The Definition of Fan

[sistermagpie]

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.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Usually I find myself wishing that the people involved would find some way to sort it out themselves, without feeling the need to drag everyone else into it, because I think that in most (if not all) cases, such situations are only made worse by the involvement of a host of previously-disinterested parties - it often seems to serve only to transform what could have been only a "temporary" falling-out into a much nastier and far more permanent one.

The other thing I noticed about this later was when I discovered I *did* know one friend who did exactly this. She would foster disputes between people all the time. In my life in school there's exactly one person who hated my guts and did so overnight and I've come to believe it must have been this other person telling her something I supposedly said about her. (One person asked her why she hated me and she claimed I'd told everyone she was a slut--which was particularly annoying to me because if I would never call anyone that of all things!)

Anyway, the thing about people like that is that they don't usually wind up with everyone being suspicious of them, probably because they do take sides, very publically, or else give the impression they are, or put themselves in the middle. It's a totally different personality type: one doesn't think friendship requires you to show things you don't feel or believe things you don't believe, the other is all about manipulating those things.

Also, another way this relates to the current wank, I remember seeing how reluctant people were to believe these things about this girl if I ever told them. And I'm not talking about me going around and saying everyone should hate her. I'm saying that when I learned some facts about the situation and shared them, people easily brushed it off, which was bizarre to me. It didn't make them rethink their relationship with her. I remember once my mother, who loved this girl, randomly wondered why I wasn't still friends with her as an adult because she'd always come across to her as a great friend. So I said she really wasn't a great friend, quite the opposite, and my mom starts defending her! Like to her she seemed like a great friend because she looked very together. I was in this odd position of realizing my mother was encouraging me to be friends with somebody she thought was cool for kind of superficial reasons, over people I thought were cool for other reasons.

I imagine this is much the way a lot of people felt in the msscribe thing when they had proof of what she was doing. If you've given someone ISPs etc. and they still need more proof...I can see why that would be frustrating and make it seem like they don't care what this person is doing, period. Especially if you're then accused of having some grudge or being crazy when to you do it, as it seems people were, when to you it looks like such a straightforward case of other people just being mistaken. And that gets back to fandom's ideas about friendship again too--it's hard to read the Jordan Wood saga without feeling like people were actively participating in their own deception and that it was a con based on the same things other cons are based on: greed.

It seems to me, at any rate, that you meet far more self-identified "geeks" in fandom

That reminds me of a comment that surprised me about F_W once where someone compared it to being the small group of nerds snickering at the popular folk or something like that. It's not like I wanted to jump in and say, "You're just like the mean girls in high school!" but it did seem a bizarre thing to think when a lot of wanks come down to hundreds and hundreds of comments directed at one or a small group of people. It did seem like there was this reflex to assume that any group that I'm in is the group of nerds. Besides, even in high school popular girls are known to be set upon and tormented when a big group of people goes after them. You could see the potential danger in people having the power of numbers but also wanting the freedom of being a minority.

[skelkins.livejournal.com]

Well, as I think this recent brou-ha-ha has amply demonstrated - as, for that matter, does most of what goes on at F_W -- there really are people who go out of their way to stir up shit between factions and people for their own ends. I don't know if I've ever had any experience with the Liar Liar variant of Little Miss Troublemaker (if I have done, then I guess I've been successfully duped!), but I've certainly had a lot of experience with her soul-sister, the Spin-Meister.

You've met the Spin-Meister variant on Little Miss Troublemaker, I'm sure? She's quite common in fandom. The Spinmeister says things that are technically truthful, but she never fails to put the worst possible spin on them. She will often quote people directly, for example, and her quotes are always accurate. They're also taken completely out of context, of course, thus totally changing their meaning...but how can you argue with the honesty of a direct quote? She enjoys passing on gossip, but she doesn't really bother to make up lies about what person A said about person B. Instead, she just "reinterprets" them, and always in a way that paints her enemies as utterly villainous, and her allies as pure and innocent victims. When called on her bullshit, she is shocked and indignant. How can you call her a liar? Is not she the only truly honest and forthright person the world has seen, like, evah? (The Spinmeister often likes to portray herself as a lone voice in the wilderness, or as the Only Person Who Dares To Speak Teh TRUTH!!!!) And are not her enemies clearly liars and weasels? You can tell that they're dishonest, of course, because they're not hotly denying the things that she says. Instead, they're resorting to waffle statements like "Yes, I did say that, but what I meant was..." and "Yeah, I wrote that, but if you look at the context..."

It is one of life's little ironies that the best way to appear "dishonest" to some people is to do your very best to tell the truth. Many people don't have a lot of patience for nuance, or for situations in which there are neither easy answers nor obvious heroes and villains.

I'm not entirely sure which I think is more damaging, in fact, the prevalence of Little Miss Spinmeisters in the HP fandom, or the prevalence of her natural followers - people who see the world in starkly partisan terms. They sort of go together, really. It's a symbiotic relationship: where you find one, there you will inevitably find the other.

Bah. A pox, I say! A pox on all their houses! I say it's spinach, and I say to hell with it! ;->

It is a pity, though, that so much of what goes on in fandom winds up reading like a rather crassly and obviously-written satire of the very dumbest aspects of modern American politics.

That reminds me of a comment that surprised me about F_W once where someone compared it to being the small group of nerds snickering at the popular folk or something like that.

Oh, I know! I remember having the same reaction to that comment. It really does tie into an issue that often comes up in canon discussions as well, though: the tendency for people to think that bullying is perfectly okay, so long as they can find some way to position themselves as the ones With Right On Their Side, or to position their enemies as Bad People Who Got What They Had Coming To Them.

I think that it's also often a lot easier for people to behave badly if they can convince themselves that they're acting from an intrinsic position of powerlessness. If with power comes responsibility, then with powerlessness comes a kind of freedom: after all, if I'm powerless, then nothing I do can really hurt anybody anyway, so that means that it must be okay for me to do whatever the hell I want. Right?

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

It is one of life's little ironies that the best way to appear "dishonest" to some people is to do your very best to tell the truth. Many people don't have a lot of patience for nuance, or for situations in which there are neither easy answers nor obvious heroes and villains.

Yeah, I've noticed.:-) It's one of those things that really scares me because I always have this stupid idea that if you could just sit down and talk with people eventually you'd reach a compromise. I figure even somebody said something rude that can be gotten over. People say stupid stuff--it's unfortunate that on the Internet it's in writing. But then you see how people are happier to spin things to create more trouble, or read things in a way that makes them more inflammatory, or bringing up stuff to get people angry. What's weird is that somehow the culture of the 'net is perfect for people to stir things up because, like we said, there's that whole culture of showing how loyal you are to different people, even if you don't know them.

I feel like emotions in general get exaggerated on lj--even stuff like {{hugs}}--saying that to someone is actually a different gesture than giving them a hug. Things get exaggerated to the point where you can even feel a pressure to be more emotional and demonstrative when you think you're dealing with a space that's all about the mind and words, you know? Would the Spin Meister really be able to cause quite as much trouble in the real world if people could talk to each other or maybe see expressions? It just seems especially strange that with the msscribe thing, where people were played for what side they were on, doesn't change that. There are people who are now reconnecting, apparently, who fought back then, but it still seems like a common enemy thing. It's like another shuffling of alliances.

I was thinking today about the whole suspicion of people not seeing something in black and white and I thought hey, yet again I picked the right lj name--magpies are black AND white. (And if you look at them closely they're really blue and green as well.) They're supposedly cursed for only wearing half-mourning at the crucifixtion. Talk about spin!