and who is not. It is this collective understanding of the character that the community generates and coheres around and which is disrupted when official casting of adaptations don’t match fans’ collective shared fantasies and expectations. Shared fantasies and communal understandings are also integral to how we make meaning of AU vids, the context in which we encounter bodies shaping our understanding of them. For fans, fan communities and fanworks provide the context in which bodies are perceived and meaning from them constructed; Harington and Turner, Kinney and Reedus, Fanning and Ford, their bodies take on certain meanings when embedded in the ecology of a specific vid created for a particular fan audience. The social dynamics of meaning-making are integral to how the members of fandoms construct characters and make sense of texts. It is through participation in communities that we create shared characters and narratives and that we develop shared practices of thinking and critically close approaches to meaning-making. The fan collective provides the context through which we make sense of the bodies we are encountering and it is from an embedded position within the community that fans receive and understand texts and create their own.

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References 3cMonster. 2017. A Court of Thorns and Roses Discussion: Fancast. Good Reads. https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/17260418-­fancast @ZAYNCESS. 2013. We want Matt Bomer and Alexis Bledel as Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele on 50 Shades. Change.org. https://www.change.org/p/ we-­want-­matt-­bomer-­and-­alexis-­bledel-­as-­christian-­grey-­and-­anastasia-­steele-­ on-­50-­shades “Alone.” 2014. The Walking Dead, season 4, episode 13. AMC, 9 March. u/anika_skywalker. 2021. Literally Luke Eisner as Tamlin…that is all . r/ AOTARHulu, https://www.reddit.com/r/ACOTARHulu/comments/ qj0v0e/literally_luke_eisner_as_tamlinthat_is_all/ AnneSoshi. 2020. Jon & Sansa | Do you still love me? (Modern AU). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Md7KYMUCZo u/blueberry-236. 2021. “This has been said before but Regé-Jean Page as Azriel?” r/ACOTARHulu, https://www.reddit.com/r/ACOTARHulu/comments/ q26kl6/this_has_been_said:before_but_reg%C3%A9jean_page_as/ Bui, Hoai-Tran. 2016. Marvel’s ‘Iron Fist’ casting kicks Asian representation while its down. USA Today, 17 March. https://www.usatoday.com/ story/life/entertainthis/2016/03/17/marvels-­iron-­fist-­casting-­kicks-­asian-­ representation-­while-­its-­down/81915698/ Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cochran, Tanya. 2015. From Angel to Much Ado: Cross-Textual Catharsis, Kinesthetic Empathy and Wedonverse Fandom. In Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences, and Paratexts, ed. Lincoln Geraghty, 149–163. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Coëgnarts, Maarten, et al. 2016. Seeing Yourself in the Past The Role of Situational (Dis)continuity and Conceptual Metaphor in the Understanding of Complex Cases of Character Perception. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 10: 114–138. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2016.100110. Conroy, Colette. 2010. Theatre & the Body. New Haven: MacMillan International. Cook, Amy. 2018. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2020. Shakespearean Futures: Casting the Bodies of Tomorrow on Shakespeare’s Stages Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coppa, Francesca. 2006. Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 225–244. Jefferson: McFarland. ———. 2018. Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 189–206. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell.

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Cumberbatch, Chaka. 2013. I’m a Black Female Cosplayer and Some People Hate It. The Root, 05 February, https://www.theroot.com/im-­a-­black-­female-­ cosplayer-­and-­some-­people-­hate-­it-­1790895144. u/devdarrr. 2022. Comment on Is This How Everyone Pictures Rhys in Their Head, or Just Me?, originally posted by Jocelynforrea, 2022. r/ ACOTAR. https://www.reddit.com/r/acotar/comments/s4ru61/is_this_ how_everyone_pictures_rhys_in_their_head/ Essien, Enobong. 2019. Was Hermione Black? Overcoming White Bias in Literature. Book Riot, 18 September. https://bookriot.com/white-­bias-­in-­ literature/. Darcy Evans. 2014. Enchanted | bethyl [AU]. YouTube. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Yt_w1QYAc8I. Famurewa, Jimi. 2020. John Boyega: ‘I’m the Only Cast Member Whose Experience of Star Wars Was Based on Their Race.’ GQ Magazine, 2 September. https://www.gqmagazine.co.uk/culture/article/john-­b oyega-­i nterview-­ 2020?amp. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in this Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gatson, Sarah N., and Robin Anne Reid. 2011. Editorial: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom. In Race and Ethnicity in Fandom, Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, ed. Robin Anne Reid and Sarah N. Gatson, 8. https://doi. org/10.3983/twc.2011.0392. Gilliland, Elizabeth. 2016. Racebending Fandoms and Digital Futurism. Transformative Works and Cultures 22. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2016. 0702. Goodsell, Nick. 2019. My Fancast/Dreamcast: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series by Sarah J. Maas. NJG Entertainment, 19 October. https://njgentertainment. com/2019/10/19/my-­fancast-­dreamcast-­a-­court-­of-­thorns-­and-­roses-­series/ Holmes, Anna. 2012. White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games. The New  Yorker, 30 March. https://www.newyorker.com/books/ page-­turner/white-­until-­proven-­black-­imagining-­race-­in-­hunger-­games Hutabarat-Nelson, Tiffany M. 2017. Fantastical Body Narratives: Cosplay, Performance, and Gender Diversity. PhD Dissertation. Louisville: University of Louisville. u/jocelynforreal. 2022. Is This How Everyone Pictures Rhys in Their Head, or Just Me? r/ACOTAR. https://www.reddit.com/r/acotar/comments/s4ru61/is_ this_how_everyone_pictures_rhys_in_their_head/ u/jvwhyte1. 2021. Cody Fern as Tamlin? In My Mind It Would Literally be the Perfect Cast! r/ACOTARHulu. https://www.reddit.com/r/ACOTARHulu/ comments/pmy2eq/cody_fern_as_tamlin_in_my_mind_it_would_literally/.

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Khosravi, Ryan. 2017. Racist Reaction to Black D.Va Cosplayer Shows the Struggles of Being a Nerd of Color. Mic, 8 June, https://www.mic.com/ articles/179335/racist-­reaction-­to-­black-­dva-­cosplayer-­shows-­the-­struggles-­ of-­being-­a-­nerd-­of-­color#.JKYrxsFkL. Kirkpatrick, Ellen. 2019. On [dis]play: Outlier Resistance and the Matter of Racebending Superhero Cosplay. In Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color, Special Issue of Transformative Works and Culture, ed. Abigail De Kosnik and André Carrington, 29. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1483. u/listless_epitaph. 2021. I Think Justin Baldoni Would do Great as Rhys. r/ ACOTARHulu. https://www.reddit.com/r/ACOTARHulu/comments/ qczd0s/i_think_justin_baldoni_would_do_great_as_rhys/. marvelglimmer. 2019. Fan Casting Rhysand (Rhys). MyCast. https://www. mycast.io/stories/a-­court-­of-­thorns-­and-­roses/roles/rhysand/157894 McConachie, Bruce. 2008. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mcentire, Keshia. 2017. Black Heroes Matter: Unmasking the World of Black Cosplay. Black Girl Nerd, 3 May. https://blackgirlnerds.com/black-­heroes-­ matter-­unmasking-­world-­black-­cosplay/ McWilliams, Ora C. 2013. Who is afraid of a black Spider(-Man)? In Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books, Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, ed. Matthew J. Costello, 13. https://doi.org/10.3983/ twc.2013.0455. Mendelsund, Peter. 2014. What We See When We Read. New York: Vintage Books. Middleton, Kim. 2010. Alternative Universes on Video: Ficvid and the Future of Narrative. In Writing and the Digital Generation, ed. Heather Urbanski, 117–134. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. miller, joan. 2020. Raceplay: Whiteness and Erasure in Cross-Racial Cosplay. In Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voice, ed. Rukmini Pande, 65–78. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Nadkarni, Samira, and Deepa Sivarajan. 2020. Waiting in the Wings: Inclusivity and the Limits of Racebending. In Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices, ed. Rukmini Pande, 122–135. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. u/ohjackie91. 2021. Nervous About the Casting . r/ACOTARHulu. https://www. reddit.com/r/ACOTARHulu/comments/pmf1qh/nervous_about_the_casting. Oliver, John. 2015. Fifty Shades #NotMyChristian Apology (Web Exclusive): Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fPloDzu_wcI&t=115s. One_Vehicle543. 2021. Young Ian Somerhalder as Rhys,, i think he would’ve been perfect he’s just a little old now . r/ACOTARHulu. https://www.reddit. com/r/ACOTARHulu/comments/mutemr/young_ian_somerhalder_ as_rhys_i_think_he_wouldve/.

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u/oxleyreno. 2021. This Has Been Living in My Head for a While…Putting It Out There to Free Up Some Room;) I Would LOVE to See Michael B Jordan as Cassian. Anyone else? r/ACOTARHulu. https://www.reddit.com/r/ AC OTAR Hulu / c o m m en t s/ px c l n z / t h i s_ h a s_be e n_l i v i ng_i n_my _ head_for_a/. Riahchan. 2021. Hi! Kit Mentioned in an Interview. Reblogged post, originally posted by Woodswit, 2021. Tumblr. https://riahchan.tumblr.com/ post/653813426146181120/hi-­k it-­m entioned-­i n-­a n-­i nter view-­t hat­he-­would. Rukmini, Pande, ed. 2020. Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. u/sarahsunda1125. 2021. I Think I Found a Tamlin… Though he Might be a Little Too Good Looking:/. r/ACOTARHulu. https://www.reddit.com/r/ ACOTARHulu/comments/pqbpe1/i_think_i_found_a_tamlin_though_ he_might_be_a/ Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Seymour, Jessica. 2018. Racebending and Prosumer Fanart Practices in Harry Potter Fandom. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 333–347. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stanfill, Mel. 2018. The Unbearable Whiteness of Fandom and Fan Studies. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 305–317. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. u/tarot_and_tea. 2021. Comment on Nervous About the Casting , Originally Posted by ohjackie93, 2021, r/ACOTARHulu. https://www.reddit.com/r/ ACOTARHulu/comments/pmf1qh/nervous_about_the_casting “The Door.” 2016. Game of Thrones, season 6, episode 5. HBO, 22 May. thereyouareivebeenlookingforyou. 2019. Do-you-ever-see-a-fan-cast-and-­ wonder. Tumblr. https://thereyouareivebeenlookingforyou.tumblr.com/post/186669 387704/do-­you-­ever-­see-­a-­fan-­cast-­and-­wonder-­if-­you-­and Tresca, Don. 2013. Spellbound: An Analysis of Adult-Oriented Harry Potter Fanfiction. In fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century, ed. Kristen M.  Barton and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, 36–46. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Underwaterbananas. 2021. Lucien Can Be None Other Than Tom Hiddleston. r/ACOTARHulu. https://www.reddit.com/r/ACOTARHulu/comments/ q37eay/lucien_can_be_none_other_than_tom_hiddleston/.

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Warner, Kristen Jamaya. 2015. The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. London: Routledge. Woodswit. 2021. Hi! Kit mentioned in an interview. Tumblr. https://woodswit. tumblr.com/post/653806323413172224/hi-­kit-­mentioned-­in-­an-­interview-­ that-­he-­would. u/xAkumu. 2022. Comment on Is This How Everyone Pictures Rhys in Their Head, or Just Me?, originally posted by Jocelynforrea, 2022. r/ACOTAR. https://www.reddit.com/r/acotar/comments/s4ru61/is_this_how_ everyone_pictures_rhys_in_their_head/ Zuckerman, Esther. 2013a. Can Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey Finally Satisfy ‘Fifty Shades’ Fans? The Atlantic, 24 October. https://www.theatlantic.com/ culture/archive/2013/10/can-­j amie-­d ornan-­c hristian-­g rey-­f inally­satisfy-­fifty-­shades-­fans/309623/ ———. 2013b. Some People Really Don’t Like ‘50 Shades’ Casting Charlie Hunnam as Christian Grey. The Atlantic, 3 September. https://www. theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/09/some-­p eople-­r eally-­d ont-­ 50-­shades-­casting-­charlie-­hunnam-­christian-­grey/311496/

CHAPTER 5

Reframing Vids

“Jon & Sansa | If you come around again” (2019), a fanvid by AerisVideos, combines the mournful hope of Ingrid Michaelson’s song “The Chain” with clips from Game of Thrones (GoT) (2011–2019), edited together and superimposed on one another. As we watch the vid, we construct the story of Sansa Stark’s longing for Jon Snow during his absence, her envy when he returns to Winterfell as Daenerys Targaryen’s lover, her grief at his exile at the end of the series, her yearning for him to come home again. In GoT, Jon and Sansa are never lovers, but some fans, perceiving romantic subtext in these characters’ interactions (see Chap. 3), wish they were, and this vid invites us to construct a story that aligns with that desire. It takes scenes that the viewers are familiar with and recontextualizes them so that a new narrative emerges. In the video’s YouTube comments, fans compliment the beauty and artistry of this fanvid, praise its “brilliant” (Silviasi22 2019) and “genius” editing (Julianna 2019) and laud the vids’ ability to distill and intensify the feels associated with this ship. One wrote “I felt everything all at once like I feel for Jon and Sansa 10 x more with this piece of art” (Vendettis 2019). Others detailed their emotional and bodily reactions to the fanvid: they cried (Emilia Matera 2019), their hearts melted (lustandmoney 2019), their souls were crushed (ldtProductions2 2020). These comments demonstrate the important cognitive and emotional role that vids play within shipping communities. Vids invite fans to rewatch

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scenes, repeat emotions, reiterate interpretations, and rehearse ways of thinking about characters and shows. But they also generate new interpretations by altering and amplifying our perception of performances as scenes are recontextualized and transformed by remixing them. Remixes, as Lawrence Lessig (2008) explains, can be expository, argumentative, revelatory; they are transformative—and, I argue, performative—acts that use existing material to generate something new. I am interested not just in what remixes say, but how we understand them, the way that they represent individual and communal cognition, and the pleasure we experience as we engage with and think through them. Theories of conceptual blending, frame-shifting, and embodied cognition demonstrate that our  to understand vids, like “Jon & Sansa | If you come around again,” is emotional, embodied, and embedded within fan culture, reflecting fans’ critically close engagement with texts and communities. Central to my—and other fans’—experience of watching fan vids is the pleasure we feel when making sense of these recontextualized clips. Indeed, as Sarah Fiona Winters (2012) notes, “Theorists of vidding have repeatedly made the point that vids blend criticism and pleasure” (1.7). However, many discussions about the pleasure we experience watching vids rely on the language of psychoanalysis. Winter’s reading, like other critics, for example, focuses on the scopophilic, voyeuristic enjoyment of vids. While I agree that vidders and other fans experience erotic enjoyment in watching the bodies of attractive actors and relish the fragmentation of texts, I’m—following cognitive film theorist Carl Plantinga (2009)— operating within a broader understanding of pleasure that includes: “(1) cognitive play, (2) visceral experience, (3) sympathy and parasocial engagement, (4) satisfying emotional trajectories rooted in narrative scenarios, and (5) various reflexive and social activities associated with film viewing” (21). These pleasures are rarely isolated and distinct, but fuse together in our experience of them (21). As we watch vids, it is not that they “blend criticism and pleasure” (Winters 2012, 1.7), but that pleasure and criticism are inseparable; emotion, enjoyment, and desire are integral to how we understand and interpret vids. Vids enact communal cognitive play as fans create connections between the song and the scenes, shifting the frames through which we view them. As they watch vids, fans experience the pleasure of repeated engagement with moments from shows and films and the enjoyment of recognizing how each iteration is different, transformed through its recontextualization. Vids function as a performance of not just

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the individual fan’s way of thinking about a ship; they are part of the broader cognitive ecology of fandom. They are tools, making affordances of texts and technology to enact and pass on critically close ways of reading, of thinking about and through the source text and the practice of vidding. There is pleasure, too, in the emotions that we experience as we watch vids. Plantinga (2009) argues that emotions are integral for both our construction and understanding of narratives and our enjoyment of them (5). Vids distill and intensify our experience of the source text through their recontextualization of scenes from it. As we watch, we are mainlining already emotionally charged scenes from the source text, our feelings reinforced by the music accompanying them. The intensity of these emotional experiences is the reason why Coppa (2022) has referred to vids as “the crack cocaine of television” (25). These emotions leave their traces in us, affecting our memory and our perception and experience of texts. If we cannot separate our emotional and cognitive systems, then what we feel as we watch a vid is part of how we think about and think with it. As we watch fanvids, we also experience the pleasure of living in counternarratives that fulfill “satisfying emotional trajectories” (Plantinga 2009, 21), giving us the narrative outcomes we desired, maybe even anticipated, but were denied by the source text. And this desire, satisfaction, and pleasure is not just experienced by the isolated fan, but is felt within the collectives that have cohered around different ships.1 Part of the pleasure of vids is the sense of belonging we experience watching them, the feeling that other viewers also get how perfect these characters are for each other. Interrogating the cognitive, emotional, and communal pleasure of vids and the mental operations that underpin our understanding of them, I argue that they function as a form of distributed cognition within fan communities. Vids are not just part of the archive, but rather what performance theorist Diana Taylor (2003) refers to as the repertoire of fandom. They are not only an artifact of fan thinking, but an act of thinking. They rehearse fan arguments about ships and interpretations of character’s facial expressions and interactions. Through vids, we are invited to integrate songs and visuals, to slot characters into new frames, 1  I focus specifically on the fans and communities that post their vids to YouTube, which are then often shared and spread through Tumblr. As Francesca Coppa (2022) and Louisa Ellen Stein (2014) have both discussed, different practices and cultures exist among YouTube vidders and convention vidders—like those who gathered annually at Vividcon. However, as both Coppa and Stein explain, these communities are not completely insular, but porous and shifting.

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roles, genres, and stories, and pass on critically close modes of reading. Vids are not just something we think about, but something we think with and think through.

Communal Ways of Thinking While fanvids, like other forms of remix, take advantage of the affordances of video editing software2 to recontextualize extant cultural material to create something new, they are also a distinct genre in their purpose, construction, and reception (Coppa 2022, 8). Vids originate from and are received within the context of fan communities. Fans create these works for one another, playing within—and often stretching—the boundaries of the texts. Both theoretical work in semiotics and empirical research in the cognitive sciences demonstrate that context plays an important role in how we make meaning of words, facial expressions, and bodies; our perception is always embedded within particular environments and circumstances that invite us to think and feel in particular ways. The community in which these texts are embedded and through which we understand them informs our understanding of clips and music, images and words—not just what we think about them, but how we think about them. My approach to vids builds off of existing scholarship on the role of the community in the creation of vids and the reading strategies that fans employ to understand them. Coppa (2008), for example, argues that “Vidding is a form of collaborative critical thinking” (5.1). And, Kim Middleton (2012) asserts that our understanding of vids emerges not just from the remix itself, but rather “acquires meanings through its manifold social systems of circulation, and its cultures and subcultures, composed of knowledgeable community members who know what do with it, and how to respond in a myriad of ways that add new layers of context to the video” (3.6). However, Tisha Turk and Joshua Johnson (2012) critique the ways in which some approaches to the collaborative and communal nature of fandom “erase individual creators” (2.2), and they propose the metaphor of “ecology” as an intervention, a way “to think of fandom as a system (or series of systems) within which all fans participate in various ways” (2.3). Individual fans, they argue, construct the communities, context, and  The editing technology has evolved overtime and has become more widely available to fans. In the early days of vidding, fans did not have access to the same tools that fans today make affordances of, which influenced the aesthetics and conventions of the vid. For a discussion of the history of vidding, see Coppa (2022), Jenkins (1992), and Stevens (2020). 2

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environment in which fanworks are created and received (2.6) and shape the interpretative practices through which they are understood (3.1). When fans compose or watch vids, they draw on existing fan interpretations and interventions, ways of reading and making meaning from the text (3.2). The scenes that fans focus on, analyze, and repeat and the stories they tell through them are perceived through the social and interpretative context in which they are embedded and encountered. Turk and Johnson’s (2012) framing of fandom as ecological connects to theorizations of  distributed and extended cognition. The mind, as cognitive philosopher Andy Clark (2011) explains, is not constrained by “arbitrary barriers of skin and skull” (78). Clark and Chalmers (1998) have posited that cognition is not located solely in the individual, but extends into physical and social environments. We think not just about the content of our social and material environments, but through it. Understanding cognition as ecological, Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton (2011) argue, helps us to see that “[m]any cognitive states and processes are hybrids, unevenly distributed across the physical, social, and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains, hooking up in both temporary and more enduring ways with other people and with certain things— artifacts, media, technologies, or institutions” (95). In the theater, for example, a table might be set up with outlines of the different props so that they are placed in the same spot every night so that the actors don’t need to remember where they put (or have to put) their props, because the thinking is done for them by the system established within the environment (Blair and Cook 2016, 129). The person and their environment become a part of a cognitive ecology across which thinking is distributed (Tribble 2016, 135), the world around us integrated into and part of our cognitive system. Fandom also functions as a cognitive ecology. As we receive and create stories within the ecological context of fandom, we make use of the affordances of fic, gifs, remixes, and vids to think about texts and characters. E. Charlotte Stevens (2020) discusses vids in terms of Alison Landsberg’s prosthetic memory, vids a “shorthand for much more extensive relationship between a text; how it may be interpreted personally and collectively; and how it might be articulated, re-framed, and memorialized in a vid” (122). However, I find it more productive to think of vids not as “memorializing” our cognition about a text, but as actively engaging it through a dynamic exchange; vids and other remixes enable ways of thinking about characters and stories by encouraging us to see the text in certain ways and generate new understandings of it.

