The Good Ship SNSD: Fanfiction part GAME OVER
Title unabashedly stolen from Pink Wota.
Where there isn't much literature on idols with regards to their happily playing with identity(or rather, focussing on the asian idol subset of celebrity culture), there is a lot of writing about fanfiction and its dirtly little corners, and not all in a condemning tone either.
Holy crap look at all of the articles.
Thanks to R and jko for finding me these links.
Most of this entire book is available on Google books:
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Psychology Press, 1992
Bye guys, brb when I finish reading.
Just kidding, but this basically covers the foundations of fandom culture as it pertains to standard media. However, as it was written in 1992 it doesn't talk about the impact of the internet, but regardless just from skimming the introduction it'll be a great diversion for me over the holidays.
On the other hand, this one does deal with the Internet and Fanfiction specifically:
Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse, Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the Internet: New Essays, McFarland, 2006
Just reading the abstracts for these essays hurt my brain. For extra soul-sucking fun check out the related books. "Chapter 9. My Life Is a WIP on My LJ: Slashing the Slasher and the Reality of Celebrity and Internet Performances" looks like a promising source of future discussion when we talk about the fandom itself instead of just the idols.
Now that the dense background stuff is out of the way some more relevant excerpts.
First, from Slate
"One surprising aspect of fanfic is its indifference to plot. The vast majority of its writers are women, and Deborah Tannenism pervades it. Most stories are much more attuned to emotional dynamics than narrative. MIT professor Henry Jenkins, the leading scholar of fanfic, notes that fans usually choose shows with a pair of closely bonded leads: Kirk and Spock, Mulder and Scully, Xena and Gabrielle, Starsky and Hutch. Fanfic writers pore over the relationship between the pair. One popular subgenre is "hurt-comfort," which explores what happens when one lead gets hurt and the other has to help him.
So why on earth do normal people spend their lives writing fantasies about TV characters? Almost all fanfic writers hide behind pseudonyms. They rightly fear ridicule, because fanfic invites mockery. Though the United States admires sports fans, it treats TV and movie junkies derisively. America's most famous movie fan: John Hinckley. Pop culture fans are pinned by caricature: Spock-eared Trekkers or loon-bird stalkers. Fanfic seems to confirm every stereotype about fans: They are obsessive. They can't separate fantasy from reality. Their lives are so empty that they fixate on banal TV shows. (What kind of loser writes story after story about Quantum Leap or The A-Team?) They don't even have the imagination to make up their own characters.
But this condescension misses the point. In his superb Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, MIT's Jenkins argues that fanfic represents a flowering of modern folk culture. For thousands of years, we have shared stories about mythical popular heroes, from Prometheus to Paul Bunyan to Brer Rabbit. Each storyteller embellished the tale, inventing characters, adding details, rewriting the ending. In the 20th century, however, folk culture has been privatized. The characters we share today are TV icons and movie heroes. Paul Bunyan has been supplanted by Xena. These characters don't belong to the public. They are literally owned by studios and producers, who run the character's "life" and expect us to accept their decisions gratefully.
Fan fiction rebels against the private folk culture, Jenkins argues. Writers reclaim folk heroes by creating new stories about them. They embellish the myth. Viewed through Jenkins' lens, a fanfic writer keen on Capt. Jean Luc Picard is no different from a 19th-century folksinger who paid tribute to John Henry. Fanfic writers assert control over a pop culture designed to be passively consumed. "I wanted to make the show mine," explains Kat of her Friends fanfics, echoing the battle cry of fan writers. By writing fics about Monica and Chandler, Kat is insisting that they belong to her as much as to NBC. Fan fiction puts the pop back in popular culture.
Writing fanfic, Jenkins argues, is an act of "fascination and frustration." Writers are fascinated by the characters but frustrated at the cavalier way producers treat them. Fanfic is a "way of repairing the damage done to the core mythology by producers who mess up. The fanfic folk culture pulls it back into realignment." When producers make a beloved character disappear or end a love affair that should continue, fanfic restores the mythology."
