Killer Fandom

Front matter

Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer

Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, dis-

Contents

Dist of Figures. sro arans. se Ba a a Ew we a a xi Listof Tables otete a hae Ve Ba OD ea a a ee xiii INTRODUCTION. ooa 00 ee ee 1 2. TEXTUAL POACHING TO DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS . . . . 57 Referens o u e ee ELEM ES GEL A ae ee eas 203

Acknowledgments . o. o 1 1 aaa e 243

List of Figures

Introduction

6 heir declarations of lust and love wouldn’t seem out of place on a

message board for the newest chart-topping boy band of the month,” the stern and worried article at feminist site Bitch Media opens. “But these devoted fans are not beguiled by harmonized pop songs or synchronized dance moves: They’re obsessed with serial killers” (Willoughby 2017). The piece is titled “Killer Crush: Inside Tumblr’s Serial Killer Fandom Problem.” This interestingly ambiguous piece of phrasing could grammatically render the fandom, its object, or both as the posited “problem.” Of course, it wasn’t so long ago that fandom itself was, unambiguously, the “problem.” Many of us in the field of fan studies still remember our obsession with media and textual objects being a teenage secret, our guilty awareness that it wasn’t quite “normal” to be so “obsessed” with a fictional text. Or a series. Or a band. Or all of the above. The first wave of fan studies was more-or-less devoted to undoing this stigmatization, to demonstrating that media fandom was a social, productive, creative, life-enriching, and positive experience (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992). Later work, of course, has been more nuanced, inspecting fandom’s relationship with capitalism and with conservative ideologies, its reinforcement of classed, racial, and gendered hegemonies, as well as its progressive and creative aspects (Leppänen 2009; Scott 2011; Fathallah 2017; Pande 2018).

The field of fan studies is now well-established. The study of true crime, as a genre and a mode of digital media, is likewise a flourishing field. Yet the obvious—if difficult—conjunction of these themes in the popular phenomenon of serial killer fandom remains strikingly underexplored. In some ways, this is surprising: Fandom of serial killers is older than the term “serial killer,” and has actually been one of the most publicly visible forms of fandom historically, from Victorian hawkers selling bottled dirt from murder-sites as souvenirs to media moralizing over the contemporary sexualization of Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez or Ted Bundy. Yet, in other ways, it is expected. Remember that fan studies evolved from a place of pathologization, seeking to reclaim the positions and affinities of fans from the labels of “freak, “obsessive,” and “abnormal.” Early fan studies scholars can perhaps be excused for their avoidance of so-called “dark fandoms, which a handful of scholars are just beginning to explore (Broll 2020, Jones 2020). But these days, surely, the figure of the media fan is sufficiently mainstreamed and visible—not to mention commercialized—that, for better or worse, one can assume that the category of “fan” as such is a neutral descriptor. What one is a fan of, and in what ways, can of course still produce all kinds of (gendered and raced) stigmatization. But scholars should not avoid the discussion of more confronting fandoms on the grounds that it might reinforce lazy stereotypes that “being a fan” makes one crazy.

In this book, I want to look at contemporary serial killer fandom online, considering the ways in which it is or is not like other forms of fandom, and what fan studies scholars can learn from applying some frames that fan studies has now established. The small body of work on fandom of criminals so far has tended to focus on school shooters, probably because of their problematized connections with youth subcultures and the vast amount of media coverage they generate. Certainly, there is crossover between serial killer fandom and school shooter fandom, in the sense that they share a common stigma, but I wish to open a discussion on serial killer fandom specifically now, because it has a specific mediated history. The relationship of the mainstream media to serial killing and the celebrification of serial killers is quite distinct and deserves specific attention.

