This case study’s fan fiction and its subsequent non-RPF romance novel version reveal a complex blend of the fan fiction, romance novel, intimatopia, pornography, slash fan fiction, Real Person Fan Fiction, and Men’s Hockey Real Person Fan Fiction genres and subgenres. Intimatopia’s ideological framework provides a specific method for the romance novel’s reordering of self and society, as well as a description of the resulting ordered society and self. As analysis of the reader comments left on the Archive of Our Own fan fiction reveals, intimacy is also critical to the fan fiction’s community, because the reader is driven to comment by the text’s affective power. The relationship between the reader and the text is primary for the reader, whereas the author’s primary aim is to seek an intimate relationship with their readers. There is a conceptual link between the literary and social contexts through their privileging of intimacy as a mode of interaction for the texts’s characters, readers, and authors.
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The exact nature of the relationship between the romance novel genre and the fan fiction genre has been debated and analyzed by scholars, readers, and writers alike. The romance novel, as defined by Pamela Regis, is “a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” [...] Fan fiction, by contrast, is defined more by its conditions of production than its narrative elements. (1)
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Another genre critical to my work in this thesis is Elizabeth Woledge’s intimatopia genre. Coined as a term and identified as a genre by Woledge in her 2005 PhD dissertation, intimatopia centers the creation and development of an exclusive and reciprocal relationship between characters that blends love, friendship, and intimacy. (2-3)
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Pornography, while not as important to this thesis as intimatopia, is so frequently an intersecting genre with the romance novel and fan fiction genres, and also a genre whose textual features heavily appear in my two primary text stories, that it is included here. (3)
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defining the relationship between a text and its genres is far more complex than simply pitting the romance novel genre and the fan fiction genre against each other in order to identify and place value on their differences. However erroneous this oppositional positioning of the romance novel genre and the fan fiction genre may be, it was this initial question that prompted my academic research into the effects of genre and social context of production on a fic’s textual features. I am an avid romance novel reader with writerly aspirations, a more recent but no less avid fic reader, and, most recently, a fic author. My experiences as both a reader and writer in these genres prompted me to research the intangible difference(s) I observed between the effects of romance novels and fan fiction. I wanted to know why I felt more satisfied by fan fictions than romance novels, even though many fics I read ostensibly followed the same required narrative structure as the romance novels that left me frustrated. As an academic, I wanted to research this phenomenon and report back to these fields of study with my results so that other scholars could continue to deepen our collective understanding of what is happening to the way we read, tell, and feel these stories. As an author, I wanted to become part of a fandom writerly community; I also want to write and traditionally publish a mainstream romance novel that captures the intangible essence that I felt in my favourite fics—I want to show non-fan fiction readers what romance novels could be. (3-4)
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I have chosen a definition of the genre that avoids assumptions based on specific subcategories of the genre, time periods, or publishing companies. I can thus demonstrate, through comparisons between the requirements of each genre (see Appendix A), how the romance novel genre is able to intersect with other genres often placed into opposition with it, like pornography, fan fiction, and intimatopia. (24)
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I distinguish between the public personae that I, and other members of the community, read and write about, and the real people behind these personae. In order to maintain this separation between the world of RPF and the real world of the public figures, most hockey fics are Archive-locked. Archive-locked fan fictions are only visible and available to people with an Archive of Our Own account. (48)
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I have determined that my fan fiction is a combination of the genres of fan fiction, the romance novel, pornography, and intimatopia, and three subgenres of fan fiction: slash fic, Real Person Fan Fiction, and Men’s Hockey Real Person Fan Fiction. The romance novel genre is what provides the text’s narrative structure and ideological framework of reordering a disordered society and self; fan fiction provides the social context of the text’s production, characters, and focus on queerness; slash fic provides the relationship between two queer men; Real Person Fan Fiction provides its focus on the difference between the ‘real self’ and public persona; Men’s Hockey RPF lends the personae of real professional hockey players, its focus on the consequences of hockey’s homophobic and toxically masculine culture, and its focus on the body as a source of injury, attractiveness, sexuality, and identity; pornography provides its explicit sexual content for the purpose of producing arousal in the reader. (58-59)
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Intimatopia, the most critical genre intersecting in my two stories, provides the ideological framework that centers the development of an exclusive, reciprocal, romantic relationship that is a mix of love, friendship, and intimacy. Intimatopia structures my fan fiction and its revised non-RPF version in such a way that the society and characters’s selves are reordered by and around the exclusive intimacy of this romantic relationship.
This intimacy—critical to the textual features and content of my fic and its revision as a romance novel—is also critical to the social context in which my fic was produced. After analyzing the content, frequency, and number of author/reader comments on my fan fiction, I discovered that the readers primarily read my fic in order to form an emotional relationship with the text. Only after that primary relationship was established did they also form a secondary intimate relationship with me as the author. (59)
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In this thesis, I attempt to describe and explain in a clear, linear fashion, how this web of interconnected ideas, emotions, genres, and communities interact with each other using my fan fiction, A Good Place to Disappear, the fic’s Men’s Hockey RPF community on Archive of Our Own, and its revised, non-RPF romance novel version, Compass Points North, as my primary texts. (60)
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The romance novel’s ideological framework does not specify the method by which disorder is made into order, what the original disordered state is like, nor what the final ordered state is like. This lack of specificity allows the romance novel genre to be flexible and respond to changes in societal ideas about what is a disordered self and society, what an ordered self and society are, and how to get from one to the other. Intimatopia’s ideological framework provides one specific method of going from disorder to order and one specific description of the final order: A blend of love, friendship, and intimacy within an exclusive and romantic relationship. A non-intimatopic romance novel would have a different method of reordering disorder and a different vision of what constitutes an ordered self and society, one which may depict romance without showing the development of friendship or intimacy within the romance. (81)
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intimacy is shown and developed over the course of the text, and is not presumed to exist based on the presence of romantic gestures. If this ideological drift from fan fiction and other intimatopic texts to romance novels occurs significantly, readers and writers who enjoy the idealized fantasy of being completely known and loved, and of completely knowing someone and loving them in return, will be able to read and write mainstream, traditionally published, romance novels that satisfy and honour this desire. (97-98)
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This investigation answers two questions regarding the process of revising a fan fiction into a non-fan fiction romance novel: 1) To what textual features of my fic did readers respond, thereby indicating the source of the text’s affective power? 2) What kinds of relationships generally formed between me as the author and my readers; more specifically, what is the nature of the editorial feedback I received and—depending on the answer to this question—the subsequent question of whether or not it is ethical for me to attempt to traditionally publish the non-RPF version of this story in order to profit from the mainstream publishing industry. (100)
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