A cultura participativa e as artes de fãs como modificadoras da construção de sentido de uma obra original, através do fenômeno da borboleta em Arcane (2024)

Abstract

This article aims to highlight how fanarts create new constructions of meaning for an original media, and what internal and external impacts they may be involved in — using as a case study the reinterpretation of the relationship between Jayce and Viktor through the white butterfly in the series Arcane. This monograph discusses fans not only as consumers, but also and especially as participating cultural producers capable of exerting broad influence over authorship; as it will position fan-artists and their fanarts as translators of a work. The ‘translation’ here is understood as transferring from one system of signs to another, in an intersemiotic translation (PLAZA, 2003), selecting, cropping, mixing, and suggesting new content, creating works that reflect the original ones — but with new constructions and new meanings, modifying the reading and the very reception of the original work for part of its audience. To this end, four Arcane fanarts will be analyzed using the semiotic methodology of image analysis (JOLY, 2007), to understand how the translation occurs and how content is modified by each artist, suggesting new possibilities for the relationship between Jayce and Viktor and for the symbolic image of the butterfly itself. Fanarts will thus be seen as symbolic tools of power and the hierarchization of individuals within fandom’s social groups. By studying the fanarts and the fans who produce them within the context of fandoms, we highlight the complexity of the internal social communication processes of a group once seen through prejudice and an overly simplified view of behaviors, in order to demonstrate the power that consumers can hold over a work. In that regard, fanarts have been recognized in various roles within its social groups, such as symbols of appreciation, means of ranking content and individuals, and ways of exercising symbolic power.