Across the coming chapters, I'll be utilizing four of the major frames applied to fan studies generally: fandom as textual poaching, convergence culture, and/or fandom as the discursive construction of its object (Jenkins 1992; Jenkins 2006; Fathallah 2020); fandom as affective community (Baym 2000; Bury 2005); fandom as subculture through the lenses of capital building and gatekeeping (Thornton 1995; Hills 2002; Fathallah 2020); and fandom as digital play (Booth 2015, 2017; Fathallah 2020). This introduction provides an overview of the key work that has been done on true crime and killer fandoms, scattered across a variety of academic fields and in the popular press, noting the absence or intermittent, scattershot use of the theoretical lenses that fan studies has established for media fandom. I then give a brief overview of the fan studies frames I will be applying, though each will also be explicated more fully at the start of the relevant chapter. Chapter 1 presents a historical retrospective of serial killer fandom as it emerged amid Victorian era tourism practices through to the twentieth century discursive construction of the serial killer as celebrity. I will consider what scholars can learn from applying fan studies frames to this pre-digital history. Subsequent chapters (2-5) turn to the digital sphere, especially Tumblr and TikTok, where serial killer fandom flourishes, but also to fanfiction sites and sites for the sale of so-called “murderabilia.” In each chapter, I focus on applying one of the established fan studies frames, investigating what, if anything, is unique or distinctive about this most-moralized form of fandom, and what it has in common with more mainstream fandoms. I'll also be concerned with the construction of the serial killer as celebrity in the mainstream media texts that fans utilize, as these intersect and interact with more underground and pathologized texts, each feeding off the other in the creation of a full-fledged “serial killer industry.” Indeed, one primary argument of the book, explicated most fully in the final chapter, is that serial killer fandom is not particularly unique, nor is it directly opposed to the mainstream construction of serial killers. It might operate “at the edges” of popular discourse—it might even stretch the limits—but just as with any fandom, the material and textual roots of serial killer fandom are already part of the cultural fabric. Fans did not make serial killers into celebrities: We all did.

For the purposes of this research, I will be taking a primarily discursive perspective on the term “fan.” By this I mean that I define a serial killer fan as a person who claims to be one, and or/professes love and dedication to a serial killer. Granted, there is a blurred line between “serial killer fandom” and true crime fandom: Many true crime fans express empathy or at the very least pity for serial killers with particularly awful backstories and display the same kind of fannish tendencies to documentation, collection, and focused reading and research that self-professed killer fans do (Barnes 2019). Yet at the same time, true crime aficionados are typically keen to distinguish themselves from serial killer fans, looking down on these fans as the pathologized Bad Other or Bad Fan of the broader true crime community (Daggett 2015, 53; Fathallah 2022). True crime fans state, loudly and often, that they are not serial killer fans, much as they might display similar behaviors. There may well be a different study to make here, on the degree to which self-professed true crime fans actually differ from self-professed serial killer fans in their interests and practices, but there is certainly a sufficient number of the latter, and a sufficient number of fanworks praising and celebrating serial killers that, as the first extended academic foray into serial killer fandom, it makes sense to focus this project on these manifestations. Nonetheless, I will now review some of the key work on true crime fandom as part of this introduction, before narrowing down the focus to murder-related fandoms and serial killer fandom specifically, because all of it provides important insights on fan practices for the work to come.

Serial Killing and the Media, Part 1: The Creation of Celebrity Killers

Serial killing is predominantly a media event.

—Haggerty, “Modern Serial Killers” (2009)

The serial killer is a modern invention (Haggerty 2009). Naturally, there have always been humans who killed a series of other humans over a period of time, but the term “serial killer” was popularized in the 1970s by FBI agent Robert Ressler.’ This peculiarly modern discursive construct has always existed at the intersection of the media, the judicial system, and public imagination. In a US context, the figure partly served to take the place of the criminal gangs that had operated during Prohibition: an ever-present domestic threat whose existence helped to justify the functions, operations, and continued funding of the FBI (Schmid 2005). The news media have always paid disproportionate attention to serial killings, which make up a miniscule fraction of all crime. This is particularly true when the victims are deemed appropriately sympathetic and the killings sufficiently sensationalist. Police investigators and the murderers themselves have often had a contentious yet productive relationship with the media industries, which have served by turn to assist with, interrupt, compromise, and promote investigations, motivate and encourage murderers, and disseminate public safety information (Gibson 2006).

Kevin Haggerty suggests that the serial killer is a creature (and creation) of modernity, and “the mass media and the attendant rise of a celebrity culture”

1 Tt is difficult to claim that any one person coined the term, but it certainly didn’t have much currency before the 1970s. The English phrase might be a direct translation of “Serienmorder,’ which can be reliably dated to 1931.

have been key factors in this creation (2009, 168). There have always been people who kill a number of other people, but the serial killer as a “type” or “kind” of person is a twentieth century invention, in which the mass media play a critical part. Jean Murley explains:

Serial killing is not new—there are records of such deeds throughout recorded human history—but the phenomenon was named in the 1970s and it was constructed in 1980s true-crime murder narratives [.. .] as a new kind of murder, one that reflected and refracted fears about anonymity, depersonalization, and the consequences of extreme self-interest. (2008, 156)

