Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 23 (2025)
Abstract
Within the last fifteen years, a new form of community-driven literary practice has developed on the internet, namely fanfiction. Fanfiction is unlicensed community-authored writing about established intellectual property, made for fans by fans. In this paper, we provide an overview of contemporary fanfiction circulated on the most popular fanfiction platforms (Wattpad and Archive of Our Own). We also bring in recent cognitive science studies on creativity and art, where there is an emerging consensus that creativity is not a product of an individual mind that imposes its intentions onto a static object. Instead, creative processes tend to be co-emergent between agents, materials, and constraints. Our research adds to the growing embodied and distributed creativity literature. We argue that the distributed nature of author, community, and intellectual property interactions in fanfiction can be modeled as a decoupled, participatory, sensemaking system.