Why the Buffyverse?
I was reading a fanfic musing over at shapinglight's journal. I started to respond, but it was getting a little long-ish, so I decided to do a post instead. It's an interesting read in general, but this question in particular stood out to me:
Which leads me to wondering why it is that the Buffyverse is still the only fictional world invented by other people that I want to fanfic? Am I just hidebound and complacent, do you think? Or are there still lots of meaningful things to say about the Buffyverse and its characters?
This is something I've asked myself plenty of times before, and I'm not sure if I've ever come up with a satisfying answer, or if I'll be able to now. I also started writing after both shows had already ended, and I recall that even back then several older and more prolific writers were declaring fandom dead, sometimes with a fairly snobby "Après moi, le déluge" sort of attitude. For a short while it felt like the comics might spawn a revival, but so few writers liked the comics (and so many couldn't even tolerate them) that this particular revolution seemed to die at the beer hall stage.
Even so, I think maybe the more pertinent question is, why is anyone still writing Buffy fanfic at all?
"Well, people are still writing Star Trek fanfic," someone might say, "and Shatner is older than dirt!" And while that's true, I also think it misses a crucial difference in the way we receive content these days. Back when Star Trek was on, there were only a handful of channels, a few radio stations and a couple of movies that would come out each week. The rate of turnover for content was also much slower, and the options for entertaining yourself were extremely limited. As a result, I think our connection to content becomes stronger and sharper the father back in time that we experienced it, because our memories of that time period aren't as cluttered. Meanwhile, all the syndicated re-runs allowed the idea to really grow its roots into the culture and percolate in the collective consciousness. When you add in the nostalgia factor (and the market-driven desire to acquire licenses with proven track records), that fully explains the phenomenon of reboots, retreads, rehashes and "re-imaginings" of older shows that started in the mid-90's (The Brady Bunch, The Addams Family, The Beverly Hillbilies, etc) and now has an iron grip on the box office.
The results are usually dull, but it's not really the studios' fault. It's an information era survival tactic, I think; now that we've got Youtube, On-Demand TV, a thousand cable channels, video games, DVDs, et cetera, there are just so many content options that the newer stuff simply isn't as memorable as the older stuff, and it's therefore harder to stay connected to it. One would imagine this would include a show like "Buffy", which was born back at the beginning of the digital age -- too young to maintain that blade-sharpness of a pop culture artifact, but too old to linger on in the audience's ever-shortening attention span. And yet, and yet...
Over the years I've only written a grand total of 8 fics, including one (perhaps permanent) WIP. All of them have been about the Buffyverse, and I never once thought of writing fan fiction about anything else. I guess that's partially because I only ever really wanted to write one fic in the first place, and it took me a very long time to finish that one fic. But I guess it's also something to do with the Buffyverse itself. It felt like those stories just had so much to say to me, and that it was almost a little rude not to at least try to say something back. No other show has ever even come close to demanding a response from me, the way BtVS did.
Most TV shows -- even the good ones -- are just "on". "The Walking Dead is on, might as well tune in... Breaking Bad is on, might as well tune in... etc." But with Buffy -- even though it is now dead and over and complete and archival -- I am finding that the shows still matter to me. I can still watch something like "The I in Team" or "Life Serial" or "The Weight of the World," a hundred times and it simply never gets old, even though by now every line, every facial expression, every centimeter of blocking and framing is burned into my brain. Everyone else can move on if they'd like, and most have. Joss Whedon is now directing bazillion dollar superhero movies of middling quality. Marti Noxon and Jane Espensen are producing shows that range from the supremely awesome to the mildly overrated to the insufferably bad. SMG's career is stuck in limbo, Nicholas Brendon's is on ice, and Alyson Hannigan has moved onward and upward in ratings and salary. Meanwhile, greedy studio execs somewhere are probably still kicking around the idea of a Buffy reboot, and basically everything about the comics feels like a licensing cash grab to me. No show has ever been more over in the history of over-shows. It's the motherfucking Platonic ideal of the dead TV show, as far as I'm concerned.
And yet, and yet...
I don't know if I'll ever write more fan fiction (of any kind), but I'll probably continue to write essays about the Buffyverse -- about its meticulously drawn characters, its mile-deep themes, all the poetry and pain and humor and awesomeness. It's that rare perfect pearl for me, and that diamond in the rough, and I'm not sure anything could change that. I know other fanfic authors approach the material more skeptically, and actually write about it because they aren't satisfied with it -- because there were aspects they'd rather change and paths they would have rather taken at the various forks in the various roads. That was never my goal, though. It wasn't a writing exercise either. To be honest I didn't get much enjoyment out of the writing itself, and at times it was excruciating. So, I guess I'm still not exactly sure why I started, or why I can't seem to stop (in essay form at least). Or rather, I can't describe it in a completely left-brained way, analytic way.
In the end, I suppose it's sort of like trying to explain why you fall in love with some person, and only that person. Since love is such a wonderful thing, you'd think we'd all love more than one person, and maybe even fall in love with everyone on planet Earth en masse. But I can't. Love just doesn't work that way.
I don't write about Walking Dead or Breaking Bad or Whatever-ing Whatever because, while I like them all well enough and would totally take them out for coffee or a movie and maybe flirt with them at the office holiday party after a few vodka gimlets... I'm simply not in love with them. My heart belongs to someone else.
