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I just came across this fabulous quote from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teratologist about analyzing the Re-Animator movies. Re-Animator being a movie that contains such classic dialogue as, "Who's going to listen to you? You're a talking head."
Teratologist says:
Ah,
Being a "fan," I've realized, really has nothing to do with being a fan in terms of loving or hating something, since fans are known for ranting as much as raving. There's a reason comic book guy's trademark line on The Simpsons is "worst [insert thing here] ever." Me, I've never been much for squeeing. Which is not to say I look down on it. It's just not something I get into. I get into analyzing stuff in...whatever way it is I analyze it.
To give you an idea of what I mean, once a friend of mine grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me because I was working myself into knots trying to work out the hidden meanings of Grease 2, and looking that closely at anything starring Adrian Zmed was just wrong. I just can't help it. I guess it surprises me when anything like this is questioned in fandom because I always thought fandom was where you went when you did stuff like that. You leave the larger community because you're a geek and nobody else likes this stuff, and you find people who are interested in discussing whether Scully got her cross for Christmas or for her 15th birthday and what difference it makes. Maybe you could even get into an argument about it.
In fact, I assume this must be what makes one a "fan" because it's sometimes the only definition I fit. At the moment I seem to be in the HP-fandom, yet I've never been a fan of the books in terms of, you know, really liking them. That's not a dismissal of the books as crap or something that sucks. They're just not books I ever enjoyed that much. They're not a personal love, book-wise. But there was stuff in them I wanted to talk about with people, so I wandered onto the Internet and found other people who liked talking about them too, with me. It seems silly to say I'm not in the fandom, exactly, even if I got into it in a strange way.
I've been thinking, though, about being a fan and how fans shouldn’t judge books on what they should be, according to us, but on what they are. I think that's true--it's a losing battle anyway. How can you judge something for what should have been? I remember saying that plenty of times in LOTR fandom regarding the movies--you can't judge the movies that got made against some fantasy movies in your head that would have been perfect but we'll never know. Otoh, I'm surprised by what sometimes seems like the idea that it's wrong to use a story to discuss your own opinions on something that story brings up because, I guess, to me this is part of fandom and part of what makes people love a book. If I'm talking about LOTR, for instance, I would presumably talk about what Tolkien seems to be saying about the world and things he believes to be true. In my experience as somebody who writes and edits for a living that's a big part of what stories are; a way of communicating an idea to someone. And as teratologist so brilliantly puts it, this is sometimes most obvious in fun stories where you just go with your instinct. I know my agent has pointed out things that are "my thing" that I write about, conflicts that interest me, values that come up again and again. Authors are often pretty open about things like this if they're called on it. Maybe they didn't intentionally set out to say, "This is what I believe," but when asked they often will say, "Well, yes, I guess I do feel that this is so..." Or maybe they'll explain how you misunderstood--that happens to. But there's a reason people make jokes like, "You've read one Thomas Hardy you've read them all." Holly Lisle puts it like this
Sometimes having your manuscript analyzed --and here I think Original Writing is very different from fanfic because for some reason having someone else's text can remove you from view just a bit--is very much like a therapy session.
It's pointless, therefore, to say that any author should have written *our* story instead of his or her own. The same brain that created the characters and the beginning is going to write the ending. Ultimately that will probably make for the best story it can be, I think. But at the same time, it surprises me when it seems like this means somebody can't argue with whatever point of view seems to be being put forward. For instance, plenty of people read LOTR and remain completely convinced that Sam was the True Hero in the sense that he should have carried the ring to Mount Doom, and if he had he would have been able to destroy it because of his humble good-nature (already proven when he carried the ring briefly before). I've had this discussion with people before. To me, the idea doesn't work--nobody could destroy the ring, any lone ringbearer without a companion wouldn't have made it, there's a reason Frodo was right for his job and Sam was right for his job, yadda yadda yadda. But the point that person is arguing, imo, isn't so much that Tolkien wrote the wrong story the wrong way, but that they see and organize the world very differently. For them it's not just that they want Sam to be the big hero because they love him, but because that would say something about life that validates the way they see life. For them, there will always be that phantom ending, because it is the true answer to the questions the author raised.
