Fans Reconstruct Heroes: Modeling Fictional Characters in Participatory Culture

The study of fictional characters has always been a crucial part of literary research, and the rise of participatory culture has made character representation increasingly dynamic and complex. This paper focuses on the character module of the GOLEM ontology---a formal framework for modelling and comparing fictional characters across cultures, narrative traditions, and reading communities---and makes three distinct contributions. First, it provides a theoretically grounded account of the module's design, situating key decisions within established debates in literary theory, from structuralist character functions to cognitive-narratological approaches. Second, it presents a formal comparison against existing ontologies for fictional characters, demonstrating that no existing model simultaneously supports cross-work character identity, context-specific attribute variability, provenance of reinterpretations, and flexible linking of character instances across narrative versions. Third, it contributes an empirical case study on Greek mythology fanfiction from Archive of Our Own, evaluated through ten expert-formulated competency questions as SPARQL queries. The dual-layer model (G0_Character-Stoff / G1_Character), a controlled vocabulary derived from 3,211 character feature concepts, and the SPARQL-based evaluation together demonstrate GOLEM's capacity to represent both canonical characterisations and fan-driven reinterpretations within a single interoperable knowledge graph.