"I Love You, My Dear Friend": Analyzing the Role of Emotions in the Building of Friendships in Online Fanfiction Communities.

As people continue to develop friendships over the Internet in greater numbers than in-person, the complex factors behind them become important to study. One such factor is emotional expression, and we are motivated to better understand how it plays a role in both continuing existing and building new friendships. In this study, we examined the role of emotions in the formation of different degrees of bonds between members on Fanfiction.net, an online community where members post fanfiction and receive reviews from readers. We developed an emotional taxonomy and used it to qualitatively code 11,292 reviews from Fanfiction.net. We introduce a novel metric of counting characters in reviews, an adjusted character count (ACC). We found that both positive and negative reviews have implications on friendship building, such as through in-depth mentorship and co-creation. Through a mixed-methods analysis of different degrees of emotional expression and review length, we observe users going from shallow connections based on short reviews with low emotional expression to stronger relationships through repeated demonstrations of high emotional investment to tight friendships which transcend the fictional content being exchanged.