Eerste Versie MA Scriptie Esther Lugtigheid1
Name: Esther Lugtigheid
Student number: 250206
Study program: Children’s and Young
Adult Literature
Date: 19 August 2014
Coaches: Dr. S.J. Lehtonen and
Prof. dr. W.H.L. van Lierop- Debrauwer
Co -reader: Drs. A.W.M. Duijx
“I’ve found fanfiction as a learning plateau to be very amusing”: Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction
by
Esther Lugtigheid
Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
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Disclaimer
The author declares that the text and work presented in this master thesis are original and no other sources mentioned in the text and the reference lists have been used in writing this thesis. The copyright of this master thesis rests with the author. The author is responsible for its contents.
The views expressed in this thesis are those of the student and do not necessarily express the views of Tilburg University.
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Acknowledgements
Although most students I know have an utter dislike for writing theses, I have found it to be the most enjoyable and rewarding aspect of my academic career. However, it was also stressful at times. Especially during periods of time when you are juggling your thesis, courses, work and personal life one can feel a bit overwhelmed. I would hereby like to take the opportunity to thank the people who were there for me during such moments. First of all I would like to thank my second supervisor/Masters programme coordinator Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer for creating the only MA programme that focuses on children’s and young-adult literature in The Netherlands and for guiding me through the programme. I would like to thank my parents for their love and support. Thank you for giving me the final push to embark on another educational journey. I would also like to thank my friends for the countless study dates at the Tilburg University library and for the motivational speeches that I know I need at times. The two people that I would like to thank most of all are my boyfriend and my supervisor. Thank you boyfriend, for comforting me when I felt overwhelmed (which was, to be honest, most of the time) and for being so understanding. Then - yes, I am saving the best for last - my main supervisor Sanna Lehtonen. Aside from the fact that you spent so many hours reading (and re-reading) my chapters and providing me with valuable and detailed feedback, you also scheduled in an appointment with me nearly every week, which caused me to keep working on my thesis until I finally enjoyed writing again after suffering from writer’s block.
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Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to determine whether writers, whose mother tongue is Dutch but who write online fan fiction in English, show improvement in writing and second language skills without receiving constructive feedback from their readers. The main research question is:
Does the act of writing fan fiction in a passionate affinity space such as FanFiction.net with its own norms, rules and guidelines help to improve one’s second language writing skills?
The sub questions are:
What kinds of writing skills are demonstrated in the examined texts in terms of language use and narrative techniques?
Are there any developments in the examined texts regarding language use and narrative techniques over time?
I conducted a textual analysis of twelve texts written by four writers based on narrative structure, characterisation, style and spelling and grammar. Three out of four writers show improvement in writing skills and second language skills, both according to fan fiction and formal norms. This analysis could thus support previous research that suggests that writing online fan fiction in a passionate affinity space could improve one’s second language and writing skills.
Keywords: fan fiction, fanfiction, fandom, literacy, literacies, second language acquisition, online learning, informal learning, fandom, passionate affinity space
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Inhoud Acknowledgements ...... 3 Abstract ...... 4 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 7 Chapter 2: Literature Review ...... 12
2.1 What is Online Fan Fiction? 12 2.1.1 Terms and Definitions...... 12 2.1.2 Multimodality and Intermediality ...... 15 2.2 What Puts the ‘Fan’ in Fan Fiction?: Fandom, Identity and Participatory Culture ...... 16 2.2.1 What Is a Fan and What Is Fandom? ...... 17 2.2.2 The Demographics of Fan Fiction ...... 20 2.3 Online Fan Fiction, Literacy and (In)Formal Learning ...... 24 2.3.1 Fan Fiction and Literacy ...... 24 2.3.2 Fan Fiction, Writing Skills and Norms in Informal Settings ...... 31 2.3.3 “Caught not taught”: Fan Fiction in Formal Settings? ...... 33 2.3.4 How Fan Fiction Could Help Acquire a Second Language ...... 24 3.1 Research Question and Aims 35 3.2 Data 37 3.3 Analytical Framework 41 Chapter 4: Analysis ...... 45
4.1 Mosquito 45 4.1.1 Killing Me Softly ...... 45 4.1.3 Oops.. A Rabbit! ...... 58 4.1.4 An Overview ...... 65 4.2 Aydine 68 4.2.1 Interfering with Salvation Chapter 1 ...... 68 4.2.2 Interfering with Salvation Chapter 2 ...... 73 4.2.3 Vodka or Scotch for Whiskey? ...... 76 4.2.4 An Overview ...... 80 4.3 Maartje87 83 4.3.1 I Will Always Be with You ...... 83
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4.3.2 The Vision ...... 87 4.3.3 Redemption ...... 90 4.3.4 An Overview ...... 93 4.4 Angie-Face 97 4.4.1 Can I Do Anything? ...... 97 4.4.2 Life’s Reward ...... 102 4.4.3 Revenge ...... 106 4.4.4 An Overview ...... 109 4.5 Comparative overview 111 Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion ...... 114 5.1 Introduction ...... 114 5.2 Synthesis of Empirical Findings and Answers to Research Questions ...... 115 5.3 Discussion/ Policy Relevance and Implications ...... 116 5.4 Limitations of the Study and Recommendations for Future Research ...... 117 5.6 Final Conclusion ...... 118 Works Cited ...... 119 Notes...... 121
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Chapter 1: Introduction
Fan fiction (also known as fanfiction, fan fic, or fanfic) could broadly be defined as fan-made content that is based on pre-existing media formats, such as television series, films or books. Although fan fiction is widely known to be textual content, it encompasses all kinds of modes. Take, for instance, the YouTube channel ‘potterpuppetpals’, which is based on the popular Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. This channel contains fan-made videos of the Harry Potter characters acting out scenes that were written by the potterpuppetpals creator. Although fan-made content is created out of love for the original work and is mostly read by fans themselves, there are also instances of fan fiction finding its way into mainstream popular culture, such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, which places Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in an alternate universe where zombies walk amongst humans. The immensely successful Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James started out as Twilight fan fiction on FanFiction.net - an online fan fiction platform - before it was turned into a bestselling book i. The Internet as a medium in itself has been -- as we will discuss in the following chapter -- crucial to the development of fan fiction. Fan fiction was already being created before the Internet became accessible to the general public, but as the Internet enables writers and readers to communicate with each other and to easily share their content with an international community, fan fiction can now be shared with a larger group of people. Another change that occurred during the transition between offline into online fan fiction regards the demographic: the Internet, according to the author of Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction , Rebecca Black, caused a shift in demographic over the years from mostly adults “producing hard-copy print zines to large numbers of tech-savvy adolescents” (11) who prefer online platforms such as FanFiction.net. Websites such as FanFiction.net have millions of international users and due to this international audience and appeal, many (non-English- speaking) writers of fan fiction tend to write in languages other than their mother tongue in order to increase their audience, resulting in a better understanding of their second language. Aside from being skilful at writing fan fiction and being digitally literate (i.e. knowing how to use a computer and post online content), these writers also write in a second language. They are thus gaining knowledge and acquiring skills in several areas when
Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
7 creating online fan fiction. This makes it an interesting topic for researchers who are interested in literacies, multimodality and second language acquisition and perhaps could lead to a better understanding of how formal education could benefit from these informal literacy activities. Previous studies by Rebecca Black (Language; Adolescents) and Sirpa Leppänen (Cybergirls; Youth; Playing) have focused on second language acquisition through online fan fiction writing by mainly looking at the social aspects. They did this by going through comments and feedback given by readers and beta readers (voluntary editors who check fanfics for spelling and grammatical errors and help improve style before the stories are published on the website) and by doing a textual analysis to discover how writers construct their identities in their fan fiction. My approach differs from these studies as I am doing a textual analysis to discover if any improvement is detectable in second language and writing skills. I will not be looking at feedback or comments provided by readers, but rather focus on elements such as syntax, narrative structure and spelling errors in order to answer my research question:
Does the act of writing fan fiction in a passionate affinity space such as FanFiction.net with its own norms, rules and guidelines help to improve one’s second language writing skills?
The sub questions that will aid my research question are:
What kind of writing skills are demonstrated in the examined texts in terms of language use and narrative techniques?
Are there any developments in the examined texts regarding language use and narrative techniques over time?
As the source for my analysis I used FanFiction.net. This is an international database/archive site to which writers of fan fiction can post their work. It was created in 1998 and is the world’s largest fan fiction site. To be able to compare fan elements, such as character improvement and adherence to the original work, I chose to work within the Buffy
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8 the Vampire Slayer fandom, as I have enough knowledge of this television series to read the fan fiction texts as a fan and because it is a popular fan fiction topic.
Fig 1. user1. “ I”. 5 Dec 2012.Image.“Why I’m really not a Star Trek fan anymore…” Apocalyptic Productions. Web.11 June 2014.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - which will henceforth be referred to as Buffy - is an American television series created by Joss Whedon and is based on his film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992). The show consists out of seven seasons that aired from 1997 up until 2003. The series revolves around Buffy Summers, a high school student that just moved from Los Angeles to Sunnydale. Viewers of the series follow Buffy as she struggles with battling vampires and demons whilst dealing with everyday hardships. With over 46000 fan fiction texts, Buffy is the fourth most popular television series to write about among fan fiction writers on Fanfiction.net. These numbers are remarkable, as the final episode of Buffy ’ aired over ten years ago and the top three most popular television series ( Glee, Supernatural and Doctor Who) on FanFiction.net are shows that are still aired on television . Why Buffy is still a highly popular online fan fiction topic is open to speculation. In their study of Swedish fan fiction readers and writers, Patrick Wikström and Christina Olin-Scheller note that the larger the franchise behind a product, the more likely the chance of it becoming a popular fan fiction topic: “It seems as in order for a fandom to really take off, it is not sufficient for it to
Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
9 be a popular book, it also has to be available as a film, a TV series, or a video game (89).” This is certainly the case with Buffy , as the franchise includes Buffy books, comic books, cd’s, action figures, board games, video games, as well as a film on which the television series is based and a spin-off series Angel . The popularity of the series as an online fan fiction topic, despite it being absent from television for over a decade, makes it socially relevant. One could say that online fan fiction writing has extended Buffy ’s shelf life by keeping it alive online. For my research I constructed a framework that allowed me to measure improvement in writing- and language skills. This improvement was measured both according to formal norms (i.e. less spelling errors, use of figurative language, etc.) as well as fan fiction norms (does the character resemble the character from the original work?; does the writer insert self-designed characters?). I then did a detailed textual analysis of 12 texts, written by 4 female writers whose mother tongue is Dutch. These texts, written in English, were selected because they were published onto FanFiction.net at least a few months apart in order to allow room for improvement of writing skills and language skills. By comparing a writer’s texts to each other based on the aforementioned framework I aimed to find out whether the writers showed improvement regarding writing and language skills. This thesis is structured as follows: As online fan fiction is quite a modern phenomenon, I will begin by explaining existing definitions of fan fiction, its basics and related terms in chapter 2.1 ‘What Is Online Fan Fiction?’. This chapter is followed by 2.2 ‘What Puts the Fan in Fan Fiction?: Fandom, Identity and Participatory Culture’, in which we will look at what drives the writers of fan fiction, what it means to be a fan and why people read and write fan fiction. As mentioned before, it takes more than being able to read and write in order to write online fan fiction. Therefore in chapter 2.3 ‘Online Fan Fiction, Writing Skills and Norms in Formal and Informal Settings’ I will look at how the definition of literacy has changed in the digital world and what types of literacy are relevant when it comes to online fan fiction. Some of the skills that are necessary for creating online fan fiction are taught in formal education (i.e. in the classroom). However, there are also skills that are not taught in formal education and that the writer picked up through informal education (i.e. outside of the classroom). Even though fan fiction is written voluntarily, that does not mean that there are no norms within the fan fiction communities that a writer should stick to if
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10 he/she wants to be successful at writing fan fiction. This will also be discussed in chapter 2.3. In chapter 3 ’Methodology’ I will present you with my research questions and aims, data and the analytical framework. This framework will be the basis of chapter 4 ‘Analysis’, which consists out of 12 textual analyses. Finally, in chapter 5 ‘Conclusion and Discussion’, I will discuss and compare the results of the 12 analyses , how these results could be used to improve formal education as well as my recommendations for further research.
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Chapter 2: Literature Review
2.1 What is Online Fan Fiction?
This chapter contains terms and definitions that are closely related to fan fiction. I will begin by explaining what fan fiction is followed by ways in which ways fans create new content based on several media and the relationship between fan fiction, multimodality and intermediality.
2.1.1 Terms and Definitions
Fan fiction is a term that was first used in 1944 as “a fictional account written by a fan of a show, movie, book, or video game to explore themes and ideas that will not or cannot be explored via the originating medium”ii . Merriam-Webster adds to that by saying that contemporary fan fiction is “often posted on the Internet”iii . Due to the impact that the Internet has had on the execution of fan fiction, the meaning of the term has also changed over time. It is not surprising, then, to see that there does not seem to be a definition set in stone. The definitions of fan fiction range from “the ‘raiding’ of mass culture by fans who use media texts as the starting point for their own writing” (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 556) to “writings by television fans about their favourite characters (Heinecken 48)”. Black uses another definition, namely “Fanfiction is writing in which fans use media narratives and pop cultural icons as inspiration for creating their own texts (Language 172)”. Finally, a more elaborate definition is given by Wikström and Olin-Scheller: “stories based on well-established characters and structures, but written by the fans of these well- established characters rather than by the original author [...] normally written without a commercial purpose and without the approval of the author of the original text” (84). One thing that becomes clear when you compare definitions of fan fiction is that although most of these definitions allow for the final product to be based on various kinds of media, they solely include the fan-created product to be “writings” or “text”. However, fan fiction also entails (as discussed in the introduction) creations such as potterpuppetpals or fan-made animated videos of The Adventurous Adventures of One Direction, created by Mark Parsons. Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
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Fig 2. Mark Parsons. “One-Direction-Animated- Fan-Fiction”. 30 May 2012.Image.“One Direction Get Animated In Cartoon Fan Fiction” Idolator. Web.11 June 2014.
Fan fiction can be based on characters and stories from all sorts of media. In this thesis, Wikström and Olin-Scheller’s definition of fan fiction will be used, as it is highly detailed and encompasses a crucial point in fan fiction, namely that fans create without the approval of the original author and that most of the fans do not set out to financially gain from their creations. However, there are some works of fan fiction that have had commercial success, such as the Fifty Shades of Grey (2011,2012) trilogy by E.L. James, but these are exceptions and the definition leaves room for this. Black distinguishes between fanfic and profic, saying profics are written with the purpose of making money out of them, while fanfic is written because the writer enjoys the original work (Adolescents 10). This distinction is not very easily made as a sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey is still written out of love for the original work, but is also bound to sell a significant amount of copies based on the success of its predecessors. This makes it difficult to say whether the book is written as a fanfic or profic, as the writer will presumably still have written it out of love for Twilight , but also for monetary gain. As far as Buffy is concerned, no fan-made creations have broken through to the mainstream pop culture in this way, despite the fact that it is a popular fan fiction topic. It is not unusual for a popular fan fiction topic not to break into the mainstream pop culture, as examples of fan fiction success stories such as Fifty Shades of Grey are sparse compared to the amount of available fan fiction.
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Fan fiction is part of fanon . Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson make a distinction between canon and fanon : Canon , “the events presented in the media source that provide the universe, setting, and characters”, and fanon , “the events created by the fan community in a particular fandom and repeated pervasively throughout the fantext (10).” Fanon can contain certain details that are not completely supported by or that are contradictory to canon. However, even the canon can be difficult or challenging to define. In the case of Buffy , for instance, are the tie-in products such as the Dark Horse comic books regarded as part of the canon? Some fans may only consider the original film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), the television series (1997 - 2003) and the comic books that are all written by Joss Whedon as part of the canon, but not everyone necessarily feels the same way. What a fan fiction writer considers to be canon is essential to the reception of their texts, because it is expected of them to stick to the canon (Busse and Hellekson, 10).This can be challenging, as fan fiction norms differ for each fandom and these norms are not always explicitly mentioned. Furthermore, writers do not necessarily always agree on what these norms are or what constitutes “good” writing skills or fan fiction. In chapter 2.3 we will come back to this when we take a look at fan fiction writing in formal and informal settings. According to Busse and Hellekson (2006), fan fiction consists of three main genres: gen, het and slash . All three of these genres are based on romance. Gen is an abbreviation of ‘general’ and it is a story that does not involve an “imposed romantic relationship among the characters” (10). Het is an abbreviation of ‘heterosexual’ and concerns a story that revolves around a heterosexual relationship between the characters. This relationship can stem from the source text or can be invented by the fan fiction writer. Finally, slash revolves around a homosexual relationship between characters. The inspiration for slash fanfics , according to Busse and Hellekson, is usually based on a homoerotic subtext in the source text (10). In Buffy slash fan fiction, male characters Spike and Angel are regularly romantically linked and there are even Buffy specific databases outside of FanFiction.net that focus entirely on slash fan fiction, such as Strictly Slash on BuffyGuide.com. Henry Jenkins does not use traditional genres of categorising types of fan fiction. Rather than using genres, he lists ten ways to rewrite a television show based on “a survey of some of the dominant approaches employed by fan writers [indicating] the community’s characteristic strategies of interpretation, appropriation and reconstruction” (Jenkins 162).
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These ways, or rewriting strategies, can be used to categorize different kinds of fan fiction and altogether provide a more detailed description than Busse and Hellekson’s categories. However, there is such a high degree of overlap in these rewriting strategies, which causes his way of categorising fan fiction to be rather obscure. It is interesting to note that there is a discrepancy on FanFiction.net between to which genres fans ascribe their stories and the genres that are attributed to fan fiction, such as gen , het and slash . This discrepancy is likely caused by the website’s genre filter as the website does not use fan fiction specific genres, but rather traditional genres such as romance, adventure and parody. In chapter 4 we will return to the use of and adherence to genre by the selected fan fiction writers as knowledge of genres could be seen as part of writing skills.
2.1.2 Multimodality and Intermediality
Two terms that are strongly related to fan fiction are multimodality and intermediality as a fan fiction writer combines several modes, such as visual and textual. Especially in an online setting where fans can share their self-made content with people all over the world, original content is being edited and remixed in various modes. Multimodality means that there are several modes aside from written or spoken language that can be a source of information and can be used to create meaning. The three main modes are textual, audio and visual and these modes can be combined in different ways in different media (Murray). For instance, television sometimes uses all three simultaneously when a series or film is broadcasted and supported by subtitles. In a way, written text (handwritten as well as printed) in itself is multimodal as it can be linked to visual meaning (Cope and Kalantzis as cited in Chandler-Olcott&Mahar 561). Multimodality is closely related to intermediality, which can be defined as “a way of understanding the relations between two media, such as writing and images, or the transgression of boundaries between them” iv . All kinds of media are closely related and as Marshall McLuhan said: “The content of any medium is always another medium” (McLuhan 8). Meaning that in order to create a series such as Buffy for the medium of television, you need the content of film, just as in order to create written content such as fan fiction you need the content of speech. No medium stands on its own, it always has uses another medium. Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
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Books, be it comic books or novels, often serve as sources for films. Similarly, fan fiction is (often) written text that can be based on a play or other text (intertextuality) and/or visual media such as television and film. The textual mode differs from the visual mode through the use of one’s senses. The textual mode is absorbed by the eyes but only creates an image inside your brain, whereas the visual mode creates an image for your eyes to absorb. This means that when someone transforms a television series into fan fiction they are faced with certain limitations, such as the lack of squeaking noises when a door opens in a horror story or intonation in a sarcastic text. A sarcastic text can be wrongly interpreted due to lack of intonation. It is the writer’s task to create the correct image inside the brain of the reader via text. An example of how these limitations could be overcome in fan fiction employing the textual, written mode is by adding elements of playwriting or film script to deal with visual and auditory restrictions: “A girl’s voice: *sniffs and the TV picture goes on a slant*”(Playing 11). By doing so, the writer places their text in a space between the two media as the limitations of a written text are dealt with by adding visual action in writing. As Buffy is originally visual content, it is essential that the Buffy fan fiction in textual mode feels authentic to the reader. This is one of the criteria of fan fiction norms that will be further discussed in chapter 2.3. Readers of Buffy fan fiction are familiar with Buffy in the visual mode, so in order to create authentic Buffy fan fiction, the writer needs to overcome the limitations that the textual mode can create. This could be done, for instance, by creating a clear locational setting for the story, replicating dialects and accents and using aforementioned elements of playwriting or film script.
2.2 What Puts the ‘Fan’ in Fan Fiction?: Fandom, Identity and Participatory Culture
In this chapter, I will look at levels of involvement and commitment of fans based on the model of fan motivation and personality traits, created by Lars Honsel, Martin Klaus and Ralf Wagner (2011). Is there a difference between a fan and a fanatic? I will also explain the notion of fandom (both in online and offline setting) and provide information on the demographics of (online) fan fiction. Who write and read (online) fan fiction?
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2.2.1 What Is a Fan and What Is Fandom?
To be able to explain what a fandom is, we will first have to give a definition of the word “fan”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a fan is a person who is enthusiastic about a person or thing v. This person or thing can be a pop star, a television series, a sports team, an artist or a brand, among other things. According to Jenkins, the term “fan” has a negative connotation:
“Whether viewed as a religious fanatic, a psychopathic killer, a neurotic fantasist, or a lust- crazed groupie, the fan remains a “fanatic” or false worshiper, whose interests are fundamentally alien to the realm of “normal” cultural experience and whose mentality is dangerously out of touch with reality”(15).
This image is arguably less negative in present-day society. Due to an increasingly internationally orientated society, which could at least partially be credited to the rise of the Internet, small groups of fans can now share their passion with millions of people around the world. For example, television series and films can be viewed online, which offers people who otherwise would possibly not have had the opportunity to even watch or read a product the chance to become infatuated or “obsessed” with it. The Internet also enables these fans to meet each other in chat rooms, on fora and fan pages. These groups of fans or enthusiasts, also called “fandoms”, did not come into being by the invention of the Internet, however. According to Jenkins (48), media fandom came into being in the 1960s as a result of the enthusiasm about Star Trek. Nevertheless, the Internet has made it easy to connect with other fans (especially worldwide) and create communities online. Examples of well-known fandoms are Trekkies ( Star Trek fans), Potterheads ( Harry Potter fans) and Whovians ( Doctor Who fans). Fandom is about more than just being a fan, it is also about a sense of belonging to a community conversing with like-minded people, friendship and personal development:
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“We started out watching the series [ Star Trek ] because we enjoyed the show but we watched the reruns, attended the conventions and published fanzines for something overlooked by theses ‘theories.’ We fen [the fan slang plural of fan] are still around because we enjoy each other’s company ....The majority of our social life revolves around fannish things: conventions, writing, drawing and publishing. While we fen still enjoy the series and movies, we enjoy sharing our enthusiasm with others even more.” (Allyson Dyar as cited in Jenkins 75.)
