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Reading about the recent…episode…is reminding me that people have very strong feelings about BNFs--some feelings even border on disturbing. It started me thinking about the question of definitions, specifically
BNF and Fan.
These two words are absolutely central to the fandom experience, yet they’re both argued over all the time. I think part of what makes them both so difficult is that they’re very much "I know it when I see it" words, and when someone tries to define them more clearly they start to drift away from the way they’re really used.
For instance: fan. When I first came into HP fandom I always felt I needed to confess that I wasn’t really a "fan" of the books because they weren’t special books to me. I didn’t re-read them for the pleasure of re-reading them, they weren’t "my books" in that way. But eventually I realized it was pointless for me to protest I wasn’t a fan because I was in the fandom. It didn’t matter that I didn’t loooooove the books, what made me a fan was the way I related to them and focused on them. There might be plenty of other people who profess to love the books more than I do and have far fewer problems with them, but they never think about them when they’re not reading them. I think between me and someone who loved the books but hadn’t given them much thought any random person would accurately name me as the "fan" based on my tons of essays and discussions about them. The other person would be a "fan" in the casual sense—they like the books. I would be a fan meaning I was in the fandom, and that’s the definition I use on lj.
That brings up the question of whether one is no longer a fan if one becomes disappointed with the source material. Some would say one can’t be both, but if it’s true, what do we call the many people who are active in every fandom and also very critical? I stayed in X-Files fandom until the show ended, yet I thought the last couple of seasons were horrible, even to the point of betraying the whole point of the show. Did that make me no longer a fan? It seems pointless to say so, since I was still active in the fandom. I was just now one of the fans to whom people said, "If you don’t like the show, why do you watch it?" and who had to point out that I enjoyed talking about the show, that my fandom interest was never based on just passively liking it. I was still enjoying pulling it apart and seeing how it worked and didn’t work.
The second definition that gets fuzzy is BNF/Big Name Fan. Lately I’ve seen a number of calls to level the playing field in canon by defining BNF as only fen who have some kind of contact with the people involved in the creation of the source material. The closer you are to them, the bigger you are. In HP, for instance, Emerson is a BNF because JKR knows who he is and has been interviewed by him. I would never challenge Emerson’s status as a BNF—on the "I know it when I see it" scale I’d give him a yes (there’s plenty of BNFs I’ve never heard of—HP is a big fandom with lots of people producing stuff). But not because he has had contact with JKR. For me that definition, where he’s a BNF because he has had contact with the "only true" BNF, JKR, is completely strange. First of all, JKR is not a BNF. She is not any kind of F, she’s the author of the source material. Secondly, I just see no more reason to be impressed with someone for having contact with a celebrity than I do to be impressed with someone for writing a widely-read fanfic. Actually, to be honest, I am more impressed with the fanficcer if I admire his/her work.
That’s just the way I center my fandom experience. It’s about creating things in fandom in response to the source material, be it art, Meta, fic or a service for others like an archive. It’s all centered in the fandom community, not the world outside the community. Someone having celebrity contact to me is just like…eh, it’s just a person with a potentially good anecdote (and equal potential for a boring anecdote). I know plenty of people who have interviewed or somehow come into contact with celebrities and it means very little to me—not because I’m so above that sort of thing but because it just literally usually means very little. Celebrities get interviewed; they get seen by regular people sometimes. My coming into contact with one says absolutely nothing about me except that I happened to have this contact with the person one day. If someone has more contact than that, like if they have an ongoing true relationship with a celebrity, and it makes them a BNF, frankly it makes me think less of them, not more, because why are they trading details of their friendship with strangers in fandom?
So it basically comes down to my tailoring my experience in fandom differently than other people do. Some people are interested in the author, the actors, the movie-making or tv-producing process. I’ve always been more about the fictional world and what people have to say about that. It’s like two different fan universes that orbit around different centers and perhaps both think the other is very strange. I’ve read plenty of posts where people argue that fans should "respect the canon" or the author by writing the characters the way that fan thinks the author says they should be written, or not changing certain aspects of the world in fanfic, or agreeing with the author’s take on any random subject.
