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shadowkatSupposed to have a snow-storm tonight into tomorrow, but no more than 2-4 inches in the city. Also supposed to be cold, but just below freezing. New York City is whining again about it. Seriously? Makes you want to ship them all to the Midwest, doesn't it?
Have been suffering all day with a head-ache inducingly painful cystic pimple on the bridge of my nose. Red and angry. And embarrassing. Wished I didn't have to be at work, tried everything to cover it up. Gave up. And I had to be in a meeting with 20 people. Also present at the meeting. I know, whine, whine, whine...but there it is.
Being a Buffy fan on the Internet.
A Long Rambling Muse. Inspired by Mark Watches Buffy of all things. 1998-2012. Sort of Stream of Consciousness. Lots of typos, because no time to edit, may do that later.
And includes an explanation of my posting name - how I came up with it, when I first came up with it, and why.
Been reading the Mark Watches bits here and there...and, okay, has the guy watched any serials, or soap operas? Or teen angst dramas? Did he completely miss "My So-Called Life", "Party of Five", "Eight is Enough", "Freaks & Geeks", "Square Pegs", "Popular", "Fame", or the supernatural daytime soap operas: Passions, Dark Shadows,
and Port Charles? Did he never watch 90210? Melrose Place? Skip over Dallas and Dynasty? Never see The Thorn Birds? Or watch St. Elsewhere and L A Law? Did he skip
"Dawson's Creek" which was on the WB at the same time Buffy aired and dealt with similar issues? I want to ask him this:
(Sigh, maybe my age is showing? He may be 25 and was just too young to have seen the good adult and teen serials in the 1980s and 1990s.) I restrain myself.
But seriously if he thinks S2 is out there, just wait until he watches some of the episodes in the later seasons - S3, S4, S5, S6, and S7 had some of the most ground-breaking, controversial and envelope pushing episodes in tv history. Here's a short list:
Where the writers played with narrative structure and jumped beyond the format and the rules, and bit their thumbs at network censors and tv standards. I mean once you've seen Smashed and Restless and HUSH - Innocence seems a bit...silly. So...I'm reading Mark, like everyone else, just to see...his head explode when he reaches the "really" good stuff. He's not there yet.
The best seasons are the latter ones - and I say that, after criticizing the plot of those seasons to death. Whedon's strength was never in his plotting, sorry to say. He plots like a daytime soap opera or marvel comics writer - by the seat of his pants, and centered on emotion or shock value, BUT he is quite good at character centric emotional/psychological writing. Most soap writers are. He reminds me a lot of a daytime soap writer...which I know people hate to hear because people have an odd view of soap operas they are a bit like my friend CW who..has no peripheral vision when it comes to cultural pursuits, for she likes Opera but hates musicals, not seeing the different strengths and attributes of both. But if you've watched as many daytime soaps and as for as long a period as I have - you know the secret, sometimes there's incredibly imaginative and excellent bits of writing hidden in there. Experiments with narrative form that would knock your socks off. It's like any art form, artists create a lot of crap, before they do the excellent thing. Law of averages. Marvel comics was the same way...for every bad comic or cliche story, occasionally you'd hit something that was so good, so amazing, it blew your socks off. Shakespeare's like that too...he wrote a lot of bad plays in there, or didn't you try to read Timon of Athens or Two Gentleman of Verona? And Dickens - sigh, okay I'm admittedly not a good judge of Dickens, considering I still hate the over-filmed Great Expectations. Even Austen (Northanger Abbey makes me cringe).
There used to be a meme that would go around - which episode would you rec for someone to get into Buffy? Impossible. Because Buffy was such a soap, a serial. Each episode built on the next. The plot was less important than the metaphors, the analogies, and the characters. It made no sense to pop into the middle of it. If you watched The Body, without seeing S1-4, you wouldn't understand or get the full emotional impact of that episode. It only worked in context. Soaps and Marvel Comics The X-men were like that. You had to read the whole thing, in order to appreciate that one truly marvelous episode or comic. There are tv shows that are brilliant all the way through more or less - like The Wire. I admit that. But even the Wire had its weak episodes and moments. All TV shows do.
