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shadowkat1. Saw the Aladdin movie which was better than expected. While Will Smith is no Robin Williams (who is, really?), he was good in the role. Particularly well cast were Jasmine, Aladdin and Javar. The handmaiden, however, was a bit jarring.
2. Also watched the first two episodes of S3 Wynonna Earp --- which is actually better than the first two seasons openers. I really like the actress playing Wynonna. I actually like her better than I did Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy.
3. Speaking of Buffy, got into a bit of a discussion on the origins of Buffy's last name with a FB Whedonesque Studies Fandom. One of the Whedon media scholars can't deal with the idea that it might have been Scott Summers aka Cyclops (which I think Whedon referred to as an origin, when he took over Astonishing X-men) and is insisting it was either Jamie Summers (Bionic Woman) -- unlikely, I don't think Whedon remembers it or watched it. Or Montague Summers -- who I've never heard of and is a bit obscure. The difficulty I had with the "academic" portion of the fandom is well, television writers aren't as educated as you folks are, nor as well-read. I hate to break it to you but they really aren't. They are basically hacks, many of which got jobs screen-writing or tele-writing out of high school, undergrad, and have film majors. Whedon was a film major not an English Lit/History major.
The fandom is often far more educated, intellectual and well-read than the writing/art they are obsessed with -- so yes, I get the fact that you really want Whedon and company to be referencing Socrates, Proust, Wharton, and the Literary Greats or feminist television series like say Bionic Woman...but in reality, it's mostly General Hospital, The Prisoner, Star Trek, Shakespeare, John Ford Westerns, Horror Movies, and Marvel Comics - specifically the X-men. (Weirdly, the comic book writers were more versatile in their reading. I'm thinking they just have more time?)
4. It's a beautiful day today. Clear blue sky. Breeze. In the 80s, which was a bit of surprise -- and made me wish I'd stuck with the lighter white linen pants as opposed to jeans. Went to church, tried to take a long walk along the promenade afterwards -- with the view of taking pictures, but alas, my cell phone was low on batteries. (Considering I was convinced that I charged it the day before this was somewhat surprising.) Instead, I wandered through a street fair, watched people, bought fudge and a chocolate milkshake, also Avocado and Cucumber Soup, and some groceries. Since I was dropping off to sleep or dozing in church, also got some unsweetened green tea. (I don't buy sugared drinks as a rule. And am off alcohol for the time being.)
Church annoyed me. I have more than a little of my mother's mother in me, I suspect. My mother's parents weren't religious -- they had issues with the sanctimonious preaching of pastors. And didn't much like authority figures any more than I do. The minister felt the need to tell us that the reason our society is currently in crisis is we've fallen away from religious practices which before now gave people stability. I'm looking at her and thinking, for someone who claims to have gone to theological school and studied history, you don't know much about your own history do you? Because I hate to break it to you -- but we're actually less in crisis now than we were at the beginning of the 20th century, or the 19th or the 18th. I mean let's consider this for a moment -- what happened in the 20th Century or even at the beginning of the 21st, when all these so-called religious practices were in full effect?
If anything we're less nasty now than we were back then. The difference is we have more information now. And we don't quite no how to handle all this information. A lot of people were never trained to decipher and critically assess information. I can tell, because they take a lot of the information fed to them at face value. And don't dig deeper. Granted, it's hard to dig deeper -- when there's so much, and it's fired at you 24/7. Very tempting to just cling to the comforting stuff or the stuff that validates one's world view, without further analysis.
Anyhow she lost me there and I started to play with my program. I did however pick up information on the convenant groups and may join one of them. I've decided to ease on down this road and see where it leads. I can jump off at any point.
5. My cousin on FB posted about a dream she had, and has decided that no matter what choices her parents made, she'd have met the same people and ended up where she currently is -- one way or another. That life has definite plan. And everything works out.
I'm more agnostic on this score. Maybe because I'm single, no family, and I can see multiple outcomes. Also, while I think there is a definitive pattern to existence..it's one strung with various interlocking threads that we can't see and aren't about us -- at least not directly -- yet inevitably effect the direction our own thread goes or is stitched in the tapestry. So yes, we may end up where we currently are by different means, but the people surrounding us may not be the same or in the same roles. Pull one thread and everything changes.
