Weaponizing Everything

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Philippe Leblanc

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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One of the main strengths I’ve recognized throughout Joss Whedon’s work is his careful crafting of deep, multifaceted characters. He puts enough care and attention into them to ensure they aren’t simple cardboard cut-outs that drive the story along, but persons whose reasoning we can understand. In addition to his complex characters, Whedon focuses on the concept of the family. It’s a recurring theme that, however alienated the characters are when introduced, they’ll inevitably will be drawn into a tight familial group. Case in point, the Scooby gang in Buffy, the crew of the Serenity in Firefly, Angel investigations crew in Angel, the Los Angeles Dollhouse or even, to a lesser extent, the Avengers.

A striking point in Whedon’s work is that these familial groups eventually confront militaristic organizations in one form or another. Some of these organization appear as a benevolent force at first and turn into a tyrannical opponent afterwards, such as the Initiative in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Some are conventional “villains” from the onset, such as the Alliance in Firefly or the facility operators in Cabin in the Woods. All military industrial organizations we see in Whedon’s work have a clear path: self-destruction. This trajectory is present throughout Whedon’s work; as the military acquires knowledge of powerful artifacts (or powerful persons depending on the genre) they try to weaponize it. Despite the best of intentions at times, the moment the military tries to harness these “powers, they’re propelled onto a collision course with our protagonists. It’s a matter of arrogance; the military sees the potential for power in something and assumes that they are strong and righteous enough to control it, but are ultimately consumed by it. The characters we follow are no less tempted by this thirst for power, but aren’t as misguided by hubris and only resort to wield the artifacts in question as a last resort to avert disaster. In the rare cases where our protagonists yield to those temptations, their punishment is swift and their remorse keeps them from following the military down an ethical slippery slope. This recurring narrative shows a distaste for the hubris of the military organizations and sows the seeds of anti-authoritarian thoughts, but there may be more to it than this.

I wonder if this relationship between his characters and the organizations around them is a reflection of a long running theme of anti-authoritarianism or perhaps, a reflection of Whedon’s troubled relationship with the studios he has worked for. For decades, his battles with studio executives have become well-known and documented. Angel was cancelled over posturing, Firefly was doomed from the start, the networks backed out of the Dollhouse premise and his recent comments about the Marvel Studios fiasco seems to only hint at the contentions between them. As the subtext seeps into the plot, his complicated and tense relationship with his employers is difficult for the audience to ignore. It’s hard to know which came first: is the underlying anti-authoritarian theme the result of studio conflict, or do the studios rush to stifle Whedon’s creativity when it starts to veer towards difficult themes? Whatever the case, this theme is growing more pronounced with every new piece that Whedon produces.

Buffy developed a huge fan following due to the care and attention Whedon put into building an intricate world and multifaceted characters. The studios want to capitalize on this success and rake in the profits, but balk at the time it takes to build the story. They jump at the idea of working with Whedon, giving him some freedom at first, but become increasingly intrusive and controlling, as they have a very strict idea of where and how the story should be told. They call a halt when Whedon veers off the “acceptable” course or takes too long to get somewhere, and this window is getting narrower the longer their partnership lasts. The studios, much like the military organizations, don’t understand what they have and try to exploit it. They try to capitalize on Whedon’s strengths without understanding them for their own purposes (profit, brand recognition) but it is not what Whedon seems to want to do, which is art.

Is Whedon’s negative relationship with the studios the only thing that affects his writing?
Whedon also seems to enjoy working with regular artists and contributors over time and, although this interaction is normal, it reinforces the subtext. Close friends and the family you create are better and stronger than the organizations you associate with, (corporations and the military industrial complex included). Those entities are bound to destroy themselves through their own misdoings and hubris.

These musings bring the slaughter of the white collar drones and the military organization in Cabin in the Woods into a new light. The military may want to do well, but trampling the civilians and treating them as expendable causes their downfall. The small group of survivors, whether considering this movie or Whedon and his close creative partners, band together and fight back, no matter the cost. They lose their life for their freedom in the former; Whedon loses his job for his freedom in the latter.

First-Name Basis, or How Joss Whedon Finally Stopped Being Your Friend

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Anne Moore

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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How do we define “authorship,” anyway? Even in this age of endless reboots, remixes, and universe-building, there’s still some kind of value placed on the idea of originality, as there has been all along. Whether it’s Dickens’ attempts to tighten copyright law in order to shut down rogue performances of his work, JK Rowling’s attempts to shut down publication of a Harry Potter encyclopedia, Warner Bros. forbidding Rocky-Horror-style viewings of “Once More with Feeling…”, or countless post-finale interviews with showrunners offering the “right” interpretation of their show, the relationship between a reader and an author is largely defined by power and anxiety. Sometimes they’re protecting their money, but more often than not, especially in the case of flesh and blood writers like Dickens and Rowling, they’re guarding the sanctity of something more ineffable—something that gets at the etymological root of “authority.”

As auteurs go, Joss Whedon has never overtly demonstrated too much of this kind of anxiety. From the beginning, he’s positioned himself as a fan among many, but a kind of super-fan. He engages in projects that feel like fan fiction, recasting Dracula as a minor player on the Sunnydale scene, rewriting space opera from the position of the colonized in Firefly, continuing the story of Buffy in comic form, and even including his own image in a panel of Buffy’s dream sequence–look at the bottom of the page below. It’s Mary Sue through the looking glass!

Perhaps even more importantly, Whedon’s let fans behind the curtain of the production process, participating in early fan forums such as The Bronze and Whedonesque, and even going so far as to hire fans such as Drew Greenberg and Michelle Trachtenberg in later seasons of Buffy. When “authority” has influenced the direction of a text, Whedon’s always positioned himself as being on the side of fans–Fox stunted his vision of Firefly, Warner Bros. didn’t appreciate him enough to give his actors ER or Friends-level salaries, Fox hamstrung the development of Dollhouse, etc. Even his more recent, high-profile work within the Marvel franchise is so rooted in his own fandom that the difference between “adaptation” and “fanfic” gets hard to parse. It’s no wonder fans refer to him as “Joss”–he spent a lot of time and energy, especially early on, cultivating just that kind of intimacy.