The fandom thus becomes a “passionate affinity space”, a term coined by James Paul Gee (69), referring to a space, either online or offline, where people with shared interests come together and informal learning takes place. Online examples would include fan fiction websites, or online gaming forums. In a personal affinity space, the fans do not simply consume the product but also create a community around it where they produce their own secondary products. On websites such as Fanfiction.net, fans can filter fan fiction according to the topic, the genre and even a specific writer. Thus, if a visitor is only interested in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction, and more specifically the hurt/comfort genre, they do not have to pay for or browse through an entire fanzine to read their favourite fanfics. This is a benefit of online fandom. In Consumer Fanaticism: A Typology of Fans Related to Fan Motivation and Personality Traits, a paper by Lars Honsel, Martin Klaus and Ralf Wagner (2011), a typology of fans is proposed that will allow us to categorise the level of involvement and commitment that fan fiction writers show. They distinguish four types of fans: a sympathizer, an enthusiast, a fanatic and a dysfunctional fan. The sympathizer is the type with the least amount of involvement, commitment and intensity. (Honsel, Klaus and Wagner 3-5) The enthusiasts distinguish themselves from the sympathizers by going to fairs and conventions (such as ComicCon), being members of offline fan clubs (which requires more commitment as it requires more time and money and is less easily accessible than online fan clubs) and are protective over the object of their fascination. The third type of a fan, the fanatic distinguishes himself/herself from the enthusiast by being known for their expertise (reaching “expert” status), displaying memorabilia privately as well as publicly and producing their own material. Finally, there is the “fanatic” that Jenkins also speaks of. This is the
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18 dysfunctional fan that displays unacceptable, anti-social behaviour (Honsel, Klaus and Wagner 3-5) . The level of commitment and involvement of fans differs for each fandom and fan. There are certain levels of fanaticism, or the level of involvement or interest a person has. A thirteen-year old girl who describes herself as a Justin Bieber fan will probably display more elements of a “lust-crazed groupie” than a fifty-year old male Chicago Bulls fan and her level of commitment will possibly be higher due to intensified feelings teenage girls are generally known to suffer from emotional instability. Due to being in a developmental phase, the girl could quickly find a new singer to adore. The middle-aged fan could have a lower level of involvement but also have been a fan for a long period of time. Even fans of the same age and gender have different levels of commitment and involvement. Owning the Battlestar Gallactica boxset and watching an episode on occasion does not display the same level of involvement as in the case of a fan that goes to fan conventions and buys expensive memorabilia. In this sense, we could make a distinction between a fan and a fanatic: a fan displays a lower level of involvement and commitment than a fanatic, even though they also express a liking for a person or thing. Due to the fact that the Internet provides an easily accessible platform for fans and fandoms, the image of fan as a “neurotic fantasist” could be in the past, because one is only “abnormal” if one is different from other people. If there are thousands or millions of other people who like Buffy the Vampire Slayer as much as one does, one is part of a group and not an outcast: “The stereotypical conception of the fan, while not without a limited factual basis, amounts to a projection of anxieties about the violation of dominant cultural hierarchies. The fans’ transgression of bourgeois taste and disruption of dominant cultural hierarchies insures that their preferences are seen as abnormal and threatening by those who have a vested interest in the maintenance of these standards ( even by those who may share similar tastes but express them in fundamentally different ways)” (Jenkins 17). The Internet also causes there to be a difference in the level of commitment in online and offline fan fiction writers. Based on the model by Honsel, Klaus and Wagner, writers of fan fiction, or fans who produce secondary materials, are considered level three fans: “fanatics”. However, their level of fanaticism is not the same as in Jenkins’s term “fanatic”, which is comparable to the highest level of fanaticism described in the model, the “dysfunctional”
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19 fan. It has to be noted that writing fan fiction and posting it online does not display the same level of commitment as sending it to a fanzine like fans did before online fan fiction and fan sites appeared. As previously mentioned, the level of commitment and involvement with online fan fiction is lower than if it were sent to and published in a fanzine. Websites such as FanFiction.net are free to join, easily accessible (even on a smartphone) and anonymous, whereas fanzines probably require a contribution, are not anonymous and demand more time to make (due to layout, selection of texts, editing, etc.) Therefore, online fan fiction writers could be scaled before offline fan fiction writers. One could say that online fan fiction writers are “slightly fanatic” and offline fan fiction writers simply “fanatic”.
2.2.2 The Demographics of Fan Fiction
The arrival of online fan fiction could arguably to be a reason for the shift in demographic with regard to fan fiction production. As mentioned in chapter 1, the demographic of fan fiction writers has shifted from adults to “large numbers of tech-savvy adolescents” (Adolescents 11-12) Present-day adolescents have an advantage over present-day adults, as they are more likely to have grown up with a computer and Internet at hand, meaning there are less boundaries to cross when wanting to produce online fan fiction. As mentioned in chapter 1, being literate is not enough if one wants to post their fiction online. Other skills, such as being able to use a computer, are also a necessity as I will argue in chapter 2.3. Although online fan fiction might be dominated by adolescents, adults are arguably also posting their fanfics online. Based on popular fan fiction canons on FanFiction.net such as Star Wars, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Lord of the Rings that are rather dated cultural products in comparison to Harry Potter, Twilight and Glee , one could suggest that adults still create fan fiction online as these canons likely attract an older audience . Black supports this observation as she states that:
“...it is clear that a sizeable portion of these texts [online fan fiction] is composed by adolescents. However, the demographic is often somewhat related to the canon, that is canons such as Doctor Who or Lost are likely to have a greater proportion of texts composed
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20 by adults, whereas Pokémon or The OC might have more texts composed by a younger audience”. (Adolescents 20)
The gender of online fan fiction writers mostly depends on fandom. Twilight fanfics are more likely to attract (young) female writers, whereas Star Trek will arguably draw in more male writers based on the target audience of both original works. Television shows, films or books are targeted towards a particular audience and this also influences whether men and/or women watch the show and, further, whether men or women write fan fiction based on the show. Results from a statistical sample done in 2011 showed that 78% of FanFiction.net members are female and that 80% of all members are between the ages of 13 and 17 vi . However, these results provide information on all members of FanFiction.net and the sample is not concerned with who produces and who consumes. It is noteworthy that the fan fiction texts on FanFiction.net can be read by anyone with an access to the Internet and that what you gain by being a member are the ability to comment, post your own fanfics and the benefits of being part of a community (interaction with other members, getting feedback and serving as a beta-reader). It is also unknown what percentage of all members are active users. Yet, based on these numbers it is likely that at least the majority of readers and writers of online fan fiction are adolescent females. The reason for why these young women are well represented in the world of online fan fiction can be explained by looking at why people read and write fan fiction in general. First of all, fans read and write fan fiction to be part of a community. Websites such as FanFiction.net provide readers and writers with a community, they can identify themselves as member of a group who are also seen as “fanatics” and they share something that they are passionate about. By speculating, interpreting and discussing with other fans in the fandom, fans are already rewriting the original work (Jenkins 155). By writing and reading fan fiction, fans feel like they belong to a group (Gee; Jenkins; Youth). By writing fan fiction in a second language, such as English, they also present themselves as members of an international community. Often these English Language Learners (ELL) emphasize the fact that English is not their native language, and thus explicitly create the identity as a member of the international community (Language 173). Secondly, fans are drawn to fan fiction out of love for the original work.
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Fans are fans because they love a product. However, they can get frustrated by plot twists even though or exactly because they love the product and want to rewrite the original work if it does not cater to their needs. Fan fiction allows writers to create an Alternate Universe (AU) in which they can see what happens if aspects of the plot or relationships between characters change (Playing 12). According to Jenkins (23), it is often a combination of love for the original work and frustration that drives fans to write fan fiction (among other ways of producing): “Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them from their interests.” They are, in a sense, powerless when it comes to the original work. However, by writing fan fiction, the fans can, for instance, keep beloved characters alive. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer , is notorious for not shying away from killing off beloved characters in his shows. Fans who are unhappy about Whedon’s decision to kill off their beloved characters can resurrect them in fan fiction by expanding the series timeline (as discussed in chapter 2.1). On Fanfiction.net alone there are 1180 texts written about Tara, one of the main characters in Buffy that was killed off in Whedon’s script for season 6. This could also be a way for fans to show their disapproval. In this way they are not mindless consumers but active participants and producers. A more obvious reason as to why fans read and write fan fiction is because they cannot get enough of the original work., When a series, film or book is finished, the reader/viewer can be left for wanting more, which can result in watching or reading the product for another time, or in creating new content: “Fans read these stories not so much to relive their own experience of the television episodes as to explore the range of different uses writers can make of the same materials, to see how familiar stories will be retold and what new elements will be introduced” (Jenkins 177). Writing or reading fan fiction can change the way one looks at the original work, providing a fan with a new way of looking at the characters and storyline (Jenkins 177). In this way a new original work can be produced, whereby the shelf-life of the “old” original work is extended. Finally, fans read and write fan fiction to create an identity, to express or identify them. A reason for reading and writing online fan fiction in particular also has the benefit of being anonymous, as one is able to construct a new identity that is not linked to their offline identity. Being part of an international community is not the only way for writers of fan
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22 fiction to construct their online identity. The fans can read and write whatever they want, because online communication can be anonymous and on fan forums fans are with like- minded people, which makes it safe to write about sensitive topics without censorship. Apart from the fact that anonymity means that you cannot be judged as a person on what you write about, you cannot be judged as a person in terms of personality, looks or ethnicity. Anonymity also ensures that a reader can read whatever they want without censorship or judgment. If someone were to read works that contain erotic content or that explore sexuality in any way can do so anonymously. This would not be the case if one were to borrow a book from the library on those topics, as the books would be registered to your name. In sum, it could be argued that adolescents are well represented on FanFiction.net because they can be themselves among peers with similar interests and that it is a safe environment to explore their identity through writing. The overwhelming majority of females on FanFiction.net can be explained by the fact that female adolescents “are more interested in written text while the boys preferred visual forms of expressions such as pictures and videos” (Wikström and Olin-Scheller 88). Now that reasons for reading and writing fan fiction have been discussed, it is important to note that a lot of fan fiction is being written in languages other than the writers´ native language. English is the most commonly used language online and a lot of pop culture comes from the United States or United Kingdom. This means that fans can stay closer to the original work when they read and write texts in English. They also mix up languages to show they are part of an international community (Language 175-176). Finally, some English language learners also note that English is not their native language but that they want to learn, stimulating language based feedback and social support (Language 182). This is also the case for some of the Buffy fan fiction writers whose texts will be analysed in chapter 4. Aydine, for instance, says that she “found fanfiction as a learning plateau to be very amusing” vii and Maartje87 apologises for any mistakes she has made, as English is not her native language viii .
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2.3 Online Fan Fiction, Literacy and (In)Formal Learning
It is obvious that in order to create written online fan fiction, one has to be literate. However, besides being able to read and write, one also has to know how to operate a computer and more specifically, how to take original content from a medium and decode it into written text, upload online content to a database such as FanFiction.net and discuss this content with other fans. In this chapter I will discuss the skills that are required to create online fan fiction and the new types of literacy that emerged in the twenty-first century. There are also norms and guidelines to take into consideration when writing online fan fiction. Besides basic writing skills that are taught in school, such as spelling, grammar and being able to write a story that garners the interest of fans, there are also norms that are created by the online fan fiction communities. These norms will also be discussed in this chapter. Finally, I will briefly highlight what fan fiction and literacy researchers have said about the possibility of using fan fiction in a formal setting, such as school.
2.3.1 Fan Fiction and Literacy
2.3.1.1 Literacy
In general, literacy refers to “the state or condition of being literate (=able to read and write)” ix . Gee and Hayes (16) add to this by stating that literacy is a means to use “writing as a delivery system for language”. According to the website of UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 84.1% of the world’s adult population is literate and the number is 89.6% for youth (15-24 years) x. These rates are even higher in the Netherlands: a whopping 99% of the Dutch population above the age of fifteen is literate and this number is evenly spread between men and women. In order to go about in contemporary society, one needs to have a basic level of literacy. This is called functional literacy. Knowledge is stored in various forms of writing, both offline and online, and to have access to this knowledge one must be able to read. The definition of literacy discussed so far describes the act of reading and writing in general. However, due to new media that emerged at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, we no longer speak of literacy as an all-
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24 encompassing definition. Terms such as ‘new literacies’, ‘21st century literacies’, ‘digital literacies’, ‘media literacy’ and ‘web literacies’ have arisen due to these new media and the effect they have on traditional literacy. Being able to simply read and write is no longer enough to be able to have access to knowledge. According to Gee and Hayes (16), contemporary children learn various skills through reading in general. To be able to gather information online, one also has to be able to use a computer and know how to use a search engine, among other things. This is called digital literacy. In this section, we will look at three kinds of new literacies that help to discuss the connections between language skills and fan fiction: media literacy, digital literacy and transliteracy. These “new” forms of literacy do not replace the traditional form of literacy but rather build upon it. For a Dutch writer of English fan fiction, one has not only to be able to translate their ideas into written language, but into a foreign written language. This means that there are two barriers that the writer needs to overcome: first, expressing one’s ideas in written language and, second, translating these thoughts into another language. Thus, literacy is also a key part of second language learning. For this thesis, however, the focus will be on literacy, as the analysis only deals with written language and not oral language. Furthermore, the focus will be on writing skills rather than reading skills. Finally, there is at least one other barrier that stands between an aspiring writer of fan fiction and their goal when they want their work to be read by an online community. The writer also needs to be media literate in at least two ways. The writer has to be digitally literate in order to know how websites such as Fanfiction.net work or how to communicate with peers on fora or online communities. Often the fan fiction writers also have to be able to transfer information from one medium to another when they write fan fiction, especially when their writing draws on visual media, as we have discussed in chapter 2.1. To be able to be a skilled writer and produce good texts, one also needs to be aware of norms (be it formal norms that are introduced in institutional contexts such as schools, or emerged in informal contexts such as fan fiction sites).
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2.3.1.2 Media Literacy
Media literacy is a broad term that is defined by the Center for Media Literacy as follows:
Media Literacy is a 21st century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy (Media n.pag.).
In this definition of media literacy, reading or writing are not mentioned. Being media literate, it refers to the understanding how different media work, how to interpret them and how to produce one’s own texts, video’s, among other things. In this sense it is similar to traditional literacy, as one has to be able to either analyse or decode a product as well as to produce oneself. Or, as David Buckingham (Defining 274) puts it: “Media literacy involves «writing» the media as well as «reading» them”. Production and social participation are key terms when it comes to media literacy, meaning creative ways of dealing with media production, such as building web-pages, online gaming, writing blogs, or uploading videos on YouTube and conversing about these products also count as being media literate. The fans are utilising. Buckingham (Media 34) suggests that everyday communication practices, such as sending text messages or e-mails also count as media literacy. Media literacy is closely linked to fan fiction writing, as fans are producers of online content and they participate in online communities such as FanFiction.net, as discussed in chapter 2.2. Fans provide each other with helpful feedback, participate and discuss the original content as well as their fan-made content and are part of an online, global society. Fan fiction writers are utilising several media. They are using original content (e.g. books, television series, films) and transforming this content into another medium. For instance, Buffy fans are media literate as they recognise, use and transform content from the television medium and transforming it into text. They show they are media literate by including elements of the television medium (such as flashback references to a scene in the
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26 original series) or lyrics of music playing in the background of the scene, to give the reader a taste of the story’s setting.
2.3.1.3 Digital Literacy
According to Mike Rubble and George Bailey, digital literacy means “the capability to use digital technology and knowing when and how to use it" (Rubble and Bailey 21). This means being able to evaluate and interpret information via digital tools (i.e. a computer). As previously discussed, fan fiction already existed before the Internet became accessible to the general public. The arrival of the Internet has, however, created a worldwide platform for writers and readers of fan fiction that could arguably not be trumped by any printed fanzine. This said, in order to get access to online fan fiction, one has to be digitally literate and this could be a boundary that has to be overcome if one wants to have this access. Digital literacy is part of the overarching term of media literacy, as digital tools such as computers are also considered to be media. The terms also overlap, as several types of media exist within the digital world. For example, radio and television are types of media that exist on their own, but also exist as a digital medium. For example, broadcast stations also make their programmes available to listen to on their online websites, rather than the programme just being accessible via a traditional radio. Another example of this overlap is websites such as Netflix that make traditional television series available to view on computers, mobile phones and television. Digital literacy does not simply refer to the ability to use a computer (hardware and software) or understand electronic technology, it also refers to knowing how website interfaces work or how to find content on the Internet. Regarding fan fiction, there is a clear difference between digital literacy and media literacy. Digital literacy in this respect means knowing how to upload content, how databases such as FanFiction.net work and communicating with other fans on fora or via instant messaging functions on the website. However, media literacy means being able to use content from other media (such as television and books) and being able to transform it into another medium. For example, YouTube user Heather Indeed composed a video based on Buffy and Supernatural , in which she uses clips from both television series supported by the song ´Wild Horses´ by Charlotte Martin to create a crossover fan fiction clip in order to create a shipping pair of characters Buffy and Dean (a main character in Supernatural )xi . In this YouTube clip, Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
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Heather uses the television medium and a separate audio format to create her own content. The gathering of sources requires Heather to be media literate, whereas the digital creation and uploading on YouTube requires her to be digitally literate.
2.3.1.4 Transliteracy
Transliteracy is defined as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and films, to digital social networks” (Ipri 532). The ability to read and write is included in the definition of transliteracy, whereas the definition of media literacy focuses more on being able to conceptualize and understand how media work. In this sense, the definition of transliteracy is more closely related to the general definition of literacy than media literacy is. Transliteracy focusses on the relationship between different media. Rather than viewing different kinds of media as separate islands, it looks at the overlap between them. Transliteracy also has more to do with how people use technology in relation to media rather than technology itself. It closes the gap between digital literacy and traditional literacy, because its aim is to provide “a unifying ecology of not just media, but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction and culture” (Ipri 533). Transliteracy also takes into consideration aspects that influence media, such as pop culture. In this sense, it could arguably be the most applicable term in relation to fan fiction as opposed to digital literacy and media literacy. As fan fiction is also closely linked to culture (and especially pop culture) and digital literacy and media literacy focus mainly on the media itself and how it is used rather than how this kind of literacy fits into the bigger picture and how these media interact and overlap. For this reason it is applicable and important with regard to fan fiction, because fan fiction can be based on and produced in several media. As becomes clear by looking at fandoms and the cultural aspects of fan fiction such as interaction (e.g. feedback, dialogue and fan gatherings both offline and online), fan fiction is about much more than merely using products from different types of media and creating your own product. It is about fan culture and friendship as well. By adding a transcendent language structure (Adolescents 63) such as smileys or emotes (e.g. *cries*), fan fiction writers are overcoming the limitations of the textual mode by implementing audio-visual Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
28 elements of the television medium. More importantly, they are using a universal language which binds the fandom together, as these smileys and emotes address a global community due to its international usage. Therefore it is arguably the literacy term that is most closely related to fan fiction.
2.3.1.5 New Literacies in Formal Settings
It is important to note that if you want to use media in education, you have to educate about media first. As Umberto Eco said: “If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television” (Umberto Eco in Defining 264). As discussed before, fan fiction can be based on and produced in various forms, meaning that being digitally literate simply is not enough. In order to use fan fiction as a means to improve writing skills or second language skills, young people first have to be media literate. They have to know what kind of media there are, what their characteristics are and how to use them. David Buckingham agrees with Umberto Eco in the sense of having to be taught about media before these media are implemented in teaching. However, he thinks that when it comes to digital media, it is important to focus on the ethical side as well. It’s not just about teaching young people how to use a search engine to get the information you need, but more importantly to be critical about what you read and to find trustworthy sources (rather than sponsored information, for instance). Buckingham proposes a model of critical aspects to keep in mind with regard to media education that he applies to media literacy as well as to digital literacy: One should be able to evaluate who provides the information, for what reason and interpret the values and ideologies of the provider, be aware of meta-language and codes that exist in communication of all sorts and be aware of the fact that you’re part of a targeted audience (Defining 267-268). In order to be able to use fan fiction as a means to improve writing skills or second language acquisition, children would possibly also have to get media education. Even though there are benefits to teaching digital literacy in schools, there are also downsides to the growing importance of computers and the Internet that make it difficult. Computers are expensive and (especially in the current economic climate) not everyone has the luxury of owning one. Due to this, the digital age widens the gap when it comes to social inequalities like rich and poor and/or educated and uneducated. If a person is not in a Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
29 financial position where he/she can buy a computer then they will not have access to information that someone who owns a computer does have access to. When they finally do have the money to buy one, their knowledge will likely not reach that of the person who has had one for a longer period of time. This vicious cycle of inequality makes it difficult to teach media literacy in schools, for the same problem occurs with other media such as books or television. The worse the economic status of the parents the less access children will have to media, which reinforces the social inequalities. This could also be an argument against using fan fiction in formal settings. Buckingham (Media) also points out the problem that not everyone has access to Internet, and even if children attend schools that have computers with Internet access, we don’t know to what extent they are actually able to use it. Children who do not have access to a computer at home will fall behind their peers who do (Alvermann 2008). When it comes to education of digital media, Buckingham says: “Teachers need to recognize that young people’s uses of the internet are intimately connected with their other media enthusiasms – and that this is bound to be reflected in the texts they produce” (Defining 275). It will therefore be likely that their texts or other created products are influenced in one way or another by pop culture, as young people use digital media for entertainment as well as education. (275) In this sense, using fan fiction as an educational tool could function as edutainment, being educational and entertaining at the same time. However, it could also lead to social inequality in the classroom due to the fact that teachers are unable to monitor if the children are able to spend a sufficient amount of time on the Internet to put their fanfics online, which could lead to children falling behind their peers who have unlimited access.
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2.3.2 Fan Fiction, Writing Skills and Norms in Informal Settings
Even though fan fiction is written in a passionate affinity space this does not mean that there are no rules and guidelines that one is expected to follow. In this section our primary focus will be on Fanfiction.net as a passionate affinity space, with a specific reference to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction. We will discuss how one can learn from writing fan fiction, which implicit and explicit norms one is expected to follow as well as the importance of comments, beta readers and feedback. The norms that will be addressed in this chapter will be used to create an analytical model in chapter 3. Firstly, there are general language usage norms that a writer must stick to, which are taught in formal education but can also be consulted in online grammar guides for fan fiction writers, such as Holy Mother Grammatica’s Guide to Good Writing. For instance, linguistic norms and norms guiding the construction of a good/fluent narrative (Wikström and Olin- Scheller 90). A writer must pay attention to spelling and grammar and the story has to have an interesting and exciting plotline, otherwise people will not enjoy reading it xii . Secondly, there are fan fiction norms that concern characterisation of original characters and creating new content while at the same time staying as close to the original source as possible. Whether a character resembles the original character is judged by the fandom. Writers must, for instance, try to avoid characters behaving Out-of-Character (OOC) (Wikström and Olin-Scheller 91), which refers to a situation where a fan fiction character does not behave according to the expectations of fans based on the original character. On the one hand, fan fiction writers are judged in terms of whether they stay close to the original work, for instance, in the sense of their characters not behaving Out-of-Character. On the other hand, they are often also praised for having their own style and not just copying the original work. Creativity and originality is something a writer should strive for in the sense of plot and relationships between characters, but character traits must remain intact: “Authors are expected to stay close to the narrative ‘design’ they have chosen: for example, ‘in canon’, where the author remains true to the nature, characters, foci and settings of a media text while adding new storylines or exploring relationships between characters” (Black as cited in Researching 235). If a writer does not stick to the norms of the fandom, it can result in constructive criticism (if any) or fewer readers.
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Besides the norms that should be taken into account when writing fan fiction there are also beta-readers on the website who are willing to read and improve your story before you publish it online. These readers voluntarily do so and can be chosen by the writer based on which fandom they belong to, their strengths and weaknesses which are all listed in their profiles. These beta-readers give constructive feedback and based on their feedback the writer can decide to either publish the story or revise it first and publish it later or not at all. This is one of the benefits of being digitally literate that is also applicable to online fan fiction. Writers post their fanfics on websites such as FanFiction.net and they get feedback from beta-readers and readers who are more experienced as writers than they are. This group of individuals band together to help inexperienced writers become more skilled by providing them with feedback. The writers can benefit from the experience of others and, as they become more skilled themselves, can provide other writers with feedback as well. They are not dealing with the feedback of a single editor, but a pool of knowledge provided by numerous writers and readers. Due to the fact that the comments can be read by every member of the website, discussions can take place when members disagree with each other’s feedback. These discussions could also occur in classrooms. Finally, feedback in the form of reviews and comments are important motivators for continuing to write fanfics and for improving your second language (Wikström and Olin- Scheller 91). These kinds of feedback are given to support and help the writers progress, but first and foremost to uphold the set standards as mentioned previously. One type of feedback is the discussion pages in the “Communities” or “Forum” sections of the website. In these groups, writers can brainstorm ideas, come up with challenges for the uninspired or ask for help. On the Buffy forums fans seem supportive by creating a Writer’s Support Corner and helping each other by providing one another with feedback and advice. This corresponds to Black’s claim that “reviewers almost uniformly know to position themselves as supportive and collegial in their feedback, balancing expressions of pleasure in the story with gentle, constructive suggestions for further improving the narrative” (Black as cited in Researching 235). However, especially in large fandoms such as Buffy , a lot of readers do not get feedback, comments or reviews. For instance, one of the writers that was approached during the data collection phase of this study stated that she stopped posting fanfics out of frustration that not a lot of people read her stories.