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For this reason, while most of the research on vids focuses on their role as texts, I argue that they are also a performance. Coppa (2006) makes a compelling argument for viewing fanfiction, because of its repetitiveness and focus on bodies, as dramatic rather than literary. Like fanfic, vids construct and repeat narratives through the bodies and performances of actors, revisiting and revising texts, reiterating old stories and telling new ones. Taylor (2003) has articulated the distinction between the archive, which is made up of “supposedly enduring materials,” and the “so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge” (19). As fanworks, vids contribute to the collective fantext, and so we might be tempted to think of them as part of the archive. And indeed, Stevens (2020) explains that vids are made up of “archival evidence” from the source text (106). But the arrangement of clips is more akin to the repertoire, a performance,3 a way to pass on not only communal knowledge but also ways of thinking through the embodied reception of texts within the cognitive ecology of the fan community. Busse (2017), drawing on the work of performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz, argues that “fannish artifacts” are the “ephemeral traces” of fandom, “tied in with a specific place, time, and community” (53). Fanworks, like vids, are not merely a representation of fan discourse, fan thinking, but a performance of it; not just an artifact, but an act of critically close engagement with the source text and the community. These performances, as Taylor (2003) explains, “replicate themselves through their own structures and codes” (21). We create and understand vids through their conventions; to make sense of them, we need to be familiar with the practice of vidding—what Coppa (2022) refers to as its “visual language” (23)—and the collective beliefs and desires of the fan community. The role of vids, to use Joseph Roach’s (1996) explanation of performance, is “to bring forth, to make manifest, to transmit” fans’ ways of critically close reading and thinking about the text, but they also “reinvent” (xi), recontextualizing and thereby transforming the source text, the characters, and the stories the actors’ bodies tell. Characters repeat the same scenes, movements, and exchanges, but the roles into which they have been cast and the frame through which we organize them shifts. Many of the clips that fans select to integrate into their vids have already been reread and repeated by the fan community. They are moments that 3  In fact, film editor Karen Pearlman (2009) argues that editing can be thought of as akin to choreography of shots and sequences (23).

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are significant to the ship and the collective that has cohered around it, having been rewatched, giffed, referenced in fic, and incorporated into other vids. In this way, like theatrical performances, vids and other remixes are ghosted by the previous iterations of source material. Performance theorist Marvin Carlson (2003) explains that “ghosting” occurs when the audience is presented with “the identical thing they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context. Thus, a recognition not of similarity, as in genre, but of identity becomes part of the reception process” (7). When an audience watches a production of Hamlet, they encounter the same script they’ve seen before, but a different play, the same actors they've seen before, but different characters. Something similar happens when we watch a vid; the clips are ghosted by their original context as well as the different performances the fan community has enacted through them (Stevens 2020; Freund 2018). The clips, actors, and characters remain the same, though the narrative that emerges through each performance differs. Plays cast different actors, cut lines, change settings; vids, on the other hand, alter the coloration, saturation, framing, and arrangement of clips and the music that accompanies them, inviting us to understand the characters, bodies, movements, gestures, and expressions within a different context. As we watch, we “reinvent or recreate” them, so that, within the vid, “no action or sequence of action is performed the same way twice” (Roach 1996, 29); the rearrangement of clips and the lyrics of the song alter the way in which we perceive the actors’ performance. The clips are the same, but the story they rehearse is different. Part of the pleasure of vids is in recognizing these familiar moments and understanding how they are recontextualized and reinvented through the vid’s performance. As we watch the vid, we form networks of meaning between these various iterations of the scenes, characters, and stories. Through vids, the critically close interpretative and compositional practices of fan communities are passed down. They become an extension of fan cognition, a performance of what is repeated and relived—as well as what is excluded and forgotten. The thinking of the fan community is felt, rehearsed, and preserved in the body, the “expressive movements” of characters functioning as “patterned movements made and remembered by bodies … a psychic rehearsal for physical actions drawn from a repertoire that culture provides” (Roach 1996, 25). They function as cognition, a rehearsal of thinking and feeling with and through the source text, the body, and the cognitive ecology of fandom.

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Blending Stories Or maybe you’re watching Talitha’s vid “Problem,” where the drum-­ thumping, guitar-whining chorus is a chant: “That girl is a goddamned problem,” except the footage you’re watching is from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and the “girl” in question seems to be brainwashed assassin Bucky Barnes. How to explain the pleasure of thinking of the character in those terms? ….Where the pleasure of the vid is in the intuitive and internal mapping out of the ways in which that girl, Bucky Barnes, is a goddamned problem? (Coppa, Lothian, and Turk 2017, 235)

Coppa asks these questions in a conversation about fanvids with Turk and Alexis Lothian, and they get to the heart of vids: How do we construct meaning from the recontextualization of familiar lyrics, characters, and clips and what makes doing so pleasurable? I argue that Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) can help us to answer some of these questions, to understand the cross-space mapping and selective projection that occurs as we watch a vid and construct a narrative.4 By thinking about vids in terms of conceptual integration we can begin to understand how we hold multiple narratives in our minds as we watch them: the stories of the canon, the song, the fanon, and the individual clips, and the narrative that’s told by bringing these all together within a new context. CBT can help us to think about what is projected into the blend of the vid, what is dropped, and the recasting and reframing that occurs as we watch them.5 In The Way We Think (2002), Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner use the riddle of the monk and the mountain to illustrate conceptual blending: A Buddhist Monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top for several days until one dawn when he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset. Make no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his

4  It has been a tradition in fan studies to distinguish between what Jenkins has called “constructed reality,” which creates a “new story,” and other vids that have different paratextual relationships to the source text or, as Stevens (2020) categorizes them, “character study, constructed reality, multifandom, meta, and recruiter vids” (18, emphasis in original). I posit that all vids tell stories, because we can’t think about people and their relationships without stories, though admittedly some vids are more narratively complex than others. 5  Media scholar Angela I. Karpovich (2007) also discusses the way in which characters are “reframed” (19). However, she does not use the term in the specific cognitive sense in which I have been employing it throughout this chapter.

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pace during these trips. Riddle: Is there a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two separate journeys? (39)

How do we go about solving this riddle? It is not, Fauconnier and Turner argue, through complex mathematical calculations, but rather through conceptual blending (Fig. 5.1). The monk’s path on day one and his path on day two are both projected into a blended space where time is compressed and the two narratives are run simultaneously. It becomes clear that the monk must cross his own path, and therefore must be at the same point at the same time on the respective days (39). Fauconnier and Turner note that “it is impossible for the monk to travel both up and down” the mountain at the same time and that he could not possibly “meet himself” as he does so (49). And yet, this explanation is a widely accepted way to go about solving the riddle. They argue that CBT explains our ability to reason through the impossible scenario of the monk encountering himself; it helps us to understand how we can hold the two stories—the story of the monk’s ascent and the story of his descent—in our mind at the same time,

Fig. 5.1  Monk and the mountain riddle blend

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integrating them so that a new story in which he crosses his own path— emerges (40). The narrative of this meeting is not present in either input space, but is constructed through the projection and compression of them (40). Blending preserves the input spaces—we still understand the monk walking up and down the mountain on separate days—while using them to create something different, something new. CBT’s explanation of running two narratives simultaneously renders it a productive framework for thinking about fanvids and other forms of fanworks. As we watch a vid, Turk (2011) observes, it “combines at least two stories: the story contained within the original source text, and the story of the vidder‘s response to and transformation of that text at the level of narration” (91). In fanvids, we project elements of the selected song, the edited clips, the source text, and the fantext developed by the community to create narratives that emerge through the blend of these inputs. As Paul Booth (2012) explains, remix “takes data from two or more different inputs and mixes them together in such a way as to create a unique, third form without loss to the meaning of the originals” (1.2). Booth’s explanation maps onto Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of conceptual integration: The remix is the emergent, blended space created through cross-space mapping and selective projection of the input spaces. The act of blending does not alter the input spaces, though the blend can be projected back onto them, which “can lead us to modify the initial input spaces and change our views of the knowledge used to build those input spaces” (Turner 1996, 83). CBT, then, helps us to understand the dialogic role of fanworks, the way that they can reshape our individual and communal understanding of and ways of thinking about their sources. Thinking about remixes and vids from the perspective of conceptual integration foregrounds fans’ active reception. Meaning is not located within the vid, but emerges from the fans’ interaction with it within the cognitive ecology of fandom. In this way, my research builds on and diverges from the work of other fan studies scholars who have discussed vids and vidding. For example, while Stevens (2020) frames her analysis in terms of “how vids make meaning” (179, emphasis mine), I am shifting our focus to what we as viewers do to construct meaning, emphasizing the cognitive operations that underpin the creation and reception of these texts. I am highlighting our role in the narratives we construct and the networks we create to understand Bucky as that girl and a goddamn problem.

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One of the ways that we construct meaning as we watch vids is the connections we create between the visuals and music. The interaction between music and image is crucial for understanding how viewers make sense of vids, the thinking they rehearse with and through them. According to fan studies scholars, music and lyrics function as a “script” (Burwell 2015, 311) and “an interpretative lens” (Coppa 2008, 1.1); Coppa explains that “the song tells the spectator how to understand the montage the vidder has constructed” (Coppa 2011, 123), Turk notes that it can “shift genre in terms of story-type or plot” (2015, 170), and Jenkins (1992) argues that lyrics give “voice” to the characters’ “thoughts, feelings, desires, and fantasies” (235). But in vids, the interaction between the song and the clips is not as unidirectional as some of the other theorizations of this relationship imply. Rather, by selectively projecting elements of the song, source text, clips, and fans’ collective desires, we integrate music, image, and communal expectations into a network of meaning through which a narrative is generated. We’ve all perceived the way that a mournful violin can cause those tears prickling in our eyes to spill over, how a discordant shriek across the strings can make us jump. We’ve all felt the way that music affects how we perceive and experience our emotions. This connection between music and our perception of emotion, Arthur Shimamura (2013) notes, has been documented through empirical research. For example, one study showed that skin conductance increased when subjects watched safety videos accompanied by horror music and decreased when soothing music played (20). Music affects our bodies, which in turn, affects how we make meaning of the world. Rudolf den Hartogh, Cheng Heng Hsu, and Jacob Groshek’s (2013) research, for instance, found that pairing trailers with different music shifted subjects’ assessment of genre—despite the fact that the visual content and editing remained the same. The participants in their study self-reported perceiving themselves experiencing different emotions based on the musical context of each trailer, which influenced their evaluation of the film. Depending on what music was playing, they perceived and understood the footage differently. In his discussion of the connection between musical score and emotion, Jeff Smith (1999) posits that music has a “polarizing” influence on our perception of scenes. So that when congruent, it amplifies our emotional experience of them, and “when the emotional meaning of the film excerpts were ambiguous,” music had an even more pronounced effect on how viewers understood the content and emotional valence of scenes (161).

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Noël Carroll (1996) presents a similar take on “modifying music” (139), which “may be a matter of enhancing qualities that are already suggested in the imagery, but need not be; the music might attribute an otherwise unavailable quality to the visuals” (140). By embedding visuals in a new musical context, we can emphasize or bring forth meanings, the aural stimuli provided by the music integrated into our perception of actors’ performance and emotions. Understanding the effects of music in terms of polarization or modification, speaks to how fans’ individual and collective desires and their practices of critically close interpretation figure into both the enjoyment and effectiveness of vids. Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet (2011) have documented that nonfans respond to vids like “Closer” by T. Jonesy and Killa—which pairs clips of Star Trek’s (1966–1969) Kirk and Spock with the Nine Inch Nails song from which the vid takes its title—as if it is a “joke” (134). Not only do these nonfans not have the same experience of and emotional engagement with the characters and scenes, but they also do not understand the practices of slashing or the transformative aesthetics of the vid; they are not embedded in the cognitive ecology from which the vid emerged, so they don’t know how to think with and through it and the reading strategies it rehearses. Rather than perceiving what Smith refers to as “affective congruence” (Smith 1999, 162), viewers who are not part of the community laugh at what they perceive to be the incongruity between song and scenes. They don’t map all the ways that Kirk and Spock are coded as queer, don’t understand how Bucky Barnes is “that girl.” Music also heightens our emotional engagement with and experience of the vid through the narratives that it presents us. The music chosen for fanvids tells a story—through tempo, instrumentation, and lyrics. Philosopher Aaron Smuts (2011) argues that the lyrics of songs present us with “suggestive narrative structures” (132), the “skeleton of a story” (142), which we then personalize by relating to our experience (142). Or, to put it into cognitive terms: The songs provide a frame into which we slot our experiences as we map them onto it. We selectively project from these two input spaces—the story of the song and our personal experiences—creating a blended space that shapes our understanding of both and through which the song becomes about us. Thinking of songs as providing narrative structures helps to explain why, after a bad breakup, when we listen to Dashboard Confessional or Taylor Swift, we understand their music in terms of our experiences, generating a personalized understanding of it.

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Likewise fans play an active role in constructing these connections, linking the narrative of the song and the characters we characters. It might seem, as Turk (2015) recounts that when a vidder listens to a song, it “instantly overwhelms her with its rightness for a specific character, relationship, or show” (165), an explanation suggesting that there is something inherent in the song that connects it to the characters, which the vidder, then, passively receives. But those connections have to be constructed by creators and viewers. As we listen to Spotify, we map connections between songs and characters, scenes and lyrics; we think about characters with and through the song and about the song with and through characters, rehearsing our understanding of ships by integrating the story in the music with that of the narrative collectively created by the fan community. As literary critic Mary-Anne Shonoda (2012) explains in her discussion of intertextuality and CBT, it is not that the connection is inherent in the text, but that it is constructed by the reader, the viewer, the fan. Through cross-space mapping and selective projection, by creating these links between texts, by “sift[ing] through their whole network of associations connected with the intertext,” Shonoda argues, the reader constructs meaning through “the relationship between two objects” (85). The connections that we build might seem self-evident, obviously in the text, but they emerge only through our often unconscious mappings between inputs. If we feel like we’ve found the perfect lyric or song for a character or pairing, it is because of the cross-space mapping we have done, the networks of meanings that we have created. Consider, for example, four different fanvids exploring the relationship between Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s (1997–2003) Spike and Buffy: “Spike/ Buffy Accidentally in Love” (2014) by NerdyinNeverland, “Buffy and Spike: Take me to Church” (2015) by a Slayerett  - always and forever, “One More Night—Spike and Buffy (BtVS)” (2013) by cemetarythings, and “Spike and Buffy—Love the Way You Lie” (2011) by Josheykis. On each of their YouTube pages, viewers have left comments stating that the vids used the “Perfect song for their relationship” (xXxMsDawnxXx 2012), that the commenter “first heard this song and IMMEDIATELY thought of this pairing!” (Peralee Knight 2014), that “the song really does fit them” (Jaime Bee 2015), and that “This is the perfect song” (Trevor McNeil 2015). Each of these songs, though, is very different, suggests a different kind of relationship, tells a different story: unexpectedly finding love; looking for redemption in zealous, obsessive sexual adoration; a toxic erotically charged combination of sex and violence; and a destructive,

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abusive relationship. How is it, then, that they can all be “perfect” for— can all “fit”—Buffy and Spike? CBT can help us to understand how we can conceptualize Spike and Buffy’s relationship through these different songs and in these different ways. Our understanding is constructed by selectively projecting moments and interactions into a blended space through which our conceptualization of their relationship emerges. Based on what we project into the blend— and what we don’t—the frame that we slot their relationship into shifts (Fig. 5.2). Frames, cognitive linguist Seana Coulson (2001) explains, are skeletal cognitive structures into which we slot words, images, characters, and situations (19), providing the background knowledge necessary to make sense of them. When new information about situations or characters doesn’t match the frame into which they have been slotted, this prompts a “reanalysis process” that Coulson refers to as “frame-shifting” (3). Coulson theorizes frame-shifting at the level of linguistic utterance, but I believe it can be helpful in thinking about fan remix more generally. By pairing a song with clips, these different Spike/Buffy vids provide “additional context” that “can necessitate reinterpretation” of the characters and music (Coulson 35). As we watch each different vid, we experience different versions of Spike and Buffy’s relationship: erotic, abusive, obsessive, lighthearted. In short, we shift the frames into which we slot and through which we conceptualize them. We also shift the frames through which we

Fig. 5.2  Generating different relationship dynamic

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understand the songs, so that the story “Accidentally in Love,” for example, is slotted into an enemies-to-lovers frame—a narrative that is not present in the lyrics, but that emerges through its integration with the clips. In doing so, we do not just interpret the characters and the song in different ways; we generate new versions of them. The clips selected for the vid can also invite us to shift the frames through which we conceptualize characters by integrating certain moments and traits and dropping others as we construct the blend. As Turk (2010) notes, “A vid represents a close reading, and like any close reading it is selective” (89). “Spike/Buffy Accidentally in Love,” for example, edits together mostly humorous and tender scenes between the characters; their more violent interactions—and notably Spike’s attempt to rape Buffy—are not included in the vid, dropped from the network of meaning that we construct as we watch. The rape scene is also excluded from “One More Night - Spike and Buffy (BtVS)”; the integration of clips and music in that vid encourages us to construct the narrative of a relationship where sex and violence are erotically conflated, where Buffy might want to say “No” but can’t and ultimately consents. In contrast, “Spike and Buffy - Love the Way You Lie,” incorporates clips of the attempted rape, inviting us to integrate it into our understanding of their abusive relationship, an argument that the violence between vampire and Slayer is not always consensual. As we watch each of these vids, the integration of songs and clips reframes the characters, relationships, and interactions. We fill in the skeletal structure of frames by mapping connections between the lyrics and visuals from the source text. This mapping is encouraged by the vid, at times, through what is referred to as “illustration,” the “literal or figurative synchrony between lyrics and visuals” (Goodwin 1992, 117). For example, in “One More Night - Spike and Buffy (BtVS),” the line “slamming the door,” paired with an image of Buffy from the episode “Crush” (2001) closing a door in Spike’s face; as Hozier sings “I’ll worship at the shrine of your lies,” we see an image of Buffy uncovering the stalker-shrine Spike has built to her (“Crush” 2001); Rihanna’s line “Just gonna stand there and hear me cry” is paired with an image from Buffy’s “Fool for Love” (2000) in which Buffy sits on the back steps of her house, crying because she has learned that her mother may be seriously ill. By mapping between the clips and the songs, the frames through which we structure these scenes shift. The image of Buffy crying is mapped onto the song so that we understand her tears as being about not her mom, but Spike. We project her emotion, but not the cause, into the blend we create.

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His tentative hand on her back is not about comforting her, but an apology: same gesture, different frame. Later in the vid, a clip from the episode “Tabula Rasa” (2001) is similarly reframed. Buffy sits at a bar looking distraught, and Spike approaches, which then cuts to a clip of them kissing. In the show, Buffy is upset because she feels abandoned by her father-figure Giles, who is returning home to England. But as we blend the editing of clips and the lyrics of the song, we understand her sorrow as about Spike, not Giles, their kiss a reconciliation, not her desperate attempt to feel something other than depression. It is through this reframing that the lyrics seem to “fit” perfectly with our conceptualization of the characters and their relationship. That is not to say, however, that the clips lose the meaning they had in their original context. As I watch these vids, I know where the clips come from and they are ghosted by those previous iterations. Recontextualizing them within vid does not erase that understanding of them; the inputs projected into the blend remain intact. In fact, part of the pleasure of viewing these vids is in recognizing the source of the clips along with how they are being used and reframed through this new context. The connections we make between source text and song, characters and lyrics are created unconsciously and seem to be obviously in the text once we have attended to them. But while they are invited by the vid, they emerge through the network that we create as we hold the song and the source text in our minds at the same time, rehearsing different ways of thinking about the characters and reframing their relationships.

