Pulling Yourself Up by the Bootstraps”: Fandom Self-Referentiality in Goncharov (1973) – A Case for Meta-Fanfiction
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2025-06-30
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en
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How fan audiences organise themselves differs as a result of the affordances of the platform on which they are operating. These differences allow for a multitude of distinct fandom works to be created, one of which is fanfiction. Just as is the case with other forms of fan creations, how fanfiction is written is largely dependent on the context in which it is written and the material and methods available to the writer(s). Fanfiction has academically long been considered a literary practice contingent on the existence of a concrete source text, often in the form of a fictive narrative or some form of (popular) media.
However, in the last few years, other examples of fan-made narratives have been put forward, which are not constructed with a source text as the narrative from which they are derived, such as the case with Goncharov meme on Tumblr. During the last few months of 2022, the Tumblr community came together to collectively create an imagined movie through jokingly insisting that the movie exists and pretending to be people who had seen the movie and commenting on the contents of the movie. I contend that the Goncharov meme challenges the academic understanding of fanfiction, which has been traditionally put forward by demonstrating how narratives can emerge from more abstract sources, such as the collective experience of minority fandom members, rather than a concrete source text in the form of a narrative with an established progression.
By introducing the concept of “meta-fanfiction”, this research aims to more concretely conceptualise the phenomenon occurring with Goncharov (1973) in which meta-references on how minority fandom members typically alter subtextual or lacklustre representation in fanfiction are transformed into creating the base narrative of Goncharov (1973), thus illustrating the evolving and reflexive nature of both fanfiction and how audience members relate to mainstream media. The concept of silosocilaity will be used to show that there is distinctiveness in how people on Tumblr operate, meaning that fandom on Tumblr does have self-awareness of their operational codes.
Through attention to how queer and female characters are represented in the Goncharov (1973), this research explores the research question: to what extent does the creation of Goncharov (1973) as fanfiction differ from how the creation of fanfiction has been academically described? I argue that Goncharov is fanfiction created by the Tumblr fandom that alters the definition of what fanfiction is beyond the focus which has been kept in academic discourse on fanfiction, in which the emphasis is on an already existent media text. The alternative is that people may draw upon their lived experiences as a foundation to
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create fanfiction. The argument is substantiated through the analysis of three works of canon-compliant fanfiction derived from Goncharov (1973) as a source text, as well as one work of fan art also derived from Goncharov (1973).
Keywords: fanfiction, fandom, Tumblr, self-referentiality, meta-fanfiction.
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