Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

For our fan artifact, we found two pieces of media that we felt exemplified this week’s reading, both related to Beauty and the Beast.

The first is a video from an online fan documentary entitled Beauty and the Beast: 20 Years of Remembering, which explores Beauty and the Beast fandom as it exists presently. Specifically, we were struck by the second chapter: the second chapter (link is to a 63 Mb .mp4, just to warn you), Blame it on the Beast, described thusly:

“He was looking for his Catherine. She was looking for her Vincent. Despite the three thousand miles that first separated them, Nicholas and Jennifer Thalasinos of Colton, California managed to find the loves of their lives thanks to Beauty and the beast and an Internet bulletin board.”

We noticed the connections that these two fans chose to draw between a television show and their real lives. Jenkins on page 107 explores the concept of “emotional realism” and the need for fan texts to be emotionally applicable to the lives of fans. Especially interesting was the inclusion of imagery from September 11th as an analogous danger to that which Catherine faces in the pilot episode and from which she is rescued and comforted by Vincent. Jennifer describes Nicholas as a comforting presence, who “really took care of her”, during this time of “emotional trauma”. The two were in L.A. at the time — Nicholas did not in fact rescue Jennifer from the WTC, but the two apply the narrative to their relationship regardless, fitting with Jenkins’ theory. Furthermore, Nicholas proposed to Jennifer at tunnel entrance similar to the Tunnel World where Vincent and his ilk dwell.

Secondly, we found a piece of fanfiction called Of Love and Magic, a crossover between Beauty and the Beast, Labyrinth (the David Bowie one), Gargoyles (the mid-90s animated series that has a bizarre number of parallels with BatB), The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables, and Phantom of the Opera. This fic elevates three cult fan texts that the academy might situate as being lower on the hierarchy of taste by juxtaposing them with three classical works of literature. Furthermore, its premise of a happily-ever-after ending changes and indeed challenges the meanings found in both the text itself and the explicit wishes of the producers (especially of BatB). In five of these six texts, the romances are tragically unfulfilled: the romantic heroines (Catherine, Sarah, Elisa, Esmeralda, and Christine) are separated forever from their outcast romantic heroes (respectively Vincent, Jareth, Goliath, Quasimodo, and the Phantom). Les Mis is the only exception to the rule. In Chapter 4 of Textual Poachers, Jenkins discusses the idea of reading generically and the expectations on the part of fan readers that that entails. In this example, Lady Rosesong and her readers have interpreted these texts as part of the fairy tale tradition and therefore expect the conventions thereof to be represented. They choose to fix producers’ “errors” by constructing alternate narratives of the texts; in some cases these “correct” fan readings replace the producers’ intended meanings. This model of generic reading and “correction” can be seen in both fanfiction and the application of fan narratives to the fans’ own lives.