Haggerty similarly designates the rise of a relatively anonymous society, the marginalization of particular groups and opportunities for victimization, and the notion of society as engineerable (e.g., by mission-orientated killers who target groups they consider undesirable, such as sex workers or the homeless) as socio-cultural resources that co-create the serial killer as a modern phenomenon. Multiple writers have commented on the media construction of the serial killer as celebrity in the modern sense, where celebrity applies to the property of “knownness” rather than virtue or achievement (Schmid 2005; Gibson 2006; Haggerty 2009). Gibson documents the media treatment of twelve cases of serial murder in the US, UK, and France, from the early to late twentieth century. In each case, the media industry, the killer themself, and to a more conflicted degree, law enforcement, collaborate in the creation of the serial killer celebrity. Most serial killers read their press: indeed, they contribute to it, and have done so for a hundred and fifty years. The infamous “Dear Boss” letters attributed to Jack the Ripper may be unverifiable, but nineteenth century American killer H. H. Holmes confessed publicly (and exaggeratedly) to his crimes in both the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

There is, likewise, a huge public appetite for stories about serial killers, from (in roughly more-to-less normalized order) the consumption of mainstream news stories; to reading and collecting crime books; to the collection of murderabilia—souvenirs and artifacts associated with serial killers and their victims. People who perform these widespread and often mainstream practices would usually deny that they are fans of serial killers, but there is no denying that “serial killing [. . .] has become big business within the culture industry” (Jarvis 2007, 327). Again, while I will be focusing on serial killer fans, the reader ought to bear in mind that the material of their fandom is generated by a much broader background of general fascination with serial killers. In their edited volume Criminals as Heroes in Popular Culture, Roxie James and Katherine Lane argue that “while we may need heroes, we want criminals” (2020, 3, italics in the original). Rather than serial killers as such, their volume is concerned with “ambiguous figures” who have clearly broken the law and often violently, yet are generally not considered evil (4). Drawing on Paul Kooistra’s work, they argue that the criminal hero is understood to be rebelling against some brutally corrupt authority or political regime. They are driven to crime by their injustice of their life and situation; their actions are illegal but justified, at least to a degree, by a morality higher than law (2020, 4). Moreover, James and Lane contend that “we no longer expect our heroes to be picture perfect” but “expect/accept a duality in our heroes” (5).

Typically, serial killer fans do not consider their heroes to be “moral and honorable men,” but they do often consider them as victims of social injustice and as standing against some authoritarian figure or regime, such as in the case of Aileen Wuornos, a sex worker who was systematically abused by men from an early age. There are echoes here of a cultural tendency identified by Lionel Trilling (1972) in his lectures on sincerity and authenticity: specifically, the location of the authentic in a form of insanity that defies all social restriction in favor of total self-realization. The ultimate origins are Freudian, conflating “authenticity” with some received idea of the id drive. Relatedly, James and Lane cite Wayne J. Douglass on the popular appeal of the psychopathic criminal, who “assert[s] their identity through their violence and disregard for societal strictures,” to become “an existentialist hero rebelling against the conformist demands of modern society” (8). British serial killer Ian Brady self-consciously framed himself in this way in his book Gates of Janus.

Why are the mass media and the public so fascinated by serial killers, yet show not the least interest in, and quite frankly, absolute boredom with, far more prolific legalized killers? [. . .] It becomes transparent that the reason why the media and public are so fascinated by serial killers is that these people kill at will, requiring no legislation, without asking for or needing permission, the very concept never entering their mind. (quoted in Gibson 2006, 69)

Via the available discourses of existentialism and anti-authoritarianism, Brady, who is a diagnosed psychopath, constructs himself as an existentialist antihero. Ironically, as Brett Easton Ellis so powerfully showed us, it could equally well be argued that psychopathic serial murder is merely the full expression of the ultra-rational, neoliberal hyper-capitalism that dominates Western societies (cf. Haggerty 2009; Jarvis 2007). In his book Natural Born Celebrities, David Schmid has a similar view regarding the celebrification of serial killers, observing that the serial killer both outrages and thrills us by his seeming ability to stand outside the law, to make his own law, in a gesture whose ambivalent destructiveness and creativity mirror our ambivalent response to the killer, composed of both fear and attraction. (2005, 24)

