this is not spinal tap
To begin with, I have a fic recommendation: Everyday Mysteries in the Summertime by
wax_jism.
Brothers working at a gas station. A new kid in town. Star-crossed lovers amidst the class conflict between Hill kids and Valley kids. Dysfunctional families and melancholy boys who draw (and drink) instead of talk. So bleak and teenaged it makes your chest hurt, and makes you remember clear as day those people in your own past you swore you'd forgotten. All you need to know about a certain (poignantly familiar) corner of the world wrapped up in a (long-ish) one-shot package.
But, if you haven't guessed already, there's some serious explaining that needs to go along with this rec. This story, ladies and gentlemen, is bandom fic. What that means, because I think some of you haven't encountered this corner of internet-land, is "fanfiction" about real people--in bands in this case; My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, to be specific. Sometimes these "real person fiction" stories are set in the "real" world, i.e. band members are band members who are . . . on tour or something. Sometimes the same people are cast in "alternate universes" where they are working at a gas station during the summer. Or something else.
This is the first bandom AU I've read (and really, only the second bandom fic I've read, and I encountered both only because they were written and/or rec'd by a writer whom I admire tremendously). So I stayed up late reading this story that turned my head around because it was this bitingly bleak and perfect world populated by beautiful and intricately drawn characters . . . who also happened to be people I recognize from music videos.
That's the thing I don't get. Why write that story as AU band-fic instead of as an original piece? But I realized that, as a reader, even though I had no real previous attachment to the bands or their members, I read it as bandom fic and not as original fiction. More than once, I stopped reading to google some images of MCR to see . . . okay, the older brother, that's Gerard Way, right? So then which one is Frank Iero? And when I finished it, and realized that I'd mixed up two members of FOB, it totally messed with me, and I had to re-vision the pictures in my head and it was too traumatic to be rationally explicable.
(And let me add, despite the fact that Pete Wentz is undeniably pretty and emo, I'd still make sure it was Patrick Stump I was kissing across a gas station counter, if it were left to me.)
What I'm trying to say is that the larger world the piece connected to, by virtue of being bandslash and not original fic, added something to my reading of it. But what? I don't entirely know. I can't articulate it. But it went both ways, because now I'm significantly more squeeful about the band members in question, the actual people who were represented in the story without their knowledge or consent, which is another whole confusing dimension of real person fic that I can't consider here.
And I think the same principle of "connecting to something larger" is at work in any process of fanfiction creation, and perhaps in any element of fandom. But what does it mean? Why do we do it? And how does it change us and the world?
Because I think it does. I mean, I know it does. Nothing happens anywhere that doesn't change something, even thinking private thoughts in our heads and feeling secret feelings in our hearts--and this phenomenon is much, much broader than that. I feel like I've stumbled upon a vast and important sociological phenomenon that seems to be pointing somewhere, I just can't tell where it will take us.
And if those of you reading this, especially those of you who've been in fandom for a while, know something you're not telling, please, please share?
wax_jism.
Brothers working at a gas station. A new kid in town. Star-crossed lovers amidst the class conflict between Hill kids and Valley kids. Dysfunctional families and melancholy boys who draw (and drink) instead of talk. So bleak and teenaged it makes your chest hurt, and makes you remember clear as day those people in your own past you swore you'd forgotten. All you need to know about a certain (poignantly familiar) corner of the world wrapped up in a (long-ish) one-shot package.
But, if you haven't guessed already, there's some serious explaining that needs to go along with this rec. This story, ladies and gentlemen, is bandom fic. What that means, because I think some of you haven't encountered this corner of internet-land, is "fanfiction" about real people--in bands in this case; My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, to be specific. Sometimes these "real person fiction" stories are set in the "real" world, i.e. band members are band members who are . . . on tour or something. Sometimes the same people are cast in "alternate universes" where they are working at a gas station during the summer. Or something else.
This is the first bandom AU I've read (and really, only the second bandom fic I've read, and I encountered both only because they were written and/or rec'd by a writer whom I admire tremendously). So I stayed up late reading this story that turned my head around because it was this bitingly bleak and perfect world populated by beautiful and intricately drawn characters . . . who also happened to be people I recognize from music videos.
That's the thing I don't get. Why write that story as AU band-fic instead of as an original piece? But I realized that, as a reader, even though I had no real previous attachment to the bands or their members, I read it as bandom fic and not as original fiction. More than once, I stopped reading to google some images of MCR to see . . . okay, the older brother, that's Gerard Way, right? So then which one is Frank Iero? And when I finished it, and realized that I'd mixed up two members of FOB, it totally messed with me, and I had to re-vision the pictures in my head and it was too traumatic to be rationally explicable.
(And let me add, despite the fact that Pete Wentz is undeniably pretty and emo, I'd still make sure it was Patrick Stump I was kissing across a gas station counter, if it were left to me.)
What I'm trying to say is that the larger world the piece connected to, by virtue of being bandslash and not original fic, added something to my reading of it. But what? I don't entirely know. I can't articulate it. But it went both ways, because now I'm significantly more squeeful about the band members in question, the actual people who were represented in the story without their knowledge or consent, which is another whole confusing dimension of real person fic that I can't consider here.
And I think the same principle of "connecting to something larger" is at work in any process of fanfiction creation, and perhaps in any element of fandom. But what does it mean? Why do we do it? And how does it change us and the world?
Because I think it does. I mean, I know it does. Nothing happens anywhere that doesn't change something, even thinking private thoughts in our heads and feeling secret feelings in our hearts--and this phenomenon is much, much broader than that. I feel like I've stumbled upon a vast and important sociological phenomenon that seems to be pointing somewhere, I just can't tell where it will take us.
And if those of you reading this, especially those of you who've been in fandom for a while, know something you're not telling, please, please share?