sistermagpie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sistermagpie) wrote2005-05-29 12:48 pm
sistermagpie) wrote2005-05-29 12:48 pm
Those crazy fans
It seems like in the past few days I've run across an awful lot of posts explaining how people other than the poster think. Boy, I love posts like that (not)
Yes, my reaction to the text is completely explained by my not being able to read, and the fact that I spend all my time projecting and twisting the text to say things I want it to say rather than what it does. Anyway, one of the many ways I seem to have stumbled across this recently brought up the idea of people identifying with Slytherin and why they do this. (This particular discussion was actually not obnoxious and was not part of the stuff I just described; I'm just mentioning it because I think it gets into that same area of trying to understand someone else without really leaving your own pov.)
The idea was that to identify as being Slytherin one must be turning them into what you want them to be, either the movie actors or the fanon versions. Obviously there are people who do that, who consider it the "Goth house" or the one that shows you're sort of a rebel or whatever. And while I think even those people are responding to something in the text people may want to deny, the fact is that sitting where I do in fandom, smack in the middle of Slytherin-land, that's not my experience. I, myself, do not identify with that house--in most tests I've taken I come out with Slytherin on the very bottom. Perhaps it's the fact that they're so foreign to me that makes me not dislike them as much as others. But anyway, of the people I know who do identify with those characters they actually seem not only accurate about where they would be but surprisingly honest about themselves. Because not only do they not deny all the bad qualities of Slytherin, they say they once had that mindset, and in some ways still do, and so understand them. HP is based on stereotypes which in themselves are based on reality. The Slytherin characters may be the most cartoony but even they are based on real people--so why would people not identify with them? They recognize themselves as the ones being caricatured. In fact, the one person like that who made the most impression on me was a kid who loved the books until she got old enough to recognize that she would be in Slytherin and so was really not wanted there. It seems like dismissing this pov as basically stupid, while that is what the text seems to favor, is a bit counter-productive.
Of course, you don't have to identify with the house to dislike the way it's used within canon or interpret scenes with Slytherin differently than someone else. Some of the things that seem perfectly obvious and uncontroversial to me are decried as absolute insanity in many parts of the fandom. People have been known to convince me that I'm seeing things wrong, though the arguments against my view of Slytherin still seem to come down, bluntly, to adopting way of looking at the world I don't like and don't see as a particularly good one.
Which brings me to the next thing that came up elsewhere, which is why one is in fandom? This came up in the context of saying that fandom is supposed to be "fun" and if you're making yourself miserable there's something wrong with you. First, this taps into something that's always going on in fandom, I think, which is always finding ways to show that you're not one of the crazies or the losers. We all know that people have been known to stalk and kill actors, or have no social life outside of fandom. To outsiders we're probably all perilously close to that stereotype. For many people the fact that you read or write fanfic is enough to mark you as a loser; they don't care if you only write genfic or you think slash b/w underage characters is abhorrent. I don't know if this is why we feel we need to police ourselves vigilantly, or if perhaps there's some self-hatred going on or what. But I'd say pretty consistently since I've been in fandom the standard way to insult anyone is to tell them they have no life and suggest their fandom obsession marks them as "one of those" people--unlike the person doing the insulting, who does not take fandom seriously at all, etc.
We all have certain behaviors that ping us as being unhealthy and weird in ways that our own behavior isn't. It'd be dishonest for me to act like this is everyone else's problem and not my own (or that people don't sometimes get unhealthy, of course). It's sometimes just different things that disturb us, different attitudes that strike us as indicative that the person is losing their grip on reality. The trouble is, fandom is by definition about agreeing to loosen your grip on reality, isn't it? It's about discussing works of fiction as if they were somehow "real," if not in terms of the characters actually existing (though for some people it is about that) then in terms of these works being solid enough to hold up to examination and tell us something about the real world.
This is maybe why it surprised me to hear someone say that there was something wrong about someone's fandom experience encompassing feelings of grief or dissatisfaction or sorrow or pain. To me, fandom is not for people who just really enjoy a piece of fiction, it's for people who interact with fiction a certain way--a way we really can't help, at least I can't. We're not just sitting around agreeing with something as being good. Some people do get something out of, say, squeeing at the fact that "their" book is a movie, or cheering for the actors who are in it, or whatever. I can't really relate to that social aspect. While I think this is a valid part of fandom, I think if that was all there was to it there simply wouldn't be much of what we call fandom.
Fandom is more people coming together because it means more than that. Last week on Bullshit Penn & Teller took on Mother Theresa, Gandhi and the Dalai Llama, proving they were all just people who didn't always represent what was best about the species. They kept going back to this group of women who were talking about what sounded like one of the three--a spiritual leader. They couldn't really explain why he made them feel so inspired, but they wanted to help him reach his goals etc. They discussed times they had met him in person and described how his actions in those few minutes supported their previous ideas that he was just a really special, good person. Finally at the end of the show they went out to see him and we, the audience learned the name of their idol-their American Idol: Clay Aiken-woo-hoo!!!
