three links for my fandom friends

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Okay, so the truth is I just stole these wholesale from toft_froggy. But I know I’ve got people on my flist who think thinky thoughts about fanfic, and I suspect these links will provoke much thinky thoughtness for them.

What Started It All: thingswithwings posting about Merlin fandom and the ways in which fandom migrations occur. (Can I just say I love the phrase “fandom migrations”? The mental images are great.)

In Which the Comments Blew Up: various people pick apart reasons for participating in a fandom and what it means to say it’s “just for fun/pleasure.” (Okay, I didn’t read the whole thread, because there’s a bit where it explodes and I didn’t feel like following it. But I read the stuff I didn’t have to hit “expand” for.)

A Typological (Not Typical) Response: miriam_heddy sorts out patterns in the comments to the previous post — so you don’t have to! (Haven’t read the comments here, though. I only have so much time in my life.)

My take? I think there is a degree of social responsibility in choosing one’s fandom, because if giant flocks of ficcers descend upon a show, then it’s a form of positive feedback to the people who write and produce that show. And if they can attract massive fan interest despite being racist and sexist and what-have-you, then I do think it encourages more writing in that vein. (Or at the very least, it doesn’t encourage them to improve.) So I sympathize with thingswithwings‘s reaction, in the vein of, dude, what if we poured all this love and creative effort into stuff that doesn’t have those flaws? And I do not — sorry, folks — sympathize much with the “but life is hard and I watch this stuff for brainless fun” response, because if your brainless fun involves consuming intellectual poison (“women with power are eeeevil!,” frex), then yes, I’m going to judge you for that. Things can be fun and good. What a novel idea!

Huh. I must be getting over the Respiratory Bug of Suck Unidentified Viral Infection, if I have the energy to engage with this.

Edited to add: An excellent comment by cryptoxin, which very tidily (though with heavy use of academispeak) sums up the aspect I latched onto in the original post. Rather than making tempests in teacups about whether thingswithwings is just upset that everybody’s leaving her fandom for a new one, I wish more people would engage with this part of the question.

0 Responses to “three links for my fandom friends”

  1. misterseth

    Like the Clearbrook Icon!

    • Marie Brennan

      I post about comics rarely enough that I also use her as my fandom-related icon — since, had I known what fanfic was and had access to these kinds of communities when I was thirteen, I totally would have been posting Elfquest fanfic. ^_^

  2. Anonymous

    You mean women with power aren’t evil? Shit, I’ve got to change my entire world-view now.

    Random slightly related tangent to my above comment: Did I ever mention that on the list of, “Things I’m sad were cut from the Mummy game due to time” was that originally Samantha was supposed to, through Beck, and then more directly through Hashim and Kalil, become a ridiculously powerful hedge mage. She was going to be the only person that had the possibility of surviving the, “murder of all the PC’s loved ones” stuff near the end. If she didn’t survive she was at least going to go down fighting and take a bunch of nasties with her. I’m really sad I couldn’t put that in.

    More on-topic as a whole though: I’ve found myself actually pondering over a conundrum like this recently. A week or so ago I borrowed two trade paperbacks of Walking Dead from Jason Pisano. In case you’re not familiar, Walking Dead is an ongoing comic set in a post zombie-apocalypse. The only way it could be more up my alley is if it was also set on Mars.

    After reading the first two volumes, I’ve checked and there’s actually nine volumes of TPBs out, and I’m struggling over whether or not I should buy them for myself and keep reading. The writing, and by that I mean quality of the prose, isn’t great. It isn’t terrible, but it’s not great. I would call it average. Story-wise, the first volume is okay. The second volume is a definite improvement, to the point where I might even call it good. Here’s the big problem though: It’s really really sexist. Not to the point where all of the men are constantly referring to the women as bitches and ho’s or anything like that but still everything significant is done by the male characters, the female character are kept from doing anything significant by the male characters who are in general over-protective of all of the women. Only one female character has mentioned this once (and she was just bitching about it to the other women, not actually doing anything constructive about it) in the first volume, and no one has said anything about it since then.

