Building a better fandom. My way

Okay, so five minutes ago I decided on a new blogging strategy. It's sort of a tapering-off approach, like any addict might use. From now on, I have to stop blogging, no matter what I'm in the middle of, and get to work no later than 9:30 each day.

So, now it's 10:30 and here I am, writing a blog entry.

Oh, well. That deadline was supposed to kick in tomorrow, so I'm still okay, right? Anyhow, I worked yesterday. Quite a lot. I have a lot more to do today, but I can start in 15 minutes and still be okay. I think.

I forgot to set up Spike BtVS to tape last night. I hope I didn't miss anything crucial.

And, speaking of fandom...I have Rude Thoughts to share.

I've been thinking about this whole fandom thing, okay? I mean, thinking about it as it existed when I "discovered" fandom in the late 70s, when I rediscovered it as on-line fandom ten years ago, and what it is today. And, please be aware than unless I specifically state otherwise, "fandom" is synonymous with "slash" because I've never been active in gen fandom and don't know a thing about it beyond the prevalence of MarySue, author-insertion fic.

Anyhow. Fandom today?

We Are Not Amused.

What was once a fairly geeky but at least privately geeky pastime has become this huge, public farce. As I've been telling friends for years now, I'm embarrassed to be labeled a "fan" today in ways that I wasn't even embarrassed when standing next to the guy with the Spock ears at a convention in the 70s.

First, I accept that we're "out" as fans. The internet and the public have "discovered" fandom and slash and I'm resigned to the fact that a thousand new "fans" or more are going to be appearing each and every month. I don't like it, but this isn't one of the kinds of reality I intend to rail against.

Today's question (yes, we're getting to the point) is about what fandom is. Who defines fandom, and more importantly, slash, when there are (numbers rounded for ease of discussion) two thousand "old" fans who have been around for years and 200,000 "new" fans who have been around for weeks?

Is this a democracy? Does the majority prevail, even when they're steering us off the tracks and toward a ravine? Or is there an "old guard" who should be installed as hall monitors to make sure that everyone is coloring within the lines and no one is running with scissors?

If an "old guard" exists, could you pay them to try and monitor this group of lunatics? I think not, so that's not going to happen.

Who gets to define what "we" are these days? Do "we" even need definitions? Should anything and everything that some newcomer defines as "their kind of fandom" be scooped under the general fandom umbrella?

If someone wants to take the two prettiest dogs at the dog show and write slash fiction for them, is that acceptable? Is writing stories where the teapot and the candelabra from Disney's animated "Beauty and the Beast" film marry and have deformed appliance offspring a legitimate form of "fandom"? How about those Teletubby slash stories, mostly meant as satire? Are those "fanfiction"?

digression

Are we really willing to have the woman who stalked Adrian Paul and made his and his family's life a misery identified as, "one of us"? Are we willing to have the so-called "fans" of Peter Wingfield, the ones who sent his fiancée death threats, as part of our group? Are we willing to stand up and be counted with the people who have moved beyond the core "fictional characters" part of our identity and who are now writing and posting graphic sex stories about actors?

Where do we draw the line between our playful obsessiveness with television shows, movies, and books and the fictional characters that populate them and the people who are comfortable dragging the private lives of actors and musicians into their public fantasy world?

With, in short, those who have given up on exploring characters and who are now obsessing only over "pretty faces" since I don't think any of the folks writing sex stories about real people are pretending they're doing any more than using attractive faces and bodies to populate their too-public fantasies.

Okay...this isn't the moment to get all distracted by my ongoing distaste of real person sex stories, I know.

(Just for the record, I'd totally support a movement to corral those folks and explain to them, gently, why they can't call themselves part of "fandom" and should find another word for what they're doing, though.)

/digression

Anyhow. Back to the topic. The RPS idiocy aside, let's stick with fandom and fictional characters. Mostly, as I said before, slash.

Slash: The exploration of a closer emotional and sexual relationship of two same-sex characters than is portrayed on-screen.

I think that's a pretty fair working definition. I know it leaves out the threesome fans and the m-f-m kink, and litfic, but I have to reduce things to some kind of basic standard or I'll go crazy trying to talk about everything at one.

(I am not!)

So, without denying the existence of the multitudes of kinks that abound today, let's stay with the basics. Two characters. One gender. The urge to Do The Deed with one another. Usually accompanied by feelings of emotional attachment.

Okay?

