seeing someone’s work on ao3 after seeing their username on tumblr is like seeing your friend dressed up in formalwear when 2 hours ago they were eating pizza in their sweats on your couch
and then when you see a writer who you know mainly from ao3 on tumblr it’s like running into the local news anchor at the grocery store
you know who they are but they’ve never seen you before
i made at least 3 friends IRL at cons cos we were in the same lift in the hotel and they read my nametag and had read something of mine. I am still blown away by that.
when you think about it fanfiction is actually amazing
there are thousands of brilliantly written novel-length stories kids wrote from their own brains about characters and shows/books/movies they love all twined into the internet and other kids read these 50k+ stories in their own time and invest themselves in it
nobody’s being paid to write it and nobody’s being told to read it, people do it because they legitimately enjoy it
I’m really not here for bashing on anyone for being a fan of Supernatural, Doctor Who, Sherlock or – gasp! – even all three. It’s grating to see people having to loudly declare how embarrassed they are of their “superwholock past”, or making disparaging remarks about those who still enjoy said shows. I’m sure there’s a longer and more in-depth post to be written about this, but idk man, I’m tired. I’m just not here for this shit.
Generally I’m not a fan of being expected to be embarrassed about stuff you used to be into.
Or the idea that once a thing is no longer one of your main interests, you no longer like that thing. Which I feel is sometimes connected to having to be embarrassed about your previous main interests.
are … are you not aware that mocking superwholock fans is less because they are “embarrassing” and more because of the extremely homophobic, racist, misogynist and ableist tendencies the fandom/s at large has/have exhibited?
Have you ever seen the Star Wars fandom? It’s a goddamn nightmare and it’s everywhere. The ableism and the misogyny was and is appalling. When John Boyega was cast as Finn fans of the franchise sprouted crap about “forced diversity” and “political correctness” on here and on Reddit and Twitter. and everywhere you went on the Internet. When the main character of Rogue One was announced to be a woman fans flipped their lids about “feminism taking over”. When Jake Lloyd was diagnosed with schizophrenia Star Wars fans laughed, because he was in the worst of the movies, don’tyaknow, and therefore his suffering was funny.
Plus the franchise itself still hasn’t got a single main LBGT character or WOC anywhere in the movies, in 2016, and it probably won’t anytime soon. John Boyega got paid less than Adam Driver, for more screentime. Most of the movies don’t have more than a handful of female characters, and only a couple of them even pass the Bechdel Test. Leia had that gold bikini. Whenever articles appear in the media saying how nice it would be for more diversity and less sexism to happen, they’re shouted down by Star Wars fans yelling and yelling and yelling.
Homophobia, racism, misogyny and ableism? Check, check, check and check. A franchise not being as progressive as it should be? Check. So where’s all the “fuck-no-starwars” blogs? Where are all the “ugh I can’t believe I used to be in Star Wars fandom” posts? Surely people should want to distance themselves from that toxic, unending crap. Why don’t they?
Lord of the Rings was used by Lord of the Rings fans as a rallying point for actual fascism and white supremacy, once upon a time, and in the modern day the movie producers can’t even bring themselves to cast non-white hobbits. Or any characters of colour at all. Number of Middle Earth blogs I’ve seen post a disclaimer to explain that it’s okay, they’re not like that, they just like the story, they’re not racists: zero.
No, it’s not that. Or if it is that, it’s deeply hypocritical.
I have these Native American reenactments in the summer, okay. We dress in authentic Native garb and go teach about our culture and whatnot at historical events. There’s this one on a weekend that housed all reenactors from Ancient Greece to World War II–you can walk through a timeline of living history. It’s cool.
So there are these guys in a tent on the far hill called the Scottish Highlanders. They bring about two to five people to their thing per year. They do all the good medieval Scottish jazz. Kilts, weapons, challenging you to fights.
But theres this one guy that is there every time. I always go visit to hear him give in depth talks about Scottish Reavers and their malitia and weaponry and stuff. He’s fun, so I go talk to him and he’s asking about what school I’m going to, what I want to do, etc.