And you know? The show wasn't making fun of them. Partially because they'd just shown that deifying Gandhi or Mother Theresa is just as ridiculous as deifying Clay Aiken, even if they, personally, admired certain acts of Gandhi more than anything Clay's done. The point was just that people do this, that these figures are something we use to discuss what we admire, what we want to be. I think as strange as it sounds, this is just a common way of processing the world. People have always done it.
So what happens if it starts to become negative? Well, that's part of it too. How could you process the world through fandom, be it fandom surrounding a person or a canon, if it didn't reflect the bad as well as the good? In my own experience, if the object of my fannishness makes me upset it's because it taps into something bigger than just that I'm sad my character didn't get the girl or whatever. That's why you tend to gravitate towards people who read canon the same way you do, at least that's what happens to me. Why else would we need to come up with explanations of how those other people in fandom think? If it was all just the same people wouldn't need to explain away why people like Sirius rather than Snape-it would just come down to which cardboard cut-out you chose to squee at the feet of. That's really what it's about, isn't it, us thinking differently about the world? That's why it seems impossible to privilege our own fannish experience as being the one that's not crazy or not as much of a personal investment. It's kind of like ignoring the huge elephant in the middle of the fandom room, which is that we all get something personal out of this, and we all put something into it personally. When we debate about scenes or characters we really are arguing about different ways of seeing the world, and that's not, imo, a waste of time or having no life. The thing that makes fictional fandom potentially more self-aware and interesting than, say, sports fandom is that we can be more honest about it or more interested in that fact that we're doing that. Sports fans are just as committed and sometimes wind up even fighting physically over this stuff. It just seems that usually they talk about the why's less, you know? They're not supposed to talk about the personal, geeky reasons they do this--they just think X is the better player or the better team. Maybe it's because it's not spoken about it can be treated with more respect by Hollywood--I mean, the sports movie is pretty standard and comes pretty close to the stuff those Clay Aiken fans were talking about, only it's presented as something healthy and universal there.
The celebrity or character or idea you like says something about who you are-not in a passive way, like a zodiac sign, but in what you've chosen to stand for. The object of your attention simply gives you a good context in which to discuss it. You define what that means by how you talk about that character or celebrity. Who you dislike is exactly the same thing. And it's rarely, in my experience, a case of two people being on opposite sides of something. It's more that they are both looking at the same object and understanding it differently in context of the world. This sometimes makes it much harder to discuss it with each other, perhaps because both sides feel threatened. But you know, there are lots of times when I feel like people assume that if they accept that the other person's view of something is valid it means they have to give up their own when they really don't. The two views really often can exist side by side if we'd let them, imo. Though maybe neither side can be quite so extreme in their views…I don't think that's usually a bad thing.
I think I've begun to ramble. Perhaps more than begun.:-)
Yes, my reaction to the text is completely explained by my not being able to read, and the fact that I spend all my time projecting and twisting the text to say things I want it to say rather than what it does. Anyway, one of the many ways I seem to have stumbled across this recently brought up the idea of people identifying with Slytherin and why they do this. (This particular discussion was actually not obnoxious and was not part of the stuff I just described; I'm just mentioning it because I think it gets into that same area of trying to understand someone else without really leaving your own pov.)
The idea was that to identify as being Slytherin one must be turning them into what you want them to be, either the movie actors or the fanon versions. Obviously there are people who do that, who consider it the "Goth house" or the one that shows you're sort of a rebel or whatever. And while I think even those people are responding to something in the text people may want to deny, the fact is that sitting where I do in fandom, smack in the middle of Slytherin-land, that's not my experience. I, myself, do not identify with that house--in most tests I've taken I come out with Slytherin on the very bottom. Perhaps it's the fact that they're so foreign to me that makes me not dislike them as much as others. But anyway, of the people I know who do identify with those characters they actually seem not only accurate about where they would be but surprisingly honest about themselves. Because not only do they not deny all the bad qualities of Slytherin, they say they once had that mindset, and in some ways still do, and so understand them. HP is based on stereotypes which in themselves are based on reality. The Slytherin characters may be the most cartoony but even they are based on real people--so why would people not identify with them? They recognize themselves as the ones being caricatured. In fact, the one person like that who made the most impression on me was a kid who loved the books until she got old enough to recognize that she would be in Slytherin and so was really not wanted there. It seems like dismissing this pov as basically stupid, while that is what the text seems to favor, is a bit counter-productive.
Of course, you don't have to identify with the house to dislike the way it's used within canon or interpret scenes with Slytherin differently than someone else. Some of the things that seem perfectly obvious and uncontroversial to me are decried as absolute insanity in many parts of the fandom. People have been known to convince me that I'm seeing things wrong, though the arguments against my view of Slytherin still seem to come down, bluntly, to adopting way of looking at the world I don't like and don't see as a particularly good one.
