Post your fanifestos here!
January 24th, 2008 by BobComment on this post with your fanifesto. The deadline for this is Monday, Jan 28, at noon, so we all have a chance to read each others’ fanifestos in advance of Tuesday’s class.
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Rationally, I know I must have liked things before the advent of Harry Potter in my life. I don’t believe that a certain canon can make someone into a fan that didn’t already have fannish tendencies, no matter how unfulfilled. So, yes, I must have liked things and had a hunger to know as much as possible about them. I read Catherine, Called Birdy about three times, for example. But I can’t remember being really passionate about something, or really identifying with something, before my wise mother gave me a copy of SS (Book 1, or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) for Hannukah when I was 11. Almost immediately, I jumped straight into fandom. Early on I was (and I’m a little ashamed to admit it) a Harry/Hermione shipper and read almost systematically through all HP fic on fanfiction.net, back before ff.n started censoring and HP fandom moved to LJ. I even tried writing a little fic, somewhat disastrously: upon seeing Dr. Strangelove I had the genius idea of doing an HP/Strangelove crossover. One of the reviews said that Kubrick was spinning in his grave. Given that I have the exact same attitude about horrible writing by 13-year-olds, I can’t be too upset about this.
Of course, like any reasonable human being, eventually I dropped the het and became a die-hard slasher, Harry/Draco by preference as this was before I matured enough to appreciate Remus/Sirius. Slash led me to Lord of the Rings movie fandom (Aragorn/Legolas) and then to LotR actor slash and then anything was fair game, and I mean *anything*. I once spent an entire middle school showing of The Music Man making slash jokes with a friend.
A pledge to follow the LotR boys anywhere they might go led me to LOST through Dom (Merry) and Pirates through Orli (Legolas, and yes, I call him Orli), and Pirates introduced me to Johnny Depp. I’ve now seen every movie Johnny Depp’s made except Nightmare on Elm Street and the one he directed, and that only because I can’t find it anywhere. Meanwhile, my mother had fallen in love with Viggo Mortensen (she and I share fandoms sometimes — we go to HP conventions together) and so I’ve seen all of *his* movies too, and I have to say, they’re a lot weirder on average than Johnny’s. Never, *ever* watch The Reflecting Skin.
In large part, my involvement in fandom has shaped my entire self. I’m only a tech geek and a Google ninja because I spent so much time on the Internet looking for fic. I like media because I like the stories that they tell, although not all of my fandoms are strictly media-related. I’ll always be a fan of certain things: HP, certain actors, everything Neil Gaiman says or does. My newish fandoms are Bollywood movies, Doctor Who, Project Runway, a boutique perfumerie called Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, James McAvoy, and NBA basketball. But, as we said in class, fandom isn’t about the things I like. Fandom isn’t what I read or listen to or watch, it’s how I do so. It’s how I shop with brand loyalty. Fandom is missing most of the talks at the last HP con to work security with my friends and knowing that Harry Year 4 in Harry and the Potters is a jerk, but the lead singer of Draco and the Malfoys is a great guy. Fandom is hysterical excitement at midnight movie premiers and sobs at the end of Atonement. Fandom is about the way I commit myself: passionately, with knowledge as complete as I can make it, with loyalty, and with love.
For the most part, I have come to love the current objects of my fandom independently. Although I may have originally learned of them by word of mouth, I have sort of embraced them as my own. In this sense, I consider my fandom to be very personal.
My favorite movie is The Big Lebowski. Although I understand that this film has a pretty significant “cult” following, I haven’t attended any Lebowski related events or really sought out this community. That being said, one of the three Facebook groups I belong to is entitled “Everything I Know I Learned From the Big Lebowski”. In my opinion, this is a movie that can be quoted everyday, since its genius lies in its dialogue, and when someone picks up on this, I feel a sort of connection with them because they’re letting me know that they understand what makes the Big Lebowski so great. I also like other movies, such as Clerks and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, that are heavily dialogic and appeal to my very dry sense of humor.
Although my favorite movies are those that are subtely hilarious, television shows seem to be a different case. My two favorite shows, Curb Your Enthusiasm and South Park, are both outrageous, but in different ways. The creators of South Park designed the show to incorporate subjects from current affairs or pop culture into an episode’s plot and cleverly exaggerate their already existing qualities to the point of rediculousness. What I love about this show is that nobody or thing is safe from its biting satire and because it is indescriminate in choosing subjects to make fun of, I don’t consider it too offensive. Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm is the biggest social disaster I have ever witnessed and takes everything a little bit too far. Disaster, usually brought on by himself, seems to follow him everywhere he goes. I like that, because of the its heavy use of improvisation and because Larry David plays himself, the show gives off an air of reality.
The biggest object of my fandom is music. I’ve arrived at my favorite music over the years mostly by seeking it out on my own. I think that this has made my taste more comprehensive and yet personally tailored, as I don’t rely on so much on other people’s tastes. Although my favorite genres of music are classic rock, blues, and metal, I regularly listen to jazz, reggae, funk, rap, as well as other stuff. My favorite artists include Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers Band, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Black Sabbath.
I’ve always considered myself a die-hard fan. It started when I was eight and watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for the first time. I quickly became hooked on Star Trek and watched every episode that had been made, recording the new episodes of DS9, Voyager, and, later, Enterprise as they came out. Like many others, I read Harry Potter for the first time when I was ten and immediately became hooked on both Harry Potter and numerous other fantasy book series I have since discovered. Currently, I’m also into The Song of Fire and Ice (a fantasy series by George R. R. Martin), Discworld, Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth in general, and Babylon 5. I’m also a huge fan of the Beatles, but that borders on worship and thus above and beyond any other fandom (except DS9 which comes close).
Despite my love of Star Trek, Harry Potter and Scifi/Fantasy novels, I have never participated in traditional fandom. I never went to a convention, or even dressed up for a movie or book release. I rarely read fanfics and certainly never wrote any. My participation has been strictly individual. So while I regularly check Mugglenet for new tidbits of information and theories, I do little else.
Since my fandoms have always been deeply individual, I’ve never actually understood the culture surrounding some of the things I am deeply obsessive about. In some ways I get the worst of both worlds. I still have the stigma of being a Trekkie and a fantasy geek without the support system of participating in the fan cultures. At the same time, when spending time with other fans I quickly get lost if the discussion turns to fanfics. Yet it would be hard to find a bigger fan in some ways. Sure, I don’t dress up as Spock, but I can identify almost any episode, from any series, in five minutes or less (yes, I’ve been tested by my family and I have never been stumped). Fandom for me has always been about my deep, personal, and rather obsessive love of various books, TV series, and a rock band.
I’m the kind of kid who read the Star Wars encyclopedia and Harry Potter fan fics online. I used to debate those “Millennium Falcon vs Outlaw Star” topics with true seriousness. My fandom has only decreased due to the time I now have to devote to Academic fandom (“neurons are so cool!”).
I did not create much new content — I am a consumer of fictional worlds. The closest I came to creativity was when I was 6 and imagined scenes with my Star Wars action figures. I am probably the stereotype associated with our kind: anti-social escapists.
Looking back, however, I realized that the escapist nature of my interaction was only one motivation. It was definitely a social endeavor for me. I too ended up focusing on fan creations more than the canon. I liked the sense of freedom and community.
I don’t spend much time on fantasy fiction now. But already this course has made me have a realization by reflecting on the way I spend my leisure time. I could easily be classified as a “music fan.” I spend many hours listening, working with local bands through Free Culture, and I explore new artists through websites and magazines. Just like with Star Wars, I debate bands and genres; I gossip about music celebrities. I don’t go to conventions anymore, I go to concerts; I DJ on radio shows as a type of “fan participation.”
I do connect music with politics and history, but most of my love is of the abstract “fan” variety. For some reason, I just love it. Whether the New York Dolls are proto-punk or proto-glam has no more significance than lightsaber crystal types, but I still love to talk about it!
So much of “fan culture” is going to appear to me, in this new light, as more ubiquitous than I previously imagined. I look forward to the generalities and connections between fandoms that this course will provide.
Growing up, I did not really have any formal showing of fandom. However, I did develop somewhat obsessive relationships with the few shows I did watch. When my friend’s television didn’t include the channel that showed Full House in the afternoon, I began sobbing until I was driven back to my house to watch my beloved show. In middle school, I was the only person I knew at my all-girls school who watched the two hours on Fox every Saturday night consisting of two Cops episodes and America’s Most Wanted. Certain shows tended to become part of my routine, and I was very upset if this routine was interrupted. I’m still like that to this day, so while I don’t usually develop an undying need to see something right away, if it becomes part of my routine then I will rarely miss it. My very first memory of watching a movie satisfied this same pattern as well. My first memory is at about age 6, when I would make it a habit of coming back from school and watching Dumbo every single day. That is, until the tape wore out. My brother decided to “console” me by letting me watch one of his movies, Stephen King’s IT. To summarize the effects, I could barely turn the sink on or flush the toilet without crying for quite a while. My brother was also the first and one of few people close to me who was really a fan. His collection of comic books and video games rivaled many growing up.
