The Friday Five: Fandom!

[dawn_felagund]

This is the first Friday Five that's been interesting in a while, at least in my humble and hard-to-please opinion. Alas, it is not Friday, but since Friday found me without communication of any kind at work and an evening full of activities at home, then we shall consider it the Belated Friday Five.

The questions:
1.) What fandom do you center on

Comments

[dawn_felagund]

You bit! Mwah!

That's interesting about the Tolkien Society. Interestingly, I've heard that complaint made about certain online groups: that they lack a sense of humor and tend toward the "canatic" persuasion and enjoy looking down their noses at genres like AU, slash, and "Mary Sue" because they don't meet their ideals of canon and writing quality. HASA/Henneth-Annun gets accused of that a lot. (As someone who's been on the Henneth-Annun Yahoo list for a year now and endured lived through about three squeeing hyperactive conversations about underwear, each involving about 100 emails fired back and forth, I can say that while some of the members can be a bit pompous and intimidating, it's hardly true of everyone!)

Although I wonder what your Tolkien Society even thought of fanfiction....

I like "serious" discussions, but then, I've probably been involved in an equal number--or more--chats that go "OMG Maedhros is hott!!11!1!" and the like. Well, maybe not quite that bad! But I've certainly written my share of stupid stories to contribute to the hilarity.

There's such a wide range of activities and aspects of life and writing to explore that you don't have to stay in a rut, unlike, say Batman, or deal with an entire real-life industry like with Star Trek.

Yes, I've always been challenged by the idea of a "living" fandom, like Harry Potter for example, when readers/writers don't have the full story yet and so must work within those confines or invent and acknowledge that they'll probably be very wrong and "AU" when all's said and done. I suppose that doesn't bother some people, but I do like that we have pretty much all of the information (unless more notes are published than we currently have) and know how the story ends.

And, for that matter, anyone who wants to whine about what Chris Tolkien did to his father's work is cordially invited to go look at what Rick Berman did to Star Trek after Gene Roddenberry died and then get back to me.

Heh. I'm not much of a Star Trek fan (mostly because I've never taken the time to get involved in it more so than any aversion to it), so I can't really comment on that! But I do know that poor Chris does get a lion's share of hatred among certain Tolkienites. But he was damned the moment that he began the project because--no matter what he did--he probably would have ticked someone off. If he misread a single word of JRR's scrawl, he would have ticked someone off.

He's rather like Peter Jackson in that way. But I look at the alternative: Because of his (Chris Tolkien's) work, we have resources that otherwise would not be readily available. I think he got much more stuff right than he got wrong; we know his "errors" and are welcome to interpret them as they will. That's what matters, to me anyway.

[frenchpony]

I don't know what the Tolkien Society actually thought about anything. I didn't go in and watch them; we just kind of peeked into their room as we were leaving. But they really did impress us with how grim and unhappy they looked. I'm sure they would have hated the very first Tolkien fanfiction I ever wrote. It was very much a parody, and to this day, it's the only one of my stories that's set outside the Pony!verse.

Frankly, I think the thing that pisses people off most about Chris is his personality. He is known for being unpleasantly possessive of his father's estate, and most unhappy with the fact that dear ol' Dad had the unmitigated gall to sell movie rights to his own work during his lifetime so that Chris can't forbid any adaptations. My personal theory is that he's spent so much time guarding his position as Son Of Tolkien, Heir Apparent, that he hasn't really developed a life of his own, or written anything of his own. That makes him mad, and being mad makes him unpleasant, and being unpleasant makes Tolkien's fans blow him off. Which makes him mad. . .

Basically, the thing with Rick Berman and Gene Roddenberry boiled down to the range of their vision. Roddenberry was an old-school science-fiction writer at heart. He wrote dreams of fabulous, semi-socialist future utopias where people were forever discovering new and fascinating wrinkles to the universe, testing themselves and their perceptions against new challenges. His original concept of Star Trek was as a space western, "Wagon Train to the stars," as he described it.

Berman was much more a California television executive. He wanted to do sex and angst and dysfunction and political intrigue and soap opera, and all the little problems that fit nicely inside a television instead of expanding through the universe. Once Roddenberry died and wasn't able to remind Berman that Star Trek was science fiction above all else, the franchise quickly turned into "90210 to the stars." The sense of humor and adventure completely vanished, and the stories became more and more thinly veiled allegory. Not that Star Trek had never had thinly veiled allegory, but the ratio of allegory to exploration and adventure got worse and worse.

Eventually, I heard that Enterprise, Berman's new series set before the original Star Trek, would premiere on UPN instead of NBC. And that was when I knew it was all over.

I'd be interested to see what you think of the original Star Trek, though. In some ways, it's a terrible show. It's got William Shatner, its lack of budget shows (all alien planets look like Southern California), and the costumes, hair, and ethnic/gender relations are so 1968 it hurts. But it's also got Leonard Nimoy, and some pretty nifty (for 1968) special effects, and some fabulous storylines by great science fiction writers. This was the series that dared to show why someone might admire the Nazis, even while acknowledging just what a bad idea this is. Berman wouldn't dare do that.

[dawn_felagund]

Frankly, I think the thing that pisses people off most about Chris is his personality. He is known for being unpleasantly possessive of his father's estate

I would certainly agree with that! I remember in my days as a rampant miniatures painter, I worked with the Games Workshop line of miniatures, largely because they had a line of models based on the LotR movies and that was how I got involved. The big competition for miniatures painting is Golden Demon; it is held at several sites around the world, including (for some strange reason) Baltimore. (I've yet to compete in Golden Demon, not because I don't think my work is that caliber but mostly because I'm too cheap to spring for a $45 dollar convention ticket unless I have a model to enter into every category for which I am eligible. But I digress....) Anyway, the issue of the hobby's magazine that features the Golden Demon winners is always a big deal because many of the models are simply extraordinary. I remember one model, though, that they could not print in the magazine. Why? Because its builder/painter had used pieces from a model from the LotR line on a non-LotR piece, and the Tolkien Estate would not grant permission to display anything so heinous as a space alien with an orc arm...or whatever LotR bit it was that the artist used.

That's interesting about Star Trek too. Not being in the "fandom," I knew that there was some recent hullabaloo when the shows came off television, but I didn't know the story behind it. I would certainly watch the early stuff--and probably like it!--but the question is finding time to watch the early stuff...but I'll keep an eye out for it.