Sudha Rajagopalan:
Not just spooky: the collaborative aesthetics of Supernatural fandom on Runet - Abstract

Part of an ongoing study of Russian-language internet (Runet) fandom for the American TV series ‘Supernatural’, this paper is an exploration of how the tv-supernatural.ru fan community on Runet engages with the otherworldly visuals and narratives foregrounded in this occult melodrama. Tv-supernatural.ru has roughly 25,000 members and is one of the largest fan communities on Runet for this particular TV series. These fans view the show on the popular Ren-Tv channel, but also download episodes from the internet long before the eventual Russian broadcast. Upon viewing an episode, fans interact online and perform their readings of the show; that is, they articulate their views in a manner that suggests they are cognizant of the expectations of their audience (the other fans in the forum) as well as prevalent cultural assumptions about the supernatural. They dissect their own fear-filled responses to the show, judge textual veracity, discuss the possibility of legends coming true and share tips and other trivia on practices and phenomena common to the symbolic universes of urban legends and other popular culture beliefs. In the process of formulating evaluative criteria to judge whether the show delivers as a horror/supernatural text, members of this community interrogate epistemic hierarchies and test the boundaries of normative discourse on the real and the unreal.

EASA Media Anthropology Network