As much as I may criticize Buffy or anything I love, I also see the contradiction in my criticism, the part of it that I do love. For example I may hate the Willow/Spike plot cliches in S6, but I also at the same time love them to pieces. It makes no sense, not even to me. There was just something there embedded deep within all of it that pulled at my gut, my heart, my emotion - screw the head. It wasn't what is appealing to Mark Watches or not the same thing at any rate - so there's a disconnect. But then I'm not male. I'm not in my 20s. I don't make money blogging. And I'm not gay or queer or lesbian. I'm straight. There was another guy who was watching the show for the first time a while back, more scholarly, less emotional, who I liked better. Never been much of a squee-er. Too frigging analytical. Sort of gets in the way. Which was why I joined the ATPO board and stayed away from Bronze Beta or the list-serves such as Yahoo.
Fandom was also different in the early 00s than it is today, in part because the internet was vastly different. We had less gadgets. Less rules. Less guidelines. It was newer. TV shows were on VHS, and we taped them. They were not on DVR or DVD, which didn't really show up until around 2004. Oh they were available, but a lot of people like myself couldn't afford them and stuck with VHS tapes - which wore out quickly. I broke the one with Innocence/Suprise that I taped way back in 1998, along with the Becoming episodes. Had to re-record them off of F/X which was re-running all the episodes on weekdays. Back then - F/X didn't have much original programming and just showed old episodes of shows like Buffy.
Buffy premiered on the wobbly WB, and I remember wanting cable so I'd get better reception. In 2002, S6, it was on the even wobblier UPN. Which didn't come in. And you worried on a weekly basis that you wouldn't get to see the show. Unlike now - if you missed it, you were screwed and had to beg people to either send tapes or wait for it to show up on F/X or in re-runs.
Spoilers ruled. IF you could find them, and Whedon's writers had a lot of fun setting up wild goose chases. The best and most legendary mislead was Spike getting his chip removed. We were all convinced. They even took bets on why he'd do it and if he'd turn evil after it happened. Of course, it was a complete mislead. They even fooled the actor, who thought that was what they planned on doing. No one knew he was going after a soul (although I guessed it, because that made more logical sense without the arc...but the show was so much like a soap in some ways, that you couldn't be certain. You never knew.).
And the online world...was made up of hard-core geeks. You had to work at finding this stuff. Voy was always crashing. Finding fan-sites, really good fan-sites, required detective work. Often it was by recommendation.
You'd start at:
There was an online radio show...that was done out of someone's basement, they'd interview the writers by phone online after episodes, and you'd listen to the podcasts.I can't remember the name of it. [Oh, The Succubus Club] People wrote transcripts for those of us who missed the cast.
If you were really scholarly inclined : You'd head over to slayage.com (a list of links) or Slayage - an online scholarly journal of nothing but Buffy essays. And of course there was Teaatheford.com for female scholarly types obsessed with Spike. You had to be invited. It was psuedo-private. Professors were teaching Buffy in colleges, and presenting papers, and getting paid for it. This blew my mind. Then Writercon popped up - a fic writing con devoted at first just to Buffy, it slowly expanded to other things. There were also sites devoted to each character, and ship. As well as actor on the series. Such as Marsters Mobsters, More than Spike, etc.
Now? It's gone. Oh there's still vestiges here and there. But..it feels a bit like looking at an old tv show that you loved as a child...and thinking, uhm. So much of the fun was due to rudimentary nature of the net. We were exploring it together.
This new territory, fanboards, vids. This was before YouTube. Where you downloaded fanvids and almost crashed your computer, but did it anyway. Sharing files on the sly.
It's hard to explain to people who weren't there. Sort of like, I suppose, trying to explain what it was like to ride in that first car or see the first cell phone, or get color tv for the first time. Now technology comes so fast and furious, people almost take it for granted.