6. 88 year old Grandmother was an International Jewel Thief
I know this may sound odd? But stealing jewelry doesn't bother me. Go ahead steal it. The appeal of jewelry has always been lost on me. I don't tend to wear it. The stuff I like isn't valuable -- I like homemade and unique stuff without any gemstones. And only earrings. Light earrings.
As a result, I like stories about jewel thieves -- I sort of root for them as modern Robin Hoods.
In a time where it seems as if the United States has a fascination with “scammers,” whether it’s Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, or Billy McFarland, Payne undermines these archetypes in that she is Black, a woman, and older. Even further, she does not consider what she does a con — though her story of undermining the law across the world has spawned a documentary, a forthcoming movie with Tessa Thompson as the lead, and now a book, Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief.
In this memoir, Payne begins with her humble yet proud upbringing in a cloistered West Virginia town, then the hustle and bustle of Cleveland, and eventually whisks us away to jewelry stores in Europe and Asia. Throughout her love affairs, the deaths of loved ones, and brushes with the law, Doris remains the anchor. Hers is a voice that’s in control of her own narrative and a connoisseur of every diamond cut as she connects her life’s work to the power structures of who can and cannot afford this life — and at what cost.
7. United We Stand: With an assist from the internet, politicians have become pop icons and citizens their fans. What does that mean for our politics?
Did no one read the biography of Hamilton? Or for that matter, the histories of Truman, Roosevelt, Nixon, JFK, and Hitler? I mean they act like people have never done this before the 21st Century. That no one treated politicians with fannish fervor before.
Honestly, you'd think the journalists would know better.
Whatever persona Elizabeth Warren hopes to project in her presidential campaign, it is probably not that of a child witch. But that is the persona that some of her biggest fans have chosen for her.
Images of Hermione Granger, played in the “Harry Potter” films by a young Emma Watson, materialize at Warren’s every move. Warren steps onto the debate stage, and her fans craft tweets where Hermione stands in as her, rolling her eyes at the boys in wizarding class. Warren reads the whole Mueller report, and Hermione smugly wags her wand. In one extremely cursed tweet with zero likes, Warren’s face is transplanted onto Hermione’s frame, posed alongside Beto O’Rourke as Harry and Pete Buttigieg as Ron Weasley.
What is this strange chimera of presidential campaigning: a candidate’s head on pop culture’s body? It is the product of a great convergence between politics and culture, citizenship and commerce, ideology and aesthetics. Civic participation has been converted seamlessly into consumer practice. It is democracy reimagined as fandom, and it is now a dominant mode of experiencing politics.
You can see it in the efforts to sort the candidates into “Harry Potter” houses, converting the election to a personality quiz in a children’s book, and in the mash-up video that distills the 2020 candidates into quotes from Michael Scott, the buffoonish boss of “The Office.” A photograph of three Congresswomen of color is published and instantly compared to a Whitney Houston GIF, as if women interrogating Michael Cohen are analogous to Houston confronting her cheating boyfriend. Politicos of all stripes are styled as saints and stamped onto novelty devotional prayer candles.
Yeah, well, the problem with all of this is it does pre-exist the internet. The internet merely heightened it to a fevered pitch, because the information is more accessible to a broader audience, and 98% of social media is controlled by insane marketing folks. Everyone has their marketing guy online pushing their agenda. One of the many reasons I like Dream Width is it tends to be, at least for the most part, ad and marketing free. It flies beneath the media radar as a result. There's no ads on it, no spam, and no marketing. When people try to set up marketing and advertising accounts they get kicked to the curb by the administrators of the platform. The same cannot be said of Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Live Journal, Twitter, SnapChat, Yahoo Forums, and a whole host of others. I know I've been on many of them -- and it's basically ad and marketing city. The fandom is inter-mixed within it, and there are a lot of professional marketing people in there pretending to be fans. (They think I can't see them -- I can. I keep hiding them and snoozing them. It's bloody irritating.)
