(no subject)

[shadowkat]

I don't know why this is but some inexplicable reason I can't write today. Had to do a free hand writing sample for an interview and my words just got stuck. They would not come.
Did it again tonight with an lj entry. Did not any sense when I read it again.

Does this happen to you? The words just get stuck somehow. They won't come out.
Perhaps I'm tired?

Oh...has anyone heard of Allyson Beatrice? Or Buffistas? (The board group she moderated and ran?)

She apparently wrote a book entitled, I kid you not, Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby: Adventures in Cult Fandom

And yes, if you guessed it was about Buffy fans, you guessed right.

Sigh. She beat me to it. Although from reading the excerpts in Entertainment Weekly, she's had far more bizarre experiences and done far crazier things than I have. So, I doubt I'd have gotten published. Plus Tim Minear encouraged her to write it. Can't beat that.

I'm not a fan. I just flirted at being a fan. A fan is someone who stalks follows (and I mean literally not just watching them on tv or reading stuff on the net) actors, writers, creators of the series about. And writes them. Emails them. That is a fan.
Me? I just happened to be a little obsessed by the show.

Comments

Fans

[hankat.livejournal.com]

Hey you could write something about the cult of Spike...;)

I loved the show as you know but did I want to meet any of the writers or actors...not really. I was always confounded over the ways fans found to abuse each other when they didn't agree on something to do with the show. I was lucky enough to find a small community of fans that didn't 'hit the looney button (a beasty phrase) when the show didn't go their way. I still remember back to an e-mail I wrote to David Fury about his issue with fans and Spike. I remember basically writing to say Spike and Angel weren't much different to each other (when it comes to suitability to be with a young girl)when it comes to backgrounds. I pointed out that if people were angry about what he was saying about the Spike character he had to remember that the writers did kinda send fans in one direction only to get cold feet and make serial killer comparisons. My contention was about the misuse of the word serial killer as a label for a supernatural being and that if Spike was a serial killer then hadn't they noticed they wrote a whole show around a 'serial killer' in the form of Angel. I noticed a change in attitude when the Spike character joined the Angel show. Those were the days I was so glad I wasn't a shipper type and suffer the negative feelings some did when their characters outcome wasn't to their liking.

I loved your essays and the fact you were willing to see the good and bad in each character. When a character becomes too perfect people no longer are interested in the overall character development.

Long live Miss Kitty and Groofus!!!!!!!!!!!!


Rufus

Re: Fans

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I loved the show as you know but did I want to meet any of the writers or actors...not really.

Feel much the same way.

I don't like meeting celebrities in person, whether they be actors, writers, politicians, diplomats, business men, or what have you. I always feel like we aren't on equal ground. It's embarrassing. And makes me uncomfortable. And I honestly have never understood why others do it. Allyson Beatrice makes no sense to me. I wasn't that type of fan.

The ATPO board was an atypical fanboard. It really was more for people who were obsessed with the show, not necessarily fans in the traditional sense of the word. Rarely did you see pictures of actors posted (like you do on the other boards) or postings about conventions, actor gossip or sightings. Most of the people on that board would not have been caught dead at a fan convention nor would they have tried to contact an actor or writer of the series. They were obsessed with the show more than who was behind the show. IT was more of an analytical/scholarly board than a fan board, I think. And I think at a certain point, people were more addicted to and fans of the interactions on that board than they were of anything else - to such an extent, that a group of us sort of brought it over to lj. In fact, 80% of my flist is from that board.

I still remember back to an e-mail I wrote to David Fury about his issue with fans and Spike.

Fury - often made me wonder if he watched the show or just knew about his own episodes. TV is weird. Writers of tv shows tend to forget what they've written - which makes sense in a way, considering they often didn't write it, someone else did, and they don't have time to watch their friend's effort or keep track. That's why continuity in television is not an easy thing to do. Later, in S6 of Buffy, and S5 of Angel, I think Fury had a better take on things. Prior to those seasons, he really wasn't full time on either show and saw his episodes but not others.