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A search for explicit rules and norms on the FanFiction.net Buffy fora led me to conclude that there are no rules or norms as far as language use, narrative structure or characterisation is concerned, although there does seem to be a general disliking for Riley and Kennedy fanfics. This statement is based on comments in the Buffy communities section and on the fora on FanFiction.net, as this example shows: “I am accepting of all the show’s characters, yes even Riley and Kennedy..” xiii The fact that the writer justifies her acceptance of Riley and Kennedy suggests that within the fandom, these characters are unpopular. Even though there are no Buffy fandom specific rules and norms on FanFiction.net, writers are still expected to follow general rules and norms for fan fiction writing.
2.3.3 “Caught not taught”: Fan fiction in Formal Settings?
As Rebecca Black clearly states in Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction (2008), there is a difference between acquiring a second language inside or outside a classroom: “I was even more intrigued by the fact that many youth who claimed to hate English class and/or asserted that it was their worst subject, voluntarily composed fan fictions in English and then posted them online.” (21) We’ve seen in chapter 2.3.2 that even though online fan fiction is done in a passionate affinity space and not in a formal setting, there are still norms that make it possible to distinguish “good” fan fiction from “bad” fan fiction. If writing fan fiction in a second language could indeed improve this second language, would this make it interesting to implement it into formal institutions, such as secondary schools? The general consensus among researchers is that implementing fan fiction writing as it is done in passionate affinity spaces is not advisable. Alvermann (2008) agrees with David Buckingham that adolescents must be taught how to be critical when it comes to texts (both analogue and on the Internet) and improve their knowledge of digital literacy, but does not believe that turning the passionate affinity-based learning that these adolescents do should be theorised. He also points out the difference between the amount of work that can be done on an outdated computer in a public place a opposed to a private computer with high bandwidth and easy access. Chandler-Olcott and Mahar (2003) believe that had their test subjects had help from a teacher or classmates that their end products would have been less limited. Even though Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
33 they do not believe fan fiction should be integrated in teaching plans, they do wonder what would happen if teachers were to invite their students to hand in creative writing work done outside the classroom in order to provide them with feedback. Lankshear and Knobel agree with the other researchers that this form of passionate affinity-based learning should remain outside the classrooms as “young people resent having their cultural forms (mis)appropriated into schools” (Flogging n.p.). We will discuss if and how formal education could benefit from fan fiction in the final chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion.
2.3.4 How Fan Fiction Could Help Acquire a Second Language
In Introducing Second Language Acquisition , Muriel Saville-Troike addresses the differences between learning a first language (L1) and learning a second language (L2). According to Saville-Troike there are facilitating factors that influence L2 learning that are not necessary in order to learn an L1. These factors include feedback, aptitude, motivation and instruction (20). Aptitude means having the memory capacity and the ability to learn an L2. Feedback and instruction can be provided to the learner by teachers or parents, but motivation cannot be provided to the learner. In this respect, writing online fan fiction has an advantage over formal training when it comes to the aspect of motivation, as the writers create fan fiction because they have a desire to do so, rather than being instructed to learn a second language or write a story. Writers of online fan fiction, as mentioned earlier, often write fan fiction in English, as it enables them to show their content to readers all over the world. This causes them to have motivation to learn how to read and write in an L2. This is an important factor of L2 learning, as “motivation largely determines the level of effort which learners expend at various stages in their L2 development, and it is often a key to ultimate level of proficiency.” (178) Besides the fact that informal L2 learners are arguably more motivated to learn the L2, they also receive feedback and instruction like they would receive in formal education by consulting websites such as Holy Mother Grammatica’s Guide to Good Writing , which is a website for fan fiction writers that addresses writing norms and guidelines and by using beta readers. In this sense, writing online fan fiction could help to acquire a second language.
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Chapter 3: Methodology
In this chapter I will provide my research questions and aims, data and analytical framework on which I will base my analysis.
3.1 Research Question and Aims
As can be concluded based on the previous chapter, online fan fiction writing is a subject that has not gone unexamined. Studies by Sirpa Leppänen and Rebecca Black (Language; Adolescents; Cybergirls; Youth; Playing) suggest that writing online fan fiction could improve one’s second language writing skills, which is the field that I am interested in researching. However, these studies have mainly focused on the effect of feedback and comments on second language acquisition, as well as identity aspects (e.g. gender studies). What these studies do not do is provide a detailed textual analysis of the texts in which they compare a writer’s texts with the purpose of showing progression in second language and writing skills . These studies also suggest that one could expect to see progress in the writing of fans whose fanfics receive a lot of feedback. This does not necessarily mean that the mere act of writing fan fiction can improve one’s second language writing skills, but, instead, these studies show that receiving feedback helps to improve one’s writing skills. In Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction , Black discusses informal learning done by adolescents in an online environment, such as fan fiction. She puts emphasis on the communicational aspects as well as on writing by looking at dialogic negotiations (such as feedback and comments). Her analysis shows that the online fan fiction community is supportive when it comes to L2-learners (second language learners), which creates a good learning environment. The focus in the following analysis chapter will be on the text itself rather than on communicational aspects, because it might show us if the mere act of writing fan fiction (i.e. practicing) contributes to improving one’s second language and writing skills. What I am interested in is whether improvement can be detected with regard to second language acquisition and writing skills in texts that do not receive constructive feedback.
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Black’s aims differ from mine, as she puts emphasis on the communicational aspects as well as on writing by looking at dialogic negotiations (such as feedback and comments), whereas my analysis will be based on close textual analysis of the fan fiction stories themselves. Furthermore, my study will differ from Black’s research because my focus will be on Dutch writers of English fan fiction, whereas Black’s L2-learners are females who do not share the same nationality. This has led to the hypothesis that the act of writing fan fiction in a passionate affinity space with its own norms, rules and guidelines in itself helps to improve one’s second language. An example of an online fan fiction website is FanFiction.net, the world’s most popular fan fiction database. As it is the most popular fan fiction website worldwide, I will examine this website as a passionate affinity space for my analysis. Thus, the main research question that will be examined in the following chapter will be:
Does the act of writing fan fiction in a passionate affinity space such as FanFiction.net with its own norms, rules and guidelines help to improve one’s second language writing skills?
The sub questions that will aid my research question are:
What kinds of writing skills are demonstrated in the examined texts in terms of language use and narrative techniques?
Are there any developments in the examined texts regarding language use and narrative techniques over time?
By answering these sub questions I aim to find out whether the writers show improvement in their existing second language skills and narrative techniques and if they acquire new skills. This will help me to speculate about the possibility of using fan fiction inside the classroom.
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3.2 Data
After establishing my research question I had to select a fandom in order to be able to make a fair comparison between the stories. As it is easier to compare stories from one fandom based on characterisation, I decided that the stories I would use for the analysis would have to be written within the same fandom. First and foremost, I chose the Buffy fandom because I am very familiar with the series. This makes it easier to draw comparisons between the original work and the fan fiction text, as well as recognise when a character is acting out of character. The Buffy fandom is also interesting as there is an emphasis on dialogue in the series and I am particularly interested in detailed language use and writing skills. The dialogues are witty (mostly due to wordplay), some of the main characters are British (as opposed to the other characters who are mostly American) and series-specific terms and phrases made it an interesting fandom for me to investigate. It is also a popular fandom, which increases the possibility of finding Dutch xiv writers of English fanfics, as there are simply a lot of fanfics written about Buffy . As mentioned in chapter 1, nearly 47,000 fanfics have been written about this show, making it the fourth most popular television show to write about on FanFiction.net, even though the final episode (season 7, episode 21) aired over ten years ago. I will give a brief summary of the show and its spin-off Angel to give an impression of what the fanfics are about. Buffy is a vampire slayer, a term that is defined in the introduction to the series as: ‘In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.’ ’ The series focuses on Buffy and her friends Willow and Xander, lovingly called ‘the Scoobies’. The school’s librarian Rupert Giles is also a main character, but not as part of the trio. He is Buffy’s Watcher, part of the Watcher’s council who train the Slayers and have knowledge and information on most mystical creatures. He fills the role of Buffy’s father, as her parents are divorced and her biological father is noticeably absent throughout the series. The series begins when Buffy has just moved to Sunnydale, hoping to start a new life without supernatural interference and attend high school like a normal teenager. However, as she is the Chosen One, her duties follow her to her new hometown. She quickly meets Willow and Xander, who will become her best friends throughout the series, and librarian Giles. The fans see Buffy
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37 become an adult with responsibilities that are sometimes too hard to bare and watch her struggle to fulfil her Slayer duties while dealing with “real life” hardships, such as heartbreak and the death of her mother. Alongside Buffy also ran its spin off series Angel , based on Buffy’s former lover and vampire Angel, which also featured other characters that had appeared on Buffy . In the few years that these two series aired alongside each other, Buffy and Angel (and their friends) regularly visited each other, meaning Angel made guest appearances in Buffy and vice versa. These shows are intertwined in a way, meaning a fan of Buffy would miss information if they did not watch Angel . In this way, you could see the shows as one whole consisting of eleven seasons, even though Angel was originally created for a different audience xv . Angel is less comical and focusses more on the inner turmoil of the characters than on witty dialogue. For a writer of Buffy fan fiction, it could be important to also have seen Angel , as they would otherwise miss relevant information that could be added to the fan fiction. Angel could therefore be seen as part of the Buffy canon, because the two shows are intertwined. Crossover stories between Buffy and Angel were included in the analysis for this reason. After selecting the fandom I did a more detailed search for Dutch writers of Buffy fan fiction. I used FanFiction.net as a database as it is currently the most popular database and the website offers the possibility to search on the language in which the story is written, therefore making it possible to find writers who are writing their stories in Dutch. I found one of my writers by searching for fan fiction texts in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer canon (categorised under the television series section on the site) and then using the language filter to find Dutch texts. I could then select the writer of the texts and see whether they stated their nationality in their self-description in the Author’s Notes section of their profile. I then browsed through her stories to see if she had written English stories as well. Due to a disappointing amount of Dutch writers found through the aforementioned method I decided to also use the search engine Google, as FanFiction.net does not offer the possibility to search for writers by country or nationality, but rather by language. Google did provide me with the writers’ nationalities as they were stated in the self-description of the author’s profile page. I entered “fan fiction Buffy the Vampire Slayer Netherlands”, which resulted in Google redirecting me to FanFiction.net, but showing which writers mentioned their nationality on their profile pages. I then used the same method as stated above to find
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English texts written by Dutch writers. To be able to detect progress in second language and writing skills, I decided that I would only use writers who have written at least three stories in English. Based on these criteria I selected texts written by two female writers xvi . Initially, I only planned on selecting three writers rather than four. Due to the fact that two of Maartje87’s stories are published only a day apart, however, I decided to select a fourth writer in order to make my research more representative as I wanted to select texts that were published with at least a few months in between, as change and progress does not happen overnight. Finally, I wanted to select texts that had received a limited amount of reviews in order to minimize the impact reviews have on the writer’s (possible) development. Some writers did receive reviews, but these did not contain feedback that would help writers improve, meaning they only received words of encouragement rather than feedback on their skills or language use. These criteria led me to select the following writers and stories. The writers were contacted through the Instant Messaging feature on FanFiction.net in order to receive their permission to use their texts for academic purposes. Unfortunately, only Maartje87 replied and gave her permission. As these texts are publicly and freely available for everyone that is connected to the Internet they will be used nevertheless. As these texts are freely available for anyone with an Internet connection without subscribing to FanFiction.net, these fanfics were considered public materials and can thus be used in research without the author’s permission.
Mosquito Gender: Female Years active: 2002-2009 Stories: Has published 24 stories in 5 different fandoms, which are all written in English. The majority (16) of texts is written within the Buffy fandom. The ones that will be analysed are ‘Killing Me Softly’, ‘The Promenade’ and ‘Oops a Rabbit!’. Main character(s)/Pairings: Willow and Spike (or, “Spillow”) Additional information: Makes a distinction in her self-description on the author profile page between writing for pleasure and writing to improve one’s second language. She stresses
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39 that she writes for pleasure only and apologizes for any errors regarding the American institutions that are addressed in her texts, but not for language errors.
Aydine Gender: Female Years active: 2004-2006 Stories: Has published 11 stories in 2 different fandoms, which are all written in English. There are 5 stories written within the Buffy fandom. The ones that will be analysed are ‘Interfering with Salvation part 1’, ‘Interfering with Salvation part 2’ and ‘Vodka or Scotch for Whiskey?’. Main character(s)/Pairings: Spike and Buffy (or “Spuffy”) Additional information: In her self-description on the author’s profile page, the writer is conscious of her status as a non-native writer of English and writes fan fiction in order to improve her skills: “I’ve found fanfiction as a learning plateau to be very amusing”. She also says that she does not make use of a beta reader, but uses spell checkers and dictionaries to polish up her stories. ‘Interfering with Salvation’ consists out of two parts that are written with significant time in between. Part 1 is written in 2002 and part 2 in 2004. Due to this gap, the texts will be considered as two separate texts. It also makes these texts especially interesting to analyse, because they contain more constant factors, varying only in time.
Maartje87 Gender: Female Years active: 2006 - present Stories: Has published 8 stories in 3 different fandoms; 3 of them are written in Dutch and the remaining 5 are written in English. There are 6 stories written within the Buffy fandom. The ones that will be analysed are ‘I Will Always Be with You’, ‘The Vision’ and ‘Redemption’. Main character(s)/Pairings: Tara and Willow (Tillow), Willow, Faith. Additional information: Apologises for spelling errors she might have made and adds that she writes because she enjoys it (rather than to improve her English) in her self-description on the author’s profile page.
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Angie-Face Gender: Female Years active: 2010-2011 Stories: Has published 11 stories, each of them within the Buffy fandom and in English. The ones that will be analysed are ‘Can I Do Anything?’ ‘Life’s Reward’ and ‘Revenge’. Main character(s)/Pairings: Buffy and Angel (Bangel). Additional information: Is the only writer who states her full name and age (which was 24 in 2011) in her self-description on the author’s profile page. She also mentions that she has been writing fan fiction since 2003 and posted in her final chapter that due to her uncle’s passing, she could not focus on writing a new chapter. Angie-Face has not posted anything since then. ‘Revenge’ was updated two months after publication; however, this does not affect the analysis as it is the final text that has been published. Says “I need it!” in the feedback bar, which could indicate either insecurity about her writing/language skills or a desire to be a more skilled writer.
3.3 Analytical Framework
To be able to notice an improvement in writing and second language skills, one needs to determine to which factors one can accredit such an improvement. A lot of “good writing tips” regarding fan fiction correspond to what are perceived to be basic writing skills to master in formal training, such as grammar, spelling and vocabulary, and regarding story writing skills: narrative structure, settings and plot xvii . There are, however, fan fiction specific norms that are addressed on online grammar guides, such as Holy Mother Grammatica’s Guide to Good Writing. Specific fan fiction norms as regards narrative structure focus mainly on continuity and warn fan fiction writers not to include timeline errors or plot holes xviii . Black mentions that cliff-hangers are also used by fan fiction writers to get fans to come back to their story, so they will be able to know how the story ends, as well as making a series out of their fanfic and posting chapters over time in order to get this result (Adolescents 69). However, this is a technique that is also adopted by professional writers of fictional texts. This means that
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41 creating cliff-hangers or series will be investigated in the analysis, but will be viewed as a sign of advanced writing skills rather than specific fan fiction related writing skills. Spelling and grammar are just as important in fan fiction writing as formal writing as “Incorrect spelling makes reading your story more difficult. It also gives the impression that you don't care enough about your writing to do the most rudimentary checking. If you don't care about your story, why should your readers?” (Holy n.p.) The grammar guide thus advises writers to consult dictionaries and use spellcheckers and beta-readers to proofread their texts. As the texts in the following analysis are based on a television series that focusses on American characters as well as two British characters, it is important that the writers use their colloquialisms, slang and verbal characteristics in order to create a good fanfic. Using language that does not suit the characters makes them seem Out-Of-Character and copying their verbal mannerisms creates a believable character. For example, peripheral character Spike has a Cockney accent and uses curse words such as “bollocks” and “bloody”, whereas librarian Giles has an RP English accent and uses expressions such as “I'm a hair's breadth from investigating bunnies at the moment” xix Fans get to know the characters and by using these characteristics in their fanfics they show that they belong to the fandom. As a general rule of writing fan fiction is “show, don’t tell” (Holy n.p.), there is a clear emphasis on action and dialogue rather than description and narration. This fits the medium of television, as in the original Buffy series dialogue and action are also the main focal points. Furthermore, the fan fiction community values creativity and originality by adding original characters that are not in the original source or making the story take place in an alternate universe, the characters do need to maintain their own traits (i.e. behave the way they behave in the original source). Finally, something that is frowned upon in fan fiction culture is creating a character that contains autobiographical traits of the fan fiction writer. This is called ‘Mary Sue’ xx . Although the term is not set in stone and ‘Mary Sue’s’ are mostly based on interpretation of the reader, it is an important criterion regarding characterisation norms and will therefore be taken into account in the analysis. These norms will be taken into account during the analysis, as a fan fiction text may adhere to formal norms and guidelines as to what makes a good story, but good fan fiction texts should also adhere to the rules set by the fan fiction community. Based on these norms as well as general writing skill norms as
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42 set by the English department for Education xxi , I have created the following framework that I will base my analysis on in chapter 4: Analysis:
Formal training Fan fiction norms
Narrative structure: Narrative structure: - Adherence to genre - Adherence to genre - Engaging plotline/strategies to - Engaging plotline/strategies to garner garner interest in stories (literary interest in stories (literary tools such as tools such as ellipsis and open form) ellipsis and open form) - Plot development - Plot development - Chapter length (more room for - Chapter length (more room for development of character and development of character and narrative) or part of series narrative) or part of series - Narration/narrator - Narration/narrator - Tense - Tense - Timeline errors
Characterisation: Characterisation: - Roundness of characters - Roundness of characters - Characters resemble the characters from the original work (mannerisms, language use) - Original characters created by the writer - Mary Sue (level of personal involvement)
Style: Style: - Register (formal language) - Register (slang/jargon/colloquialisms)
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- Use of imagery and descriptive - Use of imagery and descriptive language language - Repetition/variation (sentence - Repetition/variation (, sentence length, length, word choice, narration, word choice, narration, description, description, dialogue) dialogue). More dialogue and action - Tense rather than description: “Show, don’t tell”. - Tense (past tense, third or first person) - Chapter length
Spelling and Grammar: Spelling and Grammar: - Syntax (word order, prepositional - Syntax (word order, prepositional structures), semantics and structures), semantics and pragmatics pragmatics - Punctuation and capitalisation - Punctuation and capitalisation - Idiom/vocabulary - Idiom/vocabulary - Dutchisms - Dutchisms
Although characterisation could be seen as a part of narrative structure, characterisation will be discussed separately in this thesis, as the role of characterisation in a fan fiction story is arguably bigger than in non-fan fiction stories due to aforementioned norms of the fandom.
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Chapter 4: Analysis
In this chapter I will discuss the writings of Buffy fan fiction authors Mosquito, Aydine, Maartje87 and Angie-Face. I will do based on narrative structure, characterisation, style, and spelling and grammar, respectively. I will provide the analysis for three texts, followed by a general overview of conclusions that can be drawn from the analyses. I will repeat this structure for every writer.
4.1 Mosquito
4.1.1 Killing Me Softly
The first story I analysed by Mosquito consists of 4,301 words and centres around Willow and Spike. ‘Killing Me Softly’ begins with a third-person omniscient narrator providing the reader with a setting for the story. Willow has been driving for days after fleeing Sunnydale due to a traumatic experience. Through the use of ellipsis xxii , this experience is not first explained but left as a gap that is filled in after 25 lines. The reader finds out why she left Sunnydale because Willow calls her best friend Xander a few days after she has left. Willow and Spike, the pair in this narrative, were living together and Willow came home early to find Spike and Buffy in bed together. When the story continues, a year has passed and Willow has settled in Toronto. She now has a roommate called Linda, whom she has met in a coffee shop, and a job in IT. She is still friends with Xander and they call each other occasionally. This way, Willow is still connected to her old life in Sunnydale. She still loves Spike but Linda gives her a deadline: if Spike has not come looking for her within the next three months, Willow should move on. After two months and twenty-three days, someone knocks on the door of Willow’s apartment (that she no longer shares with Linda). Willow opens the door to see Spike standing in front of her. He has come to ask for her forgiveness and agrees to let him atone for what he has done to her. She offers him Linda’s old bedroom and they agree to start over together. The story is an AU (Alternate Universe) text that explores a relationship (pairing) that is not present in the original television series. In the series, Buffy and Spike are in an
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45 unconventional relationship that starts in season 5 when Spike realises that he is in love with Buffy. Willow and Spike do not strongly dislike each other, but they are not friends in the series either. The protagonist of the story is Willow, and the reader gets to know her thoughts and emotions through the voice of the narrator. The fanfic cannot be placed within the original timeline and is a stand-alone text. It develops chronologically and the timespan is roughly a year and three months. According to the writer, the text can be categorised as angst/romance. ‘Angst’ is a fan fiction genre that includes texts about emotionally tragic subjects, such as death or a breakup. As this story is about a breakup and Spike betraying Willow’s trust it fits in with this genre. It also fits in the romance genre as it does contain a complex romantic relationship. The description is written in past tense and the dialogue is written in present tense. Willow is the protagonist of the text and is a round character whom we get to know through the narrator and her conversations with Linda, Xander and Spike. Although Willow is constructed as a round character who shows emotions, she does not possess traits that make her unique. In the original series, Willow is handy with computers and her skills are advanced compared to her classmates. The writer’s choice of Willow ending up working in IT means that the writer does possess character knowledge. In the story, however, Willow does act out of character several times. In the series, even when Willow’s girlfriend Tara is shot and Willow’s grief makes her turn into an evil wicca, Willow never raises her voice. She can be called a mousy type: quiet, timid and shy. In the fanfic, however, she raises her voice and uses curse words:
““ What? That I would be your fiancee while you screwed my best friend behind my back, and pretend that everything would be okay, that I wouldn’t care?” “No, that’s not what I meant.” “Then what, Spike? What would we have worked out?” Willows voice was rising with anger, but she didn’t move from her seat in the armchair.”
Willow also does not use magic in the story, which is remarkable as she uses magic in most episodes of the series. This lack of magic could be due to the fact that it is an AU story in which none of the characters use magic. Based on the plot of the story, it is unlikely that fans
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46 will react to this negatively, as the story revolves around a break up and Willow´s powers are irrelevant to the plot. Spike, the second round character, uses pet names Luv and Red, which he also does in the series. However, he also uses ‘fuck’, which is something he never says in the series. Instead he uses British English curse words, such as ‘bloody’ or ‘bollocks’. This could be seen as an error in characterisation, as Spike does curse in the series, but only uses British curse words. It is also possible that the writer’s second language skills are not advanced enough to grasp the difference between British and American English. Spike does not possess British features in this fanfic, other than his use of ‘Luv’ xxiii . Another error when it comes to characterisation is that Spike cries blood tears. When it comes to crying vampires, every television series or book has its own rules or preferences. Recent pop culture hits that also revolve around vampires, such as True Blood and Twilight have different ideas about what happens when vampires cry. In True Blood vampires cry blood, in Twilight vampires cannot cry, but in Buffy , vampires cry like humans do, meaning they produce actual tears. Thus it can be said that Mosquito mixes up two different fandoms: True Blood and Buffy . Whether this is done by preference/on purpose or accidentally is unknown. Due to the fact that the writer does not mention a preference and that no other characteristics of the True Blood fandom are present in the text, it is likely that this is an accidental mix-up. It is interesting to note that Mosquito is the only writer who consistently adds “original” characters to her stories that do not exist in the television series xxiv . Plot-wise, she could have left Linda out as she is a flat character, but the fact that the writer creates a backstory on how Willow met her, where she works and why she moves out does add depth to the story. It shows that she is creating her own content, and that she is doing more than just copying the series. As far as style is concerned, the writer continuously uses informal American English. There is, however, a difference between dialogue and description. In the dialogue, the writer uses oral and informal language, rather than formal written language:
““ Are you just gonna let him be piss drunk like that. He knows he hurt you. Hell, he sent that letter to you through Xander. That must mean something.” Willow didn’t answer, but kept looking out the window avoiding. Linda must have gotten the hint, because she didn’t say anything else until they arrived at the office.”