But it’s important to remember that this intimacy was always charged with hostility. Jonathan Levinson on Buffy is probably the best example of this vexed closeness. In “Superstar,” for instance, Jonathan gets the intimacy that being on a first-name basis with Joss Whedon might lead to (included in the credits, influencing the rest of the plot of Season Four), but his desire for too much closeness, too much control, is what turns the other characters away from him at the end of the episode, and lays the framework for his return in Season Six as one of three Bad Fans. It’s common enough to have figures of bad fans in a text serving as negative examples of Reading Gone Wrong–the Trio has good company in Ben Linus on Lost, Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend, Felix Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica, Comic Book Guy and countless others. The thing that’s interesting to me is how, in “Superstar,” Jonathan’s “bad” fandom doesn’t look that different from the “good” fandom that came from all the people Whedon had been palling around with on The Bronze and Whedonesque. This relationship to authorial power–the boss who’s also your buddy–is ultimately unsustainable, and that’s where the vitriol behind the depiction of fans in Season Six of Buffy comes from, I think.

Which brings us to the present day, and Whedon’s decision to quit Twitter. In his recent interview with Buzzfeed, he blows off the idea that feminist blowback to the Black Widow storyline drove him from Twitter. To his credit, he’s pretty blasé about the whole thing, pointing out how much worse it is for women on Twitter than it would ever be for him. What struck me upon reading the interview, though, was how his reasoning had less to do with politics than it did with intimacy. Twitter is an intimate medium, and the intimacy comes with very little effort on either side. For instance: when I was writing my dissertation (which partially focused on Buffy, natch), I was following television writer and producer Jane Espenson on Twitter, and every now and then she’d announce a “writing marathon,” encouraging her followers to tweet how much they’d written. I didn’t mention her on my acknowledgements page or anything, but those goals felt supportive, and kept me on track toward finishing. I was never part of those early Bronze chat rooms, so I’ve always been a little put off by calling Joss Whedon “Joss,” but when I was writing my dissertation, Jane Espenson did feel like “Jane.” Twitter can feel like a place where you’re hanging out with your friends (shades of The Bronze, perhaps), but when it turns, it turns fast and hard.

With a property as big as The Avengers, the intimacy that characterized his early work just isn’t sustainable anymore, and that’s what his retreat from Twitter is about, I think. Like many others, I was pretty put off by the “big reveal” of Natasha Romanova’s sterilization backstory, and especially by her line that infertility made her a “monster.” I found myself making excuses for Whedon in my head, almost right away, since this seemed so different, at first, from choices he’s made in the past (except, of course, for that one episode of Dollhouse). If it were from anyone else, would I have been surprised by such a hacky motivation for a central female character? Getting depth for female characters in summer blockbusters is always tricky, especially for writers working within an established franchise. But because of my love for Buffy (and Angel and Firefly and Dr. Horrible and even Dollhouse) my expectations are higher, and my disappointment proportionally greater. Based on the tone of some of the responses, I’m not alone in my feeling that this cinematic disappointment is more personal than others.

But here’s the bind for Whedon: his “betrayal” isn’t as personal as it feels, because there’s just no way that he would have the same kind of control over the content of something like The Avengers. Nor can he position himself as a creative genius, hemmed in by the forces of an evil corporate Big Bad. He’s too close to this Big Bad, and his position is much more precarious–Dan Harmon and Amy Sherman-Palladino excepted, it’s rare for a showrunner to get booted from the fictional world s/he invented (and Community and Gilmore Girls both serve as cautionary tales for doing so). But The Avengers is different–he could get replaced on this project easily, though, so his old “I’m on your side, it’s the goddamned network fencing me in” approach isn’t available.

Ultimately, Joss Whedon is too close to too much power (without actually wielding that power) to be the Cool Dad anymore, the one who “gets it” but has to exercise authority because he loves you. The project is too big, its influence too far-reaching for him to be able to hang out on message boards and kibitz with fans. Twitter offers the promise of intimacy, but Whedon’s fans have come to expect something that approaches the real thing. And as Cool Dads have learned since time immemorial, the closer you are aligned with the machinery of power, the less possible it is to be everybody’s BFF. Whedon will just have to settle for being one of the richest guys in Hollywood.

The End of Comic Geeks?

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Aaron Kashtan

This piece originated as a paper presented at the 2015 University of Florida Comics Conference. A slightly different form of this paper was incorporated into my lecture “Change the Cover: Superhero Comics, the Internet, and Female Fans,” delivered at Miami University as part of the Comics Scholars Group lecture series. While I have made some slight changes to the version of the paper that I gave at UF, I have decided against editing the paper to make it read like a written essay rather than an oral presentation. The accompanying slide presentation is available here.
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First, I’m very grateful to be here because this is my first time back in Gainesville since I graduated from UF, and being here, I realize that I really miss it and that UF has played a major role in making me the person I am today.

So this is not something I’m currently working on, but it is something I’ve been thinking about extensively, and I think it may provide material for a future book or article project. It does relate to my earlier work on comics and Internet culture and it’s sort of a sequel to the paper I gave at ICFA last month, about comics and female fan culture. And this paper is based more on my personal than my scholarly knowledge. It’s based less on my scholarly work than on my many years of experience in organized comics fandom. I acknowledge that my discussion here would benefit from incorporating theoretical perspectives from fan studies, and that’s a direction I do intend to explore if and when I turn this into a longer work.

So as a general trend, what we might call geek culture or nerd culture or fandom has been steadily growing more inclusive. Whether we think of science fiction fandom or video gaming or comic books, each of these is a fan community that has traditionally been dominated by white men, but is gradually opening itself up to participation by women and minorities and LGBTQ people. In comics, for example, the comics industry has a notorious history of excluding women and younger readers, SLIDE 2 and there is a persistent and largely accurate stereotype of the comic book store as a man cave. SLIDE 3 But as I argued in my ICFA presentation, this is gradually changing. Titles like Raina Telgemeier’s Smile and Cece Bell’s El Deafo are dominating the bestseller lists SLIDE 4 and even Marvel and DC have sought to appeal to female and younger readers. SLIDE 5

Now in other fan communities, the opening up of previously male-only spaces has triggered a backlash from the straight white men who used to dominate. The obvious example of this is Gamergate, where the inclusion of women in video gaming has led to an organized campaign of misogyny which has even crossed the line into domestic terrorism. SLIDE 6 A less well-known example is what’s been happening in science fiction fandom. In recent years, novels by liberal writers like John Scalzi and female and minority writers like Nnedi Okorafor and Sofia Samatar have dominated the major science fiction awards. SLIDE 7 When this started happening, certain mostly white male writers became extremely indignant that science fiction was becoming poiliticized, or rather that it was being politicized in a way they didn’t like. So they started an organized campaign known as Sad Puppies SLIDE 8 whose object was to get works by right-wing white male authors included on the ballot for the Hugo award, which is the only major science fiction and fantasy award where nominations are determined by fan voting. And this led in turn to the Rabid Puppies campaign, which was organized by notorious neo-Nazi Vox Day and which is explicitly racist, sexist and homophobic. SLIDE 9 And these campaigns succeeded partly thanks to assistance from Gamergate. On the 2015 Hugo ballot, the nominees in the short fiction categories consist entirely of works nominated by Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, and this has led to an enormous public outcry.