Prior to the internet, they did this -- it was just harder. You had to use the newspapers, and the magazines, and press releases. Now? You can do it without paying print media or broadcast media to showcase your product, brand or candidate. Obama sort of revolutionized how elections were done -- buy using social media to further his candidacy. It's not unlike what John F. Kennedy did in the 1960s with television, or Franklin D. Roosevelt did with radio, or Hamilton/Burr/Jefferson did with newspapers.
Heck in Shakespeare's time they used plays. Plays were used as social commentary, and fandom's often associated political figures with characters from theaterical productions.
This is not new. Did the writer of this article just forget to brush up on her history first? Was she not conscious in the 1970s and 80s? One wonders.
People need to stop critiquing the present by praising the past. The past wasn't as good as you think.
Now, The Mary Sue Breaks Down the Times Article -- apparently they didn't agree with the journalist either, for different reasons".
I’ll admit, when I first saw the headline “How Fan Culture Is Swallowing Democracy,” my heart sank. Written by Amanda Hess, the nine-part essay series tracks the connection between American politics and fandom/stan culture, and it seems to miss a key part of what actually makes fan culture. Hess seems to confuse fandom with memes, two things that oftentimes go hand in hand but are definitely not the same thing. Not by a long shot.
In one of the essays, titled “United We Stan,” Hess breaks down the culture surrounding Elizabeth Warren, pointing out the tweets that have cropped up comparing her to Hermione Granger and the “Elizabeth Warren always” meme. In another, she talks about the cult surrounding Ruth Bader Ginsberg, with her action figures. A third documents how ironic memes about Marianne Williamson turned into actual promotion of the candidate. Of course, there is the requisite piece on sitting President Donald Trump and how he was memed into the Presidency.
These are well-written essays, and Hess clearly understands the weird way that Internet culture works. But I feel as though there’s a vast difference between Internet culture and fan culture, even though fandom exists on the Internet and has adopted much of Internet culture into the language spoken by fans. Fandom is different, and while there are definitely cults around candidates, it isn’t “fandom” or “stanning.”
Most of what Hess writes about Warren and Ginsberg is reliant on meme culture, and while Williamson’s grassroots campaign manages who made memes of her astrally projecting might be fans of hers, the emphasis is still on the meme aspect. Memes are hard to explain. Seriously, try explaining to your grandmother why an image of a cat caught mid sneeze is such a #mood and then come back with a decent definition of a meme.
My difficulty with journalism is that it has swung a bit too much towards editorializing and opinion, and further from factual investigative writing. Everyone has an opinion. In this world of 24/7 news cycles -- we get journalistic opinions fired at us on a minute to minute basis. Fueling the flames of confusion and discord. In short, we have too many professional journalists, with little more than a graduate degree in "journalism and/or media studies or creative writing" offering up their opinions on everything under the sun. Often in book form or long persuasive essays.
I agree with the Mary Sue, Amanda Hess lost me fairly early on in her essay, and I stopped reading. I looked up Amanda Hess and found that she's the NY Time's critic at large -- basically she gets paid for writing her opinion on various topics. Her opinion, in short, is no more persuasive than say Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Allysa Milano, Amber Tamblyn, Mark Hamil, Rachel Maddow, Murphy Brown, Roseanne Barr, Stephen Colbert, or John Oliver.
I'm more willing to buy various people on DW's take on the issue, because they have studied history, studied fandom, written a dissertations on it, and conducted extensive research.
Since Harry Potter and Twilight took fandom mainstream, various newspaper and magazine writers have taken a stab at critiquing and analyzing fandom, without much knowledge of fandom or experience in it. As a result we get a lot of generalizations and suppositions with little to no true factual support.
As the Mary Sue writer states:
Ultimately though, this comes down to a misunderstanding of what fan culture is. Fan culture is taking the text of something and making it your own. It’s rewriting endings and pairing new characters off and having a personal relationship with a song or a movie or a book. It is not just memes, though there are plenty. Fan culture is large and nebulous but it goes beyond just the digital meme-o-sphere. Hess doesn’t seem to understand that.
