Happily Ever After: Comparing Sentiment Arcs in Emotionally-Inflected Fanfiction Genres Across Fandoms

This paper uses sentiment arcs to compare three different genres of fanfiction – Angst, Fluff and Hurt/comfort – each characterized by particular emotionally-inflected content. We examine whether these arcs and arc development throughout stories reveal differences between the three genres. We also compare sentiment arcs across four fandoms: Ancient Greek Religion and Lore, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Percy Jackson. When using two different Sentiment Analysis methods – a BERT-model and the Syuzhet package – mean sentiment differs significantly between two of the three genres. Additionally, four detectable clusters of sentiment arcs are dominated by particular genres in each case, conforming to expected patterns. Additionally, we find an ending effect – a tendency for stories’ endings to be more positive than their beginning – in most stories regardless of genre. This suggests the therapeutic potential of fanfiction, as even the gloomiest stories tend to progress towards happiness or positivity in their sentiment. Finally, we also find that each fandom has its own emotional “bandwidth” with stories in the Lord of the Rings fandom consistently displaying the most positive sentiments while stories in the Percy Jackson fandom consistently display the most negative sentiments, regardless of genre.