So across various spheres of geek culture, the move to open up these traditionally white male spaces has led to a backlash from white men who are afraid of losing their dominant position. Another way to look at this is that geek identity is historically bound up with white male identity. Being a geek or a nerd or a fan has traditionally meant being a person like me, a bespectacled athletically inept socially awkward white guy. As Dan Golding writes in the context of video games, “videogamers … developed a limited, inwards-looking perception of the world that marked them as different from everyone else. This is the gamer, an identity based on difference and separateness. When playing games was an unusual activity, this identity was constructed in order to define and unite the group … It became deeply bound up in assumptions and performances of gender and sexuality. To be a gamer was to signal a great many things, not all of which are about the actual playing of videogames.” SLIDE 11

And to an extent this is also true of comic book identity. Matthew J. Pustz wrote that “In most cases, being a comic book fan is central to fans’ identity.” And as Pustz goes on to write, the ultimate example of this is fanboys, or “comic book readers who take what they read much too seriously.” Stereotypically, fanboys are bespectacled, acned overweight misfits who have an encyclopedic knowledge of ’60s Marvel comics but have never spoken to a woman. And this stereotype is often cited in comics themselves, such as Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Club stories. SLIDE 12

Now Golding goes on to discuss how gamer identity, as traditionally conceived, is under threat, because it’s too inflexible to survive the gaming industry’s increasing openness to female and minority and LGBTQ gamers. “When, over the last decade, the playing of videogames moved beyond the niche, the gamer identity remained fairly uniformly stagnant and immobile. Gamer identity was simply not fluid enough to apply to a broad spectrum of people. SLIDE 13 It could not meaningfully contain, for example, Candy Crush players, Proteus players, and Call of Duty players simultaneously. When videogames changed, the gamer identity did not stretch, and so it has been broken.” Thus, Golding’s article is called “The End of Gamers,” and he suggests that Gamergate is the last gasp of traditional gamer identity: that Gamergate is what happens when gamers as traditionally conceived realize that the concept of gamers no longer refers exclusively to them.

So the question I want to explore in this essay is whether this is also happening to comic book fans, and if so, what can we do about it. Is the category of “comic book fan” resilient enough to embrace people other than straight white males, or is comic fan identity going to be squeezed out of existence? My answer to that is twofold. On one hand, while comics fandom has not experienced anything quite as drastic as Gamergate or Sad Puppies, we have seen a certain backlash from misogynistic male fans who see comics as their exclusive property and who are resistant to the diversification of the medium. On the other hand, I believe that this sort of backlash has been a less significant phenomenon in comics fandom than in science fiction or video game fandom, and this is because being a comics fan has never been synonymous with being a stereotypical fanboy. For as long as I’ve been involved with it, comics fandom has always had at least some room for people other than straight white males. There has always been a significant segment of comics fandom that wanted to expand the reach of comics, and at least in my own circles, the stereotypical fanboy has been the exception rather than the rule. This is of course not exclusively true of comics fandom. Women have been prominently involved in gaming since before the dawn of the modern video game, as Jon Peterson’s Medium article “The First Female Gamers” brilliantly demonstrates, and science fiction fandom has an even longer tradition of female involvement. I focus on comics fandom here purely because this is the fandom with which I have the most personal experience, although I will speculate about some ways in which comics fandom may differ from other fandoms in terms of its openness to people outside its traditionally dominant demographic.

So in the first place, there clearly have been examples in which the diversification of the comics industry has led to a backlash from entitled fanboys. And these examples have mostly involved DC Comics because DC is the only major remaining company whose output is almost exclusively marketed toward fanboys, although that is starting to change slowly. Anyway, the most obvious recent example of fanboy backlash is what happened last month with the Batgirl #41 cover. SLIDE 14 I’m not going to describe this in depth because I assume most of you are familiar with it, but very briefly, DC announced a variant cover for Batgirl #41 which was an explicit reference to Batman: The Killing Joke, and which depicted Batgirl as a passive victim of the Joker. So there was a Twitter campaign to get DC to change the cover, and it succeeded because the artist of the cover, Rafael Albuquerque, asked DC to withdraw the cover, and DC agreed. Albuquerque wrote “For me, it was just a creepy cover that brought up something from the character’s past that I was able to interpret artistically. But it has become clear, that for others, it touched a very important nerve. I respect these opinions and, despite whether the discussion is right or wrong, no opinion should be discredited. My intention was never to hurt or upset anyone through my art. For that reason, I have recommended to DC that the variant cover be pulled. “ And then there was a competing campaign to get DC to keep the cover, and this campaign was supported by Gamergate. So this is evidence that some people at least see comics as the private property of men, and are violently resistant to the idea that comics should be sensitive about the depiction of violence against women.

But I think we’re all pretty familiar with that incident, so I want to focus on another recent case of fanboy backlash, which is relevant to me personally because it involved an online community that I was a member of for many years. In April of last year, Janelle Asselin wrote an article for comicbookresources.com, commonly known as CBR, in which she criticized Kenneth Rocafort’s cover for Teen Titans #1. SLIDE 15 Specifically, Asselin complained that on this cover, Wonder Girl’s proportions are totally unrealistic – she’s a teenage girl but she clearly has breast implants. And she pointed out that this sort of depiction is explicitly problematic because this is a Teen Titans comic, and the various Teen Titans TV shows are widely popular among teenage girls and among children ages 2 to 11, SLIDE 16 and Rocafort’s cover is specifically designed to exclude those audiences.

Now Asselin was hardly saying anything controversial here. It’s pretty obvious that this cover is not only terrible but also misogynistic. And yet just for pointing out this obvious fact, she was not only criticized but threatened with rape. At the same time that she published the article, she released a survey on sexual harassment in the comics industry, which is also a significant problem, and some unfortunate trolls discovered this survey and filled it in by posting rape threats against Asselin. According to CBR proprietor Jonah Weiland, “These same “fans” found her e-mail, home address and other personal information, and used it to harass and terrorize her, including an attempted hacking of her bank account.” And according to Jonah, many of the fans in question were regular participants on the comicbookresources.com message boards, SLIDE 17 this character is the mascot of the CBR forums, and the harassment of Janelle Asselin was emblematic of an atmosphere of “a negativity and nastiness that has existed on the CBR forums for too long.” So because of this incident, he completely deleted everything on the CBR forums and restarted them from scratch with a new and much stricter moderation policy.

