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I was thinking today about fandom and friendship...
The stereotype of the geek/fan etc. is that he/she/we is introverted anyway. I know for a lot of people, including me, the great thing about the net is that you have control over the time you spend there. Even if you can't make yourself stop checking lj, you decide when to talk and what to talk about. But it's also an intensely social activity, fandom is.
When I think of being "a fan" the way I usually use the word, I think of responding to art a certain way, like I talked about in my previous post. Whether you focus on the fictional characters, the world, or the people involved in its creation, there's a specific way of interacting with the text. This does not require other people. I know most fans I know have been doing this for years, long before they knew anyone else thought this way. Fanfiction, for instance, is not something one has to discover on the net, it's something you possibly started making in your head when you barely old enough for school. Having a real fannish love for something isn't always something you want to share, either. Like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
praetorianguard said recently, reading is an intensely private experience.
Then there is being "in fandom," which is a different thing. It doesn't even have to require deeply loving something. Personally, I don't tend to get involved in fandom unless I have problems with a text and need to work something through about it, for instance. If I just love something, I'm a fan. If I feel the need to talk to people about something, I consider being in the fandom. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don't.
So that leads to this whole social aspect of fandom. On one hand it's brilliant: you meet other people who share your love of this stuff. More importantly, perhaps, they understand you when you talk. They want to have a conversation over minutiae in canon. They think it's important enough to spend time discussing. Now the object of your fannishness is not only an entry point for you into the world, or into yourself, but into a social situation. But I wonder sometimes...how does it stack up against other social situations?
Let's say, for instance, you meet someone with whom you share a love of a specific baseball team. You can go to games together, maybe, discuss the minutiae of the team. But perhaps you'll also become friends for other reasons because you spend time together. The same thing might happen if you meet someone who shares your love of a certain activity: you meet together to go bike riding or whatever, but also wind up talking about other stuff. I met my writing partner (who's one of my best friends) in a dance class, though we didn't bond over dance, but our interest in children's books. We had a career in common, and now have lots of things in common. We also have things we don't have in common, but we know each other in a "whole" way so we roughly understand the stuff that doesn't have to do with the other. We're kind of integrated into the whole thing, part of each other’s lives.
The weird thing about fandom is that while on one hand it offers all these possibilities for social stuff and bonding, it's also got stuff in it to make things difficult. First off, it's easy to disappear. All you have to do is go offline or delete your lj and you might as well have never existed. People might miss you, but still never have had a good idea of you as a person. I should also add that, of course, you can lie and present yourself dishonestly, even be more than one person at a time. That's more stuff that's difficult about the internet in itself. It’s neat to be able to start over afresh, but it also means you give up being a consistent, whole entity.
Also, though, I wonder if the intense focus of fandom sort of holds within it the beginning of the end. I mentioned before that I wondered about a sense of self-hatred I sometimes got in fandom. First there's the obvious thing which is that the #1 insult used in all fandoms I’ve ever been in is always that so-and-so has no life, lives in a fantasy world and has no contact with reality...which is, of course, what fandom is all about. To outsiders we're all the crazy ones, and they're not completely incorrect in seeing it that way. So first there's a sense of excitement in discovering fandom and meeting people who don't think you're crazy for thinking it's important to figure out some minor element of a story or a TV show. But then you discover you're just as likely to be accused of having no life and caring too much within fandom as you are outside of it--more so, in fact, because in the real world you'd probably keep your thoughts to yourself whereas in fandom you're tempted to share them with others. Not to mention, fen sometimes seem more intent on hurting you over it than someone on the outside, who may just be casually thoughtless.
Also...I'm not sure how to describe this exactly, but I know it's something I've felt. There's a sense of relief that comes with not being a fan of something anymore. When you really love the canon and are bound up in it, even while you know it's fake, you can be very affected by things that happen in it. It can be a little scary. So when you get over it, lose interest, maybe there's a sense of loss but there's a sense of freedom as well, at least for me. It no longer has any power over you whatsoever. You don’t care what happens to any of the characters or the actor you liked or whatever. I know I've seen other people imply similar things, like if somebody is talking too intensely about something they used to feel intensely about as well they'll say, "I'm glad I never got THAT crazy," or "Yeah, I felt like that when I was 14..."
But that often means that when you move on from one fandom to another there's almost a sort of...shame attached to your previous self. I remember noticing this even growing up where people would say something like, "I can't believe I ever liked that [movie star/actor/whatever]. He's such a loser!" Or maybe you just don't like it anymore and your relationship with that particular canon "ended badly" so you don't want to hear about it at all. It reminds you of things about yourself that you don't like, or you hate the way it turned out. Maybe you're just sick of it. You don't want to talk about it anymore, and you don't want to hear about it. So the obvious thing to do is to avoid people who talk about it. So that means you avoid your former fandom friends. You literally take them off your friends list.
I guess...it just seems like I see this often in fandom just as an everyday thing. I have no way of objectively comparing fandom relationships to relationships that come in other ways, so I can't make any pronouncements about it. But I do sometimes wonder if, you know, people who play racquetball together go through quite so much drama, where people are friends and then say cruel things about each other. Obviously that happens in real life too--I don't think that's unique to fandom, but...maybe it's the performance aspect of the Internet. You publicly state which person you're with or against, however that works. Since you create your persona out of nothing but words, maybe you are more adamant about things, or seem more adamant because even throwaway comments seem set in stone. Or then, perhaps it's just the fact that IRL you can say something to one person without being overheard, whereas on the Internet making a comment to person A does not mean person B isn't reading along and making copies.