    I’m wondering to myself, if this sexism continues throughout the whole run of the comic can I handle it? If it continues throughout the whole run of the comic, should I support it? Then I started wondering to myself whether or not the sexism is there because that’s just the way the writer is and he doesn’t realize he’s doing it? After all none of it has been of the, “women with power are evil” variety, it has pretty much just been all of the men being over protective of the women, and the women for the most part just accepting that. It’s sexist in very traditional ways, the women go off to do the laundry in a nearby creek, while the men go out hunting for food. Does that make it any better or more acceptable? Then I wonder whether the writer has intentionally put that sexism there. The main character is from Kentucky, and then the majority of the two books I read were set in Georgia. I know the statement I’m about to make may be problematic but; as someone originally from the west coast I have noticed that states likes Kentucky and then continuing south to states like Georgia tend to have more conservative social values, and therefore sometimes much more sexism in that traditional gender-roles, male over-protection of females kind of way. So, my though is, since this comic is set in these areas is the author intentionally putting this sexism there because he thinks that’s how people from those areas act? Is that okay? Then even further, and in relation to the ideas of your original post, whether the sexism is intentional or not, should I support this comic by buying it? I mean I really want to like it, ’cause you know. . . zombies, post-apocalypse, continuing story. . . how can I not like it?!? But if the sexism just keeps going, I don’t know if I can handle it. If it gets worse then I know I won’t be able to handle it. Now the question is raised of should I even support it?

    I guess it’ll come down to whether or not my desire for a long running post zombie-apocalypse comic will outweigh the problems I have with the sexism in the story.

    Tony

    • Anonymous

      And this was supposed to part of the above reply but I exceeded the character limit ’cause I’m so damn long winded:

      Incidentally, I’ve noticed myself, in the last week or so, doing a lot (boy I’m really going nuts with the bold thing) more critical thinking and analysis lately about well. . . everything. I’m not sure if I’ve always done this much critical thinking and analysis about stuff and I just never noticed it, or if I actually have been doing a lot more recently.

      Tony

    • Marie Brennan

      You did mention that about Samantha once, and it would have been cool. RPGs are an interesting case in and of themselves; I’ve heard of truly awful groups and GMs who treat female NPCs and even PCs in a sexist manner, but thank the Great God Gygax, I’ve never been within sniffing distance of one. So what happens with female (and minority) characters is much more negotiable, and in the hands of the players — which would be interesting all on its own to study. (Dammit, I do still miss grad school.)

      Your zombie series could be any one of a number of things: sexist writer, writer who assumes all Southerners are sexist, writer who wants to say interesting things about “old-fashioned” gender values in the South and will be complicating that picture as the story goes along. (The latter would be great, but it doesn’t sound too likely.) I kind of sympathize with where you’re at: I’ve started reading Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, and my level of interest is about at “check out from library but do not buy.” Now, I’m told, and I believe, that Butcher gets better at making it clear that Harry Dresden is sexist but Jim Butcher is not, so I don’t quite have the same problem you do; in my case, the things that annoy me are less ideologically problematic. But is that an option for you? The library does have some graphic novels, or maybe somebody in B-town has collected more of the series. In your shoes, I generally try to test the waters ahead before I hand over my money and my support for a story that might be going bad places.

      And there ain’t nuthin’ wrong with critical thinking. I find it quite fun — obviously. <g>

  3. anima_mecanique

    I have difficulty throwing stones at people who say “I like this shitty piece of media for reasons I can’t entirely articulate”, because, well…I obsessively read pulp fiction, which is just shitty media with a vague veneer of respectability laid over it because it’s old and some famous artists glommed onto some of it. The majority of my fanfic output these days, also, is based on video games, which are hardly bastions of literary merit (except the SNES RPG Earthbound, which I will defend to the death as a work of genius). I think I’m pretty good at articulating the things I like about, say, Fantômas, and to a lesser extent the video games thing, but a lot of other people aren’t, and so they fall back on “I watch it for fun!” when they really mean “I like exploring the implications of how magic works in this show” or “the haphazard mish-mash of genres is appealing” or something.

    Sometimes, “thing that is good” and “thing that inspires you to write”, or even “thing that has a good fandom”, is different. Avatar is a great show — the fandom, not so much. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a beautiful book that I loved more than I can possibly articulate, but I’m still over here writing fic about Final Fantasy 4, a game which features a castle full of ninjas. So, sometimes, when faced with a choice between “engage fannishly with the really well-done thing” or “engage fannishly with the thing that actually inspires me for whatever reason”, people are inclined to stick with the one that’s going to help them sustain their hobby. Whether or not that’s wrong is another argument, but I think that’s the real root of the “it’s for fun!” argument.

    Admittedly, though, I don’t really get the concept of migrating to a fandom you don’t like just because there are people there…I mean, I used to be in LOTR fandom, and many of the people I connected with in LOTR fandom have migrated to other stuff I don’t care about, but it’s not like we stopped talking or anything. I just can’t fathom the mindset that will sit through hours and hours of a show they hate just so they can read their friends’ fanfiction. Especially with TV shows, I mean…god, that’s a lot of time.