Schmid builds on Walter Benjamin’s observations that “the figure of the ‘great’ criminal” has often “aroused the secret admiration of the public” for his “violence confronts the law with the threat of declaring a new law” (24). Though we might consciously condemn their acts, many people are at some level attracted to the existential outsider, who appears to operate outside all established moral and social systems. For Schmid, this is a peculiarly American phenomenon, rooted in frontier mythology and the cult of the individual. He observes that “even the most explicit rejection and condemnation of serial killer celebrity can find itself implicated in (and perhaps even unwittingly encouraging the growth of) that celebrity” (2005, 2). At one extreme, he gives the example of the murderabilia industry, through which one can “now purchase the nail-clippings and hair of some killers, as if they were religious icons,’ but notes equally that features of supposedly public-service orientated programs like America’s Most Wanted “pander to the same prurient public interest in crime that the program supposedly condemns” (3). Public appetite for true crime is apparently insatiable—Schmid called the genre a “phoenix” for its remarkable ability to morph, adapt, and resurge through transformations in social structures and the media industry (175)— and it is impossible to draw clean moralistic lines regarding the uses and gratifications of either its producers or consumers. According to Schmid, the contemporary evolution of the concept of fame has “allow/ed] not only for the existence of criminal celebrities such as the serial killer but also make[s] the serial killer the exemplary modern celebrity” (4). Fame, after all, is now characterized by “visibility rather than achievement” and “it no longer makes sense to distinguish between good and bad forms of fame” (9). Schmid stresses the “multiaccentuality of serial murder”: that is, the way that “serial murder can be used to support such a wide variety of ideological agendas,’ as useful to policy makers and law enforcement as to novelists, sociocultural critics, and filmmakers (6). From the perspective of media studies, one might call the media construction of serial killers a producerly text, which John Fiske defined as a text which contains multiple gaps and potentials onto which diverse groups and individuals project and construct meaning (1989, 104). The shocking and antisocial nature of the acts demands hypotheses and explanation from the psychological to the socioeconomic to the religious. It can even play a comforting, nostalgic role: a domesticated, explicable, understandable threat to contrast against the politicized unknown quantity of the terrorist or radical extremist (Schmid 2005, 27).

Drawing on Leo Braudy (1986), Schmid argues that the modern celebrity is defined more by a performed identity than achievements or actions. He writes that, as the “exemplary modern celebrity,’ the serial killer is “widely known and famous for being himself’—famous for what he is. Granted, what he is is defined by series of acts (murders), but in the serial killer “action and identity are fused” (2005, 15). He is himself because he is a serial killer, and he is famous for being himself. This tendency is evident in serial killer fandom, wherein a killer’s name evokes in shorthand a whole range of known characteristics. Schmid contends that true crime as a genre serves a primarily conservative function (see also Murley 2008 and Browder 2006). Typically, popular true crime narratives depict serial murderers as individual psychopathic monsters disconnected from the social fabric that produces them, and thus these stories operate in a mutually beneficial relationship with law enforcement in general and the FBI in particular. The aberrance of serial killers is constructed via retrospective psychological analysis, typically focusing on their childhoods, rather than an analysis in critical socio-economic terms. Moreover, the construction of serial killers as a social threat disproportionate to their actual prevalence helps secure public support and governmental funding for the FBI and related organizations. Certainly, serial killer fandom undermines this conservative function, appropriating media construction of serial killers to different uses, including forms of sociocultural parody, examined in chapter 5.

Illustrating the disparity with which interest in serial killers has been addressed across academic frameworks, scholars from some disciplines have produced moralistic treatises on media sensationalism which go on to participate in the very sensationalism they condemn. A key example is Scott A. Bonn’s Why We Love Serial Killers (2014). A criminologist and lecturer who sets himself up as an expert witness on serial killer enthusiasts, Bonn constantly condemns the media for their focus on serial killers—yet he advertises his exclusive interviews with said killers as a selling point of his book. He contends that a certain degree of interest in serial killers is normal, a fascination with the incomprehensible driven by fear and adrenaline and a desire to play detective, yet claims that fans constitute a “curious and obsessive world” of their own. He makes no clear distinction regarding what separates a fan from the normally-interested (other than “low self-esteem,” apparently). He positions his book as a corrective to how mass media have made “morbid rock stars” of serial killers. Yet in his rhetorical use of declarations like “the Son of Sam legend is born,” it is hard to characterize what he is doing here as any different.” At some points, Bonn invokes Emile Durkheim, suggesting serial murder as proceeding from social circumstances rather than individual consciousness, yet equally claims that “some acts of evil defy comprehension.” Bonn’s confused treatise—which notably perpetuates the construction of monstrous queerness, attributing Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes to a need for sexual gratification that “had no limits”—illustrates the need to apply consistent theoretical frameworks to interest in serial killers, whether focusing on self-declared fans or not.