Anyway...I don't know. What do other people think about fandom as a place for forming friendships? Sometimes I feel like for all our pride in being weird we still do find something shameful in just how we spend our time and would gladly never speak to any of our Internet acquaintances again to be free of it. A "real life" seems almost held up as a holy grail in fandom--you either need to get one, feel other people need to get one, or know you have one no matter what anyone else says so nyah nyah! But I wonder if that whole attitude bleeds over into all our interactions without our even realizing it, like no matter who you're talking to online they can't ever be as important as the most casual RL acquaintance. Nothing here is "real"--not the canon we read, not the people we talk to, not the relationships we have, not the celebrities we have pictures of, not the theories we come up with, not the characters in our heads. All of those things belong to real people in the real world, or the real authors of the real books, or the real actors in the real shows. So what does it matter what happens to any of us here? You can't lose what you never had.
ETA: this posted explanation.
The stereotype of the geek/fan etc. is that he/she/we is introverted anyway. I know for a lot of people, including me, the great thing about the net is that you have control over the time you spend there. Even if you can't make yourself stop checking lj, you decide when to talk and what to talk about. But it's also an intensely social activity, fandom is.
When I think of being "a fan" the way I usually use the word, I think of responding to art a certain way, like I talked about in my previous post. Whether you focus on the fictional characters, the world, or the people involved in its creation, there's a specific way of interacting with the text. This does not require other people. I know most fans I know have been doing this for years, long before they knew anyone else thought this way. Fanfiction, for instance, is not something one has to discover on the net, it's something you possibly started making in your head when you barely old enough for school. Having a real fannish love for something isn't always something you want to share, either. Like
praetorianguard said recently, reading is an intensely private experience. Then there is being "in fandom," which is a different thing. It doesn't even have to require deeply loving something. Personally, I don't tend to get involved in fandom unless I have problems with a text and need to work something through about it, for instance. If I just love something, I'm a fan. If I feel the need to talk to people about something, I consider being in the fandom. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don't.
So that leads to this whole social aspect of fandom. On one hand it's brilliant: you meet other people who share your love of this stuff. More importantly, perhaps, they understand you when you talk. They want to have a conversation over minutiae in canon. They think it's important enough to spend time discussing. Now the object of your fannishness is not only an entry point for you into the world, or into yourself, but into a social situation. But I wonder sometimes...how does it stack up against other social situations?
Let's say, for instance, you meet someone with whom you share a love of a specific baseball team. You can go to games together, maybe, discuss the minutiae of the team. But perhaps you'll also become friends for other reasons because you spend time together. The same thing might happen if you meet someone who shares your love of a certain activity: you meet together to go bike riding or whatever, but also wind up talking about other stuff. I met my writing partner (who's one of my best friends) in a dance class, though we didn't bond over dance, but our interest in children's books. We had a career in common, and now have lots of things in common. We also have things we don't have in common, but we know each other in a "whole" way so we roughly understand the stuff that doesn't have to do with the other. We're kind of integrated into the whole thing, part of each other’s lives.
The weird thing about fandom is that while on one hand it offers all these possibilities for social stuff and bonding, it's also got stuff in it to make things difficult. First off, it's easy to disappear. All you have to do is go offline or delete your lj and you might as well have never existed. People might miss you, but still never have had a good idea of you as a person. I should also add that, of course, you can lie and present yourself dishonestly, even be more than one person at a time. That's more stuff that's difficult about the internet in itself. It’s neat to be able to start over afresh, but it also means you give up being a consistent, whole entity.
Also, though, I wonder if the intense focus of fandom sort of holds within it the beginning of the end. I mentioned before that I wondered about a sense of self-hatred I sometimes got in fandom. First there's the obvious thing which is that the #1 insult used in all fandoms I’ve ever been in is always that so-and-so has no life, lives in a fantasy world and has no contact with reality...which is, of course, what fandom is all about. To outsiders we're all the crazy ones, and they're not completely incorrect in seeing it that way. So first there's a sense of excitement in discovering fandom and meeting people who don't think you're crazy for thinking it's important to figure out some minor element of a story or a TV show. But then you discover you're just as likely to be accused of having no life and caring too much within fandom as you are outside of it--more so, in fact, because in the real world you'd probably keep your thoughts to yourself whereas in fandom you're tempted to share them with others. Not to mention, fen sometimes seem more intent on hurting you over it than someone on the outside, who may just be casually thoughtless.
Also...I'm not sure how to describe this exactly, but I know it's something I've felt. There's a sense of relief that comes with not being a fan of something anymore. When you really love the canon and are bound up in it, even while you know it's fake, you can be very affected by things that happen in it. It can be a little scary. So when you get over it, lose interest, maybe there's a sense of loss but there's a sense of freedom as well, at least for me. It no longer has any power over you whatsoever. You don’t care what happens to any of the characters or the actor you liked or whatever. I know I've seen other people imply similar things, like if somebody is talking too intensely about something they used to feel intensely about as well they'll say, "I'm glad I never got THAT crazy," or "Yeah, I felt like that when I was 14..."
