Identity building and language learning opportunities in the brony fandom

Resumen

This thesis reports on fan practices among an international fandom of bronies, adult fans of the animated cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP:FiM). With the use of digital ethnography, it is explored how two groups of bronies—one in Russia and the other in Spain—carry out these fan practices and what language learning opportunities these provide. This thesis is built on the collection of articles including four different papers about the bronies’ language fan practices. The first paper presents our initial approximation to the brony fandom. The findings showed that bronies used their L2, English, while both consuming and creating products such as fan translations, fanfiction, fan art and fandubbing in different contexts. The second paper is a case study focused on the discourse of a Russian brony crafter who was writing in English on the platform Deviant Art. Drawing on a one-year period of data collection, it was found that he gained online fame as a crafter and at the same time developed his writing by appropriating new linguistic, technological, and multimodal resources. He achieved these results due to his participation in the affinity space of Deviant Art and the support of this space. Moreover, the third paper is focused on another fan practice―collaborative fan translation of a fanfiction novel from Russian to English. Based on one-year observation, this paper is mainly focused on the collaborative writing processes in fan translation with its connection to identity building and learning. The findings made visible how the participants, by sharing common values, creativity constructed one dialogic space, in which they were encouraged to negotiate their expert identities. The last paper of this thesis is based on the same community of fan translators, however, focused on the cultural aspect of language learning. It was found that the fan translators engaged in transcultural discussions while adapting a fanfiction novel for a global readership. During these discussions, they creatively mixed different linguistic and cultural resources as they reflected on literary and philosophical traditions of the Russian and English-speaking cultures. Altogether the results demonstrate the variety of language learning opportunities and identity work in the brony fandom. Fans collaboratively used English and other languages to construct meaning during the practices of writing and translation. Meanwhile, brony fandom demonstrated to be a safe space which provided opportunities for language learning and identity building.