Skip to main content

Home/ fanfic forensics/ Group items tagged fandom:general

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Nele Noppe

Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models | Scott | Tr... - 1 views

  • n particular, recent work on online gift economies has acknowledged the inability to engage with gift economies and commodity culture as disparate systems, as commodity culture begins selectively appropriating the gift economy's ethos for its own economic gain.
  • My concern, as fans and acafans continue to vigorously debate the importance or continued viability of fandom's gift economy and focus on flagrant instances of the industry's attempt to co-opt fandom, is that the subtler attempts to replicate fannish gift economies aren't being met with an equivalent volume of discussion or scrutiny.
  • There are a number of important reasons why fandom (and those who study it) continue to construct gift and commercial models as discrete economic spheres. This strategic definition of fandom as a gift economy serves as a defensive front to impede encroaching industrial factions. H
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • at the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation"
  • Thus, there is both a legal and social imperative to view fandom as transforming the objects of commodity culture into gifts, a transformative process "where value gets transformed into worth, where what has a price becomes priceless, where economic investment gives way to sentimental investment" (Jenkins et al. 2009b), and where bonds of community are formed and strengthened.
  • For other scholars, who foresee the commercialization of fandom's gift economy as an alternately unnerving and empowering inevitability, the possibility of fans monetizing their own modes of production is posed as an alternate form of preemptive "protection."
  • though monetizing fan practice to preserve the underlying ideals of fandom's gift economy might seem counterintuitive,
  • Richard Barbrook, reflecting back on his 1998 essay "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy" in 2005, acknowledges that constructing commodity culture and gift economies in binary terms is problematic.
  • commodity economies and gift economies are always already enmeshed,
  • Although De Kosnik asserts that "the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies"
  • Media producers, primarily through the lure of "gifted" ancillary content aimed at fans through official Web sites, are rapidly perfecting a mixed economy that obscures its commercial imperatives through a calculated adoption of fandom's gift economy, its sense of community, and the promise of participation.
  • The regifting economy that is emerging, I argue, is the result of the industry's careful cultivation of a parallel fan space alongside grassroots formations of fandom.
  • regifting economy is meant to synthesize the negative social connotations tied to the practice of regifting with a brief analysis of why acafans and existing fan communities should be aware and critical of these planned communities and their purpose as a site of initiation for the next generation of fans.
  • Henry Jenkins and others (2009a), adopting the term moral economy from social historian E. P. Thompson and questioning its applicability to the exchange of digital media, state that the moral economy is "governed by an implicit set of understandings about what is 'right' or 'legitimate' for each player to do."
  • the social stigmas attached to regifting are rooted in the act's inherent subterfuge, breaking the rules of the moral economy by masking something old as something new, something unwanted as desirable. If "the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange [is] that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people" (Hyde 1983:57), then "we cannot really become bound to those who give us false gifts" (70).
  • This construction of men as agents of capitalism with no understanding of the (frequently feminized) gift economy or its functioning continues to be evoked in anxieties surrounding the masculine/corporate exploitation of female fan communities and their texts.
  • media producers pushing these ancillary content models as the "white man keepers" of online fan culture who have failed to understand that it is the reciprocity and free circulation of fan works within female fan communities that identifies them as communities.
  • restricting the circulation o
  • its unrestricted movement.
  • Positioned precariously between official/commercial transmedia storytelling systems (Jenkins 2006:93–130) and the unofficial/gifted exchange of texts within fandom, ancillary content models downplay their commercial infrastructure by adopting the guise of a gift economy, vocally claiming that their goal is simply to give fans more—more "free" content, more access to the show's creative team. The rhetoric of gifting that accompanies ancillary content models, and the accompanying drive to create a community founded on this "gifted" content, is arguably more concerned with creating alternative revenue streams for the failing commercial model of television than it is with fostering a fan community or encouraging fan practices.
  • By regifting a version of participatory fan culture to a general audience unfamiliar with fandom's gift economy, these planned communities attempt to repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new
  • Although it could be argued that fandom also polices its boundaries and subjects, its motivations for doing so are ultimately about protecting, rather than controlling, the ideological diversity of fannish responses to the text. As Hellekson (2009) notes, "learning how to engage [with fandom and its gift economy] is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan."
  • Although fandom responds to its own mainstreaming within convergence culture by fortifying its borders and rites of initiation, ancillary content models are opening their doors to casual viewers unfamiliar with what fandom has historically valued and how it functions
  • Whether or not ancillary content models are being actively deployed as a device to rein in and control fandom, they are serving as a potential gateway to fandom for mainstream audiences, and they are pointedly offering a warped version of fandom's gift economy that equates consumption and canonical mastery with community.
  • As this example suggests, ancillary content models offer few incentives for fans already enmeshed in grassroots creative fan communities to contribute, and there is consequently less opportunity for participants to be exposed to and initiated into those fan communities.
  • More frequently than not, fannish participation is restricted to enunciative forms of fan production (Fiske 1992:38), such as posting to message boards and the collaborative construction of the show's wiki.
  • The result, according to Kristina Busse (2006), is that "certain groups of fans can become legit if and only if they follow certain ideas, don't become too rebellious, too pornographic, don't read too much against the grain."
  • Perhaps one of the central reasons why fans continue to cast a wary eye at these planned communities and their construction of a "legitimate" fandom is because they recognize the gifts being given mass audiences as their own.
  • spectacular case that potentially overshadows more covert examples.
  • male fans have historically sought professional status or financial compensation for their creative works more frequently than their female counterparts
  • media producers shape their definition of an ideal fandom, it is increasingly one that is defined as fanboy specific, or one that teaches its users to consume and create in a fanboyish manner by acknowledging some genres of fan production and obscuring others.
  • ancillary content models
  • Given the long, gendered history of fan communities and their relationship with producers, and the frequent alignment of gift economies with "feminine" forms of social exchange
Nele Noppe