But that often means that when you move on from one fandom to another there's almost a sort of...shame attached to your previous self. I remember noticing this even growing up where people would say something like, "I can't believe I ever liked that [movie star/actor/whatever]. He's such a loser!" Or maybe you just don't like it anymore and your relationship with that particular canon "ended badly" so you don't want to hear about it at all. It reminds you of things about yourself that you don't like, or you hate the way it turned out. Maybe you're just sick of it. You don't want to talk about it anymore, and you don't want to hear about it. So the obvious thing to do is to avoid people who talk about it. So that means you avoid your former fandom friends. You literally take them off your friends list.
I guess...it just seems like I see this often in fandom just as an everyday thing. I have no way of objectively comparing fandom relationships to relationships that come in other ways, so I can't make any pronouncements about it. But I do sometimes wonder if, you know, people who play racquetball together go through quite so much drama, where people are friends and then say cruel things about each other. Obviously that happens in real life too--I don't think that's unique to fandom, but...maybe it's the performance aspect of the Internet. You publicly state which person you're with or against, however that works. Since you create your persona out of nothing but words, maybe you are more adamant about things, or seem more adamant because even throwaway comments seem set in stone. Or then, perhaps it's just the fact that IRL you can say something to one person without being overheard, whereas on the Internet making a comment to person A does not mean person B isn't reading along and making copies.
Anyway...I don't know. What do other people think about fandom as a place for forming friendships? Sometimes I feel like for all our pride in being weird we still do find something shameful in just how we spend our time and would gladly never speak to any of our Internet acquaintances again to be free of it. A "real life" seems almost held up as a holy grail in fandom--you either need to get one, feel other people need to get one, or know you have one no matter what anyone else says so nyah nyah! But I wonder if that whole attitude bleeds over into all our interactions without our even realizing it, like no matter who you're talking to online they can't ever be as important as the most casual RL acquaintance. Nothing here is "real"--not the canon we read, not the people we talk to, not the relationships we have, not the celebrities we have pictures of, not the theories we come up with, not the characters in our heads. All of those things belong to real people in the real world, or the real authors of the real books, or the real actors in the real shows. So what does it matter what happens to any of us here? You can't lose what you never had.
ETA: this posted explanation.
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i never feel a sense of shame about a previous fandom--only a sense of loss when my intense love is fading.
and i think for me the really great thing about fannish friendships is that though we may meet over pairing X or show Y, there are an amazing number of people i seem to "click" with; in fact, i can't recall more than a couple of female friends i had either growing up or in university and after. so suddenly having *friends* that share with me a variety of intersts, opinions, ideas, approaches to life, passions (heck, the very fact that we *can* be passionate about a fictional text or world) is a truly amazing thing to me and i still relish it!
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seriously, i've spent the last couple of days tracking down all the stuff written on identities online and virtual bodies and all the mid-nineties cyberculture crap. and i think this initial need to make it this "other" space (either utopian where we can be anyone we want to be or dismissive as not having any impact on our RL) is very problematic and has indeed been questioned.
Not only do we bring our issues online with us, i.e., we never fully leave our bodies behind, there also are far more intersections between on and offline reality than many of these theories account for.
I don't think my friendships are any more real b/c i don't see people face-to-face. The friends I talk to daily on the phone and exchange comments and emails with have a much better sense of my life, thoughts, fears, than a casual f2f neighbor or acquaintance. We create social networks all the time that are not necessarily community based (church, work, school brings people from different areas together as do any type of clubs interst groups, etc.) and while we do it world wide and do not *see* one another, i'm hesitant to say it's less "real"...
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And yes, the focus on fannishness can make some of the 'friendships' superficial, and easily forgettable.
However, there are definite exceptions. Meeting people face to face can definitely make it more real, but I don't think even that is a requirement for fandom friendships translating something resembling 'real' friendships.
Like I said, I cut off all ties with the BTVS fandom, with the exception of four friends I'd actually made an effort to keep in touch with. We have a Yahoo group where we talk from everything from RL, politics, films, and yes, even fannish stuff, but that's not even the focus, since we're in different fandoms. I'd never met any of those women, but they don't feel any less real to me than my RL friends.
There are some people in this fandom I'm fairly certain will still figure in my life even after the HP obsession has waned-some of them I met, some I haven't, but at the end of the day, it comes down to finding common ground beyond the fannish.
What I'm trying to say in a rather long-winded way is that while fandom might not be the *best* place to form friendships, it does happen.
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Sure there are online friends whom I wouldn't be heartbroken about if they dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, but there are people like that offline as well. A good friend of mine is a lot more social than I am, and has made friends at her job and at school, and sometimes I hang out with them. I like these people, but if I never got together with them again, it would be no huge loss.
But I don't see any difference between my close online friends and my close offline friends.
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I mean, a readily accessible, pervasive online world is only really a creation of the late 90s. For people who were in already in college then, or *whistles* already young adults out working, the internet was something shockingly new. And it's attraction was, let's be honest, a bit morbid: Porn! Anonymity! Unaccountability! A masked ball where nobody ever had to take off their mask! You couldn't do any of that stuff before, at least not nearly as easily and privately, and it was fascinating.
And yes, a lot of that got old quickly, and ordinary social behaviors tended to prevail more and more, but I wonder if there's a lingering sense of online life as a transgressive world, for people who first experienced it that way. Whereas, for people who grew up with it, it's primarily an ordinary way of communicating with ordinary, tangible, perfectly real-life friends. And if by extension it's still possible to venture into some pretty funky territory, at the root it all feels as normal as talking on the telephone. So for people who grew up with it, the weirdness is only one, maybe creepy, potential, and there's no lingering anxiety that online life is fundamentally second-class, fundamentally an unhealthy substitute for the real thing if you don't keep it tightly controlled.