Now this incident is personally relevant to me because I was a member of the CBR forums for many years. I started posting on the CBR forums sometime around 1997 or 1998 when I was 14 or 15 years old. So I’ve been involved with this community for more than half my life. I was the moderator of the CBR Classic Comics forum and I used to run the annual Citizen of the Month award. I’ve gradually stopped posting at CBR because I’ve been annoyed at the way the conversation there is dominated by fanboys, although I still communicate with many of my old CBR friends via Facebook. So the Janelle Asselin incident seems like evidence that at least as far as CBR is concerned, comics fan identity has come to be defined in a way that excludes women and that emphasizes toxic masculinity.

At the same time, my experience at CBR is also what makes me hopeful about the future of comics fan identity, and it’s what makes me believe in alternative and more productive ways of being a comics fan. I started posting at CBR in the late ‘90s when I was a young teenager, and it was actually because of CBR that I gained the ability to think of being a comics fan in terms other than being a fanboy. Before I discovered CBR, most of what I knew about comics came from Wizard magazine, which was basically instrumental in defining the fanboy identity. SLIDE 18 If you’re lucky enough to not remember Wizard, basically it was the comics version of Maxim, the Magazine for Men. It was a sexist, homophobic rag that ridiculed women and that completely ignored comics that didn’t involve superheroes. In 2001, Frank Miller tore up a copy of it at the Harvey Awards banquet. And once I was camping out with some people I knew from CBR and we used a copy of Wizard to start a campfire. SLIDE 19

Anyway, at CBR I came into contact with comics fans who were much older and wiser than me, and these people convinced me that this way of being a comics fan was unsustainable. As long as comics were marketed purely to fanboys, comics were going to lose readership and they were ultimately going to be irrelevant, and this would be a bad thing. I think some of the people who told me this were themselves parents and were afraid that their children wouldn’t be able to grow up with comics in the same way that they did. SLIDE 20 And this experience convinced me that it was important for comics to be inclusive, that comics couldn’t continue to appeal to the same fanboy audience. Thanks to CBR, I grew up with the notion that comics needs to abandon its traditional target demographic or die. I think this is fundamentally different from the Gamergate mentality, which is driven by fear that games are becoming too popular and that the gaming industry is abandoning its traditional target demographic.

Perhaps the difference here is that the popularity of games is currently at its peak. While there are nagging fears of the death of big-budget video games, the gaming industry currently enjoys a huge audience, and game developers can still make a profit by producing games marketed toward the exclusive “gamer” demographic. Therefore, game developers and players may not see the need to reach out to new audiences. I’m not sure if the same is true of science fiction fans and publishers, but my sense is that science fiction literature also has enough of an audience that the industry is not facing existential threats to its survival.Conversely, the popularity of comics, at least in America, peaked during the ‘40s and ‘50s and has been steadily in decline since. SLIDE 21 Among the comics fans I grew up with, there was this notion that comics is a declining art form and that traditional concepts of comics fan identity are a threat to the long-term survival of the medium.

So I got this idea that in order to save comics, it was necessary to abandon fanboyism as the sole model of comics fan identity and to embrace a broader and more inclusive model of what it means to be a comics fan. According to this model, to be a comics fan is to be a lover and evangelist of the medium of comics, and to help expand the audience of the medium. And that’s what I try to do when I teach comics in first-year writing courses.

So this is a model of comics fandom that involves a certain radical openness to new audiences. And this notion of comics fandom is not just based on my personal experience; we also see it in things like Free Comic Book Day or in Michael Chabon’s 2004 Eisner Awards keynote addres where he called on the industry to do a better job of appealing to children. And I believe that if comics fan identity is defined in this way rather than in terms of fanboy identity, then to return to the earlier quotation from Golding, comics fan identity can be “fluid enough to apply to a broad spectrum of people.”

A Short Interlude

Posted on October 1, 2013 by subdee

When popular webcomic/sprawling trans-media megatext Homestuck last appeared on this website, we* talked about the enshrinement of internet memes and other pop culture ephemera, the love-hate relationship with low culture, the large and active fandom that sometimes found itself reflected back in an epic narrative. We* also talked Homestuck’s strong logical structure – in which computer and card games, programming logic, and light-dark dualities, among other things, propel a story that’s largely about creation and destruction. (The creative process, in other words.)

All of those things are as true as they ever were, and, in a recent arc, you can see them play out – without knowing anything about the larger story! I thought I’d highlight this arc for you guys because I enjoyed it a lot. It starts here and ends here, so it’s about 55 pages (or panels) long.

First, some shots of the protagonist looking skeptical and offering skeptical commentary on the on-screen action:

The main thing you have to know to make sense of this is that a major series villain is the creator of the story you are reading on your screen. He turns out to embody a lot of the worst fannish impulses – and what’s even worse, to make bad, clichéd fanart.

And on top of all that, he’s a lazy artist – maybe even a plagiarist!

The original protagonist of the series, meanwhile – the guy in blue – has developed the superpower of being able to pop in and out of the narrative, disrupting the logic of inevitable doom I talked about in my last post. Since he exists outside of the framework of the story, he’s able to offer on-screen commentary on the action. Somehow or other, thanks to his powers, he’s found himself in this parody comic the villain is creating. (Don’t ask me how, I don’t know either.)

So far, so not-so-unusual-for-snarky-webcomics. This kind of meta-commentary isn’t even unusual for Homestuck, which divides its narrative arcs using images of screens and curtains and has several characters that exist “on the other side of the screen” and “behind the curtain” (including the author himself).

For that matter, the purposefully bad art isn’t new to Homestuck either: there’s already an absurdist comic-within-the-comic drawn “ironically” by one of the characters… which you can purchase it in a deluxe limited-edition hardcover here.

Another way you can tell John is outside the narrative, however, is through the shift into three-dimensional perspective, through which we can directly observe the crude artificiality and flimsiness of the (literally) two-dimensional story being created by the series villain.

And so on, with apologies to Andrew Hussie for pulling out so many images in a row.

Appropriately for a meta and self-referential comic, we also get some explicit commentary on the way some fans take an interesting piece of art and make it less interesting through their own (gross) interpretations.

Really, with stuff like this on the page, there’s not much left for critics to do.

But on the subject of female characters – and before you start to think that the author-fan relationship has gone irrevocably south – rest assured: the evil villain character responsible for the art in this section – who on top of all his other faults, is a bad artist – has a twin sister who represents everything that is good, or at least harmless, about fannish participation. (She’s a cosplaying fanwriter who just wants to meet the people she’s been reading (and writing) so much about, befriend them, and help them towards a better ending.)

Sadly, compared to her evil somehow-competent-despite-his-stupidity brother, she’s not very effective… but who knows how the comic will play out.