"Educated, white, middle-aged women have traditionally dominated fanfic. But the Web is opening the culture up to kids. Their writing usually limps, and they don't share old-timers' interest in shows with pair-bonded leads. But they are wonderfully boisterous. Younger writers have deluged the Web with fanfics about Buffy and Dawson's Creek.
They also irk the traditional fanfic community by writing about real people, especially music idols. Jakob Dylan of the Wallflowers and the young men from 'N Sync are subjects of much fanfic. The most prolific fandom belongs to the Backstreet Boys. BSB fanfic is heavy on first-person "Mary Sue" daydreams-"The Boys saved me after our plane crashed" and the like-but slash also pops up regularly. Stories such as "Backstreet Lust" describe how a Backstreet Boy-usually Nick or Brian, the two pretty ones-seduces a young male fan. Unlike other slash, Backstreet Boys slash tends to be written by males. An Internet skirmish is raging over Backstreet Boys erotica. Some BSB worshippers have organized online opposition to the X-rated fanfics. Their motto is "WWTT," as in, "What Would They [the Boys] Think?""
So with that as the appetizer into RPF issues, we arrive at the RPF meta article to end all RPF meta articles. No seriously, Read this janx. And then have nothing else to say. :D
Excerpts, with my own interjections:
History
"In their 1992 article "Beatlemania" (Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. The Adoring Audience [1992]), Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs explore young female Beatles fans and the erotics and power relations of their libidinal investment in the band. Beatles fandom lacks the sustained documentation or the clearly traceable history of such a fandom as Star Trek; still, anecdotal evidence suggests that many girls wrote stories featuring themselves and their favorite Beatle or possibly even their two favorite Beatles together."
I wonder how much archaic literature, using folk heroes that could be cobbled from real life figures would be counted as RPF. It's also interesting to note that general self-insert fantasies are counted as RPF, and so similarly I wonder how many fictional characters in older stories before the rise of copyright were also self-inserts, such as the many fictional knights romanticizing the possibly not-so-fictional King Arthur. Hell, Sir Dinadan's character was that he was a troubadour knight and many interpretations had him singing about his own exploits. Also of note is the actual appearance of slash in Beatlemania RPF, although it was the 60s after all. How many of the classic historical bromances weren't considered as such back in the day, especially in ancient cultures where homosexuality was not so taboo?
"The little RPS that appeared often originated from extremely small fandoms (such as rock band slash like Duran Duran or Metallica [see, sidewinder]); likewise, wrestling fic had firmly established its own fandom, separate and mostly independently from media fandom. In media fandom, there occurred the simple collapse between actors and their characters, often importing the actors into the mediaverse or the fictional characters into our reality in order to bring together both the fictional romantic pairing as well as their real life counterparts. These collapses of reality and fictional universe were rare, usually frowned upon in the fandom at large, and often seemed to be accompanied by conspiracy theories that posited real life relationships between the actors (for example, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson of The X-Files or David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer rumors actually describe early Shatner/Nimoy stories).
Things changed around 2001. Early in the year, a number of multifannish mediafic writers suddenly started writing *NSYNC stories. At the same time, with the release and success of the Lord of the Rings movies in December 2001, fans began to imagine the intense filming experiences and the relationships between the cast members. Lotrips (LOTR RPS) was born, often drawing its members from fans not previously exposed to media fic and its rules or from LOTR fans who often moved effortlessly between actors and characters. Beyond an increasing influx of new writers who enter these fandoms through their interest in the actors, singers, or performers, a large segment of fan fiction writers have migrated from media to Real People Fiction, in the process erasing some of the moral prohibition on RPS and eroding the traditional ban on fictionally playing with real people’s lives.
