Take two Excedrin and call me when the dust settles

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Title:	Take two Excedrin and call me when the dust settles
Creator:	wiliqueen
Date(s):	May 26, 2007
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:	Take two Excedrin and call me when the dust settles, Archived version
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Take two Excedrin and call me when the dust settles is a 2007 post by wiliqueen.

Topics Discussed

• Violating the Fourth Wall
• FanLib
• how fandom is, and isn't, defined
• Fandom and Profit
• TPTB's Involvement with Fandom

Excerpts

Virtually every single one of us reinvented the fanfic wheel in isolation. Prior to the Internet explosion, there were pretty much two outcomes of that: You bumped into someone participating in fandom through newsletters and cons and such and had the "I didn't know!" moment... or you continued to create in isolation, maybe just in your own head and not even on paper, convinced you were nuts. In either case, you may or may not have had any aspirations toward pro/original fiction. If you didn't, life was a helluva lot more fun if you'd found fandom. If you did, there were circles where you could get feedback and develop your skills in both fannish and non-fannish contexts...although if you joined a writing group including people who wrote in certain genres, chances are at least one of them would be in fandom, which brings us back to step one. :-)

Fast-forward to, oh, about 1996 or so. Those among us who were in online fandom at the time will know what I mean when I say I have one word: Buffy. Other fandoms were born around the same time, and were taking advantage of new express lanes on the information superhighway (remember when the media called it that? *g*) as fast as they could be built. But this was something completely else, a genre show that morphed almost overnight from "cult" status to mainstream hit. The WB's marketing team went all-out with the new Web toys like kids on Christmas morning, and gave us *drumroll* the Bronze. Raise your hand if you wasted HOURS on that board. C'mon, raise 'em higher. Yeah. :-) And then the inevitable happened: People who wouldn't know a fanzine if it bit 'em on the hand, and who would picture a guy in stripes with a ball and chain if you said "con," were writing fanfic. And posting it to the board. Y'know, the board where half the writing and production staff, two or three of the cast (beware of bored Alyson Hannigan procrastinating painting her ceiling!), and of course Big Ol' Geekboy Joss himself, were sometimes wasting as much time as the rest of us. At least every other day we had to explain to some lovely, enthusiastic person that there were places for that, and it wasn't here. Because if you did it here, they would have to take our toys away. Now, this in and of itself was nothing new. There had always been the need to grab someone by the back of the belt and yank them back from the edge of the Lunatic Fringe cliff. Or, if they were particularly determined, cut our losses and hide until the "thud" stopped echoing through the canyon and the dust settled. But now we were running out of hands to grab all those belts, not just on the Bronze but all over the place. Peer education is easy when a trickle of true believers is stumbling on your doorstep. When they're arriving in Ellis Island droves, you'd better accept that they're going to start forming their own communities.

Which is, in fact, exactly what's happened. At this stage of the game there's a lot of hinky intersection, especially in spaces like LJ with a wide generational and experience range. But there are also parallel spaces where fannish creativity is flourishing with little or no contact with what I've been calling, for want of a better term, "traditional fandom." Some of them have outright rejected what we try to tell them, and I'm not sure they're entirely wrong to do so. Yeah, we're just trying to give them the benefit of our own experience, but when it comes right down to it? We're trying to cover our own asses. Fandom is by its very nature an anarchic structure. When one or more of us say "Stop peeing in the pool, ya dumb kids!" (and I've seen it phrased both more and less tactfully and/or effectively), we have exactly as much authority as the addressee chooses to give us.

Guess what? It's no longer just "us" and the Lunatic Fringe. The "other" fannish communities are starting to have been around long enough to develop traditions of their own. And to have little or no interest in ours. We might not approve, but by our own ethos, if it doesn't threaten us, that's not for us to judge. The question then becomes: To what extent is the parallel activity a threat? Which aspects of "MySpace fandom" are genuinely careening inexorably toward a destruction of the grey area, dooming us all to be officially lumped in with DVD pirates and/or psychofan stalkers forevermore?

I don't have an answer to that. Some people seem to be working on it, like the commenter who proposed that FanLib's fic archive model might be salvageable if it were restricted to the fandoms for which they have industry sponsorship. That would present its own kinks that would need to be worked out, and I seriously doubt anyone I know would be interested. But it's not hard to imagine it serving somebody else's needs, and not bringing down the industry on all our inoffensive heads with the Thunder of Mighty Intellectual Property Vengeance.

This is also part of what I was thinking of when I said the other day that we were "talking past one another." FanLib personnel keep protesting that they are fans, and that some of them have come out of the fannish community. A lot of people are taking this as pure cynical marketingspeak, but here's the thing: It's probably true. What they're failing to recognize -- albeit with considerably less excuse -- is the same thing industry skeptics like Denis McGrath lack the perspective to grasp: There is no such thing as THE fannish community. There hasn't been for at least a decade, and probably longer. And, as one of the commenters so succinctly put it, we are not the fannish community FanLib is looking for.