Embodied and Embedded Rehearsal When we watch vids, we do not analyze the music, editing, and performances from a cool, disembodied position, rather we perceive them in and through our bodies. Fans’ understanding and enjoyment of fanvids is emotional and embodied. Vids are about emotion and desires—those of the characters and those of the audience—and for this reason, Coppa (2016) asserts that their “closest relatives are the lyric poem, the aria, and the soliloquy: forms that allow for the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (150–151). If, as I have argued, fanvids are an act of thinking, a “repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge” (Taylor 2003, 19), then it is through fans’ bodies that this knowledge and practice is experienced and rehearsed. Our emotion, desire, and bodies are an integral part of how we make meaning from and interpret the vid, how we feel about a vid

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inseparable from how we think about it. In Chap. 3, drawing on the work of Shaun Gallagher (2020), I argued that our perception of emotion is smart—culturally and narratively situated. The recontextualization of clips in vids demonstrates that our perception of emotion is shaped by the context in which character facial configurations and interactions are embedded. Since the early days of fan studies, scholars have noted the importance of subtext in fans’ interpretation of and engagement with slash counternarratives. Our understanding of subtext depends on our embodied experience of character interactions, the frames we slot them into, and narratives in which we embed them. Actors’ performances are often ambiguous, which explains why not all fans ship the same characters. However, as shippers watch these performances, there is something in the actors’ facial configuration and the character interactions that they perceive as indicating romantic interest, desire, or longing. In Chap. 3, I discuss the way that we live through the bodies of others, using our kinesic intelligence and phenomenological and social experience of bodily interactions to understand the actors’ performances and characters’ bodies. When I watch Netflix’s The Witcher (2019–), the way that Jaskier looks at Geralt, doesn’t feel platonic to me because of my cultural understanding and embodied knowledge of what it feels like to look at someone in that way. When I watch a vid like sweetgerlion’s “Geralt & Jaskier | The Witcher | You belong with me” (2020), my perception of the characters’ interactions as romantic is reinforced through the new narrative context in which it is embedded. In this way, vids function as a performance of the fans’ collective interpretation of the text. We rehearse our critically close engagement by reframing our perception of characters’ emotions through the de- and recontextualization of clips. Our embodied reception of performances is affected by the context in which we encounter them; the way that shots are arranged, framed, and edited provides a context through which we see them. When we watch a vid, we look at the same performances that we saw when watching the source text, but might perceive them differently—and they take on new meanings—because the context that we are seeing them in changes, thereby prompting us to slot them into a different frame. In his early work on fandom, Jenkins (1992) analyzes the ways in which fans create “homoerotic narratives” by recontextualizing “the exchanged glances, gestures, and expressions that actors bring to their roles” to “assign them alternative meanings” (227-228). Turk makes a similar claim, asserting that “vidders can re-edit film footage and, by setting the new montage to

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music, create emotions that weren’t in the original” (Coppa, Lothian, and Turk 2017, 231). In vids, fans not only explore but create subtext; they invite new ways of feeling and thinking about character interactions and relationships as we perceive, sense into, and live through these familiar bodies and performances in new contexts. Like animated gif sets, vids illustrate that our understanding of others is not only an embodied process, but it is embedded within wider social, cultural, and narrative contexts. Turk and Johnson (2012) argue that an understanding of characters’ nonverbal interactions emerges not only from the individual and communal experience of a single text, but patterns of representation across multiple texts: “When fans read certain interactions … as indicating that the two main characters (both male) are romantically or sexually interested in each other, they draw not only on the interactions of those two characters but also on similar interactions between characters” in other films and television shows (3.2). This cultural knowledge influences what and how we see. We understand the subtext of character facial expressions because we know social stereotypes and cinematic conventions for expressing emotion, and because our perception of emotion is smart (Gallagher 2020, 132): embedded in the cognitive ecology of fandom and enacted through our experiences of genre, stories, and the ways that we use bodies to tell them. Theoretical and empirical work in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated the role that context plays in our understanding of emotion, how the environment—social and physical—affects our perception of gestures and facial configurations. As psychologists and affective scientists Lisa Feldman Barrett, Batja Mesquita and Maria Gendron (2011) report, “emotion perception is not driven by the structural features of a face alone but also derives from the context in which a face is encoded” (286, 289). We perceive facial configurations and gestures differently depending on their context, studies show. Research by psychologists James M. Carroll and James A. Russell (1996), for example, found that pairing an image of a facial expression with a narrative situation affects our understanding of the emotion: we might perceive the same face as fearful or angry depending on the story in which it is embedded. In another study, Diane E. Marian and Shimamura (2012) found that the size, position, and arrangement of humanoid cartoon characters also shifted participants’ perception of emotion from “frightened” to “angry.” Depending on the arrangement of the figures, we construct different stories about what they are doing, and this narrative context influences our understanding of what they are

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feeling. This research suggests that our understanding of emotions—of both real and fictional characters—is structured by what Russell and Carroll (1996) term “limited situational dominance” (207). Embedding a facial configuration associated with a negative emotion in a different context can shift our perception of it to a different negative feeling—fear to anger—but it is less likely that we will view the expression as positive— like happiness. Because of the variety that exists within emotion categories, the same facial expression can be understood through different emotion concepts in different contexts (Barrett 2017, 15). As social psychologist Jamin Halberstadt and his colleagues (2009) argue, facial configurations are often an “ambiguous” combination of emotional cues (Halberstadt et al. 1259). This understanding of emotion helps to explain how, when paired with “You Belong with Me” (2008) by Taylor Swift, the actors’ performances in The Witcher are perceived differently than they might be when watching the show. The facial configuration doesn’t change, but rather the context in which it is encountered shifts our perception of it so that they feel different and are framed and categorized accordingly. In “Geralt & Jaskier | The Witcher | You belong with me” by sweetgerlion, clips from Netflix’s The Witcher are de- and recontextualized—in relation to each other and Swift’s song, embedding the characters in a different context and narrative which invites us to shift the frame through which we understand them. “You Belong With Me” tells the story of a high school girl pining for her best friend, who is currently dating someone else; the speaker of the song believes that this other girl is ill-suited to and unworthy of him. Upon first hearing this synopsis, it might not seem all that applicable to the medieval-style fantasy of The Witcher, and especially to Geralt and Jaskier whose relationship in Season One is canonically platonic.6 But through mapping and blending, fans construct connections between the characters and the song, so that, as YouTube commenters have noted, the song “fits perfectly” (human error 2020). Part of what makes this vid effective—makes it “perfect” for Geralt and Jaskier (Oliwia Zyla 2020)—is that by inviting us to cast these characters into these roles, we embed the actors’ performance into a new context; the new story 6  The second season of The Witcher included more overt queer subtext—at least on Jaskier’s side. However, the actors and show runners continue to deny a queer romance between these characters, insisting that they are just friends, which has resulted in accusations of queerbaiting.

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being told about the characters shifts the frame into which we slot their facial expressions, gestures, and interactions. Like the fanvids discussed above, this one also invites us to map connections between the song lyrics and images—to make sense of them in terms of each other. As it opens, the vid cuts to a scene from the episode “Rare Species” (2019) of Geralt and Yennefer—his canonical romantic interest—fighting, over which we hear the lyrics “You're on the phone with your girlfriend, she’s upset/ She’s going off about something that you said/ 'Cause she doesn't get your humor.” This opening invites us to cast these characters into new roles and slot them into new frames: Yennefer as the mean girlfriend and Geralt as her browbeaten boyfriend who deserves better. As the lyrics “like I do” play, we cut to Jaskier, encouraging us to cast him as the speaker of the song. He is not a teenage girl, not in high school, and definitely not Taylor Swift, but none of this matters as we cast him into this role, compressing his identity with that of the speaker.7 As we integrate the lyrics and the visuals of the vid, we project elements of its frame—unrequited love—into a blend in which we project the characters from The Witcher and the song’s narrative. By doing so, we create a queer love story, of a bard in love with a Witcher who doesn’t seem to reciprocate his feelings; this narrative is not explicitly present in either of the input spaces but emerges through their integration in the blended space of the vid (Fig. 5.3). This reframing and recasting provide a new emotional and narrative context in which we perceive characters’ facial configurations and gestures. Toward the end of the song, for example, we see a clip from the episode “Of Banquets, Bastards, and Burials” (2019). A nobleman approaches Jaskier; the vid cuts to a close-up of Geralt. His expression is solemn, his lips parted for just a moment before he presses them together. In its original context, we perceive him as annoyed; Jaskier has persuaded him to serve as a bodyguard to protect him from men, like this one, whom he has cuckolded. But in this new narrative context, we understand the nobleman through the frame of sexual or romantic interest, and, as we sense-in and live through Geralt’s expression, we feel something—longing, jealousy, a hint of disappointment and resignation—that suggests that maybe he is starting to realize what Jaskier has known all along—that they belong  Stevens (2020) argues that “The character in a vid remains distinct from the singer; the two are not conflated into a singular identity” (194). I’m suggesting that CBT can help us to negotiate the relationship between singer and character, allowing for the way in which, at times, more or less of the singer’s and/or persona’s identity is projected into the blend. 7

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Fig. 5.3  Remixing Taylor Swift and The Witcher

together. The lyrics that accompany this scene, “Have you ever thought just maybe/You belong with me,” also work to reinforce this understanding of it. The expression is the same, but our embodied perception of it feels different in this context. Research on emotion indicates that our perception of feelings is self-­ reinforcing. Halberstadt and his collaborators (2009), for example, theorize what has been called the “paradox” of emotional perception: “[E]fforts to interpret other individuals’ facial expressions can lead, ironically, to distortions of the very emotions perceivers are trying to disambiguate” (1259). What their research found is that naming an emotion affects our response to and memory of it, so that participants who verbally identified facial configurations as “happy” remembered them as happier than they actually were (1260). In addition, Halberstadt (2003) observes that

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providing a story context about why a person or character is feeling a particular way can also heighten in our recollection of emotions (200). In fanvids, we reinforce our perception of facial configurations by recontextualizing and reframing them through new narratives. Watching this vid, and others like it, rehearses and reaffirms our collective and individual understanding of the subtext in these scenes and interactions. In fan communities, because of the repetition of scenes and gifs, fans come to these characters and facial configurations primed to perceive them—to feel them—in a particular way; they have meanings that they may not for a non-shipper audience. As we watch vids, the characters are slotted into frames, the actors’ performances into a narrative, which reinforces our perception of characters’ interactions as romantic. Later, when we rewatch the source text, we hold both of these stories in our minds; the scenes of the show ghosted and recontextualized by our encounters with them in vids. And our experience of them is embodied, embedded in and reinforced by fandom’s cognitive ecology and the other vids, gif sets, and commentaries fans have produced. If, as James E. Cutting (2005) observes, in order for the emotional context to affect viewers, “the filmmaker must first win over the viewer with the narrative” (22), fanvids often have the advantage of viewers already invested in characters and the narratives they are used to construct. Fans want these stories to be told and retold and these ways of thinking to be repeated and rehearsed. Their desire and anticipation predisposes them to make sense of, to be persuaded by, and to take pleasure in the vid’s narrative.

Cutting Together Crossovers Until now, I have discussed vids that recontextualize clips of characters who already exist in the same storyworld; now, I turn my attention to vids that invite us to create a narrative that transports one character into the fictional world of another in order to investigate how CBT can help us to understand the practice of compressing distinct texts into a singular story. “Charles Vane/Lizzie Bennet || Waiting Game” (HawkeyeGin13 2016), for example, constructs a story in which Charles Vane (Zach McGowan) the pirate captain from Black Sails (2014–2017)  and Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) from the 2005 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice become involved in an illicit flirtation. Though the vid contains no scenes of these characters or actors on screen together, as we watch it, we construct a blended mental space in which the characters

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from these two different worlds are crossed-over,8 projected into the same time, space, and narrative, slotted into a romance frame and cast as each other’s love interest. As we watch “Charles Vane/Lizzie Bennet || Waiting Game,” we perceive the characters as sharing the same fictional space largely through the use of point-of-view editing, cuts that we understand as furtive glances and intense eye contact between characters. These sequences are an example of Edward Branigan’s (1975) “point/glance” shot—what Carroll (1996) has called “point of view editing” (125)—an editing sequence in which we cut a shot of a character to a shot of the person or object she is looking at. Sermin Ildirar and Louise Ewing (2007) of the Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development note that this technique establishes continuity through what is commonly known as the Kuleshov effect (23). The Kuleshov effect,9 named after the Soviet Director Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov who first identified the phenomenon, refers to the way in which we construct more meaning from the juxtaposition between two shots in a film’s montage than from a single shot in isolation. The findings of Kuleshov’s original experiment are often used to explain how editing can recontextualize our understanding of facial configurations, shaping the way in which we perceive neutral or ambiguous expressions. However, on perhaps a more basic level, the Kuleshov effect encourages us to link together images in time and space. Cognitive research on the Kushelov effect demonstrates that the juxtaposition of images in film reliably leads to spatial-temporal and causal compression; if a film cuts from a face to a bowl of soup, we make sense of their relationship by understanding them as being located in the same fictional narrative space—that the man is looking at the soup—even if there is disagreement about what the man in the clips is feeling (Ildirar and Ewing 2007, 30). In cross-over vids, fans take advantage of this phenomenon to spatially and temporally link characters from different texts, inviting us to construct a narrative that situates them in the same story and world. In the final sequence 8  The term “cross-over” refers to fan works that take characters from different fictional worlds and embed them in the same story. 9  In his experiment, Kuleshov paired the neutral facial configuration of actor Ivan Mosjoukine with images of a bowl of soup, a dead child, and an attractive woman. He reported that when viewing Mosjoukine’s face with soup, participants said that he looked hungry, with the dead child he was said to appear sad, with the attractive woman aroused. Attempts to reproduce the experiment, though, suggest that the effects may have been overstated (see Barratt et al. 2016).

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of “Waiting Game,” for example, we cut from a clip from Black Sails  of Charles Vane lounging on his bed, lazily flipping a gold coin across his knuckles, to one of Lizzie, from Pride and Prejudice, emerging from behind a door frame, her eyes directed toward the camera. Her face is in close-up, partially obscured as though she is peering around the door, and the vids editing invites us to understand that the characters share a fictional space, that Lizzie is at the door of Vane’s dwelling, looking in on him. The use of point of view editing encourages the spatial and temporal compression of these shots into a narrative sequence: Lizzie gazes at the bare-chested Charles Vane; he turns his head and sees her, her lips part as she continues to look at him, he sits up. This meaning is not in any of the individual shots of the sequence, but is constructed by us as we watch the vid. The vid also anchors our understanding that the characters share a physical space through dissolve transitions, which create moments when Lizzie and Charles’ faces and bodies are superimposed in the frame and briefly share space on the screen. Different scenes in this vid are marked by a fade to black, but transitions between the characters—and across texts— often employ a dissolve. This use and frequency of dissolve transitions is unusual when compared to traditional cinema; generally, dissolves are used by filmmakers to invite the audience to understand that the character is thinking about or remembering something (Brubaker 2017) or that time has passed (Shimamura 2013, 7). Dissolve transitions create what filmmaker Philip Brubaker refers to as “the third shot,” where one image is overlaid on top of the other, so that we see them both at the same time. In the vid, this transition technique shows us, if just for a moment, the characters sharing the screen, their images overlaid on top of each other, inviting us to understand the spatial-temporal relationship between them. It becomes a visual representation of the compression that occurs as we watch this vid, as we hold these two texts in our minds at the same time, a new story emerging from their integration. The vid also uses non-transitional superimposition to similar effect. This closing sequence, for example, includes a shot where close-ups of both characters are superimposed together, sharing the space of the shot. The vid then fades to Lizzie, her lips part, her gaze drifts down, and we understand that she is looking at his mouth, as it cuts to Vane, tilting his head, leaning in, and though we never see these characters kiss, the vid invites us to fill in the gaps, to construct a narrative of what is happening. We slot the characters into the cognitive frame of a romantic tryst, and so we understand the smiles of both Lizzie and Vane in the final two

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shots—their hair noticeably disheveled—as indicating romantic reciprocation and sexual satisfaction. We don’t need to see their lips touch, to view the sexual act itself. Rather, as we watch the vid based on the context in which we perceive the facial configurations of actors, the frames we use to conceptualize their interactions, and the roles that we cast them into, we fill in the gaps to create a narrative of the characters’ romance. Unlike the other vids I have discussed, “Charles Vane/Lizzie Bennet || Waiting Game” was not made for a preexisting community cohered around a romantic pairing; there is no existing fanbase shipping Elizabeth and Vane.10 Even the vid’s creator HawkeyeGin13 admits to stumbling aboard the ship; she began working on the vid because “my heart couldn't take making another devastating heartbreaker of a video, so I decided to give Vane a happy ending … . I happened to have P&P already, so I started playing with scenes.” My pleasure in the vid, then, is not the same as what I experience watching vids of couples I already ship. Rather, my desire to see these characters get together is generated through my experience vid itself—the sensual tone and sultry lyrics of the music and the editing together of the clips. Fans know how vids tell stories; we know how to read them, how to think with and through them because we are familiar with and primed to understand their “structures and codes” (Taylor 2003, 21). As we watch this vid, our pleasure in it emerges through our appreciation for the artistry of its construction, for the way in which crafts its story. As one commenter on the vid enthuses, “I love both of them and the beauty of your editing made me fall in love with this” (ArasEdits 2017), and another writes, “I’m totally in love with it! … Everything is so believable, their expressions are perfect, their looks, smiles and words tell a whole new story” (juxiantang 2016). As we watch the vid, we sense into and feel the facial configurations of the characters within this new context, compressing the shots that HawkeyeGin13 has edited together into a story of lust, pining, and forbidden romance—a narrative of desire that ignites our own. 10  There is only one fic listed on AO3 that crossover Pride and Prejudice and Black Sails and Charles Vane is never even featured in it. YouTube turns up only one other video featuring Elizabeth and Charles, which was posted four months after HawkeyeGin13’s. And searches on Tumblr turn up no results for “Charles Vane x Elizabeth Bennett,” “Charles Vane x Lizzie Bennett,” “Charles Vane x Eliza Bennett,” “Charles Vane/Elizabeth Bennett,” “Charles Vane/Lizzie Bennett,” “Charles Vane/Eliza Bennett.” While Tumblr’s interface is notoriously difficult to search, the lack of any results whatsoever suggests this ship’s lack of traction within any fan communities.

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In this section, I have argued that fans construct narratives across media properties, taking advantage of the way we blend and compress visuals, clips, and stories. Different texts are brought together through the use of filmmaking techniques—like point/glance editing, superimposition—in order to integrate characters from different media properties into the same story. Part of the pleasure of these vids is in the artistry of their editing, the aesthetic appreciation of the clever, skillful, creative, and beautiful way that these vids—and the narratives we build from them—are constructed. Fans’ pleasure in the craft of vids is also inseparable from the communal, embodied, and emotional pleasures of seeing narratives that the canon denied them. In some cases, these desires are generated by the vids themselves, presenting a fantasy that fans had not necessarily anticipated, but are willing to embrace, like Lizzie Bennet having an affair with bad boy pirate captain  Charles Vane. What all the vids I have discussed throughout this chapter have in common, though, is the way that fans combine, play with, and extend existing footage, editing it together to tell new stories, and in doing so, asserting fans’ ownership over the source texts. Fans draw on the “structures and codes” (Taylor 2003, 21) developed by the fan collective to craft vids that both subsume and stretch the boundaries of texts, blending stories and worlds and staking their claim on the source text through the new narratives that emerge.

Conclusion: Performing Community Work in cognitive science and philosophy can help us to understand the ways that we make sense of and make meaning from vids. Vids recontextualize moments from the source text, rearranging clips and pairing them with popular music. In doing so, they create new stories. Conceptual blending theory provides an explanation of the cognitive operations that underpin our ability to hold multiple narratives in our minds at the same time—a new narrative emerging through their integration. We project different elements of the source text, the song, and the community’s counternarratives and desires into the blended space of the vid, we cast characters into new roles, thereby reframing their interactions. Research arguing that our perception of emotion is smart— embodied and enacted—helps us to understand the way in which vids alter our perception of characters’ facial configurations and interactions. It is not just that vids draw out subtext; it is that they reshape and reframe our perception of familiar performances.

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The vids we watch and the stories we tell through them are embedded within the cognitive ecology of fandom. Fans come to vids with a knowledge of form and content that enables them to make sense of what they are seeing, to map connections between songs and scenes, to understand the emotions we perceive in characters and experience through our bodies. More than that though, when we watch a fanvid, we are rehearsing ways of thinking about the text. Vids are a performance, part of the repertoire, a way for fans to share and pass on critically close modes of reading. In vids, we see how pleasure and analysis are combined; the pleasure I feel at watching Buffy and Spike, Geralt and Jaskier, and Charles Vane and Elizabeth  Bennet is my analysis. Part of the pleasure of vids for fans is seeing a desired outcome performed through the bodies of the characters. Many of the most popular ships in some of the largest fandoms never get together in the canon of the source text, but fans can experience the pleasure of watching their love stories play out through the recontextualization of clips in vids. And, when watching the vid, our understanding of their love for one another is reinforced by the fan community. There is a sense of belonging as these collective desires and communal ways of thinking about characters are made manifest, transmitted, and performed through the vid (Roach xi). Performance, as John L.  Austin (1962), Victor Turner (1980), and  Richard  Schechner (1985), and others have noted, does something, changes something; vids leave a trace on not only individual fans, but also on the collectives that those fans form and the source texts they draw from. Through vids, we generate—we perform—stories, cognition, and community.

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Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2017. How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Boston: Mariner Books. Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Batja Mesquita, and Maria Gendron. 2011. Context in Emotion Perception. Current Directions in Psychological Science 20: 286–290. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411422522. Jaime Bee. 2015. Comment on Spike/Buffy Accidentally In Love, uploaded by NerdyInNeverland, 2014. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=8QT4ezpKjxY. Blair, Rhonda, and Amy Cook. 2016. Theatre, Performance, and Cognition: Language, Bodies and Ecologies. London: Bloomsbury. Booth, Paul. 2012. Mashup as temporal amalgam: Time, taste, and textuality. Fan/Remix Video, Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, 9. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0297. Branigan, Edward. 1975. Formal Permutations of the Point-of-View Shot. Screen 16: 54–64. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.54. Brubaker, Philip. 2017. The 3rd Shot: Superimposition in Film. Fandor: For Movie Lovers. https://www.fandor.com/posts/the-­3rd-­shot-­superimposition-­in-­film. Burwell, Catherine. 2015. You Know You Love Me: Gossip Girl Fanvids and the Amplification of Emotion. Feminist Media Studies 15: 306–323. https://doi. org/10.1080/14680777.2014.919335. Busse, Kristina. 2017. Intimate Intertextuality and Performative Fragments in Media Fanfiction. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 2nd ed., 45–59. New York: New York University Press. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Carroll, Noël. 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, James M., and James A.  Russell. 1996. Do Facial Expressions Signal Specific Emotions?: Judging Emotion From the Face in Context? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70: 205–218. https://doi.org/10.1037/ 0022-­3514.70.2.205. cemetarythings. 2013. One More Night  - Spike and Buffy (BTVS). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpX3fq9CPBM Clark, Andy. 2011. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Andy, and David J.  Chalmers. 1998. The Extended Mind. Analysis 58: 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/58.1.7. Coppa, Francesca. 2006. Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 225–244. Jefferson: McFarland.

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———. 2008. Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding. Transformative Works and Cultures 1. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc. 2008.044. ———. 2011. An Editing Room of One’s Own: Vidding as Women’s Work. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 26: 123–130. https:// doi.org/10.1215/02705346-­1301557. ———. 2016. Vidding: The Art of Flow. In Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture, ed. Bruce Grenville et al., 150–153. London: Black Dog Press. ———. 2022. Vidding: A History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Coppa, Francesca, and Rebecca Tushnet. 2011. How to Suppress Women’s Remix. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 26: 131–138. https:// doi.org/10.1215/02705346-­1301566. Coppa, Francesca, Alexis Lothian, and Tisha Turk. 2017. Vidding and identity: A Conversation. In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, 230–240. London: Routledge. Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic Leaps: Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “Crush.” 2001. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 5, episode 14. WB, 13 February. Cutting, James E. 2005. Perceiving Scenes in Film and in the World. In Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations, ed. Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson, 9–27. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Emilia Matera. 2019. Comment on Jon & Sansa | If you come around again, uploaded by AerisVideos, 2019. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=p321iVI719Q. “Fool for Love.” 2000. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 5, episode 7. WB, 14 November. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Freund, Katharina. 2018. “Becoming a Part of the Storytelling”: Fan Vidding Practices and Histories. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 207–233. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Gallagher, Shaun. 2020. Action and Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodwin, Andrew. 1992. Dancing in the Distraction Factor: Music Television and Popular Culture, 1992. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Halberstadt, Jamin. 2003. The Paradox of Emotion Attribution: Explanation Biases Perceptual Memory for Emotional Expressions. Current Directions in Psychological Science 12: 197–201. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.0963-­7214. 2003.01261.x. Halberstadt, Jamin, et al. 2009. Emotional Conception: How Embodied Emotion Concepts Guide Perception and Facial Action. Psychological Science 20: 1254–1261. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­9280.2009.02432.x.