The majority of the shows, movies, and books I spend my time with are ones that people close to me love. After dinner, I often watched Diagnosis Murder, Murder She Wrote, and Walker: Texas Ranger with my parents. I’ve mostly stopped watching these shows although I love the theme song to Walker: Texas Ranger, but if Alex gets herself into some awful damsel in distress situation one more time only to be saved by Chuck I may have to stop watching the show. While these interests were more fleeting, the Jane Austen obsession I got into because of my mom stayed with me. Before I read any of Austen’s novels, I watched the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice with my mom probably about 10 times. It is conveniently on 6-50 minute videos, more or less, so we would watch one a night for a week before bed.
In high school, I become obsessed with the Harry Potter books and felt like a fan for the first time. I’ve attended every midnight opening since the release of the 3rd book with a friend who always dressed up in at the very least a cape. I also attended the midnight releases of the movies with the above-mentioned friend. It’s funny because in this group of friends I was the one who stuck out by not dressing up, even though they were the ones being stared at in movie theatres. While I enjoyed the movies, I never felt the same desire to attend midnight releases as I did for the books. Generally, on release night, I would receive the book (usually one of the first 50 at the store, including the one great time where I was the first in the store to receive it and my 15 minutes of fame followed as people begged to just touch the book or take a picture of it), and stay up until 5 or 6 am until I finished it. Then I would think about how long I had to wait for the next one, get somewhat depressed, and proceed to re-read all the previous ones so I could read the new one again. I also got extremely upset when I waited in vain before my twelfth birthday for a letter from Hogwarts thinking perhaps I would just start a year late.
Also in high school, I admit I also was a huge fan of the OC. Perhaps because all of the girls on my hockey team watched it and that it was always the beginning of conversation every Friday morning, I began to watch the OC with some fanaticism. I currently own all seasons (even the horrible 4th season after Marissa left) and have seen each episode at least 3 times. I started watching the OC as a social thing in high school and college, but it turned in to the kind of show I stayed up until 3 am watching by myself on DVD on laptop.
I pretty much stopped watching movies and TV besides these occasional marathons in college until I started dating my boyfriend. He’s gotten me into South Park, Scrubs, the Spiderman movies, Entourage, zombie movies, and asked me/made me watch all of the above a lot. Sometimes my fan interests are solely a way to spend time with my boyfriend, although he has definitely stirred the fan inside me again. My fan interests tend to have more of a social aspect to them (besides Harry Potter) and I’m excited to see what fan fic is all about because I had never even heard of it before this class!
I was originally going to begin my fanifesto chronicling my love affair with anime during my freshman year of high school. However, the more I thought about my experience in fandom, the more I realized that my fan involvement with media started waaay back at the tender age of seven when I woke up every weekday morning at 6 to watch Sailor Moon on television. I remember my friends and I would make up Sailor Scout names for each other and write stories of our many interstellar adventures as Scouts with accompanying crayon pictures (primitive fan fiction specimen #1).
About two years later, my interest shifted to the music scene, specifically the Spice Girls and NSYNC. Yes, I had the dolls and the unauthorized biographies; yes, I bought every single magazine that had their mugs splashed across its cover; yes, my friends and I pretended to be a Spice Girl and sang and danced every spare moment granted us (I was Sporty); oh HECK YES, I stood on line for NSYNC tickets during a blizzard (well, maybe not a blizzard, but it was snowing hard enough for my mom to abandon me for the shelter of our Altima). It was also around this time that I discovered the Harry Potter books–I think the previous fanifestos sum up any and all feelings I have towards those books, although I will admit that I did not read any fan fiction until high school when I discovered the medium via anime.
My best friend Irene introduced me to anime fandom when she convinced me to spend a fateful Saturday evening watching Rurouni Kenshin. From Kenshin, I moved on to Utena, Slayers, Fushigi Yugi, Escaflowne, Kare Kano, etc. My anime fandom quickly evolved into a love of Japanese culture. J-Pop and J-Rock were on constant rotation in my Discman, and my room walls were plastered with pictures of Japanese celebrities. Around this time, I became heavily involved in the world of fanfiction, even going so far as to author three or four fics concerning the anime Weiss Kreuz (or Knight Hunters in translation). I attended three anime cons, and cosplayed at one as my favorite Weiss character, Farfarello. By the end of high school, however, my interest in anime had begun to wane. I’ve recently rediscovered my love of anime, spending this past winter break glued to my laptop watching Nodame Cantabile and Scrapped Princess(Thank you, YouTube and all of you wonderful fansubbers!).
I’m pretty comfortable with where I am in the world of fandom. I wouldn’t cosplay again, but I bought a Ravenclaw scarf to wear to the release of Deathly Hallows this summer. I even painted a scar on my forehead when I attended a Harry and the Potters/Draco and the Malfoys concert two summers ago (we were the oldest people in the audience apart from the parents, but I like to think we taught those kids how to head bang to wizard rock properly). I will always attend the midnight premieres of the Harry Potter movies, and if Lucas comes out with another Star Wars film, I’d attend the midnight premiere of that as I did for all three prequels *and* when they rereleased the original trilogy my fifth grade year). My fandom right now, like many in the class, is mainly concerned with music–I tend to be a bit of a music snob, and will peruse your iTunes if given the chance. I’m a worshipper of the cult of celebrity and cannot go to bed without reading the many gossip blogs I have bookmarked. From my dad, I’ve inherited a deep love for Monty Python, Star Wars, LotR, Star Trek: TNG, Terry Pratchett (through whom I discovered my favorite author Neil Gaiman), and pretentious cult films (such as the Soviet/French animated feature “Fantastic Planet”). Oh, and I will sing you “Jesus Christ Superstar” from start to end if you let your guard down. Fandom, for me, is simply my deep love, appreciation, and admiration for various media productions. I’m interested in learning how my, sometimes rabid, consumption of media products is affecting the production and packaging of current media.
I guess the hypocrisy of my life as a fan has only recently occurred to me. I never identified strongly with typical fan cultures but that doesn’t mean I was not a passionate observer, viewer and supporter of various television shows, films, etc. I’ll offer a pretty simple anecdote on my fan habits. I loved Dragonball and Dragonball Z in middle school and most of high school and we had an anime club but I never had any interest in joining it.
I have played sports my entire life and have never found one that had an enduring effect on my life and this translated to my viewing habits. There was no story to follow, no drama to the action. Watching sports always felt sort of contrived and stupid to me. Then I started watching the Ultimate Fighting Championships and Pride Fighting Championships and I was finally a legitimate fan of a sport: mixed martial arts.
Each time a fighter steps into the ring it is a culmination of efforts and determination that seems so lost on most mainstream sports. I remember watching Jens Pulver fight and hearing about his background and suddenly the sport took on a whole different meaning. Pulver suffered an intensely brutal childhood and to save his siblings and mother from physical abuse from their father he would focus his father’s attacks upon himself. Watching him fight – including a 35 second submission victory in December which had me screaming and shouting at the top of my lungs while completely alone – I felt a connection to something tangible, exciting, and unique. As a massive film and television buff I think that MMA has given me a sport with legitimate drama and tension to it that I never felt in other sports.
As a fan of MMA I have taken to the forum community, most notably at Sherdog.com, one of the most trafficked MMA websites out there and recently they have become an official ESPN affiliate. I post everyday with news updates on fighters, debate upcoming and past fights, and daydream about dream matchups that we may or may not ever see materialize. Each day you can find me visiting Sherdog.com, MMAFightline.com, MMAJunkie.com as well as the official websites for my favorite fighters (Evan Tanner, Jens Pulver, Tito Ortiz) at least a half a dozen times. The fandom of MMA has really grown on me as the fans are all so well informed, many are actual fighters themselves, and passionate about the constant growth of the sport.
Outside of MMA my primary fan activities revolve around bands that I love. I consider myself a huge fan of early to mid-90’s rock music, most specifically grunge and alternative rock. I am currently a member of Pearl Jam’s Ten Club, their official fan club, which guarantees me their yearly fan-only singles and special offers on upcoming concert dates. I am relatively active on their official forum and have found some great live bootlegs and unreleased material because of specific forum members.
I was also an active member of Audioslave’s message board until Chris Cornell left the band and Rage Against the Machine started playing shows as a band again. I think I have always enjoyed forum communities, especially in instances of music, because the connection is so abundantly clear and with that positive debate and discussion is almost inherent.