So I tell him I want to be a history teacher and I like to write. He asks me if I have anything published, and I say no, thinking he means an actual book. But he waves me off and asks, “No, online. Have you ever heard of Fanfiction.net?”
Let me explain a thing. This guy. Is well over six feet. His biceps are bigger than my head, he’s about 45 years old, he has the thickest Scottish accent you’ve ever witnessed, he can wave two axes around like nobody’s business, he usually resolves friendly arguments with full on battle in armor with real weaponry with the scars to prove it, and he kind of has a biker gang.
And this guy starts telling me about the 700 page Doctor Who fanfiction that he’s been writing for six years and still running.
Shamelessly continues to explain how he gets together with his badass biker buddies and they ride to his house with bottles of Jack Daniels and talk about the next fanfiction that they’re going to write together. (More Doctor Who, Xena Warrior Princess, Agents of Shield, Lord of the Rings…) They dare each other to write crossovers for interesting character interaction. This guy raves with excitement over character development and analysis.
I cried.
By the way
Here he is. Mike. In his Scottish glory.
Here he is with his buddy, Bear.
Here he is with his buddy Bear and me.
And here he is holding an ax to my throat.
I LOVE THIS. The perils of a site like Tumblr which is dominated by people under 30 (not on my dash, though, but that’s what demographics insist is true) is they genuinely don’t think anyone older has any interests in common with them. I feel like Livejournal was more varied in this regard, though again, my flist on LJ had all ages on it, so maybe it was just me. The only over 40s they know are the adults in positions of authority like parents and teachers, and surely Mom and Mr. W the Chem teacher have never heard of fan fiction or have the least interest in anything on the interwebs. A kid at work (I work at a university) who I jokingly called a meme lord once told me I needed to stop learning such things from my kid – who is 11 and basically uses the internet to watch Minecraft videos on YouTube, but of course she must be the one teaching me all these modernfangled intertoob things!
I admit though that I have fallen into the stereotype that fandom is all women, because that’s been my experience by far; I think the number of male-identified people I’ve come across in my various fandoms wouldn’t pass the single digits. But that’s probably due to the nature of my reading and the way I curate my dash. Where’s a big ol’ 40 something biker dude who writes Stucky?? Point him out to me and I’ll add him to my dash!
Mike the Doctor Who Scottish badass fills me with hope and love. <3
okay but what’s his username I want to read a 700 page Doctor Who fan fiction
how is it possible to love fictional characters this much and also have people always been this way?
like, did queen elizabeth lie in bed late sometimes thinking ‘VERILY I CANNOT EVEN FOR MERCUTIO HATH SLAIN ME WITH FEELS’
was caesar like ‘ET TU ODYSSEUS’
sometimes i wonder
the answer is yes they did. there’s a lot of research about the highly emotional reactions to the first novels widely available in print.
here’s a thing; the printing press was invented in 1450 and whilst it was revolutionary it wasn’t very good. but then it got better over time and by the 16th century there were publications, novels, scientific journals, folios, pamphlets and newspapers all over Europe. at first most were educational or theological, or reprints of classical works.
however, novels gained in popularity, as basically what most people wanted was to read for pleasure. they became salacious, extremely dramatic, with tragic heroines and doomed love and flawed heroes (see classical literature, only more extreme.) books in the form of letters were common. sensationalism was par the course and apparently used to teach moral lessons. there was also a lot of erotica floating around.
but here’s the thing: due to the greater availability of literature and the rise of comfy furniture (i shit you not this is an actual historical fact, the 16th and 17th century was when beds and chairs got comfy) people started reading novels for pleasure, women especially. as these novels were highly emotional, they too became…highly emotional. there are loads of contemporary reports of young women especially fainting, having hysterics, or crying fits lasting for days due to the death of a character or their otp’s doomed love. they became insensible over books and characters, and were very vocal about it. men weren’t immune-there’s a long letter a middle-aged man wrote to the author of his favourite work basically saying that the novel is too sad, he can’t handle all his feels, if they don’t get together he won’t be able to go on, and his heart is already broken at the heroine’s tragic state (IIRC ehh).
conservatives at the time were seriously worried about the effects of literature on people’s mental health, and thought it damaging to both morals and society. so basically yes it is exactly like what happens on tumblr when we cry over attractive British men, only my historical theory (get me) is that their emotions were even more intense, as they hadn’t had a life of sensationalist media to numb the pain for them beforehand in the same way we do, nor did they have the giant group therapy session that is tumblr.