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den Hartogh, Rudolf, Cheng Heng Hsu and Jacob Groshek. 2013. Music in the Eyes: Contextual Framing and Emotional Attributions in User-Generated Content and Culture. WiderScreen, 16. http://widerscreen.fi/numerot/2013­1/music-­in-­the-­eyes-­contextual-­framing-­and-­emotional-­attributions-­in-­user-­ generated-­content-­and-­culture/ HawkeyeGin13. 2016. Charles Vane/Lizzie Bennet || Waiting Game. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2SeDkP0DZ8 human error. 2020. Comment on Geralt & Jaskier | The Witcher | You belong with me, uploaded by Sweetgerlion, 2020. YouTube. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=S2_g3glsIKo&t=2s. Ildirar, Sermin, and Louise Ewing. 2007. Revisiting the Kuleshov Effect with First-Time Viewers. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 1. https:// doi.org/10.3167/proj.2018.120103. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 2013. Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Routledge. Josheykis. 2011. Spike and Buffy  - Love the Way You Lie. YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRcQBWtyehc. Julianna H. 2019. Comment on Jon & Sansa | If you come around again, uploaded by AerisVideos, 2019. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=p321iVI719Q. juxiantang. 2016. Comment on Charles Vane/Lizzie Bennet || Waiting Game, uploaded by HawkeyeGin13, 2016. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=u2SeDkP0DZ8. Karpovich, Angelina I. 2007. Reframing Fan Videos. In Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual, ed. Jamie Sexton, 17–28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ldtProductions2. 2020. Comment on Jon & Sansa | If you come around again, uploaded by AerisVideos, 2019. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=p321iVI719Q. Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Marking Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy. London: Penguin Books. lustandmoney. 2019. Comment on Jon & Sansa | If you come around again, uploaded by AerisVideos, 2019. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=p321iVI719Q. Marian, Diane E., and Arthur P. Shimamura. 2012. Emotions in Context: Pictorial Influences on Affective Attributions. Emotion 12: 371–375. https://doi. org/10.1037/a0025517. Middleton, Kim. 2012. Remix video and the crisis of the humanities. In Fan/ Remix Video Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, ed. Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, vol. 9. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0349. NerdyInNeverland. 2014. Spike/Buffy Accidentally In Love. YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QT4ezpKjxY.

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“Of Banquets, Bastards, and Burials.” 2019. The Witcher, season 1, episode 4. Netflix, 20 December. Pearlman, Karen. 2009. Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film. Waltham: Focal Press. Peralee Knight. 2014. Comment on One More Night - Spike and Buffy (BTVS), uploaded by Cemetarythings, 2013. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RpX3fq9CPBM. Plantinga, Carl. 2009. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkley: University of California Press. “Rare Species.” 2019. The Witcher, season 1, episode 6. Netflix, 20 December. Roach, Joseph R. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shimamura, Arthur P. 2013. Psychocinematics: Issues and Directions. In Psychocinematics: Explorations in Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura, 1–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shonoda, Mary-Anne. 2012. Metaphor and Intertextuality: A Cognitive Approach to Intertextual Meaning-Making in Metafictional Fantasy Novels. International Research in Children’s Literature 5: 81–96. https://doi.org/10.3366/ IRCL.2012.0045. Silviasi22. 2019. Comment on Jon & Sansa | If you come around again, uploaded by AerisVideos, 2019. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=p321iVI719Q. Smith, Jeff. 1999. Movie Music as Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition, and the Film Score. In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M.  Smith, 146–167. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Smuts, Aaron. 2011. Rubber Ring: Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs? In Narrative, Emotion, and Insight, ed. Noël Carroll and John Gibson, 131–153. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Stein, Louisa Ellen. 2014. Vidding: Remix as Affective Media Literacy. Intermédialités / Intermediality 23. https://doi.org/10.7202/1033338ar. Stevens, E. Charlotte. 2020. Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Sweetgerlion. 2020. Geralt & Jaskier | The Witcher | You belong with me. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2_g3glsIKo. “Tabula Rasa.” 2001. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 7. UPN, 13 November. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Turner, Victor. 1980. Social Dramas and Stories about Them. In On Narratives, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, 137–164. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Trevor McNeil. 2015. Comment on Buffy and Spike: Take Me to Church, uploaded by a slayerett – Always and Forever, 2015. YouTube. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Xy8V6rQV6bY. Tribble, Evelyn B. 2016. Distributed Cognition, Mindful Bodies and the Arts of Acting. In Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies, ed. Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook, 133–140. London: Bloomsbury. Tribble, Evelyn, and John Sutton. 2011. Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespeare Studies. Shakespeare Studies 39: 94–104. Turk, Tisha. 2010. “Your Own Imagination”: Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative Interpretation. Film & Film Culture 5: 88–111. https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/eng_facpubs/1/. ———. 2011. Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction. In Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonia Klimek, 83–103. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2015. Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9: 163–176. https://doi.org/10.3828/ msmi.2015.11. Turk, Tisha, and Joshua Johnson. 2012. Toward an Ecology of Vidding. Fan/ Remix Video Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures 9. https://doi. org/10.3983/twc.2012.0326. Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vendettis. 2019. Comment on “Jon & Sansa | If You Come Around Again,” uploaded by AerisVideos, 2019. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=p321iVI719Q. Winters, Sarah Fiona. 2012. Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in ‘Closer’ and ‘On the Prowl.’ Fan/Remix Video, Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, ed. Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, 9. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0292. xXxMsDawnxXx. 2012. Comment on Spike and Buffy - Love the Way You Lie, uploaded by Josheykis, 2011. YouTube, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VRcQBWtyehc. Oliwia Zyla. 2020. Comment on Geralt & Jaskier | The Witcher | You belong with me, uploaded by sweetgerlion, 2020. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=S2_g3glsIKo&t=2s.

CHAPTER 6

Casting, Counterfactuals, and the Communal Construction of Characters

On March 6th, 2021, @Wizards_DND, the official Twitter of Wizards of the Coast, the company that distributes the popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), tweeted “If you could play D&D with any fictional character as your Dungeon Master,1 who would you choose and why?” There were over 1200 replies. While some Twitter users picked fictional characters who have canonically DMed—like Abed from Community (2009–2015)—many did not. Instead, they selected characters, like The Hobbit’s (1937) Bilbo Baggins (@DanArndtWrites 2021) and Game of Thrones’s (GoT) (2011–2019) Tyrion Lannister (@ kushisensei 2021), who hail from fictional settings that more closely resemble the medieval fantasy realm of many D&D campaigns than our own world. These characters live in worlds where D&D doesn’t exist, so how can we possibly say whether or not they’d be good DMs? Questions like the one posed by @Wizards_DND invite us to construct, what cognitive linguists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner refer to as, counterfactuals as we imagine what these characters would be like as DMs. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) observe that “our species has an extraordinary ability to operate mentally on the unreal” (217), constructing  Dungeon Master (DM for short), sometimes referred to as the Game Master (GM) or referee, is the term used for the D&D player who runs the gaming session. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Hautsch, Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32450-5_6

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counterfactuals scenarios by integrating mental spaces to create a blended space that “has forced incompatibility with respect to a space we take to the ‘actual’” (230). When we think about which fictional character we would select as our DM, our answer doesn’t rely on whether characters have actually played the game; rather, we map certain properties of the character onto the concept of Dungeon Master, drawing connections between the characters and the role and constructing a blended space through which we understand them as a DM. When we imagine Bilbo or Tyrion as our Dungeon Master, we selectively project only the character traits that we believe make them well-suited to run our game into the blend and drop the rest—like the fact that they don’t know what D&D is. From there, if we are so inclined, we can write an alternate universe fanfiction in which Tyrion and other GoT characters hang out and play Dungeons & Dragons. Fans construct and play with counterfactuals in order to develop and reinforce communal understandings of characters. Fan theories and fanfiction often rely on imagining what characters might do and what roles they might fill, if the plot, story, or world of the source text were different. We can create these counterfactuals, because, as Sheeghan Pugh (2005) observes, the fictional characters in media texts “come alive so fully that readers feel they know them, can understand their motives, predict their actions, continue their stories” (17). As part of their critically close engagement with the text, fans’ understanding of characters is emotional, social, and embodied; they are deeply invested in them, who they love, who they are. Many fan studies scholars have pointed to the important role characters play in fandom—the parasocial relationships that fans form with them,2 the ways in which fans’ love for characters motivates them to write fanfiction and emphasize getting characters “right.” I add to their work by considering the cognitive operations that underpin our understanding of characters—how we know characters, how we predict what they might do next, and how we can imagine what roles they might play if they were in a different narrative, genre, or universe. Characters, Amy Cook (2018) tells us in Building Character, do not spring from the page or screen fully formed, rather they are constructed, 2  The term “parasocial interaction” was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956 to account for the one-sided, nonreciprocal emotional investments that viewers have with media personalities. See Nicole Liebers and Holger Schramm’s (2019) meta-analysis for an overview of how parasocial relationships with fictional characters have been theorized.

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built “from a sea of stimuli” (1). Fan debates about characters—about whether a character’s actions were in or out of character—are discussions about a fictional entity that was constructed, often over years, by writers, directors, actors, casting directors, costume designers, words on a page, and images on a screen. Not only that, though, characters are also built by fans and within fan communities, emerging through the distributed cognition of the collectives that fans form. Within the cognitive ecology of fandom (see Chap. 5), fans generate characters, casting them into different roles as a way of collectively constructing who that character is and determining the characteristics and traits that remain consistent across frames, genres, stories, and roles. Through fic, fans stress, test, and distill a shared perception of characters, cohering a community through their collective conceptualization, and the sense that they are correct, that through their critically close engagement with the text they know who these characters really are because they have built the characters themselves. Fans integrate their knowledge of the characters from canon, fanon,3 and the fantext in order to construct an understanding of their consistent character traits. This process is collective, fans refining and reinforcing each other’s understanding through the fanworks they produce within and share with the community. In fanfiction, fans develop counterfactual blends, projecting the characters into settings and stories very different from the source text. They engage in this process as they write Alternate Universe (AU) fanfiction—stories in which “familiar characters are dropped into a new setting” (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 11)—casting characters into different roles to perform different stories. Drawing on Peter Khost’s (2018) theory of literary affordance and Mark Turner’s (1996) cognitive explanation of parable, I argue that in fusion fics— narratives that retell an existing story with characters from different, unrelated texts—we think about characters through other characters and stories. Through AU and fusion fanfiction, fan communities generate and reaffirm versions of characters, cohering through their collectively constructed conception of the text.

3  Mafalda Stasi (2006) defines fanon as “a series of details and characteristics that are shared by most slash stories, but that have no factual basis in the original media text” (121).

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Knowing Characters through Conceptual Blending In a LiveJournal post titled “Someone is Angry on the Internet” from May 7th, 2010, author George R.R. Martin explains his various reasons for being “against fanfiction.” At one point, he asserts that “My characters are my children, I have been heard to say. I don’t want people making off with them” (Martin 2010a). But when fans write fic, what exactly are they “making off” with? Martin’s characters are ideas—words on a page—so how can they be kidnapped? In the comment section of his post, Martin elaborates by saying that “Reading other people’s versions of [my characters], and seeing them saying and doing things they would never say or do, would disturb me” (Martin 2010b).4 So, how does Martin know what these characters would say or do? How do readers know? Does everyone who reads his A Song of Ice and Fire (ASoIaF) (1996–) series have the same understanding of what Sansa Stark or Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen would say or do? What about fans who only watch its HBO adaptation? When we talk about Jon or Sansa or Daenerys who—or what—are we talking about? Martin’s framing of fanfic as “making off with” his characters suggests that they are singular beings. But this doesn’t match our actual experience of texts. One does not have to look far on the Internet to find fans of ASoIaF and GoT fundamentally disagreeing about what the characters are like and what they would—and wouldn’t—do in different situations. This disagreement is possible because we do not passively receive characters, as Cook (2018) observes, but actively construct them through the stimuli provided to us, our background knowledge and experiences, and the cultural environment in which our reading takes place (1).5 As fans write fanfiction, they don’t take characters, they make them. And this process of character construction is linked to community building. Fan communities collectively determine what is integrated into their conceptualization of the character, and in doing so, construct and cohere around a particular 4  It is worth noting that Martin has agreed to have his work adapted for television, which complicates claims about how painful it would be to see different versions of their characters, as adapting and casting characters necessarily alters them (see Cook 2018). 5  Reader response theorists, like Stanley Fish (1980) and Louise Rosenblatt (1978), have argued that our understanding of texts emerges from their interaction with readers—readers’ expectations, biases, and desires shaping the text—but their view of cognition diverges from mine. My interest is in the bodily and social cognitive systems and operations through which we make meaning of characters and texts.

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version—which is likely different from that of the author, showrunner, and other fans who belong to different shipping and non-shipping subcommunities. Working together, fans build and reinforce their conceptualizations of characters and ships through fanworks. Fans collaboratively develop what Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (2006) refer to as the “fantext”: “the entirety of stories and critical commentary written in a fandom (or even in a pairing or genre),” which “offers an ever-growing, ever-expanding, version of the characters” (7). Fans’ engagement with stories and characters, as scholars have noted, are communal and intertextual (Busse 2017b, 47); fanfiction is read in the context of not only the source text but also other fics. Busse (2017a), for example, argues that “[a]s each fan reads a new story, many previous versions of the characters also resonate, so that she is always reading in a context of ever more varied interpretations” (114). Just as actors are ghosted by their previous roles (Carlson 2003, 2), characters in fics are ghosted by the versions of themselves from the source and fantext. These stories invite us to link together texts, to draw on layers of meaning, which is why Mafalda Stasi (2006) uses the analogy of “the medieval palimpsest to indicate a nonhierarchical, rich layering of genres, more or less partially erased and resurfacing” to discuss fic (119). This metaphor is useful because the new writing (the fic) is superimposed over the older writing (the canon stories and the existing fantext), but the older is never fully obscured or erased. It peeks through, haunting and informing our understanding of the fic. These texts are generated within and become part of the cognitive ecology that fans think with and through. Fanfics are created for a specific audience, subcommunities within the fandom that share similar conceptualizations of characters. In fandom, Busse (2017a) asserts “fan fiction writers identify themselves primarily as fans of one or another pairing. As such, they agree on particular events, characteristics, and interpretations of the actual texts and will read certain canonical events with a particular lens toward supporting this pairing choice” (111). Shippers focus on evidence of romantic interactions— specific quotes, scenes, facial configurations, and moments of interaction— which “determines the shape” of the source text (Fish 1980, 171). For this reason, Busse (2017a) has argued that fan communities function as “interpretive communities” (58), a term coined by Stanley Fish (1980) to account for the different context, knowledge, and interpretive strategies that “shape” readers’ approach to and understand of the text (117). “Fan writers,” Busse asserts, “read texts by writing within an actual community,

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thus literalizing Fish’s metaphors” (58, emphasis original). Fans reading practices, then, are enacted through fic. As Deborah Kaplan (2006) explains, “Rewriting characters for a work of fanfiction is an interpretive act”; it “both contributes to and draws from the community’s collective understanding of character” (136). The works that fans create are not just evidence of these various ways of thinking about characters, but are acts of collective, distributed cognition. As fans write and read fanfic, they are thinking with and through these socially embedded creative texts: constructing and testing their perception of characters. Through fic, fans generate, rehearse, and reinforce ways of thinking about the characters. Francesca Coppa (2006, 2018) has argued that fic is more akin to theater and drag than literature. Building from her work, I posit that fic is performative in the way that John L. Austin (1962) and John Searle (1969) use the term. Austin theorizes that there is a distinction between descriptive utterances, which report the reality of the world, and performative utterances, which change the reality of the world (6). Within the fan community, fic functions as a performative utterance—the act of writing not only reports an understanding of a character but actively works to construct it. Fic doesn’t just interpret characters for the community; it brings them into being. If as Victor Turner (1980) and Richard Schechner (1985) argue, performances are generative and transformative (156), then fanfiction is performative because it transforms the community’s ways of thinking about characters, shifting the cognitive frames6 through which we understand them. Something happens when we read fic, something changes. Fic is an act of collective construction, a tool through which the community thinks about, creates, and negotiates an understanding of characters. Through fanfiction, fans develop, test, and refine a collective sense of characters’ consistent traits—who they are and what they are like. Though I disagree with many of Martin’s (2010b) assertions about characters and fanfiction, his complaint that in fic characters “say and do things that they would never say or do” points to an important aspect of how we conceptualize characters: Really knowing characters means anticipating what they would say and what they would do, even in completely novel situations, because we expect characters—in our fiction and our everyday 6  Frames provide cognitive structures through which we organize and understand the world and the characters in it (Coulson 2001, 19). Roles, as I am using the term in this chapter, are more specific. For example, a small town mayor and the president of the United States are different roles, but can both be slotted into the politician frame.

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lives—to behave in consistent ways. It doesn’t matter if Jon and Sansa are in the medieval world of Westeros, a modern coffee shop, or a dystopian future, they are still expected to be Jon and Sansa, to be consistent characters. Psychologists Richard J.  Gerrig and David N.  Rapp (2004) have argued that narrative fiction tends to overrepresent the consistency of characters, training us to overestimate the role of traits and underestimate the importance of context in behavior (272). As Fauconnier and Turner (2002) argue, it is “a central aspect of human understanding to think that people have characters that manifest themselves as circumstances change” (249), even though this doesn’t match our experience of how people actually operate. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) are careful to note that we understand characters as consistent, not because they actually are, but because we conceptualize them in those terms. Our understanding of characters’ stable traits, they theorize, is the result of conceptual blending. As we observe how a character—real or fictional—acts, we notice patterns in their behavior, and through conceptual blending, “we are able to extract regularities over different behaviors by the same person” (251). Some behaviors are selectively projected into it, others dropped, and a mental space for that person emerges. Through this process, Cook (2018) explains, “Humans have an ability to develop a ‘mental space’ called ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Odysseus’ that can be primed or brought to bear at any moment and that carries associations about what that character means” (118). These mental spaces are not passively received by watching a play or reading an epic poem, but are constructed through the dynamic integration of speech and behaviors into a conceptualization of a character. In fan communities, these extracted regularities are repeated and reinforced through fanfiction; the characters in fic are not stolen or kidnapped because they are created and constructed within and by the fan collective. Our belief in consistent character traits explains how we can construct counterfactual claims about both real and fictional characters. It is because we have a sense of people’s characters as stable that we can say things, like “Which fictional character would you want to be your DM?” or “He wouldn’t have a shot at winning the Hunger Games.” In order to make assessments like these, we project what we perceive to be the consistent character traits of an individual into situations that they have not actually lived through and, in fact, it might be impossible for them to ever experience (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 252). It is precisely this ability to entertain counterfactuals that renders our understanding of characters

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a valuable cognitive tool. If we don’t conceptualize our parents, partner, friends, or favorite fictional characters as consistent, it becomes very difficult to figure out why they acted the way that they did or predict what they might do next. In fandom, counterfactuals are not just predictive, but generative. Fans create counterfactuals about characters, constructing and refining a communal conceptualization of who they are—their stable and consistent traits—by imagining them in different circumstances, genres, and stories. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) explain that if we imagine modern philosopher debating Emmanuel Kant, “We do not just import to the blend what he actually wrote; rather, we construct what he might have said given his character” (250). We undergo a similar cognitive process when writing fanfiction. In these stories, we do not just “import to the blend” what characters said or did in the source text, but what we believe they might say or do given our perception of their consistent character traits. The characters that appear in fanfiction must be consistent with the ways that fans have conceptualized them or else the story isn’t satisfying, doesn’t give members of the community what they want: the pleasure of reading about familiar characters. If Kant is not “philosophical and logical,” for example, the imaginary debate doesn’t work because he is not in-character (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 250). The same is true of characters in fic, which is why Susan Coleman (2010) refers to OOC (out of character) depictions as one of the “faux pas of writing fanfiction” (99). As Pugh (2005) explains, fic writers “must work with a particular set of people and whatever situation you put them in, they must behave and speak like themselves … . [N]aturally there are different interpretations of certain aspects of the canon characters, but if too many readers feel ‘that’s not them’, then the story will have failed as fanfic” (67). Because these characters are actively constructed by fans as they read, watch, and write, what counts as OOC is different for different segments of the fandom. If I read a fic by a Jonerys (Jon/Daenerys) shipper, I am likely to feel that Sansa is OOC, and if they read one of my stories, they probably wouldn’t agree with my portrayal of Dany. In both cases, we are likely to feel alienated by the story, our pleasure in it undercut by the version of the characters we are encountering. We wouldn’t experience the same sense of belonging that we feel when reading fic by another fan who sees these characters the same way we do. It is not just a matter of what parts of the source text are integrated into these collectively constructed characters; fans also develop what is called

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“fanon”: fan canon—fan theories or ideas, unconfirmed by the source text, which nevertheless gain widespread traction within the community. Fanon is developed by the fan collective, spread and codified within it. As fans write fic, Busse and Louisa Ellen Stein (2009) argue, they consider not only their perception of canon, but the expectations and desires of the community they write for (124). For this reason, fanon is repeated throughout the community, reinforced by it, and integrated into our understanding of the character. It can be difficult to trace the elements of the blend back to their input spaces, to untangle the network that informs our understanding, so that as fanon is repeated and reaffirmed by the collective, it becomes an integral part of how we understand the character. The stories that fans write, the vids they create, and the gifs they post reflect and reinforce their perception of canon, their collaborative constructed fanon, and their shared desires; we think about characters with and through these texts and the collective that produces them, our cognition shaped by and distributed across the community and the texts it creates. Fans write the versions of characters that other members of the community want and expect to see. The importance of fanon in character construction also  helps to explain why fan versions of characters might eventually diverge so far from the source text—and each other. Disagreements about character traits emerge among different fan subcommunities, because different behaviors are projected and integrated into the character blend, so different versions of the same character are constructed. Busse (2017a) explains that “Depending on what aspects of a character are picked, viewers begin with different points and thus create wildly different extrapolations” (109). Through the fics and theories they write, members of fan communities will emphasize certain traits while downplaying others; other communities will do the reverse. For example, because of the hostility that exists between Jonsa and Jonerys shippers, a number of the Jonsa Tumblr accounts that I follow will post anti-Daenerys gif sets, theories, and memes that emphasize her negative traits: imperiousness, narcissism, rage, and enthusiasm for burning people alive. Because of my repeated exposure to them, certain images and certain lines of dialogue are integrated into her character blend, while others—in which she is vulnerable, gentle, and compassionate—are not. I think about this character in a different textual, social, and emotional context than the fans who love her and these different environments form part of the cognitive system through which she is conceptualized. And while I am certain that blogs dedicated to Jonerys can point to instances of Sansa being