Otherwise I am pretty much something of an industry insider whom is not in the industry just yet. I pretty constantly frequent Hollywood Reporter, Variety, AintItCool, and Darkhorizons and keep IMDB boards and pages updated. My interest in film and television as an industry and business comes from my father’s career as an actor and my interest in his rollercoaster ride of a career (Shameless plug time. See James Cameron’s “Avatar” December 18, 2009).
Overall I would consider myself a recently reformed inactive fan becoming more and more involved in that which I am passionate about. Maybe if the person I am today met the person I was in High School, he would tell him to just suck it up and go to one of the anime club’s meetings.
My own experience with fan communities is quite limited. For many years now, I have considered myself a serious fan of many different texts. I have always been, however, a fan of only the canonical texts. Expanded universe materials, fan-fiction, and fan videos have never been particularly interesting to me, though I have briefly explored all of those.
I have read all of the novels in the Dune series (including those written by Frank Herbert’s son and Kevin J. Anderson) and watched the film and miniseries adaptations multiple times. Every December, I begin a ritual which involves reading The Lord of the Rings and culminates in a viewing of the extended edition DVDs of the trilogy with my sister. I have also read The Hobbit and The Silmarillion but I do not make a habit of rereading these often. I have watched every episode of 24 at least three or four times and think Kiefer Sutherland does great work with the program.
Two texts that I am a huge fan are Star Wars and the James Bond franchise. Star Wars provides my most tension-laden interactions with other fans because I know a great deal about the production history and more intricate details of the films, but I have almost no knowledge of the quasi-canonical expanded universe, one of the largest that I know of. As for Bond, I have watched and studied carefully all of the EON production films as will as Never Say Never Again and Charles K. Feldman’s Casino Royale as well as the Casino Royale episode of Climax!, but I have only read the novels and short stories written by Ian Flemming himself and refuse to read any of the later novels by other authors.
Perhaps the most intriguing component of my status as a fan, and one that I look forward to attempting to look at through an academic lens is what I will call ironic fandom: There are certain television shows and movies that I watch constantly, but with a desire only to be amused, and I almost never get invested in any of the characters or storylines. Star Trek is one example. I have seen every film and almost every episode of every one of the series, but I find myself making fun of my own viewing habits. There are times when I wonder if my ironic enjoyment of the shows crosses the boundary into genuine enjoyment, but then I have only to watch another episode to be reminded how I love to dislike Star Trek.
Several films, especially those associated with certain actors, certainly also fit this description, but my viewing of them is DEFINITELY done with a strong sense of irony. The clearest examples these films are a group of three erotic thrillers starring Michael Douglas (Disclosure, Fatal Attraction, and Basic Instinct) some of the Arnold Schwarzenegger or Stallone action films (Commando, Raw Deal, and Cobra, which Stallone wrote and directed as well) and of course, the man who consistently delivers fantastically awful movies to be enjoyed ironically, Patrick Swayze. I have never laughed as hard as on the day my friends and I sat to watch Point Break, Red Dawn, and Roadhouse one after the other.
I realize that both the sarcasm with which I watch certain shows and films and the dedication I have for watching ONLY the canon of others may be unusual for a fan, but this is my way, and I look forward to discussing these issues with the remainder of the class.
There are a couple shows and other media that I love and love to write fanfiction about, but in general I don’t care very much about the canon of anything. I started reading fanfiction when a friend told me about it on the playground in seventh grade, and my involvement with it has always been more for entertainment than because I feel that these texts tell me something deep about myself or the world.
The first fandom I got into was Star Wars, and since this was right after Episode 1 came out, I started reading an amazing archive that I just have to plug – it’s called the Sith Academy, and it is a compilation of a lot of stories based on the premise that Darth Maul and Obi-Wan live next door to eachother in cheap student apartments, their masters and the Jedi Council are mostly interested in clubbing and fashion, and Darth Maul has to perform a variety of tasks to hone his rage and strength like clean the fridge and write an MA thesis. (http://www.siubhan.com/sithacademy/)
The prequels got bad enough that I stopped being interested in Star Wars, and I now mostly read fanfiction about Star Trek and Harry Potter. I love the Original Series of Star Trek for the extravagant cold war optimism and the fact that reason, freedom, and punching aliens in the face often all save the day at once. I also ship Kirk and Spock. I’ve never been able to get into any of the other series because they just can’t seem to muster the same lightheartedness and I don’t find the characters as interesting.
Harry Potter was so much fun for me because I and all of my friends had different theories about how the books were going to turn out, from predictions of who was going to hook up with who to my own long-held hope for a Dumbledore vs. Grindelwald World War Two flashback. I went to a couple midnight release parties and got excited about the new installment, but often find other fans’ ideas about where the series could have gone to be more interesting. Of course, I still love the books, and we wouldn’t have the fanfiction without them!
I’ve never written any fanfiction, unless you count the Isaac Newton/Michael Faraday slash I wrote for the benefit of a friend of mine who took physics with me in high school. Thankfully, we can’t find a copy of it any more. I love watching Project Runway (I watch it with Friends in Shane lounge, if anyone wants to join us, Wednesdays at 10) and have seen every episode of Arrested Development a couple times, but I don’t consider myself to be a serious fan of those shows. Although I like them, I don’t feel involved with them in the same way that I am with Star Trek and Harry Potter. I also love Lord of the Rings without having any desire to read fanfic about it. I guess I think of it more as mythology or literature, genres that seem more serious and legitimate than sci-fi/fantasy, and that therefore I should respect the authors intensions more than I do with, say, Harry Potter (I know, I’m privileging some texts over others, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing).
Aaron — laugh at Patrick Swayze as much as you want, Dirty Dancing is still a fantastic movie.
As a child, I watched Jason and the Argonauts an absurd number of times; meticulously collected Pokemon cards and caught them all (4 times); learned all of Linda Richman’s topics for discussion; and used my best friend’s grandmother’s connection with Mindy Sterling’s mom to get Frau Farbissina’s autograph (they play Mah Jong together). These short-lived obsessions were my first steps to becoming a genuine fan. It was not until reading Harry Potter SS, that I finally established a long-term relationship with a fandom. I participate as a fan mostly by reading the books, a lot. I lost track of the exact count but I do know that I’ve read GOF over 10 times and will defend to the death that it is the best in the series. Books 3-7 were all read in a day, without interruption or break for sleep. Also, I’ve listened to all of the books on tape and think any true fan should experience the sheer bliss of having Jim Dale narrate to them. I will admit, the movies annoy me, but I watch them a lot because I really like Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith.
Of late I tend to primarily obsess over the Sedaris family. I first entered the Sedaris fandom by reading all of David’s books and seeing him perform live. Then, I fell in love with Amy after watching Strangers with Candy. Having read and listened to both her books, I still wasn’t satisfied. I became an Amy Sedaris Youtube video connoisseur, watching clips of her awkward flirtations with David Letterman and passive aggressive battle with Martha Stewart. I saw Shrek the Third twice just to see her role as Cinderella, which was probably the best role in the entire Shrek series. I have one of her signatures in a microwave cookbook. I also support other Sedaris family projects, owning one of Paul’s “You Can’t Kill the Rooster” t-shirts. I also have created two Sedaris related Facebook groups (feel free join!)
My other fandoms are Arrested Development, Project Runway (I’m also an creator/administrator for two PR Facebook groups, so join!), Wes Anderson, and Elephant 6 bands. For me, being a fan has been mainly consumptive, save for online groups and the occasional party suggested in I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. My participation is more individualistic or includes a close friend who shares the same interest.
Despite having obsessions with media I genuinely find great, I also tend to be an enthusiastic fan of camp/trash. I think however, that the intention behind watching Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee (to laugh at her…) makes the participation different from my other fandoms, so I am not really sure how to qualify it. Even still, I have seen Showgirls an embarrassing number of times.
I was an “otaku.” I know that term has come to mean a great many things to a great many people, but for me it simply meant “outsider.”
- Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
There seems to be a level of perhaps inescapable self-loathing that comes with being a ‘fan’. I have felt it myself, quite frequently. It manifests most often when someone nostalgically speaks of some fond childhood memory, a cartoon or video game that they vaguely recollect and that I, conversely, have spent a good portion of my adult years painstakingly researching. So when someone mentions ‘that guy with the cards from X-Men’, I will laugh and audibly state how much I enjoyed that show when I was a very young child and how much more mature and sophisticated I am now and how I like grown-up things like driving cars and drinking alcohol ha ha ha let us discuss something else now please. The fact is that I never watched ‘X-Men’ as a child. The fact is that I discovered ‘X-Men’ the summer after my sophomore year in high school, and that when someone mentions ‘that guy with the cards’ I immediately think: he means Gambit, real name Remy LeBeau, with the power to kinetically charge objects by activating their latent potential energy, former ally of the heroic X-Men, recently transformed into a Horseman of Apocalypse and then recruited by the malevolent 19th Century geneticist supervillain Mr. Sinister as of X-Men Vol. 2 #200; and every time I think this I hate myself a little for doing so.