Glossary | Organization for Transformative Works - 0 views

  • Fanwork The creative work done by fans for fannish purposes.
  • Media fandom ''Media fandom is generally used to refer to fictional, Western fandoms based on movies or television'' (from http://fanlore.org/wiki/Media_fandom). Books, comics, video games, anime/manga, and real people fandoms often intersect with, but also exist in parallel to, media fandom.
  • Remix culture Remix culture is a neologism that describes a culture of creativity based on previous creations. This is in contrast with permission culture, which aims to bind derivative creativity to the permission of the license holders. Both terms are simplified abstractions for current political and legal positions. (adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_culture)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Transformative Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators.
Nele Noppe

Different attitudes in different fandoms - 0 views

  • I've been spending a lot more time lately dipping my toes back into old slash fandom waters and it makes me wonder if the general attitude of "it's all good" that I see in the HP fandom has spoiled me for participation in some of the other fandoms. Especially the fandoms where the fen seem to be older (late 40's and up). I'm fine as long as I just read fics, but when I try to interact with some of the fen I often feel like I've gone back in time. Especially when talking about gay sex.
Nele Noppe

Ian Bogost - Against Aca-Fandom - 1 views

  • But for the academic critic, I think the stakes are higher. One can like or dislike something, but we scholars, particularly of popular media, have a special obligation to explain something new about the works we discuss. There are plenty of fans of The Wire and Mad Men and Halo and World of Warcraft out there. The world doesn't really need any more of them. What it does need is skeptics, and the scholarly role is fundamentally one of skepticism.
  • While media scholars do not solely write about what we like, the prevalence of books focused on "quality television" shows that appeal to academics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, and now Mad Men—especially when compared to the lack of similar volumes or essays about more lowbrow or mainstream programs—suggests that taste is often more of a motivating factor for our scholarship than we admit. We should own up to our own fannish (or anti-fannish) tendencies regarding our objects of study, not regarding fan practices as something wholly separate from our academic endeavors by acknowledging how taste structures what we choose to write about. I'd push it further: the media scholar ought to resist aca-fandom, even as he or she embraces it. The fact that something feels pleasurable or enjoyable or good (or bad) need not be rejected, of course, but it ought to issue an itch, a discomfort. As media scholars, we ought to have self-doubt about the quality and benefit of the work we study. We ought to perform that hesitance often and in public, in order to weave a more complex web around media—not just to praise or blame particular works.
  • In this regard, I disagree with Jason when he says that "humanities scholars don't typically brand ourselves as fans of our objects of research." I think this is just plain wrong, and not just for pop-culture scholars. More often than not, humanists in general get into what they do precisely because they are head-over-heels in love with it, whether "it" be television, videogames, Shakespeare, Martin Heidegger, the medieval chanson de geste, the Greek lyric poem, or whatever else. Specialty humanities conferences are just fan conventions with more strangely-dressed attendees. Humanists are doe-eyed romantics, even as they are also snarly grouches.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Embracing aca-fandom is a bad idea. Not because it's immoral or crude, but because it's too great a temptation. Those of us who make an enviable living being champions of media, particularly popular media, must also remain dissatisfied with them. We ought to challenge not only ourselves, our colleagues, and our students—but also the public and the creators of our chosen media. We ought not to be satisfied. That's the price of getting to make a living studying television, or videogames, or even Shakespeare.