    • Marie Brennan

      That’s the thing that’s boggled me in scanning the comments — man, some people really do seem to go to a new fandom because that’s where their friends and the writers they admire have gone, and they don’t want to feel left out of the loop when half their flist is now writing about characters they’ve never heard of. (And then they claim it’s wrong to use the phrase “peer pressure” to describe the situation. O_O) Or — even better — people getting over, say, incest squick because all of their friends are now writing Wincest fics. I mean, really?

      What you say about what does and does not inspire you, though, brings up something I was wondering about last night: is there an inverse relationship between “quality of source” and “likelihood of ficcing”? It’s more or less an unanswerable question because there’s no solid way to measure quality, of course — but I wonder if a really tightly-written narrative offers fewer points of entry for a fanfic.

      As TWW says, one of the reasons you can slash Merlin so easily is that it’s all about the men, and the female characters are treated as tools in that (much more narratively interesting) dynamic. When I try to think of other texts I find very slashy, I find they fall into two categories: 1) things like Merlin (and Smallville, and apparently SGA), and 2) things that have already beaten me to it and made the slashy subtext into honest-to-god text (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Lymond, the anime X: 1999). At which point you’re really just shipping canon.

      I also wonder — and this is the point at which I don’t know what I’m talking about remotely well enough to have a leg to stand on, but that won’t stop me — whether you personally engage fannishly with a text, but do not as much engage with a fandom about a text? By which I mean, Jesus Christ, there’s this entire universe over there in which fandom migrations happen and people follow their favorite fanfic writers to shows they’re really not interested in and OMG there are always people bitching that everybody’s leaving their favorite fandom for some place newer and shinier and are you, personally, caught up in that? Or are you ficcing things, and sharing your fics, and reading other people’s fics, but not joining in that scale of activity? (I honestly don’t mean a judgment either way; I’m trying to suss out motives, here, and I suspect there may be differences on the Fantomas end of things, as opposed to the Merlin end.)

      • anima_mecanique

        I used to engage fandom a lot more than I do now, for the simple reason that most of my fandoms are pretty small. I used to be in LOTR fandom, though, which is pretty huge, and a lot of my friends there jumped ship eventually (though they mostly still go back to LOTR from time to time). I think, in my experience, being friends with someone through fandom is separate and not necessarily dependent upon continued fannish participation in the same things. I’m also probably more willing to listen to people talk about stuff I don’t know anything about — I like enthusiasm, I think. For instance, I have a fandom friend whom I mostly know as an Earthbound fan. However, she’s also really into Pokemon. I don’t give a shit about Pokemon, but I enjoy hearing her talk about it without feeling any need to go watch all four billion episodes of Pokemon and read all her fanfic, though I’ll take a look if she asks. *shrug*

        It might also be different for people who are mainly in one fandom. If you write SGA, well, there are a lot of people writing for SGA and talking about it and doing things. You could live your entire fannish life inside SGA. That’s not possible for, say, the Raffles fandom. It’s just too tiny. So a Raffles fan picking up a new fandom isn’t a huge deal, because honestly not much of her time was spent in Raffles fandom anyway due to its size. So, yeah, maybe I’m not the best person to talk to about fandom peer pressure.

        I had honestly thought Merlin was a tiny fandom, though…it was eligible for Yuletide this year, anyway. Then again, so were Heroes and Avatar at one point, so maybe it’s just too new.

        I think the criticism of slash is a valid one…I mean, I know someone who was there in the ‘zine days slashing Kirk and Spock, and she always said that the reason it happened (beyond “let’s make these hot guys have sex”) was that people felt more invested in the enduring relationship between Kirk and Spock than between Kirk and his alien flavor of the week. I know it’s probably motivating a lot of the slash potential I see in Victorian novels, but I don’t feel so bad about it because of the buffer of history.

        I HAVE noted that fanfiction writers seem to prefer shipping stuff that is subtext (intentional or not) rather than explicit canon — I’ve even noticed this with het shipping, actually. Hell, I’d bet money that writers of bishounen manga like X:1999 are doing it on purpose to keep up fan interest. Stuff that isn’t explicit onscreen, though, does offer more opportunity for easy fanfic, though, and tends to offer more inspiration in that direction.

        I am not sure fanfic inspiration is necessarily directly related to ‘quality’, except in the sense that a badly written piece of work is more likely to leave holes for fans to creep in. I’ve seen a lot of fandoms (especially anime fandoms) pop up and thrive around a shitty show because everyone agreed that there was some nub of a good idea in it that deserved developing, but I don’t think it’s necessary per se. Intentional loose ends and subtext, minor characters that don’t get a lot of screentime but are nevertheless engaging, worldbuilding that hints at a much larger setting…I’ve known all of these to inspire reams of fanfiction, and I’d consider them mostly positive features. “Entry points” is probably a better way to think about it, and different people react to different entry points (I’m a sucker for minor characters, for instance, which is what has been drawing me back into Avatar fandom recently).