That, to me, is part of fandom too. Probably more so if you're dealing with any canon that isn't finished, since we don't know really know what the author is saying until the author says it. It seems impossible to have a fandom without it, really, since fandom is not just about interaction between audience and story but also a community of people interacting with each other through the story. I think that's why, in my experience, people tend to gravitate towards people who respond similarly to the canon, because this is often because they have similar ideas about other things. Mostly everybody I was close with in XF fandom loved Mulder, and thought the idea of The Enemy as The Other was a lie, because the monster was always reflected in us. It seems impossible to think you'd bond with someone over such an abstract thing, but I think it just came out in what you talked about. In LOTR fandom I made close friends with hobbit-folk who liked talking about compassion--it's not all that different. It's easier when your canon happens to share the same priorities, but we don't always get to pick the canon that draws us. But fandom usually thrives on just these kinds of disagreements.
teratologist about analyzing the Re-Animator movies. Re-Animator being a movie that contains such classic dialogue as, "Who's going to listen to you? You're a talking head." Teratologist says:
Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator, and Beyond Re-Animator are arguably the films most likely to cause a prominent American author to spin violently in his or her grave. They're based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, but they contain very little by way of Deep Thoughts About Man's Place in the Universe and a whole lot of the sort of zombies that Shaun of the Dead was sending up. They are close to the epitome of dumb entertainment. I love them, and the reason I love them is because I can readily dissect them.
And like all dumb, 'it's just entertainment' entertainment, you arguably stand a much better chance of seeing where the collective head of some portion of society is really at by dissecting these works than by dissecting works that were written by self-conscious types with one eye on the critics. It's like observing critters in the wild instead of in a cage in the lab - if the (cue Marlin Perkins/ Mutual of Omaha Voice) Magnificent, Solitary Author is pursuing his or her life cycle blissfully unaware of the people hanging around in the background with lab coats and cameras, s/he will give us a truer picture of what material emotionally resonates with that portion of the public that thinks they just want to be entertained. If you dissect Umberto Eco and J.K. Rowling, you'll learn what Eco thinks from Eco (and that's fun), but you'll learn what's lurking in the hindbrain of Western society from ripping apart Rowling, precisely because she is under the impression that she is writing something that isn't very deep, and therefore isn't working to censor or fancy up the things she just assumes are true about society - and because we have evidence that these unfancied-up hindbrain thoughts resonate with millions of people throughout the world.
If that isn't absolutely fucking fascinating, and a real pleasure to figure out, I don't know what is.
Ah,
Being a "fan," I've realized, really has nothing to do with being a fan in terms of loving or hating something, since fans are known for ranting as much as raving. There's a reason comic book guy's trademark line on The Simpsons is "worst [insert thing here] ever." Me, I've never been much for squeeing. Which is not to say I look down on it. It's just not something I get into. I get into analyzing stuff in...whatever way it is I analyze it.
To give you an idea of what I mean, once a friend of mine grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me because I was working myself into knots trying to work out the hidden meanings of Grease 2, and looking that closely at anything starring Adrian Zmed was just wrong. I just can't help it. I guess it surprises me when anything like this is questioned in fandom because I always thought fandom was where you went when you did stuff like that. You leave the larger community because you're a geek and nobody else likes this stuff, and you find people who are interested in discussing whether Scully got her cross for Christmas or for her 15th birthday and what difference it makes. Maybe you could even get into an argument about it.
In fact, I assume this must be what makes one a "fan" because it's sometimes the only definition I fit. At the moment I seem to be in the HP-fandom, yet I've never been a fan of the books in terms of, you know, really liking them. That's not a dismissal of the books as crap or something that sucks. They're just not books I ever enjoyed that much. They're not a personal love, book-wise. But there was stuff in them I wanted to talk about with people, so I wandered onto the Internet and found other people who liked talking about them too, with me. It seems silly to say I'm not in the fandom, exactly, even if I got into it in a strange way.