So, to apply that to fandom -- if you start out from the premise that fannishness per se is a mild but harmless eccentricity, then there's a split, say somewhere along a fault line in the late twenties, between people who find the online aspect intensifies the sense of transgression and eccentricity, and people who find that it naturalizes and reduces it.
Random hypothesis of the day, brought to you by someone who used to find other ways to waste time, but on the whole likes this intarweb thing. :)
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I've never 'left' a fandom, though I've left mailing lists and communities of various sorts. While I get some nostalgia for one list in particular, the posters I left behind there aren't really any more lost to me than the people I was friends with in high school or my first year as an undergrad, and their 'real' selves aren't any more or less a mystery to me than the people I knew in high school either.
Of course, maybe I'm sort of proving your point, considering that wherever I set my butt becomes the honorary Capital City of Nerdistan....
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I'll try and restrain myself. Or at least divide up into different posts.
I guess the root of this question is how, and why, do people "meet", either in the flesh or virtually in fandom as opposed to how they do it otherwise. Forgive my innocence, but ARE there even any stable chat/virtual groups that have a strong identity APART from "fandom"? I suppose there must be, not that I've ever been moved to go look them up.
And for me its much the same in real life. I could never understand how at my (women's, private) college two girls could randomly be assigned to be roommates in freshman year and ten years remain best buds and stand in each other's weddings. This happened more frequently than you might expect... I'd guess 1/4 to 1/3 of the time. I'd find myself shaking my head at all of this. Really.. sometimes all the only obvious things a pair of friends seemed to have in common was being female, roughly the same age, choosing to go to the same college, and everyday mundane behaviors (doing hair and nails, brushing teeth, eating junk food) in geographic proximity.
Apparently - at least some of the time it worked for them. It wouldn't for me.
To paraphrase a line by Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H... some people (of course I'm referring to people like "us") are just a custom fit living in an off-the-rack world. They set that bar or friendship, even companionship, at a different level somehow, and - yes - they may adopt introverted lifestyles and spend much time alone. I think that's where the geek with no life sterotype comes from... there's certainly some truth in it, but the question might be asked if geekdom is more a cause or an effect. Something else I've also found true not addressed by the stereotype is that geeks come in all different shades and flavors. Geeks of various types may be able to recognize and identify with one another, but that does not guarantee compatability or friendship. A primarily sci-fi videogame geek may or may not be able to find enough common ground with a mostly medieval costuming geek to support an actual friendship, but probably WILL have enough to maybe post at the same movie website when fan fever is running high (such as in the middle of the "Lord of the Rings" .)
And it is during those euphoric sorts of times that geeks and non geeks alike will flock to fandom (with the regular folks involving themselves in the fun being at least geek friendly or perhaps even geek
"translators" able to understand both worlds.) What I feel fandom always offers the geek, always to some degree but most dramatically at "those" times, is an opportunity to break out of introverted patterns, poke one's head out,look around, perhaps engage the world at large a little bit - never however being called upon to stray too far from familiar territory. Perhaps ultimately find that "custom fit" of friend, creative partner, or even soul mate.
And so what does this all boil down to? To offer a REALLY geeky example here... is like that Tree that Yoda has Luke go into as a test in "Empire". What's in fandom is dependent pretty much on what you bring in with you... your obsession, delusions, undeveloped social graces, humor, yearning for connection, creativity, spite. Certainly this will also rule what you get out of it.
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I think that the thing is, there's no set 'geek behavior' we're exhibiting on livejournal to bond us, not like watching the anime together, playing/arguing about video-games together on boards, going to cons, etc. Everyone has their own niche behavior they see as 'geeky', and the bonding is necessarily smaller scale (that is, some people do online RPGs, some people do meta-analysis, some people merely sit there and lurkishly read fanfic, and while that's fannish, I guess, I don't know how geeky it is). The boundary between 'geek' & 'fan' seems ever-shifting & hard to define; my knee-jerk response is that a geek is a 'certain kind' of fan, though 'what kind' is up for grabs. I also think that it's the fan-geek that makes the tightest bonds with other fan-geeks (whether role-playing together or arguing the nitty gritty of HP into the long hours of the night), rather than merely a lurker-fan who uses the fandom and then moves on, as Sister M had said :>
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It very quickly weeds out the people who see me as a smut factory or a meta-making machine.
Just because I happen to be very passionate about certain activities doesn't make *me* only an arbiter of those activities. And yep, that's an emotional button. Mayhaps I use people for their contributions, but I do take care to understand the person behind the persona, and value it as much as I can. A user but an honest user? Unfortunately, there have been times when what I did was more valued than who I was.
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The difference for me now is that I can be in the HP fandom, not nearly as buried in it as I was in LOTR, for example, and I can be part of other fandoms as well (Good Omens, for example).
One thing this particular fandom is responsible for is my decision to continue in my pursuit of education in midwifery. If I hadn't been a part of the birth of
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That's awesome about your going back to your studies, though! It's weird when I think back on my life and realize how one thing led to another. Like, if I hadn't gotten a certain job or I'd gone to a different dance studio my life would be totally different. Same thing with fandom.