My first experience as a fan occurred early in my life. As a young child I liked dinosaurs. Almost liked them liked them, in the middle school sense of the word; I think that this best captures the combination of passion, admiration, and naivety that overcame me whenever I was exposed to the great stupid beasts. I knew their names, their physical traits, the precise details of their diet and their evolutionary development. True, my enthusiasm for the subject earned me the disdain of my classmates, especially since it showed no signs of abating up to my arrival in the fourth grade. But even when I felt uncomfortable, it felt good to have such complete mastery over something, and this was more than compensation enough.
My interests became more (slightly) sophisticated as I grew older. I became interested in several bad children’s science fiction series, and several collectable oddities, and a particular series of small plastic robots that, when properly molested, could be reconfigured into animals or vehicles that had the limbs of small plastic robots sticking out of them at odd angles. I started to play video games and to read comic books and to listen to music written by people whose perspective was not entirely removed from my own. I think that the appeal of fandom, for me, has always been the idea of mastery. I could never hope to comprehend the arcane codes of high school social etiquette, so I instead buried myself in worlds governed by simpler, more coherent laws. Grass-type beats water-type. Eastmost penninsula is the secret. It was not escapism, per say, because what I was running from was not as important as what I was running to. I was not a refugee but an immigrant.
There have been times in my life when fiction was more real to me than the real world. I have caught myself on numerous occasions unconsciously shooting out nonexistent grappling hooks at distant targets, or mentally appraising certain buildings for their utility as a stronghold against the undead legions. I have forsaken normal human social interactions for masturbatory fantasy, for inane wonderlands managed by multinational corporations and the obsessive-compulsive arrangement of imaginary worlds.
So I believe that the world will end consumed by a mammoth prehistoric squid-god, and I believe that the world will end with humanity’s reunification into the higher reality of the Supercontext. I believe that with great power comes great responsibility, that freedom is the right of all sentient beings, that not all those who wander are lost. I am Ziggy Stardust, and I yam en an-tee-Christ, and I am the last of the famous international playboys. I am hated and feared by a world I am sworn to protect. And I am not a number, I am a free man. And I am Ozymandius, King of Kings. And I am the goddamn Batman.
I am, I admit, cobbled together from bits of other people’s stories and intellectual property. And I will not allow myself to be ashamed of this. I make no apologies for it. The world has been, at times, arbitrarily cruel to me; should I feel guilty that, rather than letting it break me, I abandoned it at the first opportunity and sought out for myself a better one?
I. WE’RE ALL FANS, HERE: I would like to begin by reveling in how special I am to have been introduced to fan-friendly media like the Oz series at a young age, with my father reading Tik Tok of OZ to me in my mother’s womb, but let’s face it: it doesn’t take a head full of classic SNES titles and witty Star Trek references to be a fanboy. And not all fangirls are forged in vampire fantasies and badly-written gay erotica at the age of 15. But there is a distinction. I’m not just any fan. I am fanboy and fangirl. I used fandom as my identity before I heard of identity politics.
II.I BEAT THE GEEKS: Where did I start on being a fanboy? Girls like guys who’ve got skills, of course! Namely, I wanted to be an expert. I saw that smug John Lennon being snarky in A Hard Day’s Night. I wanted *that*. I wanted Insider Knowledge. So I read the Beatles Anthology at least three times. I remembered all their albums in order. I knew all the lyrics, all the anecdotes, all the girlfriends. All the cousins of the girlfriends who appeared in other British Invasion-era bands, and who I knew no one would ever know enough to ask me about.
Then I learned them all: the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, and eventually the Kinks. I learned the Doors and Led Zeppelin and Queen. And occasionally, I can still tell a nice little anecdote to shut up that arrogant kid who thinks he knows everything because he’s got the stock VH1-brand “classic” collection on his iPod. Or I could just give you a lecture on how you shouldn’t hate Yoko.
III.I RAN OUT ON THE DECK AND SQUEALED, OR SHOULD I SAY “SQUEED?”: Let’s be honest: if I became a fanboy to outknow the popular boys, I became a fangirl to meet other girls. I remember when Eva Gruber shoved a copy of /Queen of the Damned/, still smelling like cucumber-melon hand lotion, into my hand in the 7th grade. As self-outcast girls (“lesbians,” they said, not inaccurately), we saw something in a life of isolation lived in the dark, and somehow, strangely, lived in the gay bars of 80s San Fransisco. Before I realized I had fallen in love with my best friend at the time, I dreamed I was Lestat chasing her, Louis, across an endless pier in the middle of the ocean.
Steph Rahl gave me my first /Harry Potter/ fanfiction. She had short, straight brown hair and little square glasses. She told me Sirius Black and Remus Lupin were in love. She reminded me who Remus Lupin was. And I bought it. One night, as my future first girlfriend made her first move, I wondered, desperately, “Well, what does Remus do now?” Because Sirius would have jumped her right there. Years of thinking of myself in the suave-yet-tortured “butch” role didn’t stop me from responding, “He doesn’t do anything. Werewolves mate for life! Geez!”
IV.ACADEMIC?: So, most recently, I’m the Madame Bovary of fandom. Unable to separate fantasy from reality, I eventually get stuck in a self-destructive pattern of trying to duplicate the fiction (which is impossible) and being mad at myself when I can’t, until I shove some arsenic in my mouth and the author describes my death in pornographic detail.
The catch in all this is that I’m also interested in fan studies academically. Well well! I never gave up on that “expert” bit, I guess, and what can someone so self-absorbed that she gets up in the middle of doing schoolwork to look at herself in the mirror do as a professor besides study herself? So it’s Film and Media Studies (for the pop culture “fan” bit) and Women’s Studies (for the “queer” bit) for me!
What is academics, though, if it isn’t self-indulgent? Who can be interested in something that is, for them, entirely impersonal? So here I am, Henry Jenkins-like, vulnerable and defensive: can it really be right to study something so damn /interesting/?
VI: BACK TO THE YOUTUBE: Duh! Fan studies is more interesting today than it ever has been before. And I say this as unhyperbolically as possible. Fan studies isn’t just some Trekkies (and I can say that because I sort of *am* one… no really, I spent six hours on Saturday watching Original Series) pouring their souls out trying to create some sort of group identity for themselves. Fan studies is THE MAN!
As in, Viacom *wants* people who know about fan studies to tell them how to beat that pesky YouTube that’s giving them so much trouble. Henry Jenkins’ new book, /Convergence Culture/ reads like a skeazy manual for companies on how to exploit fans for all they’re worth!
As in, we’ve got the power (and the glory)! How are we going to use it?
See, /that’s/ what’s interesting.
That’s why I’m in this class.
NOT to reminisce about my Lesbian Angst Chronicles. So if I try to mention them again, just talk over me. Please.
Here is the most “fannish” thing I’ve done recently: Disappointed with the quality of the second and third “Pirates of the Caribbean” films (yet enamored of the concept and characters) I have chosen to excise films 2 and 3 from my mental “Pirates” canon, and hope, in the future, to envision films 2 and 3 as I think they should be.
“Pirates” is not the only text of which I am a fan, and the text/fan interaction described above is not typical of my interactions with texts or with other fans. I have a few good friends whose taste in movies, books, and music I respect highly, and often, I express my fandom in discussions with these people. We express our fandom through recommendations of texts to one another (indeed, these relationships have expanded my fandom into the realm of comic books and appreciation of the recent explosion of superhero movies).
Consumption patterns also define my fandom—I don’t often buy things, so when I purchase a DVD, CD, or book, it is because I find it worth owning. I also tend to absorb the philosophies of my favorite fan texts and characters. Thus, while reading Dharma Bums, I purchased two flannel shirts and an army surplus backpack, just in case I became a beatnik wanderer. I own a trenchcoat not only because I dressed up as Inspector Clouseau for Halloween, but also because the quintessential noir detective wears a trenchcoat.
My primary internet interaction with texts involves the posting of favorite quotes and photos via facebook. My profile picture often reflects a text that I am currently engaging—I have been Jack Sparrow, Sam Spade, Ernest Hemingway, Atticus Finch, Inigo Montoya, and Charlie Brown, among others (the confusion of self-identity with character identity is something I’d like to think more about).
Another arena in which I consider myself a fan is music. Jazz fandom has a long-established subculture, one embraced by musicians, listeners, and academics alike. Jazz is a powerful example of the legitimizing of fan rewritings—every new performance is, in essence, a fanfic that, if well-received, can become a part of the canon.
