kaigou: dynamics of fandom, 1 - Meanwhile, of course, reading essays on postmodernism and its clash with feminist theory, and browsing my way through various pseudo-academic (and outright academic) texts on Japanese animation, I kept coming across oblique references to fandom and fan participation. Or, not-so-oblique, if we get into talking about Azuma's arguments. Regardless, this all simmered, and the following illustrated meta-story, or meta-theory, is all that capped off by the discussion on my previous posts over fanfiction and the question of whether fandom has influence on the creative process or whether it's simply a backdrop to what may sometimes be a process independent of any community.
kaigou: dynamics of fandom, 2 - All that said, the tension remains, because a number of Authors see themselves as displaced, dislodged gods of their created universe, with ungrateful fans busy worshipping false gods. What the Authors don't get is that in the eyes of most fandom members, I'd say, the Authors weren't really much of gods in the first place.
Distance and pre-eminence (and careful cultivation in online/early-Internet Affirmational-style interaction) may have temporarily given that impression, but fans don't worship false gods, because that implies there were ever true gods. If we truly believed there were a 'true' god of any Original Story, would we even be writing fanfiction in the first place?
megwrites: SF and ablism (or: a not-as-such brief thought) - It seems as though when science fiction envisions a better, or at least more advanced, version of humanity it is one without disability, and thus one without disabled people. -
thingswithwings [in kink_bingo]: The Riches of Embarrassment: Or, Why I Don't Have a Humiliation Squick - Those two types of humiliation, what we might call the intentionally erotic and the unconsciously erotic, or even the consensual and the nonconsensual, get conflated in fandom all the time. And that's a real problem for me, because, see - I have such a squick for nonconsensual embarrassment scenarios that I almost can't deal, but I love to pieces the consensual kink for erotic humiliation. -
damned_colonial: Affirmational vs Transformational fandom - In the spirit of "I know it when I see it" and Tim O'Reilly's classic What is Web 2.0? post, I offer the following rough guide to some concepts that I associate with the two different approaches to fandom: -
petra: Redundant vids - Sometimes canon uses a piece of music so well that it would take a heroic effort to do better than it does, and then fans make a vid to that song anyway. -
dhobikikutti: This also is needed: A Space In Which To Be Angry - Every time I see friends who make locked posts about fic that Others them, that writes appropriatively and ignorantly and dismissively and condescendingly and fetishistically about their identities, I think - there needs to be a space where this can be said. So that, at least, others can learn. -