(don’t even get me started on the classical/early medieval dudes and their boners for the Iliad i will be here all week. suffice to say, the members of the Byzantine court used Homeric puns instead of talking normally to each other if someone who hand’t studied the classics was in the room. they had dickish fandom in-jokes. boom.)
I needed to know this.
See, we’re all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectingly’s post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.
Ancient Iliad fandom is intense
Alexander the Great and and his boyfriend totally RPed Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander shipped that hard. (It’s possible that this story is apocryphal, but that would just mean that ancient historians were writing RPS about Alexander and Hephaestion RPing Iliad slash and honestly that’s just as good).
And then there’s this gem from Plato:
“Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus – his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far)” – Symposium
That’s right: 4th Century BCE arguments about who topped. Nihil novi sub sole my friends.
More on this glorious subject from people who know way more than I do
Also a thing with fix-it/everyone lives AUs: at various points in time but especially in the mid 1800s-early 1900s (aka roughly Victorian though there were periods of this earlier as well) a huge thing was to “fix” Shakespeare (as well as most theater/novels) to be in line with current morality. Good characters live, bad characters are terribly punished – but not, you know, grusomely, because what would the ladies think? So you have like, productions of King Lear where Cordelia lives and so do Regan and Goneril, but they’re VERY SORRY.
Aka all your problematic faves are redeemed and Everyone Lives! AUs for every protag.
Slightly tangential but I wanted to add my own favorite account of Chinese fandom to this~ I don’t know how many people here have heard of the Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions (红楼梦), but it is, arguably, the most famous Chinese novel ever written (There are four Chinese novel classics and A Dream of Red Mansions is considered the top of that list). It was written during the Qing dynasty by 曹雪芹, but became a banned book due to its critique of societal institutions and pro-democracy themes. As a result, the original ending of the book was lost and only the first 80 chapters remained. There are quite a few versions of how the current ending of the book came to be, but one of them is basically about how He Shen, one of Emperor Qian Long’s most powerful advisers, was such a super-fan of the book, he hired two writers to archive and reform the novel from the few remaining manuscripts there were. In order to convince the Emperor to remove the ban on the book, he had the writers essentially write a fanfiction ending to the book that would mitigate the anti-establishment themes. However, He Shen thought that the first version of the ending was too tragic (even though the whole book is basically a tragedy) so he had the writers go back and write a happier ending for him (the current final 40 chapters). He then presented the book to the Emperor and successfully convinced him to remove the ban on the book.
According to incomplete estimates, A Dream of Red Mansions spawned over 20 spin offs, retellings, and alternate versions (in the form of operas, plays, etc.) during the Qing Dynasty alone.
In 1979, fans (albeit academic ones) started publishing a bi-monthly journal dedicated to analysis (read: meta) on A Dream of Red Mansions. In fact, the novel’s fandom is so vast and qualified and rooted in academics of Chinese literature that there is an entire field of study (beginning in the Qing dynasty) of just this one novel, called 红学. Think of it as Shakespearean studies, but only on one play. This field of study has schools of thought and specific specializations (as in: Psych analyses, Economics analyses, Historical analyses, etc.) that span pretty much every academic field anyone can think of.
(That being said, I’ve read A Dream of Red Mansions and can honestly say that I’ve never read its peer in either English or Chinese. If for nothing else, read it because you would never otherwise believe that a man from the Qing dynasty could write such a heart-breakingly feminist novel with such a diverse cast of female characters given all the bitching and moaning we hear from male content-creators nowadays)
the beauty of archival research *sigh*
i went to a building that is a “fan recreation” of one of the buildings from Hongloumeng and my like bitter, angry, never smiled once 78yo male teacher was like squeeing and giggling and kept sitting down and fanning himself and posed dramatically for photos
this guy was like the voldemort of staff, a man of legendary terror-inspiring mien. swooning.