As we’ve said before, if you’re going to write about fan culture, try to understand fan culture. It isn’t a broad label to be slapped on all Internet cultures and it isn’t a weird subculture to be stared at from afar. Fan culture is a living, breathing entity. It is more than memes.
A lot of people do not understand fan culture. Amanda Hess clearly doesn't and lost me within the first two paragraphs. I think she lost a lot of people.
I try to discuss it with mainstream folks, and they...well, they don't get it. Nor do they understand how broad it is. You can be part of fandom and never have been to a single convention. Some people aren't convention goers, some are. Conventions cost money not all fans want to spent or have the money to spend on conventions. Same deal with fanfic -- not all fans read or write fanfic, some write meta, some do vids, some draw, some discuss it endlessly on spoiler boards, some obsessively collect action figures, some make them...it's varied. You can't really generalize about it -- even though you want to.
Also it's not as gendered as journalists like to make it out to be. I know men who are huge shippers and very emotional about their ships. (I got into shipping fights with men who were shipping, strongly shipping Buffy/Xander and Buffy/Angel on fanboards. I can name at least ten of them. Also I've seen it on a General Hospital fan board, and an X-men fan board -- there are men in the X-men fandom that desperately want Wolverine and Jean Grey to get together, Marvel be damned. There are also male slash shippers -- some of the strongest Willow/Tara shippers were men.)
And, I'd add, having participated in "book" fandoms, not just comics, that there are male shippers of fictional book characters as well. In addition, this all existed long before computers were created or the internet was even a concept. All the internet did is make it possible for people to exchange information faster and on a broader scale. In other words, in 2002, a Navy nurse in Japan could discuss Spike with a woman in NYC. That wasn't as possible a decade ago.
Little Women was initially published chapter by chapter as an on-going serial in the 1800s. There were shippers back then. People who wrote letters to each other and the publisher, demanding that Laurie and Joe end up together. They formed fan clubs.
I also read that this happened with various Dickens novels, Austen novels, and the book Clarissa by Richardson. Shakespeare had his fans as well -- people who saw his plays repeatedly and heavily shipped various characters. It's not something that was created by the internet.
In the 1980s, a boy killed another boy over a Star Wars fanfiction they were writing together. Ralph and Leigh. The Kansas City Star wrote a lengthy article about them -- and I wrote a short story based on it in college. What happened -- was Ralph conned Leigh into believing that he had a connection with George Lucas and could sell Leigh's concept about the Clone Wars to Lucas. Leigh just had to pay Ralph a certain sum of money, to help develop the concept and send it to Lucas' agents. It was a total con. Leigh found out, and killed Ralph.
In the 1970s, there were fandoms associated with the 1960s television series The Monkeeys and Batman and Robin. I know because I sort of played a bit in them with my friends. Books that had fandoms included the Lord of the Rings, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, Kim Harris' novels about Rachel Morgan (people wrote fanfic about the characters), Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Rider Series, and of course Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
Fandom hit national attention with Star Wars and Star Trek, and a lot of people wrongly assumed that it was mainly male. (No. Really not.)
And it's not limited to television, books and movies -- we also music fandoms. I dated a Grateful Dead Groupie aka Deadhead in college who had over a million bootleg tapes of the Grateful Dead. He had seen almost every concert, and followed them around the country on their Farewell Tour. And my cousin is an Oasis Groupie, who has written fanfic about the band and turned her fanfic into two novels.
There's fans of people -- reality stars in performing arts competitions over seas. A friend of mine was obsessed with an actor who was competing in the Andrew Lloyd Webber reality show -- for the next lead of Joseph and the Amazing Technocolor Raincoat. They had meetups with fellow fans. Created fanfic starring the actor, got bootleg tapes and CD's of the show. I know I attended one of their activities -- even though I wasn't into the actor, and discovered during it that there was a huge amount of fanfic associated with these celebrity fandoms.
People get fannish about various things, they always have. It's not a new phenomena.
It's just that the people who don't get fannish - or don't get fannish about anything other than sports, are now aware of it. Honestly it's no different than religiously watching every Giants game or Braves game, and following those teams around. And writing fanfic about them. Playing games associated with it. And collecting cards or autographs.