Which brings me to the next thing that came up elsewhere, which is why one is in fandom? This came up in the context of saying that fandom is supposed to be "fun" and if you're making yourself miserable there's something wrong with you. First, this taps into something that's always going on in fandom, I think, which is always finding ways to show that you're not one of the crazies or the losers. We all know that people have been known to stalk and kill actors, or have no social life outside of fandom. To outsiders we're probably all perilously close to that stereotype. For many people the fact that you read or write fanfic is enough to mark you as a loser; they don't care if you only write genfic or you think slash b/w underage characters is abhorrent. I don't know if this is why we feel we need to police ourselves vigilantly, or if perhaps there's some self-hatred going on or what. But I'd say pretty consistently since I've been in fandom the standard way to insult anyone is to tell them they have no life and suggest their fandom obsession marks them as "one of those" people--unlike the person doing the insulting, who does not take fandom seriously at all, etc.
We all have certain behaviors that ping us as being unhealthy and weird in ways that our own behavior isn't. It'd be dishonest for me to act like this is everyone else's problem and not my own (or that people don't sometimes get unhealthy, of course). It's sometimes just different things that disturb us, different attitudes that strike us as indicative that the person is losing their grip on reality. The trouble is, fandom is by definition about agreeing to loosen your grip on reality, isn't it? It's about discussing works of fiction as if they were somehow "real," if not in terms of the characters actually existing (though for some people it is about that) then in terms of these works being solid enough to hold up to examination and tell us something about the real world.
This is maybe why it surprised me to hear someone say that there was something wrong about someone's fandom experience encompassing feelings of grief or dissatisfaction or sorrow or pain. To me, fandom is not for people who just really enjoy a piece of fiction, it's for people who interact with fiction a certain way--a way we really can't help, at least I can't. We're not just sitting around agreeing with something as being good. Some people do get something out of, say, squeeing at the fact that "their" book is a movie, or cheering for the actors who are in it, or whatever. I can't really relate to that social aspect. While I think this is a valid part of fandom, I think if that was all there was to it there simply wouldn't be much of what we call fandom.
Fandom is more people coming together because it means more than that. Last week on Bullshit Penn & Teller took on Mother Theresa, Gandhi and the Dalai Llama, proving they were all just people who didn't always represent what was best about the species. They kept going back to this group of women who were talking about what sounded like one of the three--a spiritual leader. They couldn't really explain why he made them feel so inspired, but they wanted to help him reach his goals etc. They discussed times they had met him in person and described how his actions in those few minutes supported their previous ideas that he was just a really special, good person. Finally at the end of the show they went out to see him and we, the audience learned the name of their idol-their American Idol: Clay Aiken-woo-hoo!!!
And you know? The show wasn't making fun of them. Partially because they'd just shown that deifying Gandhi or Mother Theresa is just as ridiculous as deifying Clay Aiken, even if they, personally, admired certain acts of Gandhi more than anything Clay's done. The point was just that people do this, that these figures are something we use to discuss what we admire, what we want to be. I think as strange as it sounds, this is just a common way of processing the world. People have always done it.
So what happens if it starts to become negative? Well, that's part of it too. How could you process the world through fandom, be it fandom surrounding a person or a canon, if it didn't reflect the bad as well as the good? In my own experience, if the object of my fannishness makes me upset it's because it taps into something bigger than just that I'm sad my character didn't get the girl or whatever. That's why you tend to gravitate towards people who read canon the same way you do, at least that's what happens to me. Why else would we need to come up with explanations of how those other people in fandom think? If it was all just the same people wouldn't need to explain away why people like Sirius rather than Snape-it would just come down to which cardboard cut-out you chose to squee at the feet of. That's really what it's about, isn't it, us thinking differently about the world? That's why it seems impossible to privilege our own fannish experience as being the one that's not crazy or not as much of a personal investment. It's kind of like ignoring the huge elephant in the middle of the fandom room, which is that we all get something personal out of this, and we all put something into it personally. When we debate about scenes or characters we really are arguing about different ways of seeing the world, and that's not, imo, a waste of time or having no life. The thing that makes fictional fandom potentially more self-aware and interesting than, say, sports fandom is that we can be more honest about it or more interested in that fact that we're doing that. Sports fans are just as committed and sometimes wind up even fighting physically over this stuff. It just seems that usually they talk about the why's less, you know? They're not supposed to talk about the personal, geeky reasons they do this--they just think X is the better player or the better team. Maybe it's because it's not spoken about it can be treated with more respect by Hollywood--I mean, the sports movie is pretty standard and comes pretty close to the stuff those Clay Aiken fans were talking about, only it's presented as something healthy and universal there.
The celebrity or character or idea you like says something about who you are-not in a passive way, like a zodiac sign, but in what you've chosen to stand for. The object of your attention simply gives you a good context in which to discuss it. You define what that means by how you talk about that character or celebrity. Who you dislike is exactly the same thing. And it's rarely, in my experience, a case of two people being on opposite sides of something. It's more that they are both looking at the same object and understanding it differently in context of the world. This sometimes makes it much harder to discuss it with each other, perhaps because both sides feel threatened. But you know, there are lots of times when I feel like people assume that if they accept that the other person's view of something is valid it means they have to give up their own when they really don't. The two views really often can exist side by side if we'd let them, imo. Though maybe neither side can be quite so extreme in their views…I don't think that's usually a bad thing.
I think I've begun to ramble. Perhaps more than begun.:-)