Dirk Gibson’s Serial Killers and Media Circuses (2006) is another example, supposedly a critique of the vast media interest surrounding serial killer cases since at least the nineteenth century. In a selling point from the forward, Gibson’s material is presented in “such a way that the crime buff, interested in the gory details of strangulation, stabbing, torture, dismemberment, and even instances of cannibalism, will not be disappointed” (Wilcox 2006 in Gibson, ix). Gibson does make some notable points regarding the communal construction of the serial killer figure by the media, law enforcement, and indeed killers themselves, mostly via the letter-writing campaigns to newspapers that presaged the current relationship between social media and self-advertising criminal behavior. I will investigate how serial killer fandom treats this material in my discussion of media convergence.

2“Son of Sam” is a self-bestowed nickname for serial killer David Berkowitz, whom Bonn interviews. At the time of his crimes, he claims to have believed himself under the influence of some demonic force, and has now declared himself a Christian.

Serial Killing and the Media, Part 2: Killing, Sex, and Gender

The media construction of serial killers is highly dependent on their sex and gender, as well as the sex and gender of their victims. David Schmid has some notable observations on this point. He compares the reportage on Ted Bundy, a heterosexual man who killed a series of women; to that on Jeffrey Dahmer, a White gay man who murdered queer men of color; and that on Aileen Wuornos, a lesbian who killed men. He argues that true crime as a genre must exonerate heterosexuality by constructing Bundy as a totally anomalous straight man, an inexplicable exception who operated counter to everything we would expect of a heterosexual male: “True-crime narratives seek to relieve straight men of any guilt by association” (2005, 27, 178). This is particularly important considering that, in reality, the vast majority of serial killers are heterosexual men, and the vast majority of their victims are women. Feminist critics like Jane Caputi (1989) or Deborah Cameron (1994) would argue that the actions of Bundy are simply the ultimate expression of hetero-patriarchal hetero-capitalism: the peak of a pyramid supported by a normative social structure. Conversely, Dahmer’s and Wuornos’s homosexuality was utilized by the press as psychological explanations for their behavior: their queerness posited as monstrous, as telling “us,” the posited straight reader, everything we “need to know” about homosexuality and lesbianism (Schmid 2005, 27). For example, Wuornos’s lesbianism was consistently used as a justification or explanation for “man hating,’ and Dahmer’s homosexuality was posited as having some sort of automatic link with “homicidal violence” (238). Bundy was constructed as an aberration, while “Dahmer had simply done what was expected of someone like him by being a murderous queer” (240). This discourse has material consequences, and actually contributed to the death of one of Dahmer’s victims, whom police returned to his apartment despite his disorientation and visible injuries. In accordance with a popular assumption of gay relationships as aberrant and violent, police took Dahmer at his word that the boy was of age (false) and that their activities were consensual (obviously also false). Fan culture is often analyzed as a queer and feminine-leaning space (Lothian et al. 2007; Levin Russo 2013). Though this is obviously site-dependent and much more applicable to spaces like Tumblr and TikTok than murderabilia auction sites, it will be important to observe how serial killers are gendered across these spaces, and how that plays into their uses by fans.

In considering the easy acceptance of murder as entertainment, Jean Murley is particularly concerned with women’s fascination with the genre. Women are the majority audience for true crime texts, and this is reflected in serial killer fandom. Murley observes that true crime and crime reporting deals primarily with “white, middle class killers and victims” (2), which is not at all reflective of real homicide statistics in America (or the UK; see also Horeck 2019). Murley is particularly interested in women’s fascination with the genre. Like Schmid, Murley is critical regarding the qualitative distinction between receiving true crime texts in socially approved ways and a posited Bad Other of fannish interest, observing that “true crime is obsessed with full-on visual body horror: autopsy footage, close-ups of ligature marks and gunshot wounds on bodies, bruises or lividity on flesh, and blood pools, stains and spatters [. . .] causing some critics to refer to true crime as ‘crime porn” (2008, 5). Put into context like this, the faux outrage and horror over serial killer fandom in popular press accounts seems all the more unthinking and uncritical. From the release of Truman Capote’s genre-defining In Cold Blood in 1966 to the multi-award winning Serial podcast (2014-present), consumption of true crime, always ubiqutous, has become almost respectable (Horeck 2019). So how does this relate to the phenomenon of serial killer fandom?

