A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises

By Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill

Increasingly over the past decade, fan credentials on the part of writers, directors, and producers have come to be seen as a guarantee of quality media making—the “fanboy auteur.” Figures like Joss Whedon are both one of “us” and one of “them.” This is a strategy of marketing and branding—it is a claim from the auteur himself or industry PR machines that the presence of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming. Such claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are often contested, with fans and critics alike rejecting various auteur figures as the true leader of their respective franchises. That split, between assertions of fan and auteur status and acceptance (or not) of that status, is key to unravelling the fan auteur.

In A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises, authors Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill examine this phenomenon through a series of case studies featuring fanboys. The volume discusses both popular fanboys, such as J. J. Abrams, Kevin Smith, and Joss Whedon, as well as fangirls like J. K. Rowling, E L James, and Patty Jenkins, and dissects how the fanboy-fangirl auteur dichotomy is constructed and defended by popular media and fans in online spaces, and how this discourse has played in maintaining the exclusionary status quo of geek culture.

This book is particularly timely given current discourse, including such incidents as the controversy surrounding Joss Whedon’s so-called feminism, the publication of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and contestation over authorial voices in the DC cinematic universe, as well as broader conversations about toxic masculinity and sexual harassment in Hollywood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496830487

Anastasia Salter

Anastasia Salter is associate professor in the Department of English at University of Central Florida. Salter is author of Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects and What Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books and coauthor of Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing and Flash: Building the Interactive Web.

Book preview

A PORTRAIT

OF THE

Auteur

AS

FANBOY

A PORTRAIT

OF THE

Auteur

AS

FANBOY

The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises

ANASTASIA SALTER and MEL STANFILL

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2020 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2020

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Salter, Anastasia, 1984- author. | Stanfill, Mel, 1983- author.

Title: A portrait of the auteur as fanboy : the construction of authorship in transmedia franchises / Anastasia Salter, Mel Stanfill.

Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020017011 (print) | LCCN 2020017012 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496830463 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496830470 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496830487 (epub) | ISBN 9781496830494 (epub) | ISBN 9781496830500 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496830517 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Moffat, Steven, 1961- | James, E. L. | Rowling, J. K. | Smith, Kevin, 1970- | Whedon, Joss, 1964- | Snyder, Zack, 1966- | Jenkins, Patty. | Coogler, Ryan, 1986- | Waititi, Taika. | Fans (Persons) in mass media. | Motion picture producers and directors—Case studies.

Classification: LCC P96.F35 S25 2020 (print) | LCC P96.F35 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017011

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017012

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Fanboys to the Rescue!

1  Steven Moffat and Fandom’s Favorite Troll

2  E L James and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Fangirl

3  J. K. Rowling and the Auteur Who Lived

4  Kevin Smith and the Independent Fanboy

5  Joss Whedon and the Allegedly Feminist Fanboy Auteur

6  Zack Snyder and the Professional Toxic Fanboy

7  Patty Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, Taika Waititi, and the Fan Auteur as L’autre

Conclusion: Fanboy Backlash and the Futures of Fan Auteurs

Notes

Works Cited

Acknowledgments

We begin these acknowledgments with the admission that they will inevitably be incomplete.

This book would likely not exist without our editor, Katie Keene, who encouraged an idea into a manuscript. We are also profoundly grateful for the thoughtful feedback of our peer reviewer, Suzanne Scott, whose fanboy auteur concept first set us on the path to examine all of these media-makers. We hope we’ve done it justice.

We have benefited in this work from feedback through our research communities: the Society for Cinema and Media Studies; the Association of Internet Researchers; the Electronic Literature Organization; the Modern Language Association; and the Children’s Literature Association. Our friends and colleagues within those spaces who’ve supported this and other work are too numerous to list.

Thanks to our colleagues at the University of Central Florida, including the Texts & Technology faculty and the Games and Interactive Media faculty, Rudy McDaniel, Amy Giroux, Lynn Hepner, Lindsay Neuberger, Jason Burrell, and Jennifer Sandoval.

