We've reached a milestone
1) This past week I shared an article regarding Rainbow Rowell's new work that looked at how fanfic worked. And given other articles this same week that also look at how fanfic functions, I'm ready to call it.
Back in 2009 I said it was the year "when fan fiction has become, if not a mainstream pastime, at least a term understood by many in the media and requiring less explanation in the press." (This was some months earlier than when a to-do was made about Merriam Webster adding a definition to their dictionary).
But it's in 2019 that fanfic is not just commonly known about, but it's actually starting to be discussed as a form of creative work.
As an example, here are four articles, all released on nearly the same day:
a) From a fannish outlet: "a common fanfiction trope when it comes to Tony Stark is that he’s Italian, mainly because of his mother. Maria Stark often refers to Tony as her “bambino” in fic, and it made me wonder where the idea came from. It wasn’t just one fanfiction; it happened enough that I thought there was some comic storyline I was missing in regards to Tony."
(No discussion per se, but a reference to the fact that stories written in fandom include shared headcanons).
b) From a mainstream outlet: "Rowell used her meta-textual interaction with the popular Rowling series to dissect and upend Chosen One tropes all the while whipping up a yearning gay teen romance for the ages. "
(A definition that goes beyond the standard "derivative work about a known source.")
c) From a general news outlet that's discussed fanfic before: "It feels like I’m writing Nancy fan fiction, which is very freeing. I’ve said the same thing to my editor before, and she’s gently broken it to me that my Nancies are canon, but fan fiction is what it feels like nonetheless. Maybe what I mean by this is that I feel comfortable transforming the strip in ways that suit me because I trust readers to know “the rules” of transformative works like fan fiction. It’s your take on characters that are shared by everyone. You’re not trying to pass seamlessly as the original author; you’re stretching and bending the original work to make it say what you want it to say."
(Assumption about a broad reading audience that understands what fanworks do)
d) From another mainstream news outlet: "It also teaches something that schools rarely do: what it’s like to write for a real audience “versus a teacher who’s read the same essay topic 1 million times,” as Black says. Muir, who used to work as an English teacher, has experienced this from both sides. She credits fan fiction with helping her learn to connect with readers, and in the classroom “being a storyteller is something I’ve always struggled to teach. We don’t give kids the opportunity to be writing for an audience.”"
(An article that is all about audience for writing and how it informs that process).
There are, of course, many other articles out there that discuss fanfic in some way. And while it seems easy to point out that AO3's Hugo win is the same sort of mile marker that the dictionary addition was in 2009, I would say that it is the cart following the horse to assume this. I read a number of news articles which discussed the Hugo nomination and win, and almost none of them actually talked about fanfic as a genre and experience as opposed to how this recognition elevated a niche area of fandom or introduced what AO3 was to a wider audience.
But this random sampling of articles shows that, in fact, the concept of fanfic has gone far beyond mere definitions or random examples of people who write it or fandoms which have it (which admittedly, still makes up the majority of articles/news segments mentioning it). Instead, it has now become recognized as a literary format that has a central community component.
I think that it will still be some while before news stories reveal a common understanding that fanworks are part of academic research and have their place in common culture. But I can see a big difference between 2009 and 2019, and I think that it's a meaningful one.
2) I've been listening to Passenger List which will be on its 5th episode soon and I'm finding it a good listen, particularly after the last episode. I have a suspicion about a further turn in the mystery, we'll see if I'm right.
I've also subscribed to HBO for now, and I have put a whole bunch of series in my bookmarks there, though the main two things I want to see soon are the Brexit film and Chernobyl. This may end up slow going as Mike is also interested and of late has been complaining that the only thing we watch together is Hogan's Heroes. But until this week that's been the only half hour show on our list. So if he's never available to watch anything until half an hour before bedtime, we're not going to be seeing much else and certainly not any two hour movies. Plus when he does have viewing time he complains that he also wants to watch things that are on his own viewing list (mostly cartoons). So I'm going to sample a bunch of stuff I can watch on my own.
Mike is like Don Quixote tilting at Time because there is never enough to do all the things he wants. One advantage of streaming is that as we switch from service to service it forces him to pare down what he actually wants to see and prioritize that instead of just filling up the DVR with things he'll never get to.
It's not just him either. While I tend to work through my own viewing lists, I have to make peace with missing stuff I'll never catch up with such as The Daily Show or Colbert when we're not subscribed to the right services for them. Weekly shows I can generally keep up with, but not even their networks archive everything for viewing.