I engage jazz music by listening and playing, but it is not a strictly artistic/performative model that informs my music fandom. An example is the Coen brothers’ film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000). Its soundtrack features numerous folk, bluegrass, and old-time country recordings, genres of which I was not a fan before seeing the film. These songs in turn led me to appreciate folk (Bob Dylan) and newgrass (Nickel Creek) artists of which I am a fan.
Other media-spanning fandoms include my excitement for “The Big Sleep,” knowing that it starred Bogart (who I had seen in “The Maltese Falcon”) and was co-written by William Faulkner (whose work I was familiar with). This kind of cross-pollination is part of what keeps me coming back to fan texts. Interconnections and links are what make fandom that much more interesting.
Ultimately, I am a fan because I am willing to let texts have an influence on the way I think and live, and because I have faith in the media world to continue to produce interesting a meaningful texts.
UPDATE AFTER READING THE POSTED FANIFESTOES:
I suppose I should place myself on the canon/fanon spectrum, as many have done. Despite my devaluation of Pirates 2&3, I do tend to value canon over AU/Fanfic sources. Also, realizing the strictly-current focus of my fanifesto, I figured I should mention my childhood fandom of Star Wars (I may have read the same Star Wars Encyclopedia that Ben mentions). I was also a huge Lord of the Rings fan (I dressed up for the premieres of TT and RotK), enough to buy a linguistic text book on Tolkien’s languages, and wonder why Craig Williamson’s syllabus for this semester’s Tolkien/Pullman course abbreviates the series as “LoR” as opposed the ‘real’ abbreviation “LotR” (the above is a grammatical use of a slash, not a reference to slasher fic). I have a homemade pirate flag hanging on my wall. I believe in Batman. That is all.
I definitely have been spending a lot of time on trying to figure out how this isn’t going to be painfully long. I consider myself to be really into a lot of different things, so I don’t know where to draw the line. I suppose my original fan activity was with the Ninja Turtles when I was real young. I watched multiple episodes a day everyday for years. I was a Ninja Turtle or at least just a Ninja like 5 Halloweens in a row. I had three Christmas’ also in a row where I asked for nothing but Turtle action figures or other memorabilia. (My mom still likes to affectionately refer to them as the Totally Turtle Christmas’.) And it is still a big part of me. I don’t watch the show anymore, but my Turtle knowledge rivals the best in the biz.
Moving on, for as long as I can remember I have had videogames and were playing them often. Until the newer ones, I owned every worthwhile system that came out, including gems like Sega Master System and Turbo Graphics. As far as fandom goes, I am still a huge fan of the older generation systems and games. I have virtually every SNES (super Nintendo) game on my computer, and the attachment that lets me use PS2 controllers on my comp, so I can play the ROMS with a good controller. My favorite genre, and where I have spent most of my fan hours, is RPG’s (Role-playing games.) There are a few SNES RPG’s that I have beaten like 5 times, and the average play time for those games one time through is like 40 hours. The Final Fantasy series is by far my most favorite and the most meaningful to me. I have watched and read so many Final Fantasy related things on the internet. One of my favorite activities is going on Wikipedia and reading the article on one of the games and hitting almost every link article. I end up reading family trees of minor characters. I was also very addicted to World of Warcraft for a good year, and I still Lan Jam twice a year at home.
In books, I pretty much only read sci-fi/fantasy or suspense novels. Stephen King is my favorite author, but Lord of the Rings are my favorite books. Last year I finished the Dark Tower series, and definitely got into some fandom with that. That’s another good opportunity for Wikipedia. I read character bio’s, monster origins, even reasons to why certain cities in the books were named. Recently I am very entranced by the Star Wars Extended Universe. I love Star Wars to death nowadays, and was so lucky to come across the extended universe. All of the authors use their peers work in their own, they reference other Star Wars books even if the authors have never met. If they write a sanctioned Star Wars book, it makes a permanent mark on the world. And Wookiepedia is the best website ever.
Concluding, I am a huge Simpsons, Heroes, Lost, Aqua Teen, Arrested Development and more fan. And I am obsessed with movies as well. I watch a couple a week. But I feel like I have gone on too long, so the TV and movie obsession will have to come out in class or later posts. Until then.
I have always had an obsessive personality. When I was young the object of my obsession was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I watched the show religiously and forced my mom to buy me the new Leonardo and Donatello toys whenever a new line of toys would come out. It worked out nicely because my little brother shared a similar affection for Raphael and Michelangelo. Unfortunately, my sister was too young so April O’Neil was left out. My TMNT phase led me naturally to watching the X-Men and the Spider-Man cartoons, because they played back to back to back on Saturday mornings. Wolverine was and still is my favorite X-Man. In fact my favorite football player for a time was a back up running back for the Miami Dolphins named Marc Logan because his last name happened to be Wolverine’s real name. I never got into the comics but I was able to rekindle my love for the super heroes with the help of 6 terrific movies, and yes I loved them all, even the widely criticized X3 and Spider-Man 3.
I am a huge fan of movies in general. I have a constantly expanding collection of over 200 DVDs that are alphabetized and cataloged in my computer. I know the exact number but I don’t want to sound too much like Rain Man in the post, so I left it out. Although I love all movies, I have a soft spot in my heart for zombie films. I only saw my first zombie movie during my freshman year at Swat, but I was fortunate to have that movie be the Godfather of zombie movies, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I saw the colorized version first and immediately bought the movie so I could rewatch it in all of its grainy, black and white, glory. I was instantly hooked. I watched the next two Romero zombie films during the same week and saw the midnight showing of Land of the Dead when it came out. I believe I have seen about 20 zombie films now and that is not counting 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later movies. As I said in class, I am a zombie snob, and despite being fantastic movies, they do not feature the living dead, they feature the very angry and rage infected living. In case you were wondering, the worst movie ever made is a zombie movie called Zombie Nation. It is not so bad that it is good, it is so bad that I fear that may be turned to stone if I ever watch it again. My dreams came true when two of my favorite fandoms collided in the comic book series Marvel Zombies.
As was alluded to in a previous post, I am quite insistent on introducing people to my fandoms. If anyone in here wants to introduce a significant other to the zombie genre, Fido is a great first choice. To borrow from Shaun of the Dead, it is a great romantic zomedy. I’m into some TV shows, but I always seem to catch on the tail end of the series. I watched the Sopranos sporadically during its run but watched every one in succession during the last semester. I’m sure I will pick up a new series this semester, because I can justify it as homework. I am also really into Scrubs and South Park. As I am writing this my girlfriend is amazed at how I could leave out my sports obsession, because she says I check ESPN.com every 15 minutes. But as Bill Parcells says in the Coors Light commercial, “That’s a good thing. Not a bad thing.” The only aspect of overt fandom that I participate in is that I check IMDb.com as soon as I finish watching a movie, even if I have seen the movie and the board 1000s of times before. I haven’t really posted on there, but I really enjoy hearing other fans’ takes on the movie and derive maybe even more pleasure from reading haters’ opinions. I am currently trying to write a movie with my younger brother. It is a crime drama that can best be described I think as a cross between the Sting and Bluehill Avenue. I think that I have always had the heart of a fan but I have only seen the ostracized nature of fandom. Hopefully, this class will give me a chance to garner a more positive experience of fandom. As I think there is a latent fan gene in my family as I have found out recently that my dad is a closet Trekkie.
First of all, I have to say that I’m really enjoying reading everyone’s comments. That’s what I’m a fan of, truly, other fans, fandom in general. Yes I have fannish texts that I enjoy (the ubiquitous Harry Potter, LOTR, Stargate: Atlantis, DC Comics, Smallville, and that’s just stuff I consider myself a fan of, not counting the stuff I enjoy in a slightly different way) and I really do enjoy them (I have been know to jump up and down squeeing) but I enjoy stories about the texts more.
I think of my fannishness as beginning when I told myself stories about Lord of the Rings when I first read them at age 11. I’ve always enjoyed reading, and I like reading series, so fanfic is excellent in that it means that there are series that *never end*. Tolkien will never write another book about Middle Earth (and fanfic probably has him spinning in his grave), but there will always be more fic out there for me to read.
The thing that I really like about fans, and the idea of being fannish, is the passion that people bring to it. It’s the thing that fans get the most crap for in their depiction in the mainstream, caring too much, but I love it. Hearing about the things that fans are passionate about, and seeing it through their eyes, even if only for a second, is great. The reason that I love fandom, and other fans, is seeing things through other’s eyes, and then realizing that you’re all coming at it with the same enthusiasm, is a great way to build a community.