Mel would like to thank their fan studies community: Kristina Busse, Alexis Lothian, JSA Lowe, Katie Morrissey, Julie Levin Russo, Suzanne Scott (again), and Mark Stewart, as well as Anastasia’s ambitious deadlines, which (though stressful) pushed us to finish this before we were hopelessly buried in new projects from our fan auteur figures.

Anastasia would like to thank the collaborators and friends from media and game studies who have influenced this work: Stuart Moulthrop, Aaron Reed, Matt Kirschenbaum, Bridget Blodgett, Dene Grigar, Amanda Cockrell, Kathi Inman Berens, Leonardo Flores, Carly Kocurek, and Jennifer de Winter, as well as Mel’s patience with very rough drafts and constant Twitter updates on horrible things.

And a special thanks to the members of our academia support Twitter group chat, where both good and bad ideas are encouraged. Emily Johnson, John Murray, and Anne Sullivan have all heard far too many fandom rants as a result of this project. Additional thanks are due to Anne Sullivan for being our graphic designer on the fan auteur graph.

Introduction: Fanboys to the Rescue!

Knowledge is knowing that the Author is dead.

Wisdom is knowing that’s just his brand.

The past decade or so has brought a recurring trope of Fanboy to the Rescue—have no fear, it says, this revered franchise is being taken over by a writer, director, or producer who is a fanboy. In this trope—which, following Suzanne Scott (2011a; 2012; 2013; 2019), we discuss in terms of the fanboy auteur—figures like Joss Whedon, Ronald D. Moore, and Eric Kripke are understood as simultaneously one of ‘us’ and one of ‘them’ (S. Scott 2012, 44). Increasingly, fan credentials on the part of writers, directors, and producers have come to be presented as a guarantee of quality media-making. This is, significantly, a strategy of marketing and branding; it is a claim, from the auteur himself or industry PR machines, that the presence of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming.¹ Such claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are often contested, with fans and critics alike rejecting various auteur figures as the true leader of their respective franchises. That split, between assertions of fan and auteur status and acceptance (or not) of that status, is key to unravelling the fan auteur.

In A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy, we examine the contemporary ascendance of the fan auteur through a series of case studies. We consider both thoroughly mainstream fan auteur figures, such as Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon, as well as more offbeat ones, including Kevin Smith. We examine those who explicitly identify as fans of the source material they engage, like Steven Moffat, E L James, and Patty Jenkins, and those who don’t but engage in fannish ways nonetheless, like Taika Waititi and J. K. Rowling. While examples of heirs apparent to transmedia franchises who are framed as fanboys are easy to come by, identification or branding as a fangirl is rare for women in similarly prominent roles. Cases of fangirls as auteurs are not only structurally less likely, given women’s greater difficulty breaking into the industry in general, but particularly rare within the high-profile franchises that shape geek culture. We therefore particularly analyze how fanboy auteurs occupy a different cultural position than fangirls. Further, we grapple with the ways this narrative is disproportionately available to white creators, with fannish auteurs of color even less prevalent than white fangirl auteurs, both making visible the whiteness undergirding the positioning of figures like Snyder and Jenkins and considering how the position of auteurs of color like Waititi, Ryan Coogler, and Ava DuVernay diverges in key ways. Ultimately, this distinction of visibility and narratives, in which only the fandom of white men creators is easily trusted, reflects the broader challenges white women fans and fans of color face in geek culture.

In this introductory chapter, we first examine the recent rise of (selectively) constructing fans as ideal audiences. Then, we consider the broader geek turn in media because it is this industrial context that has given rise to fan auteurs. Ultimately, we argue that, while the rise of the fanboy auteur may be overdetermined by these two forces, the gendered form it takes tell us much about our contemporary understandings of authorship and creativity, geek media, and normative forms of fandom.