When I first saw Innocence/Surprise back in 1998...I much like Mark Watches, went nuts, but I couldn't find the fandom boards. And blogs did not exist. You had to create a web site, which required knowledge of java code. There was no one to talk to about it and no where to discuss. I found a few sites, and spoilers. Used to go like clockwork to an Bangle fan site that I can't remember the name of and there was no way to discuss it with the person, you just read their site and the spoilers they posted, and ACIN NEWS - which at that time was the only source for tv and film spoilers, nothing else existed. There wasn't as much back then. The internet was smaller. Email listserves were more popular. As we moved forward, VOY popped up. And there was the somewhat busy chat rooms...where conversations flew by like bullets.
By the time I came back online to fandom in 2001, after I saw Once More with Feeling, Tabula Rasa and then Smashed - and once again went nuts, fanfic had exploded. I didn't know it existed until 2001. Fanfic.net and of course other character and ship related sites. There was spoilerslayer - the source for spoilers. Some guy I met at a party sent me to spoilerslayer, because he got annoyed with all the emails I kept sending to discuss the show and speculate about the spoilers. He wasn't really into discussing it by email. Buffy Cross and Stake was spoilerslayer's main source for spoilers and the board spoilerslayer sent me to because he also got sick of my long email speculations and in-depth analysis of all of the spoilers that he posted, along with the character arcs, etc. I desperately wanted to discuss the spoilers and the series. The themes. Etc. Spoilerslayer did not.
So off I went to BC&S, which required a username to join the board.
You have no idea how many different usernames I tried, including my own birth name, before shadowkat finally got accepted and went through. Which was a bit of a private joke that no one quite gets...I was an X-men comics fan before Buffy took over my soul and I ended up dumping the comics in favor of it (2001). The comics featured a cyber-geek who could phase through computers, and was wickedly smart and snarky, named shadowkat. I'm no cyber-geek, but shadowkat reminded me a little of the Buffy characters and fit my online persona. Hides in the shadows, not what it seems. And I deliberately spelled it with a "k" because shadowcat was already taken by a fanfic writer on the board. Also I liked the look of the "k" spelling better - it was sharper, had more of an edge.
Back then? You could post long, fifty page essays to fanboards. People ate them up. I don't think you can do it as easily now. Voy was nicer than the comic forums appear to be. And Whedonesque is annoyingly uninviting of posting your own stuff - you can only post someone else's stuff. Weird site, whedonesque. It took the place of Bronze Beta, but unlike Bronze Beta, was centered on a creator not the show a group of people were involved in. Very different dynamic. Bronze Beta in some respects was wilder and less censored. Never known what to make of Whedonesque, which Whedon himself...posts on occasionally - something else I'm not quite sure what to make of.
Whedon rarely posted on Bronze Beta, he left that to his minions.
The world has changed since I first came online in 2002. Mark Watches makes me aware of it. I remember fan boards without product placements. I remember people discussing whether it made sense to jump onto livejournal - was it too personal? Why would you want to post about well, yourself? While fanboards admittedly had a group therapy aspect to them...it was through the veil of a tv series. We could back away from the personal. LJ felt almost too intimate.
Yet, we got pulled in, or some of us did, one by one. Gifting each other passes. Then friending each other immediately. It did make sense - since many of our posts on the fanboards tended to jump off topic. ATPOBTVS is a good board to play around on - if you want to see how people reacted to the show as it aired. What were people's reactions to Seeing Red - when it came on the air for the first time? What was it like to post on the net and a fanboard in 2002 before DVR's and DVD's and file sharing was readily available?
Back then we didn't really have blogs. Those came about more in 2003. They were there, but not really noticeable. And there was no such thing as Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even on the net back then as far as I know. Aaron Sorkin was busy writing The West Wing. And Television Without Pity was just beginning to get up and running. There weren't as many ads or product placements. Fanboards didn't have products like Mark Watches blog does. Or most didn't. Some did.AngelFire AngelX (ETA:AngelFire was the name of the hosting agent for many of the fan sites, sort of like GeoCities - both defunct now) who ran Buffy Cross and Stake - tried to sell things, until she got worried about copyright infringement.