Well, there's one more requirement, but I'm not sure how to phrase it. Maybe it's implicit in that definition, though. When I speak of "two characters," I do mean that part. Characters. Those two characters who will naturally need to be placed in their fictional universe in order to make it a true exploration of their personalities. Because if you move 20th C. characters to the 17th C., they aren't going to be the same people. Different cultures and different mores will produce different personalities. Ditto on moving characters forward in time. Moving your guys from the Old West to 1996 eliminates most of the "ohmigod, I'm a homosexual!" conflicts, but if you're exploring the characters and not just writing out your fantasies of the guys' pretty faces you shouldn't be looking for such a cheap fix.

That neatly eliminates AUs and crossovers, doesn't it? Even though I don't care for either of those genres, that wasn't really my intent, but I'll let it stand for the moment. We're sticking with the basics, and I'm staying with the same line of thought for a few consecutive paragraphs if it kills me.

So...slash is about a further exploration of personalities that attract us, or the interaction between two personalities that we find interesting.

Where does that leave today's newbie fans? (See? Back on topic!) They make the right noises at first. "I'm a fan." "I love the ____ character." "____ and ____ are so doing it!"

But then...the stories start to come out and you're asking yourself, "who are these guys?" Because other than sharing names with the fictional characters, these story characters are complete strangers. They don't talk, act, or react in any way the on-screen characters do. These newbies post crossovers between live-action shows and anime and don't seem to have the slightest understanding of how mind-bogglingly weird it is. They claim to love the character, but the first thing they do is have him raped and pregnant. (Why? Not because they can "see" it, or because they wonder how the character would react because they have no clue about the character. Because this kind of crap gets tons of feedback and they're all about the feedback, not about the writing.)

Characters are twisted out of...well, out of character. Canon fictional universes are tweaked, twisted, and downright distorted because these writers and readers don't really care about "that kind of thing."

The only thing they care about is a labeling system that defines their particular kink (Talking teddy bears! Male pregnancy! Curtains!) so that they can find and wallow in it.

Forget bringing their brains to the story, they want to read with their gonads and nothing more. And as long as they have a screen capture from an episode to look at, they don't really require much more from stories than that the author use the same names, or something resembling the same names, in order to label something, "fanfiction."

Somehow this rant isn't going anywhere like I thought it would.

I was going to talk about fandom, what it is today, whether or not it should be as all-inclusive as it is, and whether or not the remaining intelligent, thoughtful fans should run away and form a new, "invitation only" clique.

Also, I had a lot to say about the current climate of fandom that I haven't even touched on. People who post stories and demand, "positive feedback only" and the multitudes of lists where the slightest whiff of a negative comment about a character or story draws inflamed responses from the legions of thin-skinned and all-too-involved list members. Sock puppets and cliques of like-minded ninnies who exist for the moment when they think they hear the clarion call of battle against those with differing opinions or tastes. Those over-identifying fans who take criticism of a fictional character as a personal insult. People whose idea of reasoned discussion is, "So's your mother!" We've all seen them in action. We know who we're talking about.

Is this a democracy? Has "my kind of fandom" been kicked out of office?

Fandom has always attracted a fair share of marginalized personalities. Any fandom has, whether it's stamp collecting or salt-and-pepper shaker collections or comic books. In every group there are those whose identities and lives are far too closely entwined with their hobbies, but I think it's only in this kind of fandom that the line between reality and fantasy has been so dangerously blurred.

I'm not here to psychoanalyze anyone. I've spent my fair share of time "hiding" in fandom as a relief from everyday life, so I'm not in a position to point fingers. (Okay, I'm pointing. But that wasn't really why I gathered you here today.)

Let's skip ahead and pretend I've laid the foundation for the idea of moving to a better neighborhood because I'm pretty sure there's no way I can stay calm for long enough to actually discuss how and why we'd want to do this and in any case I really do have to get back to work at some point and I've already been at this for an hour instead of fifteen minutes.

I'm sure there are fans out there who would revel in a return to in-depth discussion of canon, personalities, human interaction, and plausible storylines. People who would like to be able to open the morning paper, see an article about "fandom" and not have to cringe. People who are more interested in reading, or writing, better fiction than they are in collecting more, "It was great! Write more!" e-mails than anyone else. People who find the characters interesting and want to read or write more exploration of them. People who find the universe the show is set in is fascinating and want to read more stories set in that universe.

You know the kind of thing.

digression

No one who refers to fics, ficlets, ficcies, or eppies need apply for inclusion in this new group. We are not six year-olds, nor is actually typing the entire word, "fiction" too much work for our brains. I would accept, if pressed, the use of "eps" as shorthand for "episodes."

