Fanfic is Good for Two Things - Greasing Engines and Killing Brain Cells
| Academic Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Fanfic is Good for Two Things - Greasing Engines and Killing Brain Cells |
| Commentator: | Fiona Carruthers |
| Date(s): | May 2004 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | |
| External Links: | Fanfic is Good for Two Things - Greasing Engines and Killing Brain Cells; WebCite |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Fanfic is Good for Two Things - Greasing Engines and Killing Brain Cells is a 2004 academic article by Fiona Carruthers.
It was published in Particip@tions Volume 1, Issue 2 (May 2004).
The "test subjects" are members of a very small fan community, called "Smartania", ("Skewering stupidity so you don't have to.") [1], a badfic mocking site. An early link to the site. A later link to the site. Also see So, what the hell is this all about, anyway?.
Some Topics Discussed
- good fans and bad fans
- textual poaching
- the bricolage effect of fan writings
- suckfic (a kind of badfic) and hackfiction and hackers (MSTing)
Oddities
This paper feels very feral.
The author's paper never ties this fan community in with similar communities such as Godawful Fan Fiction.
The paper uses language such as "suckfic" and "hackfic," yet never mentions "badfic," a term much more pervasive.
While the fan community practices what appears to be MSTing, a fairly common fannish activity, it never uses that word, and only mentions Mystery Science Theater 3000 once. Nor does it discuss sporking.
The essay's author infiltrates this small fan group with a pseud and appears to quote them without permission.
It is unclear if the author of this paper actively decided not to expand their horizons, or if the tiny, tiny study group and scope was by ignorance or laziness. In any case, by not discussing contexts, it makes much of the extrapolations somewhat useless.
The site owners wrote:
I have, at last, seen the very living end, I think. Someone has actually invested time in writing about the social implications and meanings of ... hacking fanfiction. Perhaps ol' Dave Cockram, devloper and idealist and wank, was right- perhaps people in academic circles DO give a flying fuck about fanfiction and the process of hacking it.
'Fanfic is Good for Two Things - Greasing Engines and Killing Brain Cells'" by Fiona Carruthers, who quoted Smartania.com on the above and failed to realize that the original quote was from The Matrix.
Whyever do I suppose that this is untrue? And how is it that every pretentious, little fool that seems to approach the "subject of hacking" from an academic standpoint manages to miss the point of, well, everything? Why do we hack fanfic? Because it amuses us. That is, in the end, the number one reason and all others fall in behind it. It's funny. Smartania likes funny. Funny make Smartanians laugh. Run, Spot, run. Truly, the concept is that simple and yet Miss Social Mores and The Anthropoloical Ramifications of Hacking Fanfiction fails to get it.
Not getting the point that hacking = amusement is, I think, what spawns the essence of so much gai. When you remove the fact that we have a good time making fun of moronia, then you have this presumption that Smartania is on some kind of crusade to save the purity of fandoms being hacked, to save the characters, to save the show, to save Bobo the Clown before he sits down at the Council of Elrond and asks "yo, what up?". When you fail to see that we're having a good time, you become in danger of being truly stupid and thinking we're serious. You think that we're actually experiencing the emotions we play at while hacking. You are, in fact, so stupidly in danger of thinking that we're approaching the hacking of fic with passionate outrage that it's pathetic.
Hacking funny. Smartania amused. Additionally, confrontation with indignant morons also funny. Smartania amused. Nowhere will you find us standing with virtual shields and virtual arrows. Nowhere will you see us standing protectively in front of our fandoms, ready to grimly face the tide of impending moronia. I think it's mentioned on the site more than once - we're not on a crusade here. We're just out to have a good time and point at the gai in the process.
You would think someone investing so much time and academic masturbation into the subject would have had the intelligence to have seen that.
-- PKWench[2]
Excerpts from the Essay
In this essay I explore a subset of the fan fiction internet community, ‘hackers’, who pride themselves on violating fan fiction writings. I specifically concentrate on those who are active at www.smartania.com within the ‘Mystery Suckfic Theatre 3000’, a hacking base which concentrates largely on fan fictions from The X-Files and Japanese Anime fandoms and one in which I, after some difficulty and several ‘flames’, established myself on the boards under a pseudonym and managed to conduct some virtual ethnographic research in order to acquire an understanding of the underlying motivations behind what hackers do, why they derive pleasure from their activities and to place them within the wider context of fan activity. I will examine the notion of ‘distinction’ within fan communities, demonstrating that hacking functions to distinguish between ‘legitimate’ fan writers and ‘illegitimate’ fan writers and acts to establish hierarchies within fan communities. I discuss ‘hacking’ as a weapon against other fans’ incompetence as writers, serving as a means of regulating and manipulating fan writing activity on the net, and actively marginalizing certain fan writings which, according to them, do not have the right to claim authorial ownership over the text. I draw on concepts of distinction, cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984), poaching (Jenkins, 1992) and bricolage to analyse the complex relationship between hackers and other fan fiction writers. And I explore the contradictory nature of the hacking community as one which both exploits and undermines certain fan activities while also inherently relying upon them for the production and persistence of meaning within the community.