Fans as Ideal Audiences

While fans were formerly dismissed and stigmatized by default,² from 1994 to 2009, the word ‘fan’ and practices traditionally associated with fans were increasingly integrated into media industry logics (Stanfill 2019, 5). In fact, Scott (2011a, 79) contends that fanboys’ growing status as Hollywood taste-makers has granted them a modicum of mainstream respect. In this way, fans have become a constituency that media companies both recognize and actively seek to incorporate, encourage, monetize, and manage (Stanfill 2019, 5). That is, fans are a newly valued audience—and, at times, they’re even seen as the ideal one.

However, this incorporation of fans into the norm is highly selective, contingent on complying with the role prescribed to them in the media marketplace: worshipful, not critical; merchandise-buying, not transformative work-making; and certainly of the proper demographic. As Scott (2019, 13) notes, the fanboy’s visibility is, in many cases, a byproduct of his compatibility with the more easily marketable or co-optable modes of fannish participation. Put differently, fans have been embraced because (and to the extent that) their forms of participation fit within industry’s values. One key value is consumption. Industry’s embrace of fandom, Mel Stanfill (2019, 89) argues, rests in part on normalizing desire for licensed or franchised extensions of an object of fandom. Moreover, even in franchises with interactive transmedia components, if we look at what these participatory audiences are understood and encouraged to do, it is limited: explore the story world, look for clues, move across platforms, and, above all, consume (Stanfill 2019, 96). Additionally, Stanfill contends, industry also recruits both promotional labor, spreading the word about the object of fandom, and content labor, producing content that industry can wholesale incorporate into its products. This is another way that it’s specifically the fans who are useful to industry that have been welcomed. At the broadest level, Stanfill (2019, 102) argues, the drive is toward defining the true fan as affirmational rather than transformational—the one who enjoys the story as it is given rather than changing it.

Significantly, this selective normalization is also gendered. Fanboys have historically been essentialized as desiring incorporation, being heavily invested in canon and authorial intent, and more likely to collect (trivia and merchandise) than create (S. Scott 2011a, 81); fangirls are known for disinterest in or refusal of monetization, resistance to authorial control, and focus on touchy-feely subject matter. The position of the fanboy thus is compatible with an industry norm that orients fans toward a vertical relationship between a user and a media product and beyond that the industry that fangirls often do not have (Stanfill 2019, 179). Normalizing fanboys is also part of broader industry practices; Scott (2019, 51) notes that the contemporary embrace of the fanboy in fact reinforces Hollywood’s ongoing allegiance to sixteen- to thirty-four-year-old straight, white, cisgender men as their default target audience. Additionally, the fanboy is not just a member of a desired age and gender demographic but a participant in a specific, taste-based market: because journalists and the media industry are actively constructing and courting ‘fanboys’ as a market segment, with ‘fangirls’ remaining an invisible (or worse, actively excluded) part of that ‘fanboy’ demographic, these terms matter (S. Scott 2011b, 4), because how fans participate, and whose participation is valued [ … ] is commonly determined by these labels (S. Scott 2019, 5). This logic, then, is what constructs ComicCon’s male attendees as Hollywood’s most prized focus group (S. Scott 2011a, 60).

On the other hand, industry has not recruited and incorporated other fans and their characteristic practices in the same way. In fact, CW Network president Mark Pedowitz infamously sought to disavow the young women that are his network’s bread and butter, saying he wanted to put the final nail in the coffin (of the perception) that we’re a young girls’ network (Berkshire 2015). Not only white women, but fans of color and GLBTQA+-identifying fans who offer readings of characters outside of cisgender heteronormativity, are not welcomed into industry’s loving embrace in the same way as their masculine, white, and/or heterosexual counterparts. Improper fans are tolerated only when their gaze doesn’t challenge (or disrupt) the dominant gaze of the straight, white fanboy; the Other is welcome as an object and silent viewer, but not as commentator and even less as auteur. Thus, as Kristina Busse (2013, 77) notes, "It is often the less explicitly fannish (or, one might argue, the less explicitly female fannish) elements that have been accepted by [the] mainstream." Henry Jenkins (2006a) and Busse (2013) have both described the ways that many men in the industry see an unbroken continuum between themselves as fans in their youth and what masculine sorts of fans do now, but feel no such kinship with feminized fandom. This articulation of particularly white men fans with industry goals therefore begins to shed light on the foregrounding of white men as fanboy auteurs.