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A style error is made because the writer gives Willow a job in IT. Mosquito does not know the proper jargon/field specific terms that are used in IT, which does not do justice to the rest of the text (e.g. ‘She turned back to the computer pieces in front of her, and with a screwdriver in hand went back to fixing the pieces in that she’d been working on previous to the call’ and ‘Reinventing computers and adding new hardware was great’). The writer uses a lot of imagery and descriptive language. Imagery is “the use of vivid or figurative language to represent objects, actions, or ideas” xxv . There are five types of imagery that correspond with the five senses a human being possesses xxvi :
Senses: Corresponding type of imagery:
Sound Auditory
Sight Visual
Touch Kinaesthetic (broadest type of imagery: movement, action, touch, bodily functions such as thirst, hunger, fatigue)
Smell Olfactory
Taste Gustatory
Table 1 Types of Imagery
Imagery makes a text more pleasant to read, because it engages the reader as it “can evoke sensations like the heat of the sun on our bodies, the smell of fresh bread or the sound of a subway station”. Mosquito uses all types of imagery, which makes the text come alive. This is partly due to the amount of description in the story, which exceeds the amount of dialogue, meaning the writer is not just focused on dialogue, but also on setting and emotions. For instance, she makes use of auditory imagery by using onomatopoeia (“ring, ring, ring”), kinaesthetic imagery (“a tired voice said”) and olfactory imagery (“he smelled, that was for a fact, but it wasn’t of booze”). Though she also tries to use adverbs, she ends up using a verb rather than an adverb half of the time (“Spike nodded understanding”, Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
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“Spike’s head shot up surprised”). Compared to the other writers, Mosquito uses a lot of figurative language and expressions, which means that her (active) vocabulary is likely larger. For instance, she uses expressions such as “releasing the proverbial breath she had been holding” and “get back into the dating ring” and similes (e.g. it was as if it burned her eyes). This is both an indication of a relatively large active vocabulary (word choice) and more advanced writing skills (phrase structures). Her relatively large vocabulary sometimes seems smaller due to repetition of words, such as ‘frantic’ (used 3 times), ‘slugged’ (“ “) and Xander calling Willow ‘Wills’ 3 times in 6 lines. Sometimes she uses advanced words that she does not know how to use correctly: “he would be right by her” (rather than do right by her) and “input software” (rather than installed). The variation of verbs such as ‘to snort’, ‘she sighed’, ‘she countered’ and ‘Willow continued’ rather than ‘she said’, or ‘he asked’ is also an indication of her relatively large vocabulary and show that she is aware of the importance of variation in language use. A final note on style is that even though the subject and genre of the text are serious and emotional, the writer does add a joke, which is something that Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy , also does. When Spike goes to Willow in Toronto, he says:
“I’m dying without you.”
To which Willow replies:
“You’re already dead.”
In this example, Spike is being dramatic. He misses her so much that he feels like he is dying without her in his life. Willow responds sarcastically by pointing out that he is already dead, as he is a vampire (and they die before they become a vampire). Though the writer has a large vocabulary and quite advanced writing skills, her spelling and grammar errors show that English is her second language and she still makes basic mistakes. On the one hand, Mosquito does not make errors when it comes to contracted forms (e.g. didn’t, you’re) or tense of verbs (e.g. given, kneel, hung), but she regularly uses an incorrect preposition and sometimes uses expressions with redundant
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49 words (“he can’t continue on”, “she accepted him back again”). These are mistakes that are used by second language learners, as native speakers of English know which verb selects which preposition and the redundant words are semantically incorrect. The writer also makes spelling and grammar mistakes that could be considered writing skills, rather than SLA skills. A few times, she uses the pronoun ‘it’ in order to refer to a noun that is mentioned earlier on, when it does not refer to anything or refers to the wrong noun:
“Plopping herself down on the bed next to the phone she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and then picked it up .”
By using ‘it’ incorrectly, it seems as though Willow has picked up a deep breath, rather than the phone, as “it” refers to the closest referent, which in this case is the head of the noun phrase “breath”(in “a deep breath”). However, this does not make sense semantically. Although logically readers know that “it” refers to “the phone” (due to pragmatics), the sentence is syntactically incorrect. The correct sentence would be: “Plopping herself down on the bed, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and then picked up the phone.” The writer uses the Dutch rules for title capitalisation by only using a capital letter for the first word of the title. Capitalisation can be seen both as a writing skill and a language acquisition skill. Dutch titles, for example, differ from English titles regarding capitalisation. In Dutch titles, only the first letter of the title is capitalised (unless there are proper nouns in the title). In English titles, every word except for articles, coordinating conjunctions and prepositions xxvii . Mosquito is unaware of this, as she capitalises according to Dutch norms. Dutch and English also differ when it comes to punctuation. The use of commas is an example of this. For instance, using a comma followed by ‘and’ in Dutch is incorrect, whereas in English, it can be perfectly fine to do so. Another example is the use of a comma in dialogue. In Dutch, the comma comes after the final quotation mark whereas in English, it comes before the final quotation mark (“Buffy houdt van Riley”, zei Angel. “Buffy loves Riley,” Angel said.) Mosquito does not use a comma after dialogue, neither within the quotation or afterwards. She simply ends the quotation with a punctuation mark and starts a new sentence:
‘“Come in, Spike.” She said.”
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Given the fact that this error does not adhere to rules of Dutch nor English punctuation, this can be seen as an example of a writing skill error, rather than a language skill error.
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4.1.2 The Promenade
The second story I analysed by Mosquito was published roughly three years after ‘Killing Me Softly’ and consists out of 5,228 words, which is more than her previous story. It revolves entirely around Willow and Spike and begins with a third-person omniscient narrator providing the reader with the theme/subject of the text: the Sunnydale High School Prom. Willow wants to go to Prom and needs to convince Spike to be her date. Cordelia, Casey (an original character by Mosquito) and Willow are browsing magazines in order to find a prom dress, but they do not like any of the dresses in there. Spike agrees to be Willow’s date and suggests they go to Los Angeles to buy a dress. She cannot find a dress there either and they get into a fight. Willow asks Spike to leave and she calls Cordelia for help. Willow goes to a coffee shop and does her homework while she waits for Cordelia. They find their prom dresses and they finally go to prom with Spike and Angel as their dates. When they arrive at prom, Cordelia is being picked on by Harmony and her friends for wearing a revealing dress. Angel and Spike come over to protect their girlfriends and Harmony and her friends walk away. Willow and Spike spend the rest of the evening slow dancing together and finally they go home. As in the previous text by Mosquito, the story is an AU (Alternate Universe) text that explores a relationship (pairing) that is not present in the original television series. The protagonist of the story is Willow, and the reader gets to know her thoughts and emotions through the voice of the narrator. The description is written in past tense and the dialogue is written in present tense. The fanfic cannot be placed within the original timeline and is a stand-alone text. It develops chronologically. It is unclear how much time passes during the story, as the writer does not mention how much time passes in between the events that take place. The story is accurately categorised as romance by the writer, as it focusses on the relationships of Willow and Spike and Cordelia and Angel and includes a romantic scene of Willow and Spike slow dancing together. The ending is also a typical romance closure: a “happy ending”:
““ Take me home.” She pulled away from him and taking his hand walked away to the exit of the bronze.” [sic]
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There are also some elements of comedy in the dialogue between Angel and Spike:
“Spike turned around to see Angel leaning against the doorframe. “Never said that I wasn’t one nowerdays. Plus, I’m still a devil, whereas you are just a little bunny hoping behind your cheerleader.” He told his grandsire.
“One more word like that out of you my boy and I’ll show you how much demon I till have in me.” They were quiet for a moment while Spike tied his bowtie. “You’ve still got a great voice, William.”
Spike snorted. “And you’re probably still as tone deaf now as you were a century ago.” [sic]
However, the story does not contain enough comical situations to be categorised as humour. There are some disruptive elements in the narrative structure. Firstly, there is no clear change in setting, which is confusing to the reader. For instance, Willow and Cordelia are flipping through magazines looking for prom dresses when all of a sudden Willow is in bed with Spike and Cordelia is gone:
“Less than a week, I know.” Willow looked back at the dresses and sighed. “Let’s work on one thing at a time, okay?”
The girls nodded and went back to dresses.
“Willow, what’s going on?” Spike asked he crawled into bed with her.” [sic]
Secondly, there are no paragraphs, which makes it hard to see if a new scene is beginning or if it’s a continuation of a bigger story. At one point, The vampires and the girls leave L.A. and in the next line they are getting ready for prom. Does this mean they went dress shopping and to prom on the same day? This is also the case with some sentences that contain gaps that need to be filled in order to grasp the story:
“Those damning Harmettes were in the shop I bought mine”
It only becomes clear later on in the fanfic that the writer is referring to peripheral character Harmony here, who has collected a group of friends around her that call themselves the Harmettes. As Harmony is not introduced earlier on in the story and the Harmettes do not
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53 occur in the original Buffy storyline, they should have been introduced more elaborately by the writer. Willow is the protagonist of the text and is a round character whom we get to know through the narrator, and her conversations with Spike and Cordelia. Though the Willow character is round and shows emotions, she possesses few traits that make her unique as a character in this fanfic, aside from one scene where she takes a break from shopping for her prom dress in order to catch up on some homework. The other characters are flat. The writer introduces new characters -- Ronan and Casey -- though only the latter occurs and only has a few lines. There are some issues with the characters Willow and Spike. Willow’s insecure nature does resemble the character from the television series. However, when she calls Cordelia, she says: “Cordy, get your ass to LA now”. Willow wouldn’t say this in the series and rarely even raises her voice, let alone order people around. Spike uses nicknames, such as ‘luv’, ‘poofter’ and on several occasions it becomes evident that the writer is trying to show the reader that Spike is British (e.g. “sod off”). This can be seen as an improvement compared to the previous text. There is also a possible Mary Sue element present in the story. In the original series, Cordelia would not feel threatened by Harmony, as she is quite harmless. Also, Cordelia is a confident, popular young woman who is not picked on by anyone. The scene where Harmony and her friends pick on Cordelia for wearing a revealing dress can be seen as a Mary Sue element as it is not based on events in the series and the characters do not resemble the originals. However, it could also be a weakness in characterisation. As far as style is concerned, the writer continuously uses informal American English (except for the British words rarely used by Spike). The sentence structure in the story is repetitive. The writer often begins sentences in the description with a participial phrase, which, combined with the writer’s poor use of punctualisation, causes unnecessarily ambiguous sentences (e.g. “Walking out the store she turned to the vampire and said, Spike, go do your own thing, I’ll see you in a couple hours”, “Dialing she waited for Cordelia to pick up”, “Paying the bill she and Cordelia left, leaving Angel looking confused”). Aside from the sentence structure being repetitive, it is also semantically incorrect. The latter example suggests that Willow and Cordelia pay the bill while walking out of the coffee shop and the previous example is incorrect when it comes to the time frame: one has to dial a number
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54 before another person can pick up the phone, so Cordelia cannot pick up the phone while Willow is still dialling her number. Spike’s use of ‘luv’ and ‘mate’ are also quite repetitive. For instance, he uses the former thirteen times in the story. In contrast, Mosquito’s use of imagery and descriptive language is anything but repetitive. She makes use of all types of imagery (see table 1.1) and has improved in the adverbs department. Though she still makes errors occasionally, they occur sparsely (e.g. “asked a little scared”, “yelled frustrated”). These errors could be explained by the writer’s poor use of punctuation, which will be discussed in the next paragraph. Her (mostly) correct use of adverbs is a definite improvement compared to the previous story, as she used them incorrectly before. The writer’s vocabulary (still) contains advanced words and phrases, such as “a soulful fledgling”, “lunk-headed” and “all bets are off”. Due to the fact that most characters in Buffy use informal oral language, it is unlikely that the writer has copied these from the television series. The ratio of dialogue/description is evenly distributed, which makes the text pleasant to read as repetition of structure can lead to a monotonous text. Interestingly, Mosquito uses an intonation marker in the second paragraph. This is indicated by the use of italics:
“So getting Spike to some worthless dance would not be easy.” [sic]
This is a sign of advanced writing skills and is especially significant in relation to fan fiction, as it tries to overcome the limitations of written language (as opposed to oral language). This is also evident in the writer’s multimodal use of lyrics. She creates a setting for the events that take place during prom by using lyrics of songs and putting the songs that are played in a note in the Author’s Notes. This way, the readers can play the songs while reading the story (and the lyrics to the song), which makes the story come alive. Mosquito does not seem to have problems when it comes to spelling or grammar in general. There are some typos and she rarely has issues with verb structure. The most striking error that she makes in this text concerns punctuation. In the previous text, Mosquito only made errors in punctuation in between dialogue and description:
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“Okay.” He said softly. “I love you Wills.” [sic]
She still does this in ‘The Promenade’, but also makes a lot of comma errors in other parts of the sentence. She often does not add commas as intonation markers, which makes sentences difficult to read and sometimes ambiguous:
“Spike had just finished taking a shower and was standing in front of the sink, shaving no thanks to a mirror that didn’t reflect him hanging on the wall.” [sic]
Sometimes she does not use a full stop, or uses full stops where she should use commas:
“Willow grinned imagining what she and Spike would do. Hugging her cousin. She and Cordelia headed out to Xander’s car.” [sic]
Or uses a comma where she should use quotation marks:
“Walking out the store she turned to the vampire and said, Spike, go do your own thing” [sic]
Errors such as these make it more difficult to read the text and disrupt its flow, as Mosquito normally uses quotation marks for direct speech and fails to do so now. This could confuse the reader and thus disrupts the flow of the story. The writer clearly does not know how to use commas correctly. This could also explain the rare mistakes she makes when it comes to adverbs (see previous paragraph). These mistakes are correct when they are preceded by a comma (e.g. ‘yelled, frustrated’ compared to ‘yelled frustrated’). The writer uses one Dutchism. Rather than the expected phrase in English in this context to be “I’ll call when we’re done”, Willow says to Angel:
“I’ll call when we’re ready” ( Ik zal bellen wanneer we klaar zijn ).
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“Ready” means to be prepared for something, whereas “done” means to be finished, which is what is meant here (done shopping). Ready and done both mean ‘klaar ’ in Dutch, which explains Mosquito’s confusion.
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4.1.3 Oops.. A Rabbit!
The third and final story I analysed by Mosquito consists of 7,414 words and centres around Willow, Spike, Cordelia, Angel, Ronan and Casey, with the first two characters being the protagonists. ‘Oops..A Rabbit!’ was published two and a half years after ‘The Promenade’ and it is a stand-alone A/U story, as it centres around a relationship that does not exist in the television series and cannot be pinned down on the original timeline. In ‘Oops..A Rabbit!’, Spike and Willow want to get married, but they need a mating ritual before they can (because of a prophecy). Angel knows the ritual, but refuses to give it to them, because he thinks vampires are evil. Vampires, according to Angel, must be punished and cannot marry innocent humans. He does not want to get married to Cordelia for this reason as well, and they get into a fight and break up. Spike and Angel get into a fight and Willow turns Angel into a bunny. Cordelia moves in with Spike and Willow temporarily. Spike and Willow decide to get married without the mating ritual. They get married in wiccan style, which means that they have to do some rituals. The description is written in past tense through the eyes of a third-person omniscient narrator. The dialogue is written in present tense. The story develops chronologically, with the exception of one flashback, and the timespan is roughly five days. The writer has categorised the story as Romance/Angst. As discussed before, ‘Angst’ is a genre that focusses on heavy subjects, such as death or a bad breakup. There is a breakup in the story (Cordelia and Angel), but this does not dominate the narrative. The story also has a happy (closed) ending. Due to the fight between Angel and the other three main characters and the breakup, the story does contain dramatic elements. However, because the breakup is not a focal point in the narrative and it does not happen between the protagonists it does not overshadow the entire narrative. There is a difference, according to fans, between ‘Angst’ and ‘Drama’: “Drama is like and emotional roller coaster ride […] But it doesn’t have to be only sad things.” xxviii Whereas “angst is more on a personal level, and it’s kind of like inner thoughts/sadness/downright depressing things […] typically it only goes on with yourself or the view of the character you’re writing.” xxix
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The story progresses in a chronological sequence of events and mostly takes place at Willow and Spike’s home, Spike’s bar, and Angel’s mansion. As far as development of plot is concerned, there is a unresolved ending to one event that is not tied up by the end of the story. At the beginning of the narrative, Willow uses her magic to transform Angel into a rabbit. However, none of the characters address this towards the end of the chapter and when the story ends with Willow and Spike having had their wedding, Angel is still a rabbit. Due to the fact that the title of the story is ‘Oops..A Rabbit!’, readers could assume that Angel being turned into a rabbit is an important plot point. The writer does not address what happens to Angel, although the fan fic itself has a closed ending:
‘“Come husband.” Willow said, “Let’s go to bed.” Then pulling his hand she led him indoors.
END”
This could be perceived to be an unintentional unresolved ending. Three logical errors are made in the content of the narrative. The first error that is made by the writer concerns the names of the characters. When Willow and Spike are about to be married, the priest asks:
Who comes [sic] to be joined together in the presence of the God? What is they [sic] name, O Woman [sic]?
To which Willow replies:
Willow Ann Torford
This is curious, as the ceremony is just getting started, meaning the couple is not yet married and her name should thus still be Willow Ann Rosenberg, which is her maiden name in the original series. There is also an inconsistency in Spike’s name when his name in this text is compared to the one given to him in Mosquito’s The Promenade. In the television series it is explained to the viewer that Spike was called William before he became a vampire. However, he is not given a last name on the show. Mosquito calls him William Thropford in The Promenade, but in this fanfic, his name is William Torford. This is likely an error, as these
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59 last names closely resemble one another. In addition, Mosquito’s chapters are part of one series, which could be an argument for seeing the disagreement of last names as an error. Curiously, Willow’s middle name in the story is Ann, which is actually Buffy’s middle name in the series (Anne). Willow’s middle name in the series is actually Danielle xxx . Spike also calls Angel ‘Angelus’ twice, but Angel becomes Angelus when he is evil and he is not evil in this story. The second error that is made is an inconsistency in dialogue. In the flashback Spike has of his conversation with Angel, he says:
“I’m willing to put my selfishness aside for her, for this stupid prophecy that will probably kill us…”
However, two lines later, he says:
“I love her too much for her to want for something and I’m too selfish to have her with me that I’d go to the ends of the earth just to give it to her.”
Spike states that he is willing to be selfless and then two lines later he says that he is a selfish person for willing to do whatever it takes to make Willow happy, which is a selfless act in itself. Finally, when Willow is browsing through an online literature catalog, she says:
“This is great! It’s got Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Mothers and Daughters by Eliysabeth Gaskell, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Evelina by Fanny Burney, Jane Eyre by Elizabeth Bronte, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf…” [sic]
However, Mothers and Daughters should be Wives and Daughters (by Elizabeth Gaskell) and Jane Eyre is written by Charlotte Brontë, rather than her sister Elizabeth. This is a mistake with allusions to books. Overall, there is not a noticeable improvement in narrative structure. Apart from the errors and inconsistencies in the characters’ names, there is a noticeable improvement in characterisation. In terms of language use, there is more distinction between the American and British characters in the narrative compared to the previous texts. Spike still uses ‘luv’ excessively, but in this story he also uses British words
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60 expressions, such as ‘watching telly’, ‘bollocks’, wanker’, ‘bleedin’’ ‘soddin’’ and ‘you’re a right git’. These words and phrases are also used a lot by Spike in the series. The American characters use informal sentences, such as ‘Kay. See ya tomorrow’ The writer also makes a distinction between formal and informal British English, because Giles speaks formal English as he does in the series (e.g. ‘I had best get more people on the matter’, ‘give my regards to everyone’), whereas Spike uses informal (Cockney) English, as the aforementioned examples show. Willow’s character in the narrative is also true to the original character. She is too shy to perform the mating ritual in front of her friends, which is something the original character would not do either. Giles liking classical music, however, is a misrepresentation, as he listens to classic rock on the show (e.g. The Who, Cream). Mosquito’s original characters Ronan and Casey recur in this fanfic. These characters both play an active role in the narrative and have quite a few lines of dialogue. Though Willow and Spike are the protagonists in the story, they are flat characters, just as the other characters. The narrator focuses on them, their actions, and occasionally their thoughts, but they do not show complex emotions, nor do they show signs of emotional growth in the story:
“Spike thought of the conversation he’d had with Angel that evening as he sat at his desk. He’d dropped Willow and Cordelia off at the house and then gone [sic] to work while the latter was getting settled. Willow said that they’d do the ‘girl thing’, whatever that was, and then she’d see him when he got home, early in the morning. ”
Spike does not show emotions, even though we get to “read” his inner thoughts. Flat characters, in general, are not complex, do not show growth of any kind and thus remain unchanged throughout the story. This is the case for all the characters in the story. As far as style is concerned, the writer continuously uses informal American English in dialogue (except for lines said by Spike and Giles) and Standard English for description. This is also the case in Mosquito’s previous texts. The writer also still begins sentences in the description with a participial phrase, which, combined with the writer’s poor use of punctualisation, causes unnecessarily ambiguous sentences (e.g. “Dreaming she found herself back in the library at Sunnydale High” or “Getting into bed she lay down”). Again, there is a difference between dialogue and description: the writer uses informal expressions and oral language in dialogue and standard written language in description: Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
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“No prob. Night Willow.”
“G’night”
“Luv,” Willow had completely forgotten that Spike was in the same room with [sic] her. He moved behind her and enveloped her in his arms.”
The sentence structure in the narrative varies, in contrast to ‘The Promenade’, which makes the text less repetitive and more pleasant to read. This is a stylistic improvement. In comparison to ‘The Promenade’, this narrative contains more dialogue and less description. This is noticeable from the very beginning, as the dialogue begins in the first line and thus there is no backstory or setting available to the reader. In addition, the writer uses punctuation marks (***) to indicate the start of a new scene. This is a positive improvement from ‘The Promenade’, where the lack of paragraphs or chapter titles made it difficult to see whether a new scene had started. These changes can also be seen as improvement when looked at from a fan fiction/multimodality perspective, as it closely resembles the visual mode of television, where the viewer is also directed from one scene to another without introduction. The narrative starts in medias res , which is also a narrative device that is often used in cinema xxxi . Compared to the previous two texts, Mosquito gradually uses less description and more dialogue. This is made possible by her use of imagery, descriptive language and the small lines of description that accompany the dialogue, which provides the reader with the visual tools to construct the setting themselves:
“To kill Angel.” She said with determination as she hunted for her sneakers.
“Luv,” Spike said reaching for his jeans.”
As in ‘The Promenade’, Mosquito uses tools to create a setting for the wedding dance that take place during the narrative. In the Author’s Note, the writer directs the reader to an online image on which Willow’s wedding dress is based on, provides the source that the wedding ritual comes from and provides the reader with the song to which Spike and Willow
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62 are dancing on their wedding through the insertion of the song title and artist in the Author’s Note as well as the use of the song’s lyrics in the dance scene. This use of multimodality could be used to overcome the limitations of the textual mode and makes the story come alive, because the readers can listen to the song whilst reading the story and experience it with two of the senses (visual and auditory) rather than one (visual). The text also contains literary allusions (intertextuality), as Angel is compared to Mr. Darcy (of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice ). Another stylistic tool the writer uses is the use of italics in dialogue and description to signal a flashback. The flashback is also followed by a line that clarifies that it is in fact a flashback:
“Well, I’m not you.”
“Obviously.”
“Spike thought of the conversation he’d had with Angel that evening as he sat at his desk.”
