Negativity and Positivity associated with Canon vs AUs

To see whether or not AUs and Canon works have any correlation with more positive or negative language, I used Tableau to graph the negative and positive metric against AU works and canon works. I took the top ten results from each of these graphs because I couldn’t fit all of the fanfictions into one page. Looking at all four graphs, there isn’t much of a difference between canon and AU works in regards to positivity and negativity. The positivity metric was below 0.045 for all works except one work from each group. The positivity category references positive acts (rescuing), emotions (joy), relationships (love), and values (justice). This category is mostly looking at positive sentiment. For the negative category, which was previously defined in methods, we see there still isn’t much of a difference between canon and AU works in regards to negativity. One could argue that canon works are slightly more negative on average, but it is not significant. I thought AUs would have more positive emotions associated with them then canon works do and the same for negative emotions and AUs, but perhaps fanfiction authors feel indifferent when writing either type of story.

The data did have one outlier for canon works that was high in the negativity category with a sum of 0.11517 while all other works under 0.05. The work is titled “all i’ve ever known is how to hold my own (but now i wanna hold you)” and was written by C_AND_B. C_AND_B is a popular author in the Supergirl fandom. This work is canon divergent and focuses on Kara and Lena’s friendship growth leading to the identity reveal. In the author’s note you can see some negative language by them saying that they were going to ignore certain characters and plot lines, which is what makes this canon divergence in the first place. Throughout this work we get insights into Lena’s thoughts, which are mostly self-deprecating, but also full of care for Kara. In fact when Kara and Lena are starting to get close one of thoughts Lena has is “She feels herself starting to care again and it’s terrifying.” The reason that the negativity category is so high though is because of the emotions during the identity reveal itself. The author throws out several words like angry, disappointed, sorry, self-deprecation, etc just to name a few (C_AND_B ). This work is very interesting since there are a lot of identity reveal fanfictions in the Supergirl fandom that have a lot of kudos. Many of these works follow the same formula for what emotions Lena has when she finds out. I hypothesize that the reason that Tableau and Docusope didn’t pick that up is due to writers not using explicit language for how characters feel and relying on actions.