Comments

2007

Diane Duane: I have doubts as to whether fic-writing fandom -- fandom at large, I mean, as it exists on/around LJ and many other places -- is at all tameable. The kind of fandom likely to colonize a "monetized" platform will probably only resemble free-range fanfic fandom in the way domesticated beer yeast resembles the wild yeasts that are encouraged to fall into fruit mash in Belgium and turn it into lambic. Lambic is utterly unpredictable, never the same from one batch to the next...and very yummy, partly because of that crazy variation.

wiliqueen: We know that, but intra-fandom politicking happens as much under the radar as fic does. There's no reason for them to have even heard of FW, and should they happen to glance at it for some bizarre reason, they have no context in which to place 90% of it. And even FW still operates on the "us and the Lunatic Fringe" model to a great extent.

rez: I don't think it's possible to overstate the degree to which big media (an oligarchy at this point) understands that a business model based on control of big expensive distribution methods is doomed. They're trying legislative/judicial methods as a substitute means of control--the customer as criminal--but also recognize the need to reassemble the famous mass audience somehow in a way that will keep it within reach of and responsive to advertisers. So there's a carrot, and there's a stick. FanLib is one of the carrot-providers, and it may also eventually figure into the stick business given that it's basically owned by Yahoo! VCs and CBS, and that the RIAA strategist who gave us the DCMA is the head of their first project. It's not a conspiracy, just business as usual. And if it works well enough, then maybe we can hope that they'll leave those of us who aren't interested alone. But big media's bigfooted behavior toward its target markets to date doesn't encourage optimism. So even if a lot of the fans whom FanLib is interested in couldn't care less about "us," it's important that we raise a ruckus as we have been, imo. But I couldn't agree more that thinking "we" somehow have the Good Word on who's a fan and who's not is simply incorrect. Thank you again for the valuable perspective.

vaznetti: I'm not sure there ever was a single fannish community, but certainly, there isn't now, even though people do come out of their own isolated communities and into what I think of as "fandom" (by which I really mean, multifannish people on livejournal, these days) or to a more traditional fannish experience. But you can spend years writing in a fandom like harry Potter and never encounter anything like that. But I think that attacks and threats (real or perceived) on fannish practices in general tend to make some members of the community try to pull together -- I mean, I've also seen people on the fannish side claiming to be speaking in this dialogue on behalf of "fandom," and even some talk from other fans of that being quasi-official representation. Which is kind of crazy, but I can see where the urge comes from.

cofax7: Great post. I'm also occasionally frustrated by the fact that Fandom is expected to have crackpots, and we're tainted by association with them, while nobody blames, oh, Ellen Kushner for Harlan Ellison's misdeeds, you know? And yes, indeed, on the fact that fandom does police itself, but there's a limit to how effective such policing can be, and frankly that not all such policing is even right to do. (I'm reminded of the dogpile on cousinjean some years back, when she asked for financial contributions to fund her finishing some fannish WIPs. Wrong, yeah, violating community norms, yeah, but did she really deserve that kind of vilification in public? Probably not.)

2015

Anne Jamison: This resonates so much with conversations I’ve been having in the last few days. The sense it evokes of The Impending and Irreversible Doom of Change and Things Are Not What They Were has been such a constant in my research on historical fandoms. Although often exaggerated, those fears are also always justified. Very often what they fear will change *does* change, and *is* lost. What is more rare here is not only the understanding that there will always be a group of fans for whom your Irreversible Doom of Change is the happy status quo but that there probably already is a group of fans doing things quite differently from you who can lay equal claim to fandom. As striking as the continuities with current conversations, though, is the way this piece acts as a marker of the very kind of change it describes. 2007 is ancient history (MySpace fandoml! LOL). In the longer post and in the comments, we see bemusement at the idea that some fans might take headcanon or fanon to be canon, and that showrunners should take heed or be wrong (or worse). The commenters have never seen such a thing! This just seems quaint now. Ditto the near disgust expressed for creators reading or responding to fanworks—not that many fan writers don’t still share this sense of horror, but that these encounters are so common. Gotcha moments on talk shows, cons, mainstream journalism, widely publicized published fanworks, Wattpad, and the kind of sponsored contests and licensing this piece is so wary of—they happen all the time. It’s then doubly interesting to understand that this same “natural” horror of fanwork and creator encounters was itself a recent development. Arthur Conan Doyle had his favorite pastiches and parodies. The fears may be justified, but the changes also don’t always play out exactly as expected. The new ubiquity and visibility of fanworks, for example, has largely done away with the fear of being shut down if “they” find out. These same exponentially large numbers make finding *any* readers, much less official ones, a common source of frustration for many fan writers in larger fandoms, but the expectations for readership have also changed in those communities. On Wattpad, “only” a few million hits on a piece of fanfic is no longer really anything to write home about, while more senior fan writers (with more than, say, four years in fandom under their belt) don’t even recognize Wattpad as having anything to do with “real” fan writing experience.