I believe in you, dude!

*”We” meaning me, of course, since as far as I know I’m the only fan around here. Actually, I want to ask: Did any of you guys reading this website take the plunge and start in on Homestuck?

Non-Canonical

Posted on April 24, 2013 by mouse

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Black Metal Fandom

In the framing of the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us,” the pheonomenon of Black Metal was born and died in the same instant as the publication of sensational reports in the Norwegian media of the activities of Varg Vikerness and the supposed “inner circle” of musicians and agitators retroactively called the second wave of black metal. The aesthetic and thematic trappings of the world-wide scene to come, including, paradoxically, the adherent reverence to the supposed ideals of the original inner circle who despise and disavow all those who follow them, are cribbed almost entirely from these (mostly false) accounts of Satanism, Anarchism, and (unfortunately true) pointless grisly murder.

Punk Rock died in Los Angeles in 1986, according to some sources. It emerges, Elvis-like, on the underside of skateboards coasting across uneven gravel mall parking lots, or in communal houses in the suburbs of Rangoon, and in endlessly concurrent music documentaries about the life and death of Punk Rock, year after year.

Disco died when white people started making it and other white people got real mad. The whole scenario is pretty embarrassing in general. I’m glad I hadn’t been born at the time.

&The children’s television program My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic something something bronies blah blah siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Superheroes never die. They just get new writers who sometimes kill them. But later, new writers – and who knows?!

My favorite manga should have ended like, ten volumes agooooo. It just doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

***

What bugs me about semi-autobiographical works is that an author can always ascribe the lousy parts of their stories to the fixed continuity of the supposed “autobio” part. Jonathan Lethem’s toad of a novel “Fortress of Solitude” sets its story against the backdrop of Brooklyn in the waning of the 20^th century. So it makes perfect narrative sense that after the dissolution of the possibility and wonder of the childhood friendship of the book’s two heroes, Mingus gets chewed up and his talent suppressed by the intertwined terrors of drug addiction and the criminal justice system as his neighborhood is gentrified in real time. Dylan, the more privileged of the two, more or less becomes a dried-up old turd from the moment he begins to monetize his passions, to value things over people and to vaporize his yen for music and culture into the loveless prison of obsessive collection and curation. The fact that the former character is black and the latter white is no accident, it’s just fate. Too bad the semi-autobiographical author was only semi-interested in designing a universe with less banal systematic cruelty along with the addition of magical rings of power.

***

Being a fan draws a lot of people into happiness and/or success as creators in comics. But as fandom becomes more visible and defined in our consumer culture, a vocal following can blur the line between fan/participant and master and enforce rules that no one can remember writing in the first place. Just like the lions eat the antelope and the lions turn to a grass lot which gets built up into a boutique for silk-screened baby onesies and the antelope get pushed out of their neighborhoods by rent hikes, whole artforms can be scuttled by the arbitrary curation of its fans when the joy of discovery becomes the rote drudgery of collection.

I didn’t mention furries in this essay-ette, so it’s not canon.

“Don’t call me a fucking BRONY, ok?”

Metatext of Doom

Posted on July 23, 2012 by subdee

Homestuck: where to begin?

In a book I haven’t read, Rob Salkowitz “explores how the humble art form of comics ended up at the center of the 21st-century media universe” by talking about the mother of all trade shows: the San Diego Comics Convention. In this book, which again I haven’t read although I have read some excerpts on Amazon, he talks about how the focus of SDCC has shifted from intellectual property delivered via printed books to intellectual property that might, once, have been printed on a page, but that is bound to be far more profitable on screens: on movie screens, of course (though as with all good things the superhero movie boom must one day come to an end) but also on television and computer screens (TV shows, games) as well as tablet screens (digital serialization). Despite all this talk of “digital,” however, webcomics only get a few pages near the end of his book! And even then they are brought up largely as an example of artists who lack business sense! (Note again that I haven’t read the book.)

Nothing else in this article will focus on business, trade shows, superheroes, or the construction of what ruthlessculture.com calls trans-media megatexts. I only felt like I had to open with something appropriately journalistic or academic to fit in with the general tone of this website. “Trans-media megatexts,” however, is a label that might apply to a work like Homestuck, as I will discuss later on. Bear with me, I am going somewhere!

Homestuck is a multimedia webcomic with a large fan following, which as of November 9th of last year was 4,107 pages and 326,796 words long. That’s half the length of Atlas Shrugged, only taking into account page titles and captions. Words that come together with the art are a whole different story, and not included in this analysis because they are too difficult count. They are largely sound effects or image macro-style commentary on the action, anyway.

What enables this preposterously high wordcount is the inclusion of long chat logs below the art in which the characters comment on the action, crack jokes, and discuss their feelings. Because duh. How else would a group of teenagers who only know each other through the internet communicate while playing a cooperative computer game which can create and destroy reality?

Before getting any further into the plot of this comic, I want to talk about what it’s actually about. Homestuck is a self-aware work which is knowingly preoccupied with low or “junk” culture and this is expressed in a variety of ways. To start with an obvious one, John, the first character we are introduced to, and arguably the “shoujo heroine” of the series, lives in a room decorated with “bad movie” posters. His greatest irrational (?) fear is that the evil Betty Crocker will do something unspeakably awful to him, but Gushers replenish his health. Meanwhile, Dave, his smart-cynical rival and best friend, the ultimate “cool kid” of many talents (although he rarely leaves his room), lives surrounded by bad videogames and junk food, which he claims to love “ironically.” He is also the author of an intentionally bad dada-ist webcomic.

A panel from Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff,
the intentionally bad webcomic drawn “ironically” by a character in Homestuck.

The love-hate affair with low culture doesn’t end there. Whole character arcs in Homestuck are built out of bad puns, as when a character identified with the Sagittarius zodiac sign is revealed to be too strong for his own good (because he is a StrongBow – get it?). The character, “Equius,” was raised by a monster resembling a centaur who is also a butler – which is only appropriate, as his blood is literally blue.

Equius Zahaak, a character whose entire personality is built from a pun
on “blue-blooded” and the Sagittarius Zodiac sign

As frivolous and inconsequential as these jokes might have been in the hands of another author, in Homestuck they are taken, not just “seriously” as elements of the narrative which must be as carefully and exhaustively thought out as any other element of the narrative, but often to their most tragic logical endpoints. For example, the strong blue-blooded character is unable to pursue hobbies in archery or robotics as he continually breaks the equipment. More tragically, several millennia of suffering and oppression have resulted from the blood caste color system he supports.

