On fandom's love/hate relationship with spoilers
When I was nine or ten, I had a friend who told me that she always read the endings of books before starting them from the beginning. I didn't get that at all on a personal level, and squawked indignantly at her about how she was ruining the whole experience for herself, but I understood intellectually that clearly she must have enjoyed stories in a fundamentally different way from how I enjoyed them. Because she obviously wasn't ruining the experience for herself. That experience was somehow what she was looking for.
There's been some interesting research lately on spoilers. It turns out people actually enjoy stories more when they've been spoiled for them. I think this is relevant to understanding how fannish consumption works on a psychological level.
A detour into neuropsych, which I will try to keep relatively brief: in any situation where people make decisions or judgments of any kind, there are two main cognitive processes involved. Different fields have come up with different names for them; in my thesis on the physiology of dual processing, I called them heuristic and analytic processes. Heuristic processing is strongly instinctual, rooted in deeply-ingrained pattern recognition and emotional urges. If you're standing at a street corner and not looking directly at the light, and the other six people standing around you all step out into the street at once, and you follow their lead and start crossing too, that's a heuristic-based decision; you're not putting a lot of thought into it, you're making reasonable assumptions based on your experiences. Analytic processing is more conscious, when you deliberately weigh factors against each other. Basically all judgments use both of these processes to some degree. (If you're interested in this stuff, ask me about what happens when people get brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and can't integrate the processes--it's fascinating.)
I think that for me, engagement in most canons involves more analytic processing--following the plot, figuring out the characters, picking up on worldbuilding, etc.--and a lot of fannish engagement is more heuristic, in the sense that I usually know basically what to expect. With fic, the characters are familiar, the worlds (in non-AU fic) are familiar, and many of the plotlines are familiar. If I start reading a fic about Jeff Carter and Mike Richards partying in Philly, I can expect them to get traded, and then Jeff to angst for a while before getting traded to Mike's new team and going on to win the championship at the end of the season. If I start reading a fic about Brendon Urie the brave little toaster working his way through high school and struggling to make it to band practice between shifts at the Smoothie Hut, chances are good that Pete Wentz is about to swoop in and discover him and make him famous, and chances are also good that either Spencer or Ryan (whichever one Brendon is making moon-eyes at in the first five hundred words of the fic) will end up his boyfriend. Hell, we even spoil ourselves for who the boyfriend is going to be in the fic header. In fandom, we love being spoiled.
But just for fic. God help you if you whisper a word about which adorably MFEO couple Joss Whedon tore apart by brutally killing off the more femme-performing one. Fandom will stab you to death with the pointy eyebrows of their disapproving >:( faces if you dare mention a single plot point without fair warning. Because, I think, canon is often where we go to be surprised, while fic is where we go to be comforted.
And that doesn't always hold true. Canon can easily be as much of a happy place as any schmoopy fic, and there are plenty of fabulously plotty, fluff-defying, expectation-curbstomping fics out there. They're my favorites, usually; they're the ones I bookmark on Pinboard under my "you hurt me so good" tag. But when I've had a hard day and I'm too tired to fall asleep, those aren't the ones I crave. I want the one where Arthur is a workaholic lawyer and Eames is a charmingly quirky coffee shop owner and they fall in love. I want the one where Brendon is a waiter and Spencer is a chef and they fall in love. I want the new one I haven't read yet (except I kind of have) where Geno pines and Sid doesn't know how feelings work and they fall in love. Not because of the falling in love, necessarily; more because I know they're going to. In the same way that sometimes I want to read the first Harry Potter book or watch The History Boys for the squillionth time, just because I know exactly how it goes and I want it to go that way again because I know I liked it the first squillion-minus-one times. In the majority of cases with fic, I don't need to have read it to know approximately what to expect.