3) Speaking of streaming, I'd be very curious to see data on how many people who either have cut the cord or have subscribed to cable for the first time end up switching back, especially because it's a dataset always missing from the debate. It's definitely more work but less than a year into the change I can't see myself ever returning to it.
For one thing, as I mentioned above, having to intentionally subscribe to stuff means that one has to prioritize what one is truly interested in, yet at the same time trying out things one might not have otherwise because one has access to it at the moment.
Secondly, besides the fact that we're saving a lot of money from the switch, if we had kept cable, we would continue to miss stuff because a lot of what I want to see is behind different paywalls. Cable offers a fair amount of free On Demand viewing, but it's only short term. A lot of stuff either disappears or comes with a separate cost. (For example, you can watch all of the current season for free, but earlier ones must be paid for). At least on streaming I pay one price and get most all of the earlier content included. Plus, I don't need a DVR for it which would also cost me extra.
For example, if I had cable and wanted HBO, I'd have to pay extra for it anyway. We've always had a separate Netflix subscription. I've had to purchase stuff from Amazon I couldn't get any other way.
My biggest concern for the future is not that stuff is going to be locked behind different walls, because it already largely is. Rather, it is that one is going to be locked into service contracts with streamers, so that one can't easily subscribe and unsubscribe. For example, the AMC A-List I used this summer required you to keep it for three months, and once I dropped it, it will not allow me to renew it again for 6 months.
Cable companies always had the excuse that they had to do physical things to provide you with service at your residence, and thus scheduling that service or turning it on and off was costly in terms of time and money. (This proved completely untrue once we cancelled it though - that happened within 10 minutes of confirming it on the phone!) But streaming services have no reason to make it difficult for you to start and stop service…except making more money.
Right now they still have plenty of competition from cable and other services. But someday that won't be true. And at that point I could see a lot of service contracts springing up, making it too costly to start and stop services as a general practice.
4) Given the employment data came out this week, saying we had the lowest unemployment in the U.S. since data began being collected in 1972, I was unsurprised to read in an article about terrible employment practices that the actual number is higher: "if you look at the proportion of people in the labor force who don’t have a job and want one, it’s about 7.1%, which is a pretty big number when you figure the unemployment rate is 3.7%. It’s almost double that number, so there are still a lot of people who are unemployed and would like a job. How many of those people are impossible to employ? Well, that’s a pretty good question, and we don’t know the answer."
I'd bet a ton of them are over 50 as age-discrimination in employment has only been growing. If you factored in underemployment, I suspect that number would be more like 20%.
5) If I'm not mistaken, this is the company that OTW Legal had to block from trademarking the word "Fandom" when they chose to rename the company. Which, in itself, is such a dick move that it says a lot about how little they care about fans themselves. Their new report is such a mix of things that I hardly know where to start.
One thing, for example, that they fail to look at is any difference between curatorial and transformational fans, instead just lumping together all types of activities.
"A full 30% of fans in this stage will become content creators themselves. Heavy creators will write articles or blog posts, contribute to wikis, and produce podcasts, fan fiction or videos.
Light creators will share or post memes, respond to comments and discussions on social media or fan communities, and create short-form content about their fandoms, usually in text format.
The motivations behind this fan-generated content range from the emotional payoff they receive from the community that sees their work (the same reason people enjoy getting likes and comments on the personal photos they share on social media platforms) to the desire to “serve the greater good” or see themselves as an integral part of a larger fan community."
To me writing blog posts about a fandom and creating fanworks are totally separate things, especially if what you're writing isn't even meta. Ditto contributing to a wiki (practically the definition of curatorial work) vs writing fanfic or the effort needed to create a podcast. And nowhere is it mentioned that people feel creatively inspired or like learning new skills as a result of their fan activities.
Another example: when talking about how TV fans are more casual than movie fans, they also say:
"Comedies beat out dramas as fan favorites (39% vs. 32%) when it comes to TV. This is reflected in both fans’ all-time favorite shows as well as in their top-cited recent favorites."
Yet if you look at the most popular transformational fandoms, none of them are comedies. In fact it's long been obvious that comedies have far fewer works than much smaller drama or scifi fandoms, and some of the particularly popular comedies that have fanworks (I'm thinking Community or Brooklyn Nine Nine) are not particularly successful in terms of audience size.
So my guess is that what they're really measuring is what shows people like to declare themselves fans of, or which ones they watch repeatedly. Also, their survey only covered people 16-44 since they're only interested in that demo for marketing purposes. But if you want a real "ugh," look at one of their conclusions:
"Align with trusted content that is for fans, by fans...Put official content in the hands of fan communities, empowering fans to use your content to express themselves and curate their social identity. Embrace fan-created content to help move audiences along the stages of fandom."