2. Also watched the first two episodes of S3 Wynonna Earp --- which is actually better than the first two seasons openers. I really like the actress playing Wynonna. I actually like her better than I did Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy.
3. Speaking of Buffy, got into a bit of a discussion on the origins of Buffy's last name with a FB Whedonesque Studies Fandom. One of the Whedon media scholars can't deal with the idea that it might have been Scott Summers aka Cyclops (which I think Whedon referred to as an origin, when he took over Astonishing X-men) and is insisting it was either Jamie Summers (Bionic Woman) -- unlikely, I don't think Whedon remembers it or watched it. Or Montague Summers -- who I've never heard of and is a bit obscure. The difficulty I had with the "academic" portion of the fandom is well, television writers aren't as educated as you folks are, nor as well-read. I hate to break it to you but they really aren't. They are basically hacks, many of which got jobs screen-writing or tele-writing out of high school, undergrad, and have film majors. Whedon was a film major not an English Lit/History major.
The fandom is often far more educated, intellectual and well-read than the writing/art they are obsessed with -- so yes, I get the fact that you really want Whedon and company to be referencing Socrates, Proust, Wharton, and the Literary Greats or feminist television series like say Bionic Woman...but in reality, it's mostly General Hospital, The Prisoner, Star Trek, Shakespeare, John Ford Westerns, Horror Movies, and Marvel Comics - specifically the X-men. (Weirdly, the comic book writers were more versatile in their reading. I'm thinking they just have more time?)
4. It's a beautiful day today. Clear blue sky. Breeze. In the 80s, which was a bit of surprise -- and made me wish I'd stuck with the lighter white linen pants as opposed to jeans. Went to church, tried to take a long walk along the promenade afterwards -- with the view of taking pictures, but alas, my cell phone was low on batteries. (Considering I was convinced that I charged it the day before this was somewhat surprising.) Instead, I wandered through a street fair, watched people, bought fudge and a chocolate milkshake, also Avocado and Cucumber Soup, and some groceries. Since I was dropping off to sleep or dozing in church, also got some unsweetened green tea. (I don't buy sugared drinks as a rule. And am off alcohol for the time being.)
Church annoyed me. I have more than a little of my mother's mother in me, I suspect. My mother's parents weren't religious -- they had issues with the sanctimonious preaching of pastors. And didn't much like authority figures any more than I do. The minister felt the need to tell us that the reason our society is currently in crisis is we've fallen away from religious practices which before now gave people stability. I'm looking at her and thinking, for someone who claims to have gone to theological school and studied history, you don't know much about your own history do you? Because I hate to break it to you -- but we're actually less in crisis now than we were at the beginning of the 20th century, or the 19th or the 18th. I mean let's consider this for a moment -- what happened in the 20th Century or even at the beginning of the 21st, when all these so-called religious practices were in full effect?
If anything we're less nasty now than we were back then. The difference is we have more information now. And we don't quite no how to handle all this information. A lot of people were never trained to decipher and critically assess information. I can tell, because they take a lot of the information fed to them at face value. And don't dig deeper. Granted, it's hard to dig deeper -- when there's so much, and it's fired at you 24/7. Very tempting to just cling to the comforting stuff or the stuff that validates one's world view, without further analysis.
Anyhow she lost me there and I started to play with my program. I did however pick up information on the convenant groups and may join one of them. I've decided to ease on down this road and see where it leads. I can jump off at any point.
5. My cousin on FB posted about a dream she had, and has decided that no matter what choices her parents made, she'd have met the same people and ended up where she currently is -- one way or another. That life has definite plan. And everything works out.
I'm more agnostic on this score. Maybe because I'm single, no family, and I can see multiple outcomes. Also, while I think there is a definitive pattern to existence..it's one strung with various interlocking threads that we can't see and aren't about us -- at least not directly -- yet inevitably effect the direction our own thread goes or is stitched in the tapestry. So yes, we may end up where we currently are by different means, but the people surrounding us may not be the same or in the same roles. Pull one thread and everything changes.
