Fanfic Forensics

Serious researchery on fanworks going on here, beware. 'Fanfic Forensics' is Nele Noppe's Ph.D project at the Japanese Studies department of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. I focus on comparing narrative and visual elements in Japanese and English-language fanworks based on the same original work (Harry Potter). Many posts here are mirrored from the main project website. My research ethics, let me show you them.

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I spent the last couple of weeks fine-tuning a grant application. Everything hinges on this one three-page text: one wrong word or fuzzy sentence and bam, the application goes straight in the bin. That means reading and rereading and spell-checking and putting in more jargon ad nauseam, and soon advisors start giving contradictory advice as to what should be in there, the page limit becomes a nightmare, and by the deadline you're quite ready to ritually burn the monster and dump the ashes in the cat box.

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Next month I'm going to Sweden for the symposium 'Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities' (program and abstracts), where I'll be making a case for 'The 'open work' as a framework for the interpretation of fan fiction'. For those who are interested in seeing a coherent argument emerge slowly from a morass of disconnected gibberish, I'm constructing the presentation here. Abstract:

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

A new Australian law could impose penalties on anyone who views slash fic or other (fan) media that feature fictional minors in a sexual situation. This isn't throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it's also throwing out the bath, the parents, the dog, and a couple of people who were just walking past the house.

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Most of us have heard of help_haiti by now. I'm auctioning off three illustrations for any Harry Potter fic here.

EDIT: that's four illustrations now.

And here's my snapelyholidays entry. Warning: seriously big file.

Art for: bethbethbeth 
Title: Illustrations from Home Studies
Pairing: Snape/McGonagall
Rating: PG
Media: ballpoint pen
Warnings/Kinks: none
Description: Five pictures from 'Home Studies' by Beth H. The original Snapely Holidays post has the pic chopped into five pieces for those on slow connections. Even better, bethbethbeth kindly inserted the images into her story here! That way they even make sense! *happy*
Disclaimer: The world of HP and its characters belongs to Rowling. The artist has borrowed them for the purposes of storytelling. No profit was or will be made.

This was my entry for snarry_holidays. Fairly large image.

Art for: sev1970
Title: Protective Custody
Medium: Ballpoint pen
Rating: PG
Pairing: Snarry
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property
of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement
is intended.
Summary: Harry certainly didn't enjoy spending the last part of
his sixth year in detention after the Sectumsempra incident, copying
out his father's past misdeeds. Imagine having to watch over him for
hours on end, from only a few feet away, knowing what happened, what
will never be, and what's coming... Any day now.
Artist's Notes: All furniture and the knicknacks on Snape's desk, including the lopsided oil lamp with modern lampshade on, were inspired by Snape's office as it appeared in the CoS movie.

Look at my pressies! 'Invasum (Like Father, Like Son)', my Snarry Holidays gift, was written by the most excellent winoniel. It is long and plotty and shiny and has Tobias Snape in it doing very interesting things that I'm not going to mention at the risk of giving the plot away. It is mine and I loves it.

And for Snapely Holidays, I got a delicious Snape/Slughorn called 'Subtlety Personified' from therealsnape. 'Delicious' in the sense that is subtle, poignant, Slytherin through and through, and has the best Slughorn voice in any fic ever. (And the ending. The ending.)

In case it's not obvious, I am officially chuffed and very, very grateful. Please go read, and shower with praise.

(I made a couple of things too, but will get back to those somewhere in the next few days. Life is busy and the gods of html do not approve of me today -I haven't managed to format a single thing correctly.)

Some final notes and observations following "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics" in Kyoto. I had a great time, learned a lot, and was quite impressed in general. The amount of fail was surprisingly small for an academic gathering (a few people excepted), and several presentations gave me some very helpful pointers and new ideas. My personal favourites were CJ Suzuki and his insights on manga studies from an SF research perspective, Mizoguchi Akiko on yaoi readers, and Thomas Becker on the need to supplement semiotic analysis of manga/comics with considerations of social circumstances (abstracts).

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I just realized that crossposting to InsaneJournal got stuck a couple of months ago. Sorry for that, everything's back up to date now.