I like a lot of things, but from the description of fans brought up in the two introductions (more specifically Jenkins), I’m not sure if I am one. Jenkins refutes de Certau’s notion that “readers’ activities can only be theorized, not documented.” (Jenkins, 3) Jenkins, on the other hand, thinks that we can theorize about readers’ (or fans’, at least) activities through their production. That theme of fans as both consumers and producers came up a lot in both introductions. In Jenkins, I got the sense that it was very important for fans to forge a community with other fans. I think that sentiment was present in the introduction by Gray et al., but to a lesser extent because that collection is trying to create a wider-ranging collection of fan studies, so they focus less on the idea of the creation of a subaltern community. If, according the Jenkins, in order to be a fan, one must consume, produce, and forge community, then I am probably not a fan. I consume, but I do not produce, and in terms of forging community, the closest thing that I can think of was when I watch America’s Next Top Model in the Shane Student Lounge and a number of people I didn’t know joined me. In thinking about that more, I guess that was forging a community. In the vein of Benedict Anderson, America’s Next Top Model had created an imagined community of which I was a part, along with people with whom I would normally not interact.
The assignment of the “fanifesto” brought up a lot of things for me. For one, I was forced to question why I actually want to take the class. I don’t particularly identify very strongly with any sort of fad or subculture. If you had asked me when I was 14, I would have said the punk scene, but as I’ve aged (ok, so it’s only been seven years, but still), I’ve realized that I don’t know what I really like. What would I do anything for? What’s something that I would forgo homework for?
And then I realized that it’s very hard for me to enjoy something for the pure pleasure of it.
Perhaps everyone has this same feeling. Perhaps everyone who loves to read fan fic and who does cosplay do not do it for the pure enjoyment. Perhaps everyone who knows all of the details of Star Trek (and every generation thereof) does not enjoy it just because.
People in the class mentioned “trashy television shows” and I too watch those until 5 AM. Tila Tequila, Project Runway, America’s Next Top Model, Beauty and the Geek… all of these shows take up time I could be using to write my thesis. But no, I care more about Tila’s craaaaaaaazy (and totally exploited) bisexuality than the women I interviewed in China who have to hide their sexuality.
I wonder if I actually like these shows or if I am fascinated by the phenomena they represent. A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila is a fascinating example of the fetishization of non-mainstream sexualities. Project Runway frames fashion as contemporary art and makes the viewer think about current social issues and the affect they have on aesthetics. Also, the designers only design for women (except for one or two challenges). What does that mean? America’s Next Top Model is very interesting in terms of performance theory and aesthetics. When I watch it, I’m fascinated by the performance of gender and race on the show. When Tyra says “You really need to embody your culture” to a Latina model, what does that mean? Beauty and the Geek advertises itself as a “social experiment”: can dorky guys teach hot girls to be smart? Can hot girls teach dorky guys to be cool? This past season, “the experiment” had “evolved,” so there was one team that was a hot, cool guy and a dorky girl. However, because the challenges were so gendered (they rely on the fact that the “beauties” probably are afraid of creepy-crawly things) that the new hot guy/dorky girl couple got to the final two. Then the producers did things differently this season and America (through calling and text messaging) decided the winner. Go figure.
I was relieved when we read the introductions to both Textual Poachers and Fandom. I was happy to see that this class was not just about talking about who our favorite x’s and y’s are. While that’s a totally valid past time, I think it’s so interesting to get to the phenomena surrounding the texts rather than the texts themselves. Rather, in Textual Poachers, Jenkins alludes to the power struggle between sub and supercultures, as well as the construction of alternative social communities and texts. Regarding the power struggle of sub and supercultures alluded to in Jenkins’ introduction, the quote by Renato Rosaldo establishes a network-like power structure reminiscent of Foucault. Through the evocation of a Foucaultian power network, Jenkins hinted at the idea (although not as explicitly as Gray et al.) that it is not majority and other. Although fans (particularly fans of television shows and movies) have been singled out as the other, they are intricately connected to the “masses” through the consumption of and production of texts. Gray et al. briefly referenced Said when discussing periphery social circles and the mainstream because one cannot exist without the other. I thought Gray et al. did a very good job of establishing the idea that in this fan/mainstream culture debate, power is not hierarchical (again, like Foucault). Rather, it is exchanged in a weblike manner, and fans and other subaltern communities do have their hand in power at times. I think it’s so important to keep in mind in this class that it’s not “us versus them” or the “self/other” debate. Fandom is interwoven with popular culture and mass media, especially in this ever-globalizing world.
If this sounded preachy, I’m very sorry. That was not what I intended. Within the first two days of class, I started to feel like the “other” because I didn’t know who Optimus Prime was. There was a fan community forged in the classroom of which I was not a part. This is more for me. I just need to remember that this is not a struggle between the mainstream and periphery.
I’ve never really considered myself anything other than a fan. I’ve always been interested in something, some sort of obsession, a thing that consumes my imagination and drives me to seek out knowledge. When I was young, it was trains and clocks, I loved them and would cut out magazine pages if they showed watch adverts on them. When I got older, it was Star Wars; I could quote the movies and place music with scenes. My bookshelves were full of the novels, I think I read every one until the Vong series. My next obsession was fantasy novels, then anime. There’s never been a point in my life, at least as far as I can remember, that I wasn’t a fan of at least something.
Yet to what I was a fan changed. Not merely because of changing interests, but because of what I was going through at the time. Up until 9th grade I was an obsessive Star Wars and, to a lesser extent, fantasy novel fan. This was a fandom which I kept to myself, something private. I knew all about Star Wars because I read about it alone. It was solitary, private. Middle school was a solitary time for me. I didn’t have many friends and stayed in on weekends. My fandom reflected that. It was a private affair, one that was for me and for me alone. As time wore on, however, my fandom, and its nature changed.
Throughout high school and into my sophomore year of college, I was a gigantic anime and manga fan. I loved it. If it was Japanese and animated I’d watch it or read it. Even more so, I’d read fanfictions about shows I liked, even writing one or two (like the 1 non-slash Gundam Wing fanfiction ever). I began to become a social fan, drawing out of my shell and bringing others into my fandoms. I watched anime with others, discussed shows at school, and joined an anime club. Most of this had to do with the fact that I had moved to a new school in 9th grade. I had begun to make friends, reaching out to others and finding companions where before I was alone. My fandom reflected that, I was still solitary at times, but, now I shared my fandom, watched shows with others. No longer was I cooped up in my room, reading and absorbing without sharing, now I was a social fan, or some semblance of such. I watched with others, went to cons, talked about the likes and possible pairings (yes, even I, as a straight male, admit some slash pairings are pretty damn adorable). I had friends, a social life, and my fandom reflected that.
Which brings me to today. I still enjoy anime, certainly possessing over 1000 hours of shows on external hard drives and on DVDs, but it’s not as all consuming as it once was when I was in highschool and my first few years of college. Today, my fandom of choice is a social one, a roleplaying game. It’s a fandom that cannot be solitary, its very existence requires others to partake in it. The very action of indulging in a game is sharing your fandom with others. This reflects my life now. I have friends, people to share my fandom with. I no longer have to keep even a part private as I always have people to share with me. My social life is important now, and I see people frequently enough that I don’t need to fall back on a private aspect of fandom. What’s going on in my life has changed, and my fandom has reflected that.
I grew up in a house that happened to contain every Star Trek episode and video, with a father who could recite entire Star Trek films line by line (Just ask my mother). Granted, my dad cannot speak Vulcan, but I can still remember testing his memory about each episode and video shelved in our house. We currently own Spock Christmas decorations, a Spock mug (that I was so callous as to use once…oops), a communicator complete with sound effects, and a model Voyager. We also have a closet downstairs full of videos, even though our house no longer has a tape player.
My own identification as a fan did not happen for sometime. Having moved six times in my life — from the north to the south, from America to England — big changes in culture and social circles was a common for me every three to four years. As a result, I have always hated picking “favorites.” Choosing favorites felt like a betrayal to me (for example: Who is your best friend?) thus I generally refused to do so. Despite my best efforts, however, I discovered my first and last favorite band in eighth grade. I heard “Round Here” by Counting Crows on the radio and it turned into that song that I listened to on repeat until I knew all the words and then some. For Christmas that year I asked for all their CDs, and as I become familiar with the illegal download scene on my computer, I began my collection of live-versions of songs, rare songs, covers, and demo tracks. Using annabegins.com, I memorized lyrics of all the versions of songs. I currently have 77 songs on my computer complimenting 8 CDs. My senior year in high school I wrote a research paper on Counting Crows for my English class, which justified the time I was spending finding all of the subtle symbolism, repeated images and characters in their songs. More than once I have given the research paper to my friends, along with a three-disc mix of Counting Crows songs in an effort to spread the CC love. There is a gaping hole in my fandom, however, and that is the fact that I have yet to see them live myself. I’m not sure if that makes me a closet fan, or if that fact denies me the title of fan, but it has yet to happen.