It's mythology, in the most essential sense. People have always shared characters, shared stories, shared worlds, adapted them and made them their own. This is why I have so much love for the concept of fanon--it's the sketched outline of a story we all draw from, the little agreed-upon details that make each character we share recognizable, familiar. And it's also why I have so much love for meta, because when we're feeling in the mood to take things apart and really look at them, process them analytically, we can do that too.
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/78702.html.
There's been some interesting research lately on spoilers. It turns out people actually enjoy stories more when they've been spoiled for them. I think this is relevant to understanding how fannish consumption works on a psychological level.
A detour into neuropsych, which I will try to keep relatively brief: in any situation where people make decisions or judgments of any kind, there are two main cognitive processes involved. Different fields have come up with different names for them; in my thesis on the physiology of dual processing, I called them heuristic and analytic processes. Heuristic processing is strongly instinctual, rooted in deeply-ingrained pattern recognition and emotional urges. If you're standing at a street corner and not looking directly at the light, and the other six people standing around you all step out into the street at once, and you follow their lead and start crossing too, that's a heuristic-based decision; you're not putting a lot of thought into it, you're making reasonable assumptions based on your experiences. Analytic processing is more conscious, when you deliberately weigh factors against each other. Basically all judgments use both of these processes to some degree. (If you're interested in this stuff, ask me about what happens when people get brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and can't integrate the processes--it's fascinating.)
I think that for me, engagement in most canons involves more analytic processing--following the plot, figuring out the characters, picking up on worldbuilding, etc.--and a lot of fannish engagement is more heuristic, in the sense that I usually know basically what to expect. With fic, the characters are familiar, the worlds (in non-AU fic) are familiar, and many of the plotlines are familiar. If I start reading a fic about Jeff Carter and Mike Richards partying in Philly, I can expect them to get traded, and then Jeff to angst for a while before getting traded to Mike's new team and going on to win the championship at the end of the season. If I start reading a fic about Brendon Urie the brave little toaster working his way through high school and struggling to make it to band practice between shifts at the Smoothie Hut, chances are good that Pete Wentz is about to swoop in and discover him and make him famous, and chances are also good that either Spencer or Ryan (whichever one Brendon is making moon-eyes at in the first five hundred words of the fic) will end up his boyfriend. Hell, we even spoil ourselves for who the boyfriend is going to be in the fic header. In fandom, we love being spoiled.
But just for fic. God help you if you whisper a word about which adorably MFEO couple Joss Whedon tore apart by brutally killing off the more femme-performing one. Fandom will stab you to death with the pointy eyebrows of their disapproving >:( faces if you dare mention a single plot point without fair warning. Because, I think, canon is often where we go to be surprised, while fic is where we go to be comforted.
And that doesn't always hold true. Canon can easily be as much of a happy place as any schmoopy fic, and there are plenty of fabulously plotty, fluff-defying, expectation-curbstomping fics out there. They're my favorites, usually; they're the ones I bookmark on Pinboard under my "you hurt me so good" tag. But when I've had a hard day and I'm too tired to fall asleep, those aren't the ones I crave. I want the one where Arthur is a workaholic lawyer and Eames is a charmingly quirky coffee shop owner and they fall in love. I want the one where Brendon is a waiter and Spencer is a chef and they fall in love. I want the new one I haven't read yet (except I kind of have) where Geno pines and Sid doesn't know how feelings work and they fall in love. Not because of the falling in love, necessarily; more because I know they're going to. In the same way that sometimes I want to read the first Harry Potter book or watch The History Boys for the squillionth time, just because I know exactly how it goes and I want it to go that way again because I know I liked it the first squillion-minus-one times. In the majority of cases with fic, I don't need to have read it to know approximately what to expect.
It's mythology, in the most essential sense. People have always shared characters, shared stories, shared worlds, adapted them and made them their own. This is why I have so much love for the concept of fanon--it's the sketched outline of a story we all draw from, the little agreed-upon details that make each character we share recognizable, familiar. And it's also why I have so much love for meta, because when we're feeling in the mood to take things apart and really look at them, process them analytically, we can do that too.
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/78702.html.