Fanfiction — that is, ‘stories produced by fans based on plot lines and characters from either a single source text or else a “canon” of works’ (Thomas 2011, 1) — is a form of cultural production in which female writers and readers are widely recognised to dominate. By contrast, Warhammer enthusiasts are stereotypically male. However, the male-dominated fictional worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 provide many opportunities for the stories of male friendship, lust, and romance that have long characterised fanfiction of all kinds. Are the resulting tales simply generic fanfiction with superficial Warhammer trappings, or does the franchise’s trademark grimdark styling impact the tone on a deeper level?
To answer this question, a corpus containing over 6000 individual works of fanfiction centred around the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 franchises was collected through automated scraping of the Archive of Our Own website, along with a corpus containing over 6000 randomly-sampled works of fanfiction from the same source and representing the full diversity of contemporary fanfiction. Statistical comparison between the two corpora enables us to identify the characteristic lexical patterns of fanfiction set in these unique imaginary universes.
Reference:
- Thomas, Bronwen. 2011. “What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things about It??” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3: 1–24. https://doi.org/10.5250/storyworlds.3.2011.0001.
Author bio
Daniel Allington is Reader in Social Analytics in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.