I find myself waxing nostalgic...tonight for some reason. It's like I want to revisit a former self that no longer exists. She's there, hidden amongst old journal posts and essays on an archived fanboard - if you want to find here. But not here, here, now in the present. I'm no longer in love with Buffy. Whedon no longer seems to entertain. And the fandom...has dispersed. Few remain. Of the ones I was online with back in the day...they merely grouse at the comics, or wax nostalgic while reading Mark Watches...hunting perhaps in Mark's blogs some remnant of themselves? Or perhaps not. Hard to know what another person thinks or feels.
I do know there were a lot of wildly brilliant and creative people on the internet who watched Buffy. And posted on those boards. Everyone from a Tibetian Monk to
scholars, geneticists, scientists, physicists, Supreme Court attorneys, actors, professional writers, agents, and people like myself - blundering fools hunting others similarly inclined.
I think tv shows like Buffy or Doctor Who or what have you...are ways to bring people together over a shared interest. A way of breaking the ice. Of finding a sort of
pseudo-intimacy through cultural work that is safe. That resonates on a level difficult to explain except to those who just get it. You either got Buffy or you didn't. You either loved it or you didn't. And for many of us who did? The internet was the only place we could discuss it - so here we fled. Discussing under fake names, but revealing multitudes that few outside of our fellow geeks would know.
I see that in Mark Watches posts...that desire to share a piece of himself, that inner self through the guise of tv analysis or tv reviews. A way to explain, that is safe but not.
Well, make of this what you will. It's late time for bed. While the snow quietly blankets the earth.
Have been suffering all day with a head-ache inducingly painful cystic pimple on the bridge of my nose. Red and angry. And embarrassing. Wished I didn't have to be at work, tried everything to cover it up. Gave up. And I had to be in a meeting with 20 people. Also present at the meeting. I know, whine, whine, whine...but there it is.
Being a Buffy fan on the Internet.
A Long Rambling Muse. Inspired by Mark Watches Buffy of all things. 1998-2012. Sort of Stream of Consciousness. Lots of typos, because no time to edit, may do that later.
And includes an explanation of my posting name - how I came up with it, when I first came up with it, and why.
Been reading the Mark Watches bits here and there...and, okay, has the guy watched any serials, or soap operas? Or teen angst dramas? Did he completely miss "My So-Called Life", "Party of Five", "Eight is Enough", "Freaks & Geeks", "Square Pegs", "Popular", "Fame", or the supernatural daytime soap operas: Passions, Dark Shadows,
and Port Charles? Did he never watch 90210? Melrose Place? Skip over Dallas and Dynasty? Never see The Thorn Birds? Or watch St. Elsewhere and L A Law? Did he skip
"Dawson's Creek" which was on the WB at the same time Buffy aired and dealt with similar issues? I want to ask him this:
"Dude? Have you never seen a soap opera or an afterschool special in your life???"
(Sigh, maybe my age is showing? He may be 25 and was just too young to have seen the good adult and teen serials in the 1980s and 1990s.) I restrain myself.
But seriously if he thinks S2 is out there, just wait until he watches some of the episodes in the later seasons - S3, S4, S5, S6, and S7 had some of the most ground-breaking, controversial and envelope pushing episodes in tv history. Here's a short list:
Restless, HUSH, Conversations with Dead People (forget the plot - look at the narrative structure), Once More with Feeling, Beneath You, The Body (which I still think is the best and most honest piece of writing that Joss Whedon has done in his entire life and will never top), The Wish, Dopplegangland, Selfless, Villains, Smashed, Bargaining, Lies My Parents Told Me, Storyteller (which I hated but that's just me), The Zeppo (ditto), Superstar (ditto).