Since then RPF has expanded everywhere to include everything and everyone. Whether the 2004 Olympics or the US elections, fan writers will pair any real person with any other, at times encouraged by the material (like Britney/Madonna after the 2003 VMA kiss; JohnxJohn", aka Kerry/Edwards; the inseparable and engagement-proof damonaffelck; or Gerard_emmy, the central actors of Phantom of the Opera); other times less so (like the most recent spread of Ratzinger stories). RPF is everywhere and the ficced and slashed objects are often aware and not necessarily upset about it. Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos, for example, comments "There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fictionalizing a genuine character as long as you make it clear that you are fictionalizing" [source] and Harry Potter actor Chris Rankin answers an interview question about fanfiction with " Ahh, it's fantastic, I love it all" [source]. Other celebrities have responded in a similar vein, possibly bemused but none too upset. After all, considering that many of them clearly are marketed as sexual objects, it begs the question as to whether there really is such a big difference between more traditional private fantasies about the celebrity's body or writing and sharing similar fan fantasies."
It's apparent that the idol movement was the impetus after all for RPS for when its stigma within media fandom was more absolute. RPF could be argued to have existed in the form of tabloidal 'shipping' of celebrities from the start, but RPS was much more restricted to niche fandoms. Of course this isn't looking at the slash-happy culture of Japan, whose ultimate boyband conglomerate Johnny's formed in 1962.
Ethical and Legal Objections
Fiction, Reality, and Collaborative Fantasy Spaces
Dammit, just read these sections in their entirety. They're so damn relevant.
Canon and Its Consensual Creation
"Non-RPF fandoms include a variety of source texts that function to varying degrees as canonical, from the most limited source of a single or serialized literary text through TV shows and movies with their clearly defined canon up to comic books with their varied and competing yet still author-dominated source texts. [...] Still, even when we are faced with competing or even opposing source texts (like Smallville and the entire DC comicverse), there is still a well-defined source text.
RPS, on the other hand, is constituted by a wealth of different sources so that its canon must be understood as a loosely agreed-on set of information. For popslash, for example, it not only includes the songs, concerts, public appearances, interviews, and print media, but even more personal experiences (such as concert experiences, sound check parties, personal photographs,…). Fans privilege one appearance over another, choose one facet from a contradictory field of information, or dismiss certain facts entirely. Moreover, the very nature of the celebrity discourse makes it impossible to ever truly believe any public account (i.e., unlike fictional characters who rarely are shown to purposefully lie to the audience, any statement by a celebrity is much more suspect: they could tell the truth or purposefully lie from disinterest or ignorance, for publicity reasons or to keep their privacy, etc.) As they try to establish what exactly constitutes the canon, RPF writers constantly confront questions about how much of any given footage is authentic, how many candid moments are, in fact, premeditated or rehearsed, and whether the question of authenticity ultimately matters. In a way, then, the canon-formation in RPS is a lot like fan fiction in general (and the fan-created consensus any interpretive fan community shares): RPS canon tries to fill in the gaps and make the contradictory information cohere.
This canon formation, this construction of narratives occurs by juxtaposing and selecting from the “official” material (which may be as varied as the celebrity’s interviews or publicity statements or any level of more or less supported rumors) as well as the “personal” material that enters the canon. After all, as the fan’s personal experiences are shared with the fan community they become public property and thereby co-create the canon. It is at that point that a distinction between canon and fanon does not make any sense in RPF. Since there exists no true author(ity), no true owner of the source text, no single canon source can be claimed; as a result, the “canon” gets created simultaneously by the celebrities, the media, and the fans alike. In other words, the fans actually help create the source text, though at that point the lines between facts and interpretation become ever more fluid. It is important to realize, however, that RPF's source text and “reality” need not coincide: obviously there are real events that are not part of the canon because fans are not privy to them; equally, rumors can easily create parts of the canon even though they are, in fact, untrue."