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manipulative or conniving or annoying, those are far less likely to show up on my Tumblr dashboard. As a result, they don’t fit with the kind of person I understand her to be; they seem “out of character,” because they have been dropped from the blend through which my mental concept of Sansa emerges. As fans rewatch GoT, our conceptualization of who each of these characters are affects our perception of them within the source text; when we return to the show, we see them differently and attend to different aspects of their characterization because of our communally generated understanding of who they are. Both ways of viewing Sansa and Dany are possible; neither of these collectives is wrong about who these characters are. But these fan communities cohere through and around their understanding that their version of characters is right and that other versions are incorrect. Part of fans’ sense of ownership over the text emerges through their belief that they understand, that they know, these characters better than anyone else. Both Jonsa and Jonerys fans can, as Busse notes, “firmly rely on the supposed canonicity of their argument” (Busse 2017a, 111), even though the versions of the characters that they have constructed oppose each other. Canon, she argues, is slippery because “every reading already includes a variety of interpretations beyond the base facts and usually places the fan into part of a group of like-minded readers” (108). The mental operations of conceptual blending are performed routinely and unconsciously; we aren’t aware of and don’t attend to them, so fans feel that their understandings of characters are correct, self-evident, based on what is right there in the show or novels and do not understand how others could have gotten it so very wrong. We perceive characters in different ways, without necessarily perceiving the embodied, emotional, and communal cognition that shapes our understanding of them. As criticism of the final season of GoT indicates, fans often feel as though they know these characters better than not only other viewers and other fans, but also writers, directors, and creators. We have long histories and deep emotional connections to the versions of these characters that we have constructed; this affective engagement is part of what makes them feel so “real” to us (Jenkins 1992, 51–52). When our understanding and that of a show’s creators don’t match up, fans complain that the writers got the character wrong. As tonysopranobignaturals (2022) observes on Tumblr, “sometimes ‘he would not fucking say that’ isn’t just about fanfic. sometimes a new season of the show comes out and in canon he is now

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saying things he just would not fucking say.” Rather than accept the authority of the showrunners and reassess their conceptualizations of the character, fans maintain that their understanding is correct. For example, ThatOneWaterCat (2022) responded to tonysopranobignaturals writing, “it’s fanfic thats more correct, usually.” And they aren’t wrong; fans perceive fanfiction as “more correct” because it is giving them the versions of the characters that the community has constructed and agreed upon. Fans do know their characters better than show creators and writers, because they know entirely different characters. Characters are not children that can be kidnapped but are cognitive tools that we build to make sense of the world we live in and the stories we tell. Fans encounter different versions of the characters in different texts: the source text, the fanon, and the fantext. Each of these versions of the characters are integrated into the network that we construct to conceptualize them. We integrate different iterations into consistent characters by pulling out the essential traits that we associate with the characters and selectively projecting them into a blend from which mental spaces called Daenerys, Jon, and Sansa emerge. Conceptual blending can help us to understand how fans and creators can conceptualize the same characters in such different ways, and how we can understand the different versions of the characters that we find in fanon and canon, from one fic to another, as having the same identity, despite their incongruities. Through their creative works, fan collectives generate and reaffirm an understanding of characters; part of what binds these communities together is not only a shared conceptualization of characters, but the belief that their version of characters is correct.

Casting AU Fics In one of the Jonsa fics I have published on AO3, Jon Snow works for Amnesty International. In another, he is an auto mechanic. I’ve written about him as a commissioned officer in a Regency era army, a member in a biker gang, and player in a D&D group. I am currently working on a fic where he is the cursed fairytale prince from “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” and another where he is a New England farmer. I write and read Alternate Universe  fanfiction because I want those stories about this character. It doesn’t matter if Jon is riding a motorcycle, rolling a D20,7 or 7

 A twenty-sided dice commonly used in D&D and other tabletop role-playing games.

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selling organic heirloom tomatoes at a farmer’s market, the community I write for still needs to understand him as Jon in order for fics to be satisfying. This repetition of characters is what makes fic so enjoyable—and so accessible. As one fan posted to Tumblr, “fanfiction is wild cause im like … Ugh im not in the mood to read a book… i’ll just read an 82k word fic instead” (raveneil 2019). Another fan responded, by pointing out: “Look … to start a book … you have to make room in yourself for new characters and worlds. Do I look like I have the emotional energy for that?… Just show me the things I already know pay good returns on my investment, except I also want something new so I guess they can be in a coffee shop this time” (brawltogethernow 2019). When we read fanfiction, we don’t need to construct a new mental space for Jon, because we already have one, and we can bring it to bear by mapping connections between the version of the character we encounter in fic and the one we have generated through the distributed cognition of the fan community. Through AU fanfic,8 fans build characters and communities by imagining “what if.” They think about and construct a shared understanding of characters by slotting them into roles, genres, and narratives that diverge from and run counter to the source text. Busse (2017a) refers to what fans are doing in AU stories as a kind of “casting” (74, 125). Building off of her use of this word, I interrogate what that means to “cast” these fictional characters into new stories and genres. My interest is in how in AU fics fans make sense of characters through the roles we cast them into, the pleasure that we get from seeing characters perform different stories and scripts, and how shifting the cognitive frames that structure our perception of characters creates new versions of them. Through AU fic, fans collectively construct, strain, and distill what they perceive as consistent character traits—the elements of the characters that are transported into different stories, frames, and roles. 8  In my research for this chapter, I read a total of 380 Alternate Universe fics in the Jonsa fandom. As of writing, there are 8164 Jonsa fics on AO3. Of them, over half (4217) have been tagged “Alternate Universe.” 2335 of these are tagged as Modern AU, 255 are Historical AUs, 213 are Fusion AUs, 131 are College/University AUs, 105 are High School AUs. In order to narrow my focus, I selected to read stories from six authors whom I was familiar with from my previous engagement with the fandom: Vivilove, Amymel86, woodswit, JonsaSnow, Kitykatknits, and thewolvescalledmehome. These are popular authors in the fandom, and who appear on a number of recommendation lists for AU fic. My goal in reading these fics was to extrapolate general trends in how fans write and conceptualized Sansa and Jon.

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Coppa (2017) asserts that if “Speculative fiction is the genre of ‘What if?’” then “Fanfiction is speculative fiction about character rather than about the world” (12). As we write AU fanfiction, we ask ourselves “what if?”: What if Jon was born in 1787? What if he was born in 1987? What if Sansa were a mermaid? What if Jon was a vampire? What if they were baristas or teachers or actors? To entertain these “what ifs,” we construct and elaborate counterfactual blends, projecting the characters into different genres and frames. In these counterfactuals, it is important to fans to get characters “right.” In The Fangirl Life, Kathleen Smith (2016) quotes a fan who explains the role that characters play in the pleasures in and the reasons for reading and writing fic: “I want to know these characters in those time lapses, and their inner thoughts during scenes. The spin their lives would take if they were in 1920s Ireland or in a zombie apocalypse or if they woke up in another body. But most of all I want to see them be true to themselves even then, because that’s why I fell in love with them in the first place” (91). It doesn’t matter if Jon is King in the North, works in an autobody shop, or plays in a rock band, he still needs to be identifiable through the consistent character traits that the community has collectively constructed for him. In AU stories, we want Jon to be Jon, but a Jon that is necessarily different from the version of him we encounter in the medieval fantasy realm of GoT. Pugh (2005) identifies “mimesis” as a goal of fic, and while this might be true for other subgenres, it isn’t in AU fanfiction. The Late Night skit, “Seth Brings Jon Snow to a Dinner Party” (2015), demonstrates how incongruous a memetic representation of Jon is in a modern setting: In the sketch, Jon makes small talk with Manhattan yuppies by warning them about the coming winter and explaining that his ex-girlfriend broke up with him by shooting him in the chest with three arrows. In AU fics, pleasure comes not from imitating Jon’s “voice” (Pugh 2005, 71), but in negotiating the Jon the community knows and the version of him we need for the stories we want to tell. As Busse (2017a) explains, fic writing is a “process of altering a character enough to fit the story but not too far to become unrecognizable” (113). We might cast Jon in different roles, have him play different parts, but he still needs to reflect the character the community has constructed, expects, and desires. To fulfill these desires, Jon still wears black in modern AUs, but he leaves his fur cloak in medieval Westeros. Katherine  Elizabeth McCain (2020) argues that AU fics reduce characters to their “shorthand elements” (162), a way of “distilling characters down to their primary personality

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traits” (173). These traits anchor our understanding of characters across the different fictional narrative spaces they inhabit. We don’t expect the Jon at a dinner party or driving a team of oxen over the Rocky Mountains to speak and act exactly the same as Jon Snow from the series, but we do expect enough of what the collective has extracted and constructed as his “core of character” (Busse 2017a, 113) is projected into the fic, so that we can still understand him as Jon. As long as we can identify the characters, we experience the communal pleasure of inserting him into the story. These character shorthands are important for fan communities, because Jonsa shippers don’t want to read just any love story; they want these stories to be told specifically with Jon and Sansa cast as the romantic leads. As Coppa (2018) explains, “we care about these characters having sex because of our engagement with the transmedia and fanmedia storyworlds from which they came” (191). Inserting characters into new roles enables the members of the fan community to recast characters, shift frames, and write the stories they want told. Pugh (2005) argues, fans write fic because “they wanted either ‘more of’ their source material or ‘more from’ it” (19). Shippers, though, seem to want more of, more from, and more for the characters. They not only want to spend more time with the characters they love, but they want more pleasurable stories for them. Fans remove characters from the dark, gritty fantasy world of GoT and insert them into new frames9—polite Austenian romances, fake-dating romcoms, and fairytales with happy endings10—casting them into new roles in order to tell stories that align with communal desires and expectations. Changes like these are common in fanfiction. Jenkins (1992) explains that fan writers often shift the genre and focus of fic, “placing primary emphasis upon moments that define the character relationships” (169). These fans write stories where characters fall in love over and over again— whether that’s during the nineteenth century, college, or the zombie apocalypse—because there is pleasure in this repeated narrative. In films, Carl Plantinga (2009) observes, “viewers seem to take inherent pleasure in 9  Veerle Van Steenhuyse (2011) argues that different genres often function as a “‘superstructural’ schemata,” as Van Steenhuyse explains, “which create reader expectations about the ‘characters,’ ‘events,’ ‘plot,’ and ‘outcome’ of particular texts” (5). Throughout this chapter, I will be thinking about characters and fic in terms of cognitive frames rather than schemata, because frames are slightly more specific than schema and better reflect the structure of narrative and genre. 10   See Anne Kustritz (2016) for an analysis of fairytale AUs within the Game of Thrones fandom.

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strongly desiring various outcomes for the central characters in a narrative” (31), and through fic, fans not only experience the pleasure of that desire, but also the enjoyment of seeing their preferred outcomes repeatedly play out. As Tumblr user pun-rocker (2015) explains, “You know why I love AUs? Because the whole point of them is that everything is changed, and yet these two people are still going to meet and fall in love- that they’re so set in stone and so meant to be that you can change literally everything in a hundred -universes and they’ll fall in love over and over again.” While fans do write reincarnation fics, AUs in general function as another kind of reincarnation; the characters finding each other and falling in love in different lives, often righting the perceived wrongs of a canon story that kept them apart. Fan collectives develop a sense of the dynamics, the tropes, the moments they want to see, which provides a script for fic writers. Coppa (2006) notes that in fic, like “in theater, stories are retold all the time” (236), and argues that “one could define fan fiction as a textual attempt to make certain characters ‘perform’ according to different behavioral strips” (230). We’re happy to have Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Ethan Hawke, and Tom Hiddleston all play Hamlet, to all recite the same lines, perform the same narrative. In each case, they follow the same script, but the casting and performance of these actors creates a different story. In fic, we cast different versions of Jon, so that the romantic lead is played by principal Jon, werewolf Jon, bodyguard Jon, pirate Jon. In these stories, we see “the recycling of specific narratives and the recycling of specific characters” (Carlson 2003, 17), our pleasure emerging from this recycling, this repetition, this familiarity. There is a pleasure for fans not only in the repetition, but in the nuances, the differences that emerge from casting those iterations of Jon and Sansa into a story. The performativity and theatricality of fanfiction is part of the reason why it is helpful to think about AU fics in terms of casting. Generally, when we talk about casting, we think of assigning an actor a part in a film, television show, or play. However, Cook (2018) argues that casting does not just occur on the stage or for the screen, but we use it to make sense of our daily interactions as we cast those around us into roles (1). In fic, we do the same thing with characters. By deciding which roles Jon or Sansa will play, we are making a statement about how we understand them. But casting is also generative, so that by casting Jon as a CEO, a professor, or a park ranger, we are not only reflecting what we know about him, but generating new ways of conceptualizing his character to test

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again our communally constructed understanding of him. As Cook explains, “A casting director may match the perceived qualities of an actor with the perceived qualities of the character, but the combination is also synergistic; casting a character creates qualities” (2). Casting Jon as a fireman or a mechanic is not just an act of matching the perceived qualities of Jon with the perceived qualities of the frame; it is performative in that a new version of the character emerges from this act. Casting the characters into different roles in different historical eras not only says something about the characters, it does something to the way that we understand them. Casting is about both who we communally perceive and who we desire the character to be. As we write AU fic, the character feels right for certain parts because of the unconscious cognitive operations through which we construct connections between character and role. Through cross-space mapping and selective projection, we make sense of how existing characters fit new parts. We construct counterfactual blends about the characters, projecting our understanding of them onto different narrative scenarios and into different frames. As Fauconnier and Turner (2002) explain, once we have developed a mental space representing a character, we can speculate about what that character would do in other counterfactual situations: “Character transports over frames and remains recognizable in all of them, to the extent that we can ask ‘What would Odysseus do in these circumstances?’ despite the fact that those circumstances are unknown in Odysseus’s world” (249). In AU fic, we ask ourselves, “[W]hat if this character was in that situation or this role?” Answering this question requires “running a blend of an identity and some frame, regardless of whether the person ever occupied such a frame” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 252). It doesn’t matter that in GoT Jon isn’t a midshipman during the Napoleonic Wars, a Jacobite rebel, or an ex-con working at a tattoo parlor; through the operations of conceptual blending, we can still understand what his character would be like in those roles, who Jon would be in those circumstances. Characters shape our understanding of cognitive  frames, and frames shape our understanding of characters. In some cases, Fauconnier and Turner (2002) explain, characters “stay essentially the same over widely different frames” (250). For example, inserting Jon or Sansa into a buy–sell frame does not automatically change anything about their character— though what exactly they are buying or selling might: Jon selling heroin, for example, creates a different Jon than him selling heirloom tomatoes— and one of those likely fits our conceptualization of the character better

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than the other. As Fauconnier and Turner note, in other cases, “frames themselves may be just as substantially linked to characters. Saint, diplomat, hooker, mediator, and conqueror, for instance can all work both ways” (253). Frames like mediator or conqueror can entail certain character traits, which we then map onto our conceptualization of characters; to occupy the mediator or conqueror frame is to be a certain kind of character and organizing Jon and Sansa through those frames generates different versions of them. In AU fic, fans play with the character traits entailed by different frames, determining which fit their perception of characters and which don’t. By casting characters into roles, structuring them through certain frames, we emphasize different aspects of their character. When we write a modern AU in which Jon Snow is a member of the armed forces or veteran recovering from the trauma of his experience at war, that identity shares a frame with his identity as a Man of the Night’s Watch and the leader of the Northern Armies in GoT; in both cases, Jon occupies the frame of soldier. When he is a firefighter, a bodyguard, or an FBI detective, he is structured by the hero frame (Fig. 6.1).11 But what about stories wherein he is a musician, an auto mechanic, or a vampire? Casting Jon into these roles creates

Fig. 6.1  Jon Snow frames, entailments, and roles  I am modeling the layout of this chart on those used by Coulson (2001) in Semantic Leaps.

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a new version of the character, but one that the community can map across mental spaces onto their shared concept of his character. By casting characters into these different roles, organizing them through these different frames, fans construct an understanding of who they are, emphasizing and generating traits, testing the limits and creating a version of the character for the community to cohere around. Casting characters into different roles—shifting the frames through which they are conceptualized—foregrounds certain aspects of the community’s perception of them while deemphasizing others. It is possible for fic writers to cast Jon as a mechanic, soldier, principal, or vampire, for example, because in each case, we selectively project different aspects of his identity into the blend, so that different parts of his character are made more visible than others. In order to make sense of AU fanfiction, different aspects of Jon and Sansa are mapped with our conceptualization of the part they have been cast into. By doing so, we created a blended space where we understand that character as performing that part and through which a different version of the character is generated. There are character traits  that the community has constructed as essential elements of their blend, and these are integrated fairly consistently across fics—their names, their physical appearances, Jon’s broodiness, protectiveness, honor, his enthusiasm for cunnilingus; Sansa’s femininity, her kindness and intelligence, her sweet tooth and love of romance, stories, and lemon cakes—but these elements are projected into the blend in greater or lesser proportion, depending on what the new role calls for. Fans writing Sansa, for example, cast her into many different roles, each of which maps to different aspects of her canonical interests and generates a different understanding of her character to test against a communal conceptualization of her. For example, Tumblr user heartofstarks (2021) posted a pic set of the different career options for Sansa, which include fashion designer, author/poet, and literature professor, among others. Depending on what career we select for her, we are creating a different character, extracting and emphasizing specific aspects of her. Sansa as a fashion designer or seamstress encourages us to map the character in those stories with canon depictions of her making and embroidering her dresses throughout the seasons. Casting Sansa as an author/poet or literature professor invites us to connect this version of the character with her love of songs and stories in the source material, and highlights her creativity and intelligence. While in some high school or college AUs, Sansa is one of the popular girls, in others she is a quiet, nerdy, goody-two shoes. Casting Sansa as popular and casting her as a bookworm creates different

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characters. She is still Sansa, but imagining her in these roles invites us to generate different conceptualizations of her, testing them against our collaboratively constructed understanding of the character. Just as some actors get typecast, playing different iterations of the same roles, fan communities also develop typecasting for characters. When an actor is typecast, their appearance in a film or play prompts us to expect certain things: Gary Oldman is going to be a villain, Michelle Rodrigues is going to kick some ass, and Tom Cruise is going to be a handsome hotshot. Something similar happens in fic. On AO3, the reason that the folksonomic tag “Ramsay Bolton is his own warning” effectively communicates something to GoT fans is because we have already slotted Ramsay into the villain frame, so we know what kind of role we can expect him to play. In the show, Ramsay is a sadist, who rapes and tortures Sansa. That’s typical Ramsay. In the show, Petyr Baelish manipulates Sansa, using her as a pawn to advance his own ambition and desiring her for both her beauty and the political capital a union with her would confer upon him. For this reason, he is often cast in a position of power over Sansa—a teacher, a boss, a guardian—who sexually harasses, abuses, and manipulates her. In contrast, if a story calls for a guy who is a player, a cheater, or just selfish and shallow, the community casts Harry Hardyng. Harry was cut in the HBO adaptation, but in the  ASoIaF novels, he is described as handsome, charming, and is rumored to be the father of at least two bastard children. He is a fuckboy type, and that is the role that fans expect him to play and cast him into, the frame through which his character is organized. This typecasting is reinforced within the fan collective; part of the reason why certain roles feel like they fit Ramsay, Baelish, or Harry better than others is because we have seen them repeatedly cast into these similar parts in fic already produced by the shipping community. Fans come to fics with a conceptualization of characters already in place, built from the roles they play in the show and roles they have been cast into in other fics, and so, when we read their names in a new story their identity is ghosted by their past roles in other texts. It is through names that we construct, access, and anchor our conceptualization of characters; as Cook (2018) puts it, “Names are themselves compressions, ways of encapsulating a person with a tag” (48). We compress the entirety of the person’s identity—their history, present, and future—into their name, so that when we read “Sansa” or “Ramsay,” it evokes the history, the body, the powerful emotional entailments, and our expectations for that character. “Our name, then,” Cook argues, “acts like a casting device, giving others a shorthand

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or sketch of who we may (or may not) be,” noting that “Some names are tainted with the memory of a predecessor” (53).12 When I read “Jon” or “Sansa” in a GoT fic—even when they are in a completely different setting from the show—those names bring with them entailments from the canon of the show and the fantext of the Jonsa community. That is because names function as an “identity connector” across mental spaces, which “does not imply that the counterparts are the same in every respect … [b]ut rather that they share an identity” (Turner 1996, 122). Sansa as debutant in Regency era London is different from Sansa as a modern-day literature professor, but those versions of Sansa are linked and compressed through her name, stabilizing the identity of the character, despite her different iterations. For members of the Jonsa community, as long as the character named “Sansa” gets together with the character named “Jon,” we can bring the associations that make the story so pleasurable. It is not just names, though, that anchor our conceptualizations of characters. Coppa (2006) argues that we come to the fic with knowledge of the “characters’ bodies and voices,” which are shared among the fan community (235). Fic doesn’t often provide long descriptions of characters’ physical appearances because it doesn’t have to; readers come to the fic with shared knowledge of actors’ bodies. But this doesn’t mean that fic is entirely devoid of physical description. Rather fans will include key descriptions as markers of the character—Sansa’s blue eyes, red hair, pale skin, freckles, Jon’s dark curls, beard, muscular build, full lips— anchoring their identity in the body of the actor who plays them and through which the fan community accesses and conceptualizes the character. As Murray Smith (1995) observes, the body not only “individuates characters” but the “continuous body” plays a “role in providing continuity” (115). In fic, the body helps to ensure the continuity of the character, so that when we read Jonsa fanfic and imagine Turner and Harington, which helps us to compress the identity of the characters in that fic and the other versions we have encountered on the show and in the other stories we have read. When an actor is cast into a role, we conceptualize that character through that body, which becomes part of the blend from which the 12  After the end of GoT, there were a lot of jokes and articles about parents who had named their daughters Daenerys or Khaleesi, the Dothraki word for “Queen” and one of Dany’s many titles (McGovern 2019; McNeil 2019). Those names meant one thing when she was a hero, but after her decision to commit war crimes, the associations with that name shifted.