Where the writers played with narrative structure and jumped beyond the format and the rules, and bit their thumbs at network censors and tv standards. I mean once you've seen Smashed and Restless and HUSH - Innocence seems a bit...silly. So...I'm reading Mark, like everyone else, just to see...his head explode when he reaches the "really" good stuff. He's not there yet.
The best seasons are the latter ones - and I say that, after criticizing the plot of those seasons to death. Whedon's strength was never in his plotting, sorry to say. He plots like a daytime soap opera or marvel comics writer - by the seat of his pants, and centered on emotion or shock value, BUT he is quite good at character centric emotional/psychological writing. Most soap writers are. He reminds me a lot of a daytime soap writer...which I know people hate to hear because people have an odd view of soap operas they are a bit like my friend CW who..has no peripheral vision when it comes to cultural pursuits, for she likes Opera but hates musicals, not seeing the different strengths and attributes of both. But if you've watched as many daytime soaps and as for as long a period as I have - you know the secret, sometimes there's incredibly imaginative and excellent bits of writing hidden in there. Experiments with narrative form that would knock your socks off. It's like any art form, artists create a lot of crap, before they do the excellent thing. Law of averages. Marvel comics was the same way...for every bad comic or cliche story, occasionally you'd hit something that was so good, so amazing, it blew your socks off. Shakespeare's like that too...he wrote a lot of bad plays in there, or didn't you try to read Timon of Athens or Two Gentleman of Verona? And Dickens - sigh, okay I'm admittedly not a good judge of Dickens, considering I still hate the over-filmed Great Expectations. Even Austen (Northanger Abbey makes me cringe).
There used to be a meme that would go around - which episode would you rec for someone to get into Buffy? Impossible. Because Buffy was such a soap, a serial. Each episode built on the next. The plot was less important than the metaphors, the analogies, and the characters. It made no sense to pop into the middle of it. If you watched The Body, without seeing S1-4, you wouldn't understand or get the full emotional impact of that episode. It only worked in context. Soaps and Marvel Comics The X-men were like that. You had to read the whole thing, in order to appreciate that one truly marvelous episode or comic. There are tv shows that are brilliant all the way through more or less - like The Wire. I admit that. But even the Wire had its weak episodes and moments. All TV shows do.
As much as I may criticize Buffy or anything I love, I also see the contradiction in my criticism, the part of it that I do love. For example I may hate the Willow/Spike plot cliches in S6, but I also at the same time love them to pieces. It makes no sense, not even to me. There was just something there embedded deep within all of it that pulled at my gut, my heart, my emotion - screw the head. It wasn't what is appealing to Mark Watches or not the same thing at any rate - so there's a disconnect. But then I'm not male. I'm not in my 20s. I don't make money blogging. And I'm not gay or queer or lesbian. I'm straight. There was another guy who was watching the show for the first time a while back, more scholarly, less emotional, who I liked better. Never been much of a squee-er. Too frigging analytical. Sort of gets in the way. Which was why I joined the ATPO board and stayed away from Bronze Beta or the list-serves such as Yahoo.
Fandom was also different in the early 00s than it is today, in part because the internet was vastly different. We had less gadgets. Less rules. Less guidelines. It was newer. TV shows were on VHS, and we taped them. They were not on DVR or DVD, which didn't really show up until around 2004. Oh they were available, but a lot of people like myself couldn't afford them and stuck with VHS tapes - which wore out quickly. I broke the one with Innocence/Suprise that I taped way back in 1998, along with the Becoming episodes. Had to re-record them off of F/X which was re-running all the episodes on weekdays. Back then - F/X didn't have much original programming and just showed old episodes of shows like Buffy.
Buffy premiered on the wobbly WB, and I remember wanting cable so I'd get better reception. In 2002, S6, it was on the even wobblier UPN. Which didn't come in. And you worried on a weekly basis that you wouldn't get to see the show. Unlike now - if you missed it, you were screwed and had to beg people to either send tapes or wait for it to show up on F/X or in re-runs.