So, I guess the shorter version of my answer is: monogamy.
(Next time, I think I'll just write that, brevity being the soul of wit and whatnot.)
Which leads me to wondering why it is that the Buffyverse is still the only fictional world invented by other people that I want to fanfic? Am I just hidebound and complacent, do you think? Or are there still lots of meaningful things to say about the Buffyverse and its characters?
This is something I've asked myself plenty of times before, and I'm not sure if I've ever come up with a satisfying answer, or if I'll be able to now. I also started writing after both shows had already ended, and I recall that even back then several older and more prolific writers were declaring fandom dead, sometimes with a fairly snobby "Après moi, le déluge" sort of attitude. For a short while it felt like the comics might spawn a revival, but so few writers liked the comics (and so many couldn't even tolerate them) that this particular revolution seemed to die at the beer hall stage.
Even so, I think maybe the more pertinent question is, why is anyone still writing Buffy fanfic at all?
"Well, people are still writing Star Trek fanfic," someone might say, "and Shatner is older than dirt!" And while that's true, I also think it misses a crucial difference in the way we receive content these days. Back when Star Trek was on, there were only a handful of channels, a few radio stations and a couple of movies that would come out each week. The rate of turnover for content was also much slower, and the options for entertaining yourself were extremely limited. As a result, I think our connection to content becomes stronger and sharper the father back in time that we experienced it, because our memories of that time period aren't as cluttered. Meanwhile, all the syndicated re-runs allowed the idea to really grow its roots into the culture and percolate in the collective consciousness. When you add in the nostalgia factor (and the market-driven desire to acquire licenses with proven track records), that fully explains the phenomenon of reboots, retreads, rehashes and "re-imaginings" of older shows that started in the mid-90's (The Brady Bunch, The Addams Family, The Beverly Hillbilies, etc) and now has an iron grip on the box office.
The results are usually dull, but it's not really the studios' fault. It's an information era survival tactic, I think; now that we've got Youtube, On-Demand TV, a thousand cable channels, video games, DVDs, et cetera, there are just so many content options that the newer stuff simply isn't as memorable as the older stuff, and it's therefore harder to stay connected to it. One would imagine this would include a show like "Buffy", which was born back at the beginning of the digital age -- too young to maintain that blade-sharpness of a pop culture artifact, but too old to linger on in the audience's ever-shortening attention span. And yet, and yet...
Over the years I've only written a grand total of 8 fics, including one (perhaps permanent) WIP. All of them have been about the Buffyverse, and I never once thought of writing fan fiction about anything else. I guess that's partially because I only ever really wanted to write one fic in the first place, and it took me a very long time to finish that one fic. But I guess it's also something to do with the Buffyverse itself. It felt like those stories just had so much to say to me, and that it was almost a little rude not to at least try to say something back. No other show has ever even come close to demanding a response from me, the way BtVS did.
Most TV shows -- even the good ones -- are just "on". "The Walking Dead is on, might as well tune in... Breaking Bad is on, might as well tune in... etc." But with Buffy -- even though it is now dead and over and complete and archival -- I am finding that the shows still matter to me. I can still watch something like "The I in Team" or "Life Serial" or "The Weight of the World," a hundred times and it simply never gets old, even though by now every line, every facial expression, every centimeter of blocking and framing is burned into my brain. Everyone else can move on if they'd like, and most have. Joss Whedon is now directing bazillion dollar superhero movies of middling quality. Marti Noxon and Jane Espensen are producing shows that range from the supremely awesome to the mildly overrated to the insufferably bad. SMG's career is stuck in limbo, Nicholas Brendon's is on ice, and Alyson Hannigan has moved onward and upward in ratings and salary. Meanwhile, greedy studio execs somewhere are probably still kicking around the idea of a Buffy reboot, and basically everything about the comics feels like a licensing cash grab to me. No show has ever been more over in the history of over-shows. It's the motherfucking Platonic ideal of the dead TV show, as far as I'm concerned.
And yet, and yet...
I don't know if I'll ever write more fan fiction (of any kind), but I'll probably continue to write essays about the Buffyverse -- about its meticulously drawn characters, its mile-deep themes, all the poetry and pain and humor and awesomeness. It's that rare perfect pearl for me, and that diamond in the rough, and I'm not sure anything could change that. I know other fanfic authors approach the material more skeptically, and actually write about it because they aren't satisfied with it -- because there were aspects they'd rather change and paths they would have rather taken at the various forks in the various roads. That was never my goal, though. It wasn't a writing exercise either. To be honest I didn't get much enjoyment out of the writing itself, and at times it was excruciating. So, I guess I'm still not exactly sure why I started, or why I can't seem to stop (in essay form at least). Or rather, I can't describe it in a completely left-brained way, analytic way.
In the end, I suppose it's sort of like trying to explain why you fall in love with some person, and only that person. Since love is such a wonderful thing, you'd think we'd all love more than one person, and maybe even fall in love with everyone on planet Earth en masse. But I can't. Love just doesn't work that way.
I don't write about Walking Dead or Breaking Bad or Whatever-ing Whatever because, while I like them all well enough and would totally take them out for coffee or a movie and maybe flirt with them at the office holiday party after a few vodka gimlets... I'm simply not in love with them. My heart belongs to someone else.
So, I guess the shorter version of my answer is: monogamy.
(Next time, I think I'll just write that, brevity being the soul of wit and whatnot.)