An unrelated scene of mass death

In fact, the logic of Homestuck often dictates that frivolous things lead logically, predictably, and inevitably to tragic outcomes. For instance, when John receives a stuffed bunny from the Nicholas Cage movie Con Air for his birthday, this sets off a chain of events which causes the game he and his friends are playing to become, according to its own rules, unwinnable.

Nicholas Cage and Con Air are reoccurring jokes in Homestuck

In this way, throwaway jokes, bad movies, fast food, and other ephermalia of US and internet culture take on mythic – and often tragic – weight. It’s only appropriate, then, that the structure of the comic follows the same general shape as the Dark Carnival mythology created by horrorcore band Insane Clown Posse, becoming much darker around the 5th Arc. Like Robertson Davies, who built an entire mythology out of a kids’ snowball fight in a rural town in Canada, Andrew Hussie of Homestuck takes these elements of low culture, destined to be thrown away, and enshrines them in a traditional epic narrative.

Mass consumer culture is not the only source mined by Homestuck for hilarious or tragic potential. Internet memes – e.g. horse_ebooks, “all the things” – are also fodder for Homestuck‘s long-running epic narrative. In this way, Dave’s love/hate relationship with low culture might (if one was so inclined) be read as representative of the author’s conflicted perspective, and the work as a whole can be read as commentary on the centrality of junk to the current US cultural landscape.

Naturally, there’s another kind of “low” culture that’s central to a work as meta-referential as Homestuck: of course I’m talking about online fan culture, and specifically online fanfiction, fanart, and fanshipping culture. In the original set of characters, John and Dave hobby-program and insult each others’ tastes in music, movies, and videogames; Rose dresses in a gothic way, fights with knitting needles, and writes fanfiction about wizards. Another female character, Jade, rounds out the original set of characters and is a more-or-less wholesome person who happens to really like anthropomorphic cartoon animals (in other words, she’s a furry).

Jade, the anthropomorphic cartoon animals fan

The inclusion of recognizable fandom “types” within the comic goes a long way toward explaining Homestuck’s fan culture, which is going strong not just in traditional nerd spaces like 4chan, gameFAQs and reddit, but also in places were female media fans hang out out like tumblr, livejournal, and devientart (and of course on the Homestuck forums). Furthermore, fan activity is not a one-way street, as art & music created by fans, fan speculation, fandom romantic pairings, and fandom injokes have increasingly found their way back into the comic in a kind of inclusive and transformative echo chamber.

A character in Homestuck cosplaying as another character in Homestuck

Perhaps this is the logical endpoint of a form of comic production that originally took reader suggestions directly into account: in Andrew Hussie’s previous comics and in Homestuck before the readership reached several million, readers could write in “commands” in order to directly affect the action. On the surface, the comic is a parody – or homage? or example? – of an interactive text adventure game, maybe the ultimate form of improv storytelling in the computer age. I’m not too familiar with the genre conventions of interactive text adventure games (though like everyone else I started but never finished Hugo’s House of Horrors in middle school), so I’ll just link to Get Boat as an example of an awesome long-running work of interactive fiction of the type Homestuck aimed to be.

To enter the Homestuck fandom, then, is to be trapped in a hall of mirrors in which your own culture is reflected back at you in an immediate way by a prolific author (Andrew Hussie updates Homestuck at a rate of up to 20 panels a day). Maybe it’s this element of reflection that explains Homestuck‘s position at (from a specific point of view) the zeitgeist. The massive popularity of the comic contributes to the centrality of its messages in certain online spaces: as happened with the Joss Whedon series Firefly, phrases which originated with or were popularized by Homestuck have found their way into the everyday speech of fans: all the feels, because reasons, coolkid, grimdark.

On another level, it’s possible that Homestuck has had an impact on, not just fannish vocabulary, but also readers’ vocabulary for the discussion of mental illness. Particularly as the comic becomes darker, entire chatlogs focus around feelings of helplessness and depression. A popular fan-created spinoff series, Brainbent, combines a DSM-IV understanding of the characters with responses to individual readers about managing mental illness.

A campfire singalong from Brainbent, a fan-created spin off comic set in a mental institution

But let’s not overstate this too much: this is still a comic where comedy or tragedy is bound to interrupt any time the discussion gets too deep. Or as a friend of mine observed: “the part that’s filtered back out of this giant epic narrative made of pasted together lulzy memes is… more memes. XD;”

So what kind of comic is it that can hold all of these things – the low culture, the fan shout outs, the sudden tragic reversals which often follow times when everything seems to have been going just a bit too well?

At its core, Homestuck is a comic about creation and destruction. The reality-altering computer game the characters are playing revolves around building – building up another player’s physical space and building up your own stats – but with greater power comes greater ability to break stuff, and that’s without counting all the meteors and falling rocks and ticking time bombs and insane homicidal maniacs who now and again will randomly – except that nothing is random in a comic which revolves around prophecies (of doom), time travel (proving you are already doomed), alternate universes (which are doomed) – destroy all the stuff you just built with your awesome godlike powers. At which point, the cycle repeats…

Driven forward by the propulsive logic of this pacing style, and held within a strongly logical structure built out of playing cards, chess pieces, light/dark dualities, and time travel paradoxes (with callbacks often occurring to events hundreds of pages in the past: no one can be more obsessed with Homestuck than Andrew Hussie, who does this for a living) – the comic is a carnival of amazing things and small moments – to make up for its violent and depressing tendencies? In the world of Homestuck, there is always something new to see and experience. Animation, short videos, a soundtrack, and playable “levels” are incorporated directly into the narrative, giving Homestuck the feel of one of those trans-media megatexts discussed earlier.

Click through to watch an early atmospheric and non-spoilery animation from Homestuck

Questions to ask about the work include: is it ultimately an optimistic or a pessimistic narrative? Does the depressive logic of the series, in which characters are repeatedly told that the story will end badly no matter what they do, cancel out its huge create energy? On a personal level, outside the privilege of being able to participate, however indirectly, in a zeitgeist, is it worth your time to spend hundreds of hours on a comic which is (however knowingly and intelligently) obsessed with junk culture and might end horribly?

Of course this will devolve to questions of personal taste. Are you someone who spends a lot of time online? Do you like things that are well made with a strong understanding of cinematic framing and pace? Is there value in the pleasure of small moments, or truth in the back and forth of the characters as they discuss depression? Do you enjoy art which is self-referential and actively engaged with its audience? Do you trust in the author to deliver a satisfying ending? Are you a nerd on the internet?

Personally I have a strong suspicion that whatever the case, the series will end in a logical and appropriate way. This is Andrew Hussie’s fourth comic, after all. And anyway, who doesn’t love a good rollercoaster ride?

The Homestuckkers were out in force at Comic-Con, by the way.

