Delicious angst and tooth-rotting fluff: Distant reading community discourses of emotion in Harry Potter fanfiction comments

Abstract

This article employs distant reading to examine discursive norms for expressing emotion in comments on Harry Potter fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3). Using text analysis tools to identify collocational patterns, the article shows how fanfiction engages this community and how community members express their engagement in accordance with community discourses. The analysis transcends the level of individual utterances by examining large-scale patterns in the data. Comparing comments for three fanfiction genres (angst, fluff and hurt/comfort) reveals three patterns. First, commenters frequently describe stories about suffering in positive terms. Second, metaphors likening fanfiction consumption to food consumption are prevalent in all genres. Commenters also use language blending physical and emotional sensations. Finally, commenters describe stories about positive emotions using negative metaphors of rot, decay, gluttony or overload. This use of positive or negative language need not indicate positive or negative judgements but instead reveals discursive fields to which fanfiction reading is linked. Additionally, comments indicate that fanfiction is used to influence emotional states. These findings contribute to an understanding of the impact of fanfiction within its community and raise questions regarding the role of emotion in fanfiction reading.