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Clawing through the fourth wall: Interactions between the fans and creators of MTV’s Teen Wolf

2017; Intellect; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1386/jfs.5.1.21_1

2046-6706

Emily Thomas,

Digital Games and Media

Abstract The question of interactions between media creators and their fanbases has been an especially multifaceted and polarizing topic across many fandoms. Pierre Bourdieu described culture as an economy, with different types of culture in turn producing various commodities. It is possible to be both a creator and a consumer of these cultural commodities, particularly in a world where social media has rendered the barriers between media creators and their fans thinner than ever. This relative ease of communication has had the two-pronged effect of allowing creators to explore the marketability of their fans and fans realizing they can make their voices heard, all in the time it takes to compose a tweet. Both the production team and the fandom for MTV’s Teen Wolf serial took abundant advantage of this, with the show’s creators making a concerted effort to reach out to the subsets of its fanbase that were using social media as a vessel to engage Teen Wolf cast and crew members in discussions about race, homophobia, and queer representation. This analysis regards the Teen Wolf fan/creator dialogue through the lens of a world steeped in social media, and in doing so examines the notion of boundaries between consumers and creators, and the point at which fandom ceases to belong to either group exclusively.