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Actually, I think I don't feel that way at all. I have this thing, see, about how I am the same person online as I am in "real life" because, dammit, it's all real life. I don't see what is so separate about it. I would never respond to people in fandom any differently than I respond to people I meet at work or at a coffee shop or anywhere else. Not in a significant way, anyway. Maybe I'm a little shyer in person... a little less confident about putting myself out there, due to specific insecurities that aren't a factor online, but really it's all the same to me.
As for how fandom itself figures into this... well, I don't think I actually am in any fandom in which I do not have a deep love for the object of that fandom, or at least a strong infatuation.
I don't know. I actually think all of it is real. How can anything not be real? The books we read are real thoughts written down by real people. The people we talk to are real people, whether they are revealing their true selves to us or not. They are still real people. There are no fake people. Our relationships are real, whether we're honest with ourselves about their nature. I can see how some things may not be what we make them in our heads, but they are real. They exist. They can't not.
Take you and me. We are friendly acquaintances. We don't know a lot about each other, but we do have some interests in common, and we must connect on some level or I wouldn't be typing right now. You are a real person, whether I know your name or not. I am a real person, flesh and blood, sitting here at a computer in my house with my husband and my puppy, listening to Prokofiev and typing a livejournal comment. How could I not be real? How could you not be? Just because something is ambiguous does not make it less real than anything else. That's how I feel about everything I do and everyone I talk to online, whether in fandom or elsewhere. There is no "real life" set apart from everything else. We only get one life. This is part of it.
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However, I don't think it's as simple as most people 'moving on', especially if by fandom you mean livejournal; plenty of people keep talking with their former fandom friends after they leave the fandom-- if they were really 'friends' and not just on each other's friendslist. If you'd chatted about other things over time, you form a bond with people online just like in any other situation, and you give them your name/number/contact info so they can at least call you up & knock you over the head if you disappear. I'm an antisocial sort of person who barely ever talks to anyone off lj (as in, chat programs), but even I have made a few strong friendships where I think if I disappeared, some people would, in fact, email me and maybe even call my mother's house~:) Given, there's probably only one person who might possibly do that, but fact remains I have at least one friend like that :D
Like, for instance I would be pretty worried if you 'just disappeared', but happily I could do something about it, too :)) Well, at least I could email you ;) But then, I think we have more things in common than just Harry Potter; it seems like in my experience the amount of fannish talk I've had with the people online I've really met depended on our mood & that particular person. Some people barely talked with me about fandom at all (while still being in fandom), and some talked to me about fandom all the time even though they're out of it and we still keep emailing each other about aspects of fandom even when we've nearly both left it. It becomes a very small club about issues that interest us & especially as seen by each other. So I think if people are friends in general, they'll always have something to say to each other about a former interest, if only in a nostalgic way. You know how these things flare up :>
Which brings me to this:
There's a sense of relief that comes with not being a fan of something anymore.
I know just what you mean! I overdose on my obsessions all the time-- otherwise they'd just go on and on and I'd never get to anything new. And while there's always been a slight sense of guilt/shame about being a former Trekker (I hate the term Trekkie!! I always will be enough of a Trekker to uh-- hate that), but I never really stopped loving Star Trek, myself; I just stopped reading books/watching the show religiously/etc. At the back of my mind, there will always remain a fondness, even as there's this sense of 'relief' that I can think about other things. A lessening of any obsession brings a sense of renewed clarity & relief to me, but I still want to find a new obsession/interest almost immediately, 'cause I guess my brain just works like that.
I think a lot of people -are- in online fandoms 'casually' and the bonds they make aren't serious-- and of course they're not serious with every fandom acquaintance-- but from what I've seen, a whole lot more people always take other people they like seriously, and if they stop talking it's usually because they'd had a friendship break rather than a fandom break, if you know what I mean~:) So yeah, the friendship issue is more about people's relationship with online vs. offline rather than fandom vs. 'real-life', because people do take their interactions with others beyond the mere fannish context, most especially on livejournal, 'cause that's just the nature of lj, what with most people's tendency to make 'personal posts' & be personal in comments & so on. Though I have to say, when it comes to be, I can't care less about the average "casual RL acquaintance" if we don't share some basic interest that's as important to me as Harry Potter was/is :>
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I think the overwhelming response of the commenters here shows that at least the folks on your flist don't see much of a dividing line between "real" and online life. As a matter fact neither do I, but your question about why "get a life" is the insult of choice in fandom disputes still stands, and I think the responses to your post make it even more urgent. If we DO think fandom life is real life, it seems all the odder that "get a life" is so common as a fandom retort.
Maybe there are two ways to look at insults. First, they might be purely tactical: that is, the person doing the insulting is just trying to be hurtful and using any possible means to do it. Second, they might inadvertently reveal the speaker's true values. This second view makes a certain of amount of sense to me. We don't insult people by saying things at random; we have to be able to name some quality that our victim will predictably be insulted by. No one gets teased in high school for having a perfect complexion. They get teased for having zits, and whether they have zits or not is irrelevant to the implicit values system invoked by the insult: zits are bad, and a perfect complexion is good.
I take it that your point about "get a life" is that it works the same way. Even if a person is incredibly invested in fandom and spends twelve hours a day on line squeeing about hot boyslash, this same person all too often is ready to turn around and say "get a life" to someone else. And yeah, there's an contradiction there between the lived values and values in the insult: it's as if someone who spends all her time actively campaigning for equal rights for people with zits suddenly turns around and insults someone by saying they have zits. Under such circumstances we're inclined to think that this person is at the very least conflicted. What does she really believe? Does she hate herself for the kind of life she's leading?