From True Crime Enthusiasts to Serial Killer Fans

We will now explicitly introduce the relationship—or sliding scale—between the more acceptable and popular forms of true crime fandom and serial killer fandom. Multiple academics have observed that women are significantly more likely to engage with true crime media than men are (Vicary and Fraley 2010; Browder 2006; Boling and Hull 2018; Schulenberg 2021). Reasons might include education—learning the ways and means of serial killers, in a bid to decrease one’s chances of becoming a victim (Vicary and Fraley 2010, 82; Boling and Hull 2018; Schulenberg 2021), empathy (Schulenberg 2021; Browder 2006), a strong interest in abnormal psychology (Schulenberg 2021, 83), to vicariously cope with and process patriarchal violence, and/ or to safely explore an interest in violence from which women are typically proscribed (Browder 2006, 292; Schulenberg 2021). Many women who enjoy true crime “feel that others perceived their reading habits as strange or disturbing” and express a sense of kinship and community upon finding other women who enjoy the same genre (Browder 2006, 933). Though

I would question how far an interest in true crime really is pathologized (cf. Horeck 2019), the important thing is that the women Laura Browder interviewed in her study of female true crime fans felt their interest to be stigmatized. Just as Jenkins and Bacon-Smith’s Star Trek fans, analyzed in the first wave of fan studies, Browder’s interviewees felt a sense of kinship, homecoming, or finding their communities upon meeting others who were equally invested in a then-stigmatized interest. Rhiannon Bury’s (2005) soap opera fans reported a sense of community in their fandom that sometimes superseded interest in the text itself. Schulenberg writes, likewise, that fans of the irreverent female-hosted podcast My Favorite Murder feel a strong sense of communal support from their fandom, and experience para-social relationships with the hosts. Browder reports that the female true crime readers she interviewed identified with both the victim and the killer:

Marla told me that “I can probably empathize and feel both what the criminal and the victim must be feeling at that moment, and I put myself into their shoes and think about what I would feel like if I were having these things done to me and I also do the same thing with the criminal.” (2006, 932)

While these readers wouldn't call themselves serial killer fans, it is already clear that identification with murderers is not unique to self-professed killer fandom. Moreover, while true crime is generally considered a conservative genre, Browder notes that its modern form can be subversive in its critique of the patriarchal family structure (most female victims are killed by husbands or boyfriends). She suggests that true crime functions as a “dystopian romance”:

Many true crime books concern what happens to women who take romance novels too seriously: the genres talk to each other. A subgenre of true crime is the narrative of gullible women who are lulled by the romantic promises offered to them by psychopaths. (938)

In my consideration of serial killer fandom as textual poaching and discursive construction, I will consider how far serial killer fandom subverts conservative structures such as that of the primacy of the straight man, the valorization of law enforcement, and denigration of women. I will also return to this point in chapter 5, on sociocultural parody.

Kelsea Schulenberg does invoke a fan studies framework in her qualitative study of My Favorite Murder fans, who like many fandoms have evolved a collective noun, in this case, Murderinos. Schulenberg is aware of fan studies history and writes that the original direction of her work “pointed towards possible findings that would align with previous fan studies work on participatory culture (Jenkins, 2013) and fan behaviors like gift economy (Hellekson, 2009)” (2021, ii). Ultimately, though, her “findings tell a story fundamentally centered on journeying from feeling alone to no longer feeling alone” (ii), thus more aligned with Bury (2005) and Nancy Baym’s work on affective communities (2000). I would actually consider the gift economy aspect of fandom—wherein fans gift each other user-generated content (UGC) based on their preferred texts without expectation of direct return, upon the understanding that the whole community benefits from the common practice—to be an aspect of an affective community rather than an alternative lens (see chapter 3). Indeed, this is how Schulenberg ends up treating gift culture as an aspect of affective community in her analysis, despite the statement quoted that seems to separate them. She explores Murderinos’ UGC from a fan studies perspective, following Jenkins to analyze how analyze how “new tools and technologies enable consumers to achieve, annotate, appropriate, and rearticulate media content” and “promote DIY media production, a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies” (2021, 21). Sarah Sacks also focuses on convergence culture and UGC as a framework for analyzing Murderino fandom (2017). In line with Line Clausen and Stine Sikjaer’s observations on the participatory nature of podcasting as a genre, she acknowledges how “the hosts’ inclusion of UGC promotes collaborative meaning making and knowledge” (2017, 35).