Consumptive fandom & transformative fandom
I've been watching a lot of hockey lately. A lot. (No, wait, don't run away! This isn't actually a post about hockey.) I have quite a few friends who are also into hockey, and it's interesting to note the different ways I interact with them based on their styles of fannishness. Hockey fans who are in RPF fandom have a different context for the sport than hockey fans who aren't, but some of the ways they think and act are similar, and it's making me think about definitions of fandom and fannishness.
The most immediate meanings of the term "fan" to non-fandom people are probably sports fans and music fans, which is interesting to me, because hockey and bandom are my main fandoms right now. But I'm a hockey fan in all senses of the word, while my bandom fannishness is almost entirely RPF-based. Most of my bandom friends care a lot about the actual bands on a personal level, which makes way more sense than my fanon-based way of doing things. But I'm not the only one--I've talked to other people who interact with bandom this way, and I've seen quite a lot of people saying they interact with hockey fandom in the same way, reading fic but not watching or caring much about the game.
I think it makes sense, to me at least, to conceptualize fandom as a spectrum from consumptive behavior to transformative behavior. I don't mean to imply that these are entirely distinct from one another, nor that one is better than the other, nor indeed that transformative fandom is limited to online relationship-based fanworks. I think people who dress up and make signs and such for sports games are engaging in transformation. This is not consumptive behavior. (I don't really know what it is. Always Sunny in Philadelphia/sports fandom crossover cosplay acrobatics? Whatever it is, it's not consumptive.)
My personal engagement with different fandoms varies, as I said. In bandom, I would say on a scale from entirely consumptive behavior at 0 to entirely transformative behavior at 6, I am perhaps a 5. (I made it 0 to 6 so I could refer to this scale in my head as the Kinsquee scale. Don't judge me.) In hockey, I started out at 6, slid like a trombone all the way to around 2 a week ago with the advent of the playoffs (so many games to watch! so much commentary to read! so many YouTube videos, oh my god, the YouTube videos!), and am now working my way back toward the middle by writing fic of my own.
As a side note, I'm thinking of the act of consuming transformative works as engaging in transformative fandom. Really, it's probably more like a second level of consumptive fandom based on transformative fandom, but at that point definitions get messy enough that making up categorization schemata to process them becomes less useful. But I would like to point out that anyone who follows a particular author who writes fic about the BBC's modern AU of the Sherlock Holmes stories is, by all useful definitions, a fan of a fan of a fan. INCEPTION FANDOM. Wait, no, that's something else.
Back to me and my questionably helpful schema. So I consume almost exclusively in some fandoms; Hikaru no Go comes to mind as an example of a canon I adore and interact with primarily at the canon level. And I interact with other fandoms primarily through fanon, like bandom and Inception. And then there's hockey, which I interact with... any way I can, really. I watch games, I process players as people and as characters, I read fic and sports blogs and Puck Daddy and Wikipedia articles and fandom primers and the NHL rulebook (no, really). I will talk about hockey with anyone who's willing and most people who aren't, on whatever level they want, whether that's based on Kaner's obvious oral fixation (SO OBVIOUS, YOU GUYS) or the best shootout goals of all time (look at Malkin here, look, LOOK) or the structure of the league (two seven-team conferences means they want a 32-team league in the long term, right, so Seattle is DEFINITELY getting a team, right, yeah?)... I will talk about it. I will not shut up about it. I will engage on ALL OF THE LEVELS.
I totally lied about this not being a post about hockey, oh my god. FOCUS, JULIA.
Okay, so it seems to me that consumptive fandom is seen by non-fans as more valid. At least, my experiences of people's reactions to me saying that I watched the entire seven-season run of Buffy in under a month have generally been a lot more accepting and less weirded out than their reactions to me saying that I write fanfic about members of pop-rock bands. That's a lot of Buffy, people. I did not do much that month except watch Buffy. And yet people seem to get that, to find it reasonable to get that involved in a canon. There are a ton of people who are watching just as much hockey as I am right now, and there are a ton of people who watch sports for hours every day even when it's not the Stanley Cup playoffs, and they might be stereotyped as lazy, but nobody thinks it's weird. People will accept a ridiculous level of obsession with canon as understandable, as long as you don't touch it. As long as you don't do anything to it.
And like I said, I am often a consumptive fan. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But sometimes I feel like writing a fic about the teeth Duncan Keith gave to Brent Seabrook, and sometimes I feel like engaging in an explicit conversation on Twitter about Tazer indulging that oh-so-obvious oral fixation of Kaner's, and sometimes I feel like spending half an hour making a Google map of all the locations of NHL teams to look at the geographic distribution, never mind that I could find a map somebody else made in two seconds of searching, I want to do it, just to prove to myself that I can remember all of them. Sometimes I want to sit back and relax and watch and listen, and sometimes I want to create. These are all legitimate forms of fannish activity. And so is paying God only knows how much money to sit next to the penalty box and wave your green-spandexed legs in the air at whoever's playing the Canucks. Godspeed, bemusing yet inexplicably entertaining little green men. Godspeed.