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character emerges. Fanfiction illustrates the importance of the actors’ bodies in anchoring and understanding characters, as we see writers integrating elements of the actors’ bodies into their representation of characters. For example, Turner is an inch taller than her 5’8” costar, and a number of fics mention their respective heights so that Jon is slightly shorter than Sansa. This detail is not one that comes from the novels, but is integrated into our understanding of characters through the bodies of the actors who portray them. In addition, fans use Harington’s body to speculate about and understand what modern Jon would be like. In many fics, for example, when he doesn’t put his contacts in, Jon, like the actor who plays him, wears a pair of wire-framed eyeglasses. Harington’s body becomes a shared touchstone through which the community can anchor their conceptualization of modern Jon, their desire for Jon and Harington conflated and played out through the fantasies they craft and stories they tell through AU fic. Through fic, fan communities play with and reaffirm their understanding of who these characters are. We cast characters into different roles, organize them through different frames, and use them to tell different stories; however, they still have to map onto our collective understanding of who they are. According to Cook (2018), the process of character construction is “one in which human beings ‘cast’ information from one domain to the other, building layers of meaning in a networked assemblage of bodies, histories, biases, actions, and words” (2). As fans construct characters in AU fics, we build conceptual networks that draw on the bodies of the actors, the history of the characters in the canon and fanon, fans’ emotional investment in characters, and our understanding of the roles they are filling. Different elements of the characters are selectively projected so that they can be reframed within different narratives while still remaining a version of themselves. In this way, AU fics both strain and structure the limits of the collective’s conceptualization of who the characters are and who they can be; these stories enact the different narratives desired by the community and reaffirm a shared perception of character. The characters are ghosted not only by the source text, but by all of the other roles they have been cast into, all of the other iterations of their characters that we have seen. We tell these stories with recycled bodies, recycled characters, and they are all the richer for it.

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Thinking through Stories On Tumblr, tell-me-this-isnt-jonsa (2019) announces the purpose of their blog: “Do you marvel at how well Jon and Sansa fit into countless fairy tales, myths, and character archetypes? Is pretty much every romantic couple on film a potential AU for these two. This is a blog for those of us who simply can’t help but see Jonsa everywhere.” This sentiment resonates with the Jonsa shippers who have cast Jon and Sansa into stories ranging from Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Downton Abbey (2010–2015) to Emma (1815) and Tangled (2010) to The Princess Bride (1987) and The Breakfast Club (1985).13 In these stories, we aren’t casting them into roles or types—preppy popular girl, quiet book worm, cowboy, courtesan—rather we are casting them as other characters. We aren’t telling a story that repeats the same tropes or the same script, but are retelling the plot of an existing fairytale, film, or novel, this time with our favorite characters cast as the romantic leads. This practice is referred to as “fusion fic” because of the way that these stories fuse narratives and identities. By doing so, fans use these stories as cognitive tools to think about characters, conceptualizing them as and through the characters they are cast as within the fic. Fans might marvel at the fact that they “simply can’t help but see Jonsa everywhere,” but these connections are not passively received, but actively created by readers. As Mary-Anne Shonoda (2012) reminds us, intertextual references and connections “require readers to fill the relationship gap between primary-text and intertext” (84). In their critically close engagement with the text, Jonsa shippers, as a community, experience pleasure in constructing connections between Jon and Sansa and “pretty much every romantic couple on film” (tell-me-this-isnt-jonsa 2019). These fans perceive Jon and Sansa “everywhere,” but these connections are not inherently in the texts; they are generated as fans link together characters. In doing so, fans insert Jon and Sansa into existing love stories, enacting and reinforcing the shipping community’s understanding of them and desire to see them structured through the romance frame. Drawing on Khost’s theory of literary affordances and Turner’s (1996) discussion of parable, I look at how we use stories to think about other stories, characters to think about other characters. The stories fans cast 13  The fics referenced in this chapter were found by searching for “Alternative Universe Fusion” stories on AO3 within the Jon Snow/Sansa Stark tag, which turned up results for 213 fics.

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characters into function as cognitive tools through which fans’ communal thinking about characters is enacted. Like the casting we saw in AU fanficton, the casting choices that writers make  in fusion fics are representative of the ways that the communities conceptualize these characters and their relationships. But they are also generative of new understandings. Casting Jon and Sansa into existing stories does something more than just demonstrate the way that these characters and their relationship is perceived by members of the Jonsa shipping community; it creates new versions of the characters that reshape and reframe our experience of the source texts. As we read fusion fic, which character fits into each part is not determined individually, but is “ecological” (Cook 2018, 105), character entailments informing the intertextual network of character relationships that fans create when they insert characters from one story into another. In fusion fics, we think about characters with and through other texts. I have previously written about how we can think of fusion fics in terms of what Khost (2018) calls a “literary affordance” (Hautsch 2018). The term “affordance,” as used by ecological psychologist James J. Gibson (1983) and cognitive scientist Anthony Chemero (2003), refers to the way that our cognition is embedded in and enacted through our environment. They argue that we perceive and make use of our environment within the context of specific circumstances and according to our needs and abilities—the organism, environment, and situation integrated into a cognitive system. Khost applies this idea to literature and culture, arguing that we make rhetorical use of literary texts. These affordances are not about the text, but about using the text: “[W]hereas an interpretation is a textual response that is about the text, a literary affordance is a response to something else through a text” (2, emphasis original). For example, Khost suggests that the most famous instance of literary affordance is Sigmund Freud’s use of Oedipus Rex to describe a stage of psychosexual development (3). Freud’s affordance of the Oedipus myth, Khost argues, presents his theory in a way that makes it more accessible, suggesting that “his difficult and controversial theory becomes easier to understand and remember” (3). By compressing the myth and the psychoanalytic concept, we use the story as a cognitive tool, thinking with and through it to make sense of the theory. Examining fusion fics through the lens of literary affordance helps us to see the ways in which cognition about texts is distributed throughout the fan community and the social, textual, and cultural environment it creates. Literary affordances are inherently and explicitly intertextual

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practices—and so is fanfiction. Roland Barthes (1977) argues that texts are “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). Julia Kristeva (1980) makes a similar assertion about intertextuality, describing texts as “a mosaic of quotations” arguing that “any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66). In fusion fic, stories are “absorbed” and “blended,” new meaning emerging through this “mosaic.” They are both the content and the context from which we produce meaning. Though fans’ critically close, intertextual engagement with stories, they use texts to not just say something about other texts, but to actively think about them. As we read fusion fic, our cognition is distributed across an (inter)textual environment, so that we are not just thinking about the relationships between stories, but thinking through them to generate new meaning. Conceptual blending theory is central to understanding how we make an affordance of one text to think about another, helping us to understand the cognitive operations that are at work as we construct links between stories. Turner (1996) argues that our ability to understand one story into terms of another—what he refers to as “parable”—is a basic cognitive tool through which we make sense of the world. He explains that in order to understand parables, we build connections between mental spaces, linking them together, so that “one story is projected onto another” (5). Through this projection, a blended space emerges, which then reflects back onto the input texts. Turner argues that “parable typically distributes meaning over many spaces. The aggregate meaning resides in no one of them, but rather in the array of spaces and in their connections” (85). As we fusion fanfic, meaning does not emerge from the source text (GoT) or the other input text (Emma, The Princess Bride, or Downton Abbey, for example). Instead, meaning comes from the links that we generate between mental spaces; meaning is not a singular entity or a linear progression, but a network formed through interaction and conceptual integration (Turner 1996, 57). Like AUs fanfiction, meaning in fusion fic is constructed through our ability to cast characters into new roles as they take on the part of other characters in these stories. But even though we are casting characters into these various narratives we still conceptualize them as themselves. For readers, the pleasure of fusion fic is in seeing those characters in that story. So, just as “[t]he actor is never inviable, never wholly subsumed by the identity of the character,” characters in fusion fic are “never wholly subsumed by” the role into which they have been cast (Cook 2018, 23).

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We remain aware of characters as they are represented in both of the source texts, the analogic and disanalogic relationships that emerge through casting choices changing the way that we conceptualize, not only beloved characters but also the characters we cast them as.14 Fan enjoyment of these stories is not only in the repetition of characters but the difference and nuance that emerges from casting one character as another. As we cast these characters into these new roles, we create links between them, projecting some elements of our understanding of the characters, while dropping others. The fusion fic “And Then There Was You” by Periwinkle39 (2019), for example, takes the characters from GoT and casts them as characters in Downton Abbey. At first glance, the BBC’s Edwardian drama has little in common with HBO’s gritty fantasy. But both shows deal with themes of family, power, class, and change, and these similarities allow fans to map connections between characters based on the roles they play in their families and societies. Part of the pleasure of reading these stories is making connections between the characters (Fig.  6.2), in

Fig. 6.2  Mapping Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey 14  Fans will also often put notes explaining to readers that they need not be familiar with both stories to follow the fic, but the experience of reading these texts are richer when we are familiar with both.

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understanding how Sansa fits as Mary  Crawley, how  Jon works as her handsome, lower-class cousin and eventual love interest. Sansa makes sense—or rather we make sense of her—as Mary Crawley because we can connect her propriety, her cool exterior, her determination to fulfill her duty to her family by marrying well to Sansa. Jon fits as the lower-class relation, Matthew Crawley,  who never expected to inherit and has no desire to take his cousins’ home from them because we can map those traits onto his character arc in GoT. In contrast, casting Sansa’s sister Arya as Mary doesn’t work because the links between those characters aren’t as easy to map. Arya’s rejection of the strictures of her society and the expectations foisted upon her as an aristocratic woman make her a better fit for Mary’s younger suffragette sister, Sybil. These casting choices might seem evident to Jonsa shippers—of course you would cast Sansa as Mary and Arya as Sybil, and not the other way around—but that is only because of the understanding of each character that we have constructed and the complex mental operations that map links between the input spaces and create connections between them. As we cast characters as other characters, aspects of them and their relationships are dropped in order to make sense of them in their new roles. For example, one of the elements that is excluded as we map connections between and project Sansa onto Mary and Jon onto Matthew is Jon and Sansa’s close familial relation. Jon and Sansa were raised together at Winterfell, believing they were half-siblings. During Season Eight that they learn that they are actually cousins, and while it is common practice for cousins in Westeros to marry, some viewers found it squicky15 for Jon and Sansa to get together because of the quasi-incestuous nature of their relationship. But when we cast them as Mary and Matthew—fourth cousins, who had not met prior to the events of the television show—Jon and Sansa assume a more distant, and, for some, a more palatable, relation. As Coulson (2001) explains, “blending provides a way of changing the relative prominence of a particular frame … and of skirting the need to address controversy in a particular domain” (197). By casting Jon and Sansa as Matthew and Mary, the family frame is dropped and we structure the characters’ relationship through the romance frame, thereby avoiding the incest controversy associated with this ship. How the community frames the relationship between characters, then, plays an important role in terms of deciding whether or not casting fits. As  “Squick” is a fan term for something that they find disgusting or intensely unappealing.

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Cook (2018) explains, “We do not ‘read’ characters one at a time like some kind of semiotic processing machine … spectators do not make sense of characters in isolation” (105). Rather, characters and casting gain meaning within the ecology of the narrative and in relation to one another. As we cast the characters from GoT into these other narratives, we decide who should fill which roles not just by considering the traits of the individual characters but also the ways in which the characters interact and the relationships between them. For example, in “As You Wish” by OftheDireWolves (2018), Jon is cast as The Princess Bride’s dashing romantic hero Westley and Sansa as the beautiful Princess Buttercup. As we cast Jon into that role, we create connections between the characters: Jon, for example, shares not only Westley’s fashion sense—they are, after all, both men in black—but also his bravery, his skill as a fighter, and miraculous resurrection after being, at least, mostly dead. Sansa, like Buttercup, is a beautiful woman forced into a betrothal with a monstrous prince. But we also make sense of Jon’s Westley in terms of Sansa’s Buttercup. If we don’t see the romantic subtext between Jon and Sansa, their casting as Westly and Buttercup doesn’t fit. The casting of other characters in the fic is similarly ecological (Fig. 6.3). Joffrey, for example, works as Prince Humperdinck not just because they are both pompous, entitled, abusive assholes, but also because we can map connections between Joff’s betrothal to Sansa and Humperdinck and Buttercup’s.

Fig. 6.3  The Princess Bride/Game of Thrones casting ecology

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This casting works because it matches the frames the community organizes the characters’ relationships through. Fans also play with casting by slotting characters into roles that are against type in order to generate different perceptions, meanings, and versions of the characters. For example, in a pic set titled “Normally I like dark, gritty reboots but you have to admit the original was much funnier” (2016), we see how casting against type shapes interpretation. In it, Cersei Lannister, one of the primary political antagonists on GoT, is cast in the role of The Princess Bride’s romantic heroine Buttercup. Doing so creates an emergent space where Cersei’s frame shifts from villain to damsel. Casting Cersei as Buttercup creates a network of associations that include not only the visible physical similarities between Robin Wright’s and Lena Headey’s embodiment of their characters, but also Cersei being trapped in an affectionless marriage to King Robert Baratheon, whom she was forced to wed for political reasons. The reframing that emerges within the blended space of the fusion fic, then projects back onto the source text. It invites us to view Cersei in a more favorable light through the lens of Buttercup; we reframe her as a princess and damsel rather than a villain (Fig. 6.4). In short, by using Buttercup as a tool to think about Cersei, we conceptualize her in a different way, increasing her sympathy but also decreasing her agency. This process of casting Cersei as Buttercup is not just about making these connections but is also performative, transforming our perception of characters.

Fig. 6.4  Casting Cersei as Buttercup: Constructing connections, shifting frames, changing roles

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Cersei’s is not the only frame that shifts through the casting of this pic set. For example, it casts fan favorite Tyrion Lannister as the scheming villain Vizzini, who masterminds Buttercup’s kidnapping and plans her murder at Humperdinck’s request. Both Vizzini and Tyrion are clever men who “drink and know things” (“Home” 2019); however, Tyrion is a relatively sympathetic character and a favorite among fans. Casting him as Vizzini encourages us to reframe him as a schemer and villain, inviting us to understand him from Cersei’s—who wrongfully suspects that he murdered her son Joffrey—perspective (Fig. 6.5). She sees him as a villain and we are invited to do the same. The casting of these characters is also ecological. Tyrion doesn’t work as well in this role if we cast Sansa as Buttercup, because their relationship brings a different set of entailments to the parts; his casting as Vizzini makes sense only if we think about him in terms of his relationship to his sister rather than the broader plot of the show. This ecology of casting invites us to engage in pattern completion as we fill in the parts of the story, what Coulson (2001) describes as our ability to elaborate a blend (122). The roles in these stories provide us with specific frames that we match with what we know of the characters and their network of interrelationships. For example, even though he is not featured in the picture set, viewers can complete the blend so that King Robert Baratheon, Cersei’s husband, is cast into the role of Prince Humperdinck. By doing so, we shift his frame. While Robert is an unfaithful and abusive husband, a drunk, and an irresponsible king, he is generally not treated as a villain in the source text. However, by viewing him through the lens of Humperdinck, Robert’s antagonism toward

Fig. 6.5  Reframing characters through casting

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Cersei is foregrounded, which is then projected onto the show, inviting readers to shift Robert’s frame to that of a villain. The casting of these characters into The Princess Bride is made more meaningful because of their relationships to each other, as we view not only the individual characters but the ecology of their relationships through new frames. Just thinking about these characters in those roles requires us to shift our understanding of them, the versions of these characters that emerge from this process of integration projected back onto the source texts. As darkmagyk comments on imagineagreatadventures’s (2018) Emma/Game of Thrones fusion fic “Sansa: A NOVEL in Five Parts,” “My favorite AUs are ones where the characters fit into the new roles so well, while also bringing an extra dimension to the idea.” Natasharostovas (2018) expands on this idea, noting that, “All your choices when it came to the characters were so well thought out, Sansa as Emma was my favorite thing, but Jaime/ Brienne as Frank/Jane was such a brilliant choice too, as were all the others hehe, this one caught my eye because I never would have thought about it. But now that it’s here i can see that it fits them so well.” Casting Jaime Lannister—one of the early antagonists of Game of Thrones who is later, somewhat, redeemed—and Brienne of Tarth—a female fighter who wishes to be a knight and forms an unlikely friendship and romance with Jaime— in the roles of Frank  Churchill and Jane Fairfax  requires that we think about those characters in a different way. As theworldunseen (2019) comments, “I feel like this story was made for me lmao. Me, suddenly caring about Frank Churchill lol.” By casting Jaime in that role, we bring our emotional connection to and communal understanding of him to our perception of Churchill, transforming that character through our intertextual engagement with him, and reshaping our conceptualization of and affective connection to him. We perceive Frank Churchill in a different way because we understand him through our previous emotional, embodied, and communal engagement with Jaime. The power of these blends, then, is in their ability to invite us to experience the same characters over and over again, but with a difference that emerges through each of these repetitions. As we think with and through these texts, we map connections between them, shifting frames into which we slot characters and our understanding of them. Turner (1996) argues that parables are fundamental to human thought, that “we think, invent, plan, decide, reason, imagine, and persuade” through them (“preface”). In fusion fic, we think with and through these stories, our cognition about these characters offloaded onto, across, and extended through existing

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narratives. Our ability to make affordances of stories to conceptualize them in terms of each other, allows us to create new insights about characters as we slot them into narratives, casting them into new roles. These fics are performative, not just reinforcing ways of thinking about characters, but generating and inviting new ways of thinking about and through them within a community of fan readers.

Conclusion: Cognitive Flexibility Conceptual blending theory and cognitive frames can help us to understand how we construct a communal understanding of characters. Fanfiction is performative, we use it to strain and distill understandings of characters as we cast them into different roles and conceptualize them through different frames. Through fic, fan communities test the limits of who characters are and determine who they are not. This characterization is self-reinforcing as it is shared and repeated throughout the fan collective. Through fanfiction and other fanworks, fans collectively construct understandings of characters, and, in doing so, build communities. Fans take advantage of our ability to creatively blend narratives and characters in the stories that they write. They retell Pride and Prejudice (1813), Romeo and Juliet (1597), and Jane Eyre (1847), casting and recasting roles, blending them with Game of Thrones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Witcher. These stories are reused to think about others stories, the characters recast in each iteration. As Fauconnier and Turner (2002) assert, “We may create different blends out of the same inputs” (26). Conceptual blending theory helps to explain how we can cast not only Jon and Sansa as Westley and Buttercup, but how we can also construct a blended space in which Jaime and Cersei, Buffy and Spike, or Geralt and Jaskier take on those roles. Just like we understand multiple actors playing King Lear or Lady Macbeth, we can make sense of casting these different characters into the same roles. And just as casting Anthony Hopkins creates a different Lear than Ian McKellen, different characters emerge when I cast Sansa as Buttercup then when I cast Cersei, Buffy, or Jaskier. Different Buttercups and different stories are generated through this casting, but we are still able to make sense of all them because of our ability to link together different mental spaces. Certain casting might feel like a better fit, more in keeping with our understanding of and desires for the characters, but in each case, we are able to run the blend and make sense of these fusions.

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Conceptual blending also explains how we are able to run blends that cast Jon as a boxer, a racecar driver, a soccer coach, a  D&D nerd, a midshipman during the Napoleonic wars, Cousin Matthew, and Westley; how we can make sense of Sansa as a baker, a novelist, a political science major, a secretary, Lady Mary Crawley, and Buttercup. And we can do all of this while still understanding these characters as Jon and Sansa, their identities connected despite their differences. Indeed, part of the pleasure of these fics is in their multiplicity. As one fan commented on “Sansa: A NOVEL,” “I just rewatched Northanger Abbey and realized JonSa is perfect as Tilney and Catherine too! But I really wish I could find these two as Darcy and Elizabeth in a good fanfic” (rosalyn 2019). The problem is not that Jon and Sansa are cast into too many roles for Jonsa shippers, but that they are not cast in enough. Part of the pleasures of reading and writing these fics is in mapping more of these connections, casting characters into more of these roles, and inviting other members of the fan collective to do the same.

References @DanArndtWrites. 2021. Bilbo tells the best stories. Twitter. https://twitter. com/DanArndtWrites/status/1368245790804697092. @kushisensei. 2021. Tyrion Lannister. He Has a Way with Words and His Knowledge Allows Him to Paint Scenery Like no Other. I Think he’ll be an Interesting, Albeit a Bit “Out There” DM.  Twitter. https://twitter.com/ kushisensei/status/1368245911835512839. @Wizards_DND. 2021. If You Could Play D&D with any Fictional Character as Your Dungeon Master, Who Would You Choose and Why? Twitter. https:// twitter.com/Wizards_DnD/status/1368245490228355078/. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O.  Urmson. Eastford: Martino Fine Books, 2018. First published by Harvard University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Brawltogethernow. 2019. Fanfiction Is So Wild Cause. Reblogged Post, originally posted by raveneil, 2019. Tumblr. https://brawltogethernow.tumblr.com/ post/186474405400/fanfiction-­is-­so-­wild-­cause-­im-­likeugh-­im-­not Busse, Kristina. 2017a. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ———. 2017b. Intimate Intertextuality and Performative Fragments in Media Fanfiction. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C.  Lee Harrington, 2nd ed., 45–59. New York: New York University Press.

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Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson. 2006. Introduction: Work in Progress. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristen Busse, 5–32. Jefferson: McFarland. Busse, Kristina, and Louisa Stein. 2009. Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context. In Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities, ed. Kristina Busse, 121–139. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. Previously published in Popular Communication 7.4. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Chemero, Anthony. 2003. An Outline of a Theory of Affordances. Ecological Psychology 15: 181–195. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326969ECO1502_5. Coleman, Susanna. 2010. Making Our Voices Heard: Young Adult Females Writing Participatory Fan Fiction. In Writing and the Digital Generation, ed. Heather Urbanski, 95–105. Jefferson: McFarland. Cook, Amy. 2018. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Coppa, Francesca. 2006. Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 225–244. Jefferson: McFarland. ———. 2017. The Fanfiction Reader: Folktales for the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2018. Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 189–206. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic Leaps: Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. darkmagyk. 2018. Comment on Sansa: A NOVEL in Five Parts, Chapter 1, posted by Imagineagreatadventures, 2018. Archive of Our Own. https:// archiveofourown.org/works/13432770/chapters/30785340 Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in this Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gerrig, Richard J., and David N. Rapp. 2004. Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact. Poetics Today 25: 265–281. https://doi.org/10.121 5/03335372-­25-­2-­265. Gibson, James. 1983. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Westport: Praeger. Hautsch, Jessica. 2018. “One of your little pop culture references”: Argument, Intertextuality, and Literary Affordance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fanfiction. Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy+ 16.