Spoilers ruled. IF you could find them, and Whedon's writers had a lot of fun setting up wild goose chases. The best and most legendary mislead was Spike getting his chip removed. We were all convinced. They even took bets on why he'd do it and if he'd turn evil after it happened. Of course, it was a complete mislead. They even fooled the actor, who thought that was what they planned on doing. No one knew he was going after a soul (although I guessed it, because that made more logical sense without the arc...but the show was so much like a soap in some ways, that you couldn't be certain. You never knew.).
And the online world...was made up of hard-core geeks. You had to work at finding this stuff. Voy was always crashing. Finding fan-sites, really good fan-sites, required detective work. Often it was by recommendation.
You'd start at:
1) Spoilerslayer (a site devoted to slaying bad rumors and spoilers, confirming real ones - it also had all the transcripts to the series available, plus transcripts that hadn't aired. Fox kept trying to shut it down, but didn't succeed until the show was long over.), which took you to -
2)Buffy Cross and Stake and Angel's Soul Board, and in turn to BAPS (Bloody Awful Poet Society) (if you were a Spike fan and a sucker for redemption stories), and if you were lucky to write a really cool meta -to
3) ATPOBTVS &ATS (All Things Philosphical About Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series) - if you liked to write long meta analysis and reviews...if you had a thing for Dorothy Dunnette and the Chronicles Lymond, plus an invite, you ended up on Sunnydale U listserve, but first you had to take a test proving you had read Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles and were worthy. If you wrote good or popular essays, you might find yourself rec'd on whedonesque (which didn't pop up until the Bronze Beta disappeared and sort of took its place [ETA: Apparently that's not true, Bronze Beta is still in existence, and it took the place of Metafilter.]).
There was an online radio show...that was done out of someone's basement, they'd interview the writers by phone online after episodes, and you'd listen to the podcasts.
If you were really scholarly inclined : You'd head over to slayage.com (a list of links) or Slayage - an online scholarly journal of nothing but Buffy essays. And of course there was Teaatheford.com for female scholarly types obsessed with Spike. You had to be invited. It was psuedo-private. Professors were teaching Buffy in colleges, and presenting papers, and getting paid for it. This blew my mind. Then Writercon popped up - a fic writing con devoted at first just to Buffy, it slowly expanded to other things. There were also sites devoted to each character, and ship. As well as actor on the series. Such as Marsters Mobsters, More than Spike, etc.
Now? It's gone. Oh there's still vestiges here and there. But..it feels a bit like looking at an old tv show that you loved as a child...and thinking, uhm. So much of the fun was due to rudimentary nature of the net. We were exploring it together.
This new territory, fanboards, vids. This was before YouTube. Where you downloaded fanvids and almost crashed your computer, but did it anyway. Sharing files on the sly.
It's hard to explain to people who weren't there. Sort of like, I suppose, trying to explain what it was like to ride in that first car or see the first cell phone, or get color tv for the first time. Now technology comes so fast and furious, people almost take it for granted.
When I first saw Innocence/Surprise back in 1998...I much like Mark Watches, went nuts, but I couldn't find the fandom boards. And blogs did not exist. You had to create a web site, which required knowledge of java code. There was no one to talk to about it and no where to discuss. I found a few sites, and spoilers. Used to go like clockwork to an Bangle fan site that I can't remember the name of and there was no way to discuss it with the person, you just read their site and the spoilers they posted, and ACIN NEWS - which at that time was the only source for tv and film spoilers, nothing else existed. There wasn't as much back then. The internet was smaller. Email listserves were more popular. As we moved forward, VOY popped up. And there was the somewhat busy chat rooms...where conversations flew by like bullets.
By the time I came back online to fandom in 2001, after I saw Once More with Feeling, Tabula Rasa and then Smashed - and once again went nuts, fanfic had exploded. I didn't know it existed until 2001. Fanfic.net and of course other character and ship related sites. There was spoilerslayer - the source for spoilers. Some guy I met at a party sent me to spoilerslayer, because he got annoyed with all the emails I kept sending to discuss the show and speculate about the spoilers. He wasn't really into discussing it by email. Buffy Cross and Stake was spoilerslayer's main source for spoilers and the board spoilerslayer sent me to because he also got sick of my long email speculations and in-depth analysis of all of the spoilers that he posted, along with the character arcs, etc. I desperately wanted to discuss the spoilers and the series. The themes. Etc. Spoilerslayer did not.
