Hypothesis and Thesis

Despite the show finishing over a year ago the fandom is still very active. I posted a fanfiction on December 8, 2022 and as of December 12, 2022 it has 863 hits and 83 kudos. The fandom has a lot of material to work with due to six seasons and various minor characters because of the “villain of the week” style of writing. Due to the amount of minor characters I wanted to explore how these characters shape the fandom. Within fanfiction writers will often give expanded roles to minor characters. I defined minor characters as characters who appeared in one season or less. For example, Sam Arias was a series regular in season 3, but only guest starred in one episode after exiting the show. Using Supergirl as a case study, I would like to see if there are any trends among which characters get chosen to be written about. 

I hypothesize that women, especially those that interact with Lena Luthor and Kara Danvers, will be more likely to be written about than men. Additionally from my knowledge of this fandom I think that most minor characters will stay minor in fanfiction pieces, but have an expanded role in relation to one of the major characters. For instance Jess, Lena’s former secretary, was shown in one scene in one episode, but has been given her own tag on AO3 and has several works using that tag. However, her role serves as a friend and employee of Lena. I also hypothesize that minor characters will be more common in AU poaching due to a lot of minor characters being villains.