Clearly they wouldn’t post these things if they didn’t think them, yet to me they’re completely bizarre. It’s like someone telling me to create some fictional master for myself that I must obey and please while I’m in fandom for no reason. Why would I model the things I could say about the books or the world in general on some random person just because they wrote the books? I mean, of course there is a certain respect I pay to the author as a human being. If the author didn’t like people putting up pictures of her child, for instance, I’d respect that opinion (I wouldn’t do it in the first place!). But a lot of the stuff other fans call me to respect seems completely odd to me. The things that some people think make one "cooler" as a fan might be the things that make me cringe with embarrassment and vice versa.
In fact, sometimes it just seems to come back to the same thing everyone claims to want to avoid, which is power imbalance in fandom. If we stop giving undeserved respect to fans on the basis of their sub-creations (fics, art, archives, etc.) and place it where it belongs, with the author, then we’ll all have a more realistic and egalitarian view or ourselves as fans, right? Well, no, wrong. Because as is always seen in fandom, that’s just another power set up based on different principles. It’s almost like the difference between a society with a power base of artisans or intellectuals (using the terms a little tongue-in-cheek since we are talking about fanfic and porn) and one where the power lies with the priests—that is, with fans claiming to be oracles for the god creator. Both systems are easily corrupted or lead to power imbalances. Both are going to create BNFs and those BNFs are going to have circles of friends and so inspire resentment in those inclined to need to be friends with them just because of their status. Both groups of BNFs "control" fandom in different ways. The first group makes people feel that people "only read" fics recced by them or whatever. The second group privileges contributions they deem "author supported" over any they don’t, and quickly comes to mistake their own preferences for canon anyway.
In both cases the real power to "fight against" the oppression lies in the individual him/herself. As I said I do believe that fans can make things unpleasant for other fans and so influence what gets said. There’s sometimes an uneasy balance between people who need to be their own person and learn to deal with disagreement and people who act maliciously (or just poorly) and don’t take real responsibility for it. It’s easy to do the one and accuse everyone else of doing the other.
BNF and Fan.
These two words are absolutely central to the fandom experience, yet they’re both argued over all the time. I think part of what makes them both so difficult is that they’re very much "I know it when I see it" words, and when someone tries to define them more clearly they start to drift away from the way they’re really used.
For instance: fan. When I first came into HP fandom I always felt I needed to confess that I wasn’t really a "fan" of the books because they weren’t special books to me. I didn’t re-read them for the pleasure of re-reading them, they weren’t "my books" in that way. But eventually I realized it was pointless for me to protest I wasn’t a fan because I was in the fandom. It didn’t matter that I didn’t loooooove the books, what made me a fan was the way I related to them and focused on them. There might be plenty of other people who profess to love the books more than I do and have far fewer problems with them, but they never think about them when they’re not reading them. I think between me and someone who loved the books but hadn’t given them much thought any random person would accurately name me as the "fan" based on my tons of essays and discussions about them. The other person would be a "fan" in the casual sense—they like the books. I would be a fan meaning I was in the fandom, and that’s the definition I use on lj.
That brings up the question of whether one is no longer a fan if one becomes disappointed with the source material. Some would say one can’t be both, but if it’s true, what do we call the many people who are active in every fandom and also very critical? I stayed in X-Files fandom until the show ended, yet I thought the last couple of seasons were horrible, even to the point of betraying the whole point of the show. Did that make me no longer a fan? It seems pointless to say so, since I was still active in the fandom. I was just now one of the fans to whom people said, "If you don’t like the show, why do you watch it?" and who had to point out that I enjoyed talking about the show, that my fandom interest was never based on just passively liking it. I was still enjoying pulling it apart and seeing how it worked and didn’t work.