The Geek Turn in Media

At the same time that (some) fans are being positioned as the new ideal consumer, there has been an upsurge of franchise media centered on geek culture. This has been anchored by the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s eleven-year, twenty-three-film (and counting) juggernaut, but also includes reinvigorated DC, Star Wars, Star Trek, and more franchises. This geek turn has complex causes. First, in an era of rising production costs and greater demand for return on investment, drawing on familiar intellectual property is less risky than trying out untested concepts. As Derek Johnson (2013, 5) notes, control of intellectual property resources became increasingly central to corporate strategy, both in their potential to be protected as proprietary and their potential to be widely shared and flexibly multiplied on a production level. This points to the next benefit; once an existing intellectual property is reinvigorated once, franchising further—including in transmedia ways—is safer still.

Within the drive to franchising, fannish intellectual properties have notable benefits. As greater availability of broadband made peer-to-peer transfer of even film-sized files increasingly easy by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was a move toward going big, including extensive use of 3D, to create an in-theatre experience that couldn’t be replicated with a downloaded bootleg. This drove tentpole movies ever more toward spectacle, making speculative media’s flying and explosions and alien landscapes all the more attractive. Moreover, fantasy and science-fiction are world-dominant, and the more richly imagined a storyworld is from the beginning, the more stories can be told about it, and the more discoveries it offers to the user. This is why world-dominated narratives present much better material for transmedia (M.-L. Ryan 2015, 5)—and spinoffs and sequels and more.

Another key feature driving franchising of geeky, fannish properties is, tautologically enough, the fans. Benjamin Derhy Kurtz (2014, 1) argues that "efforts made by the industry to create these authentic universes in order to target involved audiences demonstrate how transmedia practices have impacted not only on storytelling processes, but the text—and the brand." That is, we get texts with a higher degree of the speculative world-building that creates a sense of more behind a story because that’s what drives the engagement industry seeks. Thus, Johnson (2013, 6) argues that franchising has developed as a logic of multiplied cultural production alongside an increasing industrial focus on niche groups and their social capacity for participation such as the intensive consumption and promotional and content labor described by Stanfill (2019). Labor questions are key here— it is the meaning-making activity of consumers that forms the basis of brand value (Arvidsson 2005, 237), often side-by-side with only minimally acknowledging the implicatedness of the activities of consumers (Lury 2004, 12). Through the intersection of these industrial trends, then, geek franchise media have become ever more central to industry business models.

Enter the Fanboy Auteur

The fan auteur may be the inevitable outcome of the convergence of normalizing fandom with the geek turn in industry; certainly, as an emergent (and maybe ascendant) concept, it very much speaks to its moment. This is unsurprising given that, as Michel Foucault (1980) reminds us, authorship is a technology, a way to assign texts to an entity constructed by the laws and institutions of its context. That is, the fanboy auteur, while tied to a set of real people, is most interesting as a construct. We therefore need to ask how authorship is contested, granted, claimed, denied, fought over, and/or shared in this specific context (Gray 2013, 89). In particular, in Foucault’s model, the author is a definable quality, coherence, style, and time period. Thus, for example, Gene Roddenberry is the author of Star Trek, and deviating from his particular quality, coherence, or style is often described as a ‘betrayal’ of Roddenberry’s personal vision, thereby displacing discomfort with the series content onto some other aspect of the production process (Paramount, the networks, other members of the production team) (H. Jenkins 1995, 187); the belief in Roddenberry’s quality, coherence, and style requires that divergences be someone else’s doing.