As the previous two stories, Mosquito displays her large vocabulary by using words and phrases that are advanced compared to the vocabularies of the other writers, such as “catch 22” or “AWOL” . In comparison to the language use in the previous two texts, the writer shows improvement in terms of use of adjectives and adverbs, as she makes little to no errors in using them. She also uses advanced adjectives and adverbs, such as ‘teary-eyed’, ‘forlornly’ and ‘arduously’. Aside from this use of descriptive language, Mosquito also uses imagery to make the text come to life (such as “They were laying [sic] in bed with Spike up against the headboard and Willow leaning back against him with her nose in the mating book that had been sitting on her nightstand for over a year.”) In comparison to ‘Killing Me Softly’ and ‘The Promenade’, Mosquito has not improved as far as spelling and grammar are concerned. She still makes errors, especially in punctuation in between dialogue and description. Especially her use of commas is still insufficient. She often does not use commas as an intonation marker, which makes the text harder and less pleasant to read:
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“Cordy released him and with the first smile since her initial row with Angel bega [sic] telling them of her plans”.
Capitalisation is also still a problem for Mosquito. In “Killing Me Softly”, Mosquito adhered to the Dutch norms of title capitalisation, meaning she only capitalised the first letter of the title. In this text, however, she uses both English and Dutch norms:
“The wedding comes from “A Witches’ Bible: The Complete Witches’ Handbook” by Janet and Stewart Farrar. The song is ‘Dream a little dream,” by Edith Piaf.”
This inconsistent use of capitalisation occurs throughout the text (e.g. Goddess/goddess, The Pentacle/this pentacle). Mosquito’s spelling is also inconsistent. She uses the word handfasting thirteen times, of which she writes handfasting nine times, and hand fasting four times. She also uses both prophecy and prophesy in the text. Finally, the writer uses one Dutchism. Rather than saying “Angel, just give it to me.”, Cordelia says:
“Angel, just give it.” ( Angel, geef het gewoon/nou maar )
This is a syntactic error, as “give” is a verb that selects a preposition, such as “up” or “to”.
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4.1.4 An Overview
The author is consistent in her choice of genre. The first and last stories are labelled as ‘Angst/Romance’ and the other one is simply labelled ‘Romance’. As stated in the analysis of ‘Oops..A Rabbit!’, arguments could be made for placing the story in the ‘Drama/Romance’ genre, rather than ‘Angst/Romance’, due to the mental state of the characters and the lack of sad, depressing events. There is a noticeable increase in word count (4,301; 5,228; 7,414), meaning the chapters are longer. The third-person omniscient narrator that is consistently used throughout all stories provides the reader with information that the reader would not get if the narrator were first-person character bound. This information adds depth to the story. The writer also uses the same tense in every story (past tense for the description and present tense for dialogue) and gives each story a closed-off happy ending. Though the chapters gradually increase in word count, there is a decrease in description, which means that the final story consists mostly out of dialogue. This is mostly caused by two factors: timespan and one of the narrative devices that she uses. The first story Mosquito published, ‘Killing Me Softly’, has a timespan of an estimated fifteen months. Within the text, Mosquito uses headers to indicate that a specific amount of time has passed between two paragraphs. A year has passed between the first paragraph and the second paragraph and a month and twenty-three days pass between the second and third paragraph. Mosquito uses several lines of description to fill the reader in on what has happened during these gaps. In comparison, the timespan of the other two stories is no more than a week and these stories have a significantly smaller amount of description that fills up gaps in the narrative. Thus, the main factor that causes the difference in the amount of description/dialogue between the first story and the other two stories seems to be caused by a longer time span in the first story. The second factor that might affect the difference in the amount of description/dialogue is caused by the choice of the narrative device that is used in the opening of the story. The first two stories start off with a descriptive introduction that summarises previous events: the writer provides the reader with a framework that the story can be placed in (i.e. Willow left Sunnydale due to a painful breakup and past events that possibly made Spike hesitant to be Willow’s Prom date, respectively). In ‘Oops..A Rabbit!’, however, the story starts in the middle of a conversation between Willow and Spike:
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“Okay Spike,” Willow said.
This is a narrative device used in literature as well as cinema. The writer provides the reader with a framework through the use of dialogue, rather than an introductory description:
“Are you even listening, Luv?”
“Yeah, you said that if we can’t find it on [sic] time that we’ll have a hand fasting [sic] and when and if we find the mating ritual then we’ll do it. Prophesy be damned: [sic]”
The use of this device can be seen as an improvement of narrative structure as the writer not only uses Ellipsis and Flashback in the third story, but also starts the story in medias res . Most importantly, beside the point that it is a literary tool that shows improvement of narrative structure, it also makes the text resemble the visual mode more, as films and television series often begin in the midst of things, especially Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mosquito does not show improvement as far as narrative errors are concerned. There were no errors noticeable in the first text, but there were several in the other two texts. In conclusion, Mosquito shows improvement according to formal training norms as well as the fan fiction norms by using the narrative devices in medias res and flashback. When we compare the three texts, a vast improvement is made regarding characterisation. There is more distinction between the American and British characters in the narrative compared to the previous texts. Mosquito also distinguishes formal British English and informal (Cockney) English in the final text, which can be seen as an improvement as she did not make a distinction between American and British characters in the first story and hardly so in the second narrative. Whereas Willow and Cordelia behaved out of character in the first two stories, none of the characters show this behaviour in the final narrative. It must be said that the lack of description/the reduced presence of the omniscient narrator causes the final text to be more superficial, meaning the text contains flat characters (as opposed to round characters in the first two texts). This does not, however, diminish the latter improvement, as the characters are judged on their behaviour and not on their inner thoughts. Mosquito also shows improvement according to fan fiction norms by turning her original characters Ronan and Casey, who functioned as side characters who were barely present in the
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66 first two texts, into main characters with lines in the final text. She is creating her own content based on the television series and is not simply copying it. This will be discussed further in chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion. As far as style is concerned, the writer continuously uses informal American English in dialogue, except for the lines said by Spike in the final two stories and Giles in ‘Oops..A Rabbit!’, and Standard English for the description. The writer does make a distinction between informal use of oral language and standard written language, as she uses informal oral language in dialogue (“The party’s for the rest of ‘em) and written language in description (“Then his kin came forward with rings, which they exchanged”). The final text does contain less description regarding describing settings or events than the other two. Due to the narration the characters still perform action and descriptive language and imagery makes the story come to life, but the loss of description in the final text makes the characters superficial and flat as the narrator does not tell us what they are thinking, neither is this reflected in the actions of the characters. The writer begins sentences in the description with a participial phrase in every text, which, due to the writer’s poor punctualisation skills, causes ambiguous sentences. Improvement can be seen when we look at sentence structure. The length of sentences varies more in the final text, which makes the text less monotonous. The final text also has a clearer structure than ‘The Promenade’, as the writer uses punctuation marks to indicate the start of a new scene. This is an improvement according to fan fiction norms, because television also ‘cuts’ between scenes and thus the writer copies the visual mode. The limitations of the textual mode are also overcome in the final two texts by adding lyrics to the song, providing the reader with the song’s title and artist, and an image of what Willow’s wedding dress looks like. This makes the text multimodal and makes the reader experience what the characters are feeling in romantic situations. Finally, Mosquito also shows improvement when it comes to adverbs and adjectives, as she gradually makes fewer errors in using them. Overall, Mosquito shows stylistic improvement regarding sentence structure, narrative structure and the use of adverbs and adjectives. Her texts gradually adhere more to fan fiction norms as well as formal training norms. No improvement could be detected in Mosquito’s use of punctualisation and capitalisation and throughout the three texts she makes a significant amount of typo’s compared to the other writers.
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4.2 Aydine
4.2.1 Interfering with Salvation Chapter 1
Note: As ‘Interfering with Salvation’ consists out of two chapters, they show a lot of similarities. Therefore, some elements (such as genre) will have remained the same and will be omitted from the analysis of chapter 2.
The first story I analysed by Aydine consists of 3,467 words and centres around Buffy and Spike. Even though Aydine states that ‘Interfering with Salvation’ is set in season 6 of Buffy , it is a stand-alone text that exists on its own and can take place anywhere between season 6 and 7. This timeframe is set as the only limitation is that Spike and Buffy are a couple, which is the case in these two seasons of the original series . This story begins in medias res . Buffy is fighting a vampire and is about to turn him into dust when a man interferes. The man turns out to be a lawyer, who wants to take her to court for attempted murder on the vampire. Spike offers to be her lawyer, as she does not have the funds to hire a professional one. The Scoobies and Giles have their doubts about this and express these to Buffy. The chapter ends with an open ending when the trial has just begun. The fight takes place at an unknown location. Other locations that are present in the story are Spike’s crypt, Buffy’s house and the courthouse. The story progresses chronologically and the timespan is roughly three days. The description and narration are written in past tense and the dialogue is written in present tense. The story is told by a third-person omniscient narrator. Aydine categorises her narrative as ‘Humour/Parody’. Though the story contains comical elements and is packed with jokes, it does not fit in with the parody genre. Parody can be defined as: “An imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect” xxxii . Aydine’s text is based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and contains comical characters, however, they are not showing exaggerated comical behaviour, meaning it is not a parody. As the characters show behaviour that is also present in the original series, there is an element of imitation, but it could be argued that imitation is an element of all fan fiction. Due to the fact that the text shows little to no signs of parody, it could be argued that the narrative fits in best within the humour genre.
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Aydine is very inconsistent when it comes to characterisation. On the one hand, Buffy and Spike, the main characters in the story, behave like the original characters do in the television series. Buffy is cracking jokes and having fun during the fight with Dustin the vampire and Spike also makes a lot of jokes, uses British phrases and curse words like he does on the show (e.g. ‘sod’, ‘bloody’ ‘he wouldn’t fancy...’). On the other hand, however, Buffy curses a lot, which she does not do in the original series. This makes Buffy act out of character as her language use is quite rude here. This is also the case for Willow (e.g. ‘I don’t mean to piss ya off or anything’) The comical elements that are present in the series are also in the text, which makes it authentic. There is a lot of play on words, especially by Xander, Spike and Buffy, which is very true to the original work, although the writer has not copied the dialogue from the original work:
“No, no! Not us, it’s just Anya! She brought it up!” Xander frantically exclaimed, and pointed an accusing finger at his fiance. He then turned to Buffy again, “And please, could you not use the words ‘Spike’ and ‘penis’ in one sentence? Thank you!”
[...]
“So what’s this about me and a penis?” he asked baffled. [sic]
“Oh great,” Xander soughed [sic] as he helplessly hung his head.
“Yes, I know,” Buffy taunted Xander with a wicked smile.
In this example, the writer copies Xander´s mannerisms perfectly as well as the deadpan humour of the original series. The writer uses Xander´s utter dislike of Spike to create a comical situation. Xander wants to change the topic of the conversation when Spike, who has only heard his name combined with the word ´penis´, chimes in. Xander expresses his disappointment because Spike has gotten the topic back on the table again and Xander expresses his disappointment by sarcastically commenting “Oh great”. Spike then takes the opportunity to further taunt Xander by pretending he thought that Xander’s remark reflects on the size of his penis. Due to the large amount of comical scenes and dialogue on the one hand, and a very minimal amount of description on the other, the reader does not get to know the characters
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69 and they do not develop during the story, which makes them flat characters. The writer clearly assumes that the reader is familiar with the original series as the characters are not introduced to the reader, which would explain the flatness of the characters. As far as style is concerned, Aydine makes a distinction in register between informal spoken language and standard English description and narration (just like Mosquito):
“Listen, you sod. I’ve bloody well had it with your insults! Buffy ‘ere can’t afford a decent defence, and until you can provide somethin’ better than criticisin’ my helpin’ hand, get the hell off my back, monkey boy.”
As can be seen in this example, Aydine replaces Spike’s word-initial ‘h’ or vowels, and word- final ‘g’ with an apostrophe to indicate informal British English pronunciation. Aydine varies between long and short sentences, which makes the text pleasant to read, as repetition can make a text monotonous. The text consists mostly out of dialogue and narration. This, as stated before, leaves little room for character description and development. The reader does not get to know their inner thoughts and the text is thus more focused on humour and action, rather than emotions. The lack of description and the abundance of dialogue makes the text resemble the original work/the visual mode, as there are no descriptive lines in Buffy either. However, the lack of description when it comes to setting and the introduction of new scenes is a stylistic shortcoming, as the reader does not get a clear image of the setting. Just like Mosquito, Aydine makes use of a gap to switch between scenes. However, Mosquito does this by using asterisks to indicate that a new scene begins, but Aydine does not use any indicators to show this change of scene:
Still befuddled, she answered a couple of Logan’s questions. Before he walked off he advised Buffy to get a lawyer, and gave her a provocative smile.
“See you in court, Miss Summers.”
“Sued?!” Spike asked Buffy with disbelief.
Spike was not present when Buffy was fighting the vampire and there is a gap between Mr. Logan leaving and Buffy informing Spike that she’s being sued. However, the gaps between these three lines are equal in size (Aydine uses double spacing in these texts). This indicates
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70 the start of a new scene. As discussed before, this change closely resembles the visual mode for the camera also switches from one scene to another without introducing this (as often happens by providing the reader with a descriptive introduction in the beginning of a new chapter starts in the textual mode). The lack of description lines makes it harder for the reader to get a visual image of the described scenes. For instance, the writer does not mention where the fight takes place between Buffy and Dustin, so the reader must create a setting without the help of the writer. The writer uses bold letters to put stress on words or syllables (e.g. ‘ Dust in’, ‘ Not in my car!’) She uses all types of imagery, which makes the text multidimensional and partly makes up for the fact that she uses little description in the sense of settings or events. Aydine uses imagery and descriptive language to make her narrative come to life. She uses all types of imagery (e.g. ‘BOOM’, ‘well, it smells good’, etc.) extensively, which balances out the lack of setting, as it creates a visual image for the reader. This resembles the original mode, as there are no descriptive lines in the original series either. Although she uses adverbs to a great extent as well, she uses them incorrectly. She also uses sentence-initial adverbials repetitively (e.g. “Defeated she plopped on the couch,...” [sic]). Aydine is aware of the difference in punctuation between Dutch and English. In dialogue, she places the comma before the final quotation mark when it is followed by narration and does not use a capital after the quotation mark xxxiii :
“No, not particularly,” it declined.
She is the only writer that uses the English convention and who does not use a capital after the final quotation mark. She is also the only writer who consistently capitalises chapter titles according to English norms. It is interesting to see that Aydine does have difficulty with the use of commas, especially after sentence-initial adverbials:
“Surprised Buffy raised her eyebrows when Spike proudly presented himself, carrying a briefcase. Puzzled she studied him.”
She also uses run-on sentences:
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“With a smack the vampire fell on it’s [sic] back, completely baffled, he watched how Buffy went to sit on top of him.”
This is a stylistic error that occurs both in Dutch and English, so it is unlikely that this has to do with second language skills. Aydine has a large active vocabulary and has a lot of variation in language use (use of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.). Though she uses adverbs correctly most of the time, she does make mistakes sometimes (e.g. ‘grinned meaningful’, or ‘smiled devious at her’). Overall, Aydine makes few errors as far as spelling and grammar are concerned. She does, however, use two Dutchisms. At one point in the chapter, Willow says: ‘one thing came to another’ [emphasis added]. Interference of the native language can clearly be seen here. The correct expression is ‘one thing lead to another’ xxxiv , which, in Dutch, is translated to ‘van het een kwam het ander’[emphasis added]. The literal translation of ‘kwam’ is ‘came’, which indicates the interference of Aydine’s first language in the expression. The second Dutchism in the story is when the omniscient narrator says: ‘she discovered that this was nor a demon nor a vampire’[emphasis added]. This sentence is ungrammatical. The correct sentence should be: ‘this was neither a demon nor a vampire’[emphasis added]. However, in Dutch, it is perfectly fine to repeat the Dutch equivalent of nor : ‘Het was noch een demoon, noch een vampier’ xxxv .
Finally, an error is made in the use of tense:
“At the same time Spike stormed into the front door, and closed it immediately as he puts out the fire that’s gradually burned up his trusty blanket.” [emphasis added]
In this example, Aydine uses a present tense verb, whereas in the rest of the story she uses past tense.
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4.2.2 Interfering with Salvation Chapter 2
The second story I analysed by Aydine was published sixteen months after the first chapter. It consists of 4,108 words. The story sets off where the first chapter ended (in medias res), namely the beginning of Buffy’s trial. During the trial, Spike indeed represents Buffy and manages to win the case by proving that the vampire who sued her is, indeed, a vampire. The jury and judge are shocked by this, as they did not know that vampires truly existed xxxvi . Buffy stakes the vampire, Dustin, in front of them and the judge eventually dies of a heart attack caused by shock (of seeing an actual vampire), which corresponds to the genre of the text due to the humouristic nature of this event and the deadpan humour of the original Buffy television series. The Scoobies decide to have celebratory drinks, even though they feel bad about the fact that their victory caused the death of the judge. The story has a closed ending. The ending is “happy” when looked at from the perspective of the main characters, as the case was dismissed and they have celebratory drinks. The story progresses chronologically and the timespan is roughly four hours. As far as characterisation is concerned, not a lot has changed. The characters behave like their original counterparts, except for Buffy’s cursing. Giles cleaning his glasses in an uncomfortable situation is true to character and shows that Aydine has closely examined the characters, as this is something that Giles does often in the series and she is thus able to repeat their mannerisms, which shows advanced characterisation skills. Giles also says ‘oh dear’ often in the series, which he also does in this chapter. He uses formal RP English in both the series and this story, which shows the writer’s awareness of the difference between American and British English. Although the other characters use informal language, Spike, the prosecutor and the judge use formal language, though Aydine is not consistent in doing so:
“Objection, Your ‘onor!” Spike protested. “Mr. Fancy Lawyer’s puttin’ bloody words in ‘is client’s mouth!”
The witty dialogue that is a crucial part of the original series also occurs in this story:
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“Buffy chuckled, “This is Sunnydale, mister, the Extraterrestrial Inn .”
In this example, Buffy compares Sunnydale, her hometown, to a hotel for aliens due to the fact that Sunnydale attracts a lot of demons and vampires. The second chapter of ‘Interfering with Salvation’ consists mostly out of dialogue and narration, just like its predecessor. Although this chapter contains more formal language, there is still a clear difference between oral and written language in the chapter. This is mainly caused by the writer replacing word-initial ‘h’ or vowels, and word-final ‘g’ with an apostrophe:
“ ‘Ello again, Dusty,” Spike began delighted. “How ya doin’, mate?”
The writer shows that she is an advanced second language learner, as she uses proper jargon during the case, such as ‘badgering my client’.
Aydine varies between long and short sentences, just like in the first chapter, which makes the text pleasant to read. A noticeable difference in style between the two chapters is that the writer used bold letters to put stress on words or syllables in the previous chapter, but uses italics to indicate stress in this chapter:
“And you didn’t drink anything?”
This, however, is a stylistic inconsistency and cannot be seen as an improvement nor fault, as there are no rules about this in fan fiction and the rules in formal training vary in this respect. She uses all types of imagery, which makes the text multidimensional and partly makes up for the fact that she uses little description with regard to describing settings or events. Aydine still sometimes uses adjectives as adverbs. Finally, Aydine is quite repetitive in her use of sentence-initial adverbials. Not a lot has changed as far as spelling and grammar is concerned either. Aydine still rarely makes typo’s/spelling mistakes, uses British norms for capitalisation and punctuation and has an advanced vocabulary for a second language learner. A small improvement can be Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
74 seen as the text does not contain Dutchisms. It is interesting that in Aydine’s text, ‘meanwhile’ is written as ‘mean while’ twice. This is a feature that can also be seen in the texts of other writers discussed in this chapter (such as Angie-Face). This curious phenomenon will be discussed further in the final analysis where all writers will be compared. Though Aydine does not use Dutchisms in this text, she does make a linguistical error:
“Spike landed with his back and a nosebleed on the floor.”
This sentence is structured in such a way that makes it sound as if ‘his back and a nosebleed’ are a compound noun. Although ‘nosebleed’ is a noun, it is not an entity that can fall on the floor, thus the sentence is linguistically incorrect. This is also incorrect in Dutch, so it is not a second language error, but rather a writing skill error. A writing skill error she still makes is her incorrect use of commas, especially after sentence adverbials:
“Vigorously [sic] Spike pulled him away from the judge [sic] but in the process [sic] Dustin’s sweater slipped out of his grip, causing Dustin to land on the floor in front of the jury. Spike sprinted to the vampire just as hastily as Dustin got up to grab an attractive young woman by her hair.”
Without the comma, the sentence is structured as though ‘vigorously’ modifies ‘Spike’, which is not the case.
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4.2.3 Vodka or Scotch for Whiskey?
The third and final story I analysed by Aydine is published roughly two years after ‘Interfering With Salvation Chapter 2’. It consists of 1,894 words and centres around Buffy and Spike. As with the first two texts, even though Aydine states that ‘Vodka or Scotch for Whiskey?’ is set in season 6 of Buffy , it is a stand-alone text that exists on its own and can take place anywhere between season 6 and 7. This timeframe is set as the only limitation is that Spike and Buffy are an item, which is the case in these two seasons of the original series. A possible reason for her continuous use of the timeline between season 6 and 7 could be because of the pairing (Spuffy) that only exists within these two seasons in the original series. The story, like Aydine’s other two stories discussed in this analysis, starts in medias res as the story begins in the middle of a heated argument between Buffy and Spike. Spike and Whiskey, a kitten he initially won for Buffy, have been attached to the hip for weeks and Buffy has been feeling left out. She wants to buy a new kitten, so that Whiskey has a new playmate. Spike, however, does not want another cat and they argue about this during the entire story. The ending is open and witty:
“Spike shrugged. Sometimes he just didn’t get the Slayer. “Suit yourself,” Spike sneered. “Here, have some whiskey.”
For a moment, Buffy’s face brightened, ready to embrace the kitty that she damned to hell just a few minutes ago.
“Not the cat, Buffy,” he sighed as he dangled a bottle of whiskey in front of her. “Have a drink, looks like you could use one, pet.”
The story takes place in Spike’s crypt and one of the many cemeteries of Sunnydale. The plot develops chronologically, with the exception of one flashback. The timespan is very short and can be limited to the amount of time it takes for them to have their argument, as there are no gaps in the narrative. The description and narration are written in past tense, with the exception of one error (‘Spike interrupts’) and the dialogue is written in present tense and the story is told by a third-person omniscient narrator. The story is accurately placed within the ‘humour’ genre, as the story is filled with deadpan humour (such as the aforementioned example) and the story is light-hearted. Spike and Buffy clearly resemble the characters in the television series. Spike uses British slang (e.g. ‘pet’, ‘poor bugger’, and ‘bloomin’ cat’) and their interaction seems
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76 authentic as well. Buffy and Spike argue a lot in the series. Buffy also pouts in the series and uses sentences like:
“God, you’re like a whiny little woman with a massive dose of testosterone!”
They are the only two characters that occur in the story and, due to the light-heartedness of the story and the lack of character development, they are flat characters. Though the characters strongly resemble the original characters, the conversation does contain a possible Mary-Sue element. Buffy and Spike are having an eristic argument, meaning they are arguing for the sake of arguing. Buffy does not seem to want another kitten, she is just jealous that Spike is not giving her any attention:
“My crypt, my say,” Spike started determined and took a moment to think. “My cat,” he concluded.
Did Buffy really hear this? “Wh - Your cat!” she blurted out, enraged. She didn’t even have the words to express her indignation.
“Fine,” Spike sighed and rolled his eyes. “My crypt, my say, our cat.”
Boggled, Buffy stared back at him. “Do you have a point, at all?” she wanted to know.
Spike fondled with the cat’s pelt and thought about that for a while. “Other than not wanting a second cat, no, not particularly.”
It could be concluded, based on the dialogue, that neither of them are focussed on finding a common ground or resolution to the problem, but on being right:
“You’re stupid!” she snapped at Spike and pouted.
“Why?” he wondered and smirked. “Because I’m right?”
“No, you’re annoying.”
“Yeah, but because I’m right, right?” he asked confident [sic], yet he started to doubt himself a little.
In addition, the argument that began due to conflicting ideas on buying a second cat turns into an argument about possessiveness and stealing sweaters. Finally, the argument ends with Spike declaring that he is often right and Buffy agreeing to this.
This type of argument is not something that occurs in the original series and therefore could be a Mary-Sue element as the choice of words (“You’re stupid!” “You’re annoying”) and behaviour (Buffy’s pouting) could signify teenage behaviour. It is debatable whether the Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
77 writer uses this discussion as a way to make fun of the characters (humour/parody) or whether she is unaware of the unrealistic or immature nature of this discussion.