A more recent example of fandom in history is the original Sherlock Holmes fan base! It’s one of the earliest coherent models we have that closely represents the fandoms of modern media.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s first two Sherlock Holmes novels weren’t hugely popular, but when he began to write stories for The Strand magazine involving Sherlock Holmes, the public basically went absolutely mental. He used to get fan mail – predominantly from women, apparently – addressed directly to Sherlock Holmes, some women even offering to be his housekeeper.
He eventually got so fed up of writing stories about a character he didn’t really like (he considered Sherlock Holmes to be an irritating distraction from his ambition to write historical fiction, once saying “he takes my mind from better things”) that he took measures to end the series once and for all. First, he raised his fee for writing the stories to an extortionate amount, hoping that the magazine would refuse to pay it and fire him. However, there was such a demand for new Sherlock Holmes stories that the magazine just agreed to pay his ridiculous fee. So, he killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 in the Reichenbach Falls, and when he did that, shit hit the fan. People reportedly placed Sherlock Holmes obituaries in newspapers. Many of them cancelled their subscription to The Strand, and wrote angry letters to Arthur Conan Doyle explaining how he’d broken their heart. To fill the gap left by the death of their bb, some people wrote fan fiction and shared it in literary groups and book clubs.
Conan Doyle caved to pressure in 1901 and wrote Hound of the Baskervilles, partly because the fan fervour never really died down, and partly because cash dollah. You know how fans lobbied for the return of Firefly, and ended up getting Serenity made? The original Sherlock Holmes fans totally got there first.
You forgot the bit where Holmes fans wore honest-to-god *mourning* attire after the death of their fave. Men wore crepe armbands in the streets for Holmes. It was redonk.
I know, I know. I get it. But I also believe that you gotta relate to people via the stuff they care about. You have to get people to care using the language/metaphors they already understand.
This is why scientists and science communicators are coached to use “natural” numbers – you don’t say something’s 200 meters long; you say it’s the length of 2 football fields. You say that something is as small as the period at the end of this sentence and that if you put all of the thing from end to end, it would stretch to the moon and back. People don’t think in microns and lightyears; they just don’t. You have to give them stuff that means something.
You don’t say that someone has a 20% chance of dying from the disease; you say that four out of five people survive it. You use the things people understand, even if the words sound painfully silly and you are dying of embarrassment just using them, because it just works better. The people can understand it, it’s meaningful to them, they’ll remember it, they will use it in their lives now.
It would be nice if everyone cared about research and data – if everyone was informed and engaged, and came out of the womb with a good grasp of the scientific method and a working knowledge of the civic institutions of their country. But they don’t and they’re not, so what are you going to do about it? Hopefully, you’ll give them the knowledge you have in a way that makes it easy to receive.
So when I ran off the rails in a tumblr post, getting overexcited about the impact of a restructured Supreme Court on the welfare of the USA in the next 50 years, I used Harry Potter metaphors. I cringed a little, because I feel like the SCOTUS is so interesting and important that we shouldn’t have to relate to it through the lens of decade-old YA literature, but I did it.
I said we “haven’t destroyed Scalia’s horcruxes” (Meaning: we can’t undo the legacy of a Justice even after their death, because the things they create to survive them are functionally immortal – except in very specific situations where people work together to deliberately destroy them in a special way.)
and “why are you focusing on your Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher when the Wizengamot is corrupted” (Meaning: the temporary influence of a relatively powerless private individual is not as important as the stability of the functionally immortal, unchanging, supreme decision-making body that dictates the very fabric of society.)
In both cases, the metaphor is actually shorter than the meaning, and more people will get the impact – and even an interestingly nuanced context to remember it in. I know, it sounds so immature. I know, it shouldn’t take a spoonful of sugar. But if you believe the important thing is the message… then you’ll spoon out the sugar, act it out with sock puppets, take the kids on a field trip on a magic fucking school bus to make that message accessible.
And you know that I hate pop culture. But I’ll use it. I’ll use anything
– sports references, Harry Potter, memes, ALL CAPS DISCOURSE, Miss Fucking Frizzle – even if
it’s irritating to lots of people, if it means it makes a difficult thing
accessible to people who otherwise can’t get it.
