Coming Clean: 2009 & The End of Dumb Things

[2_perseph]

General Disclaimers: 1) It needs to be said that this does not apply to all fandoms, nor across the board to the ones it does apply. 2) This is how I experienced fandom on LiveJournal, where as far as I can tell, fandom has made its home.

PREMISE OF ARGUMENTOnce upon a time, there was a movement called “Bohemian.” This movement was made up of

Comments

[ratcreature]

I don't think the urge to be acknowledged by creators is new. In a way it is inherent in both large parts of SF fandom as well as comic fandom, where people first write or draw for fanzines (with original works) but often hope to make it pro. Getting the attention of the people you admire (showing your drawings at comic conventions to your favorite pro artist etc etc), thus happens all the time. Media fandom grew out of that, so naturally when media fans made fanzines those weren't all suddenly hidden from show creators and actors at the conventions from what I heard. And sometimes kerfuffles over that happened because actors saw zines with naked people on the covers even back in the 1970s.

I haven't been in fandom back then, but I've been in online tv fandom since the mid-1990s (in offline comic fandom before that), and as long as I remember there have been always fans who wanted acknowledgment (like getting your fanart autographed), and sometimes there were fans who were in closer contact to production than the rest of fandom for whatever reason (some worked in entertainment industry, were writing scripts or trying to get scripts accepted etc).

Another classic example of how fandom likes to get attention of creators is when fandom does charity drives for some cause one of the actors or producers supports. Many fandoms do that, like in Sentinel fandom artists and authors would do charity auctions of their works for a charity associated with the actors, so that money would be raised on behalf of fandom. There are charity zines doing the same thing too.

Then there are the "Save the show" campaigns for example, which by their very nature need acknowledgment by producers and production. And big ones raise enormous amounts of money for that. Enough for advertising in big entertainment magazines, like the Save Farscape campaign did.

Personally I like to stay away from the production side of things, and am not an actor fan at all, and by now I avoid authors and comic artists as well, because too often some statement or other made me cringe too much to ever forget and like their stuff again, but this urge to get noticed is not new at all IMO, and I don't think it started with the internet either.

[2_perseph]

No, I'm not saying it started with the internet, I'm only saying that the internet could end up doing something to fandom it did not anticipate, and that if there's a medium that could do it, it would be this one.

I do attend cons, big and small, and I see the interactions with creators; I know of the countless charity drives, etc. But -- and if I'm incorrectly stating facts, I really would like to know -- at no time in the past has fandom taken the kind of stand (staking a claim) in relation to originating works that it seems to take for granted nowadays. Am I wrong about this? Have I missed other such directions in fandom? This coupled with the way the internet exists, is what is making me so nervous.

The "save our show" drives I don't think are what I'm talking about. In fact I think that's the kind of thing fandom is all about.

Thank you for commenting, and I hope I was able to make my position a little clearer.

[ratcreature]

I don't think I witness this "claim staking" much. Maybe because I never go to forums where the creators are, and am squicked by celebrity fandom as well as by RPF, so I don't go everywhere in fandom. I mean, I do have seen plenty of criticism of how racist or sexist etc a source is, and I have seen fans take those complaints to the creators (like the racebending.com campaign to protest the casting of Avatar the last Airbender and other yellowface casting) demanding change, but I don't think that fans protesting racism in Hollywood and trying to get the producers to be less racistis going to ruin fandom.