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heartofstarks. 2021. Sansa Stark Week 21 Mordern Au Career Options. Tumblr. https://heartofstarks.tumblr.com/post/651538144189202432/sansa-­stark-­ week-­2021-­modern-­au-­career-­options “Home.” 2019. Game of Thrones, season 6, episode 2. HBO, 12 May. Horton, Donald, and Richard Wohl. 1956. Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance. Psychiatry 19: 215–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049. Imagineagreatadventures. 2018. Sansa: A NOVEL in Five Parts. Archive of Our Own. https://archiveofourown.org/works/13432770/chapters/30785340. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Routledge, 2013. Khost, Peter. 2018. Rhetor Response: A Theory and Practice of Literary Affordance. Logan: Utah State University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Edited by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kustritz, Anne. 2016. “They All Lived Happily Ever After. Obviously”: Realism and Utopia in Game of Thrones-Based Alternate Universe Fairy Tale Fan Fiction. Humanities 5. https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020043 Late Night with Seth Meyers. 2015. Seth Brings Jon Snow to a Dinner Party. Late Show with Seth Meyers, NBC.  YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BabsgCQhpu4 Liebers, Nicole, and Holger Schramm. 2019. Parasocial Interactions and Relationships with Media Characters–An Inventory of 60 Years of Research. Communication Research Trends: Centre for the Study of Communication and Culture 38: 2–31. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405186407.wbiecp006. Martin, George R.R. 2010a. Someone is Angry on the Internet. This is Not a Blog. https://grrm.livejournal.com/151914.html ———. 2010b. Comment on Someone is Angry on the Internet, originally posted by George R.R.  Martin. This is Not a Blog. https://grrm.livejournal. com/151914.html McCain, Katharine Elizabeth. 2020. Today Your Barista Is: Genre Characteristics in The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe. PhD Dissertation. Columbia: The Ohio State University. McGovern, Kyle. 2019. So You Named Your Kid Daenerys. How’s That Feel Now? Vulture, 13 May. https://www.vulture.com/2019/05/game-­of-­thrones-­parents-­ daenerys-­name.html McNeil, Stephanie. 2019. Here’s What People Who Named Their Baby ‘Khaleesi’ Think Of Last Night’s Episode. Buzzfeed, 13 May. https://www.buzzfeednews. com/article/stephaniemcneal/what-­moms-­of-­babies-­named-­khaleesi-­think Natasharostovas. 2018. Comment on Sansa: A NOVEL in Five Parts, Chapter 3, posted by Imagineagreatadventures, 2018. Archive of Our Own. https:// archiveofourown.org/works/13432770/chapters/30785340

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“Normally I like dark, gritty reboots but you have to admit the original was much funnier.” 2016. Imagur. https://imgur.com/gallery/VhVwHBh OftheDireWolves. 2018. As You Wish. Archive of Our Own. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15809997 Periwinkle39. 2019. And Then There Was You. Archive of Our Own. https:// archiveofourown.org/works/19822819/chapters/46936519 Plantinga, Carl. 2009. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkley: University of California Press. Pugh, Sheenagh. 2005. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press. pun-rocker. 2015. You Know Why I Love AUs. Tumblr. https://johnlockdivis i o n . t u m b l r . c o m / p o s t / 9 5 1 7 5 7 0 2 5 2 7 / pun-­rocker-­you-­know-­why-­i-­love-­aus-­because-­the raveneil. 2019. Fanfiction Is So Wild Cause. Tumblr. https://brawltogethernow. t u m b l r . c o m / p o s t / 1 8 6 4 7 4 4 0 5 4 0 0 / fanfiction-­is-­so-­wild-­cause-­im-­likeugh-­im-­not Rosalyn. 2019. Comment on Sansa: A NOVEL in Five Parts, Chapter 5, posted by Imagineagreatadventures, 2018. Archive of Our Own. https://archiveofourown.org/works/13432770/chapters/30785340 Rosenblatt, Louise M. 1978. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transaction Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shonoda, Mary-Anne. 2012. Metaphor and Intertextuality: A Cognitive Approach to Intertextual Meaning-Making in Metafictional Fantasy Novels. International Research in Children’s Literature 5: 81–96. https://doi.org/10.3366/ IRCL.2012.0045. Smith, Kathleen. 2016. The Fangirl Life: A Guide to All the Feels and Learning How to Deal. New York: TarcherPerigee. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stasi, Mafalda. 2006. The Toy Soldiers from Leeds: The Slash Palimpsest. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 115–133. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. tell-me-this-isnt-jonsa. 2019. Introducing Tell Me This Isnt Jonsa a New Blog. Tumblr. https://tell-­me-­this-­isnt-­jonsa.tumblr.com/post/187781052550/ introducing-­tell-­me-­this-­isnt-­jonsa-­a-­new-­blog ThatOneWaterCat. 2022. Comment on Sometimes he Would Not Fucking Say That. Tumblr. https://www.tumblr.com/tonysopranobignaturals/701099356448849920/sometimes-­he-­would-­not-­fucking-­say-­that-­isnt

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theworldunseen. 2019. Comment on Sansa: A NOVEL in Five Parts, Chapter 2, posted by Imagineagreatadventures, 2018. Archive of Our Own. https:// archiveofourown.org/works/13432770/chapters/30785340 tonysopranobignaturals. 2022. Sometimes He Would Not Fucking Say That. Tumblr. https://www.tumblr.com/tonysopranobignaturals/701099356448849920/ sometimes-­he-­would-­not-­fucking-­say-­that-­isnt Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, Victor. 1980. Social Dramas and Stories about Them. In On Narratives, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, 137–164. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Steenhuyse, Veerle. 2011. The Writing and Reading of Fan Fiction and Transformation Theory. Comparative Literature and Culture 13. https://doi. org/10.7771/1481-­4374.1691.

CHAPTER 7

Epilogue

I am scrolling through Tumblr—again—as I do almost every night while I brush my teeth and get ready to go to sleep. Tonight, I come across a gif set by Jonsasnow (2017). There are eight gifs in two columns: four are of Sophie Turner’s March of 2016 interview with Christopher John Farley of the Wall Street Journal, promoting Game of Thrones’s (GoT) (2011–2018) sixth season, the others are of Kit Harington during a May 2016 interview with Jimmy Fallon, discussing the long anticipated revelation of Jon Snow’s resurrection. As I read the captions on the gifs, though, they reframe my understanding of what I am seeing, the meaning that I make from the images and their combination. This gif set is an example of what Paul Booth (2010) and Nistasha Perez (2013) identify as “gif fics,” narratives constructed by combining recaptioned extant footage of actors—in and outside of the story world of the fan object—to create counternarratives. In the case of this gif fic, the captions invite me to understand the gifs as not being of Turner and Harington, but Sansa Stark  and Jon  Snow, who are cast as  actors being asked questions about the rumors that their on-screen chemistry has led to a real-world romance. In his book Playing Fans (2015), Booth defines gif fics as “the combination of multiple gifs together to create a story line. Although the narrative may be unique to the gif fic, each of the images is a pastiche of a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Hautsch, Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32450-5_7

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particular moment from the original text, often subtitled with fans’ original dialogue” (26). According to Perez (2013), gif fics originated in the Harry Potter fandom when fans began to make affordances of developing Internet technologies to recaption gifs and arrange them into narratives of “one to ten gifs, with many containing either four or six to maintain the gif’s symmetrical balance” (152). Their concise format means that gif fics communicate only “snippets of a story” (Perez 152); they give us a sliver of narrative and we fill in the gaps to construct the story. Throughout this book, I have discussed the cognitive operations that underpin how we understand footage of these two actors giving interviews not as Turner and Harington, but as Sansa and Jon, and how we can cast these characters from a medieval fantasy world as actors in our own romantic fantasy. The ease with which fans understand fanworks, like this gif fic, belies the complex and creative but unconscious mental operations that must be done to make sense of them. In order to understand of these gifs, we compress actors and characters so that we are able to understand Turner and Harington’s bodies and gestures as being those of Sansa and Jon—even though they aren’t in costume or character. We sense into and live through their movements, understanding what their bodies are doing through our own, our embodied cognition embedded in narrative, emotional, and communal contexts that influence our perception of their bodies, gestures, and feelings. As we look at these gifs, we live through the way that Sansa’s hands fidget, clasp together, her small smile as she looks down, pausing after having been asked a question, and we understand her movements and facial configuration as indicative of her nerves, her desire to keep her feelings for Jon secret as she discusses the nature of their relationship. We understand Jon’s smiles and guffaws as his not entirely convincing attempt to laugh off questions about paparazzi pictures. We do so not by coolly analyzing their movements from a distant and disembodied perspective. Rather, our physical and emotional responses are our interpretation of the images, an integral part of how we make meaning from and understand them. This gif fic also illustrates the communal and collaborative nature of thinking within fandom, the way that cognition is extended beyond the body of the individual fan and throughout the fan collective. We make sense of this gif fic in part because we understand the textual, social, and cultural conventions of animated gifs; we know that the words superimposed on the gifs in that typographic style are captions because of our experience with the medium. More than that, we have previously

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encountered how gifs and text work together, how words can recontextualize our perception of gestures and expressions, how images can shape our understanding of words. We know how to make sense of them within this context, community, and cognitive ecology. This knowledge and practice helps us to understand of how the story in the gif fic is being told. The story, too, is part of the cognitive ecology of fandom. The narrative of Jon and Sansa falling in love has been told over and over again by the fans who ship them, shaping what they anticipate, desire, and perceive. While not as popular as some other AUs, there are currently thirteen Jon/ Sansa actor AUs tagged on AO3. The tropes in this gif fic are familiar, too. Jon and Sansa refer to each other as their “best friend,” so we can easily slot them into the friends-to-lovers frame. We know the story, so we anticipate how the brief glimpse of it that we get of it here will end because we already know the characters, the beats, and the narrative that the Jonsa fan community desires. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to see it play out. In response to this gif fic, klarojonsa (2020) comments “THIS.  NEEDS.  TO. BE. A. FIC!! /My reaction when it becomes one:” followed by a gif of Lauren Conrad (of Laguna Beach (2004–2006) and The Hills (2006–2010) fame), her eyes wide, mouth open, hands waving, fluttering. This comment performs an emotional and embodied desire for and excitement about this fic, not despite their knowledge of what will happen in the story, but because of it. Shippers want to read this fic because they know the tropes, know the story, and want to experience the pleasure—the feels—of it playing out—again and again. By reblogging and replying to this gif fic with their comments, fans cohere a community by repeating and rehearsing their emotional and embodied to see this narrative enacted through the different mediums of fandom. The focus of my work has not been what fans think, but how they think—through their feelings, their bodies, and their communities. While I have, at times, provided analysis of specific fan artifacts—like the gif fic above—to illustrate the concepts I have been discussing, I hope that the main take away from this work is not the close readings of individual fanworks but a methodology for understanding them and why this work is valuable. This book draws on research in the cognitive sciences, cognitive linguistics, cognitive philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience that challenge us to think about our thinking in different ways, to conceptualize our mind as not a rational, disembodied part of our being—which can be

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disentangled from our flesh, feelings, and environment—but embodied, extended, enacted, and embedded. These ways of thinking about the mind are especially productive for theorizing what I refer to as fans’ “critically close” engagement with texts. Contrasting critically close reading practices with the academia’s ideal of critical distance, fans’ approach to reading draws attention to the way in which our meaning-making is embodied, emotional, and communal. The mind cannot be separated from the body, because we think with and through our body. Feelings cannot be separated from thinking, because they are a part of our cognitive system. Cognition is not located within the individual but is distributed across physical, social, and cultural environments; we think with and through the contexts in which we find ourselves as we make affordances of the material, textual, social, and digital ecologies in which our thinking is embedded. We rehearse our cognition within communities, sharing not just ideas, but ways of thinking, passing on not only interpretations, but ways of interpreting. These cognitive practices are performative, not only in the sense that they are on display for other members of the community, but in that they change the text, the characters, the story, the mind, the world. Texts, like this gif fic, are not an artifact of fan thinking, but an act of it—a performance that generates something and passes down fannish, critically close ways of thinking about and responding to texts. I want to end this book not with a conclusion but an invitation to other scholars to put their scholarship about the thinking, feeling, creating, and performing that readers do in conversation with the research being done in cognitive science and philosophy. Throughout my work, I have talked about fan collectives as not only communities of affinity, but communities of thought, feeling, and practice, cognitive ecologies that fans think with and through. Through their creative works, fans rehearse ways of interpreting texts, of understanding characters, of constructing counterfactual narratives. Fan studies as a discipline is another ecology, the field offers an environment that we think with and through. My hope is that this book offers a different vantage point from which to view fans and fandom, reception and creation, and that other scholars will find it helpful to think about bodies, emotion, and meaning-making from this perspective. In this way, I see my book as part of the repertoire of fan studies. Much like the fanworks that I discuss throughout it, it is not an artifact of thinking, but an act of thinking, rehearsing an approach to reading and writing that I encourage other scholars to take up, try out, and perform as well.

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References Booth, Paul. 2010. Digital Fandom 2.0, Revised ed., 2016. Bern: Peter Lang. ———. 2015. Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Jonsasnow. 2017. Modern AU Jon Snow and Sansa Stark Are Costars. Tumblr. https://digirhetgirl.tumblr.com/post/657913396773240832/jonsasnow-­modern-­ au-­jon-­snow-­and-­sansa-­stark Klarojonsa. 2020. Modern AU Jon Snow and Sansa Stark are Costars. Tumblr. https://klarojonsa.tumblr.com/post/634122784669417472/jonsaagenda-­ jonsasnow-­modern-­au-­jon-­snow Perez, Nistasha. 2013. GIF Fics and the Rebloggable Canon of SuperWhoLock. In Fan Phenomena: “Doctor Who,”  ed. Paul Booth, 16–27. Bristol: Intellect Books.

Index1

A Actor, see Casting; Performance Affect theory, 5, 26 Affordance, 23, 80, 142n2, 201, 210 literary, 173, 192–194 of editing techniques, 86 of fanvids, 143 of gifs, 84, 85, 88 technological, 80–82, 85, 141, 142, 208 Ahmed, Sara, 5 Alexander, Leigh, 93 Animated gif, see Gif Archive of Our Own, 1–4, 39, 39n2, 181, 182n8, 189 Aubrey, Jennifer Stevens, 8 Austin, John L., 27, 74, 165, 176

B Bad fans, 9 Bad readers, 7, 25 Bakhshi, Saehed, 79 Barker, Jennifer M., 28, 76n4 Barnes, Jennifer L., 87n11 Barratt, Daniel, 161n9 Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 16, 16n13, 18, 30, 39n3, 40, 51, 53, 53n13, 54, 62n19, 75, 79, 83, 88, 89, 156, 157 Barthes, Roland, 194 Beardsley, Monroe C., 25 Behm-Morawitz, Elizabeth, 8 Benjamin, Walter, 88 Berlant, Lauren, 5 Bernstein, Robin, 74 Black Sails, 2, 28, 160, 163n10 Charles Vane, 160–165, 163n10

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Hautsch, Mind, Body, and Emotion in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32450-5

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INDEX

Blair, Rhonda, 21, 143 Bledel, Alexis, 114 Bolens, Guillemette, 5 Bomer, Matt, 114, 115, 120, 125 Booth, Paul, 4n8, 7, 9, 24, 43, 43n7, 47, 62, 64, 94, 96, 148, 207 Bourlai, Elli E., 79, 79n8, 80 Bradway, Tyler, 8 Branigan, Edward, 161 Braubaker, Jed R., 75 Brown, Katherine, 94 Brubaker, Philip, 162 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2, 28, 151, 201 Buffy Summers, 2, 151–153, 165, 201 Spike, 2, 151–153, 165, 201 Burwell, Catherine, 149 Busse, Kristina, 9, 18, 19, 25n15, 28, 40, 43n6, 144, 173, 175, 179, 180, 182–184 C Cacioppo, John T., 80, 82 Canon, 15n12, 22, 73, 73n3, 85, 93–96, 98, 123, 131, 146, 157, 158, 164, 165, 171, 173, 175, 178–181, 185, 188, 190, 191 Caracciolo, Marco, 5 Carlson, Marvin, 48, 109, 119, 119n2, 127, 129, 145, 175, 185 Carroll, James M., 156 Carroll, Noël, 92, 150, 161 Cartesian dualism, 6, 11, 209, 210 Castano, Emanuele, 87n11 Casting, 4, 30, 32, 108, 109, 125, 132, 145, 185, 208 of actors, 109, 111–113, 185, 190 adaptation, 107, 113, 114, 117, 132, 174n4 against type, 198

colorblind, 123, 124 color conscious, 123 as community building, 115 community formation, 117 controversy, 114; backlash, 114, 121, 121n4, 121n5, 124n10 cosplay, 121, 122 counter casting, 31, 124, 125 director, 173, 186 diversity, 122 ecology, 32, 197, 199 Fan cast (see Dreamcasting) hyperdiegetic, 129 names, 189 as performative, 108, 113, 117 'right for the part', 118, 120, 121 speculation, 107 through fanfiction, 173, 182–185, 187–189, 191, 192, 194–196, 198–202 through fanvids, 157, 158, 161, 163, 164 through frame-shifting, 91 through gifs, 58–60, 98, 99, 207 through vids, 144 typecast, 189 whitewashing, 122 Catharsis, 29, 49, 50, 63 anti-catharsis, 29, 49, 65 Catmur, Caroline, 76n4, 79n7 Cavill, Henry, 71, 72, 82, 83 Cerulo, Karen A., 90 Chalmers, David, 23, 143 Chemero, Anthony, 80, 193 Cho, Alexander, 79n8 Clark, Andy, 23, 143 Click, Melissa A., 8 Cochran, Tanya R., 129 Coëgnarts, Maarten, 128 Cognitive ecology, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 143–145, 148, 150, 156, 165, 173, 175, 209, 210

 INDEX 

Cognitive frame, 12–14, 13n11, 30, 31, 90, 91, 92n12, 98, 152–155, 157, 158, 160, 162, 176, 182, 183, 184n9, 186, 187, 189, 199, 201, 209 conqueror, 187 browbeaten boyfriend, 158 buy–sell, 186 damsel, 198 diplomat, 187 enemies, 90 enemies-to-lovers, 153 family, 196 frame-shifting, 14, 140, 144, 152, 158, 184, 198–200; narrative reanalysis, 14 friends, 90 hero, 187 hooker, 187 lovers, 90, 91 mean girlfriend, 158 mediator, 187 politician, 176n6 princess, 198 restaurant, 13n11 romance, 158, 161, 192, 196 romantic tryst, 162 saint, 187 schemer, 199 sibling, 90, 91 soldier, 187 unrequited love, 158 villain, 189, 198, 199 Cognitive humanities, 3–5 Coleman, Susan, 178 Collective intelligence, 24 Colombetti, Giovanna, 21, 30, 72, 73, 76, 78n6, 85, 88 Community, see Casting; Desire; Emotion; Fanfiction; Ship Conceptual blending theory, 12, 14, 108, 109, 140, 146–148, 151,

215

152, 158n7, 160, 164, 194, 201, 202 actor/character, 111 blended space, 15, 110, 147, 148, 150, 152, 158, 160, 164, 172, 188, 194, 198, 201 compression, 30, 108, 110–112, 117, 126, 128–130, 147, 160–163, 189, 190, 193, 208 conceptual blending, 110, 157, 177, 180, 181, 186 conceptual integration, 4, 110, 146, 194 cross-space mapping, 148, 151, 157, 172, 182, 186, 188, 191, 195, 196 elaboration, 199 input spaces, 15, 110, 148, 150, 151, 154, 158, 179, 194, 196, 201 mental space, 108, 110, 126, 172, 177, 181, 182, 186, 188, 190, 194, 201 monk and the mountain, 146 pattern completion, 199 selective projection, 110, 146, 148–152, 172, 177, 179, 181, 186, 188, 194–196 skiing waiter, 15 Conceptual metaphors, 4, 12, 12n10, 15, 20, 30, 44, 51, 55–58, 60, 63, 65 ARGUMENT IS WAR, 55 EMOTIONAL EFFECT IS PHYSICAL CONTACT, 60 EMOTIONAL HARM IS PHYSICAL HARM, 60 EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE OTHER-PROPELLED MOTIONS, 62 EMOTION IS PHYSICAL ASSAULT BY A FOREIGN OBJECT, 62

216 

INDEX

Conceptual metaphors (cont.) EMOTIONS ARE A CONTAINER, 12, 56 EMOTIONS ARE A FORCE, 60n18, 61 EMOTIONS ARE A NATURAL FORCE, 57, 58, 62 EMOTIONS ARE AN OPPONENT, 60n18 EMOTIONS ARE A PHYSICAL FORCE, 57, 58, 62 EMOTIONS ARE NATURAL PHENOMENA, 58 EXISTENCE OF EMOTION IS POSSESSIONS OF AN OBJECT, 56 GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN, 13 HAPPY IS UP; SAD IS DOWN, 56 HAVING CONTROL OR FORCE IS UP; BEING SUBJECT TO CONTROL OR FORCE IS DOWN, 13 INTENSITY OF EMOTION IS AMOUNT/QUANTITY, 56 INTENSITY OF EMOTION IS HEAT/LACK OF EMOTION IS COLD, 56 LACK OF CONTROL IS DOWN, 12 LOCATIONS ARE CONTAINERS, 59 MIND IS BODY, 56n16 PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL STATES ARE ENTITIES WITHIN A PERSON, 61 RATIONAL IS UP; EMOTION IS DOWN, 13, 59n17 SEEING IS UNDERSTANDING, 20 STATES ARE LOCATIONS, 59 TIME IS MONEY, 55 Conroy, Colette, 109

