(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

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.