6. 88 year old Grandmother was an International Jewel Thief
I know this may sound odd? But stealing jewelry doesn't bother me. Go ahead steal it. The appeal of jewelry has always been lost on me. I don't tend to wear it. The stuff I like isn't valuable -- I like homemade and unique stuff without any gemstones. And only earrings. Light earrings.
As a result, I like stories about jewel thieves -- I sort of root for them as modern Robin Hoods.
In a time where it seems as if the United States has a fascination with “scammers,” whether it’s Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, or Billy McFarland, Payne undermines these archetypes in that she is Black, a woman, and older. Even further, she does not consider what she does a con — though her story of undermining the law across the world has spawned a documentary, a forthcoming movie with Tessa Thompson as the lead, and now a book, Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief.
In this memoir, Payne begins with her humble yet proud upbringing in a cloistered West Virginia town, then the hustle and bustle of Cleveland, and eventually whisks us away to jewelry stores in Europe and Asia. Throughout her love affairs, the deaths of loved ones, and brushes with the law, Doris remains the anchor. Hers is a voice that’s in control of her own narrative and a connoisseur of every diamond cut as she connects her life’s work to the power structures of who can and cannot afford this life — and at what cost.
7. United We Stand: With an assist from the internet, politicians have become pop icons and citizens their fans. What does that mean for our politics?
Did no one read the biography of Hamilton? Or for that matter, the histories of Truman, Roosevelt, Nixon, JFK, and Hitler? I mean they act like people have never done this before the 21st Century. That no one treated politicians with fannish fervor before.
Honestly, you'd think the journalists would know better.
Whatever persona Elizabeth Warren hopes to project in her presidential campaign, it is probably not that of a child witch. But that is the persona that some of her biggest fans have chosen for her.
Images of Hermione Granger, played in the “Harry Potter” films by a young Emma Watson, materialize at Warren’s every move. Warren steps onto the debate stage, and her fans craft tweets where Hermione stands in as her, rolling her eyes at the boys in wizarding class. Warren reads the whole Mueller report, and Hermione smugly wags her wand. In one extremely cursed tweet with zero likes, Warren’s face is transplanted onto Hermione’s frame, posed alongside Beto O’Rourke as Harry and Pete Buttigieg as Ron Weasley.
What is this strange chimera of presidential campaigning: a candidate’s head on pop culture’s body? It is the product of a great convergence between politics and culture, citizenship and commerce, ideology and aesthetics. Civic participation has been converted seamlessly into consumer practice. It is democracy reimagined as fandom, and it is now a dominant mode of experiencing politics.
You can see it in the efforts to sort the candidates into “Harry Potter” houses, converting the election to a personality quiz in a children’s book, and in the mash-up video that distills the 2020 candidates into quotes from Michael Scott, the buffoonish boss of “The Office.” A photograph of three Congresswomen of color is published and instantly compared to a Whitney Houston GIF, as if women interrogating Michael Cohen are analogous to Houston confronting her cheating boyfriend. Politicos of all stripes are styled as saints and stamped onto novelty devotional prayer candles.
Yeah, well, the problem with all of this is it does pre-exist the internet. The internet merely heightened it to a fevered pitch, because the information is more accessible to a broader audience, and 98% of social media is controlled by insane marketing folks. Everyone has their marketing guy online pushing their agenda. One of the many reasons I like Dream Width is it tends to be, at least for the most part, ad and marketing free. It flies beneath the media radar as a result. There's no ads on it, no spam, and no marketing. When people try to set up marketing and advertising accounts they get kicked to the curb by the administrators of the platform. The same cannot be said of Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Live Journal, Twitter, SnapChat, Yahoo Forums, and a whole host of others. I know I've been on many of them -- and it's basically ad and marketing city. The fandom is inter-mixed within it, and there are a lot of professional marketing people in there pretending to be fans. (They think I can't see them -- I can. I keep hiding them and snoozing them. It's bloody irritating.)