So I guess what I’m saying is that it’s worth it, if the message is.
But I totally get it if you roll your eyes.
considering that pop culture is based on human experiences and dreams and wishes and thought experiments I … really dont see why folk are acting like using it as a metaphor is somehow demeaning to the information that they want to share. Please get the fuck over yourselves.
Well, fair point. But ideally we wouldn’t need to, say, use fake characters to get people to understand that white supremacy is villainous. Ideally, people wouldn’t need a pop culture framework to get to a place of empathy and activism. Ideally you wouldn’t need to coat things with sugar to get people to care, or compare (living) people of color to (fake) Muggleborns.
I definitely saw the point being made in both tweets. And I am seeing notes from people who feel strongly about both sides – “Why are people so snobbish about pop culture when it is incredibly important to the fabric of our society” vs “why do people only care about genuinely serious shit when it reminds them of the fake struggles offake predominantly-white teens.”* Both are good points. Both are also currently being held up as examples of privilege.
I think that’s why it can be read as demeaning – actually I think it’s
more disheartening than demeaning. If you really care about/are deeply
affected by something, it can be really disheartening to spoonfeed
people until they see it as important (at least in my perspective).
What I think is important is the message that “sometimes pop culture is a frustrating way to relate problems to people, but it works, and if the message is important, you gotta use/respect what works.”
* I think there’s a lot of nuance there to unpack but I would be talking out of my ass if I tried, so I’m gonna leave it.
The pop culture hate is too often irrational and elitist tbh.
Also? It strikes me as a pretty ableist attitude. I’m Autistic, and I interpret most things through fiction. It helps me handle and understand a lot of stuff I otherwise wouldn’t be able to cope with. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s the way my brain works, and talking about how I ‘should’ process things differently and only in the way you approve of is ableist and useless
I’ve been puzzling over this for weeks now and I still got nothin’. I remember a good post I read about Les Miserables once, a story based on a real social revolution, which began with “Fiction is not inherently trivialization” and I agree with that totally. But on the other hand the money-making franchise-creating machines which spring up around things like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games often do trivialize them, and make you wonder what people’s motivations are for Tweeting about them: do they believe what they’re saying or do they just wanna shift a few more Katniss Funko Pops or Gryffindor scarfs from their online stores? Or do they just wanna gain social currency from sounding cool and approachable maybe? I wonder about that…
On the other hand I’ve seen photos of real-life protestors in real-life horrible situations making the Hunger Games salute at each other and that seems like one of the least trivial things in the world to me, but I imagine the key words there are to me.
And then there’s the fact that through no fault of their own some people just really do see the world better through a fictional lens which is fine, but also once stuff like Hunger Games hits the mainstream it ends up whitewashed in just about every sense which is the opposite of fine, and god there’s so much stuff just floating around right now about the power of stories but also which stories and who’re they about? Harry Potter might not be much use to you when you’re literally staring down deadly weapons but maybe something else might? I just don’t know.
“Omg every girl is gonna be Harley Quinn for Halloween” every guy has been batman for like 94 years shut the fuck up you insufferable toe
Yes but everyone knows batman most of the people going as Harley only know her from suicide squad they didn’t read the comics and grow to love her as a character like we did with batman. When we decided to be batman for Halloween it’s because he inspired us to be The Batman not because he became a pop culture icon like Harley fucking Quinn
IT 👏🏼 DOESNT 👏🏼 MATTER 👏🏼 She is a fictional character You and anyone else are not entitled to tell people they don’t like her enough to dress like her It doesn’t matter if they’ve read all the comics or just saw the movie they are literally hurting no one by dressing as her It’s a FUCKING night y’all need to chill your roll like holy fuck
One thing I wished fandom did more of: openly disliking something without having to add any moral judgments to justify disliking that thing in the first place. It’s entirely fine to dislike a pairing, or a show, without having to slap the ~problematic tag on it, or labeling people who do like that thing “deviants” or whatever label people are doing now.
I mean, man, I STILL judge people who ship Harry/Hermione, but I don’t pretend to be morally better because I liked Ron/Hermione as a kid. Ship wars by any other name are still ship wars, even if the vocab has changed now that we’re all on tumblr.