Cook, Amy, 4, 21, 31, 65, 74, 78n6, 81, 82, 98, 99, 108, 110–113, 117–119, 119n2, 121, 122, 124, 131, 143, 172, 174, 174n4, 177, 185, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197 Coppa, Francesca, 1n1, 9, 43n6, 48, 86, 108, 115, 117, 125, 141, 141n1, 142, 142n2, 144, 146, 149, 150, 154, 156, 176, 183–185, 190 Cosplay, 19, 44, 44n8, 121, 124, 125 Coulson, Seana, 13, 13n11, 14, 152, 176n6, 187n11, 196, 199 Counterfactual, 15, 32, 73n3, 95, 96, 171, 172, 177, 178, 183, 186, 210 lottery depression, 95 A Court of Thorns and Roses, 2, 28, 107, 108, 115, 118 Rhysand, 107, 115, 116, 118–120, 120n3 Cristofari, Cécile, 25, 26 Critical closeness, 3, 4, 6, 25–30, 40–42, 44, 48, 50, 54, 66, 72, 73, 75, 85, 98, 108, 114, 115, 125, 131, 132, 140–142, 144, 145, 150, 155, 165, 172, 173, 192, 194, 210 Critical distance, 25–27, 210 Cumberbatch, Chaka, 122 Cutting, James E., 160 Cuyckens, Hubert, 11 D Damasio, Antonio R., 6, 18 Dancygier, Barbara, 4 Day, Naomi, 99 den Hartogh, Rudolf, 149 Descarte, René, 6 Desire for casting, 109, 118, 129

 INDEX 

cognition, 140, 154 communal, 2, 31, 83, 114, 130, 144, 149, 150, 164, 179, 183, 184, 192 community, 186 for emotion, 40 erotic, 52, 83, 83n9, 115, 120 narrative (see Narrative) for repetition, 49 stigma of, 8 DeSouza, Meghan E., 79n8, 80, 81 Digital blackface, 99 Distributed cognition, 4, 11, 22–26, 141, 143, 173, 176, 182 Donald, Merlin, 24 Dornan, Jamie, 114, 115, 120 Downton Abbey, 192, 194, 195 Mary Crawley, 196, 202 Matthew Crawley, 196, 202 Sybil Crawley, 196 Dreamcasting, 30, 115–120, 120n3, 123–125, 132 Dungeons & Dragons, 55, 171, 171n1, 172, 181, 181n7, 202 E Effeminate, 2n6, 7–9, 7n9, 19, 26, 27, 29, 42, 49, 83, 99 Effigies, 74, 99, 100 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 43n6 Eisenstein, Sergei, 87, 87n10 Embodied cognition, 4, 5, 10, 11, 19–22, 26, 72, 73, 76, 85, 87, 88, 140, 208 kinesic intelligence, 21, 77, 77n5, 155 Emma, 192, 194, 200 Emma Woodhouse, 200 Frank Churchill, 200 Jane Fairfax, 200 Emotion, 15–18

217

apparisal theories, 17n14 body, 40, 41, 43, 44, 49–56, 60, 64, 78, 79, 99 communal, 40, 41, 47, 64, 65, 72, 74, 80–84, 98, 100 community, 64 emotional contagion, 80, 82 emotion category, 39n3, 51, 54, 75, 86 emotion concept, 16, 17, 30, 39n3, 49, 51–53, 57, 58, 60, 63, 65, 73, 75, 79 genre, 39, 46, 47 intensity, 47, 49–52, 56, 59, 64 meta-emotion, 30, 51, 63, 64 stigma of, 7–9, 18, 26 theory of constructed emotion, 16, 17, 30, 40, 51, 75 Emre, Merve, 8 Essien, Enobong, 124n10 Ewing, Louise, 161 Extended cognition, 4, 11, 22–25, 143, 200, 208 F Fanart, 2, 44, 79, 86, 116, 123, 124 Fan cast, see Dreamcasting Fanfic, see Fanfiction Fanfiction, 1–3, 1n1, 7, 10, 14, 27, 32, 39, 44, 46, 47, 48n12, 49, 63, 65, 79, 86, 117, 123, 143–145, 177, 201 alternate universe, 15, 15n12, 32, 48n12, 172, 173, 181–183, 182n8, 184n10, 185–188, 191–194 angst, 39, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 63, 64 characters, 172, 174, 176, 178, 181–183, 186, 189, 193; bodies, 117, 125, 190, 191; names, 189; traits, 183, 188

218 

INDEX

Fanfiction (cont.) community, 175, 182 context, 175 crack, 46 crack fit, 46n11 erotic, 9, 19, 46 fanon, 179 fluff, 39, 42, 44–46, 49, 63, 64 fusion fics, 1, 32, 173, 192–195, 198, 200 genre shifting, 184 hurt/comfort, 46, 46n10 as interpretation, 176 intertextuality, 194 objections to, 174 OOC (out of character), 178, 180 self-insert, 9 slow burn, 39, 49, 63 smut, 1, 44–46, 49 subcommunities, 179 tropes, 39, 47, 48, 65, 185, 192, 209 What if?, 183 Fanning, Elle, 129–132 Fanon, 146, 173, 173n3, 179, 181, 191 Fanvid, 2, 2n4, 3, 14, 15, 23, 27, 31, 47, 63–65, 86, 93n13, 126, 131, 139, 141–143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156, 158, 160, 165, 179 alternate universe, 31, 109, 126, 132 cross-over, 31, 161, 161n8 music, 2n4, 31, 126, 141, 142, 145, 149–154, 156, 163, 164; lyrics, 145, 146, 150, 151, 153, 154, 158, 163; modifying music, 150; polarizing, 149 Fauconnier, Gilles, 14, 30, 31, 73n3, 95, 95n15, 108–112, 110n1, 129, 146–148, 171, 177, 178, 186, 201

Feels, 12, 17, 29, 40, 43, 50–66, 53n13, 59n17, 60n18, 73–75, 80–82, 84, 99, 139, 209 Felski, Rita, 5, 25, 26 Fiesler, Casey, 75 Fifty Shades of Grey, 114 casting controversy; #NotmyChristian, 114 Christian Grey, 114, 115, 118, 120, 125 Fish, Stanley, 118, 174n5, 175 Ford, Colin, 129–132 Frame, 189 See also Cognitive frames Freund, Katharina, 145 G Gallagher, Shaun, 20–23, 27, 30, 31, 72, 76, 78, 79, 87, 88, 91, 92, 155, 156 Gallese, Vittorio, 5, 76n4 Game of Thrones, 14, 28, 39n1, 84, 88, 89, 96, 112, 117, 126, 127, 129, 132, 139, 171, 172, 174, 180, 183, 184, 184n10, 186, 187, 189, 190, 190n12, 194–198, 200, 201, 207 Arya Stark, 196 Brienne of Tarth, 200 Cersei Lannister, 198, 199, 201 Daenerys Targaryen, 84, 94, 117, 139, 174, 178–181, 190n12 Harry Hardyng, 189 Jaime Lannister, 200 Joffrey Baratheon, 14, 197, 199 Jon Snow, 1, 39n1, 84, 88–91, 94–96, 112, 117, 126–129, 131, 132, 139, 140, 174, 177, 178, 181–188, 182n8, 190–193, 192n13, 196, 197, 201, 202, 207–209

 INDEX 

Petyr Baelish, 189 Ramsay Bolton, 189 Robert Baratheon, 198, 199 Sansa Stark, 1, 39n1, 84, 88–91, 94–96, 126–129, 139, 140, 174, 177–181, 182n8, 183–186, 188–193, 192n13, 196, 197, 199–202, 207–209 Tyrion Lannister, 171, 172, 199 Gatson, Sarah N., 123 Geeraerts, Dirk, 11 Gendron, Maria, 156 Genre, see Emotion Gerrard, Ysabel, 2n6, 8, 9 Gerrig, Richard J., 39, 39n4, 177 Ghosting, 31, 109, 119, 120, 126–129, 131, 132, 145, 160, 175, 189, 191 possessing, 31, 109, 126, 129–131 Gibson, James J., 23, 80, 193 Gif, 1, 1n3, 3, 30, 47, 49, 50, 63–65, 72–79, 84, 86, 87, 91–94, 96–99, 109, 143, 160, 179, 208 feels gif, 30, 51, 52, 57–64, 59n17, 60n18 gif fic, 207–210 gif set, 1–3, 1n3, 14, 23, 27, 30, 47, 48, 65, 71–73, 80, 82, 84–86, 90, 93–98, 156, 160, 179, 207 reaction gif, 2, 30, 40, 58, 65, 72, 74–76, 80–85, 98 Gilliland, Elizabeth, 123, 124 Goffman, Erving, 13n11 Goodwin, Andrew, 153 GoT, 197 Green, Joshua, 99 Groshek, Jacob, 149 Grossberg, Lawrence, 43 Guerra, Michele, 76n4 Guitton, Matthieu J., 25, 26

219

H Hagman, Hampus, 97 Halberstadt, Jamin, 157, 159 Halpern, Faye, 8 Harington, Kit, 112, 126–129, 131, 132, 190, 191, 207, 208 Hatfield, Elaine, 80, 82 Hautsch, Jessica, 10, 74, 98, 99, 193 Hellekson, Karen, 173, 175 Herring, Susan, 79, 79n8, 80 Hess, Elizabeth, 43n6 Heyes, Cecilia, 76n4, 79n7 Hickok, Gregory, 76n4 Highfield, Tim, 75 Hillman, Serena, 79n8, 80, 82, 86 Hills, Matt, 18, 43, 54n14 Hobson, R. Peter, 78 Holmes, Anna, 121n4 Horton, Donald, 172n2 Hsu, Cheng Heng, 149 Hunnam, Charlie, 114, 115 Hutabarat-Nelson, Tiffany M., 122 I Ildirar, Sermin, 161 Interpretive communities, 118, 175 Intertextuality, 151, 175, 192–194, 200 J Jackson, Lauren Michele, 99 Jacobs, Gloria, 43n6 James, E. L., 114, 125 James, William, 16 Jenkins, Henry, 7n9, 8, 10, 18, 24, 28, 43, 43n6, 43n7, 47, 86, 142n2, 146n4, 149, 155, 180, 184 Jenson, Joli, 8, 43n6 Jiang, Jialun “Arron”, 75 Johnson, Claudia L., 8 Johnson, Joshua, 142, 143, 156

220 

INDEX

Johnson, Mark, 11–13, 12n10, 18, 20, 55, 59, 59n17, 61 Jones, Sara Gwenllian, 49, 87 K Kaplan, Deborah, 176 Karpovich, Angela I., 146n5 Keen, Suzanne, 87n11 Kelley, Brit, 7, 18, 19, 29n16, 43, 43n6, 44 Khosravi, Ryan, 122 Khost, Peter, 173, 192, 193 Kidd, David Comer, 87n11 Kinney, Emily, 130–132 Kirkpatrick, Ellen, 44, 122 Klinger, Barbara, 47 Knightley, Keira, 160 Kociemba, David, 77n5 Kövecses, Zoltán, 15, 55n15, 56–60, 60n18, 62 Kristeva, Julia, 194 Kuleshov effect, 161, 161n9 Kustritz, Anne, 184n10 L Lakoff, George, 12, 12n10, 13, 55, 59, 59n17, 61 Lamerichs, Nicolle, 18, 19, 43n6, 44 Lancaster, Kurt, 47 LeDoux, Joseph E., 17n14 Lessig, Lawrence, 140 Levy, Pierre, 24 Lewis, Lisa A., 8, 43 Liebers, Nicole, 172n2 Lothian, Alexis, 146, 156 Lynch, Deidre Shauna, 8 M Maas, Sarah J., 2, 107, 115 Madden, John Savery, 75

Mar, Raymond, 87n11 Marian, Diane E., 93, 156 Marshall, Kelli, 96 Martin, George R.R., 39n1, 174, 174n4, 176 McCain, Katherine, 10, 183 McConachie, Bruce, 111, 117, 125 Mcentire, Keshia, 122 McGowan, Zach, 160 McKee, Alan, 26 McNeil, Trevor, 151 McWilliams, Ora C., 123, 123n8 Mendelsund, Peter, 115 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 28 Mesquita, Batja, 156 Meyers, Seth, 183 Middleton, Kim, 126, 142 Miller, joan, 122, 125 Miltner, Kate M., 75 Mind-body split, see Cartesian Dualism Mixer, Lindsay, 46 N Nadkarni, Samira, 124 Narrative, 163 body, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50 construction, 91, 95, 98, 126, 129, 146, 160–162 context, 31, 78, 87n10, 88, 91, 92, 94, 97, 155–158, 160 conventions, 47 counter narrative, 22, 31, 73, 85, 91, 93–98, 108, 109, 129, 130, 141, 155, 164, 207 desire, 91, 96, 139, 141, 160, 163, 165, 185, 191, 209 ecology, 131, 197 of fanvids, 139, 141, 144, 146, 149, 153 fictional space, 41, 161, 184 gif fic, 207

 INDEX 

performance, 145 reincarnation, 127 repetition, 184, 185 song, 150, 151, 158 structures, 150 telos, 95n14, 97, 141 Neustaedter, Carman, 79n8, 80, 82, 86 Newman, Michael Z., 75, 86 Ngai, Sianne, 5 Noë, Alva, 19 Nostalgia, 30, 96, 98 O Oatly, Keith, 87n11 Olenina, Ana Hedberg, 87n10 Oliver, John, 114, 120 Oliver, Mary Beth, 63 Omori, Ayako, 58 P Pande, Rukmini, 29n16, 123n9 Parable, 173, 192, 194, 200 Pearlman, Karen, 144n3 Pearson, Roberta, 26 Perception of actors, 128 of bodies, 108, 121, 124 of canon, 179 of characters, 14, 30, 87, 91, 92, 118, 126, 127, 155, 173, 176, 180, 187, 188, 191, 198, 200; traits, 178, 182 as cognition, 20 embodied, 21, 159 of emotion, 29, 149; others, 30, 73, 76, 78, 80, 83–85, 87, 89–91, 149, 157, 159; self, 30, 40, 41, 46, 48, 50, 60, 65, 75, 89

221

of gestures, 156, 208, 209 of performance, 140, 160 smart, 22, 27, 30, 31, 78, 79, 83, 85, 92, 94, 142, 155, 156, 164 of subtext, 30 of texts, 141 Perez, Nistasha, 79n8, 80, 81, 93, 207, 208 Performance, 27 of actors, 30, 77n5, 78n6, 85, 86, 88–94, 97, 98, 108, 111, 127, 128, 150, 157, 185 conventions, 86 of emotion, 41, 71, 72, 74, 75, 83, 84, 99 emotional spectatorship, 82 fanvids as, 31, 140, 144, 145, 155, 165 of feels, 40 nonverbal dimensions of, 86 past, 129 past roles, 120 performance theory, 6, 9, 28, 99, 108, 109, 141, 144 reading as, 3, 27 repetition of, 48 of spectatorship, 74, 81, 99 theatrical, 46 Performative casting as, 108, 113, 186 cognitive practices, 210 fanfiction as, 32, 176, 185, 198, 201 fanvids as, 140 gifs as, 30, 74, 75, 84 performative utterances, 176 spectatorship as, 74 Petersen, Line Nybro, 79n8, 80 Phelan, Peggy, 99 Pinkowitz, Jacqueline Marie, 43n6 Plantinga, Carl, 140, 141, 184

222 

INDEX

Pleasure, 2, 16, 47–49, 141, 209 as analysis, 140, 165 of casting, 99, 100, 107, 118, 132 cognitive, 15 communal, 2, 27, 30, 73, 90, 184 constructing connections, 192 effeminate, 83, 99 of emotion, 141; meta-emotion, 51, 63, 64 erotic, 19, 83 of fanfiction, 183, 194, 195, 202 of fanvids, 140, 163 female, 9 of gifs, 75, 85, 96, 97 meta-emotional, 30 narrative, 95, 182 of reading, 6, 178 in repetition, 184, 185 of shared emotion, 82 squee, 29, 29n17 of vids, 145, 146, 154, 160, 164 Pride and Prejudice, 160, 163n10, 201 Elizabeth Bennet, 160–165, 163n10 The Princess Bride, 192, 194, 197, 198, 200 Buttercup, 197–199, 201, 202 Humperdinck, 199 Vizzini, 199 Westley, 197, 201, 202 Procyk, Jason, 79n8, 80, 82, 86 Proprioception, 77 Pugh, Sheenagh, 28, 47, 172, 178, 183, 184 R Racebending, 31, 121n6, 123, 124, 124n10 Radway, Janice, 8 Rapp, David N., 177 Rapson, Richard L., 80, 82

Reddit, 121 Reedus, Norman, 130–132 Reid, Robin Anne, 123 Repertoire, 27, 31, 141, 144, 145, 154, 165, 210 Repetition characterization, 177, 179, 189, 201 of characters, 182, 195, 200 effigies, 74 of emotion, 29, 30, 41, 42, 44, 47–50, 63–65, 74, 81–83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 96–99, 140 fanon, 179 gifs, 30, 50, 63, 93, 97, 98 media consumption, 47, 49, 63, 65, 73, 85, 93, 96–98, 140, 143, 144, 160 narrative, 30, 40, 46–48, 65, 73, 85, 97, 109, 144, 184, 185 theater, 9 Roach, Joseph, 74, 99, 144, 145, 165 Rohrer, Tim, 12, 19 Rokotnitz, Naomi, 5 Rosch, Eleanor, 19 Rosenblatt, Louise, 174n5 Russ, Joanna, 19 Russell, James A., 156 S Saltz, David Z., 92 Samermit, Patraway, 75 Sandvoss, Cornel, 47 Sansa, 188 Schechner, Richard, 165, 176 Schema, 12, 13, 13n11, 60, 184n9 CONTAINER, 13 EMOTIONS ARE AN ASSAULT BY A FOREIGN OBJECT, 61 FIRES, 58 FLOODS, 58

 INDEX 

FORCE, 60 INSIDE/OUTSIDE, 13 NATURAL FORCE, 57, 58 NATURAL PHENOMENA, 58 PHYSICAL FORCE, 57, 59 STORMS, 58 WAVES, 58 Schramm, Holger, 172n2 Schulzki, Irina, 87n10 Searle, John, 176 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 5 Seeing-as, 92 Seymour, Jessica, 124n10 Seymour, Laura, 4 Shimamura, Arthur P., 93, 149, 156, 162 Ship, 2n6, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 109, 129, 139, 141, 145, 151, 155, 163, 163n10, 196, 209 community, 2n6, 22, 91, 93, 96, 139, 141, 175, 189, 193 shippers, 2n6, 90, 93, 96, 98, 155, 209; Bethyl, 129, 131; Jonerys, 178–180; Jonsa, 39, 90, 91, 94, 129, 179–181, 182n8, 184, 190, 192, 193, 196, 202, 209; stigma of, 2n6, 8 Shipping, 192 Shipping goggles, 92, 97 Shonoda, Mary-Anne, 151, 192 Sivarajan, Deepa, 124 Smith, Jeff, 149, 150 Smith, Kathleen, 88, 183 Smith, Murray, 108, 119n2, 190 Smuts, Aaron, 150 Sobchack, Vivian, 28, 76n4, 88 Social reality, 16, 16n13, 30, 40, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 86 Somerhalder, Ian, 120, 120n3 A Song of Ice and Fire, 174, 189 Spolsky, Ellen, 5, 21, 30, 72, 76, 77 Stanfill, Mel, 8, 9, 29n16, 123n9

223

Stasi, Mafalda, 173n3, 175 Stein, Louisa Ellen, 18, 25n15, 28, 43, 62, 64, 79n8, 80, 81, 85, 93, 141n1, 179 Stevens, E. Charlotte, 142n2, 143–145, 146n4, 158n7 Strukus, Wanda, 77n5 Subtext, 21, 87, 87n10, 131, 139, 155, 156, 157n6, 160, 164, 197 perception of, 22 Sutton, John, 4, 24, 143 Swan, Anna Lee, 18, 19, 40, 44 Sweetser, Eve, 56n16 Swift, Taylor, 150, 157–159 T Tavris, Carol, 49, 64, 65 Taylor, Diana, 27, 31, 141, 144, 154, 163, 164 Thompson, Evan, 19 Three Patch Podcast, 7n9 Tobin, Vera, 5 Tolins, Jackson, 75 Torrance, Steve, 76 Tresca, Don, 125n11 Tribble, Evelyn, 4, 24, 143 Tumblr, 1–4, 1n2, 3n7, 30, 44, 44n9, 45, 54, 55, 65, 71–73, 79–81, 84, 85, 89, 93, 94, 96, 97, 118, 123, 129, 141n1, 163n10, 179, 180, 182, 185, 188, 192, 207 reblog, 3, 3n7, 4n8, 65, 72, 81, 82, 87, 97, 209 Turk, Tisha, 142, 143, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156 Turner, Mark, 12, 14, 30, 31, 73n3, 95, 95n15, 108–112, 110n1, 129, 146–148, 171, 173, 177, 178, 186, 190–192, 194, 200, 201

224 

INDEX

Turner, Sophie, 126–129, 131, 132, 190, 207, 208 Turner, Victor, 165, 176, 177 Tushnet, Rebecca, 150 Twitter, 121, 171 U Urban Dictionary, 30, 51, 52, 56, 57, 61 V Van Steenhuyse, Veerle, 10, 184n9 Varela, Francisco, 19 W The Walking Dead, 28, 129, 130 Beth Greene, 129–131 Daryl Dixon, 129–131 Warhol, Robyn R., 7n9, 8, 29, 41, 42, 46–49, 64

Warner, Kristen Jamaya, 124 Williams, Rebecca, 43, 47, 89, 96 Wilson, Anna, 18, 40, 44 Wilson, Elizabeth, 96 Wimsatt, William K., 25 Winters, Sarah Fiona, 140 The Witcher, 1, 28, 71, 71n2, 72, 82, 155, 157–159, 157n6, 201 Geralt of River, 1 Geralt of Rivia, 71, 71n2, 72, 82, 155, 157, 158, 165, 201 Jaskier, 1, 155, 157, 157n6, 158, 165, 201 Yennefer, 158 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 78, 92 Wohl, Richard, 172n2 Wojciehowski, Hannah C., 5 Y YouTube, 3, 47, 79, 126, 129, 139, 141n1, 151, 157, 163n10