LUCY ROUSE: It’s the year 2013. Beyonce played the Superbowl, Apple released the iPhone 5s– with a revolutionary fingerprint scanner, Cronuts (the fusion of croissants and donuts, obviously) became a thing, and most importantly, the British boyband One Direction was dominating the charts. With a rabid fanbase, me included, One Direction firmly cemented their place in the cultural consciousness of the era. A key example of this cultural command was seen in their strong fanfiction communities. As a teenager, I would eagerly await the daily updates of Anna Todd’s After – a Harry Styles fanfiction uploaded to social reading platform Wattpad, where the singer is reimagined as a troubled and mysterious college student with a dark past. I would devour the latest instalment and at school lunch the following day, I would gather a group of fellow After readers to discuss the day’s chapter. We would talk about how dialogue made us feel, whether we liked new characters, and how we felt about Harry as a love interest. It was a social and receptive process, where we were affectively and interactively responding to the fiction in ‘real time’.
Digital media and the rise of social reading practices through BookTok, Bookstagram, and platforms like Goodreads, means that we don’t need a group of friends to discuss our reactions to fiction. Fan readers on Wattpad are given the opportunity to express pent-up emotions through its “inline commenting” feature. Inline commenting allows a reader to select a specific line of a text and comment on it, rather than on the full chapter. The number of comments that have been made on a line appear on the side of the text block. On Wattpad, inline comments spike at key plot points; when a “ship” makes first contact, when they’re having sex, or when a character turns out to be a villain all along. Inline comments work to sustain the liveness of online texts, for fanfictions which have long been posted and completed, new readers are still able to contribute to the overarching network of the text, adding their reactions and feelings about the plot. Furthermore, readers returning to the text for a re-read comment on foreshadowing, noting things that they may not have on their first readthrough.
The inline commenting feature opens an accessible network of readers. When a commenter is screaming, crying, or keyboard-smashing over their ship holding hands, they interact with an affective community of past and present readers, actively shaping how the novel is perceived to those in the future. This rich network of readers, diarising their thoughts on top of the text itself, is a form of public annotation. When readers annotate these digital texts, they leave their affective traces on the work – their thoughts and reactions. Furthermore, readers can both improve and damage the text’s future reception. As previously mentioned, re-readers will go back and note elements of the text that they missed on their first read. While some readers will use linguistic cues like *RR* at the front of their comment, warning new readers of a potential spoiler, others do not. New readers can get spoiled even from something as little as identifying that comment numbers have spiked on a seemingly normal line of dialogue.
Inline comments also raise questions about the publicity of reading. Whilst under reception theory, reading is seen as an active and public process where readers approach a text with a rich network of pre-existing associations, Inline commenting brings this public interactivity to a new level. Inline comments often express affect over taboo plot points, like sex or death, and commenters feel comfortable reacting publicly to these plot points. It can be speculated that this is due to a notion of community that the inline commenting function fosters. Readers experience solidarity by seeing that the text has had an impact on past readers, creating a version of Berlant’s intimate public, where readers bond through shared affective response.
Ultimately, inline comments are an affective hub where the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of readers past and present lie in wait to be perceived by those of the future. They act as a reminder that digital media and social reading practices are making literary reception much more visible – a concept we may have to grapple with as reception scholars.
Further reading
Berlant, Lauren Gail. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Duke University Press, 1997.
Driscoll, Beth, et al. Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture. University of Massachusetts Press, 2022.
Felski, Rita. Hooked: Art and Attachment. University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Stein, Louisa Ellen. Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age. University of Iowa Press, 2015.
Australian Reception Network 