A Culture of Our Own

News Media Commentary
Title:	A Culture of Our Own
Commentator:	Lis Coburn
Date(s):	February 7, 2021
Venue:	online
Fandom:
External Links:	A Culture of Our Own
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A Culture of Our Own has the subtitle: "If you think fan culture is leading us into artistic poverty, you don't know fan culture."

The author is Lis Coburn, and it was posted February 7, 2021 to the site "Blood Knife," a digital magazine about sci-fi, horror, and capitalism.

The essay is a response to The Hungry Ghosts of Late Capitalism and begins with:

‘Tis apparently the season for lockdowns, anxiety about American politics, and aggressively negative takes on fanfiction. Is something in the air? I was particularly struck by Colin Broadmoor’s claim here in Blood Knife magazine that “the original functions of fanfic […] are now meaningless and have been completely subsumed within a corporate media framework.” He describes fans as happy enablers of lazy content factories, saying, “[w]here once fandom served the needs of fans (telling new stories, letting people see themselves, offering alternative possibilities for how we understand heroes), today it serves only the needs of media conglomerates.”

Some Topics Discussed

• the futility and frustration people feel when people try to speak of groups of people as a single, unifying voice or community
• fandom is far from perfect
• fandom is full of smart, innovative, and progressive people
• a short history of the creation of Archive of Our Own
• terms such as Terms like “queerbaiting,” “whitewashing,” and “bury your gays” are now standard parts of media criticism and wider conversations "because of a solid decade of organized fan campaigns"
• fandom offers an accessible platform, as well as audience
• feedback and direct communication with other fans is what makes peoples' fanworks get better
• "Sometimes that call-and-answer [of fans and fanworks] reaches back into the mainstream. Fanfiction is an underground river that feeds all of culture, though fans who make it into the pros are often quiet about their origins."
• sometimes fans go on to create for-profit art and literary works
• Tumblr NSFW Content Purge
• fan sites with adult content struggle to find platforms that won't boot them off
• the grasping and powerful hands of Amazon.com
• shout outs and/or links to The Mary Sue, Geeks of Color, Transformative Works and Culture, The Stucky Library, Queering the Script, Fansplaining, Fanlore, and How Much Is That Geisha In the Window?

From the Essay

[Fans are] some of the smartest and most talented creators I’ve seen anywhere, whose time in fandom pushed them to ever-increasing levels of originality and innovation. I’ve been surrounded by progressives who have worked to create sustainable open-source web architecture, while actively campaigning for better mass-media offerings, more diverse stories, fairer working conditions for creators, along with copyright, obscenity, and telecommunications laws that favor ordinary people, small creators, and sex workers. Where the fuck have you been?

I’ve seen shitty parts of fandom: fans who pile harassment on actors of color for existing, who throw tantrums when a game launch gets pushed back because the devs can only work so fast, who sexually harass celebs online and write the skeeviest fanfic you’ve ever seen about children’s TV shows. They, alas, are also “us”, in that we are all collectively “fandom”. I’d gotten so secure in my worldview that I was like the old-school skiffy fans who complained a dozen years ago when Fanlore launched and documented a fanfic-focused, slash-oriented history of “fandom” that didn’t mention Worldcon or the Hugos once (how dare we!).

Fans are still using the basic functions of fanfiction to explore the themes—diverse representation, new stories, and alternate paradigms—Broadmoor claims they aren’t. Racebending and fancasting are still vibrant traditions that let fans of color reflect on how people like them might fit into the stories they love; alternate universes let fans imagine what kinds of societal change might have prevented a canonical tragedy. We’re questioning the definition of heroism all the time; Marvel Cinematic Universe fans, dissatisfied with Marvel’s limited and militaristic vision of heroism, ran with Captain America’s Depression-era origins to create a socialist Steve Rogers whose activism in the modern world went far beyond punching Nazis (and whose life expanded beyond the solitary masculine stoicism that seems to define him in the movies). One of the fundamental traits of fanfiction is to encourage creators to find corners and crevices in which an alternative narrative might take root. It allows consumers a voice to powerfully externalize the lifelong call-and-answer of the individual and the society around them.

I know that life is hard right now. If you’re not actually listening to the people who are succeeding at making positive change, then all you know is that society is broken and the world sucks. Yes, Disney and Amazon own practically everything. Yes, capitalism is terrible and we’re all going to die someday. Yes, it’s an uphill climb for creators to earn a living and for diverse creators to get their work out. But that’s only half the picture and if that’s all you care about, you’ll never figure out how anything can get better.