The Greatest Fandom Ever Sold

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Joy DeLyria

You’re probably familiar with it, even if you’ve never heard the word for it. “Fandom” refers to the subculture of people who are fans of any topic. Being a fan is more than simply liking something, and usually more than a hobby. Fans devote considerable time and energy to their fandoms, sometimes even creating works based on it. While people can be fans of anything from baseball to crochet, some of the most involved fandoms are the fandoms surrounding fictional works, particularly science fiction and fantasy. No doubt you’ve encountered at least one of these fandoms: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Bible.

In some sense, these fandoms have always been with us. Before the internet, fandoms were widely dispersed networks of people who communicated by means of mail and conventions—meetings for fans to gather and discuss their favorite fictional works. The first science fiction convention was held in the 1930s, and modern science fiction and fantasy fandom evolved from that. Another milestone was the 1970s, sometimes called the “New Wave”, when large amounts of people became interested in science fiction and fantasy. One of the most popular fandoms—and the fandom that influenced so much of what came after—is another thing that you’re probably familiar with: the Bible.

Between 1967 and 1969, three books were published, called the Torah (Teaching, or the Five Books of Moses), the Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). These three books together formed one book—a fantasy novel about the history of the world and a group of people in it. The book is traditionally called the Tanakh.¹

While a small group of people became highly invested in the Tanakh, publishers did not feel that they were selling enough copies. It went out of print after three years. Usually, that’s the end of the story: a book is published, a show is made; people like it for a while, and then it’s forgotten. But fans of the Tanakh were extremely loyal. They lobbied for republication of the book, and when that failed, they took matters into their own hands. For decades, they held conventions and produced fanzines—collections of fan works published in bound form, and sent to fans with subscriptions. Fan works included art and fan fiction, stories based on the characters and situations in the original novel.

While the public seemed generally aware that Tanakh fans existed, the fandom was largely ignored. Sometimes there was an outside interest in the conventions and fanzines; outsiders periodically commentated on the inexplicable nature of Tanakh fandom. Sometimes there was even ostracism, or outright condemnation: Tanakh fans were criticized for taking the book so seriously—particularly since Tanakh was very different from mainstream literature.

As a result, Tanakh fandom remained small, but loyal. Though marginalized, it became highly organized; fans created their own traditions and jargon, building on the original text even as they celebrated it. Tanakh fandom laid the foundation for much of fandom as we know it, but the biggest way it has influenced not only fandom, but modern culture, is the spin-offs.

In 1987, there were enough Tanakh fans and enough lingering interest to justify the creation of a new series set in the universe of the original series, called the Testaments. The Testaments are two books, generally called the Old and New. The Old Testament is basically a “reboot” of the original series (à la Moore’s Battlestar Galactica in 2004, or Moffat’s recent Sherlock), while the New Testament is a sequel. The sequel incorporates references to favorite characters, including God and Satan, while introducing a next generation. At the center of the next generation is a character called Jesus Christ.

The Testaments were a huge best-seller. Many fans of the Tanakh became fans of the Testaments as well, and many new fans were introduced to the universe through the updated works. Even people who aren’t “fans” in the obsessive sense of the word enjoy the Testaments. Furthermore, even people who have never read The Testaments or even actively dislike them, generally have a little knowledge of the universe. Basically, they were the Harry Potter of the late 1980s; the Testaments have been adapted into several feature length films, and have become integral to modern pop culture.

Fans of the Testaments are more often fans of the New Testament than they are of the Old Testament, though the re-imagining of the original text is highly respected. Christ, however, was the main draw for many fans, and Christ-based fandom remains one of the strongest and most active fandoms today. While a large population has read and enjoy the New Testament, and a large percentage of that would call themselves fans, there is a small, extremely active contingent of Christ fans who almost make rabid look tame.

In the last decade, these fans have received more attention than ever before. For a long time, fandom was peripheral enough that not only was it easily ignored, but it was difficult to observe. With the advent of modern media, particularly the internet, it has become possible to view fandom without being a part of fandom. The past fifteen years have seen a plethora of documentaries, articles, and scholarly work on these fandoms, while the fandoms themselves have grown, becoming highly organized and active.

Due to this, much of the practices that otherwise would not have been exposed to the public are now common knowledge. Documentaries such as Christies², released in 1997, detail the behavior of active Christ fans. Some fans saw Christies as exploitive, but most agree that Christies treated the subject fairly. From the outside, many of the actions of Christ fans may seem strange or aberrant, but to those in the fandom, such actions are natural expressions of their love of a text.

One of the most common forms of said expression is the fannish gathering. Gatherings don’t always have to be conventions; it can be as simple as a couple of fans getting together to watch a television show or discuss a book. Although there is not an episode airing weekly to watch, weekly gatherings are a staple of Bible fandom, as they were in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when the show was airing. Instead of watching television, however, Bible fans come together to discuss the book, read passages, and even sing songs and play games–as fans do at Harry Potter parties.

Different fans participate in fandom in different ways, but for many, it’s the feeling of community that is as important as the text that draws them together. There would probably be Bible fans in a vacuum, but it’s definitely the case that sharing ideas and associating with like-minded people not only brings the fans who participate pleasure, but sustains the fandom itself. Some fans do not consider those who do not participate in gatherings active members of the fandom.

One of the largest types of fannish gatherings is the convention. Conventions are held year round by various branches of fandom, but the biggest ones recur annually at roughly the same date each year. While conventions are traditionally hosted at one venue, Bible fan conventions have become so large that they are held all over the world in many different places. Large numbers of fans turn out for these events. Some are highly devoted, and some are just people who enjoy the text and want to be a part of something. For some people, it is much like a holiday.

One thing you may see at a convention or fannish gathering is something called filk. Filk is music based on a fandom. Much like fan fiction, filk uses characters and themes from the stories, and weaves it into something new. While new filk songs are being written and performed all the time, some are so traditional that any Christ fan you ask knows the words.

Another thing you might see at a fannish gathering is cosplay, which often goes hand in hand with LARP. Cosplay is a portmanteau of “costume play,” and refers to people who dress up according to a particular fandom. While traditionally, people dressed up as characters they like, more often in Bible fandom people will dress in garb merely inspired by the universe. You may have even seen someone in cosplay; one traditional costume is a black suit with a white collar. Some people take cosplay to the extreme and remain in costume at almost all times.

LARP stands for live-action roleplay. In roleplay, like cosplay, people can “be” certain characters they like, not just by dressing like them, but by acting how they think they would act. While people can discuss how they think characters might act, they can also act it out, using props and sets made to look like things and places from the fandom text–thus the term, “live action”.