Prior to the internet, they did this -- it was just harder. You had to use the newspapers, and the magazines, and press releases. Now? You can do it without paying print media or broadcast media to showcase your product, brand or candidate. Obama sort of revolutionized how elections were done -- buy using social media to further his candidacy. It's not unlike what John F. Kennedy did in the 1960s with television, or Franklin D. Roosevelt did with radio, or Hamilton/Burr/Jefferson did with newspapers.
Heck in Shakespeare's time they used plays. Plays were used as social commentary, and fandom's often associated political figures with characters from theaterical productions.
This is not new. Did the writer of this article just forget to brush up on her history first? Was she not conscious in the 1970s and 80s? One wonders.
People need to stop critiquing the present by praising the past. The past wasn't as good as you think.
Now, The Mary Sue Breaks Down the Times Article -- apparently they didn't agree with the journalist either, for different reasons".
I’ll admit, when I first saw the headline “How Fan Culture Is Swallowing Democracy,” my heart sank. Written by Amanda Hess, the nine-part essay series tracks the connection between American politics and fandom/stan culture, and it seems to miss a key part of what actually makes fan culture. Hess seems to confuse fandom with memes, two things that oftentimes go hand in hand but are definitely not the same thing. Not by a long shot.
In one of the essays, titled “United We Stan,” Hess breaks down the culture surrounding Elizabeth Warren, pointing out the tweets that have cropped up comparing her to Hermione Granger and the “Elizabeth Warren always” meme. In another, she talks about the cult surrounding Ruth Bader Ginsberg, with her action figures. A third documents how ironic memes about Marianne Williamson turned into actual promotion of the candidate. Of course, there is the requisite piece on sitting President Donald Trump and how he was memed into the Presidency.
These are well-written essays, and Hess clearly understands the weird way that Internet culture works. But I feel as though there’s a vast difference between Internet culture and fan culture, even though fandom exists on the Internet and has adopted much of Internet culture into the language spoken by fans. Fandom is different, and while there are definitely cults around candidates, it isn’t “fandom” or “stanning.”
Most of what Hess writes about Warren and Ginsberg is reliant on meme culture, and while Williamson’s grassroots campaign manages who made memes of her astrally projecting might be fans of hers, the emphasis is still on the meme aspect. Memes are hard to explain. Seriously, try explaining to your grandmother why an image of a cat caught mid sneeze is such a #mood and then come back with a decent definition of a meme.
My difficulty with journalism is that it has swung a bit too much towards editorializing and opinion, and further from factual investigative writing. Everyone has an opinion. In this world of 24/7 news cycles -- we get journalistic opinions fired at us on a minute to minute basis. Fueling the flames of confusion and discord. In short, we have too many professional journalists, with little more than a graduate degree in "journalism and/or media studies or creative writing" offering up their opinions on everything under the sun. Often in book form or long persuasive essays.
I agree with the Mary Sue, Amanda Hess lost me fairly early on in her essay, and I stopped reading. I looked up Amanda Hess and found that she's the NY Time's critic at large -- basically she gets paid for writing her opinion on various topics. Her opinion, in short, is no more persuasive than say Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Allysa Milano, Amber Tamblyn, Mark Hamil, Rachel Maddow, Murphy Brown, Roseanne Barr, Stephen Colbert, or John Oliver.
I'm more willing to buy various people on DW's take on the issue, because they have studied history, studied fandom, written a dissertations on it, and conducted extensive research.
Since Harry Potter and Twilight took fandom mainstream, various newspaper and magazine writers have taken a stab at critiquing and analyzing fandom, without much knowledge of fandom or experience in it. As a result we get a lot of generalizations and suppositions with little to no true factual support.
As the Mary Sue writer states:
Ultimately though, this comes down to a misunderstanding of what fan culture is. Fan culture is taking the text of something and making it your own. It’s rewriting endings and pairing new characters off and having a personal relationship with a song or a movie or a book. It is not just memes, though there are plenty. Fan culture is large and nebulous but it goes beyond just the digital meme-o-sphere. Hess doesn’t seem to understand that.
As we’ve said before, if you’re going to write about fan culture, try to understand fan culture. It isn’t a broad label to be slapped on all Internet cultures and it isn’t a weird subculture to be stared at from afar. Fan culture is a living, breathing entity. It is more than memes.