As its two predecessors, the text consists mostly out of dialogue and narration. This does not cause any problems for the narrative, as the argument takes place in one setting (Spike’s crypt) and one scene.
As far as register is concerned, Aydine uses the same style here as in the previous two stories. She uses American English for Buffy’s lines, description and narration and British English for Spike’s lines. The narration and description are written in standard written language, as opposed to the dialogue, which is written in informal oral language:
“God, you’re like a whiny little woman with a massive dose of testosterone!” Buffy exclaimed upon getting no response and to add to her Spike-theorem.
As mentioned before, there is a flashback in the story that is being addressed by the narrator. However, it is a very brief one:
“Just like that one time when Whiskey slipped out the door of Spike’s crypt, Buffy searched the graveyard, yelling ‘Whiskey, are ya here?’ in broad daylight.
People were lining up to give her directions to either the nearest liquor store or a clinic. A banality, but so very embarrassing.”
Aside from this flashback, Aydine uses another narrative device, namely in medias res. Although her sentences vary in length, she uses sentence-initial adverbials to a point that it becomes quite repetitive, which is also the case in the previous texts:
“Taken aback , Buffy folded her arms. “Your say? What about my say?”
“This your crypt?” he uttered.
Thrown off , Buffy wondered what point Spike was trying to make. “No,but technically -”” [emphasis added]
There is also an occurrence of repetition in word choice noticeable in the text:
“...she just wanted some respect and consideration, and that sham-deafness of Spike, that was totally sham …[emphasis added]”
Finally, Aydine’s use of imagery and descriptive language is comparable to the previous texts. She still uses imagery, which makes the text more visual (e.g. ‘Spike fussed while his
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78 hand ran through Whiskey’s pelt’) and though she uses adjectives correctly, she still makes errors when it comes to adverbs as she uses adjectives as adverbs (e.g. ‘adds insulting’, ‘he asked confident’). Overall, no improvement can be detected concerning style when we compare the three texts. As far as spelling and grammar are concerned, Aydine is still consistent. She uses quotation marks according to English norms and does not use a capital after the final quotation mark, which she also did in the previous texts. Although Aydine still makes errors when it comes to use of commas, there is a noticeable improvement in this text. After a sentence-initial adverbial, Aydine now uses a comma, though in the following example she makes a mistake with the secondary predicate (“appalled”), which only modifies the subject and not the whole sentence:
“Appalled, Spike’s mouth shot open.”
Though she still uses run-on sentences and other compound sentences that are not punctuated correctly:
“Buffy stopped in her tracks. This was so unfair. Buffy wanted a little kitty to cuddle too, Spike [emphasis added] hardly ever let her pet Whiskey. And that deal they made with Willow, none of that happene d, thus far, W hiskey [emphasis added] hadn’t been at Buffy’s house.”
No improvement is noticeable in her word choice/vocabulary. Aydine has a rich active vocabulary, which makes the text pleasant to read. Apart from a few errors, Aydine’s written language closely resembles that of a native speaker. However, her spelling and grammar is not perfect as she uses one Dutchisms in the text:
“And next to that [emphasis added], I don’t have to have a point, because I don’t want another bloomin’ cat, period...”
‘And next to that’ is a direct translation of the Dutch ‘En daarnaast’, which means ‘And besides,...’ or ‘Additionally,...’. Overall, the only improvement that is detectable in Aydine’s spelling and grammar is the use of a comma after a sentence-initial adverbial.
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4.2.4 An Overview
The author is quite consistent in her choice of genre. The first two stories are labelled as ‘humour/parody’ and the third one is labelled ‘humour’. As stated in the analysis of ‘Interfering with Salvation Chapter 1’, the label ‘parody’ is not applicable to the two chapters. As the texts do contain a significant amount of humouristic elements, they are correctly labelled as ‘humour’. All chapters contain a third-person omniscient narrator that provides the reader with more information. The texts consist mostly out of dialogue and narration. Furthermore, all stories progress chronologically (with the exception of a very limited amount of flashbacks or gaps). Their descriptions and narrations are written in past tense, whereas the dialogue is written in present tense. The first chapter has an open ending, compared to the other two chapters that contain closed endings. This is because ‘Chapter 2’ leaves off where the first chapter ends. All stories begin in medias res and contain flashbacks. These are narrative devices used by the writer which could mean that the writer is an experienced writer who is familiar with tools that spice up a narrative. It is also possible, however, that she is merely repeating the same structure as she is not experimenting with narrative structure. There are no narrative errors in the texts. Based on this data, no progress can be detected as the writer is very consistent when it comes to narrative structure. All three texts share their protagonists: Buffy and Spike. These characters are flat as they do not show deep emotions or emotional growth throughout the narratives. The fact that the characters are flat can be explained by the use of genre (humour), because the focus is on humouristic elements than on the characters and their emotions/development. The characters are not introduced and the writer assumes that the reader is familiar with the original series and their characters, which might also explain the flatness of the characters, as the fans already know the characters. A slight improvement in characterisation can be found in Buffy’s language use. In the first two chapters, Buffy curses a lot, which does not happen in the original series. Buffy does not curse in the final chapter. Overall, Aydine
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80 skilfully uses character traits to show her familiarity with the show, such as Giles cleaning his glasses and saying ‘oh dear’, Buffy pouting, Spike’s use of informal Cockney English and Xander’s intelligent, witty lines. Due to the fact that Aydine is already skilful in the first chapter, there is hardly any mentionable development. In all three texts, Aydine makes a distinction in register between informal oral language in dialogue and standard written language in description and narration. The register is also more formal in the latter. Aydine’s style, due to the lack of description and focus on dialogue and narration, is highly cinematic/audio-visual. However, as she does not indicate the start of a new scene, it could be argued that it resembles the visual mode too much, as a new scene starts without introduction. This is problematic when combined with a lack of description of the new setting, as occurs in the first two chapters written by Aydine. As the final chapter does not include more than one setting (with the exception of an announced flashback), no improvement can be seen in this area. Aydine is irregular in her use of stylistic tools when it comes to putting stress on syllables or words. In the first chapter she uses bold letters (e.g. ‘ Dust in’) to indicate stress, whereas she uses italics (e.g. ‘didn’t drink anything’) in the second chapter and no tools in the final text. These tools can be used to add dimension to a text, so she could make more use of them in the final text. Finally, no improvement can be found in Aydine’s use of imagery and descriptive language. Aydine uses imagery and descriptive language extensively, even though she does not include significant descriptive passages to depict settings or events (i.e. setting of the story and action). However, the errors Aydine makes in the first story, namely incorrect use of adverbs (e.g. ‘he asked confident’) and repetition of sentence-initial adverbials are still made in the final text and do not occur less frequently. From the first story onwards, it is evident that Aydine has a large active vocabulary, especially compared to the other writers. She is the only one that uses quotation marks according to English norms and that does not use a capital after the final quotation mark that follows dialogue. Although she still makes errors when it comes to comma use in the final chapter, there is a noticeable improvement. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Aydine continuously overuses sentence-initial adverbials and secondary predicates. In the first two chapters, Aydine does not use a comma after these adverbials and predicates (e.g. ‘Surprised Buffy raised her eyebrows when…’). In the final chapter, she does use a comma
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81 afterwards (e.g. ‘Boggled, Buffy stared back at him.’). Apart from a Dutchism here and there, Aydine’s English skills closely resemble those of a native speaker, as native speakers are also known to misuse adverbs and her other errors are writing skill errors, rather than second language errors.
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4.3 Maartje87
4.3.1 I Will Always Be with You
The first story I analysed by Maartje87 is called ‘I Will Always Be with You’. It consists out of 890 words and centres around Willow. The plot of ‘I Will Always Be with You’ is as follows: Willow is having a bad dream that involves her girlfriend, Tara, being taken away from her. When she wakes up, she realises that it was all just a dream. She sees her girlfriend standing in front of the window and they smile at each other. Suddenly, Tara is hit by a bullet and dies. Then the house is packed with potential vampire slayers and Willow has to share her bedroom with a brunette. A few days later, Willow and the brunette, Kennedy, are on a date together. When they kiss, Willow can hear Tara whisper: ‘I will always be her baby.’ The narrative can be pinned down on the original series’ timeline: Tara getting shot happens in the nineteenth episode of season 6 (‘Seeing Red’), Kennedy staying in Willow’s room happens in the tenth episode of season 7 (‘Bring on the Night’) and Willow and Kennedy’s date takes place in the thirteenth episode of season 7 (‘The Killer in Me’). Thus, the writer seems to be pasting snippets of three original episodes together. She links them up through the use of Willow’s dream, as it recurs in her scene in Willow’s room when Tara dies and when Kennedy enters, and during their date at the Bronx xxxvii . She is using original content, mixes it up and ties it together through the use of flashbacks of the nightmare. The story starts at the beginning (rather than in medias res ) and ends with a closed ending. The writer also provides the reader with a quote that has possibly inspired the story: “True love is found beyond dead [sic]”. The story progresses chronologically. Furthermore, the timespan of the narrative is unknown as the writer does not describe how much time passes between Tara dying and Kennedy moving in. However, as “a few days” pass between Kennedy moving in and her date with Willow, the timespan is more than a few days at least. The text is written in present tense, which makes it one out of two analysed texts that are written in the present tense, rather than the past tense xxxviii . This is interesting, as in general, fan fiction is written in past tense. This goes against online fan fiction norms as fan fiction specific grammar guides prescribe that fan fiction best be written in past tense xxxix .The story is told by a third-person
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83 omniscient narrator and consists mostly out of description, as there are only two lines of dialogue. The writer categorises the story as ‘Drama/Romance’. However, due to the fact that the story focusses on Willow’s nightmare, Tara’s death and Willow’s fears and insecurities, it could be argued that the story can simply be labeled as ‘Drama’, but as some romantic elements occur in the story, it might also be categorised as ‘Drama/Romance’ This means that the writer knows her genres and the texts fit in the aforementioned genres. An error in narrative structure is present. Due to the fact that the writer does not indicate that time elapsed between Tara getting shot and Kennedy moving in, it seems as though directly after Tara gets shot, Willow is already moving on. This makes the story unrealistic, as Willow does not show signs of grief after Tara’s died. Only true fans of the original series, who know that a lot has happened between Tara’s death and the introduction of Kennedy, will be able to understand that every stanza represents a different episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . Although the writer does show writing skills by binding the episodes together through the insertion of flashbacks/memories of the dream, the story does not become a whole:
“Willows [sic] smile changes into a grin when she thinks about the steamy night she just had. The next moment Tara is hit by a bullet.
Willow doesn’t know what she should feel. She thinks it’s strange that the house will be full of potential slayers in no time…”
As can be seen in the example, the change of episode between Tara’s death and Kennedy’s introduction seems abrupt and could confuse the reader.
The protagonist of the story is Willow and she is a round character. Due to the abundance of description in the narrative, the reader gets to know Willow’s inner thoughts. Willow is afraid of losing Tara in her dream, afraid of turning into her evil counterpart again, sad, and insecure about her sexuality. In the final stanza, Willow is in love. She wonders what will happen to the memories that she has of Tara if a potential slayer moves into her bedroom. These are all character traits that Willow also has in the original series. Though Maartje87 does portray Willow as she is portrayed in the original series, Willow does not show signs of grief in ‘I Will Always Be with You’. The narrator merely mentions that Willow is “very sad”, but her actions or thoughts do not elaborate on this. This is a shortcoming, as
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Willow turned evil in the original series after losing Tara, meaning she killed people and used dark magic. It would have added depth to the story if the writer had developed this concept of sadness after loss, but this does not happen. Maartje87 also describes Tara’s physical appearance as ‘skinny’, though she is arguably the only female Scooby member that cannot be described as slender or skinny. As far as register is concerned, the writer uses informal language throughout the chapter. The chapter consists out of sentences that are mostly repetitive in length:
“Willow knows she’s dreaming. But it’s different than a normal dream. Though it isn’t real in the world were [sic] Willow lives it’s absolutely real to Willow. She’s standing across of [sic] Tara. She slowly pulls her fingers to [sic] her long golden hair. Tara whispers something but Willow can’t hear her.”
The story is also repetitive when it comes to narration. As there is barely any dialogue, the story is written entirely in present tense description that is told by a third-person restricted narrator. There is also repetition when it comes to choice of words, as she repeats words, such as ‘surprise’, ‘crying’, ‘smiles’, ‘screams’ and ‘beautiful’. The writer successfully uses a narrative tool in the story in the form of ellipsis:
“Willow is afraid that she will turn bad again [sic] a [sic] hurt all these innocent girls.” [emphasis added]
As mentioned before, after Tara died in the series, Willow turned to dark magic and killed people out of revenge. She lost control of her magical abilities and this became a traumatising experience for her. This gap in the narrative shows that the writer assumes that the reader is familiar with the original series, as she does not explain why Willow is afraid of turning into her evil counterpart again . Whether this gap was created by the writer purposely and skillfully, or accidentally, is unknown. The text is very descriptive and there is hardly any dialogue. The writer uses imagery (e.g. “She screams and somebody grabs her hands”) and descriptive language (e.g “skinny body”), which makes the text visual. However, Maartje87 barely uses adverbs and is repetitive in her use of adjectives. Compared to other writers and other texts, this text contains a lot of Dutchisms. This could be explained by the Author’s Notes preceding the fanfic:
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“Heya guys, it’s a translation from one of my dutch [sic] stories… it’s better in dutch [sic]...but it’s a [sic] English start ;-) I will write an original english [sic] one soon.’
Thus, Maartje87 has translated her text that was originally written in Dutch into English, and has done so quite literally. An example of this is:
“How closer Tara gets to the window, how more dangerous it gets.” [emphasis added]
What Maartje87 means in this sentence is ‘ The closer Tara gets to the window, the more dangerous it gets.’ ‘How closer...how more dangerous’ is a literal translation of the Dutch “hoe dichter Tara bij het raam komt, hoe gevaarlijker het word [sic]”, which is written in her Dutch fanfic Ik zal altijd bij je zijn . Another Dutchism she uses throughout the story is that she spells ‘all’ with a single ‘l’. Furthermore, Maartje87 is inconsistent in her use of capitals, as can be seen in the abovementioned introduction to the story. She writes Dutch without a capital, but English with a capital. The title is written according to Dutch capitalisation norms. She also uses a single quotation mark to signal dialogue, rather than double quotation marks, but she inserts a period or exclamation mark inside the dialogue, meaning she is unaware of both Dutch and English norms of punctuation and capitalisation. Other errors that she makes include spelling of verbs and nouns (e.g. ‘weirs’ rather than ‘wears’ and ‘guan’ instead of ‘gown’) and typos. Although the errors in this text are mostly Dutchisms, spelling errors and typos, she is playing it safe by sticking to a limited choice of words. Compared to other writers, Maartje87’s vocabulary is very small and it is evident that she is a beginning English language learner. The question that could be raised here is if it is a good thing to stick to what one knows and not risk making errors, or if it is a good thing to challenge oneself and try to use more advanced words at the risk of making errors. We will return to this question in Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion.
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4.3.2 The Vision
The second story I analysed by Maartje87 is ‘The Vision’. This story was published a day after ‘I Will Always Be with You’. It consists out of 552 words and focusses on Tara and Willow. As the story is based on a pair that already exists in the original series, it can be placed within the original timeline. The only criterion is that Tara and Willow are together and alive, which means the story can be placed somewhere between the tenth episode of season 4 (‘Hush’), in which Tara is introduced to the viewer and the nineteenth episode of season 6 (‘Seeing Red’) in which she dies. The story begins in medias res with a gap. Tara has had a vision, but it is unclear to the reader what has exactly happened in this vision. Tara tries to reassure herself that Willow would never hurt her, at which she starts to cry and bites her lip until it bleeds. Willow tries to comfort her and Tara tries to change the subject into something trivial. Her vision worries her. The story ends with an abrupt open ending and seems unfinished. As it is still unknown what was in her vision and the story ends in the middle of a conversation between Tara and Willow, this could leave the reader wanting to know what happens next. It is therefore possible that this is an intentional open ending, which suggests that the writer knows how to skilfully construct a specific type of ending for her story (rather than simply cutting it off at a random moment). This story uses the same topic/theme as in her previous fanfic, only this time it is Tara who has a nightmare/vision rather than Willow. According to Maartje87 the story adheres to the genre Romance/Drama. As the story’s central element is Tara’s worries, it fits into the ‘Drama’ genre. However, the story lacks romance in a traditional sense, as nothing romantic happens. However, as previous sources have stated (Language 181; Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 563), fan fiction writers are not strict in following genre conventions and mix certain conventions of genres together. The reason it could be categorised as Romance is because it revolves around Willow and Tara (a pairing). It is therefore plausible that the text could be seen as Romance according to fan fiction readers and writers. These differing norms between mainstream writing and fan fiction writing will be further discussed in Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion. In this text, Maartje87 has difficulty sticking to a tense and mixes up past tense and present tense. This means she uses more than one tense in the same sentence: “Who knew Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
87 what will happen..” “She felt she’s been watched”. However, the tense that is used mostly is past tense. The story progresses chronologically and the timespan can be limited to the amount of time the dialogue takes up. The story is told by a third-person omniscient narrator and consists mostly out of description and narration, although there is more variation in description/narration and dialogue than in ‘I Will Always Be with You’. The Vision demonstrates that the author has a wider set of narrative tools at hand.
The main character of the text, Tara, is a round character. The reader gets to know her thoughts and feelings, although a development cannot be found due to the fact that this is a very short story. Willow is a side character and only has a few lines in the narrative. Although there are no deeper character descriptions, Tara does resemble the original character from the show. Her stuttering and worrying is a big part of her character in the series. Willow calls Tara “baby”, as she does in the show, but tells her to “shut up” as well, which she would not likely say to Tara in the series. It is implied that readers of the fanfic should be familiar with the show, as neither characters nor setting are introduced. As style is concerned, the register throughout the description/narration and dialogue is informal English, However, the writer shows that she is not a native speaker of English by using rather archaic, formal words (e.g. ‘mustn’t’ and ‘akin’) at times. The writer uses imagery (e.g. ‘cost [sic] a shiver which ran down her spine’, ‘the taste of blood entered her mouth’), which makes the text appeal to the senses. She also uses figurative language (e.g. ‘penny for your thoughts’, ‘her heart got ripped into two pieces’), but uses adjectives and adverbs sparingly, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as the text is alive enough as it is. As sentence length is concerned, the writer has a wider tool set at her use than the first text indicated:
‘Tara, shut up!’ Willow said, playing her finger gently on the thin pink lips. She felt the softness underneath her finger. The kind of softness she’d been akin to drink in ever since she met Tara. ‘Shut up. I love to go to your dad this weekend. And you can never ever be around me enough.’
As can be seen from this example, there is more variation in sentence length compared to ‘I Will Always Be with You’.
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Spelling and grammar errors that were made in the previous chapter are still made: ‘al’ instead of ‘all’, inconsistent use of capitals. The writer also uses ‘ore’ instead of ‘or’. It is interesting to note that she writes ‘story’ as ‘storry’ but ‘sorry’ as ‘sory’. This inconsistency shows that the writer has not yet mastered the English language. She makes incorrect word combinations and especially uses wrong prepositions (e.g. ‘gaze in front of her’,’ playing her finger gently on the thin pink lips’, ‘akin to drink in’). Though her vocabulary seems more advanced, she still has difficulty with writing grammatical sentences (e.g. “Who knew what will happen”). She definitely uses more “advanced” words and phrases now, compared to the limited, repetitive vocabulary that she showed in the previous text, but isn’t proficient enough to use them properly most of the time. (e.g. ‘cost a shiver which ran down her spine’, ‘couldn’t bare the thought’, ‘a ray of light crashing on her skin’ [sic]) She also uses “couldn’t” when she should use “shouldn’t” and uses “won’t” instead of “can’t”. It could be possible that the limited, repetitive vocabulary in the first text was caused by the fact that it was a translation of her Dutch text Ik zal altijd bij je zijn , as recreation can limit one’s vocabulary, especially if it is not advanced. However, the issue has not been addressed by the writer. Maartje87 still has a significant amount of typos and she still uses single quotation marks to indicate dialogue and Dutch capitalisation norms. The writer also does not use a comma after dialogue and starts the following narration with a capital:
‘’Oh baby...’ She cried.”
She seems to lack writing skills, because she is unable to connect certain sentences and they aren’t always connected:
“Her beautiful eyes where [sic] full of love and worries. A vision of something still coming…”
This disrupts the flow of the story and could confuse readers.
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4.3.3 Redemption
The final story I analysed by Maartje87 is ‘Redemption’. This story consists out of 1,318 words that are divided into two chapters. The story was published roughly two years after ‘The Vision’ and focusses on Faith. The story can be placed on the timeline of the original series. The story assumably is an extension of the sixteenth episode of season 4, after Faith and Buffy switch bodies, as the fanfic starts off with Faith who “can’t cut out the rememberance [sic] of her own face, while she keeps hitting it. She didn’t want to fight Buffy, it was herself she loathed so much.” However, this isn’t stated in the disclaimer or header. The story starts in medias res with Faith being in a fight with, as it turns out, herself (through the mirror). In the second stanza Faith is in a boxcar, which can be confusing to the reader. Faith then jumps out of the boxcar and starts running until she is tired and falls asleep. She wakes up in the evening/night and starts counting stars, getting flashbacks from when she was a kid and her alcoholic, abusive mom calls her “disgusting” and “nothing”, just like Faith calls herself when she’s fighting Buffy at the beginning of the chapter. This is psychologically deep compared to the writer’s earlier works. She creates a backstory for Faith that explains her behaviour in the series (her traumatising childhood) and her self- loathing. In the second chapter the reader finds out that Faith walked all night until she got to rest at a farm, run by a young woman and her father. The woman wants to help Faith, but doesn’t bother her by asking questions. Each chapter describes a day in the life of Faith and the stanzas are structured based on action and/or memory. Maartje87 includes a flashback of Faith being verbally and physically abused by her mom when she was little. This is more advanced narrative structure-wise, but because Faith is sometimes mentioned by name and sometimes referred to as the tiny girl/the little girl it is confusing to the reader:
“The woman grabs the girl by her arm and Faith can smell the booze on her”.
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“Just like she did when she was a little girl.”
The second chapter does not have a closed-off ending, which leaves room for the reader to wonder what will happen next and leaves open the possibility of a third chapter:
“She kept looking at the woman, wondering what she had been trough [sic] to become like this. she [sic] felt the woman wasn’t al [sic] that bad at all, but something or somebody had put her over the edge, and Leslie was dying to find out who. She felt compassion towards Faith, and she wanted to help her in any way possible.”
The narrative progresses chronologically and the timespan is roughly four days. Interestingly, the description and narration of the first chapter is written in present tense and the second chapter is written in past tense. The story is told by a third-person omniscient narrator and consists mostly out of description and narration, although the second chapter contains more dialogue. This is unlikely due to development of writing skills, as this text was published a day after I Will Always Be with You , as well as its Dutch predecessor. It is, however, possible that it is an intentional stylistic change or awareness of the fan fiction tradition to write in past tense. A final point on narrative structure is that the writer categorises the fanfic as ‘Romance/Drama’. This is a peculiar decision, as there is no romance involved whatsoever nor is there a romantic pairing. Due to the dramatic flashback, the fact that Faith is on the run and her state of mind, the story does fit in with ‘Drama’. The character Faith behaves and is portrayed true to the television series (no strings attached, pretending not to care, emotionally closed-off) and even uses words like ‘damn’ and ‘goody two shoes’ as she does in the series. The young lady and her dad do not exist in the television series and are produced by the writer. Faith is a round character as the reader gets to know her and her emotions. The other two characters are flat characters. The creating of these side characters can be seen as an improvement in characterisation, as the writer is creating content of her own and is not just copying the existing characters. As far as register is concerned, the writer uses informal language (booze, murderous bitch) She also uses double negation once, but this occurrence is not in dialogue which, combined with the fact that it only happens once, indicates that it is probably due to poor language skills rather than a conscious decision made by the writer. However, the writer seems to be more aware of the difference between formal/informal British
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English/American English as there are no archaic words and only one British English word (‘love’ used as term of endearment), compared to several American ones (e.g. ‘lazy ass’, ‘missy’, ‘darn’, ‘big guy’, ‘goody two shoes’ xl ). The writer continues her variation of sentence length, an improvement that was noticeable in the previous story:
“Leslie told Faith she had slept two days away. It didn’t surprise her though. Al [sic] the things going on lately, she didn’t get a lot of it the past few days. The girl didn’t stop looking at her, but she asked nothing. Just the way the slayer liked it. No strings attached.”