I've been thinking, though, about being a fan and how fans shouldn’t judge books on what they should be, according to us, but on what they are. I think that's true--it's a losing battle anyway. How can you judge something for what should have been? I remember saying that plenty of times in LOTR fandom regarding the movies--you can't judge the movies that got made against some fantasy movies in your head that would have been perfect but we'll never know. Otoh, I'm surprised by what sometimes seems like the idea that it's wrong to use a story to discuss your own opinions on something that story brings up because, I guess, to me this is part of fandom and part of what makes people love a book. If I'm talking about LOTR, for instance, I would presumably talk about what Tolkien seems to be saying about the world and things he believes to be true. In my experience as somebody who writes and edits for a living that's a big part of what stories are; a way of communicating an idea to someone. And as teratologist so brilliantly puts it, this is sometimes most obvious in fun stories where you just go with your instinct. I know my agent has pointed out things that are "my thing" that I write about, conflicts that interest me, values that come up again and again. Authors are often pretty open about things like this if they're called on it. Maybe they didn't intentionally set out to say, "This is what I believe," but when asked they often will say, "Well, yes, I guess I do feel that this is so..." Or maybe they'll explain how you misunderstood--that happens to. But there's a reason people make jokes like, "You've read one Thomas Hardy you've read them all." Holly Lisle puts it like this
Writing fiction is standing on the edge of the abyss of ignorance, looking across at the cliffs on the other side, and saying, "With nothing but words, I am going to build myself a bridge that takes me from here to there . . . and when I'm done, other people will be able to cross over that same bridge." It's an act of ultimate hubris, but of ultimate courage, too, because the abyss can eat you, and will if you slip.
So which bridges are worth building? You can't cover the whole abyss. You can run a thousand lines from one side to the other if you live long enough, and you won't even cast a shadow on the voracious ignorance that lies beneath. All you can do is span the darkness with your slender threads, and build them strong enough that people can traverse them, and make them interesting enough that people will take the risk.
Which bridges are worth risking life and limb and hope and soul to create? Only those that take you to someplace you have not yet been.
And how do you decide which bridges those might be? You ask yourself the following question: To what questions in life have I not yet found a satisfactory answer?
Sometimes having your manuscript analyzed --and here I think Original Writing is very different from fanfic because for some reason having someone else's text can remove you from view just a bit--is very much like a therapy session.
It's pointless, therefore, to say that any author should have written *our* story instead of his or her own. The same brain that created the characters and the beginning is going to write the ending. Ultimately that will probably make for the best story it can be, I think. But at the same time, it surprises me when it seems like this means somebody can't argue with whatever point of view seems to be being put forward. For instance, plenty of people read LOTR and remain completely convinced that Sam was the True Hero in the sense that he should have carried the ring to Mount Doom, and if he had he would have been able to destroy it because of his humble good-nature (already proven when he carried the ring briefly before). I've had this discussion with people before. To me, the idea doesn't work--nobody could destroy the ring, any lone ringbearer without a companion wouldn't have made it, there's a reason Frodo was right for his job and Sam was right for his job, yadda yadda yadda. But the point that person is arguing, imo, isn't so much that Tolkien wrote the wrong story the wrong way, but that they see and organize the world very differently. For them it's not just that they want Sam to be the big hero because they love him, but because that would say something about life that validates the way they see life. For them, there will always be that phantom ending, because it is the true answer to the questions the author raised.
That, to me, is part of fandom too. Probably more so if you're dealing with any canon that isn't finished, since we don't know really know what the author is saying until the author says it. It seems impossible to have a fandom without it, really, since fandom is not just about interaction between audience and story but also a community of people interacting with each other through the story. I think that's why, in my experience, people tend to gravitate towards people who respond similarly to the canon, because this is often because they have similar ideas about other things. Mostly everybody I was close with in XF fandom loved Mulder, and thought the idea of The Enemy as The Other was a lie, because the monster was always reflected in us. It seems impossible to think you'd bond with someone over such an abstract thing, but I think it just came out in what you talked about. In LOTR fandom I made close friends with hobbit-folk who liked talking about compassion--it's not all that different. It's easier when your canon happens to share the same priorities, but we don't always get to pick the canon that draws us. But fandom usually thrives on just these kinds of disagreements.
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I do think--and I think Elkins has said this--that there's just something very specific that makes you need to go to fandom and it's not always just loving the thing. I never felt any need to discuss LOTR with anyone until the movies came out. There's lots of books I've loved that I didn't need to talk about--in fact, it seems like some kinds of things are suited to making for a vibrant fandom when others aren't, and quality isn't the deciding factor.