A lot of people do not understand fan culture. Amanda Hess clearly doesn't and lost me within the first two paragraphs. I think she lost a lot of people.
I try to discuss it with mainstream folks, and they...well, they don't get it. Nor do they understand how broad it is. You can be part of fandom and never have been to a single convention. Some people aren't convention goers, some are. Conventions cost money not all fans want to spent or have the money to spend on conventions. Same deal with fanfic -- not all fans read or write fanfic, some write meta, some do vids, some draw, some discuss it endlessly on spoiler boards, some obsessively collect action figures, some make them...it's varied. You can't really generalize about it -- even though you want to.
Also it's not as gendered as journalists like to make it out to be. I know men who are huge shippers and very emotional about their ships. (I got into shipping fights with men who were shipping, strongly shipping Buffy/Xander and Buffy/Angel on fanboards. I can name at least ten of them. Also I've seen it on a General Hospital fan board, and an X-men fan board -- there are men in the X-men fandom that desperately want Wolverine and Jean Grey to get together, Marvel be damned. There are also male slash shippers -- some of the strongest Willow/Tara shippers were men.)
And, I'd add, having participated in "book" fandoms, not just comics, that there are male shippers of fictional book characters as well. In addition, this all existed long before computers were created or the internet was even a concept. All the internet did is make it possible for people to exchange information faster and on a broader scale. In other words, in 2002, a Navy nurse in Japan could discuss Spike with a woman in NYC. That wasn't as possible a decade ago.
Little Women was initially published chapter by chapter as an on-going serial in the 1800s. There were shippers back then. People who wrote letters to each other and the publisher, demanding that Laurie and Joe end up together. They formed fan clubs.
I also read that this happened with various Dickens novels, Austen novels, and the book Clarissa by Richardson. Shakespeare had his fans as well -- people who saw his plays repeatedly and heavily shipped various characters. It's not something that was created by the internet.
In the 1980s, a boy killed another boy over a Star Wars fanfiction they were writing together. Ralph and Leigh. The Kansas City Star wrote a lengthy article about them -- and I wrote a short story based on it in college. What happened -- was Ralph conned Leigh into believing that he had a connection with George Lucas and could sell Leigh's concept about the Clone Wars to Lucas. Leigh just had to pay Ralph a certain sum of money, to help develop the concept and send it to Lucas' agents. It was a total con. Leigh found out, and killed Ralph.
In the 1970s, there were fandoms associated with the 1960s television series The Monkeeys and Batman and Robin. I know because I sort of played a bit in them with my friends. Books that had fandoms included the Lord of the Rings, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, Kim Harris' novels about Rachel Morgan (people wrote fanfic about the characters), Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Rider Series, and of course Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
Fandom hit national attention with Star Wars and Star Trek, and a lot of people wrongly assumed that it was mainly male. (No. Really not.)
And it's not limited to television, books and movies -- we also music fandoms. I dated a Grateful Dead Groupie aka Deadhead in college who had over a million bootleg tapes of the Grateful Dead. He had seen almost every concert, and followed them around the country on their Farewell Tour. And my cousin is an Oasis Groupie, who has written fanfic about the band and turned her fanfic into two novels.
There's fans of people -- reality stars in performing arts competitions over seas. A friend of mine was obsessed with an actor who was competing in the Andrew Lloyd Webber reality show -- for the next lead of Joseph and the Amazing Technocolor Raincoat. They had meetups with fellow fans. Created fanfic starring the actor, got bootleg tapes and CD's of the show. I know I attended one of their activities -- even though I wasn't into the actor, and discovered during it that there was a huge amount of fanfic associated with these celebrity fandoms.
People get fannish about various things, they always have. It's not a new phenomena.
It's just that the people who don't get fannish - or don't get fannish about anything other than sports, are now aware of it. Honestly it's no different than religiously watching every Giants game or Braves game, and following those teams around. And writing fanfic about them. Playing games associated with it. And collecting cards or autographs.
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Date: 2019-09-16 01:06 am (UTC)