I love this section. It's been discussed here how our knowledge of Hyo is continually overturned by a new contradiction she gives us, and how for some a large part of their fandom is trying to digest that contradiction to maintain a cohesive canon. Our complaints about butchered characterization also come from authors' willing ignorance of certain parts of their idols' released information/media in order to create their own canon, which then becomes a point of debate over which canon is superior. A point was made in the author's survey that sometimes "more accurate" characterization would supercede the quality of the writing, which seems to be a rather large point of departure from regular fanfictions in which sometimes entire plots are based off of a changed characterization.("Shinji/Harry/Naruto gets a spine, canon gets fucked" fics are so popular)
Bodies--Virtual, Real, Imaginary
Alternate Universes, Casting Fic, and Playing Roles
"So, with characters where we have real bodies that represent them somewhere, we are always constructing imaginary bodies at the same time as we go back to the actual real life actor's body. Obviously, part of the character's body is based on the actor's body and it is this template that we are undressing; there *is* this connection between our object of lust and the actual actor where we do fantasize about a real body (at least in part). So there is a real body which offers a basis and then there are our fantasies, our embellishments and alterations. That goes for body and other characteristics. There is always a remainder and reminder of the real body in the imagined one. At the same time, we use our fantasies to make the guys become more appealing to us, readers and writers. I think that happens in behavior but also in body descriptions. In turn, even though RPF may have a clearer body blueprint, it still gets altered for the fiction to serve our fantasies better.
At the same time, AUs can also serve a different function, namely they can validate and focus community-agreed upon canon. Writers invested in RPF canon do not have the ease of canonical surrounding to signal to their readers where and who their characters are but instead must make them recognizable in their new shapes or settings. One way to signpost the character's ("authentic") identity is with well-known idiosyncrasies or specific facts well-known within the fan community. However, since the aspects that make the character recognizable to the reader are often the very elements that the media uses to create an easy shorthand, these same characterizations also tend to become overused and clichéd when they are the only thing connecting the fictional character to his “real” counterpart. The most successful approach seems to come about when the writer extrapolates the character’s underlying identity and which aspects would remain the same and how. So Justin Timberlake’s tennis shoe collection may not translate into a past or future scenario, but the underlying obsessive sorting and collecting tendencies might.
The very act of writing RPF requires the writers to attain an understanding of the immutable aspects of someone’s character. Fantastic narratives simply make visible the process all Real People fan writing must perform: the act of teasing out underlying characteristics to make the characters recognizable to the readers while creating a world that is by agreement not the real one is very much the same. As such, fantastic RPF not only illuminates and highlights certain aspects of identity construction within the fictional world, but also ultimately exemplifies the very process and difficulties of maintaining recognizable characters in fan writing.
Moreover, in condensing a character into his/her central and thus recognizable parts, writers address issues of identity. In particular, they investigate how individuals become the persons they are (i.e., how much any given individual's characteristics are hardwired and how much his/her identity is created by surrounding/environment). When juxtaposing two versions of the same character separated by times or realities, when altering the character’s body, gender, or species, or when placing the character in an unfamiliar setting, the writer ultimately explores his or her reactions and possible changes and implicitly or explicitly compares this created character to the one we know as "canonical." "
LJ, Slashing the Slasher, and Performing Identities
Just read the entire section.
This section is great because it gets into the issues at the very heart of idol fandom in general, not just concerning fic. Jpop idol fandom is -very- emphatic of maintaining a distance between the idol and the fan,(it will outright preach it, lol) so much so that I was surprised how much more idol-fan direct/physical interaction occurred in Kpop. To me it feels like there is somewhat of a self-enforced separation of the fan and idol and that when that line is crossed you get stalkers and poisoning antis, but for some reason Soy's situation is making me reconsider, even if I can't quite explain why. This issue is thoroughly explored in the movie Kisaragi which I thoroughly recommend. [[SPOILER]]In it a BNF holds a meeting for all of the fans of a super small time idol, and then it turns out that all of the other fans were actually personal acquaintances of said idol. So the BNF is the one who knows the most information about the idol out of the group is at the same time the least close to that idol. Or is he, since apparently his daily fan-letters were that idols' most precious possession? Although of course that last part could be the J-ent's propaganda so wota don't give up all hope.[[SPOILER]]
Where there isn't much literature on idols with regards to their happily playing with identity(or rather, focussing on the asian idol subset of celebrity culture), there is a lot of writing about fanfiction and its dirtly little corners, and not all in a condemning tone either.
