Findings

The data presented in the introduction shows that only 27 out of the 122 videos that were pulled from Apify contained the types of comments I was looking for. While scrolling through the tens of thousands of comments on the various viral TikToks, I was looking for comments that used fan fiction in a denigrating manner to lessen a novel’s literary and aesthetic value. Basically, I was looking for comments that were using fan fiction to trash another novel and imply that the novel in question was of an inferior caliber because it “read like fan fiction.” I chose a time period when Hoover’s novel was suddenly mega viral, and it seemed like anyone who enjoyed reading was reading It Ends With Us. During this time, I noticed a surge in comments that said that Hoover’s novel “belonged on Wattpad” or “could’ve been written by a 15-year-old fan fiction author.” These comments stuck with me because of how much they bothered me, and these feelings of irritation and anger over the implications the commenters were making about fan fiction are what led to the creation of this project and the research questions that drive it.

I chose research questions based on what I was seeing in the comments online and my experience as an English student, specifically with the lack of fan studies scholars I came across during my time at two higher education institutions. While I have had some professors who have had some insight on the field of fan studies, their main research lied in Victorianism, Romanticism, or the Renaissance, making them marketable to university English departments when looking for a job. I have never met a professor whose chief research interests lie within fan studies, and I began to think about why that is. Is it because fan studies, in the eyes of the academy, is not seen as a discipline worth being integrated into university English departments on a large scale? Instead remaining on the outskirts of the academy, relegated to a side-interest someone gets to when they have some spare time. This project is not concerned with what structural changes would need to happen for fan studies to obtain a larger presence in the academy and university English departments, but why fan studies has been deemed noncanonical for so many years.

I conducted my online research with the intentions of seeing whether the data I gathered supported my research questions on the effects of the relationship between fan fiction discourse, the scholarly interests of the faculty in university English departments, and the academy. More specifically, I wanted to see if the data would reflect that negative online fan fiction discourse effects professorial hiring practices. I wanted an answer on whether fan studies’ noncanonical classification transgresses into bureaucratic processes like hiring, and whether a candidate whose research lies within fan studies would make them less marketable than a candidate with a canonical research interest like British Romanticism. From the 122 videos pulled, only 27 of them contained the types of comments that I was looking for, and while many of those 27 videos had innumerable viable comments, I found that the data did not support my research questions.

An answer other than the one you were hoping for still makes for a productive project, though. While the data did not provide me with the answers I was seeking, it allowed me to fabricate my own arguments on what I believe is responsible for the lack of a presence fan studies has within both the academy and English departments. I argue that fan studies remains outside of the academy because the literary canon Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). Furthermore, I argue that the canon only interpellates those who already support canonical ideologies to ensure that such ideologies continue to be circulated within academic circles. The problem with this, though, is that the canon, via interpellation, is pandering to a very specific group of people who already prescribe to their ideologies, meaning that both the people and genres that are already marginalized by the literary canon ISA remain outside of the canon’s consideration. It is important to note that this project is not a plea for fan studies to be labeled as canonical. Rather, it is an exploration into how the literary canon ISA negatively impacts the critical and academic presence and research of many popular genres – like fan studies – by classifying them as noncanonical because they do not align with canonical ideologies.