My second and most recent encounter with fandom came when my friend introduced me to the TV series ALIAS. That is the only TV show through out high school and college that I made every effort to watch every week it was on. When it was out of season, I was re-watching old seasons that I received as gifts or simply bought myself. I have watched each season at least five times, and with each revisit I have introduced friends and attempted to suck them into my love for ALIAS. (More than once, it has worked.) My parents once bought me a fan-book with a DVD full of extras and interviews; however, I never really read all the way through it. I am less interested in the things that don’t happen within the show. I liked the episodes themselves, and when the show was on I liked trying to predict what would happen, but I never participated in fan sites or prediction forums online. I just watched the show, and all my friends knew not to call during that hour.
As for right now, I get some satisfaction out of trashy TV shows and celebrity gossip magazines, but rarely go out of my way to find them. I’m in a pretty apathetic fan stage right now, but I did see an actor from Alias, Greg Grunberg (who is also in Heros now) while I was in LA over winter break. It was fitting that my first celebrity sighting was a character from Alias. And now, quite frankly, I can die happy.
I think it is safe to say that I am a pretty huge fan of television in general. Although at any given time I have a few shows that I watch on a regular basis, such as Scrubs, The Office, Prison Break, etc. I can usually sit down in front of the television and find something to watch. I would say, however, that the nature of my television fandom has changed significantly since being in college. With the ability to download TV shows on the internet, I no longer feel the need to watch an episode the first time it airs. Also, once stores started selling entire seasons of shows on DVD, I found myself becoming a fan of shows that I never watched while they were still on television, like Sex and the City, for example. Being able to watch entire seasons of shows in marathon form was appealing to me, and is now my viewing method of choice for many of my favorite shows.
Since the time I was about 10 or 11, I have also been a huge fan of musical theater, particularly Broadway shows. My first show was Beauty and the Beast, and since then I have seen about fifteen other musicals on Broadway alone. If I included musicals I have seen in smaller, local theaters, musicals I have actually participated in, and film versions of older musicals, that would probably bring the number up to about thirty. I’ve always enjoyed dance and music, so the musical is a perfect form of entertainment for me. In musicals, you name it, and they sing and dance about it, and I just cannot seem to get enough of it. In addition, although not all musicals end happily ever after, the overwhelming majority of them do, which is ideal for a hopeless romantic like myself. Finally, I think that the environment and overall experience of attending Broadway shows has been a large part of my fandom, especially since I have come to associate Broadway musicals with close family and friends
I also must confess to being a huge fan of Disney movies. I know what you are thinking, “A 21-year-old college student about to enter the real world is still a fan of Disney?” Yes, it is true. I mean, when I was younger, it was pretty safe to assume that all my friends were also fans, but it is much harder to come across a person my age who is willing and eager to watch a Disney movie for a little bit of rest and relaxation. When the most recent Disney film, Enchanted, came out, I didn’t rush to see it on opening night, but I did see it within a week of its opening. The moment I got home from the movie theater, I downloaded the soundtrack so I could continue singing the songs to my heart’s content. Like the nature of my love of musicals, I think I have remained a Disney fan because of the overwhelming notion that dreams can come true and that everyone can find their happily ever after. I suppose it’s my romantic and optimistic side getting the best of me once again.
I think the best way to describe my various fandoms over the years would be to say that they have been fairly sporadic and often developed based on the similar interests of my family and friends. I became a fan of many of my favorite television shows and movies because I knew it would provide me another common interest with the people closest to me. I would not go as far as to consider myself a bandwagon fan though, because I do not typically catch on to the shows that seem to create the largest pop culture followings, such as The OC, Dawson’s Creek, The Simpsons, Grey’s Anatomy, etc. I would also say that my fandom is more personal than it is a part of a larger network of fans. My identity as a fan serves a social purpose, but is still restricted to a small group of family and friends. I have never read fanfic, nor become part of discussion groups or other forums with other fans. Until I entered this class, I really had no idea that this whole world of fandom even existed, so I am really looking forward to learning from the fan experiences of other members of this class.
As a last minute addition to my fanifesto, after reading the intro to Fandom, I must admit that I am also a HUGE theory fan. Throughout high school, mostly because of being a debater, my book shelf went through a serious transition from novels to theory texts (Foucault, Baudrillard, Butler, etc.). For me, theory fandom affected my cases in debate and my essays in class, as well as how I perceive the world.
I am a fan of many things and a fanatic about none. I’ve watched every episode of “Firefly” multiple times, but have never read the fan fiction; I have perused some fan fiction for “Harry Potter,” but I hate the films; I’ve done more than one “Lord of the Rings” film marathon in my short time on Earth, but I only read the books once, and let’s face it, I was bored; I’ve had the Is-Rogue-Lame-Or-Not-Lame debate, but I am totally unqualified to participate in that forum, and secretly I couldn’t care less about the outcome. (Pretty much what I care most about in “X-Men” is Hugh Jackman, shirtless.) My participation as a fan in various cultures tends to be casual, sporadic, and probably fantastically uninteresting. I am too little involved in the fandom to keep up my end of the conversation with most people of that ilk and too entertained by fan fiction, fan videos, and celebrity gossip to be taken seriously by die-hard canon fans.
Ultimately, I’ve never been interested in mastery, but entertainment. The second I stop being entertained, I stop watching/reading/obsessing. I ducked out of my “Animorphs” obsession somewhere around book 20 and have never looked back. I feel no loyalty to any author that compels me to read or see everything they’ve ever done, just because it was done by them. I enjoy the feeling of silliness that comes over me whenever I re-start David Eddings’ “Belgariad” for the zillionth time, even though I know he’s a Tolkien-hack and a terrible writer. I’ll gladly concede your superior command of the “Harry Potter” lexicon as long as you won’t be too annoyed if I just curl up over here in the corner with my book, giggling.
This isn’t to say that I don’t love a good conversation about the books/movies/films/sordid celebrity lives that I keep up with. But I think that maybe I’ve become too much of a critic to dive headlong into fandom and never look back. In my experience, hard-core fans and I are on a slightly different wavelength. I dissect things—I like to ask what makes me enjoy this so much, how is this book well-written, is this a “good” film or just a fun film? (I will, for example, defend to the death the real cinematic value of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but I’ll make no such attempt at justifying my love for “Constantine.”) That’s part of why I took this class: I’m interested in how things appeal to fans on different levels. Why does one thing develop mere popularity and another “fandom”?
The final barrier for me to all-consuming participation in fandom is my strict belief in the separation between fandom and cannon. I try to avoid judging authors for not fulfilling my agenda. I can complain that Draco Malfoy is an underdeveloped character in books one through five, but I can’t fault J.K. Rowlings above any other children’s writer for not making him gay. Just because I love “Harry Potter” more than most children’s books doesn’t obligate J.K. Rowlings to do things to fulfill my social agenda that other authors wouldn’t. I was also saddened and annoyed when I realized that part of the experience of the last “Harry Potter” book was spoiled for me because it felt like a fan fiction I had read (Cassandra Claire’s “Draco Trilogy,” for the curious). I would have rather had the fan fiction ruined because it felt too much like the book.
Finally, while writing this I was struck by the fact that I have very few fan obsessions that are active—most of the things I consider myself fairly invested in are series that have been finished or cancelled. I’m not sure what this says about me, but it’s probably something deep and important.
First of all, let me start by saying- writing this was a struggle. There is a reason that I’m posting this at the very last minute; I struggled to think of anything to which I devote enough attention to call myself a fan of. So as you read along, know that this is equally enlightening for me as it is you.
I’ve played soccer since I could walk. Up until this, my senior year, I have always been on at least one team (before college, at least two). So this sport always has, and will be a large part of me, especially since my sister is a phenom, who is at the camp for the Women’s National Team as I type this. She’s 19. I know that as an athlete you are taught to be a student of the game, and learn from those who have gone further. But even as someone who played on up to 5 soccer teams at once, I still hardly ever watched professional teams.
Does that discredit me as a soccer fan? I love the game, all who know me can attest to that. I am an astute observer, and can analyze the tactics of a game with scholarly accuracy, but as soon as anyone starts talking Premiership, or Serie A, or Budes Liga, I freeze. What does that make me? I guess the answer lies in the personal motives behind my viewership shortcomings, but the funny part about it is there are none. I didn’t have cable in my house. I didn’t have internet until my senior year. Not only could my parents not afford either, but I was never home to watch, even if I could. When you’re on 5 soccer teams, the practices and games consume your life. I can’t help but laugh at the irony. Notwithstanding, when I did watch the odd match over a friends’ houses, I loved it. It just never took.
