A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture

Abstract

The gifts that fans exchange, which Rachael Sabotini describes as "the centerpiece of fandom,"⁴ require skill and effort to make. They may be artworks, as in vids (described in more detail in the contributions to this [End Page 114] issue by Francesca Coppa and Alexis Lothian), podcasts, fan fiction, or manipulated images. But they may also be narrative analysis, known as meta, of the primary source or of a fan artwork. They may be fan fiction archives, bulletin board forums, screen-capture galleries, fandom-specific wikis, or other aggregates of information. But the items exchanged have no value outside their fannish context. In fact, it is likely that they do not literally exist; fandom's...