Admiration and Frustration: A Multidimensional Analysis of Fanfiction

Mia Jacobsen, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

Abstract:

Why do people write fanfiction? How, if at all, does fanfiction differ from the source material on which
it is based? In this paper, we use quantitative text analysis to address these questions by investigating
linguistic differences and similarities between fan-produced texts and their original sources. We ana-
lyze fanfiction based on Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Working
with a corpus of around 250,000 texts containing both fanfiction and sources, we draw on Biber’s Mul-
tidimensional Analysis [4], scoring each text along six dimensions of functional variation. Our results
identify both global and community-based preferences in the form and function of fanfiction. Crucially,
fan-produced texts are found not to diverge from their source material in statistically meaningful ways,
suggesting that fans mimic the writing style of the original author. Nevertheless, fans as a whole prefer
stories with less focus on narrative and greater emphasis on character interactions than the source text.
Our analysis supports the notion proposed by qualitative studies that fanfiction is motivated both by
admiration for and frustration with the canon.