Go here - they like to discuss it. They'll love you. Leave me alone, so I can go back to watching NASCAR in peace.
So off I went to BC&S, which required a username to join the board.
You have no idea how many different usernames I tried, including my own birth name, before shadowkat finally got accepted and went through. Which was a bit of a private joke that no one quite gets...I was an X-men comics fan before Buffy took over my soul and I ended up dumping the comics in favor of it (2001). The comics featured a cyber-geek who could phase through computers, and was wickedly smart and snarky, named shadowkat. I'm no cyber-geek, but shadowkat reminded me a little of the Buffy characters and fit my online persona. Hides in the shadows, not what it seems. And I deliberately spelled it with a "k" because shadowcat was already taken by a fanfic writer on the board. Also I liked the look of the "k" spelling better - it was sharper, had more of an edge.
Back then? You could post long, fifty page essays to fanboards. People ate them up. I don't think you can do it as easily now. Voy was nicer than the comic forums appear to be. And Whedonesque is annoyingly uninviting of posting your own stuff - you can only post someone else's stuff. Weird site, whedonesque. It took the place of Bronze Beta, but unlike Bronze Beta, was centered on a creator not the show a group of people were involved in. Very different dynamic. Bronze Beta in some respects was wilder and less censored. Never known what to make of Whedonesque, which Whedon himself...posts on occasionally - something else I'm not quite sure what to make of.
Whedon rarely posted on Bronze Beta, he left that to his minions.
The world has changed since I first came online in 2002. Mark Watches makes me aware of it. I remember fan boards without product placements. I remember people discussing whether it made sense to jump onto livejournal - was it too personal? Why would you want to post about well, yourself? While fanboards admittedly had a group therapy aspect to them...it was through the veil of a tv series. We could back away from the personal. LJ felt almost too intimate.
Yet, we got pulled in, or some of us did, one by one. Gifting each other passes. Then friending each other immediately. It did make sense - since many of our posts on the fanboards tended to jump off topic. ATPOBTVS is a good board to play around on - if you want to see how people reacted to the show as it aired. What were people's reactions to Seeing Red - when it came on the air for the first time? What was it like to post on the net and a fanboard in 2002 before DVR's and DVD's and file sharing was readily available?
Back then we didn't really have blogs. Those came about more in 2003. They were there, but not really noticeable. And there was no such thing as Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even on the net back then as far as I know. Aaron Sorkin was busy writing The West Wing. And Television Without Pity was just beginning to get up and running. There weren't as many ads or product placements. Fanboards didn't have products like Mark Watches blog does. Or most didn't. Some did.
I find myself waxing nostalgic...tonight for some reason. It's like I want to revisit a former self that no longer exists. She's there, hidden amongst old journal posts and essays on an archived fanboard - if you want to find here. But not here, here, now in the present. I'm no longer in love with Buffy. Whedon no longer seems to entertain. And the fandom...has dispersed. Few remain. Of the ones I was online with back in the day...they merely grouse at the comics, or wax nostalgic while reading Mark Watches...hunting perhaps in Mark's blogs some remnant of themselves? Or perhaps not. Hard to know what another person thinks or feels.
I do know there were a lot of wildly brilliant and creative people on the internet who watched Buffy. And posted on those boards. Everyone from a Tibetian Monk to
scholars, geneticists, scientists, physicists, Supreme Court attorneys, actors, professional writers, agents, and people like myself - blundering fools hunting others similarly inclined.