Oh I remember the Angel/Spike debates well. Gave up fighting them finally.
If someone does not want to see your view of something, you can't make them.

My take on the two characters was that they were mirror images of each other. Both were equally bad and equally good. What was different about them was how they were bad and good. But I'm not sure you could say one was necessarily better or worse than the other, without it being completely subjective and a projection of your own issues. (ie. You shipped Angel, therefore hated Spike or vice versa.) I liked both more or less.

I noticed a change in attitude when the Spike character joined the Angel show. Those were the days I was so glad I wasn't a shipper type and suffer the negative feelings some did when their characters outcome wasn't to their liking.

Sigh. Shippers. Sigh.

I adored Spike. And enjoyed Marsters performances. Also the B/S relationship intrigued me and ahem, turned me on. But I don't think I was a *shipper*. Because I had no problems whatsoever with the direction the writers chose to take. I actually liked where they went.

I did not understand the people who got upset about the addition of Spike to Angel. I thought they were crazy. But then I also didn't understand the reaction to Tara's death. Thought that was crazy too.

Re: Fans

[zmayhem.livejournal.com]

I don't like meeting celebrities in person [...] I always feel like we aren't on equal ground. It's embarrassing. And makes me uncomfortable. And I honestly have never understood why others do it. Allyson Beatrice makes no sense to me. I wasn't that type of fan.

Fair enough, except that this:

Most of the people on that board would not have been caught dead at a fan convention nor would they have tried to contact an actor or writer of the series. They were obsessed with the show more than who was behind the show. IT was more of an analytical/scholarly board than a fan board, I think. And I think at a certain point, people were more addicted to and fans of the interactions on that board than they were of anything else

sounds exactly like the boards Allyson describes in her book. She makes the point right at the beginning that the show itself was just the hook that drew her into a world of real, thriving friendships that have ranged far and wide and almost infinitely beyond any of the shows themselves.

We (disclaimer: I'm a member of one of the boards she writes about) have yearly meetings, but there's not a celebrity in sight: in the years since we started throwing everything from Shakespeare to Warhol at each other dissecting the show, we've helped each other move, visited each other's babies in the ICN, shepherded each other through grad school, married and spawned. We still love our girl Buffy, but it's no longer about the show, it's about the community. How can Allyson Beatrice make no sense to you? Her boards are your boards.

And as to the "Ew, ick, starfucking, embarrassing!"... the one Big Name on our boards, Tim, is there because he popped up on an Angel discussion thread many years ago asking for feedback, wrestling with his writing and eager to discuss it with smart, literate folks outside the feverish little world of the people actually cranking the show out. And he stayed because the discussions were smart and literate, and because we weren't sycophantic; we praised the good and slammed the bad, and there's not a single poster who's hesitated to call bullshit on lazy, unconvincing writing.

Allyson has a lot of hero worship for Tim (and sheepishly admits to having used his email address as a journal) but because he's an extraordinarily gifted storyteller, not because he's a Celebrity. And, for that matter, the real friendship didn't happen until they got in a long loud no-holds-barred verbal swordfight over a script he thought was swell and she thought stank on ice -- as much as she hero-worshiped him, she didn't hesitate to trust her own judgment when she thought he'd fallen down badly as a storyteller.

Joss himself has stopped by a few times, and we did lose our heads a bit with the squeeing...but only at first. The thing is, he never stuck around. He'd pop in to make pronouncements about this or that project and then vanish for another few months. And the squeeing finally stopped: he may be a bigger celebrity than any twenty other writers, but he's a drive-by guy, not a member of the community, and the drive-bys aren't the people who matter. Tim isn't a writer anymore, exactly (well, he is, but you know what I mean); he's one of us. He knows about Betsy's Sondheim love and ita's migraines and how close the most recent Gaza Strip bombings were to Nilly's family.