As a type of fan activity that relies on and derives meaning from other fan activities, specifically that of fan writing, ‘hack fiction’ represents a new complexity in the field of fan creativity. Rather than employing the television show as its primary material, hackers isolate the secondary text, the fan fiction, and invert the more common trend of fan activity by prioritising and situating this as the primary text through which all meaning within the community is produced. Henry Jenkins has referred to fan creativity as a form of ‘poaching’ in which the fan attempts to gain authorship over the text by ‘continuously re-evaluating his or her relationship to the fiction and reconstructing its meanings according to more immediate interests.’
Instead of poaching the television show, appropriating and extracting various meanings, whether implicit or explicit, from its structure, hackers essentially poach the poachers, stalking members of the fan fiction community across cyberspace and penetrating their works by literally imposing their voices upon the text. Hackers are not merely critics of fan fiction; they go one step further. To criticise is to maintain a distance from and a respect of the boundary of the writer’s universe; hacking allows them the opportunity to actively and directly disrupt that world. Hackers seek out ‘bad’ fan fiction, fan writings which, for the hacker, do not meet a satisfactory standard of writing and ‘hack’ the stories, inserting their own mocking comments into the body of the original text. Labelling such stories as ‘suckfic’, they parody the writings of a number of (usually unwitting) fan writers and it is this ethic of parody which forms the basis of the hacking community. While fan fiction depends upon an intensive knowledge of the show in order to competently communicate meaning, hack fiction relies not only upon a knowledge of the show, but also upon an almost theoretical, scholarly awareness of the codes and conventions operating within fan fiction itself. This knowledge becomes the unifying factor within the hacker community, allowing the group to develop a sort of anti fan-fic meta-text. The hacker creates a social atmosphere based on a potent dislike of ‘suckfic’ writing, and this environment becomes the foundation for every type of active exchange within the community. Competence of expression is of vital importance within the community, building upon a pre-accepted notion of its members as inhabiting a somewhat elevated position within fandom discourse in general.
In the view of the hacker, however, bad fan writing reflects badly upon fan culture at large by disrupting the potential of the fan to become the author of the product. It functions only to serve the insecurities of the fan-consumer by exemplifying the frustrations of fan culture: the inability of the fan writer to properly exercise their authorial control over the show and to unjustly represent the wider, more competent fan writing community. One hackfic writer told me:
<<It’s also a lot harder to find decent stuff (fan fiction) these days due to the sheer mass of it about. Most of it (is) written by people who aren't really that interested in gaining any skills as writers (I so hate calling them that.). It all comes down to the writer at the end of the day. I remember reading fics that made me feel sad, made me laugh, and left me in awe of the writers talent …Now? After wading through 30 matrix fics about Neo boning Agent Smith or Morpheus all I feel is the burn of bile at the back of my throat.>> (5.1.03)
For hackfiction writers, knowing how to read a show ‘correctly’ functions as a prerequisite to knowing how to write the show ‘correctly’, and acts as a biased predetermination of one’s competence of expression and communication in their membership of the community. As Jenkins notes, ‘an individual’s socialisation into fandom often requires learning “the right way” to read as a fan’ (Jenkins, 1992: 89). It also works to reinforce exactly what ‘good’ writing should inspire in the reader of fan fiction. As one hackfic writer said:
<< I'm sat here hacking a Blairfic when I have work by friends who are genuine writers sat here on my computer waiting to be read. Work filled with real emotions, real angst and fear and love and wrongness, and most importantly its really well written and genuinely entertaining and moving. I could be reading that instead of this lifeless, meaningless dreck, but no. Bleh. >> (PKTechboy)
Playing the Bricoleur
This is not to imply, however, that hackers insist on a singular way of writing fan fiction. The fact that they believe that there is a ‘correct’ way to read and ‘write’ the show does not mean that there is no original way to write fan fiction. Rather, they insist on the ability to emphasise the author’s voice in the writings in order to fully communicate the meaning which they have drawn from the text of the television show to other readers and writers of fan fiction. This is subsumed into the wider ideology of the hacking community as a means of maintaining the constancy of the bricolage effect of fan writings. If fan writers can continue to ‘poach’ the text so that they gain a certain ‘authorial’ status over the text and essentially make the text submissive to the re-workings of their discretion and the imposition of their meanings, then the activity of fan writing assumes a bricolage effect, a challenge to the dominant culture, perceived and embodied within the original text of the show. Fan writers engage in a game of appropriation and re-appropriation of the text, forming their own style which, though not entirely subversive of the original text, does empower and prioritise the fan-author voice rather than that of the original ‘author’ of the show.
In these ways, and indeed in many more ways which are beyond the scope of this paper, the hacking community inhabits a complex space within fan territory. Concerned with the writings of fans and the production of meaning, they seek to safeguard and protect the fans’ relationship with the text, giving the voice of the ‘authentic’ and ‘legitimate’ fan writer precedence over his authorial claim to the text. They simultaneously work to marginalize the works of certain authors, denying them their voices within fan culture and their meanings in relation to the primary text of the television show, whilst creating and reinforcing distinctions and hierarchies within and between fan communities. However, they are also essentially bound to the texts that they hack, forcing them to at least unconsciously accept and acknowledge the meanings produced by these ‘deviant’ fan writers. In the process of denying them these meanings and performing the rituals of hacking practice upon them, they are coerced into a mutually complex relationship with them, one which constantly reinforces their dependence upon ‘suckfic’ writers for the production and maintenance of meaning within the hacking community and intrinsically causing them to continuously question, negotiate and re-examine their own positions within the broader expanses of fan culture.