Fan labor, also called fan works, are the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works (fiction, fan fiction and review literature), visual or computer-assisted art, films and videos, animations, games, music, or applied arts and costuming.
Although fans invest significant time creating their products, and fan-created or fanmade products are "often crafted with production values as high as any in the official culture,"Fiske 1992:39 most fans provide their creative works as amateurs, for others to enjoy without requiring or requesting monetary compensation. Fans respect their gift economy culture and are often also fearful that charging other fans for products of their creativity will somehow fundamentally change the fan-fan relationship, as well as attract unwanted legal attention from copyright holders. The skills that fans hone through their fan works may be marketable, and some fans find employment through their fan works.
In recent years, media conglomerates have become more aware of how fan labor activities can add to and affect the effectiveness of media product development, marketing, advertising, promotional activities, and distribution. They seek to harness fan activities for low-cost and effective advertisements (such as the 2007 Doritos Super Bowl Ad contest) at the same time as they continue to send out cease and desist to the creators of amateur fan products—threatening legal action whose basis is increasingly being questioned by fandom rights groups like the Organization for Transformative Works, which assert the transformative and therefore legal nature of fan labor products.
In the fandom subgroups science fiction fandom and media fandom, fan labor activities may be termed fanac (from "fannish activities"), a term that also includes non-creative activities such as managing traditional science fiction fanzines (i.e., not primarily devoted to fan fiction), and the organization and maintenance of science fiction conventions and science fiction clubs.
A more general and internet focused form of "fan work" is user-generated content, which became popular with the Web 2.0, often also a form of virtual volunteering.
Categories of activities Fans use all art forms to express their creativity with regard to their fandoms.
Literary arts: Fan fiction, reviews Fan fiction is the most widely known fan labor practice, and arguably one of the oldest, beginning at least as early as the 17th century.Constant, Paul. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" Newsweek Web Exclusive May 5, 2009 Fan fiction stories ("fan fic") are literary works produced by fans of a given media property, rather than the original creator. They may expand on an original story line, character relationship, or situations and entities that were originally mentioned in the original author's work. Works of fan fiction are rarely commissioned or authorized by the original work's owner, creator, or publisher, and they are almost never professionally published.
The rise of online repositories built to archive and deliver fan fiction has resulted in a new activity: fandom analytics. This fan labor practice is focused on the analysis and visualization of the use of content tags and categories, along with other metrics, such as hit and word counts in order to discuss and forecast trends and variations within and across fandoms.
Traditional visual arts: Art and graphic design Fan art is artwork based on a character, costume, item, or story that was created by someone other than the artist. Usually, it refers to fan labor artworks by amateur and unpaid artists. In addition to traditional paintings and drawings, fan artists may also create web banners, avatars, or web-based animations, as well as photo collages, posters, and artistic representation of movie/show/book quotes.
Computer-aided visual arts: Fan films, fan vids, fan games, machinima
A fan film is a film or video inspired by a media source, created by fans rather than by the source's copyright holders or creators. Fan films vary in length from short faux-teaser trailers for non-existent motion pictures to ultra-rare full-length motion pictures.
Fanvids are analytical music videos made by synchronizing clips from TV shows or movies with music to tell a story or make an argument.Jenkins 2006b:144, Kozinets 2007:198–200 "Vidders", the creators of these videos, carefully match the audio and video components to tell a story or set a specific mood.
Fangames are video games made by fans based on one or more established video games; the vast majority of fangames that have been successfully completed and published are adventure games. Many fangames attempt to clone the original game's design, gameplay and characters, but it is equally common for fans to develop a unique game using another only as a template. Fangames are either developed as standalone games with their own engines, or as modifications to existing games that "piggyback" on the other's engines.
Fans of video games have been creating machinima since 1996. Machinima creators use computer game engines to create "actors" and create scenarios for them to perform in, using the physics and character generation tools of the game. The scripts, as performed by the computer-generated characters, are recorded and distributed to viewers online.
Reanimated collaborations involve each fan animating a shot of an existing film in their own unique style. The clips are then stitched together to produce a collaborative tribute, sometimes with over 500 animators on a single film. The finished product is then uploaded to the internet for other fans to watch. Reanimated projects have been produced in honor of Looney Tunes, SpongeBob, The Simpsons, Kirby, and Zelda CDi, among others. Participants generally expect little or no profit.
