TWITTER SOCIAL MEDIA AUS

HOW FANFICTION IS RECREATING SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

Fanfiction, a product of the fandom culture believed to have started in the 1960s with Star Trek, is a type of literature that is progressively entering academic discussions. This article chooses to focus on a special type of fanfiction, called Social Media AUs, which are fanfics set inside and told through the format of social media. The first part of the analysis shows how this type of fanfiction was being produced in the more traditional fanfiction spaces – virtual archives such as FanFiction.Net and Archive of Our Own (AO3) – and how writers chose to represent social media interaction. The second part discusses the shift from these archives to Twitter (X) and analyzes aspects that differentiate the Social Media AUs produced in the app: use of images, recreation of social media formats, practicality in reading, interactive tools and multimedia approach. To do this, actual examples of fanfics from AO3 and Twitter are used and authors such as Derecho (2006) and Vargas (2005) are brought to deepen the analysis. The results show that social media is indeed influencing new storytelling ways and that there is a significant interest in stories told entirely through social media format.