So, yeah. All of this is but to say: word, I think you're really onto something here.
But now I'm going to flip around a hundred and eighty degrees, though, and think about another way to see the insult. Because if there IS an implicit value system involved in "get a life," is there anything to be said for it? Too often the insult is used in polemical contexts that make us suspicious of it -- but what instincts are leading people to use it in the first place?
I don't know: do you suppose there's such a thing as a fannish personality? If there is, I think I have one. I tend to get obsessively interested in things to a degree that seems a little odd to other people. And sometimes I say to myself, "get a life," but by that I don't really mean "become interested in something more socially acceptable, like racquetball." By that I mean: get a life, a whole one, a complete one, one that is rich and variageted and above all diverse, because the problem with focusing on an obsession is that sometimes you start to ignore other things. You (general you) start living in a world that's smaller, that just doesn't contain as much stuff in it as it might. The problem isn't that you're excluding Socially Acceptable Interest X, like racquetball; the problem is that you're excluding Range of Interests A-X so you can focus on obsessive interests Y&Z. And that, incidentally, is something that can happen on line or off, in fandom or out of it. I think it's a response not to fandom per se but to the larger category of a consuming interest.
So I guess what I'm saying here is: yes, it is hypocritical and repellent for fans to attack other fans for being fans, but: well, maybe this behavior reveals an underlying anxiety about a pretty large issue.
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But that also means that when I'm troubled or whatever I'm more likely to withdraw than, say, the extroverted person who seeks out more people. Or something in my imaginary world can affect the way I feel in the real world. It seems like a natural part of this fannish personality, if there is one, to sometimes do that. When I think back on my life there are times when I was heavily involved in fandom and also heavily involved in the real world, but there are other times when things were not going well in the real world and my relationship to fandom sort of reflected that. I don't know how to completely describe how it reflected it but I think it did. It wasn't simply an escape, I don't think, but part of dealing with things and deciding what I wanted to do. I think that might particularly be the case when I'm powerless in the real world. For instance, when I was a teenager and by definition had no power. But that can also happen at times when you're an adult, like if you're just not really satisfied with things at work or at home, but you can't see what to do about them.
So it just seems kind of weird that this kind of thing is so almost taboo in fandom. Like we can have intense conversations about our most obscure sexual kinks or agree to dress up and role play together, but if you suggest any kind of vulnerability on this issue you're repulsive. It just seems odd that of all the wide variety of human behaviors we're about accepting in fandom this really isn't one of them. It just seems like it's generally agreed upon that there's something profoundly sad about fantasy with any tinge of real longing or confusion--even more sad, perhaps, than dealing with those things through cutting, alcoholism or drugs! I just wonder why that is.
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Horizontal Hostility, and more
Of course it also fits the Power Over model, needing someone to be below one to feel good about oneself. So long as that fan over there is more weird than I am, I can feel better about my fannish activities.
As to your second-to-last paragraph, I think that there's people who enjoy drama everywhere, including fandom. I don't find that fandom is unusually extreme. Perhaps it's more noticable here because the drama is in writing and doesn't just fade with memory as verbal altercations can, and because we have whole communities dedicated to cataloging and discussing the drama (metadrama?).
I do think there are people forming real bonds in fandom, some of which are briefly intense and fade out and others which survive all parties moving into different fandoms. Which is pretty much how offline bonds work - sometimes people grow apart, some friendships survive unshared life changes and others don't. I don't think fandom is definitionally any less real, or that people are definitionally more honest/genuine in offline interactions.
I'm also quite curious as to what you thought you were talking about. :)
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I think of my overseas fannish friends as real friends who I just haven't met in person yet. I hope I will eventually meet some of them, if the opportunity arises. I feel closer to some — the ones I know in a reasonably "whole" way (job, location, family, other interests etc etc) — than to real life friends who don't know about my fannish interests.
In real life, my litmus test for considering someone a close friend is telling them about my interest in slash — something that everyone I interact with on LJ already knows.
On LJ, I generally consider someone a "friend" rather than a virtual acquaintance if I know their real name and correspond with them by means other than just LJ comments, about things other than just the fannish. I don't like talking only to an LJ name/pseudonym for a long period of time — perhaps because, as you say, an LJ identity can disappear!
My impression is that LJ is a great way to make real friends, but I haven't been able to put that to the test since I live a LONG way away from the people I correspond with! I can say for certain that it's added a lot of depth to my local, pre-LJ, real-life fannish friendships.
But that often means that when you move on from one fandom to another there's almost a sort of...shame attached to your previous self.
I can't relate to this at all. I think I'm very much the same person at 34 as I was at 10 or 15 or 25. I add new interests and fandoms, learn better ways of doing things, but so far I've never really lost interest in anything. If I like something, I like it forever (so far!). Assuming I live that long, I'll be reading slash from my first fandom in my 90's — just as today I still enjoy the books I liked at 10.
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You know, I’ve never really figured out what ‘fandom’is. The way some people talk about it I get the impression it’s like being accepted into a formal religion, where there are rules, and some kind of central ‘Mind’ governing the Fandom’s activities. I’ve noticed people referring to the Fandom, as if it’s some kind of cohesive organization that one pays a subscription too. People recently have been accused of bringing disrepute upon the Fandom, others talk about how much joy they feel in being part of the Fandom, and I don’t get it. As far as I can tell, ‘the Fandom’ is an anarchical arrangement of groups of people, each with a similar outlook on the same canon source. So you get all the little cells, I guess – the fic writers/readers who specialize in only one aspect or one interpretation, the artists, the analyists :-P - and the whole they form is not a single integrated entity, but a web of people loosely and informally associated by a base idea.