Holy crap look at all of the articles.
Thanks to R and jko for finding me these links.
Most of this entire book is available on Google books:
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Psychology Press, 1992
Bye guys, brb when I finish reading.
Just kidding, but this basically covers the foundations of fandom culture as it pertains to standard media. However, as it was written in 1992 it doesn't talk about the impact of the internet, but regardless just from skimming the introduction it'll be a great diversion for me over the holidays.
On the other hand, this one does deal with the Internet and Fanfiction specifically:
Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse, Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the Internet: New Essays, McFarland, 2006
Just reading the abstracts for these essays hurt my brain. For extra soul-sucking fun check out the related books. "Chapter 9. My Life Is a WIP on My LJ: Slashing the Slasher and the Reality of Celebrity and Internet Performances" looks like a promising source of future discussion when we talk about the fandom itself instead of just the idols.
Now that the dense background stuff is out of the way some more relevant excerpts.
First, from Slate
"One surprising aspect of fanfic is its indifference to plot. The vast majority of its writers are women, and Deborah Tannenism pervades it. Most stories are much more attuned to emotional dynamics than narrative. MIT professor Henry Jenkins, the leading scholar of fanfic, notes that fans usually choose shows with a pair of closely bonded leads: Kirk and Spock, Mulder and Scully, Xena and Gabrielle, Starsky and Hutch. Fanfic writers pore over the relationship between the pair. One popular subgenre is "hurt-comfort," which explores what happens when one lead gets hurt and the other has to help him.
So why on earth do normal people spend their lives writing fantasies about TV characters? Almost all fanfic writers hide behind pseudonyms. They rightly fear ridicule, because fanfic invites mockery. Though the United States admires sports fans, it treats TV and movie junkies derisively. America's most famous movie fan: John Hinckley. Pop culture fans are pinned by caricature: Spock-eared Trekkers or loon-bird stalkers. Fanfic seems to confirm every stereotype about fans: They are obsessive. They can't separate fantasy from reality. Their lives are so empty that they fixate on banal TV shows. (What kind of loser writes story after story about Quantum Leap or The A-Team?) They don't even have the imagination to make up their own characters.
But this condescension misses the point. In his superb Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, MIT's Jenkins argues that fanfic represents a flowering of modern folk culture. For thousands of years, we have shared stories about mythical popular heroes, from Prometheus to Paul Bunyan to Brer Rabbit. Each storyteller embellished the tale, inventing characters, adding details, rewriting the ending. In the 20th century, however, folk culture has been privatized. The characters we share today are TV icons and movie heroes. Paul Bunyan has been supplanted by Xena. These characters don't belong to the public. They are literally owned by studios and producers, who run the character's "life" and expect us to accept their decisions gratefully.
Fan fiction rebels against the private folk culture, Jenkins argues. Writers reclaim folk heroes by creating new stories about them. They embellish the myth. Viewed through Jenkins' lens, a fanfic writer keen on Capt. Jean Luc Picard is no different from a 19th-century folksinger who paid tribute to John Henry. Fanfic writers assert control over a pop culture designed to be passively consumed. "I wanted to make the show mine," explains Kat of her Friends fanfics, echoing the battle cry of fan writers. By writing fics about Monica and Chandler, Kat is insisting that they belong to her as much as to NBC. Fan fiction puts the pop back in popular culture.
Writing fanfic, Jenkins argues, is an act of "fascination and frustration." Writers are fascinated by the characters but frustrated at the cavalier way producers treat them. Fanfic is a "way of repairing the damage done to the core mythology by producers who mess up. The fanfic folk culture pulls it back into realignment." When producers make a beloved character disappear or end a love affair that should continue, fanfic restores the mythology."
