The Long-Delayed Fourth Wall Meta

Meta
Title:	The Long-Delayed Fourth Wall Meta (has the prefix: "Not April Fools" as it was posted April 1)
Creator:	FairestCat, and commenters
Date(s):	April 1, 2008
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	the fourth wall
External Links:	The Long-Delayed Fourth Wall Meta; (broken link) Live Version Archive
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The Long-Delayed Fourth Wall Meta is a LiveJournal post by FairestCat on April 1, 2008. It was written by a Bandom fan (see Bandom and the Fourth Wall), but addressed fourth-wall issues more generally.

Some Topics Discussed

• The Fourth Wall
• Violating the Fourth Wall
• fandom and visibility
• RPF
• Space: Above and Beyond fandom and interactions with TPTB
• different fandoms have different norms
• Korean pop fandom
• "Fandom in the Age of the Internet: Why the Wall is Crumbling"
• "Walls Have Two Sides: Who Controls The Wall"
• "Discovery and Consequences: What Happens When the Wall Comes Down"

Excerpts from the Post

In fanfic fandom we talk a lot about the fourth wall, the invisible separation between us, over here writing our fic, and the creators of the characters we're writing about. writing and acting and living their lives. It's a topic of particular interest in RPF fandoms, where our fic-objects are fictionalized versions of real-life people. Fans, and RPF fans in particular, can be really invested in keeping the fourth wall standing. It's part of how some fans compartmentalize, keeping the real people and the fictional characters separate in their heads. The fourth wall contributes to community cohesion, separating us, the writers and readers, from them, the objects of our stories. And it can serve as a protective barrier, shielding us from scrutiny and possible mockery. Although actually, I don't know if the fourth wall is beneficial as an actual protective barrier or merely as the perception of one. It's always been a permeable wall, but it feels safer knowing it's there. That perception of safety, of privacy and protection, can give writers the freedom to explore issues and themes and stories they might not be comfortable tackling in a more public environment.

I think what we're running into now, with more and more actors and celebrities not just knowing about fic fandom but actively poking around in it and even sometimes pandering to it, isn't actually anything new. It's the culmination of a process of increased visibility that started the moment fandom moved to the internet and accelerated rapidly with the move off of the listservs and onto lj.

We say it over and over again, the people we write fic about are not part of our community, this is not about or for them. And that's good, that's right. But we can't go around constantly reiterating their status as outside our community, as objects instead of participants, and then of and then demand that they conform to our community-specific standards and rules.

The fourth wall as we know it is coming down. Or at least becoming much thinner. There will always be -- and need to be -- some level of healthy distance between audience and performer, fan and fan object, I think both sides recognize that, but I think the sharp divide we often take as a given now is fast disappearing. And the thing is? I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. It's going to require us to adapt, to change some of the ways we do things, some of our assumptions and traditions, but if there's anything fandom's good at, it's change. It's going to be uncomfortable for a while, it already is. Increased exposure means increased opportunity for mocking and outrage. However, increased exposure also means increased opportunity for understanding, for more and more people outside fandom, particularly those who are objects of fannish attention, to come to understand fandom a little better. Personally, I don't think there's anything creepy or crazy about what we're doing here, and I'd much rather the artists I care enough about to spend my fannish time and my real money on were less inclined to think so too.

Excerpts from Comments

• comment by lapillus ("Also this isn't necessarily new. A dozen years ago Space:Above and Beyond fandom had an incredibly permeable fourth wall, more so than I've heard about today -- admittedly I'm not in Bandom so I'm not sure just how much permeability there is there, generally, but certainly more than any of the TV or Movie-centric fandoms I know currently. S:AAB was on just when AOL was first getting big and folks who hadn't been online previously were giving it a try. This includes one of the producers, several of the actors, a whole host of the techie types not to mention the parents, siblings and nieces of those involved. It made for very interesting chats and some interesting email exchanges. It had a gathering where only about 50% of the attendees were fans, the rest being folks involved with the production or their relatives (it also had a zine which we basically ended up using like a school year book with everybody signing copies and yes, the folks involved with the production getting copies of it and of the vids I made). It's the only fandom I've been in where I've plotted vids based on unaired scripts (which yes, I had copies of). It was fun and wild and intense and on the balance didn't seem to hurt either side. These days, because it's so exhausting it's not what I want generally from my fandoms (and these days the fandoms I'm in are just to big for the dynamic it had to work), but I'm very glad to have had it once and if I end up in a fandom where it happens again, I'm sure I'll sit back and enjoy the ride.")