I can well undertand being burned by any collection of people that includes elements who seem to want to feed on their young. Oy. But the dynamics of one group versus another is evident all over the place – any where that there are perceptions of power and importance. Is the rate of hypocrisy greater online? Possibly, there are greater opportunities to be completely self-righteous to complete strangers than there are to do it face to face.
I think I understand what you mean by ‘shame’, but I perhaps wouldn’t have characterized it that way. When you’ve exhausted all the possible lines of discussion, and explored every aspect and interpretation of a canon source you can, then it really can be time to let go. I found with Tolkien that I reached a point where I needed to step away from the canon, or I would begin to lose the joy I found in it. In doing that I felt almost as if I’d committed an act of betrayal, but it was a huge relief not to have to carry that around anymore.
The difference between communicating in a medium that has no cues at all apart from the written word is the intensity of the dialogue. This can become quite overwhelming. It’s a very close, intellectual bonding, which I don’t think happens so quickly, to the same level of intensity, off-line. So that’s where the racquetball players miss out. (I have been glad to meet a lot of Kitchen and LJ people in person, because that gives me a sense of voice, tone and accent, and of gesture, that helps me to fill in the gaps in the online discussions. But then, I’m naturally paranoid. :-P ) And it is open to scrutiny by all and sundry, unless you laboriously lock everything.
I don’t buy the life/no life argument. At all. Ancient taunts, those ones, that no longer hold any sting. ‘Real’ needs to defined for starters. In this techno-driven society, with so many opportunities for alternate means of communications, email, blogs, forums, MBs are now commonplace. I was trying to find a research report I’d come across through work about adult use of IM, and another one about adults forming relationships in cyberspace, but no luck sorry. The upshot was that the steps of forming relationships are really not so dissimilar. And some friendships developed to Friendships and some did not. Just like everywhere else. And no offence, but I’d say bollocks, too, to the notion that ‘no matter who you’re talking to online they can’t ever be as important as the most casual RL acquaintance’.
But now I’ve just read fictualities post and your comment, and what lay at the heart of your original post is now a lot clearer.
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And I either utterly suck at or have not put nearly enough effort into building a false online persona- nearly everyone in my little "clique" (winks at certain people) has a good grasp of my true personality traits, as shown in how they describe me in memes and even er, dreams ^^;;;
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First of all, I have no shame about any of my fannish passions, even the ones from way back when I was a child. In fact, I find them interesting in light of where I am now as a person.
Secondly, the friendships I've made through fandom aren't just related to fandom. I have developed some of my deepest relationships with women I met through fandom. I actually wasn't very good at being friends with women before - mostly because so many of them I felt nothing in common with at all.
Then through fandom I began to meet a wide variety of people. Sometimes the only thing we had in common was fandom, sometimes not. But through fandom I learned to appreciate the differences, to trust women as friends.
Because of having had a untrustworthy mother and never being close to my sister, I had never ever trusted women. My relationships in workplaces, both with women on the same level and those above me, had proven often to be fraught with manipulation and hypocrisy.
Yet the women I met through fandom all started out as equals to me. We had something in common, and we weren't in competition with each other about anything. Then I met many of them, and came to know them as the individuals they are - many very, very different from me, but each with valuable traits.
So fandom taught me to like women, and brought to me a wealth of women friends. Something regular life did not bring me. Though now I find it easier to relate to other women.
So I not only am not ashamed by former fandoms, but retain a great fondness for them for they changed me, made me a better person with a richer life.
WP
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That's put very well--I feel the same way about all my former fannish passions, and even the current ones. As I said above this whole post wound up saying something completely different than I intended, and fictualities (above) really does a better job of putting her finger on what I was thinking about. It's just this, that I do tend to be surprised when I come across this need to distance onesself from a lot of things about fandom. I do think that fandom, even the silly parts, can lead to a richer life, yet sometimes we seem afraid of some of the ways it can.
And I'd also agree with your take on how fandom can change your patterns when it comes to relationships. I was always friends with women, but I think fandom has gotten me more used to conflict, something I used to avoid completely. I think it helped being able to choose what conflicts to wade into, and to be able to think about them as I did so.
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First off, it's easy to disappear. All you have to do is go offline or delete your lj and you might as well have never existed. People might miss you, but still never have had a good idea of you as a person.
Interestingly, from my experiecne it's much harder to disappear from your fandom friends than from your non-fandom friends. When I've been off-line for any periods, pre-warned or not, fandom friends have contacted my husband via email, or written to me by snail mail or rung me up (or all three).
What do other people think about fandom as a place for forming friendships?
Personally, I've found it a wonderful place. I can in all honesty say that I am closer to my close fandom friends than I am to friends I made via work or other interests. I don't call my non-fandom friends my 'real life' friends, nor do I refer to my life outside of fandom as 'real life'. To me my fandom friends and my fandom interest are 'real life', they are as much 'real life' as any other hobby/enjoyment is. I'm sure that football fans, people to regularly go to concerts, member of amateur dramatic groups (which I was for many years), etc. etc. don't talk about 'real life' being outside of that interest/hobby. Therefore, I now make a conscious effort not to run fandom down by using 'real life' to refer to my non-fandom activities.