"Educated, white, middle-aged women have traditionally dominated fanfic. But the Web is opening the culture up to kids. Their writing usually limps, and they don't share old-timers' interest in shows with pair-bonded leads. But they are wonderfully boisterous. Younger writers have deluged the Web with fanfics about Buffy and Dawson's Creek.
They also irk the traditional fanfic community by writing about real people, especially music idols. Jakob Dylan of the Wallflowers and the young men from 'N Sync are subjects of much fanfic. The most prolific fandom belongs to the Backstreet Boys. BSB fanfic is heavy on first-person "Mary Sue" daydreams-"The Boys saved me after our plane crashed" and the like-but slash also pops up regularly. Stories such as "Backstreet Lust" describe how a Backstreet Boy-usually Nick or Brian, the two pretty ones-seduces a young male fan. Unlike other slash, Backstreet Boys slash tends to be written by males. An Internet skirmish is raging over Backstreet Boys erotica. Some BSB worshippers have organized online opposition to the X-rated fanfics. Their motto is "WWTT," as in, "What Would They [the Boys] Think?""
So with that as the appetizer into RPF issues, we arrive at the RPF meta article to end all RPF meta articles. No seriously, Read this janx. And then have nothing else to say. :D
Excerpts, with my own interjections:
History
"In their 1992 article "Beatlemania" (Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. The Adoring Audience [1992]), Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs explore young female Beatles fans and the erotics and power relations of their libidinal investment in the band. Beatles fandom lacks the sustained documentation or the clearly traceable history of such a fandom as Star Trek; still, anecdotal evidence suggests that many girls wrote stories featuring themselves and their favorite Beatle or possibly even their two favorite Beatles together."
I wonder how much archaic literature, using folk heroes that could be cobbled from real life figures would be counted as RPF. It's also interesting to note that general self-insert fantasies are counted as RPF, and so similarly I wonder how many fictional characters in older stories before the rise of copyright were also self-inserts, such as the many fictional knights romanticizing the possibly not-so-fictional King Arthur. Hell, Sir Dinadan's character was that he was a troubadour knight and many interpretations had him singing about his own exploits. Also of note is the actual appearance of slash in Beatlemania RPF, although it was the 60s after all. How many of the classic historical bromances weren't considered as such back in the day, especially in ancient cultures where homosexuality was not so taboo?
"The little RPS that appeared often originated from extremely small fandoms (such as rock band slash like Duran Duran or Metallica [see, sidewinder]); likewise, wrestling fic had firmly established its own fandom, separate and mostly independently from media fandom. In media fandom, there occurred the simple collapse between actors and their characters, often importing the actors into the mediaverse or the fictional characters into our reality in order to bring together both the fictional romantic pairing as well as their real life counterparts. These collapses of reality and fictional universe were rare, usually frowned upon in the fandom at large, and often seemed to be accompanied by conspiracy theories that posited real life relationships between the actors (for example, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson of The X-Files or David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer rumors actually describe early Shatner/Nimoy stories).
Things changed around 2001. Early in the year, a number of multifannish mediafic writers suddenly started writing *NSYNC stories. At the same time, with the release and success of the Lord of the Rings movies in December 2001, fans began to imagine the intense filming experiences and the relationships between the cast members. Lotrips (LOTR RPS) was born, often drawing its members from fans not previously exposed to media fic and its rules or from LOTR fans who often moved effortlessly between actors and characters. Beyond an increasing influx of new writers who enter these fandoms through their interest in the actors, singers, or performers, a large segment of fan fiction writers have migrated from media to Real People Fiction, in the process erasing some of the moral prohibition on RPS and eroding the traditional ban on fictionally playing with real people’s lives.