        The ethics involved also might be different in TV fandom where (I think) simply the act of watching it on TV is more supportive of the source material than, say, reading a book, because of the way TV advertising works and the general lack of alternate legal venues for getting the source material until you can rent it on DVD.

        • Marie Brennan

          I used to engage fandom a lot more than I do now, for the simple reason that most of my fandoms are pretty small.

          I’m imagining you swimming around in little side bends of the Great Fandom River, where there’s strange little micro-ecologies and the current is pretty slow, while at least some of the TWW discussion seems to be taking place in the middle of the rushing torrent, which sweeps people off to places they didn’t necessarily intend to go.

          I think the criticism of slash is a valid one

          I didn’t even mean it as a criticism, per se; just an observation. It’s entirely possible to see a single relationship as very slashy (because, as you say, it’s more enduring than the het relationships of the participants). For me, the slashiness of a text is a function of how many of those relationships exist, vis a vis enduring and interesting het relationships.

          I know it’s probably motivating a lot of the slash potential I see in Victorian novels, but I don’t feel so bad about it because of the buffer of history.

          The buffer of history is valid: you’re not complicit in the culture that produced those texts.

          Hell, I’d bet money that writers of bishounen manga like X:1999 are doing it on purpose to keep up fan interest.

          I’ve held this opinion about Smallville for a long time now, where the Clark/Lex dynamic remains (as far as I’ve seen) subtext — but a subtext that feels like it was put there on purpose, as bait.

          I am not sure fanfic inspiration is necessarily directly related to ‘quality’, except in the sense that a badly written piece of work is more likely to leave holes for fans to creep in.

          Which is more or less what I mean. If the Clark/Lana relationship were more satisfying, would people be less inclined to ship Clark/Lex? Or, to quote your later line — I can absolutely see the attraction of a “nub of a good idea” that really didn’t get the exploration you think it deserved. If it got brilliantly explored? Then I feel like the job’s been done, and maybe I don’t see any place to expand the text. It isn’t a clear-cut quality thing, you’re right, since no text can do everything at once; maybe the source was an awesome story about the implications of gender and magic, but didn’t really get into the sexuality of the characters. Or whatever. You’ve got a particular button it didn’t press, and so you go play with that. But things that are sloppily executed maybe put big flashing neon signs up saying “Enter here.”

          The ethics involved also might be different in TV fandom where (I think) simply the act of watching it on TV is more supportive of the source material than, say, reading a book, because of the way TV advertising works and the general lack of alternate legal venues for getting the source material until you can rent it on DVD.

          I don’t even think of it from that angle so much as, TV fandom is more “real-time” than book fandom. An episode airs, and within the week, you’ve got ficcers spinning stories off it. Especially as TV producers and writers take more notice of their fan communities, that provides rapid feedback on fan engagement, which may or may not affect production decisions down the line.

          • anima_mecanique

            You are probably 100% right about the fandom river. I used to be in large fandoms, of course, but I did not really produce for them — my sole contribution to Harry Potter fandom, though extremely popular, was a list of lines from OotP that sounded like sexual innuendoes when taken out of context, so maybe I was sort of in the outskirts there too.

            I guess I just didn’t realize Merlin was on the verge of becoming a fan hit.

            The buffer of history is valid: you’re not complicit in the culture that produced those texts.

            This is probably what makes me less leery of sexism in Japanese-produced video games and anime. Sure, I can see it and I don’t really LIKE it, but I feel like I’m not really going to do anything to change the culture by not playing a pretty fun game because the main female character is yet another demure Staff Chick.

            don’t even think of it from that angle so much as, TV fandom is more “real-time” than book fandom. An episode airs, and within the week, you’ve got ficcers spinning stories off it. Especially as TV producers and writers take more notice of their fan communities, that provides rapid feedback on fan engagement, which may or may not affect production decisions down the line.

            Ah. I guess I tend to assume that creators are not looking at fanfic at all, because of legal issues and the general fannish imperative to keep it on the down-low. In general I tend to think of other fannish behaviors, like buying merchandise or responding to advertising or seeing a movie five times in the theater, are vastly more influential than fanfic could ever be, but I guess it’s naive of me to think that fanfiction has no effect at all in this day and age.

          • Marie Brennan

            I doubt the specifics of a given show’s fanfic get paid attention to at all, but I would be very surprised if everybody involved in a TV show turned a blind eye to what’s going on out there. If nothing else, some intern might be tasked to set up a Technorati watch for it, so they can gauge whether fan interest is rising. But there have definitely been shows recently that tout themselves as being more “responsive” to fans — usually to their aesthetic detriment — and I expect the fic gets included in that net.

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