I did not stop work on the Fedwren Project when I addressed Matthew Oliver’s “History in the Margins” not too long ago. Indeed not; I have a number of other articles to read and annotate, bringing them into the bibliography I’m happy to be maintaining and to which I hope to make more contributions, both in itself and in producing items to add to it. One of them I read recently, Kristina Busse and Shannon Farley’s 2013 “Remixing the Remix: Fannish Appropriation and the Limits of Unauthorised Use,” is summarized in the Project here. As with other pieces I’ve read, the summary matters; the summary’s useful for other researchers, and I know that there are and have been some doing intellectual work on Hobb’s writing who make use of the Project–which is at least part of the point of my maintaining it. But, also as with a number of other pieces I’ve read, the summary is not enough on its own; I feel the need to offer some response–which I do, below, in the hope that it will be useful.

As with Oliver’s piece, I want to stress that I found Busse and Farley’s piece to be a good one. While I am not as up on fandom studies as, say, Kavita Mudan Finn (whose work I wholeheartedly recommend) or Shiloh Carroll (whose work I also wholeheartedly recommend), and I am not necessarily part of fandom communities as such (as I explain here), I found the piece to be well written and easy to follow. It’s never a bad thing for a specialist text–and, to be clear, academic journal articles are specialist texts, written by scholars to other scholars working in the same or in closely adjacent fields of inquiry–to be accessible to those outside its anticipated primary readership. (For reference, I follow Richard Johnson-Sheehan’s four-fold readership model. It seems to work pretty well.) As someone who, despite lapsing, works in fantasy literature, I am likely in one of the “closely adjacent fields of inquiry” to fandom studies, although I think they run more toward the sociological than the literary (I’m minded of reading Gary Alan Fine in the past), and there is a gap between the social sciences and the humanities, even if it is not so broad as some might want to make it out to be. But however that may be, the clear breakdown of topics Busse and Farley provide works well, it explains its terms and their use, and it offers manageable chunks of information, all of which argue in their piece’s favor.

I note above that I read the article recently to the time of this writing; it will also be close to the time of this post’s release into the world. Both are in 2024. The article dates to 2013, and it discusses an event in 2006. Consequently, there are things in the article that come across to a current reading as somewhat dated. For example, the article makes some reference to Tumblr, and while that platform is, to my knowledge, still extant as I write this (I certainly use it enough in my Hobb reread), it also–again, to my knowledge–does not function anymore in quite the same ways now as it did then. Busse and Farley do note that the community standards they reference–again, at length and with clarity–in their article are evolving and changing, so they allow for the possibility of datedness, and it is the case that it is not fair to fault an article for failing to address what occurred after it was published. (To be clear, I am not finding fault with the work.) So much said, I have to wonder if any of the authors’ conclusions would change when assessed against newer standards of conduct among the communities they investigate, and how.

This is, after all, a reaction piece, and I can only react as I have it to do.

In any event, the reason “Remixing the Remix” came to my attention to begin with is that it makes reference to Robin Hobb–specifically, the “Fan Fiction Rant.” Theirs is not the only article to do so, of course; indeed, one of the major threads of research into and commentary on Hobb’s body of work (with the understanding that the Fedwren Project is not complete; I have other articles to read and annotate into it, and there is doubtlessly more work being done in that line of which I am not yet aware) is specifically on that piece. Something about that blog post appears to have caught the interest of a number of commenters, some of them scholarly, and I think there’s more to it than simply the intersection of the fanfic and scholarly communities. (There is overlap, of course, but not congruity.) What that something is, I do not know; again, I am not a scholar of fandoms, nor yet am I a sociologist, and I think it would take a sociologist working in fandom communities to untangle it (or else an ethnographer with an interesting focus). That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate knowing, once it’s known.

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