And–to switch from the Cranky Old Fangirl In Her Rocking Chair and put on my serious hat for a moment–it bums me out on a lot of levels to see the social justice language being co-opted this way. Fandom DID have a lot of issues with misogyny, racism, homophobia, and it still does, but as a fangirl who is also a black girl, I’ve always felt a little bit encouraged by the larger awareness of fandom recently that hey, this is an issue and at least we’re talking about it openly, rather than taking the status quo for granted. (Let’s be honest, the status quo still exists, but that’s a bigger issue.)
And now we’ve got this bizarre divide where people are misusing social justice language in order to berate other fans, and old-school fans are going “hah, you see! We’re so much better going back to the old ways!” And–no. The old ways sucked too. Fandom was still unwelcoming then, it still had tons of unexamined racism and bigotry–just look up the wank surrounding that old J2 Help-Haiti Big Bang if you don’t believe me. And meanwhile a lot of people, like me, are stuck in no-man’s-land, where we don’t want to go back to the “good old days”, which weren’t so good for us to start with, but we’re not crazy about what’s going on right now either.
I’m just so used to being able to find a show or comic people are talking about online somewhere, with English translation, reasonable video quality, screenshots and sometimes even transcripts, episode synopses and fan wikis with character references and episode lists, like within ten minutes of thinking it would be handy, fanfic and art in color and all of it tagged and relatively easy to find with some hunting
Meanwhile these gals were trading third copy videotapes just to watch an episode, waiting months to go to a con just to get an index of local zines that might have fic they like, I’m getting frustrated and peeved just thinking about it
I will never forget receiving a mysterious brown paper package with the return address “The Nome King” (and nothing else) at about the time the Unabomber was sending deadly packages through the mail. I decided that he and copycats would not use that as a return address, so I opened it. Inside was a VHS tape hand-labeled “Beetlejuice”, but when I put in my VCR, which was honest to gosh hooked up to the b&w TV my parents had watched the moon landing on (it was free, and Babylon 5 and DS9 actually worked really well in b&w), the tape turned out to be My Neighbor Totoro. In Japanese. With no subtitles.
This was before Miyazaki was well-known in the states. I followed it pretty well up until the giant 18-legged Cheshire Cat pulled up to the bus stop.
I eventually located and printed out a fan translation found on a regional college network using archie/veronica.
Also the college dorm rooms at Bryn Mawr had fanzines other women had picked up at cons. i remember Jabberwocky, a longrunning Blake’s 7 series, and an anthology of Sarek/Amanda fluff by Jean Lorrah.
Doctor Who fandom in the early 80s was mostly a solitary affair, and the primary activity was amassing as complete a collection as possible of reruns recorded off TV. It took years of dedication. It meant keeping up with one’s local PBS station broadcasts, programming the VCR, pleading with the parents for more tapes, elbowing out anyone else’s wishes to record something, all with the goal of catching and recording reruns of episodes one didn’t yet have.
And then one had the magic notebook keeping track of which tape had Hand of Fear (interwoven with episodes of TNG and Monty Python and possibly Robin of Sherwood or Red Dwarf) and where ep 5 and 6 were since that tape had run out (interwoven with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers talking mythology). DItto trying to make sure one had recorded all the TNG eps and had spent a whole summer forbidding ANYONE to touch the tape that ended with “I am Locutus of Borg” so that one could record the second half right after the cliffhanger.
The prize, of course, was going back to college with some handpicked episodes, and 17 people (that was our record) crammed onto one bed to watch an episode on a teeny tiny TV perched on someone’s fridge. Or else fighting to reserve a slot on the dorm TV’s VCR, which was usually booked weeks in advance. My job was to provide Blake’s 7. Susan was in charge of keeping us supplied with Robin of Sherwood. KIm and Kimi specialized in Robotech and Queen music videos. Angela brought vampire anime. And so on.
sometimes i think i am a Dedicated Fan™ but then i remember that the people of wales once created a memorial to a dead character from torchwood back in like 2009 and it’s still fuckin there and has a tripadvisor page