Fan labor in the software domain, especially for video games, exists also in the form of fan patches, fan translations, mods, fan-made remakes, server emulators and source ports.You're in charge! – From vital patches to game cancellations, players are often intimately involved. by Christian Donlan on Eurogamer "Supreme Commander fans released Forged Alliance Forever and gave the game the online client it could otherwise only dream of. I haven't played it much, but I still got a tear in my eye when I read about the extents these coders had gone to. There's nothing quite so wonderful to witness as love, and this is surely love of the very purest order. [...] SupCom guys resurrect a series whose publisher had just gone under." (2013-11-02)
Musical arts
Filk is a musical culture, genre, and community tied to science fiction/fantasy fandom, involving the writing and performance of songs inspired by fandom and other common filk themes. Filking is often done in small groups at conventions, often late at night after other official convention programming has ended for the day; additionally, there are now dedicated filk conventions in Canada, England, Germany, and the United States.
Some fandoms are known to produce music as a form of fan labor that is not usually classified as filk. The brony fandom has developed a vast musical subculture, often referred to as brony music.
Applied arts: Costume construction, tea blending In costuming or cosplay, creators assemble and sew costumes that replicate characters or fit with the setting of the target of fannish activity. Costuming often goes well beyond basic seamstress and tailoring, and may include developing sophisticated mechanics, such as hydraulics to open and close wings, or complicated manufacturing techniques, such as building Stormtrooper armor from scratch by using vacuum molding and fiberglass application.
In fandom-inspired tea blends, creators craft unique combinations of teas, herbs, nuts, fruits, and/or spices to produce a blend that typifies a character from TV, film, or comic books or exemplifies their nature, or an aspect of it. Fan art is typically involved in the form of a custom designed label. NPR reports this started in 2012 and there are now "more than a thousand user-created 'fandom teas'" available.
Economic theories and models Having invested significant amounts of time, most fans provide their creative works for others to enjoy without requiring or requesting monetary compensation. Most fans are engaged in an economic model that rewards labor with "credit" such as attribution, notoriety, and good will, rather than money.Tushnet 2007
Relationships between fans Instead of monetary reward, one of the major rewards of fan labor is the formation of relationships between fan creators and other fans. The relationships created through fan exchanges are often as important, if not more so, than the products exchanged. The focus on relationships separates fandom economic practices from the capitalistic practices of everyday life.
From an economic anthropology viewpoint, the products of fan labor are a form of cultural wealth, valuable also for their ability to interrelate the fan works, the fan-creators, and the original media property itself through conversation and fan work exchanges. Fans, in other words, are "affines" of media property and of other fans.
Deification of media property owner From another economic anthropology perspective, fan creative practices are labor that is done in a relatively routine way and that helps to maintain a connection to the media property itself (the "cultural ancestor" or "deity"). Through their fan labor, fans are able to replicate "the original creative acts of first-principle deities, ancestors or cultural heroes".Helms 1998:171
Ritual anthropology Fans engage in skilled crafting, "routine acts" within a ritual economy. The types of material that fans produce and consume continually reproduce the structures and worldview of the fandom subset of the authors and readers, for instance, in terms of which ships are popular. These choices also reflect the relationships fans construct of their view of their place within fandom, including how they relate to the media property and the corporate structures and products surrounding it. Fans are therefore engaged in "the individual and collective construction of overlapping and even conflicting practices, identities, meanings, and also alternate texts, images, and objects".Kozinets 2007:205
The goods that fans produce as a result of these rituals are imbued with social value by other fans. Fan works are valued as fandom products, and they also support the fan creator's desire to be valued by peers.Thorne and Bruner 2006:54
Fan products and money There is a divide in fandom between those who want to see new models of remuneration developed and those who feel that "getting paid cuts fandom off at the knees".Comment by Catherine Tosenberger, speaker on "Fan Labor" panel, Futures of Entertainment 2007 conference at MIT
For example, Rebecca Tushnet fears that "if fan productions became well-recognized gateways to legitimate fame and fortune, there might be a tradeoff between monetary and community-based incentives to create."Tushnet 2007:173 By contrast, Abigail De Kosnik suggests that, since fans are inevitably part of a monetary economy in some way or another, fans should be able to profit from the people who are profiting from them.De Kosnik 2009:118
Ambivalence regarding monetary compensation Fans who do their creative work out of paying respect to the original media property or an actor or to the fandom in general gain cultural capital in the fandom. However, those who attempt to sell their creative products will be shunned by other fans, and subject to possible legal action. Fans often classify other fans trying to sell their items for profit motives as "hucksters" rather than true fans.Fiske 1992:40