Maartje87 shows stylistic improvement when it comes to the use of descriptive language. Although she already used adjectives in the previous fanfics, the writer barely used adverbs. In this story, Maartje87 uses adverbs more frequently and uses them correctly (e.g. ‘looked tired , muddy , and helpless ’, ‘ happely suprised [sic]’, ‘ swiftly turned around’ [emphasis added]). Compared to the other texts, the writer’s vocabulary has expanded greatly, which is especially noticeable in her use of figurative language and phrases (e.g. ‘her legs grew heavy’, ‘no strings attached’, etc). No improvement has been made when it comes to spelling, compared to the other two fanfics. The writer makes a lot of spelling errors and typos. The most interesting error she makes from a fan fiction viewpoint occurs in the disclaimer:
“I don’t own these characters...They belong to the creative mind of Josh…”
Buffy is created by Joss Whedon and the writer referring to him as ‘Josh’ shows lack of involvement within the Buffy fandom. An error she continues to make in this fanfic is to write ‘all’ with a single ‘l’. She makes a lot of errors like this where she seems unsure if she should use a double consonant or a single one (e.g. ‘anoyed’, ‘pullsing’, ‘trully’, ‘verry’). She also uses ‘i’ and ‘e’ interchangeably when they occur in unstressed positions, such as ‘happely’, ‘comforteble’ and ‘illigal’. A final note on spelling is that Maartje87 seems to have difficulty using certain contracted forms. While she only used one contracted form incorrectly in the previous two fanfics, she now makes a lot of errors in using them:
“Your nothing! You’re disgusting!” [emphasis added]
[...]
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‘...and it get’s to her. For the first time in her life, something really get’s to her!’ [emphasis added]
[...]
‘The tiny girl gets up...’ [emphasis added]
As can be seen from these examples, Maartje87 is inconsistent in her use of contracted forms as well. It is interesting to note that while the writer’s vocabulary has expanded, spelling lags behind. We will discuss this further in chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion. When it comes to capitalisation and punctuation, the writer does not show improvement. She does not capitalise ‘the Slayer’. However, she does capitalise proper names in this text. An improvement can be seen in grammar regarding correct verb conjugation (e.g. ‘shook’, ‘awoke’, ‘shown’ xli ) and in writing skills, as she now uses double quotation marks to indicate dialogue. However, she does not use a comma after dialogue and starts the narration with a capital:
‘“Shut up, do you think I am afraid of you?” She throws her worst enemy to the ground.”
It is unclear whether she still uses Dutch capitalisation norms, as the title consists out of a single word. Finally, Maartje87 uses a Dutchism when she describes the morning dew:
‘The air started to smell fresh and she could smell the condence in it.’[emphasis added]
Condence is not an English word, but rather a Dutch word ‘condens’, which means condensation in English. Besides the fact that it is a Dutchism, it is also not appropriate here, as you can’t smell condensation in the air, you can only feel it. However, you can smell the wet grass.
4.3.4 An Overview
Maartje87 places all three of her text in the ‘Drama/Romance’ or ‘Romance/Drama’ genre. As I’ve argued in the analyses, romance is not the focal point of any of these texts and in ‘Redemption’ there isn’t even a hint of romance present in the story. The first story focusses
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93 on Willow’s worries and although she does go on a date and kiss someone, it could be argued that due to the focus being on Willow’s worries, the scene is not really romantic and therefore could just be placed in the ‘Drama’ genre. The second fanfic also focusses on the main character’s worries rather than on romance, and as the genre ‘Drama’ does not exclude any form of romance, it could be argued that the text fits in best within the ‘Drama’ genre. However, these two texts could adhere to the Romance genre according to fan fiction readers and writers, as fan fiction genres are less strict than traditional literary genres and these texts do revolve around a pairing (Willow and Tara). The third fanfic focusses on Faith’s inner turmoil and as no romance is present in the text, it would also fit in best within the ‘Drama’ genre. In this text, there is no pairing nor romance, so it does not adhere to the fan fiction romance genre either. Maartje87 thus shows no writing skill improvement when it comes to genre selection, which indicates that she might not fully grasp the meaning of each genre yet. Maartje87 does show improvement, for the final fanfic is divided into two chapters and contains a significant increase in word count (1,318 words compared to 890 and 552 words). This increase combined with the fact that she divides the text into two chapters shows that Maartje87’s skills could be improving as she writes more elaborately and is also able to structure her text. The three texts written by Maartje87 show numerous similarities, such as the use of a third-person omniscient narrator, choice of genre and existing on the original timeline. There are also gaps in every chapter, which could indicate familiarity with the narrative tool ellipsis. A further argument for this could be the use of in medias res , a narrative tool that she also uses in the final two texts, and the use of an open ending, also in the final two texts. This could also be seen as an improvement of writing skills as the writer uses a more advanced narrative structure in these texts, compared to starting the text at the beginning and finishing off with a closed ending in the first text. An especially interesting element when it comes to her narrative structure is the use of tense. Maartje87’s first text is written in present tense, the second one in past tense and the final one contains both tenses, one for each chapter. This inconsistent use of tense within the text itself is also apparent and this could show that either Maartje87 is unaware of the fact that she uses both present and past tense in most texts or lack of knowledge when it comes to formal rules for writing.
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A possible improvement can be seen in the writer’s use of dialogue. In the first story, there are only two lines of dialogue, which makes the text monotonous. In the second and third story, however, the writer uses more dialogue, which adheres more to the oral nature of the original source.
Finally, when we compare the first text to the third text in terms of dramatic effect, it becomes evident that the writer shows improvement in terms of narrative structure. Although Tara’s death is more tragic than Faith being abused by her mother as a young girl, Maartje87’s improved writing skills cause the latter to be more dramatic than the former as she describes the events in a much more detailed manner, allowing the reader to sympathise with Faith:
“It’s al [sic] good now. Willow and Tara where [sic] fighting. They broke up because Willow used way too much magic. But they worked it al [sic] out last night.. And how… Willows [sic] smile changes into a grin when she thinks about the steamy night she just had. The next moment Tara is hit by a bullet.”
Having your lover die right in front of you is in essence more dramatic than being beaten by your mother, as one generally does not come back from death. However, due to the detailed description of Faith being verbally and physically abused by her mother seems to have more impact than Tara’s death:
‘”Faith, you better get your lazy ass inside young lady!” Her drunken mother yells. The tiny girl gets up, but is clearly annoyed [sic]. She was at 314 stars already, but her mum had to break it up again. She passes the woman on the porch. As she enters the house she shivers because of the doorslam [sic] behind her. “Don’t you even dare to set one more step missy.” She freezes. The woman grabs the girl by her arm and Faith can smell the booze on her. “You are nothing, disgusting little girl!” The woman yells. Next thing she knows she’s lying on the floor trying to protect herself from the kicks. “Disgusting” Her mum just keeps yelling, as faith [sic] starts to cry.”
Overall, Maartje87 shows improvement in narrative structure. The writer uses more narrative tools ( in medias res and open ending), uses more dialogue which makes her text multidimensional, adds more dramatic effect and writes more elaborately. She does not show improvement with regard to tense use and choice of genre. Maartje87 shows improvement when it comes to characterisation as well. In the first two stories, she makes errors by saying Tara is skinny (which is frowned upon according to fan fiction norms, as the writer should keep the canonical characters to the original series as closely as possible. She also makes an error by neglecting to show Willow’s grief in the first
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95 story and Tara saying “shut up” in the second story. She does not make an error in the final story, which could be seen as a sign of improvement. Furthermore, she adds two characters in the final story which are of her own creation, meaning she is not just using existing content to mix it up, she also adds original content created by herself. Maartje87 also shows improvement in style. She gradually uses more adverbs and becomes less repetitive in her use of adjectives and sentence length. Although she uses informal language in every story, her characters use American slang in the final story, which shows an increased awareness of characterisation as well as the difference between British English and American English. This is supported by the fact that the writer no longer uses archaic/formal words, such as ‘akin’ and ‘mustn’t’ in her informal text. One could speculate that these words were found through incorrectly using a dictionary, as there is a sharp contrast between her vocabulary and style and these words. An increase in figurative language and phrases is also noticeable in the final text and her vocabulary has expanded greatly.
An improvement can be seen in grammar regarding correct verb conjugation (e.g. ‘shook’, ‘awoke’, ‘shown’) and in writing skills, as she uses double quotation marks to indicate dialogue in the final text, although she still does not use a comma after dialogue and still starts the narration with a capital. However, the writer still makes a lot of spelling errors. She still seems unsure of when to use double or single consonants (e.g. ‘trully’ and ‘anoyed’) and of how to use contracted forms (e.g. ‘Your nothing’). She continues to make Dutchisms, although they do occur less frequently than in the first text. She also uses ‘i’ and ‘e’ interchangeably when they occur in unstressed positions, such as ‘happely’, ‘comforteble’ and ‘illigal’.
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4.4 Angie-Face
4.4.1 Can I Do Anything?
The first story I analysed by Angie-Face consists of 6206 words and centres around Buffy, Riley and Angel. This story begins with a transcript of a few lines from the twentieth episode of season four, called ‘The Yoko Factor’. The fact that it is a transcript is indicated by using italics, as opposed to the regular font used throughout the rest of the story. The episode follows a crossover episode where Buffy visits Angel in Los Angeles. In ‘The Yoko Factor’, she returns to her dorm room in Sunnydale and Angel follows her. He runs into Buffy’s boyfriend Riley and they get into a physical fight, because Riley does not want Angel to visit Buffy. Angel visits Buffy anyway. Riley follows him to Buffy’s room and points a gun at him, saying he won’t leave the two of them together in her room. On that note, Buffy and Angel go to the hallway to have their talk. In the original episode, Angel asks Buffy if he can do anything to help her and she asks him to leave Sunnydale. The fanfic starts after Angel’s line “Can I do anything?” in the transcript and is an AU (Alternate Universe) story. The story, written in past tense, answers the question: ‘What if Buffy had asked Angel to help her fight Adam, instead of asking him to leave?’ The answer, according to Angie-Face, is that Buffy would break up with Riley, get back together with Angel and together, they defeat Adam (the Big Bad enemy of season 4). Willow and Tara will do a spell, which would restore Angel’s soul, so he and Buffy can experience “perfect happiness” together. The story has a closed ending: “This was going to be a new beginning for them. A new beginning of a wonderful life.” Although Angie-Face categorises her story as humour/romance, it can be argued that the dramatic elements of the story outweigh the comical ones. Riley’s jealousy and the fights he has with Buffy, Buffy recalling how she felt when she had to kill Angel and send him to a Hell dimension, the argument she has with her mother and killing Adam are examples of the dramatic nature of the story. Therefore it would fit in better with the drama/romance genre. The story follows several of the characters through a third-person omniscient narrator: “She saw pieces of the forgotten day”, “Riley didn’t understand what was happening” . This Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
97 narrative mode is used throughout the story, whereas the main characters change every chapter. The main characters are Buffy, Angel and Riley, but Giles and Spike also have a significant amount of lines. The lack of a key protagonist is in agreement with the series itself, as the series follows the main characters and not just Buffy. Thus, the fanfic reflects the tendencies in the original. The story progresses in a chronological sequence of events and mostly takes place at Buffy’s dorm and Giles’s apartment, but also at the cemetery, and a cave. As far as development of plot is concerned, there are three errors in the narrative, which could be seen as a shortcoming regarding writing skills. Firstly, in chapter 8, when Buffy and Angel are walking towards the door “it opened by it self. Riley stood there. [sic] ” It is unlikely that the door opened by itself if someone is standing in front of the door, unless it is an automatic door (which is not the case). It is more likely that Riley opened the door before Buffy and Angel got the chance to do so. Secondly, in the following chapter, Tara and Willow perform a spell that both restores Angel’s soul and shows Angel where Adam’s weak spot is. The two women are coming with Angel and Buffy because they “know a spell that will tell you were the weak spot is [sic].” However, when Adam is defeated, Angel falls to the ground and suddenly has a beating heart (which he did not have before). The writer does not mention Tara and Willow performing another spell, and the plot does not adhere to the original plot if they risk Angel getting killed by Adam because they restore his soul during a fight. Finally, when Angel’s soul is restored, the narrator says: “He fell on the ground. He glowed, he screamed. The glowing went away and he fell on the floor.” Naturally, someone cannot fall to the ground when he is still lying down. This has to do with writing skills rather than second language skills, as this is incorrect in Dutch as well as in English. ‘Can I Do Anything’ also has shortcomings when it comes to characterisation. The characters are flat and most of them do not resemble the original characters. The characters that do resemble the originals are Cordelia and Anya, however, they have few lines compared to the other characters and are side characters, rather than main characters. Cordelia and Anya share the same character trait: they speak bluntly and honestly, which causes discomfort to everyone but themselves:
‘“They are going to have mad sex.” Anja said.
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“Anja!” Xander said.
“Well, they are. I want to too. Come Xander let’s go home.” Anja said and dragged him to his car”’
Possibly one of the most striking traits of all characters in the series is the British accent of both Spike and Giles. Being the only British main characters on the show, Spike’s Cockney accent and Giles’s RP (BBC English/Standard English) accent stand out and so does their vocabulary. In the fanfic, their vocabulary nor accent are British and Spike uses the catchphrase “you guys”, which is not a characteristic of British English, but rather American English xlii . Spike does use nicknames for some of the characters, such as Big Poof (Angel) and Fishboy (Riley), like he does in the series. The Buffy and Riley breakup that occurs in the fanfic is abrupt and out of character. Riley witnessed Buffy and Angel kissing and confronts them. Then this happens:
“You just kissed your ex and I have to accept that?” Riley said.
“Well yeah, because your [sic] not my boyfriend anymore. I have had it with you. Leave now!” Buffy said.
“What you bitch!” Riley screamed.
The dialogue is very shallow and abrupt. The conflict between Riley and Buffy is represented in a few lines, which makes it unrealistic. Riley’s response is also out of character. He finally says “Fine!” and walks away. There is also a possible Mary Sue element in the story when Angel says “Here, use my phone. My mom pays the bill”. Angel can afford to buy a hotel, has a job that pays well and he can afford staff, so it is unlikely that he will make a call on Buffy’s phone in order to save money. That’s something teenagers would do and thus this event in the fanfic reflects the writer’s everyday world, rather than the fictional world of the characters. The writer is very consistent when it comes to style. The register used both in dialogue and description is informal American English and the dialogue/narration ratio is roughly the same in every chapter (a lot of dialogue, a few lines of description). This consistency is also noticeable when it comes to the action verbs that follow every line of dialogue. The dialogue is repetitively accompanied by either ‘asked’, ‘said’, or ‘answered’ (e.g. “Pretty good actually.” Angel answered.” ) The limited use of reporting verbs, as
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99 mentioned above, are sparsely modified by adjectives or verbs that are used as adverbs. Thus, the writer tries to use adverbs but does so incorrectly (e.g. “said angry” or “said smiling” ). However, this could also be caused by a lack of comma, as “said, smiling” is correct. She does use “perfectly” correctly in one instance. An important stylistic feature when it comes to fan fiction is the use of imagery. As discussed in chapter 2.1, the textual mode is limited compared to the visual mode in the case of fan fiction. These limitations can be overcome by using (visual and auditory) imagery to add depth to the text, the use of descriptive language (such as adjectives and adverbs) and dialogue. Unfortunately, the dialogue, as seen above, can be abrupt and the reporting verbs that could make the representation of the dialogue more descriptive are verb basic and repetitious, which makes the consistency of style repetitive and one-dimensional. As spelling and grammar are concerned, Angie-Face often makes the mistake of disconnecting the first syllable from words (e.g. “an other”, “a sleep” [sic]). Angie-Face makes spelling mistakes that could indicate that her auditory/oral skills are more advanced than her writing skills xliii . She replaces certain words with homophones: words that sound the same, but are different in meaning, such as “I apologies by phone” (rather than I’ll apologise) and “whore” (instead of “wore”). Mistakes she also makes, but could also be detected in texts written by native speakers are the interchangeable uses of “your” and “you’re” as well as “to” and “too”, “we’re” and “were”. Angie-Face is aware of the difference between English and Dutch capitalisation norms, as she capitalises strictly according to English norms. Dutch and English also differ when it comes to punctuation, as mentioned before. However, Angie-Face does not use a comma after dialogue, neither within the quotation or afterwards. She simply ends the quotation with a punctuation mark and starts a new sentence:
“Spike shut up.” Buffy said tired.
Given the fact that this error does not adhere to rules of Dutch nor English punctuation, this can be seen as an example of a writing skill error, rather than a language skill error.
As far as grammar is concerned, she does make grammatical errors that clearly show that she is not a native speaker of English. There is a noticeable inconsistency in her use of the negated simple past form ‘did not’. In 9 out of 21 uses of this form, the following finite verb
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100 is written in past tense, rather than present tense: “She didn’t looked at Angel”, compared to “He didn’t hesitate…”. Interestingly enough, she does not have difficulty with the use of prepositions, which can be difficult for English language learners. Finally, Angie-Face does use a lot of Dutchisms in her story. Dutchisms are words and/or phrases used by a Dutch person in English that seem grammatical to them, but are ungrammatical in the eyes of a native speaker. Examples taken from Angie-Face’s story are:
“Looked mad at him” (keken boos naar hem)
This example makes it seem as if someone seems to be upset with someone. However, the writer should have used “mad” as an adverb.
“I’m just back” (Ik ben net terug)
Here, the writer literally translates from Dutch into English. However, the correct translation is “I just got back”.
“Riley looked a second at her…” (Riley keek een seconde naar haar)
Again, this is a literal translation from Dutch into English. The writer should have written “Riley looked at her for a second”. This mistake is caused by a difference in syntax between Dutch and English.
Finally, there is interference of the mother tongue when it comes to the spelling of ‘Anya’. In Dutch, ‘Anya’ is written as ‘Anja’, which is the spelling that the writer uses in the narrative.
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4.4.2 Life’s Reward
The second story I analysed by Angie-Face was published 8 months after ‘Can I Do Anything?’ and takes place during a crossover episode of Angel called ‘Salvage’ (season 4 episode 13). The story consists out of 4.929 words and starts off with a transcript, much like the previously analysed story. Unlike its predecessor, the writer does not indicate that she makes use of a transcript by using italics. The plotline of the story is as follows: Angel (Buffy’s former boyfriend, who is a vampire) has lost his soul and has turned into his Mr. Hyde persona Angelus. When he hears someone say that the Slayer (Buffy) is in town, he calls her to check if she is still in Sunnydale. Life’s Reward opens with the phone call between Angelus and Buffy’s sister Dawn. It is an AU (Alternate Universe) story that answers the question: What if Dawn had told Buffy that Angel had called her and the Scooby gang went to L.A.? The writer uses setting to indicate that Angelus’s lines are spoken in Los Angeles and makes the focus shift from Angel to Buffy by using the header: In Sunnydale. This means that the reader must be very familiar with the spinoff series Angel in order to know that she is making use of lines appearing in the original transcript. The writer gives the story a spin by making Buffy call Angel back at his place of work. One of his friends and employee, Fred, picks up the phone and notifies Buffy that Angelus is back and that they broke Faith (a rogue Slayer) out of prison to capture Angelus. Buffy does not trust Faith and decides to go to L.A.. She takes the Scooby gang with her for assistance as she needs wicca Willow to perform a soul-binding spell on Angelus. Faith and Angelus are already fighting each other when Buffy and Spike arrive at the old factory. Together, Buffy and Faith defeat Angelus. Angelus is taken back to the hotel where he is chained to his bed. While Willow is working on her spell, Buffy guards Angelus and they start talking. Angelus tells her that Angel (the Dr. Jeckyll persona) still loves her rather than Cordelia. Willow performs her spell successfully and Angel’s soul is restored, aware of the conversation his evil split personality had with Buffy. They go to Angel’s bedroom to have another heart-to-heart, which eventually leads to the Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
102 couple making love to each other. Cordelia, who attempted to stop Willow from performing her spell, is not happy about this, because she needed Angelus for her evil plans. The story ends abruptly with Cordelia saying: “You stupid bitch. You just had to ruin it, huh?”. The description and narration in the story are written in past tense (except for the dialogue, which is written in present tense), which is the same tense that is used in the previous fanfic. It is also similar in the fact that the story progresses in a chronological sequence of events. Unlike its predecessor, ‘Life’s Reward’ does have a clear protagonist, which is Buffy. The other main characters are Angel, Faith and Cordelia. The writer categorises the story as romance, though it could also be categorised as drama/romance, due to the events preceding the romantic elements in the story. Though this story is shorter than ‘Can I Do Anything?’, it has the same type of narrator (third-person omniscient). This story ends with a cliff-hanger, which creates a gap in the narrative that garners interest, for it makes the reader wonder: “what will happen next?”. This is the complete opposite of the closed ending of ‘Can I Do Anything?: “This was going to be a new beginning for them. A new beginning of a wonderful life.” Open form is a literary that that is used to create suspense, as the reader is left with many unanswered questions xliv . This tool is used in this fanfic. This also distinguishes this story from ‘Can I Do Anything?’ is that it does not contain plot errors that have to do with causality. Due to the lack of plot errors and the use of a literary device, it could be argued that the writer shows progress when it comes to narrative structure. Finally, it is interesting to note that while the erotic scene in the first text was concealed by using a gap, the writer does include an erotic scene in this text. This could either be because the writer’s writing skills and/or second language skills have become more advanced and now allow for an explicit erotic scene to be created by the writer, or because the writer simply decided to differ in narrative structure. A definite improvement in characterisation can be seen when it comes to the characters and their behaviour in this second story. British character Spike already used nicknames in the previous text, but the writer clearly attempts to show his British identity by making him address Buffy with ‘love’, which is a British, informal form of address xlv . Buffy and Angel are round characters, which is an improvement compared to the previous story that only consisted out of flat characters. Buffy and Angel(us) discuss their feelings with one
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103 another, which causes the reader to get to know them better. The omniscient narrator also gives the reader insight into the minds of characters through the use of free indirect discourse: “Faith stood again and watched Angelus. Why wasn’t he attacking her?” The latter example, however, only happens scantily. The writer shows that she knows Angel and Buffy well, because Angelus refers to Spike as “roller boy”, which refers back to the last time Angelus saw Spike, who was in a wheelchair at the time (during season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ). This story, dialogue as well as description/narration, is written in informal American English, (with the exception of the use of ‘love’ by Spike). It also has roughly the same ratio when it comes to dialogue/description and narration, meaning the story mostly consists out of dialogue. Her limited vocabulary of action verbs has slightly expanded. ‘asked’, ‘said’, and ‘answered’ are still used in a tedious fashion, but she makes use of other verbs occasionally, such as ‘thought’, ‘sobbed’, and ‘screamed’. The action verbs are sometimes modified by phrases such as “with teary eyes” “angry” or “with a fake smile”. Adverbs are used at times as well: “her plan was going well”, “...moving very slowly”, and “asked sarcastically”. Her use of adverbs is inconsistent:
“Because the last time you and Angel talked we got the impression that it did not go very well .” Fred said unsure. [sic][emphasis added]
“You not wrong. It didn’t go good the last time…[sic] [emphasis added]”
The story is still very basic and one-dimensional due to a limited use of descriptive language and imagery. Angie-Face still disconnects the first syllable of certain words like she does in Can I Do Anything?, such as “a live” and “an other”. A noticeable improvement can be seen in the use of the negated simple past form ‘did not’. In the previously analysed text, in 9 out of 21 uses of this form, the following main verb had the wrong tense. In this text, the writer only uses the wrong tense once. In terms of spelling, the writer makes significantly fewer errors. The writer also connects words like ‘inlove’. The errors the writer makes are also made by native speakers, such as the interchangeable uses of ‘then’ and ‘than, ‘to’ and ‘too’. The most noticeable mistake Angie-Face makes in this text concerns mistakes with conjugation, for instance, in relation to the tense and non-finite forms:
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“Who knows what will happen, if he will gets loose. [emphasis added]”
This is an example of a mistake with conjugation of a verb structure that has an auxiliary and main verb. The writer is consistent in her use of capitalisation. She used capitals correctly in the first story and this remains the same in the second one. She still uses Dutchisms:
“I just could not keep on going with it” (Ik kon er gewoon niet mee doorgaan)
This is wrongly translated from Dutch into English. The correct sentence would be: “I just could not go through with it”.
