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Tangential thoughts
May. 8th, 2005 04:23 pmWell, now, there's a thought. Is it possible to be a fan of Story X without being absorbed by/invested in the source text? Can one be a fan of Story X when one only knows it via fanworks?
My knee-jerk reaction is "yes, of course." Which I find odd, because The Story is the center and heart of my concept of fandom. Yet, rummaging around in my own motivation a little more, perhaps it isn't so strange. Because I, too, consider my fannish value system a populist one, and, out of a populist value system, should not all textual producers be equal? Why should the official/original version be privileged over the fannish reworkings?
And now I've got myself in a real fix, because I do feel the originary text has to have some priviledge; it's the primary source, it's the one the fanworks derive from.
Yet, sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes fanon overcomes canon, and the text that is central to a given fandom becomes a body of fanworks which are, sometimes quite noticeably, not much based on the originary text. For example, let me return to Gundam Wing.
Well, actually, let me not return to Gundam Wing, but let me try to draw examples from it anyway.
The canon text was, in most quarters, thoroughly drowned out by a majority-accepted fanon text which used the same names but differed significantly in descriptions, characters and plot points (keywords: cobalt, bouncy, hn, safe house). The canon text became co-equal, as a source text, with this fannish production. Details upon which to base further fanworks were taken indescriminately from either source or both.
GW was certainly fandom. It had all the standard earmarks: passionate investment in the central texts, appropriation of the text, possessiveness of the characters. Was it a fandom consisting of fans of Gundam Wing?
I have to say, yes.
I suppose my reason goes back to my conviction that a text is nothing without its readers, and that the readers are a vital part of how the meaning of any given text is produced. And that one of the most basic moves of fandom is to become author as well as reader to the source text. So, if the meaning that a bunch of fans find in a given story is better expressed by the fan telling of that story than the initial telling... that does not divorce them from the initial telling. It just complicates the relationship. A relationship still exists, even if a given fan never lays eyes on the canon text. If it is a relationship that fans who cleave to the initial telling find frivilous, well, upright, everyday, mainstream culture thinks we're all frivilous, now, doesn't it?
Addendum, which may or may not get incorporated into this particular essay:I do think there's a difference between saying "that activity/approach/value puts you outside of good/acceptable fandom" or even "outside of fandom period", and saying "that activity/approach/value makes you a weird fan who's not like me".
The latter is just discourse communities working themselves out. It's the initial gut response to something strange or uncomfortable. What I find unfortunate is when that gut response becomes the basis of one of the former statements--the universalization of one's own value set, as Cathexys says. Judging a member of one's own discourse community by the values of that community may get ugly, especially if it's part of a renegotiation of what that community's values are. But it is, I would say, part of the basic process of thinking and communicating, and we just have to hack it as best we can. To judge a member of another community by the values of one's own is pointless; fandom has plenty enough room for incompatible communities to ignore each other.
Of course this gets hugely messy, because we all have more than one community, and there are the questions of redefinition, and recruitment, and influence within larger communities. But I still think the basic principle is a useful one to keep in mind while processing the "Weirdo!" reaction.
My knee-jerk reaction is "yes, of course." Which I find odd, because The Story is the center and heart of my concept of fandom. Yet, rummaging around in my own motivation a little more, perhaps it isn't so strange. Because I, too, consider my fannish value system a populist one, and, out of a populist value system, should not all textual producers be equal? Why should the official/original version be privileged over the fannish reworkings?
And now I've got myself in a real fix, because I do feel the originary text has to have some priviledge; it's the primary source, it's the one the fanworks derive from.
Yet, sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes fanon overcomes canon, and the text that is central to a given fandom becomes a body of fanworks which are, sometimes quite noticeably, not much based on the originary text. For example, let me return to Gundam Wing.
Well, actually, let me not return to Gundam Wing, but let me try to draw examples from it anyway.
The canon text was, in most quarters, thoroughly drowned out by a majority-accepted fanon text which used the same names but differed significantly in descriptions, characters and plot points (keywords: cobalt, bouncy, hn, safe house). The canon text became co-equal, as a source text, with this fannish production. Details upon which to base further fanworks were taken indescriminately from either source or both.
GW was certainly fandom. It had all the standard earmarks: passionate investment in the central texts, appropriation of the text, possessiveness of the characters. Was it a fandom consisting of fans of Gundam Wing?
I have to say, yes.
I suppose my reason goes back to my conviction that a text is nothing without its readers, and that the readers are a vital part of how the meaning of any given text is produced. And that one of the most basic moves of fandom is to become author as well as reader to the source text. So, if the meaning that a bunch of fans find in a given story is better expressed by the fan telling of that story than the initial telling... that does not divorce them from the initial telling. It just complicates the relationship. A relationship still exists, even if a given fan never lays eyes on the canon text. If it is a relationship that fans who cleave to the initial telling find frivilous, well, upright, everyday, mainstream culture thinks we're all frivilous, now, doesn't it?
Addendum, which may or may not get incorporated into this particular essay:I do think there's a difference between saying "that activity/approach/value puts you outside of good/acceptable fandom" or even "outside of fandom period", and saying "that activity/approach/value makes you a weird fan who's not like me".
The latter is just discourse communities working themselves out. It's the initial gut response to something strange or uncomfortable. What I find unfortunate is when that gut response becomes the basis of one of the former statements--the universalization of one's own value set, as Cathexys says. Judging a member of one's own discourse community by the values of that community may get ugly, especially if it's part of a renegotiation of what that community's values are. But it is, I would say, part of the basic process of thinking and communicating, and we just have to hack it as best we can. To judge a member of another community by the values of one's own is pointless; fandom has plenty enough room for incompatible communities to ignore each other.
Of course this gets hugely messy, because we all have more than one community, and there are the questions of redefinition, and recruitment, and influence within larger communities. But I still think the basic principle is a useful one to keep in mind while processing the "Weirdo!" reaction.