As the Roddenberry example begins to suggest, what we have traditionally believed about the author is borderline mystical. As Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray (2013, 3) note, authors are imagined to stand at the gateway and threshold between creativity, innovation, wonder, and magic, and us—all of those experiencing and taking pleasure in media culture in the mundane space of everyday life. This liminality speaks to a quasi-supernatural status, similar to the slippage John Hartley (2013, 24) identifies, where authorship connects mortal people to the divine attribute of immortality and the ability of nature to create anew. There is an Author-God (Barthes 1978, 146)—we make sense of authors in terms strikingly like those of religious or superhuman figures. With the rise of Romanticism from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, the author came to be seen as the singular origin of artistic production from nothing more than his genius, and this singular creation from nothing is often used to authorize almost infinite power.³ This produces a situation in which the author as figure is often posited as the individual who created the product, he or she who can variously be thanked or blamed, and he or she who then ‘gave’ it to us (D. Johnson and Gray 2013, 3), signaling this kind of belief in creation in a vacuum. Such reverence is why the author needed to die in Roland Barthes’s (1978) poststructuralist formulation: to get out of the way so that power could be relocated in interpretation. However, like other forms of category membership, authorship is performative, created through repeated enactment.⁴ Gray (2013, 105) notes that this authorial involvement is powered by their interactions: authors can exert power over texts while writing them, but they can also exert as much if not more power when they interact with marketing teams, licensees, fans, and other clusters of authorship. Ultimately, authorship is therefore about control, power, and the management of meaning and of people as much as it is about creativity and innovation (D. Johnson and Gray 2013, 4).

If authorship is a construct, the author is especially constructed in film and television, where a singular author is inherently specious given the army of workers required to produce such texts. What media authors do, are, and mean is a question that has an important history of study.⁵ With film and television in particular, to credit the director with authorial status requires an odd and indefensible amnesia towards the scriptwriter, the cinematographer, the actors, the editor, and countless other individuals and teams (Gray 2013, 93). The fiction of singularity, however, is powerful. We tend to, as Star Trek fans do, acknowledge the collaborative aspects of the production process while ascribing primary inspiration to a single author, [such as] Roddenberry, and his ‘very personal’ philosophy (H. Jenkins 1995, 186). The degree to which the processes of media-making have to be ignored to invent the author figure underscores how deep-seated the belief in authors is. The inherent contradictions of media authorship are intensified in the transmedia franchise, which is beyond the scope of any one controlling force many times over. As Scott (2012, 43) notes, Transmedia stories disintegrate the author figure, as artists in different media collaboratively create the transmedia text, but, in order to assure audiences that someone is overseeing the transmedia text’s expansion and creating meaningful connections between texts, the author must ultimately be restored and their significance reaffirmed. The quality, coherence, and style of such transmediated texts require positing an author.

Through this projection of qualities, it becomes clear how media authors are brands (Gray 2010). As Johnson and Gray (2013, 2) argue, to see press or marketing for almost any item of media today without seeing the invocation of at least one author figure is rare, and it’s specifically this marketing angle that reveals the brand status. The use of authors is a promotional factor (S. Scott 2012, 44). However, it’s not only economically that authors are constructed by the industry, creative personnel, and viewers alike as signifiers of value (Gray 2010, 136)—rather, it includes affective value (S. Scott 2012, 45). Auteurs who achieve this type of brand become paratexts in their own right (Gray 2010, 136), often eclipsing the contributions of others involved in the media product and drawing fans into the metanarrative of their body of work. These auteurs thus become an inter- or paratextual framing device, a matrix of other (inter)texts that served as a paratextual role in directing interpretation (Gray 2010, 127). This, of course, is precisely why it is film and television, which much more visibly depend on collaborative authorship, which are overall less invested in killing their auteurs even as poststructuralism affected the conceptualization of filmic creators (Busse 2017, 26). Media branding both relies on and reinforces the idea that fragmented, multiauthored, corporate productions are somehow unified and coherent: it needs the construction of a unified author figure to serve as a creative and textual coordinator. There are practical and promotional factors motivating this consolidation, but concerns arise when a unified author figure results in an attempt to unify and regulate the audience’s interpretations of the text (S. Scott 2012, 44). Although those who, like Scott, champion fan interpretive freedom might be concerned, as Barthes argued, unifying and regulating interpretation is precisely what authors do. Certainly, the meaning the author can provide the text is valuable: franchises with a connected, invested auteur can secure the legitimacy of spinoffs and build that affective value of the auteur’s stamp of approval (S. Scott 2012, 45).