Since then RPF has expanded everywhere to include everything and everyone. Whether the 2004 Olympics or the US elections, fan writers will pair any real person with any other, at times encouraged by the material (like Britney/Madonna after the 2003 VMA kiss; JohnxJohn", aka Kerry/Edwards; the inseparable and engagement-proof damonaffelck; or Gerard_emmy, the central actors of Phantom of the Opera); other times less so (like the most recent spread of Ratzinger stories). RPF is everywhere and the ficced and slashed objects are often aware and not necessarily upset about it. Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos, for example, comments "There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fictionalizing a genuine character as long as you make it clear that you are fictionalizing" [source] and Harry Potter actor Chris Rankin answers an interview question about fanfiction with " Ahh, it's fantastic, I love it all" [source]. Other celebrities have responded in a similar vein, possibly bemused but none too upset. After all, considering that many of them clearly are marketed as sexual objects, it begs the question as to whether there really is such a big difference between more traditional private fantasies about the celebrity's body or writing and sharing similar fan fantasies."
It's apparent that the idol movement was the impetus after all for RPS for when its stigma within media fandom was more absolute. RPF could be argued to have existed in the form of tabloidal 'shipping' of celebrities from the start, but RPS was much more restricted to niche fandoms. Of course this isn't looking at the slash-happy culture of Japan, whose ultimate boyband conglomerate Johnny's formed in 1962.
Ethical and Legal Objections
Fiction, Reality, and Collaborative Fantasy Spaces
Dammit, just read these sections in their entirety. They're so damn relevant.
Canon and Its Consensual Creation
"Non-RPF fandoms include a variety of source texts that function to varying degrees as canonical, from the most limited source of a single or serialized literary text through TV shows and movies with their clearly defined canon up to comic books with their varied and competing yet still author-dominated source texts. [...] Still, even when we are faced with competing or even opposing source texts (like Smallville and the entire DC comicverse), there is still a well-defined source text.
RPS, on the other hand, is constituted by a wealth of different sources so that its canon must be understood as a loosely agreed-on set of information. For popslash, for example, it not only includes the songs, concerts, public appearances, interviews, and print media, but even more personal experiences (such as concert experiences, sound check parties, personal photographs,…). Fans privilege one appearance over another, choose one facet from a contradictory field of information, or dismiss certain facts entirely. Moreover, the very nature of the celebrity discourse makes it impossible to ever truly believe any public account (i.e., unlike fictional characters who rarely are shown to purposefully lie to the audience, any statement by a celebrity is much more suspect: they could tell the truth or purposefully lie from disinterest or ignorance, for publicity reasons or to keep their privacy, etc.) As they try to establish what exactly constitutes the canon, RPF writers constantly confront questions about how much of any given footage is authentic, how many candid moments are, in fact, premeditated or rehearsed, and whether the question of authenticity ultimately matters. In a way, then, the canon-formation in RPS is a lot like fan fiction in general (and the fan-created consensus any interpretive fan community shares): RPS canon tries to fill in the gaps and make the contradictory information cohere.
This canon formation, this construction of narratives occurs by juxtaposing and selecting from the “official” material (which may be as varied as the celebrity’s interviews or publicity statements or any level of more or less supported rumors) as well as the “personal” material that enters the canon. After all, as the fan’s personal experiences are shared with the fan community they become public property and thereby co-create the canon. It is at that point that a distinction between canon and fanon does not make any sense in RPF. Since there exists no true author(ity), no true owner of the source text, no single canon source can be claimed; as a result, the “canon” gets created simultaneously by the celebrities, the media, and the fans alike. In other words, the fans actually help create the source text, though at that point the lines between facts and interpretation become ever more fluid. It is important to realize, however, that RPF's source text and “reality” need not coincide: obviously there are real events that are not part of the canon because fans are not privy to them; equally, rumors can easily create parts of the canon even though they are, in fact, untrue."
