James Porter defined the discourse community as: “a local and temporary constraining system, defined by a body of texts (or more generally, practices) that are unified by a common focus. A discourse community is a textual system with stated and unstated conventions, a vital history, mechanisms for wielding power, institutional hierarchies, vested interests, and so on” (106). Discourse communities have a very big impact on fandoms. This makes fandom, at the most basic level, is one of the main modes of online discourse community. To create a fandom, a group of people with the same interest must come together to form a community, where they will share their ideas on the subject of their interest.
Fandom is the place where people to come together; tell stories that express their thoughts about their culture, and helps fans become more input with their fan culture. In my fandom (http://inuyasha-fanfiction.com/index.php), we have 3727 members, both men and women, who share the same interest about Inuyasha—one of the most well-known Japanese anime and manga around the world. In our community, we intercommunicate with each other through forums. We discuss our feelings and what make us excited, disappointed. In addition, we like to talk about the whole series or a specific episode, write fan-fictions, attend to cosplay events, and create donation to support our website. There are 525 authors in my fandom, who wrote fan-fiction about Inuyasha, 1719 fan-fiction stories, and 8875 chapters. In relation to Porter’s definition, these bodies of texts unify us with Inuyahsa, who is our common focus.
Fandom also engages fans who are young writers to practice transformative works in writing their fan-fictions. Instead of telling the same old stories, they get a chance to build upon it and create their own original stories. They can create different endings, change the parts of the story to suit their interest, and add different kind of characters to their fan fictions. These writers exchange their stores and share them with hundred, thousands, or even millions of readers, who will give them helpful feedbacks. These feedbacks will help the writers develop their writing and editing skills. In addition, these feedbacks greatly assist them as they learn to explore different ideas in their fandom.
In fandom, fans use specific language that people outside of their group might not understand and recognize, we call this specific language lexis. One example of lexis is a phrase I found in my Pinterest field note; the photo had the phrase “ Keep Calm and Inuyasha, sit boy!” For any Inuyasha fans, this phrase is one of the mose famous saying in the whole Inuyasha series. Since Inuyasha is a hot headed half blood demon, he always rushes and does thing without thinking. To help Kagome controls Inuyasha, Kaede put a charm necklace in Inu’ and that necklace made Inu’ do whatever Kagome commands him. Kagome magic word was “Sit, boy” because Inu is a dog demon. Sometimes Kagome said the magic word just to get revenge on Inu’s silly acts.
Fandom is something that has become really pervasive. Its goal is to lets fans express their emotion and thought about their fan culture by practices literacy. Fandom makes it possible for one to be able to nurture creativity and share our stories and our art with other people. It lets many more people have a voice and it lets many people tell stories that would otherwise not get heard Fandom is a creative space where writers can be benefit from their participation. They learn to be confidence in public performance, social connection, and improve their skills. My fandom is unified to Inuyasha, our common focus, by practices like writing, using specific language and storytelling.
For my final research in English 1302, I chose to do my research on Inuyasha, a Japanese manga written by Rumiko Takahashi in 1996 and it was adapted into an anime series in 2000. It is a story about a half blood demon named Inuyasha, the second son of Inu no Taisho, and a high school girl named Kagome. Kagome accidently traveled through time (about Sengoku period AKA Warring States Period) after she failed into a magic well in her family sanctuary when a monster tried to take the magical Jewel of Four Souls from her. Kagome accidentally broke the Jewel of Four Souls into thousands of pieces after she shot the monster with an arrow. Kagome and Inuyasha mission was to collect all pieces of Jew of Four Souls before Naraku, the villain of the story, finds them. Kagome and Inuyasha met three friends named Shippo, Sango, and Miroku who joined in the journey to recover the Jewel of Four Souls.
Even though I considered myself as an insider of my culture, there are many things that I didn’t know about. During my research on Inuyasha fandom, I have learned countless fascinating things about my culture. One thing that shocks me the most would be the diversity of Inuyasha fandoms. I’ve learn that there are many fan from other cultures that also watch and love Inu’ like I do. that watch Inu’ and share their view in Inu’ fandom. From my field note artifact 8, a fan’s comment stated that even though she likes Goku better than Inuyasha, she is still prefer to watches Inu’ because the plot is more interesting. I was stunned to see a Dragon Ball fan is also a Inu’ fan. In field note artifacts 15 and 16, I noticed that there are many Nine-tails fans who are al Inu’ fans. In the fan fictions, they use characters from Nine-tails such as Heie and Kuarama.
What intrigued me during my research should be the fan fictions. What fan fictions are the stories written by the fans that have creative ideas to write their own stories base on the original and want to share them with the world. Fan fiction is considered to be the most popular literacy practice in Fandom culture. From artifacts 12 to 17 field note, I learned that there are multiple types of fan fictions that available such as general, romance, action, adventure, poetry, etc. In artifact 12 and 13, it was surprised to see that even though Bakotsu is not the main character in the series, a lot of Inu’ fan fiction writers write stories about him.
It was interesting to see how the writers change the plot of the story but still keep the original personality of Bakotsu. From article 1-5, it is very interesting to see how fan practice literacy through Inu’ fandom, especially how they use the lexicons in their work. The only object that troubled me was the adult fan fiction. Even though the fan fiction was in romance, and adult category, I was not expecting the story to have that kind of sexual written language. Before I go to read the story, I did not get a warning that it is a rated R, 18+ stories. I hope that the fan fiction site would fix this problem in the future.
Like Heather Lawyer’s Harry Potter fan fiction website, Inuyasha fan fictions is a way to motivate young writers to make a character and participate in their world, and write their own stories. The two fan pages I use for my research are inuyasha-fanfiction (http://inuyasha-fanfiction.com/index.php) and inuyasha fiction (http://www.inuyasha-fiction.com/). Inuyasha-fanfiction website has 3741 members, with 525 authors and 1719 stories with different categories such as romance, humor, crossover; while Inuyasha fiction website has 4191 members and 4026 and two categories: fan fiction and miscellaneous. Both website layout formats are very user-friendly. In the home page, there is a brief summary about the website and most recent stories. On the top of the website there are different categories such as news, helps, contact us, etc. The members from both sites communicate through forum, and fan fiction. Unlike Inuyasha fiction, Inuyasha-fanfictions makes fun rising every year to support its website.
Inuysha-fanfiction seems to be stricter about the memberships and stories that posted in the website than Inuyasha fiction. When I go to Inuyasha fiction site, I couldn’t find any rules about the memberships or the writing rules like in Inuyasha-fanfiction. In Inuyasha-fanfiction, when a writer submits his/her story, he/she must follow all this rules:
- All submissions must be accompanied by a complete disclaimer.
- Stories must be submitted to the proper category.
- Titles and summaries must be junior high and above on reading level.
- Actor/actress stories are not permitted…not even if they’re visiting an alternate reality.
- Correct grammar and spelling are expected of all stories submitted to this site
- All stories must be rated correctly and have the appropriate warnings.
- Stories containing adults having sex with minors are strictly forbidden if the setting is in the modern era. In the case of InuYasha, this was acceptable in feudal times, so it is acceptable to include, but it must be put in the adult category and labeled appropriately.
Perhaps Inuyasha fiction has more members and views than Inuyasha-fanfiction because it is it does not many rules. For me, I personally like to use Inuyasha fiction more because it is easier to use and there are more stories available on the website.
thansong123 