The one aspect of my fandom that I am a little more in tune with is my exponentially growing obsession for films. Not movies- films. As I have always had an interest in the production of visual narrative, my knowledge of the art also grows, and organically branching from that is an appreciation for those who do it best. Abbas Kiarostami, Wong Kar-Wai, Bergman, and Roy Andersson are some of my favorites, most of whom are LEGENDS in the festival circuit. Because my personal leanings tends to be satisfied by these types of films, I am an avid reader of anything that has to do with the latest Festivals. I have been glued to my computer lately, reading up on updates about Sundance, for instance.
While some would call me a film elitist, I am definitely a more humble television viewer. As my Dad would put it, I watch TV to “mind dump” rather than to get anything personal out of it, so I love the shamelessly superficial teen dramas, and shows that seem to just go on and on, like Lost and Prison Break. But with that said, I have never seen a full season of any of them. What does that say about me?
As part of an extended joke, my roommate crocheted me this tiny stuffed octopus. (I have a bizarre emotional relationship to marine life which we will here pass over without explanation.) Last night I was sitting at the kitchen table while my roommate lingered over dinner, gazing into my octopus’s big beady eyes and making jokes for her benefit, and I said to her,
“My love for this octopus is fannish.”
I’d hit on something, I realized, and continued.
“I love it in exactly the fan way. I have this big impulse to introduce it to a bunch of other people who will love it exactly the same way I do so we can tell each other a bunch of stories about it.”
“That’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard,” my roommate said.
But! That is what fandom is for me: the creative, communal, and iterative processing of a mutually fascinating idea. One of the reasons I love fandom, I think, is that it puts me in that place I was as a little girl telling stories about my Barbie dolls with my friends. When I make art (which, uh, I do; my extremely tiny career as a poet and fiction writer is older than my life in fandom) it is often reactive in this way. I start with response, with participation, never with a wholly original idea. I think this is a pretty good model for thinking about all art, actually!
*
But I realize I’m not actually talking about fandom yet. Uh, let me back up. There are a bunch of artistic texts I love without feeling I’m a fan of. My roommate and I, for example, have steadily worked our way through all of Six Feet Under (thanks, McCabe!) and now Big Love. We watch those shows in a way a lot of people, I think, would identify as fannish: we set aside time to watch them; we gaze at the TV screen in fascination; we care about the characters (I for one have a big talking-back-to-the-TV problem) and analyze the plot developments with pleasure. But for whatever reason (ahem: the qualities in a television show that provoke fannish/cult/participatory response are long debated) I’ve never wanted to enter and transform their worlds.
So what do I enter and transform?
*
Uh, let me back up. Sitting down with the exercise of writing my fanifesto, I found myself conflicted. Here’s what’s up: I find myself very reluctant to share any details of my fannish involvement for the benefit of people who don’t already understand my perspective from the inside, or who don’t already have the information and tools to understand.
I can’t give the nuts-and-bolts details of my life as a fan (here’s a link to the story I read last night! here’s my take on the latest flamewar!), and I can’t drop the lingo (“slash”, etc.) like a native speaker, if I am attempting to give a responsible account of what-fandom-is-to-the-outsider.
I feel pretty strongly that I can’t communicate what it’s like for me personally as a fan unless it comes in the same breath as a more scholarly account, a historical and theoretical wide view of fandom. (There were a lot of italics in that sentence, I know. But those are each important points!)
*
Let me back up. I know I’m not talking to a room full of total strangers, “mundanes” (nb: I do LOATHE that science-fiction-fan affectation of calling non-science-fiction-fans “mundanes”) who have come to gawk at me like tourists at the zoo.
I’ve read Henry Jenkins; I use YouTube and Wikipedia; I wrote a (disorganized but extremely heartfelt!!) paper for Tim Burke about fandom and Web 2.0; I see important and sometimes beautiful connections between me-the-fanfiction-reader and the guy who compulsively reads webcomics or the girl who reads People Magazine at the gym.
But just as importantly, I can’t ignore the moments of discontinuity between us. Let me back up. No. Ugh! I want to talk about fandom but I can’t do it right now, in this space, I can’t be straightforward and distill it into bumper-sticker-length definitions (as in our Lexicon space, above) or insincerely breezy references to my bizarre emotional overidentification with Ray Kowalski (or my crocheted octopus, for that matter).
*
I don’t know, whatever. This blog comment is about to be overdue so here I post without proofreading. No stirring conclusion!
I guess a good way to describe me is as a well-rounded fan. I have been known to obsess over most (if not all) aspects of popular cultures, including: sports, music, stars and Hollywood culture, tv, movies and the occasional fanfic. But I’ve never been in love with something for a long period of time, instead I have deep passions that last a few years at most and then dissipate once I move on to something new.
I’ll start with marching band/football. For me, it was as much about the free front row seats to Strath Haven football games* as it was about creating music and performing. To be able to follow the team and cheer them on through championships each year was an amazing experience for me. My understanding and love of football grew from my Friday nights and carried over into Sunday Eagles game days. On one hand, I shared high school football with my friends and fellow band mates while I shared the intense emotions associated with the Eagles with my family. But don’t confuse me with the other diehard Philly fans; while I do know the Eagles fight song, I don’t have any memorabilia on my car and I don’t listen to the talk shows constantly. And now that they have repeatedly let me down, it’s hard for me to invest energy in them. Yet, in most cases I’m a social fan as I seek to share my passion with others. (*you should go check out a game. The marching band boasts over 300 people and the show is certainly a loud experience if nothing else… plus home games are under a 5 minute drive from campus.)
I also am a big music fan, in the sense that I listen to the same core group of musicians constantly. While other bands and songs rotate in and out of my life, anyone who knows me, understands that the reigning king of my heart and music library is Damien Rice. Otherwise, my music core is mostly compiled of Jose Gonzalez, Ani Difranco, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and a few others. I cherish each one of these artists because they’ve provided me with songs that speak to me, explain/justify my emotions, and are associated with different events throughout my life. Plus, I know that the music and its messages will always be with me.
I think music plays an especially important role in my fan life because my first “fan memory” is of Michael Jackson. I remember flipping out – screeching, jumping and more- over receiving his greatest hits compilation cd – I couldn’t have been older than six. I frequently listened to it until I grew out of it and MJ went officially crazy. From there, music has also introduced me to the concert – collective consumption – experience. My first pop concert without my parents (so this excludes Tina Turner and also Earth, Wind and Fire) was the Spice Girls and was followed quickly by the Backstreet Boys (yes, I am product of my generation and I am not ashamed). Since then, I’ve been to too many concerts and all day festivals to count – but the highlights have definitely been the three Damien Rice concerts. It’s interesting to note that I recently talked to someone about why they didn’t like a Counting Crows concert because the songs didn’t sound the same as they did on the record. But to me, the whole beauty of concerts is releasing the songs I cherish back to the artists so that they can recreate them and provide me with yet a new (shared) dimension to the music – Ani and Damien are both great at this.
Finally- coming back to television. The first show I ever became obsessed with was Roswell, during middle school, but I’d – more or less – always been a television viewer and interested in specific shows. I was all about TGIF. But, from Roswell, I became involved in a number of sci-fi-ish shows, including: Smallville, The 4400, and Heroes; but I don’t think there is a common genre connecting my interests since I love an assortment of shows from What Not to Wear and Project Runway to Entourage and The L Word. Yet while I’m certain I’ll enjoy certain shows, I know I could not realistically commit to them so I refuse to watch.
In addition, while I have a bad habit of vegging in front of the tv alone for hours watching movies and random shows, I especially enjoy sharing the experience. For instance, in high school, every week two of my friends and I would meet up and watch the latest episode of Alias, then analyze it and predict what we think would happen next. This habit of communal television has been oddly reinforced in college due to the lack of screens. Freshman year, my hall and I had SVU Sundays where we would watch 1 or 2 episodes together and last year, I had a crew of people I’d watch Grey’s and Heroes with.
On the other hand, when I occasionally read fan fiction it is much more of an individual experience. But canons typically mean so much more to me than the fanfic. The fanfic simply provides an outlet for me to imagine other possible storylines and relationships that I would have instantly created if I worked for the show – when will Betty and David come to their senses?! Or if I’m just so in love that I can’t admit that my viewing experience is over – guilty pleasure fanfic + canon = Cruel Intentions.
Finally, I didn’t notice at the time, but my column I co-wrote my freshman year was a clear sign of my love for all things entertainment. And my obsessive IMDb stalking is also driven by my love of stars and the entertainment industry. So overall, I guess my experience as a culture consumer has risen questions about how my fan status influences the production of the media I love.