Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

One of the most intriguing things brought up in class today, to me, was Abby’s question of why fans feel like they get to prefer meanings and control access when they take that very ability away from producers. I came up with three answers:

1. Fandom is dangerous. Maybe the obscenity suit was a bit of an exaggeration (^^;;;), but imagine if the people who made Closer were kindergarten teachers. Now imagine if their principals, or parents in their communities saw this video. There would be hell to pay, not only for this but for a lot of slash and explicit fic. There are a lot of jobs and positions in society where saying “I write/draw/edit gay and/or fetish porn about fictional characters/actors/musicians/newscasters” will get you ostracized if not fired (see, this isn’t an exaggeration; note that this website about Internet crime has articles about fic on LJ). One of the primary uses of the fan community really is self-protection, at the very least from people thinking you’re weird, but on a very real level, to protect people who write Snarry from being perceived as people who would actually tie children up in dungeons and molest them. Within fandom, you get to label things with proper warnings, both to protect the producer of the fan text and to protect anyone who might not want to read it (anyone from people like Jamison, experienced fans who don’t want their souls tarnished, to actual honest-to-god innocent children). Especially concerning slash, one of the major things that slashers learn is that we’re doing things with characters that might really upset other fans, who are very invested in a different view of the text (not that they’re not doing the same to us sometimes). And, hearkening back to my fanifesto, fandom is in some sense about caring and emotional investment: we don’t want to harsh on other people’s squee by letting them accidentally read something that they don’t want to see, and we don’t want them to harsh on our squee in response.

2. Texts are produced in a capitalistic system and fan texts are not, by and large. We pay for books and movies and we watch commercials during TV, which means that we’re giving something in fair exchange for a text. In some sense, viewers “own” the text, then. If you buy a painting, the painter has no place to say that you can’t scribble all over it in crayon, because you own it, it’s your property. I think a similar thing happens with fan texts: once we invest our time and money, the text is fair game (I’m saying nothing about the actual legal definition of fair use, though). Fan texts, however, are not paid for, they are shared. You wouldn’t scribble all over a painting in someone else’s house that they’re letting you see, so why would you mess with the meaning of something shared with you (rather than bought by you)? I’m not trying to make this argument necessarily the most logical thing, but more to explain and perhaps justify a feeling of violation on the part of creators of fan works.

3. This is more an exception than an explanation, really: there are times when fans are totally okay with people re-interpreting their works. For example, there’s a practice known as “remixing” in which authors write a missing scene or a different perspective or just generally a re-interpretation of others’ fic. However, remixing is entirely consensual, as it were: authors agree to have their fic remixed. There are conventions for this sort of thing. This, to me, is a huge trend in fandom: anyone is perfectly welcome, as long as they play by the rules (for example, these LJ etiquette rules, all of which were familiar to me but had never been spoken to me at all).

This may be completely off-topic, but I just thought of this nice Star Trek Original Series and Lord of the Rings connection, which shows really well how much fans assume other fans are familiar with Fandom in general…

This is from an album released by Leonard Nimoy called “The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy,” (sorry about the dubious link) exploring both Nimoy’s in-character, and highly folk-inflected out-of-character self.

This second one is part of a much larger oeuvre by Legendary Frog called “One Ring To Rule Them All 2.” 

What kinds of assumptions are Leonard Nimoy and Legendary Frog making by using “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins?” Would you consider Nimoy’s recording of this song as a commercial strategy, or as an expression of his own fan tendencies? Is Legendary Frog trying to gain more knowledge cred by using a very specific Nimoy reference in an otherwise tangentially related video, or is he also just expressing membership in two fandoms?

What are some uses for intertextuality in fandom that we haven’t discussed yet?

I like Jenkins. His writing style is engaging and I appreciate his efforts to legitimize fans for academics and others. But the whole concept of textual “poaching” really does leave out a large class of fans who just like to consume media and give credence to the original author. This is an issue that has been discussed in class, and surely such  people (like me, incidentally) still qualify as fans even if they are not members of the type of fan communities that Jenkins explores, but what kind of fans are they?

Many of the fan activities described by Jenkins in the first two chapters of TP apply to me, especially gossip about texts (interesting that this is so gendered, but, a discussion for another time), but so many others do not. I think Jenkins is responsible enough to recognize that his examples hardly apply to all fans, and has wisely  chosen to present a study made up primarily of case studies rather than give readers general rules for describing fandom…but it is still frustrating.

 I am passive in many ways. I sit in front of a tv and I wait to see what Ron D. Moore and his team of writers has brought me on Battlestar Galactica this week. I enjoy watching. I talk about the show and that can involve speculation, but not fiction. I often think that the spectrum is a useful model for many academic questions, but is it necessarily the case here? Surely there is a spectrum of the level of fan activity, but is being lower on that spectrum make you a less serious or devoted fan. Am I lower on the spectrum of fandom because I find the material produced by “the establishment” more compelling than that produced by fan writers.

 It is an honest question. I would be interested in learning what people think actually constitutes a “hardcore fan” Just a thought….