Sorry to go on and on, but your fan experience really sounds very similar to what Allyson spends the bulk of the book writing about. Plus, I'm not that fan, but I do actually know a fair number of smarty-pants lit-crit-thinky Ivy-Leaguey types who do enjoy the cons and the famous pretty boys and the photos with the stars; I look at it and say, as another of our board members put it, "That is not my beautiful cake," but I don't knock it. It hurts nobody, and for some people it's fun and freeing to be a giddy teen for a couple of weekends a year. And if fans start tut-tutting other fans for embarrassing fannishness, where will it all end?

I'm shutting up now before I roll right into a perfectly dreadful fannish riff on Austen's "Oh! It is only a novel!" riff in Northanger Abbey.

Re: Fans

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Whoa.

I was just commenting on what EW wrote about the book.

And no, I'd say from what you described that my experiences with fandom and Allyson's aren't similar at all. Mine were sort of boring in comparison. But then I don't have the money or time to do all that.

Never been on the Buffista board so can't comment on it.
But I know the board I was on was very different than most boards.
How so?

Ah.

We had twenty to thirty page essays posted on how Buffy related to Michael Foucault and Jung. A tibetian monk posted an essay on Buddha references.
And someone wrote a parody of Buffy in Elizabethan verse. We also had a historical discussion about origins of Hindu myth. Crazy? Yeah. But also sort of fun.

To my knowledge none of the writers frequented it nor the actors. It wasn't that chatty a board. Not like Bronze Beta or Angel's Soul Board or Buffyworld or BC&S. Also all essays were archived. So unlike many boards, we kept all our data.

Most of the people who were posting on that board at the time I was are on my lj, few still follow the show Buffy, and only a few have been to a fan convention. When they meet once a year, and I've never really gone since again can't afford it - it's maybe five or six, possibly ten people if that.

So don't assume your experience is the same. It wasn't.

Plus, if you can't make fun of fandom, what's the point? It is silly don't you think? Fawning over a tv show or a writer or actor? Shouldn't that be made fun of? Allyson certainly is by writing the book.

Re: Fans

[zmayhem.livejournal.com]

We all roll our eyes at fandom sometimes, sure; I just feel defensive and protective of my little corner of it, and I did overreact to a post that said that someone I care about makes no sense. And I do get defensive and protective about the goofy enthusiastic fans, because, as Allyson points out in her book, there's really no difference between them and baseball fans or NASCAR fans or any members of any fandom that's totally accepted in the mainstream. It does nettle me that one kind of fan is a loser and the other is an all-American straight-up regular guy when in fact there's so little difference between them, and your comment about not understanding that kind of fandom hit that hot button. Which is my hot button, my issue, clearly not yours. So I'm very sorry.

We never did Jung on our boards, but Foucault, oh yes indeedy. Buffy and Buddha, Buffy and medieval saints and The Cloud of Unknowing, the eloquent seven sonnet cycle in iambic pentameter after her swandive at the end of S5, we've been there. And that, again, is one of the points of Allyson's book (more so than the Celebrity Event anecdotes) -- that the Internet makes that kind of community possible. That without it, the 30-page Jungian essay writers and Tibetan monks and sonnet composers and Sondheim filkers would all still exist, but we'd never be able to find each other; without the Internet, the world's just too damn big. With the Internet, we're there, across time zones, continents, oceans, friends and kindred spirits sparking off each other's minds.

I'm sorry to have offended you so. I just love my board and love my fandom and I'm too easily upset lately to be allowed near a keyboard without a keeper.

Re: Fans

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Not offended so much as taken aback by the response.

I often forget anyone outside of the people I've friended and who have friended me back read this thing. And your response was to a post I wrote two days ago in my journal...it's like having someone stop their car on the highway, knock on your front door and admonish you for putting up a sign in your yard that offended them. It just blows my mind. The internet is a weird place.