If the fan auteur as a social position is a product of the centering of fans as ideal audiences and the geek turn, then, the basic contours of the concept reflect this. Fan status becomes a valuable self-branding tool for some media production staff. Here we think about the fan auteur as particularly positioned along two axes: their position as transformational or affirmational (obsession_inc 2009) and the extent to which they are primarily known for being fans of the media they author. The transformative/affirmative divide, which we might think of as the fan auteur axis, is deeply gendered (obsession_inc 2009). Affirmational fans are disproportionately men and affirm the source text: collecting both objects and knowledge and prioritizing textual fidelity and authorial intent. Transformational fans are disproportionately women, and they rework a source text—often so that it serves perspectives originally marginalized, which makes transformation also a tactic of fans of color (Seymour 2018; Warner 2015b). Thus, E L James is highly transformative, but so is Ryan Coogler, and the white men tend to cluster together as affirmational (see Figure 1). On the other axis—which we might think of the fan auteur axis—is the extent to which the figure’s creative work is tied to their own personal fandom. J. K. Rowling is not a fan of Harry Potter and Taika Waititi is not a fan of Thor, but Zack Snyder and Steven Moffat are legendarily fannish of precisely the properties they make.

Understanding the fan auteur as having both a fan axis and an auteur axis helps make sense of the tension in the concept between thinking of authors as the origin of texts, as creative geniuses operating in isolation, as sometimes-godlike authority figures, and/or as the final determinant of a text’s meaning and the apparent leveling of the hierarchy in the narrative of the fanboy auteur as just like you. Accordingly, these are figures whose status as ‘visionaries’ is alternately tempered and bolstered by their self-identification as fans (S. Scott 2013, 440). They are liminal (S. Scott 2012; 2013), both one of ‘us’ and one of ‘them,’ consumer and producer (S. Scott 2012, 44). In particular, the fanboy auteur is inherently bilingual, exalted for his perceived ability to speak the promotional language of both visionary auteur and faithful fanboy (S. Scott 2013, 440).

This fan/auteur translation runs both ways. On the one hand, fan auteurs bring fan knowledge to their work. There is, in particular, something gendered about this: the fannish auteur can

Figure 1. Our proposed taxonomy of fanboy authorship.

evade the feminizing stigma of fandom and paternalistic arrogance of the auteur simultaneously. Accordingly, while the fanboy auteur’s reverential approach to genre or source text could be viewed as an inherently more passive (or, in essentialist terms, feminine) creative approach than auteur theory has previously afforded, it is precisely this reverential quality that makes them ideal contemporary auteurs to mobilize an active fan base. (S. Scott 2013, 441)

That is, the fanboy auteur’s subservience to the canon is what enables him to become its new master and get buy-in from fandom writ large. In this way, the fanboy auteur can be nostalgic for the object of his youth and fannishly invested in protecting the core qualities of the property (S. Scott 2013, 444) at the same time that he, unlike the fans complaining about Viacom betraying Roddenberry, is positioned to do just that. The fanboy auteur can thus be the perfect solution to the transmedia franchise that outlives (whether chronologically or contractually) the auteur, as he promises both fidelity and vision, recruiting fan trust.

On the other hand, fan auteurs bring auteurship back to fandom through cultivating relationships with fans, particularly on social media. Having knowledge of niche and cult properties, and the ability to cultivate relationships with the fan communities that surround those properties (S. Scott 2013, 456), is a key part of fan auteur engagement, as we’ll see in the coming chapters. Social media and the web have played a strong role in amplifying the voices of these auteur figures even as they are often otherwise invisible outside the credits of their products themselves: social platforms allow auteurs to add their voice to the audience’s understanding of their products, and thus [they] are increasingly able to construct themselves as authors (Gray 2010, 108). This assertion of control is particularly interesting alongside the fact that one key characteristic of the fanboy auteur is that he is more ‘approachable’ (S. Scott 2013, 440), more like