I think tv shows like Buffy or Doctor Who or what have you...are ways to bring people together over a shared interest. A way of breaking the ice. Of finding a sort of
pseudo-intimacy through cultural work that is safe. That resonates on a level difficult to explain except to those who just get it. You either got Buffy or you didn't. You either loved it or you didn't. And for many of us who did? The internet was the only place we could discuss it - so here we fled. Discussing under fake names, but revealing multitudes that few outside of our fellow geeks would know.
I see that in Mark Watches posts...that desire to share a piece of himself, that inner self through the guise of tv analysis or tv reviews. A way to explain, that is safe but not.
Well, make of this what you will. It's late time for bed. While the snow quietly blankets the earth.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 07:27 pm (UTC)*nods* It's all feeeeeelings, but he's useless at looking beneath the surface. (Apart from the generic 'Oh God this is a Joss show, if I wish for happiness all that'll happen is that EVERYTHING IS DESTROYED.)
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Date: 2012-01-21 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 09:31 pm (UTC)ETA: I'm not sure I mean that in a terribly cynical way. He's found a niche and he's using it to make a living. And his history is obviously specific enough for him to have a very personal take on a lot of stuff. Hmmm. I think that's probably the heart of it? He takes it all personally, if that makes sense? To borrow a phrase from RTD, he pivots everything around himself and his own issues. And that's perfectly valid, but there's just not much more to it.
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Date: 2012-01-21 09:41 pm (UTC)here via gabrielleabelle's post
Date: 2012-01-24 04:08 am (UTC)The predictability often found in it goes with the way his blog is set up, and such - it markets better to a broader audience that way. He's not trying to join a community and discuss things with them, he's creating his own community loyal to him, to the point where first people start buying things to read/watch along with him, and then they buy his books, go to see him on tour...
I hope I don't sound mean, but I've often thought for at least the past year that his posts and his bumbly enthusiastic persona are carefully crafted to get and maintain this kind of audience. I don't mean he planned this all along, but at least somewhere during the Harry Potter project, I think he caught on to how this could work for him. I don't know what to think about that.
Some biases of mine- Well, I do admit that I have to envy how he can be popular for and make money off of something like posting his feelings on a work of fiction, without polarizing anybody, without being anyone's employee, and whilst being entirely self-absorbed -but that last part (cleverly?) tends to come across as vulnerability and honesty and makes people feel sympathetic instead of bored and tired of his personal history. I've rarely seen someone complain about his sharing, on or off the site, and even I've gotten used to it after getting very irritated at the beginning. Which I envy too, since I'm used to people not being interested in listening to my personal issues except for therapists even if the should have been, let alone investing a lot of time to do so.
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Date: 2012-01-24 04:52 am (UTC)I'm not sure why business-savvy is incompatible with fannish squee, though.
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Date: 2012-01-24 01:30 pm (UTC)Well, been thinking about this, and I think a few other people in this thread nailed it.
It would be one thing if Mark's posts weren't emotional. Just reviews, similar to what Stephen King does. Or Rob.Will.Review. But what he is trying to do is market "emotion".
And that very phrase "market emotion" is a bit of a contradiction. It implies calculation and manipulation. Which in turn implies the emotion being expressed is not real. That the writer is conning the reader or lying to them. The writer may not be lying, they may actually be feeling that emotion - but, here's the thing, the very fact that they are using "an emotional reaction" to obtain readership and consistently do it over and over..."OMG! THIS IS SO AMAZING!"
Using caps to get it across. The reader begins to pick up on the "pattern" and question it.
Wait? The reader may think, is this genuine?
Or am I being manipulated and conned?
Business savvy or marketing savvy - lends an aura of calculation and manipulation to the proceedings. The fan wonders if they are being made fun of? Is this person manipulating them?
Or are they a fellow fan?
Evil marketing people rule the world in so many ways...but the worst way is how they use human emotion to manipulate people into buying things they do not want. Don't misunderstand...I'm not saying Mark is doing that at all. And I'm joking when I say "evil marketing people" since my brother happens to be one. Hee. But ...that's why fannish and business savvy tend to be unmixy things...when you add the business/money making element, it feels cold and calculated.