Authorship and Literary Communication in Fanfiction Platforms: Harry Potter on Fanfiktion.de

Abstract

The article examines the changes in Harry Potter fanfiction during the ›corona year‹ of 2020 through metadata analysis. To do this, all texts that were newly written or continued on Fanfiktion.de in that year were compiled as a corpus. The central focus of the study is to investigate the patterns and criteria through which authors receive attention for their texts. By employing network models, the results of descriptive statistics, whose averages may lead to narrative ambiguities in the interpretation, are complemented with evidence-based analysis of various communication roles. Topic models and sentiment analyses of the Harry Potter novels, as well as fanfiction and their reviews, support a social trend towards a restrictive approach to negativity and negative criticism.