LARPing was not always a part of Bible fandom. In the early days, dressing up and acting out parts was restricted to something called morality plays. Morality plays could be performed at fannish gatherings and conventions. Most fans are no longer interested in that type of performance, although the performance of the birth of everyone’s favorite character, Jesus Christ, is a tradition at some conventions.

For some fans, however, LARPing is essential to the fandom. A central scene in the New Testament is when Jesus Christ eats his last supper, and tells his friends that the bread and wine is actually his flesh and blood. Some Christ fans act this out almost religiously; they have stand-ins for Christ offer them wine (or juice) and crackers to represent the bread and wine, and eat it at least once a week. While many people outside of fandom—and many fans within the fandom as well—consider this behavior extreme, the fans who practice this tradition see it as an essential part of being a fan.

A central aspect to some fandoms is what was called “the Game” in Sherlock Holmes fandom. Some fans believe Sherlock Holmes was a real person. More often, fans are aware that Sherlock Holmes was an invention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but they are still interested in thinking of Holmes as having existed. To this effect, they try to gather as many “facts” as they can about Holmes’ actual life. Using Doyle’s texts, they pull details about when Holmes solved which cases, when he was born, and when he died.

While many Christ fans know the events of the Testaments to be fictional, they still think of Jesus as a real man. Although most Christ fans are not as concerned as say, Holmes fans about getting dates, etc correct, a central part of LARP—and the Christ fandom as a whole—is the “reality” of Christ.

Another thing you will see in fandom is the “Big Name Fan,” or BNFs. BNFs are fans who are well known in the fandom for one reason or another, whether it is for holding gatherings, writing copious quantities of fanfic, or perhaps even having some influence on the industry that owns the copyright on the text. While not every fan is familiar with a particular BNF, enough people have heard of them that they are considered by some to hold a lofty position in fandom. Some are even considered to hold a certain amount of power, as though they have some influence over fannish interpretation of the text.

The BNF in some circles of Christ fandom is a man known by the handle “Holy Father”, AKA the Pope. Other circles of Christ fandom decry the Pope. Others don’t understand why he’s famous, and never read his meta³ on the Testaments. But there are some who regard the Pope as an authority in the fandom, feeling that only his interpretations are correct.

This and other disagreements between fans can lead to something called fandom wank. While “wank” was initially a term used in fandom to refer to works and comments that were self-congratulatory and aggrandizing, these days the term can also to refer to various kerfuffles that happen in fandom. It may seem strange, or even silly, that disagreements about a book can lead to such heated debate and sometimes even downright nasty verbal abuse, but many fans take fandom seriously. Wank can occur over anything from disagreements about the details of Christ’s “real” life, to differences of interpretation, to lack of respect for BNFs, fanfiction, and—as is most common in Bible fandom—disputes over canon.

The success of the Testaments inspired a slew of other spin-offs, including new re-imaginings, such as the Qur’an in 1993 and the Book of Mormon in 2009. There have also been an abundance of unauthorized sequels, and many, many fanfics, some published, some only famous online. One of the most divisive issues in Bible fandom is which of these text is “official”, and which is merely an interpretation—in other words, which texts are canon.

The term “canon” is derived from religion; it has been used for centuries to refer to the Star Trek works which are considered scripture. (For instance, The Original Series and Next Generation are canon; Spock, Messiah! is not.) The first use in a fannish context was in reference to Sherlock Holmes; works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were considered canon, while pastiches by other authors were not.

In fandom, “canon” refers to the material accepted as “official” by the fandom. This leads to wank because fans disagree as to who may dictate what is canon. Certainly publishing companies may claim such and such a work to be canon, but some fans prefer to decide their own canon. Disagreement over canon has even resulted in factions who refuse to communicate, or allow each other at each others’ conventions.

Perhaps obviously, fans take their fandoms seriously–sometimes too seriously. In some ways, fans take their love of fiction to an extreme level, giving it much of the same importance they might give to real world issues. If fiction were so formative as some fans make it out to be, surely we would not be fighting wars in the Middle East between Kirk lovers and Picard worshippers. People would be able to marry whomever they wished, and mothers would always be free to make choices about their lives and health, if fairytales and fantasy were really an essential component to people’s lives.

In the scheme of things, it’s difficult to feel that a little fictional story about gods and monsters is important. And yet, a fan would say that those things which are blatantly untrue–the fable, the farce, the fantasy–have the power to give us perspective. Whether that perspective would bring reality sharply into focus, or whether it would instead continue to obscure the truth in the chaos that is reality depends on the nature of the canon and the fandom. A fan would say that fiction, fantasy, falsehood–the blatant fabrication of the fairytale–has a profound influence on some people’s lives and their perception of the world. It is often said that fiction can be an escape, but a fan would say that fiction is also a framework by which some form themselves and their thought, at times more comprehensible than our insane reality.

Bible fans make this claim, many believing whole-heartedly that the themes and morals of the book are relevant. Some even claim that the Bible could teach us a thing or two about what our society could become, explaining that the Bible has underlying messages about peace and love of fellow men. That the Bible may influence how people live may seem ridiculous to us, and yet many Bible fans, despite the unusual extent of their obsession, are often well-intentioned, thoughtful people. By taking to heart what’s in the text, they try to live better lives.

The sense of community offered by fandom has also changed lives. Extremely different people from all walks of life come together due to a common interest, and some fans have even united in order to work at charity events, or raise money for areas torn apart by natural disaster. Many people are less lonely due to their participation in fandom; fandom gives them a family, and makes them feel loved.

While fandom may seem strange, even irrational, it is only human. In some ways, a fan’s need for fiction is more comprehensible than another man’s attempt to explain the ugliness of our world using only fact. Perhaps, in light of this, it is story-telling that is man’s greatest endeavor, and his most powerful weapon.

¹(Tanakh is an acronym of the three books. Acronyms are a common shorthand of most fandoms; Lord of the Rings fans call Lord of the Rings LOTR; Harry Potter fans HP, etc. While the comparison between the Tanakh and Lord of the Rings is obvious, the sequence of LOTR’s three books forms a linear narrative. The Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim are far less sequential. However, just like LOTR, the Tanakh is considered one book as a whole, though the Torah is by far the favorite among fans.)

²(N.B. Some Christ fans do not enjoy the word “Christies”, feeling that it is derogatory and dismissive of the text, or that it lumps them in with fans whose behavior is extreme. They prefer the term “Christers” or “Christians.” In this essay, the term “Christ fans” has been used exclusively in order to avoid offense.)

³“Meta,” the pretext which means “on” or “about”, is used in fandom to refer to thoughts and interpretations of the text. Meta can be discussed or recorded, and often appears in the form of essays, or in the case of the Pope, edicts.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: fandom