ON FANFICTION: A DIGITAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF “SOCIAL MEDIA AUS”

Abstract

This article describes and analyzes a fanfiction entitled Social Media AU (or Twitter AU) as a specific fictional practice that arises from the technical and discursive conditions of digital culture. From a theoretical and methodological standpoint, the study is grounded in Digital Discourse Analysis (Paveau, 2021) to describe two X platform narratives, “BTS Outcast” (Yu, 2020) and “Equalize” (Biz, 2025), which were selected for condensing the main configurations of fictional production with their specific online features integrated into the X ecosystem. Discussions proposed by Santaella (2003, 2021) are also mobilized to understand the emergence of this technodiscursive practice and to examine the enunciation of new readerly and narrative subjectivities arising from its cultural framework. The analysis shows that Social Media AUs operate according to a hypermedia logic, requiring readers to construct meaning through the articulation of multiple semiotic and technological materialities. Furthermore, the interactive affordances of the X platform enable cooperation between author and reader, whose enunciative expansion allows for a supporting participatory role of the reader within the narrative progression. As a condition of possibility for the emergence of this practice, ubiquity proves to be a decisive factor, since contemporary subjects  —  writers, narrators, and readers of these fictionalities — simultaneously inhabit different informational (hyperconnected) spaces, within a regime of continuous circulation across online and offline environments.  It is concluded that Social Media AUs not only thematize digital culture but also incorporate it, thus evidencing an interrelation between fiction and technology. By highlighting these dynamics, the article contributes to the understanding of contemporary fictional genres and their impacts on ways of reading the world in a context of hyperconnectivity.