I love this section. It's been discussed here how our knowledge of Hyo is continually overturned by a new contradiction she gives us, and how for some a large part of their fandom is trying to digest that contradiction to maintain a cohesive canon. Our complaints about butchered characterization also come from authors' willing ignorance of certain parts of their idols' released information/media in order to create their own canon, which then becomes a point of debate over which canon is superior. A point was made in the author's survey that sometimes "more accurate" characterization would supercede the quality of the writing, which seems to be a rather large point of departure from regular fanfictions in which sometimes entire plots are based off of a changed characterization.("Shinji/Harry/Naruto gets a spine, canon gets fucked" fics are so popular)
Bodies--Virtual, Real, Imaginary
Alternate Universes, Casting Fic, and Playing Roles
"So, with characters where we have real bodies that represent them somewhere, we are always constructing imaginary bodies at the same time as we go back to the actual real life actor's body. Obviously, part of the character's body is based on the actor's body and it is this template that we are undressing; there *is* this connection between our object of lust and the actual actor where we do fantasize about a real body (at least in part). So there is a real body which offers a basis and then there are our fantasies, our embellishments and alterations. That goes for body and other characteristics. There is always a remainder and reminder of the real body in the imagined one. At the same time, we use our fantasies to make the guys become more appealing to us, readers and writers. I think that happens in behavior but also in body descriptions. In turn, even though RPF may have a clearer body blueprint, it still gets altered for the fiction to serve our fantasies better.
At the same time, AUs can also serve a different function, namely they can validate and focus community-agreed upon canon. Writers invested in RPF canon do not have the ease of canonical surrounding to signal to their readers where and who their characters are but instead must make them recognizable in their new shapes or settings. One way to signpost the character's ("authentic") identity is with well-known idiosyncrasies or specific facts well-known within the fan community. However, since the aspects that make the character recognizable to the reader are often the very elements that the media uses to create an easy shorthand, these same characterizations also tend to become overused and clichéd when they are the only thing connecting the fictional character to his “real” counterpart. The most successful approach seems to come about when the writer extrapolates the character’s underlying identity and which aspects would remain the same and how. So Justin Timberlake’s tennis shoe collection may not translate into a past or future scenario, but the underlying obsessive sorting and collecting tendencies might.
The very act of writing RPF requires the writers to attain an understanding of the immutable aspects of someone’s character. Fantastic narratives simply make visible the process all Real People fan writing must perform: the act of teasing out underlying characteristics to make the characters recognizable to the readers while creating a world that is by agreement not the real one is very much the same. As such, fantastic RPF not only illuminates and highlights certain aspects of identity construction within the fictional world, but also ultimately exemplifies the very process and difficulties of maintaining recognizable characters in fan writing.
Moreover, in condensing a character into his/her central and thus recognizable parts, writers address issues of identity. In particular, they investigate how individuals become the persons they are (i.e., how much any given individual's characteristics are hardwired and how much his/her identity is created by surrounding/environment). When juxtaposing two versions of the same character separated by times or realities, when altering the character’s body, gender, or species, or when placing the character in an unfamiliar setting, the writer ultimately explores his or her reactions and possible changes and implicitly or explicitly compares this created character to the one we know as "canonical." "
LJ, Slashing the Slasher, and Performing Identities
Just read the entire section.
This section is great because it gets into the issues at the very heart of idol fandom in general, not just concerning fic. Jpop idol fandom is -very- emphatic of maintaining a distance between the idol and the fan,(it will outright preach it, lol) so much so that I was surprised how much more idol-fan direct/physical interaction occurred in Kpop. To me it feels like there is somewhat of a self-enforced separation of the fan and idol and that when that line is crossed you get stalkers and poisoning antis, but for some reason Soy's situation is making me reconsider, even if I can't quite explain why. This issue is thoroughly explored in the movie Kisaragi which I thoroughly recommend. [[SPOILER]]In it a BNF holds a meeting for all of the fans of a super small time idol, and then it turns out that all of the other fans were actually personal acquaintances of said idol. So the BNF is the one who knows the most information about the idol out of the group is at the same time the least close to that idol. Or is he, since apparently his daily fan-letters were that idols' most precious possession? Although of course that last part could be the J-ent's propaganda so wota don't give up all hope.[[SPOILER]]