Back from Japan, and alas, tons of work await. I'm so behind on reading Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays fics that it's just not funny anymore -and that's the enjoyable part of the to-do list. Most of the rest is ridiculously time-consuming translation and paper-writing, and of course infernal university administration stuff that requires cooperation from other people who also hate doing university administration stuff and also do everything possible to weasel out of it. That always works really well.

Best stop procrastinating now. Oh, a very belated happy holidays to all ;)

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I'm having a great time in Kyoto at "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale", the first international conference on manga/comics research at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, organised by Kyoto Seika University. Met a ton of interesting people with very interesting ideas that I'll write about in length later.

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday I gave a presentation on copyright issues related to dojinshi and fan culture for the first-year students at the Japanese Studies department of the Catholic University of Leuven. It was based on the conference presentation I'll be giving next week in Kyoto, with more introductory material such as what dojinshi are. The conference version will have fewer cute pictures and more long pretentious words.

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale will take place from 18 to 20 December at the International Manga Museum in Kyoto. I'll be doing a short presentation in Japanese on the 18th on the topic of what exactly "global comics studies" might study. First, the aims of the conference:

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Three months just got sucked into the vortex of cultural week organisation hell. Now it's over and done, and I managed to submit art for Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays a day before the November 16 deadlines too, so I can finally focus on research again.

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Moar kittehs!

During the following month I will translate two manga ('One Piece' 13 and '20th Century Boys' 15) and an academic article, mastermind a week of various cultural and academic activities involving a couple of hundred people from six different countries (including two dozen university professors) causing mayhem in about five different locations at the same time, finish pics for Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays whose designs are getting more complicated by the day, finish two abstracts, prepare a junior class on Japanese culture every week, make an appearance at a con, and select the final fanfic samples for my research from thousands of candidates. One or two instances of relaxed social interaction with friends are also scheduled. Judging from the strange bobbles growing on the inside of my elbows and knees, I should probably squeeze in "defeat bubonic plague" sometime this week. I wonder if it's a good thing when the to-do list is so absurd that it just makes you laugh and laugh and laugh and want to read PhD Comics instead of worry.

In other news, the number of new undergrads starting Japanese Studies at my university has gone up by forty percent since last year. Forty percent. It's very nice to know we're popular and the new group seems to contain a lot of interesting people, but crazy increase in student numbers + no increase whatsoever in staff numbers = frayed tempers. Hats off to the Japanese language teachers who are bravely coping with the worst of the extra workload.

Notes: Untitled, based on eeyore9990's hilarious Snarry Games entry Bite Me!. Go read that story now.
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: Not my characters or story.

Harry grasped the edge of the table so hard his knuckles turned white. He was sure Snape wasn't aware of how his words sounded, but God, it was like porn poured into his ears.

( Taking a wild guess, I'd say he's aware of it )

All right. I'd been meaning to do a write-up of all the ethics questions relevant to my research project for quite a while, but the Surveyfail trainwreck suddenly makes the need for a write-up feel a lot more pressing. Fortunately, others have written quite extensively on how to study fandom while not being offensive and using a sound methodology. See, to name just a couple, theorynut, Kristina Busse's post on research ethics, and of course the AOIR guide. I try to follow these good examples, and the rest of this text explains how, in long and excruciating detail. I'll be tacking a link to this at the top of my main research site and its LiveJournal and InsaneJournal mirrors.

( Did I mention this is really, really long? )

PG, Snarry. Based on this giggle-worthy drabble by alisanne . Not mine, etc etc.

( Strip gobstones under cut )

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I'm still working through the batch of over a hundred new Snape-as-a-main-character Harry Potter dojinshi I bought in July, but once more, it seems all of them are yaoi. Now, I didn't do this on purpose. Really. I specifically went looking for het HP dojinshi with Snape in them in Toranoana and other shops that cater to a male clientele, because I know there are het HP dojinshi out there. I've seen them on the net. They weren't in the shops. Not anymore, the friendly sales clerks said. The female-oriented shops still had shelves and shelves of HP dojinshi, the vast majority of them yaoi.

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