The second definition that gets fuzzy is BNF/Big Name Fan. Lately I’ve seen a number of calls to level the playing field in canon by defining BNF as only fen who have some kind of contact with the people involved in the creation of the source material. The closer you are to them, the bigger you are. In HP, for instance, Emerson is a BNF because JKR knows who he is and has been interviewed by him. I would never challenge Emerson’s status as a BNF—on the "I know it when I see it" scale I’d give him a yes (there’s plenty of BNFs I’ve never heard of—HP is a big fandom with lots of people producing stuff). But not because he has had contact with JKR. For me that definition, where he’s a BNF because he has had contact with the "only true" BNF, JKR, is completely strange. First of all, JKR is not a BNF. She is not any kind of F, she’s the author of the source material. Secondly, I just see no more reason to be impressed with someone for having contact with a celebrity than I do to be impressed with someone for writing a widely-read fanfic. Actually, to be honest, I am more impressed with the fanficcer if I admire his/her work.
That’s just the way I center my fandom experience. It’s about creating things in fandom in response to the source material, be it art, Meta, fic or a service for others like an archive. It’s all centered in the fandom community, not the world outside the community. Someone having celebrity contact to me is just like…eh, it’s just a person with a potentially good anecdote (and equal potential for a boring anecdote). I know plenty of people who have interviewed or somehow come into contact with celebrities and it means very little to me—not because I’m so above that sort of thing but because it just literally usually means very little. Celebrities get interviewed; they get seen by regular people sometimes. My coming into contact with one says absolutely nothing about me except that I happened to have this contact with the person one day. If someone has more contact than that, like if they have an ongoing true relationship with a celebrity, and it makes them a BNF, frankly it makes me think less of them, not more, because why are they trading details of their friendship with strangers in fandom?
So it basically comes down to my tailoring my experience in fandom differently than other people do. Some people are interested in the author, the actors, the movie-making or tv-producing process. I’ve always been more about the fictional world and what people have to say about that. It’s like two different fan universes that orbit around different centers and perhaps both think the other is very strange. I’ve read plenty of posts where people argue that fans should "respect the canon" or the author by writing the characters the way that fan thinks the author says they should be written, or not changing certain aspects of the world in fanfic, or agreeing with the author’s take on any random subject.
Clearly they wouldn’t post these things if they didn’t think them, yet to me they’re completely bizarre. It’s like someone telling me to create some fictional master for myself that I must obey and please while I’m in fandom for no reason. Why would I model the things I could say about the books or the world in general on some random person just because they wrote the books? I mean, of course there is a certain respect I pay to the author as a human being. If the author didn’t like people putting up pictures of her child, for instance, I’d respect that opinion (I wouldn’t do it in the first place!). But a lot of the stuff other fans call me to respect seems completely odd to me. The things that some people think make one "cooler" as a fan might be the things that make me cringe with embarrassment and vice versa.
In fact, sometimes it just seems to come back to the same thing everyone claims to want to avoid, which is power imbalance in fandom. If we stop giving undeserved respect to fans on the basis of their sub-creations (fics, art, archives, etc.) and place it where it belongs, with the author, then we’ll all have a more realistic and egalitarian view or ourselves as fans, right? Well, no, wrong. Because as is always seen in fandom, that’s just another power set up based on different principles. It’s almost like the difference between a society with a power base of artisans or intellectuals (using the terms a little tongue-in-cheek since we are talking about fanfic and porn) and one where the power lies with the priests—that is, with fans claiming to be oracles for the god creator. Both systems are easily corrupted or lead to power imbalances. Both are going to create BNFs and those BNFs are going to have circles of friends and so inspire resentment in those inclined to need to be friends with them just because of their status. Both groups of BNFs "control" fandom in different ways. The first group makes people feel that people "only read" fics recced by them or whatever. The second group privileges contributions they deem "author supported" over any they don’t, and quickly comes to mistake their own preferences for canon anyway.
In both cases the real power to "fight against" the oppression lies in the individual him/herself. As I said I do believe that fans can make things unpleasant for other fans and so influence what gets said. There’s sometimes an uneasy balance between people who need to be their own person and learn to deal with disagreement and people who act maliciously (or just poorly) and don’t take real responsibility for it. It’s easy to do the one and accuse everyone else of doing the other.
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