View poll: Kudos Footer-102
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
Back in 2009 I said it was the year "when fan fiction has become, if not a mainstream pastime, at least a term understood by many in the media and requiring less explanation in the press." (This was some months earlier than when a to-do was made about Merriam Webster adding a definition to their dictionary).
But it's in 2019 that fanfic is not just commonly known about, but it's actually starting to be discussed as a form of creative work.
As an example, here are four articles, all released on nearly the same day:
a) From a fannish outlet: "a common fanfiction trope when it comes to Tony Stark is that he’s Italian, mainly because of his mother. Maria Stark often refers to Tony as her “bambino” in fic, and it made me wonder where the idea came from. It wasn’t just one fanfiction; it happened enough that I thought there was some comic storyline I was missing in regards to Tony."
(No discussion per se, but a reference to the fact that stories written in fandom include shared headcanons).
b) From a mainstream outlet: "Rowell used her meta-textual interaction with the popular Rowling series to dissect and upend Chosen One tropes all the while whipping up a yearning gay teen romance for the ages. "
(A definition that goes beyond the standard "derivative work about a known source.")
c) From a general news outlet that's discussed fanfic before: "It feels like I’m writing Nancy fan fiction, which is very freeing. I’ve said the same thing to my editor before, and she’s gently broken it to me that my Nancies are canon, but fan fiction is what it feels like nonetheless. Maybe what I mean by this is that I feel comfortable transforming the strip in ways that suit me because I trust readers to know “the rules” of transformative works like fan fiction. It’s your take on characters that are shared by everyone. You’re not trying to pass seamlessly as the original author; you’re stretching and bending the original work to make it say what you want it to say."
(Assumption about a broad reading audience that understands what fanworks do)
d) From another mainstream news outlet: "It also teaches something that schools rarely do: what it’s like to write for a real audience “versus a teacher who’s read the same essay topic 1 million times,” as Black says. Muir, who used to work as an English teacher, has experienced this from both sides. She credits fan fiction with helping her learn to connect with readers, and in the classroom “being a storyteller is something I’ve always struggled to teach. We don’t give kids the opportunity to be writing for an audience.”"
(An article that is all about audience for writing and how it informs that process).
There are, of course, many other articles out there that discuss fanfic in some way. And while it seems easy to point out that AO3's Hugo win is the same sort of mile marker that the dictionary addition was in 2009, I would say that it is the cart following the horse to assume this. I read a number of news articles which discussed the Hugo nomination and win, and almost none of them actually talked about fanfic as a genre and experience as opposed to how this recognition elevated a niche area of fandom or introduced what AO3 was to a wider audience.
But this random sampling of articles shows that, in fact, the concept of fanfic has gone far beyond mere definitions or random examples of people who write it or fandoms which have it (which admittedly, still makes up the majority of articles/news segments mentioning it). Instead, it has now become recognized as a literary format that has a central community component.
I think that it will still be some while before news stories reveal a common understanding that fanworks are part of academic research and have their place in common culture. But I can see a big difference between 2009 and 2019, and I think that it's a meaningful one.
2) I've been listening to Passenger List which will be on its 5th episode soon and I'm finding it a good listen, particularly after the last episode. I have a suspicion about a further turn in the mystery, we'll see if I'm right.
I've also subscribed to HBO for now, and I have put a whole bunch of series in my bookmarks there, though the main two things I want to see soon are the Brexit film and Chernobyl. This may end up slow going as Mike is also interested and of late has been complaining that the only thing we watch together is Hogan's Heroes. But until this week that's been the only half hour show on our list. So if he's never available to watch anything until half an hour before bedtime, we're not going to be seeing much else and certainly not any two hour movies. Plus when he does have viewing time he complains that he also wants to watch things that are on his own viewing list (mostly cartoons). So I'm going to sample a bunch of stuff I can watch on my own.
Mike is like Don Quixote tilting at Time because there is never enough to do all the things he wants. One advantage of streaming is that as we switch from service to service it forces him to pare down what he actually wants to see and prioritize that instead of just filling up the DVR with things he'll never get to.
It's not just him either. While I tend to work through my own viewing lists, I have to make peace with missing stuff I'll never catch up with such as The Daily Show or Colbert when we're not subscribed to the right services for them. Weekly shows I can generally keep up with, but not even their networks archive everything for viewing.
3) Speaking of streaming, I'd be very curious to see data on how many people who either have cut the cord or have subscribed to cable for the first time end up switching back, especially because it's a dataset always missing from the debate. It's definitely more work but less than a year into the change I can't see myself ever returning to it.