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And I must say, my experience of and feelings about being involved in fandom are quite different from yours. Just to be clear, I have a thriving, healthy non-fannish life, with a spouse, a job, hobbies, etc. - and yet I view my fannish friends and participation in the fannish community as one of the most "real" things, and certainly the most treasured thing, I do. I'd give up all sorts of face-to-face acquaintances and friends before I'd give up the dear and true friends I've made through fandom - some of whom I've never met in person. The friends I've made in fandom are closer to me than any other friends I've had in my life, they know me better and more completely, they understand me better - because being "a fan" (and more specifically, a slasher) is at the core of me, and someone who doesn't get that could never fully get me - and also because in some ways it's easier to get to know someone really well through correspondence rather than face-to-face; the physical barriers aren't there, the automatic perceptions and assumptions that we make when we see someone. I call it getting to know someone "inside out": learning the most important things of each other's hearts before we learn how tall we are or how loud we talk or whatever. It's my fannish friends rather than my "real life" friends who tend to worry if I disappear - the real life friends have their own busy lives and assume I'm just busy as well, whereas my fannish friends email and call and ask if everything's okay.
And far from feeling that I am doing something shameful, I feel like in fandom I'm finally free of the shame I always had about being a fan, being obsessed. It's the most freeing, wonderful feeling, and I am happiest, and most "me," most "real," when participating in the fannish world.
I actually get impatient with non-fans who tell me this isn't "real." How is a community based on the internet any less "real" than any other sort of community? I spend many hours a week communicating with people, maintaining archives, writing LJ posts - how is that not "real"? Who can tell me whether my online fannish friendships are "real" or not? They are real, and valuable - precious, in fact, to me, and I treasure them. Fandom is my "real life," or an essential and vital and priceless part of it, and I wouldn't give it up for love or money.
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How odd to come across this tonight, when just today, on NPR, Umberto Eco was describing how the death of Desdemona could be more affecting, more real, than the death of an old uncle...an interesting, opposed pov.
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the #1 insult used in all fandoms I’ve ever been in is always that so-and-so has no life
'You've thought too much about this' is one I see a lot (I hear it in RL, too! I think this may be more of a commentary on me than anything... ;)
Annoyingly, though, it only seems to come up whenever you disagree with someone's point though. For instance, I was discussing The Incredibles with a friend (ironically, I had a brief lj discussion over it that was far more mature, despite differing opinions, than the RL one) and she was raving over it - loving on the voice-overs, animation, plotting, etc. I'm not so keen, and I didn't really want to insult (or 'ruin' ;) something she enjoyed, but when she probed me on it, I told her I didn't like the message, so to speak. She asked 'Why?!' and I told her I found it fairly elitism/conservative, cited an example or two, and her immediate reaction was 'You've thought too much about this.' I pointed out that for her to be able to list so many reasons why she liked it must mean she's considered it an equal amount (if not more, since I didn't take to it, so only saw it once) but she felt her reaction was an emotional one, whereas mine was intellectual. I tried to explain that to me, my reaction of disliking something was just as emotive/'real' as hers (something that often seems to come up in fandom, yeah? Someone says 'Why are you trying to overthink this and spoil it/make it something it isn't, usually by 'putting down the good guys in favour of the baddies'?' as if your reaction isn't as instinctive as theirs because it's negative. You can't possibly genuinely disagree with them, you have to be pretending for some reason - ie. if you dislike Harry/like Draco, you have to have an ulterior motive or else be suppressing your natural desires to like the former and hate the latter for said motive, probably because you're 'confused' with the movies/fanon. I keep meaning to also go reply to your 'fans explaining fans' post, but I'll probably just make the same point!) but it was in one ear and out the other. Also what came up were the old chesnuts related to the same argument of: 'You're overthinking what's supposed to be simple' ie. the creator(s), in this case, of the Incredibles, probably didn't intend their text to be elitist/conservative/sexist, whatever; so it couldn't be, as if you have to be some kind of Machiavellian Evil Corporation intent on Destroying the Youth of the world to have a message to your story, whether conscious or not. When, imho, it's the texts that aren't intended to be meaningful/insightful that show most clearly what your perspective on the world is.
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It's like that thing people always say about how they like to just go see something and not think, like thinking is somehow against entertainment so you can't do the two at once. Aren't you thinking all the time, even if you're not conscious of it?
Also there's the whole thing of what people intended it to be or not...well, first, whether or not they intended it doesn't change what's there, right? Like, maybe I set out to write a story that's all about tolerance and I wind up saying we should be nice to minorities because they're stupider than we are--are people wrong for pointing out this is what I'm saying? Or that old movie "Gentleman's Agreement" where people always joke that it was supposed to be this daring movie about anti-Semitism but the message seems to be that you should be nice to Jews because they might actually be Gentiles in disguise!
I think most writers stick stuff in they aren't aware of but are still there naturally. That, of course, comes up in discussions of HP a lot because I don't think it's set out to prove any specific line of thought. It's just somebody writing instinctively about different situations. Sometimes things contradict each other or bring up other issues etc. We don't have to only see what the author sees him/herself or wanted us to see. How could we?
I haven't seen The Incredibles, but I've read lots of responses that were just like yours, and as usual, I think it's also possible that people who liked it did like the message as well, or at least didn't have a problem with the message. Or maybe they just interpreted the message in different terms. But still I don't think they were reacting in a more genuine way. I mean, even emotional reactions have some reason. If you liked it you must have liked something.
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