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/59088.html.
The most immediate meanings of the term "fan" to non-fandom people are probably sports fans and music fans, which is interesting to me, because hockey and bandom are my main fandoms right now. But I'm a hockey fan in all senses of the word, while my bandom fannishness is almost entirely RPF-based. Most of my bandom friends care a lot about the actual bands on a personal level, which makes way more sense than my fanon-based way of doing things. But I'm not the only one--I've talked to other people who interact with bandom this way, and I've seen quite a lot of people saying they interact with hockey fandom in the same way, reading fic but not watching or caring much about the game.
I think it makes sense, to me at least, to conceptualize fandom as a spectrum from consumptive behavior to transformative behavior. I don't mean to imply that these are entirely distinct from one another, nor that one is better than the other, nor indeed that transformative fandom is limited to online relationship-based fanworks. I think people who dress up and make signs and such for sports games are engaging in transformation. This is not consumptive behavior. (I don't really know what it is. Always Sunny in Philadelphia/sports fandom crossover cosplay acrobatics? Whatever it is, it's not consumptive.)
My personal engagement with different fandoms varies, as I said. In bandom, I would say on a scale from entirely consumptive behavior at 0 to entirely transformative behavior at 6, I am perhaps a 5. (I made it 0 to 6 so I could refer to this scale in my head as the Kinsquee scale. Don't judge me.) In hockey, I started out at 6, slid like a trombone all the way to around 2 a week ago with the advent of the playoffs (so many games to watch! so much commentary to read! so many YouTube videos, oh my god, the YouTube videos!), and am now working my way back toward the middle by writing fic of my own.
As a side note, I'm thinking of the act of consuming transformative works as engaging in transformative fandom. Really, it's probably more like a second level of consumptive fandom based on transformative fandom, but at that point definitions get messy enough that making up categorization schemata to process them becomes less useful. But I would like to point out that anyone who follows a particular author who writes fic about the BBC's modern AU of the Sherlock Holmes stories is, by all useful definitions, a fan of a fan of a fan. INCEPTION FANDOM. Wait, no, that's something else.
Back to me and my questionably helpful schema. So I consume almost exclusively in some fandoms; Hikaru no Go comes to mind as an example of a canon I adore and interact with primarily at the canon level. And I interact with other fandoms primarily through fanon, like bandom and Inception. And then there's hockey, which I interact with... any way I can, really. I watch games, I process players as people and as characters, I read fic and sports blogs and Puck Daddy and Wikipedia articles and fandom primers and the NHL rulebook (no, really). I will talk about hockey with anyone who's willing and most people who aren't, on whatever level they want, whether that's based on Kaner's obvious oral fixation (SO OBVIOUS, YOU GUYS) or the best shootout goals of all time (look at Malkin here, look, LOOK) or the structure of the league (two seven-team conferences means they want a 32-team league in the long term, right, so Seattle is DEFINITELY getting a team, right, yeah?)... I will talk about it. I will not shut up about it. I will engage on ALL OF THE LEVELS.
I totally lied about this not being a post about hockey, oh my god. FOCUS, JULIA.
Okay, so it seems to me that consumptive fandom is seen by non-fans as more valid. At least, my experiences of people's reactions to me saying that I watched the entire seven-season run of Buffy in under a month have generally been a lot more accepting and less weirded out than their reactions to me saying that I write fanfic about members of pop-rock bands. That's a lot of Buffy, people. I did not do much that month except watch Buffy. And yet people seem to get that, to find it reasonable to get that involved in a canon. There are a ton of people who are watching just as much hockey as I am right now, and there are a ton of people who watch sports for hours every day even when it's not the Stanley Cup playoffs, and they might be stereotyped as lazy, but nobody thinks it's weird. People will accept a ridiculous level of obsession with canon as understandable, as long as you don't touch it. As long as you don't do anything to it.
And like I said, I am often a consumptive fan. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But sometimes I feel like writing a fic about the teeth Duncan Keith gave to Brent Seabrook, and sometimes I feel like engaging in an explicit conversation on Twitter about Tazer indulging that oh-so-obvious oral fixation of Kaner's, and sometimes I feel like spending half an hour making a Google map of all the locations of NHL teams to look at the geographic distribution, never mind that I could find a map somebody else made in two seconds of searching, I want to do it, just to prove to myself that I can remember all of them. Sometimes I want to sit back and relax and watch and listen, and sometimes I want to create. These are all legitimate forms of fannish activity. And so is paying God only knows how much money to sit next to the penalty box and wave your green-spandexed legs in the air at whoever's playing the Canucks. Godspeed, bemusing yet inexplicably entertaining little green men. Godspeed.
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/59088.html.