For one thing, as I mentioned above, having to intentionally subscribe to stuff means that one has to prioritize what one is truly interested in, yet at the same time trying out things one might not have otherwise because one has access to it at the moment.
Secondly, besides the fact that we're saving a lot of money from the switch, if we had kept cable, we would continue to miss stuff because a lot of what I want to see is behind different paywalls. Cable offers a fair amount of free On Demand viewing, but it's only short term. A lot of stuff either disappears or comes with a separate cost. (For example, you can watch all of the current season for free, but earlier ones must be paid for). At least on streaming I pay one price and get most all of the earlier content included. Plus, I don't need a DVR for it which would also cost me extra.
For example, if I had cable and wanted HBO, I'd have to pay extra for it anyway. We've always had a separate Netflix subscription. I've had to purchase stuff from Amazon I couldn't get any other way.
My biggest concern for the future is not that stuff is going to be locked behind different walls, because it already largely is. Rather, it is that one is going to be locked into service contracts with streamers, so that one can't easily subscribe and unsubscribe. For example, the AMC A-List I used this summer required you to keep it for three months, and once I dropped it, it will not allow me to renew it again for 6 months.
Cable companies always had the excuse that they had to do physical things to provide you with service at your residence, and thus scheduling that service or turning it on and off was costly in terms of time and money. (This proved completely untrue once we cancelled it though - that happened within 10 minutes of confirming it on the phone!) But streaming services have no reason to make it difficult for you to start and stop service…except making more money.
Right now they still have plenty of competition from cable and other services. But someday that won't be true. And at that point I could see a lot of service contracts springing up, making it too costly to start and stop services as a general practice.
4) Given the employment data came out this week, saying we had the lowest unemployment in the U.S. since data began being collected in 1972, I was unsurprised to read in an article about terrible employment practices that the actual number is higher: "if you look at the proportion of people in the labor force who don’t have a job and want one, it’s about 7.1%, which is a pretty big number when you figure the unemployment rate is 3.7%. It’s almost double that number, so there are still a lot of people who are unemployed and would like a job. How many of those people are impossible to employ? Well, that’s a pretty good question, and we don’t know the answer."
I'd bet a ton of them are over 50 as age-discrimination in employment has only been growing. If you factored in underemployment, I suspect that number would be more like 20%.
5) If I'm not mistaken, this is the company that OTW Legal had to block from trademarking the word "Fandom" when they chose to rename the company. Which, in itself, is such a dick move that it says a lot about how little they care about fans themselves. Their new report is such a mix of things that I hardly know where to start.
One thing, for example, that they fail to look at is any difference between curatorial and transformational fans, instead just lumping together all types of activities.
"A full 30% of fans in this stage will become content creators themselves. Heavy creators will write articles or blog posts, contribute to wikis, and produce podcasts, fan fiction or videos.
Light creators will share or post memes, respond to comments and discussions on social media or fan communities, and create short-form content about their fandoms, usually in text format.
The motivations behind this fan-generated content range from the emotional payoff they receive from the community that sees their work (the same reason people enjoy getting likes and comments on the personal photos they share on social media platforms) to the desire to “serve the greater good” or see themselves as an integral part of a larger fan community."
To me writing blog posts about a fandom and creating fanworks are totally separate things, especially if what you're writing isn't even meta. Ditto contributing to a wiki (practically the definition of curatorial work) vs writing fanfic or the effort needed to create a podcast. And nowhere is it mentioned that people feel creatively inspired or like learning new skills as a result of their fan activities.
Another example: when talking about how TV fans are more casual than movie fans, they also say:
"Comedies beat out dramas as fan favorites (39% vs. 32%) when it comes to TV. This is reflected in both fans’ all-time favorite shows as well as in their top-cited recent favorites."
Yet if you look at the most popular transformational fandoms, none of them are comedies. In fact it's long been obvious that comedies have far fewer works than much smaller drama or scifi fandoms, and some of the particularly popular comedies that have fanworks (I'm thinking Community or Brooklyn Nine Nine) are not particularly successful in terms of audience size.
So my guess is that what they're really measuring is what shows people like to declare themselves fans of, or which ones they watch repeatedly. Also, their survey only covered people 16-44 since they're only interested in that demo for marketing purposes. But if you want a real "ugh," look at one of their conclusions:
"Align with trusted content that is for fans, by fans...Put official content in the hands of fan communities, empowering fans to use your content to express themselves and curate their social identity. Embrace fan-created content to help move audiences along the stages of fandom."
View poll: Kudos Footer-102
Comments at Dreamwidth
.