Mythmoot Presentation: "Transformative Works as a Means to Develop Critical Perspectives ..."

[dawn_felagund]

I had to let the video upload on YouTube run overnight because of my current Internet situation but--at last!--the video of my presentation on Saturday at Mythmoot is finally ready. The full title (which is too long to fit in the title field) is "Transformative Works as a Means to Develop Critical Perspectives in the Tolkien Fan Community." The

Comments

[elfscribe5]

Bravo! Fandom has been an underground, often maligned endeavor. About the only time fandom gets coverage in the outside world is in a titillating, oh gasp! they're writing these characters having sex! kinda context. It's nice to see a scholarly presentation with a positive spin. :-D I immensely admire the fact that you did this. Fantastic that you got so many responses to your survey and I appreciated your analysis. I enjoyed watching your full presentation and really enjoyed your handout with the very creative use of color, organization, and calligraphy. It would never have occurred to me to do that and it made the presentation of your data much more engaging. As for the presentation, I find that reading out a paper, especially with time constraints, does tend to make one speak too fast. Being a fast-talker myself, I've had to learn over the years to slow down, enunciate much more than I normally would, and pause periodically -- take a beat -- to allow the audience to absorb what I'm saying, particularly if I've just said something intended to be amusing. If the audience laughs, that's often the only feedback one gets. It's tough to do. Were there any questions after your presentation? I was keen to hear them if so, just wanting to know how people reacted.

I smiled at your comments about how the footnotes to Tolkien fics are sometimes longer than the story itself -- I daresay that might only be true in the Tolkien fandom. Since I do read footnotes, being well-trained, I also got a laugh reading your comments there about attribution and "being buddies with a few sons of Fëanor."

Would I really get a drabble if I asked? How about one about Finrod?

I have more I could talk about with fandom and reasons for writing, but will save that for another time. Again congrats to you for an excellent paper! And thank you so much for sharing with us. The SWG, your B2MeM endeavors, the newsletter, all are ways you help create the community you talked about in your paper. It's why I stick around even though the desire to create fanfiction has faded. Cheers!

[dawn_felagund]

Thank you! It probably says something that the first question I got about my topic, before I'd even presented (but when I told someone what I was going to be presenting on) was whether the SWG attempted to restrict erotica. I gave a very resolute, "Nope." I said it wasn't a huge part of the Silm fanfic community (compared to other fandoms), but we do allow it and have a genre tag for it. But it certainly speaks to the general perception of fanfic as "oh those perverts!!1!" and of the role of an archive that has garnered respect to be, in part, keeping out said "perverts." (I had to take out the line about the undersexed middle-aged cat ladies, unfortunately, which did address this stereotype.)

I wrote over on the Heretic Loremaster: "What I didn’t want my talk to become ... was a 'let’s gawk at the weirdos,' harping on what newcomers to Tolkien fanfic tend to view as the more audacious genres, followed by a 'but we’re not all like that!' defense. Because, as anyone who reads here regularly or knows me knows, I believe that all stories have value." Everyone who has heard of fanfic has heard of that kind of stuff. The mainstream media does us more justice now, but it's still hard to find a mainstream piece that doesn't at least touch on it. I think it's past time to move beyond it.

Speaking fast has always been an issue for me. It might be scary that I have improved muchly in this since my youth. o.O It's something I'm definitely still working on.

Questions ... I was asked by our excellent moderator if people responded to fanfic with fanfic similarly to how people responded to memes with more memes (since one of the talks was about memes in HP fandom). That started a conversation about the connections between my talk, the video game presentation, and the meme presentation. I feel like we could have gone much further than that, but the hotel staff were starting to edge into the room and give us looks because we were already over time and they needed to set up the room for the banquet that night. Unfortunately, because we had a four-person panel, the Q&A time was less than in some of the other sessions (which mostly had three-person panels).

Thank you again for your encouragement and help throughout this and your kind comments! It means so much! :)

And one drabble about Finrod coming right up!