• comment by nindulgence ("when someone who knows your home address (which you know because you received an unexpected package) asks you not to slash his character theres a very different weight to it than when an actor asks fans not to do it at a con. Eep! So much for aesthetic distance!")

• comment by FairestCat ("This is all just so fascinating to me. I really know nothing about S:AAB fandom, or even the show, to be honest. I really didn't come to fandom until the very tail end of the mailing list era but mostly really got involved on livejournal. I think it sounds like, from what you and others have described, that we are at a point now that's not dissimilar to what happened when fandom first got online, a massive spike in visibility, a marked increased in fan/creator interaction across the fourth wall and everybody scrambling a bit to keep up and decide whether we like it or not. This though sparked me off on a tangent, I'm afraid: It can also put the breaks on certain things; when someone who knows your home address (which you know because you received an unexpected package) asks you not to slash his character theres a very different weight to it than when an actor asks fans not to do it at a con. I'm profoundly uncomfortable with any situation in which actors or creators feel they are able to dictate to fans how they can and cannot respond to their work. Now what you're describing here is a particularly complex and awkward to navigate situation obviously, and I can see how the very closeness of the relationship would give the actor in question's words more impact, you happened to hit here on something I've actually been thinking about a lot lately, such that I ended up writing an entire post rather than spamming you with a ridiculously long and rather tangential comment.")

• comment by inamac ("Even earlier than that Blakes Seven fandom had an extremely close contact with the show while it was in production - there were fans on the production team, and it wasn't unusual for the actors to spend time with fans - there were usually fanzines lying around in the production office (fr some reason the smut was always on top of the pile...). One reason why there was almost no published slash until after the series aired was a result of a personal promise by one of the major zine editors to Gareth Thomas. In some ways the knowledge that the people who created/embody the characters you're playing with may be reading this stuff is a good thing for the fiction - it makes me try to write to the best of my ability. The source material deserves nothing less.")

• comment by fayemeadows ("I do consider those of us in bandom to be extremely lucky in the sense that with such gaps in the wall the people about whom we write seem fairly okay with the whole deal. They are willing to laugh about it, leave comments, rec fics to their friends, etc. They don't see it as some sort of violation, merely something that comes with the territory of being in the public eye. I'd rather they be amused than horrified, y'know? Plus, these folks put their lives on the Internet so I would be really surprised if they were opposed to what we do.")

• comment by nindulgence ("Excellent meta, as always! It's the culmination of a process of increased visibility that started the moment fandom moved to the internet and accelerated rapidly with the move off of the listservs and onto lj. There's also the fact that, over the same time period that fannish culture became so rapidly visible, it also became surprisingly mainstream (or, more precisely, mainstream culture became surprisingly fannish). Sitting inside working/playing on a computer all day went from being a standard signifier of pasty-faced nerddom to the dominant paradigm, glamorized in advertising as cutting-edge and desirable. Dressing up as a pop-culture icon much cooler than yourself went from being the hallmark of the pathetic Trekkie [sic] to being something that MTV marketed to its viewers as the most awesome experience ever! (selecting plain Joes and Janes and dressing them up to lip-synch to their favourite videos). Networks that had always aimed for water-cooler discussion of their shows began to see the possibilities of and encourage online discussion and participation as well. Post-LotR, movie studios have been mining our best-loved fannish tomes for broad-appeal blockbusters and merchandise and video games. It's astonishing, really, the extent to which many classic fannish texts and activities and modes of interacting have become mainstream in the last generation (mostly driven by market forces capitalizing on new technology): I'm not sure whether that shift has made the wall more permeable on the "mainstream" side or just made it shorter outright, but it's definitely had an effect.")

• comment by naanima ("This is fascinating to me because this concern for the crumbling of the 4th wall seem to be a very western concept. Asian pop culture pander to their fans to the point that there don't seem to be an existence of the 4th wall. Pop artists purposely play up the popular 'couples' within bands for their fans, fanfic and the love of m/m couples are so well known that they are often exploited for generating money and/or popularity on shows. As long as all involved (the celebrities and the fans) know that it is all a fantasy there seem to be little issue with it.")

• comment by pandorasblog ("I'm sure that the geekification of mainstream culture has a lot to do with it. A while back I saw some teenage girls in WH Smith looking through a computer magazine and discussing deviantART. For me that typified the fact that being into computers, the internet and certain kinds of popular culture obsessions are no longer sad things to be hidden away/poked fun at, or signs of failure at socialising/romance.")