/digression

Anyhow. Is fandom a democracy? Are those of us bemoaning the disappearance of open and honest discussion that centered around the foibles and quirks of the characters dinosaurs? Are we doomed to be shouted down by the legions of "fans" shrieking in joy over a character who shows up wearing leather pants and sporting an obvious sweat sock stuffed in an unusual place? (I made that up, but it's probably happened.) Is fandom destined to become a place of sweetness-and-light with everyone's kinks accepted equally and everyone's "issues" treated with kid gloves? Is list-posting to be confined to, "I loved last night's eppie!" and "Loved your ficlet!" while we all pretend we're having real discussions?

I'd say, 'yes.' That's the way I see things going. There are still pockets of real discussion, what I think of as "real fandom," but they're getting fewer and farther between.

So I've been considering (I've mentioned this before) starting a whole new...well, a whole new thing for my kind of fans(*), so that they can separate themselves from the raving, incoherent lunacy that general fandom has become. We can leave "fandom" to the giggling, ATP-as-long-as-there's-a-sex-scene groupies.

(* Yes, I'm an elitist snob. No, I don't really have any issues with this fact. I'm quite comfortable with it, but thankyouforcaringenoughtoask.)

We can go back undercover, to a certain extent, and build a new playhouse. "No dorks allowed."

So, what other words are available that might carry some of the same connotations as "fan" but that don't automatically imply "raving lunatic"?

advocate – Too judicial
aficionado – Too pretentious
apostle – Too biblical
booster – Too sixties
connoisseur – We're not really going to be that discriminating
devotee – A bit pretentious
disciple – Again, too biblical
fancier – Sounds like an older guy who breeds cats, doesn't it?
follower – Too stalkerish
groupie – Too juvenile
habitué – And my mind always goes to, roué, so no.
junkie – Unfortunate associations
lover – Too fanatical
maniac – This is what we're trying to avoid
monomaniac – Too psychotic
partisan – Too political
patron – Hey! We're not sending money!
proselyte – A bit old-Testament, don't you think?
rooter – Too fifties
supporter - Bland
votary – A bit too Ancient Egyptian or Ancient Greek
worshipper – Too obsessive
zealot – Too monomaniacal

Surely there are other possibilities, but my imagination (and thesaurus.com) aren't offering any at the moment.

What does that leave me with? Three potentials:

fiend - A touch demonic, but not bad. Implies devotion with an air of unreality. "Fienddom" is impossible, though.
freak – A few unfortunate disco associations, but "freakdom" isn't bad. A nice sort of self-mockery about it, as well.
nut – "Nutdom" is absurd, but the word itself has a sort of playfulness about it that might work.

Of course, the suffix itself isn't fixed, and "-dom" isn't the only thing that would work. There's always "-hood" or "-ist" or "-ism" or "-oid" or any of probably a dozen more that I'll think of later. I'd fight to the death to avoid, "freakazoid," though.

Maybe I should be looking more in the "dweeb" category, to find something playful. I dunno.

I guess we could always go back to the long form of the original and identify ourselves as, "fanatics" instead of "fans" but that implies a kind of single-mindedness that I'm uncomfortable with. I'm looking, as you might notice, for something that takes itself a bit less seriously.

Something that implies dedication without an edge of psychosis.

In some ways, the English language can be very limiting.

I guess the label isn't important, but if you're starting a movement, a name and a slogan really are critical for establishing an identity in the minds of the public. I love a good slogan, too.

We need a slogan that implies fanaticism, but under control. Obsessive, but leashed. Maniacal, but medicated. Loyal, but level-headed. Devoted but within limits.

Fascinated but sane.

Nothing is coming to me at the moment. I mean, "no dorks allowed" is a good slogan, but sometimes I'm a dork, okay? I'm all about exclusion, but I don't want to be one of the excluded. It's my game and if I can't play, no one can.

Except that now I'm bored with the whole subject.

Let's kick the morons in the seat of the pants, tell them to behave or they won't be allowed in the playground, and reclaim "fandom" as the crazy-but-loveable absurdity that it used to be. Tell the folks writing about real people to go away, beat the newcomers over the head and shoulders until they've memorized the definitions of "canon" and "characterization" and have promised to stop inflicting mind-bogglingly impossible fates on facsimiles of our beloved characters, and get down to the serious business of drooling, discussing, reading, and writing actual fanfiction.

Or, you know, not.

I'm pretty flexible.