Essay of DOOM, Part the Third

I've changed my mind about where this essay is going next. Some notes:
In discussing the "Text, Context, and Subtext" of the genre, I left a lot implied. What I was trying to say was that the con/text of fanfics includes fan knowledge of the originary text, and that the various texts and rhetorics surrounding the fanfics come from fan knowledge. I used Dragonball as an example of the types of knowledges fans bring to texts.
I also wanted to highlight the fact that many of these fanfics are--and I think I got distracted from my purpose in my paragraph about fanfiction.net--recast by the authors into a different genre. Genre distinctions on fanfiction.net and mediaminer.org are part of the search criteria that allows readers to narrow the results--a necessity for a site that features fanfics in the thousands for some series. While the specific genres are different for each site, some remain a constant: Action, Adventure, Humor, Drama, Angst (itself an interesting "new" genre), Romance, Mystery, Scifi, Fantasy, and Tragedy. Of the 1500 or so pages of fanfics for InuYasha, for example, more than 900 identify themselves as being "Romance," which isn't a surprise, considering that the anime and manga are both considered Romantic Comedy. Of the 1200 pages of Dragonball Z fanfics, however, 500 are identified as Romance--a rather large portion for a series known for its martial arts and long battle scenes against evil, nearly immortal monsters. It is perhaps a moot point to make to say that one of the jobs of the genre is to "fill in the gaps," as it were, the gaps left by the original creator. In action-based series, particularly those with well developed characters like DBZ, it is not surprising that authors turn to the characters' love lives for a point of extension.

now, back to the flow of things. Next I'm going to look at restrictions... Think of this next section as a giant insert that goes before the sentence I started in my last entry on "audience."

Restrictions and Constraints
Bitzer finds that rhetorical texts, while initiated by exigency, are constructed according to the various restrictions and constraints--both practical and contextual--placed on the text. I have already mentioned some of these restraints: in order to be published on a fanfic database website, a text must follow the terms of service of that site. Mediaminer.org's recent ban of CYOA or "Role-playing fanfics" is one such restriction; now all texts must be written in standard prose forms, and in the first or third person. Both Mediaminer and fanfiction.net reserve the right to remove texts that are "disrespectful of the English language" in that they use "chat language" or are vastly erroneous in spelling and grammar. Fanfiction.net reserves the right to remove material they deem to be above an "R" rating; because the authors select the rating themselves, this can be problematic. What constitutes "R" is arguable; in general, there are to be no "full blown 'lemons,'" although "lime" and "citrus" are allowed. Most fanfic users understand "lemons" to include graphic description of sexual intercourse, where as "lime" or "citrus" are respectively less graphic, constituting a continuum that allows users to restrict their own reading, or the reading of their children. "Lemonade," "limeade," "orange" and other derrivatives have been created to be even more specific, but the lemon/lime distinction holds the most sway for what constitutes a restricted text.
The creation of jargon and euphemisms to talk about such restrictions points to the existence of a discourse community and the concerns of that community. That such a wide selection of descriptive jargon has been created to aid users points to the users' knowledge of restriction, and their respect for it as a constituting element of their texts and community. While here I could expound on some of the other salient issues in the lemon/lime disctinction, including the constituting of a normalized sexuality, I will leave that for others to discuss. For a discussion of "slash" fiction (called so for the slash mark between gender pairings such as f/f, m/m, m/f and various other combinations) and its work, see Berg Nellis and Kelly Anne Colleen's forthcoming dissertation on the fan community of X files, "Making Sense of Television: Interpretive Community and 'The X-Files' Fan Forum. An Ethnographic Study."
Legal restrictions are also a necessary and defining element of fanfiction.

I'm going to stop here for a moment. It seems like a good place to stop. Plus, since the "apocalypse" hit Boston, I've been feeling lethargic, and the warm computer lab, the white noise of the heater above my head, the quiet chatter from the Writing Center, are all working together to make me want a nap. A lap around the building should clear my head.