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4.4.3 Revenge
‘Revenge’ is published a year after ‘Can I Do Anything?’ and 5 months after ‘Life’s Reward’ and focusses on the Buffy-Angel-Riley love triangle, much like the first story. It consists out of 3,976 words and the story takes place halfway through the fifth season of Buffy . The story starts with a 30-line description that gives the reader a sneak peek into the mind of Buffy, the protagonist in chapter 1. Buffy’s mother, Joyce, is in hospital because she has a brain tumour and had to have surgery. When her mother got sick, Buffy broke up with Riley, because he wants to give her relationship with Angel another go. Riley is furious because of this and wants Angel gone. He visits Willy the Snitch’s bar and informs him that he is trying to find someone who will kill Angel for him. Willy gives him a phone number, which turns out to be the number of Lilah, employee at Wolfram&Hart, which is a law firm that wants Angel gone just as much as Riley does. Lilah decides to help Riley. Buffy asks Willow to bind Angel’s soul so she can make love to him again, without Angel turning into Angelus again. Willow perform the spell and Buffy and Angel make love to each other twice. The spell has worked: Angel’s soul remains intact. The dialogue of the story is written in present tense and the description and narration in past tense, just as the previous texts. Again, Angie-Face categorises the story as ‘romance’ even though there is more to the story than the love triangle. Buffy’s mother is in hospital and Riley hires someone to kill Angel. The latter part is just as big as the romantic element of Buffy and Angel, which is why the text could fit in the drama/romance genre. Compared to the other two stories, this fanfic has a lot more description. This gives the writer the opportunity to add depth to the characters and create a visual image by describing the setting. The writer does indeed add depth to the characters by providing the reader with a peek into Buffy’s mind through the third-person omniscient narrator: “She had to be tough infront of everbody, but with Angel she could let her guard down. She knew he would be there to pick up the pieces.[sic]” The story takes place in the mansion that Buffy and Angel share, Riley’s dorm, Willy’s bar and the law firm ‘Wolfram&Hart’.
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The plot develops logically and chronologically and, like the previous text, has an open ending which is a plot device. The protagonists and main characters change every chapter. Buffy is the protagonist in chapter 1 and 4 and the other main character is Angel. Riley is the protagonist in chapters 2 and 3 and Lilah is the other main character. This variation is an engaging strategy that makes the story resemble the television series. Buffy is the main character of the television series, but she is not in every single scene. Riley and Buffy, the protagonists, are round characters as the reader gets to look inside their heads and the fanfic represents these characters with emotional complexity. The other characters are flat. All characters resemble the original characters from the show. They are very basic and show general human emotions, such as love and jealousy. One error when it comes to categorization is the fact that Buffy moves in with Angel. Buffy’s mom just had surgery, is in hospital, and unable to take care of her teenage daughter Dawn. In the original series, Buffy moves back home when she finds out her mom is ill and takes care of her little sister. It is out of character for Buffy to put her own interests first and leave her little sister to take care of herself. In contrast with the variation in protagonist is the repetitive nature of the sentence length and structure. This is not the case in the previously analysed stories. Unlike in the previously analysed stories, here the writer starts most sentences in the description with “he” or “she” and a following verb. The sentences also do not deviate in length, which creates a monotonous description:
“He walked into his dormroom and closed the door behind him. He was glad that his roommates were out. He needed some alone time right now. He needed to get his thoughts straight. He lay down on his bed. He was thinking about that day in the hospital.[sic]”
A comparison cannot be drawn, however, due to the fact that this story contains an increasing amount of description. As mentioned before, this text contains a 30-line introductory description whereas ‘Life’s Reward’ does not have an introduction and immediately starts off with dialogue. The description in ‘Life’s Reward’ is limited to describing an action, such as “Right on cue, Fred walks in.” Like the other two stories by Angie-Face that are analysed in this chapter, the fanfic is written in informal American English.
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A noticeable improvement can be seen when it comes to the relationship between dialogue, and description and narration. In the previous text, the writer was very limited in her use of verbs and the dialogue was mostly accompanied by “Angel said” or “Buffy asked”. This is no longer the case in ‘Revenge’. The repetitive structure of such descriptions after dialogue have mostly been replaced with either a full sentence that describes an action, or precedes the dialogue:
“Well in that case, welcome home.” Buffy tiptoed and kissed him.
“That is the welcome I had in my mind.” Angel smiled.
“Everything went well in L.A.?”
“Angel nodded. Buffy put her arms around his torso. “I am so glad you are back. I really missed you.”
This variation makes the story more vibrant and alive. Rather than just stating which character says which line, the writer adds detail, such as “Riley fel back on his chair [sic]” or “Willy looked around before coming closer to Riley. [sic]” She still uses the verbs ‘asked’ and ‘said’, but modifies these verbs, which, again, adds dimension to the story. The writer still makes errors when it comes to adverbs, but she does use them more, compared to the other stories. Adverbs that are uses, for example, are ‘hystericly ’, ‘ immidiatly ’ and ‘ quickly ’. The latter is also used as a sentence initial adverbial. Verb forms and tense is still an issue in this story. The writer uses past tense rather than past perfect. This does not happen in the previous texts and can be explained by the increase in description. This text contains an increased amount of spelling and grammar errors. However, this is due to the fact that she is using more complex structures here, as previously the stories consisted mostly out of present tense dialogue and past simple description. The other issues that occurred in the previous text, such as use of commas, connecting and disconnecting of words (e.g. ‘ infront ’, ‘ goodday ’, ‘ an other’ [sic]), the interchangeable uses of words (e.g. ‘then’ and ‘than’ or ‘to’ and ‘too’) and Dutchisms (‘chose for him and not for that thing’ rather than ‘chose him…’). In the final story, Angie-Face uses ‘didn’t’ 8 times and selects the wrong finite verb 3 times. This is not an improvement compared to the previous text.
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4.4.4 An Overview
The author is consistent in her choice of genre. The first story is labelled as ‘humour/romance’ and the following stories are simply labelled ‘romance’. As stated in the analysis, this label is not broad enough when we look at the events that take place in the texts. The texts, as I’ve argued, contain dramatic elements and to simply label them as romance means that the story is oversimplified. ‘Can I Do Anything?’ is also labelled as being humouristic, though it contains more dramatic elements than humouristic ones. The word count of the texts decreases over time, but the quality of the texts does improve, meaning even though the writer does not produce longer texts (which is often seen as a development in fan fiction and might also reflect on her expanding language skills), she does produce texts that are more advanced in terms of narrative and linguistic structures. There is an increase in action and character building due to the fact that the description increases as well and a variation in action verbs. The third-person omniscient narrator that is consistently used throughout the stories provides the reader with more information, which adds depth to the story. The transcripts that are used in the beginning of the first two stories (in order to place the story in a timeline) makes way for a 30-line description in the final text that creates a backstory. This makes the story multidimensional, but it also makes it more difficult to write and causes the writer to make more errors regarding spelling and grammar. The first text ends with a closed “all’s well that ends well” ending, whereas the writer uses the literary tool of open form in the latter two by keeping the ending open (or unresolved). There are also no narrative errors in the final two texts. Based on these improvements, it could be argued that the writer has shown overall improvement as far as narrative structure is concerned. An improvement in characterisation can be seen in the second and third texts. Through the narrator, the reader gets to peek into the minds of the round characters. Spike’s British identity is not established in the first story and a slight improvement can be seen in the second one. Unfortunately, the character is not present in the final story, which means a
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109 comparison cannot be drawn. In the first text, the characters do not all adhere to the original characters and there is a possible Mary Sue element that can be detected. This is not the case in the other two stories. It has to be said, however, that although the characters are round in the other two, they are still basic and do not have traits that makes them individuals. Due to this, the improvements that have been mentioned might not be convincing enough to say that there has been a definite overall improvement when it comes to characterisation. However, it is also possible that the writer does not explore the characters fully because she assumes that the readers are already familiar with the characters. This will be discussed further in chapter 5: Conclusion and Discussion. Except for register and monotonous sentence structures, the writer has made a definite improvement when it comes to style. The final text contains a lot more description, which means that the writer can create a visual image by making the characters walk to a liquor cabinet or clean glasses behind the bar. The characters do not just say their lines or answer other characters, they become less static and feel “the cool air of the aircondiciner [sic]” or see “restrainment in his eyes” . The writer increasingly uses adverbs and adjectives, which also creates a visual image. There seems to be an improvement when it comes to spelling and grammar. This is partly due to the fact that the final text contains more description. The writer clearly finds it difficult to write in past perfect tense and struggles with this in the final text. Her vocabulary has increased, which is noticeable when we look at her expanded use of verbs, adjectives and adverbs. She tries to use the past perfect tense, which means that her grammatical resources are more extensive here. Again, this will be discussed in chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion. In all, an improvement in spelling and grammar is detectable, although the presentation of verb tenses is not perfect.
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4.5 Comparative overview
Mosquito shows definite improvement as far as writing and second language skills are concerned. Her texts gradually increase in word count, which enables the possibility to develop characters and narrative more fully. Mosquito also uses more (or mostly) dialogue towards her final text, which means that she mimics the original medium of television and shows improvement according to fan fiction norms (show, don’t tell). She also mimics the original medium by starting in medias res in the final story. In the Buffy television series, episodes also start in the middle of a fight or conversation. This is also an improvement according to fan fiction norms. The use of ellipsis and flashback in the final story also indicate that her narrative structure has become more advanced, compared to the previous texts. However, starting in medias res and using narrative tools such as ellipsis and flashback are also used valued in formal training. An improvement can especially be seen in characterization, as her original characters Ronan and Casey become more present in the final text as they play a bigger part in the narrative without showing elements of Mary Sue. She also distinguishes between formal and informal language regarding the British characters and although her characters behaved Out-Of-Character in the first two stories, none of the characters do so in the final text. As far as style is concerned, she shows improvement regarding sentence structure, narrative structure and the use of adverbs and adjectives. Most importantly, Mosquito adds lyrics, references to books and images to the last two texts. This use of multimodality and intertextuality shows that she is media literate. She gradually makes fewer errors in using adverbs and adjectives although her second language skills were already advanced compared to other writers. Overall, Mosquito shows that she is media literate and shows improvement according to fan fiction norms as well as formal writing norms and second language skills. Aydine shows from the first text onwards that she is a skilled writer. She uses narrative tools (ellipsis, flashbacks, in medias res) already in the first text and is consistent in her narrative structure and use of these tools. This could either mean that she is consistent and skilled, or that she is simply repeating the same structure as she is familiar with it. Due to her skillfulness already showing through the first text, no progression is made in narrative structure. This is also the case with characterization. Although Aydine uses flat characters, Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
111 this could be attributed to the medium, as fan fiction characters are mostly based on pre- existing characters that are already introduced in the original work. It could also be caused by genre, as her texts contain a lot of humour, which puts emphasis on the narrative, rather than characters. As far as style, spelling and grammar are concerned, the writer does not improve either, as she still shows advanced writing skills in some cases (imagery and descriptive language, correct use of English quotation marks norms), but continues to make mistakes in other cases (e.g. comma use, Dutchisms, incorrect use of adverbs). Overall, Aydine’s improvement, compared to the other writers, is diminishable. Her writing mostly adheres to fan fiction norms and formal norms, although her (scarce) use of Dutchisms, misuse of commas and repetition of sentence structure will likely not be disturbing to fan fiction readers as they focus mostly on content rather than form, it would be noticed in formal settings. I will return to this later on in the chapter. Maartje87 shows improvement in narrative structure by expanding on the description of dramatic events, which makes them more emotional and adds dimension to the story. She also uses more narrative tools and the cause-effect relationship between paragraphs becomes clearer. These are improvements according to formal and fan fiction norms. The increase of use regarding dialogue is a vast improvement according to fan fiction norms, as it represents the original medium more (show, don’t tell). She also shows improvement by dividing the final text into two chapters and adding a cliff-hanger ending in the first part of this text, which is a fan fiction technique used to draw in readers and making them come back to the writer’s profile to see if an additional chapter has been added, thus creating more views (Adolescents 69). An improvement of characterisation can be seen due to the lack of characterisation errors in the final two texts and addition of original characters in the final text. This could be regarded as improvement according to fan fiction norms, as the writer is not just copying original work, but creating new content as well. Finally, Maartje87’s second language skills have improved as well, as her vocabulary increases over time, she uses more advanced verb structures and shows awareness of character nationality by using British and American slang. Although she still makes a lot of errors regarding spelling and grammar, she is experimenting with verb structures and idiom, which shows that her second language skills are improving. I will return to this further on in the chapter.
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Angie-Face, the final writer, shows a significant improvement in narrative structure. Although her texts become smaller as far as word count is concerned, the linguistic and narrative structures become more advanced. She includes a reference to the original storyline by adding original dialogue, which shows that she is media literate. There is an increase in character building and action due to an increase in narration/description and use of action verbs. Although fan fiction norms prescribe more dialogue and action (rather than description), the first two texts mostly consisted of dialogue and little description/narration, which affected the story. Using dialogue is important according to fan fiction norms, but the writer also needs to “show” the setting, as the reader cannot create a mental image if they do not know where the conversation takes place. By creating more description/narration, the narrative structure improves and thus Angie-Face shows improvement according to formal and fan fiction norms. The writer also shows stylistic improvement due to the increased use of adverbs and adjectives, which adds dimension to the story and making it resemble the original visual mode more. This is thus an improvement according to both sets of norms as well. Much like Maartje87, Angie-Face’s vocabulary shows improvement, although this means that she makes more spelling and grammatical errors. Again, this will be discussed later on in the chapter.
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Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion
In this chapter I will repeat my research questions and aims, followed by an overview of empirical findings as well as answers to my research questions. I will discuss how these findings can be used to improve second language learning in formal settings and give my recommendations for future research. Finally, I will give an overall conclusion.
5.1 Introduction
This study was set out to investigate what kind of writing skills second language writers of online fan fiction demonstrate and if they show improvement or progression regarding said skills in their texts. The general theoretical literature on this subject suggests that passionate affinity spaces such as FanFiction.net provide a nourishing environment for second language learners. They can write about topics that they are passionate about, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a second language in a supportive environment that stimulates improving writing and language skills by receiving feedback from readers and beta-readers whilst learning about what is perceived to be “good writing”, what general fan fiction norms are, as well as fandom specific preferences. Previous research has focused mainly on these forms of dialogic negotiation (feedback and community) as well as how identity is constructed in online fan fiction. This study focussed on whether writers who did not receive constructive feedback from other readers still showed improvement in writing and second language skills.
This study sought to answer three questions:
1. Does the act of writing fan fiction in a passionate affinity space such as FanFiction.net with its own norms, rules and guidelines help to improve one’s second language writing skills?
2. What kind of writing skills are demonstrated in the examined texts in terms of language use and narrative techniques?
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3. Are there any developments in the examined texts regarding language use and narrative techniques over time?
The results to these questions will be discussed in the following paragraph.
5.2 Synthesis of Empirical Findings and Answers to Research Questions The second and third research questions can be answered by looking at the analysis in the previous chapter. To summarise, all writers show improvement in second language skills and writing skills according to fan fiction and formal norms, with the exception of Aydine. Aydine’s skills are already more advanced in the first text, which could mean that she has more experience when it comes to writing fan fiction and writing in a second language than the other writers. Therefore, based on my analysis, textual analysis could support the claim that in a passionate affinity space such as FanFiction.net with its own norms, rules and guidelines, writing fan fiction helps to improve one’s second language writing skills. It has to be noted, however, that we do not know whether these improvements can be attributed to fan fiction writing alone. It is plausible that the writers received formal training in English and writing as well. Aside from this impediment, the writers also show improvement in the portrayal of original characters and this is not something that can be taught in formal education, but rather comes from experience and familiarity with the original source. It is interesting to note that most writers wrote in past tense and used a third-person (omniscient) narrator, which is valued according to fan fiction norms (Holy n.p.). There are also noteworthy issues regarding second language learning that need to be discussed. Most writers do not have difficulty using adjectives, but errors in using adverbs are present in a striking amount. Also, Angie-Face and Aydine both disconnect certain words, such as ‘ a sleep’ or ‘mean while’. As both elements of these words also exist on their own, it could be argued that these mistakes are made because the writers learned to use these words in sentences through osmosis xlvi through oral language. Maartje87 also shows signs of this by making homophonous errors (e.g. “ cost a shiver…” or “ Playing her finger gently on…”, replacing ‘ through’ by ‘to’ ). These implications for formal education will be discussed in the following paragraph. Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
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For the sake of clarity I will briefly come back to the main research question. My analysis shows that textual evidence supports the claim that the act of writing online fan fiction in a passionate affinity space such as FanFiction.net with its own norms, rules and guidelines could help to improve one’s second language and writing skills.
5.3 Discussion/ Policy Relevance and Implications
Now that textual evidence suggests that the act of writing fan fiction in itself, without using beta-readers or receiving constructive feedback, could improve one’s second language writing skills, the possibility is created to discuss the effects that these findings could have in formal settings. As mentioned in chapter 2.3.3, the general consensus among researchers is that implementing fan fiction writing in formal settings, such as schools, is not advisable. There are several reasons why implementing fan fiction in formal settings will not work. One problem is that fan fiction is written for personal reasons and often contains personal content. This means that writers of fan fiction will likely not applaud at the opportunity of showing their work to their teachers. Fan fiction writing it is a highly personal engagement and having to hand in fanfic to a teacher would take away some of the benefits that online fan fiction provides as you would no longer have anonymity.
Another problem is that although the textual analysis shows that online fan fiction writing can improve second language writing skills according to formal and informal norms, there is a discrepancy between what teachers think makes for good writing and what fan fiction writers and readers believe to be good writing. Fan fiction readers and writers focus mainly on characterisation and narrative structure (content) and less on style, spelling and grammar; whereas this is a complete opposite of what teachers tend to focus on. This is mostly caused by motives for reading the text. Readers of fan fiction in a passionate affinity space read a text because they like the fandom and want to further explore it. Although settings and events mostly change during episodes of a television series or fanfic, it could be argued that the characterisation is the most important aspect of good fan fiction writing. One could debate whether a text that is based on Buffy , but that does not include any of the Buffy characters, could be considered a Buffy fanfic, whereas the setting and plot change in
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116 every story, be it in the original television series or in fan fiction texts. Second language writing skills will thus be used as a tool to create a story. In formal settings, a story would be used in order to improve one’s writing tools. In order for the teacher to judge a fan fiction text based on originality and characterisation, they would have to be familiar with the fandom. This poses an obvious problem, as it is impossible for a teacher to dive into the fandom of every student. It also leads to another problem, which is grading.
In an ideal world where every child in a classroom has exactly the same access to media, is it possible to grade fan fiction? As discussed, fan fiction norms and formal norms are not the same as they both have different ideas of what makes “good writing”. Writers such as Aydine, who are already advanced in terms of fan fiction norms, could benefit from having fan fiction implemented in formal settings, as second language educators are trained at pointing out errors, such as her misuse of commas, Dutchisms and repetitive sentence structure. In contrast, as these errors are not grave and do not affect the narrative, they will likely not be addressed by readers as they do not disturb the flow of the narrative. In formal settings, writers such as Angie-Face and Maartje87 will arguably receive low grades for the presence of spelling and grammatical errors, whereas their stories do get better because they are not afraid to experiment with difficult verb structures or idioms. Receiving a lower grade could cause them to become discouraged, which in effect could have a negative effect on creativity.
In all, implementing fan fiction in formal settings poses some important problems that underscore the opinions of researchers such as Black, Lankshear and Knobel and Chandler-Olcott and Mahar. However, as the analysis shows that second language writing skills could be improved by writing online fan fiction, it does emphasise that there are more ways than through formal education to gain second language writing skills. Moreover, allowing students to use second language writing skills as a tool, rather than a goal, is not necessarily an inferior strategy and can help them improve these skills whilst doing something they enjoy.
5.4 Limitations of the Study and Recommendations for Future Research
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Even though the analysis shows that three out of four writers improved their second language writing skills over time, there are external factors that could have influenced or caused this development. It is possible that the writers are progressing due to formal education, even though improvement in characterisation occurs by becoming more familiar with the original source or becoming a more experienced writer. Another limitation of the study is that it is unknown how much time as elapsed between starting a fanfic and finishing it, as well as finishing it and posting it on FanFiction.net. Although these limitations could be reduced by approaching the writer, but that will create a consciousness of having to improve or being closely examined, which could lead to a loss of interest in writing fan fiction due to pressure. A final limitation was the fact that there were little Dutch authors writing English Buffy fan fiction. Maartje87’s texts had to be included even though two out of three texts were published only a day apart. This does not allow for a lot of room for development. However, due to my knowledge of the original source Buffy, this issue was not big enough to switch to another fandom, as in being able to judge character development and mannerisms as a fan, I needed to be familiar with the original work. However, for future research it is suggested to pick a fandom based on whether there are enough second language learners writing fan fiction in the fandom.
5.6 Final Conclusion
In conclusion, this thesis provides textual evidence that support previous research that suggests that writing online fan fiction in a second language could help improve said language. Furthermore, writers also improve their writing skills according to formal and fan fiction norms. Implementing online fan fiction writing into formal settings is problematic due to a discrepancy between what is deemed to be good writing in formal and passionate affinity space or a writer’s reluctance to show their content to teachers. However, the outcome of the analysis in this thesis could be used as an argument to allow second language learners to use their second language as a tool to produce content that they enjoy producing (and in effect improving this tool), rather than making them create content in order to create the tool. Improving Second Language and Writing Skills by Creating Online Fan Fiction Master Thesis Esther Lugtigheid June 2014
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Notes i Deahl, Rachel. “E.L. James and the Case of Fan Fiction”. Publishers Weekly . 13 Jan 2012. Web. 12 Jun 2014. ii "Fan Fiction." Dictionary.com Unabridged . Random House, Inc. 11 Jun. 2014. iii "Fan Fiction." Merriam-Webster.com . Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 11 Jun 2014. iv Newman, Michael Z. “Intermediality and Transmedia Storytelling”. Thinking C21 . 17 Sep 2012. Web. 14 Jun 2014. v "fan, n.2". OED Online. Jun 2013. Oxford University Press. Web. 5 Aug 2013 vi Sendlor, Charles. “Fan Fiction Demographics in 2010: Age, Sex, Country”. 18 Mar 2011 Fan Fiction Statistics – FFN Research. Web. 11 Jun 2014. vii Aydine. “Aydine bio”. 4 Apr 2004. FanFiction.net. Web. 12 Jun 2014. viii Maartje87. “Maartje87 bio”. 1 Jun 2014. FanFiction.net. Web. 12 Jun 2014. ix "Literacy." Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. 3rd ed. 2005. Print. x United Nations. “UNESCO Institute for Statistics”. Adult and Youth Literacy. 2012. Web. xi Heather Indeed. "Lost and Found ||Crossover FanFic|| Dean and Buffy" Online video clip. YouTube . YouTube, 7 Jan. 2014. Web. 14 Jun. 2014. xii Holy Mother Grammatica’s Guide to Good Writing”. n.d. Web. 13 Jun 2014.
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xlii Jochnowitz, George. “Another View of You Guys”. American Speech 58 (1) (spring, 1983): 68-70. xliii This is something that native speakers also do, so this is a sign of a writing skill error, rather than second language error. xliv Esnaashari, Mr. “An Introduction to Literature 1: Literary Terms”. English Language and Literature. N.d. Web. 13 Jun 2014. xlv "love". Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press , n.d. Web. 14 June 2014. xlvi Picking up information, such as language,without realising it.
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