The reading ‘this week’ (actually a few weeks ago now) mentioned how, with the rise of the Internet, creation of material has not been restricted to people with privileged access through education or corporation. The fans have been able to enjoy some power in injecting their own creativity, desires or perspectives into the arena.

Jenkins suggests that fans, or members of a ‘fandom’, are poachers, due to the fact that they traverse a textual ‘landscape’ (that is, a media artefact), and take and repurpose certain parts at their own discretion. Sometimes these fans may feel they are reluctant poachers, and are only manipulating the text because of a perceived duty to protect the core integrity of the text as a whole. This poaching can take the form of engaging in active discussion about the text, or even the creation of new texts based on parts of the original one.

A more recent example of this can be seen in the sci-fi video game series, ‘Mass Effect’. This series is praised by fans for its epic and expansive multi-linear storytelling, as well as the quality of the characters that the player encounters in the games. However, the ending of the series’ final game, ‘Mass Effect 3’, was considered by many to be deeply unsatisfying, contradictory to the series’ overarching themes, and lacking of closure for the journeys of the game’s characters. Sparking heated discussion online, the ending was so controversial that fans petitioned to the game’s developer, BioWare, for a revised ending. Some fans took the poaching to even greater lengths, with a group putting together a ‘fan theory’, in which it was suggested that the ending was so terrible because it was a hallucination in the protagonist’s mind, and that the real ending was still in development by the game’s makers. These fans became so invested in this alternate text that they began to herald it as the ‘true’ ending, disregarding the original work.