Fanfic, fandom, and writing essays..

[shadowkat]

It is midnight and I should be in bed. But oddly wired. I think PMS? Maybe not. Maybe so. Just finished betaing the first 20 pages of a fanfic that I wrote and posted to teaattheford tonight. It's the one I wrote last year but didn't finish. No not the evil fanfic, that's already there still unfinished. The other one. Which I hope to finish this weekend and post complete to that board. Little fearful. But nice to have it someplace intact. Was almost impossible to locate in my journal.

At any rate, while betaing the thing I got to thinking about fanfic and fandom. Two things that are relatively new to me. I've never been in a fandom before BTVS and to be honest, there are times that I look at fandom and think, yes, the word and it's dictionary meaning fits. Fanatic. Crazy. Obsessed person. Okay. Needing approval and validation through outside means. Yep. Yet, the people I've met have also been incredibly generous and fun. So like everything else? Double-edged experience.

Fanfic provides one with a comfort zone. You are working with established characters and an established back-story. You are also writing for an audience who knows possibly as much if not more about these characters than you do. This provides you, the fanfic writer, with the ability to skim over certain things that writers of original fiction cannot skim over, which is not a good habit to get into. You do not have to describe backstory or deal with exposition. You do not have to provide as much detailed description. Your audience already knows these characters, they know their back-story, where they came from, who they are. So unlike a writer of original fiction, you can sort of push past the tough stuff and get right to the meat or heart of things. Unless of course you are doing an alternate universe fic - then you have to tell more. There is of course a down-side to your audience being overly familar with your characters - they have their own ideas about them, own wants and desires, and if these wants and desires conflict with yours - well, you lose them.

Why is it written? To fill in gaps in the narrative. The writer and audience are left unsatisfied in some way, they want something and are uncertain what it is. Television serials are excellent for fanfic - because they have gaps in their narrative structure. The more loose the show is written and by loose, I mean the writer deliberately does not tell you everything about the characters or what has happened to them, the more likely you will see fanfic on it. Action-adventure/mystery/sci-fi and western serials are perfect - since their focus is more on action than relationships, they leave a lot of things open-ended. And being a serial - they can't quite let any of their characters stay together - another perfect opening for a fanfic to be written, because we all yearn for happy endings or endings period and tv serials rarely have endings.

Coming online tonight, I read one of the posts on my flist then read a response, and smiled. The post was asking if anyone knew of any NON-fanfic writers who explored myth in their essays and could speak about them and explored fandom. The person who responded recommended three FAN-FIC writers, big name ones, who to my knowledge have never written any essays on the verse and haven't really read any. I laughed. When I was writing essays on the Buffy Cross & Stake board in 2002-2003 - then later, briefly, Angel's Soul, the board was split. You could at one time only post fanfic with permission and only on the non-spoiler board, without spoilers. On ATPO - All Things Philosophical About Buffy and Angel - you rarely posted fanfic, not sure if they permitted it or not - short ones, maybe. Just links were allowed. But essays could be as long as you wanted and no permission was necessary. Slayage.tv - the academic site - only did essays.

I wrote over 400 pages during the series run in 2002-2005, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of the B/S fanfic writers on my own correspondence list never read one of them.  It's not because I wasn't well known - I wrote and posted on the most trafficed board online at the time - BC&S Spoiler Board which had over 400 visitors a day. Or accessible. But we ran in different circles. I read them, but then I read both essays and fic. A lot of people I know in fandom either read one or the other. There is an equal number of people I'm certain that have never read a fanfic, but have read quite a few essays. A friend of mine, soon to be published writer, refuses to read fanfic, sees it as silly and only read essays, even bought a book of essays. There is a split in fandom and people are very weird about it - but then people are weird about anything they get passionate about.

At any rate this persuades me to create a meme for the essay writers - everyone names their favorite fanfic writers, but I haven't seen anyone list their favorite essay writers, ever. Not once.  So, Who are your favorite Buffy/Angel essay writers? They had to have written an essay on the series. They cannot be someone known for writing lots of fanfic on it and have oh, written a brief post or two. No, You can only name people who have written at least one to two essays and have posted those essays someplace on line. Also if you are an essay writer, you are not allowed to name yourself. Name at least five. You can name ten. And if you can't think of any and you've written fanfic? Shame on you.. Go to these websites and start reading: www.teaatheford.com, www.atpobtvs.com. Who knows you might get some new ideas.

Who were my favorite essayists?

This is not as easy as it looks. Particularly since a lot of people on my flist wrote essays on this series.

1. Slain - who wrote essays on noir themes.

2. Alcibades

3. plin - otherwise known as superplin

4. Rahael - who wrote about myth

5. Caroline (or habiti ) who wrote about myth and did an amazing analysis of Buffy S7.

6. manwitch - who also did an interesting analysis of Buffy seasons as the hero's journey and the 7 chakras.

7. Destiny - a psychologist on Bloody Awful Poet, who did psychological analysis of Spike on each episode of BTVS and reviews

8. Lesley - who also analyzed myth on the series

9. atpoch who did analysis of each Angel episode, literary and musical analysis.

10. hankat - who examined the narrative structure.

Also: londonkds, Exeter, Haccity, Pip, ramsesII, frenchani, redcat, and cjlasky

I started by reading fanfic, but the essays were what got me hooked, particularly the discussions that followed.

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Totally get what you state above. I was the same way in S6. Had this craving. Reviews didn't cut it. Then, I found the BC&S forum and started seeing more analysis - people articulating my own feelings. Still wasn't enough and I was so bored at the time, with a lot more time on my hands than I have now and in emotional pain - so writing the essays, was, in a way, my way of handling all of that. But I know I would not have enjoyed writing the essays without the reactions or reading the reactions. I also craved others essays and read quite a few of them. I'd forgotten Rowen and Etrangere and Fresne, but yes, I looked for theirs - particularly enjoyed our discussions. Etrangere and Mal had some of the best debates, as did Sophist and Mal.

Also agree - that it wasn't the essays themselves that were so interesting as the reactions, tangents, and conversations that sprouted from them. Which is how essays differ from fanfic - you really don't get the tangents you did with essays on discussion boards, at least not quite the same types of tangents. Who could forget redcat and rahael's long debate on Clarissa and feminist literature? Or redcat's posts on Hawaiian myths?

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

Reading this thread has made me nostalgic for the good old days when the shows were both going strong, and the discussion on ATPO and Tea at the Ford was so intense. I'm going to take some time and go through the archives again. Every time I go there I find more fascinating things to read and think about.

[ann1962]

Sophist's link to his list in the archives let me wander those pages either side of his link for at least an hour the other day. I can get lost there regularly.