Nele Noppe

When I Became a Mom I Put Away Childish Things | Geek Feminism Blog - 0 views

  • And even as a convergence culture encourages and invited media property holders to create and engage fans, such behavior remains generally perceived as ridiculous, embarrassing, and often hidden–unless it revolves around more masculine exploits such as sports teams, of course. Fantasy football and wearing team colors are acceptable behaviors where fanfic and wearing Hogwarts uniforms are not.
  • Not only are traditionally female fan objects and fan engagements devalued, the very gender identity of the fan thus becomes problematic: reading done in private by women is a selfish and time-wasting activity, and fannish investment is a selfish and time-wasting squandering of emotion. Mothers, however, are meant to focus their activities and emotions on one target only: their family.
  • So what is it then that makes a fannish mom such a threat, such an offense? Fannish practices are a focus away from the children, from a mother’s duty to put her home, husband, and family first rather than to indulge herself, both literally and metaphorically.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But that’s not the end of the fannish mom’s depravity: media fandom in particular often engages women’s sexuality with its erotic writings, explicit imagery, and frank discussion of nonstandard desires. As such, it not only juxtaposes the selfless mom identity against the selfish fan identity, but also juxtaposes the sexless madonna against the perverse whore.
  • Within fandom the geek hierarchy is alive and well: who doesn’t like to think of those folks weirder than ourselves–and if noone’s left, we still have the furries! That many fans themselves seem to think of their hobby as the opposite of life is certainly noteworthy, but the insult is often modified into terms of age, becoming “Don’t you have better things to do as a grown up. My parents would never sit and discuss a TV show online.” Likewise, there’s an expectation among many younger fans that they themselves will eventually “grow up” and leave fandom. Adulthood is in this context seen as fandom’s antithesis, and parenthood is often the ultimate marker of adult status.
  •  
    And even as a convergence culture encourages and invited media property holders to create and engage fans, such behavior remains generally perceived as ridiculous, embarrassing, and often hidden-unless it revolves around more masculine exploits such as sports teams, of course. Fantasy football and wearing team colors are acceptable behaviors where fanfic and wearing Hogwarts uniforms are not.
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Introduction - 1 views

  • These fans feel a deep sense of community and are engaged in a complex subcultural economy—using work time to write about copyrighted characters, teaching one another how to use complex technological equipment to create zines for free, and so on
  • fan vids address many of the issues raised during my search for a perfect cover image: each draws from a variety of sources that may be familiar to a particular community of media fans but often are more obscure to other TV viewers. Explaining how and why a particular scene resonates for a fan may indeed rely on the shared knowledge of a story, vid, or central fan discussion.
  • The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning, when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn't offer—dominated as it is by male producers—
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Some scholars posit that today all viewers are interpellated as fans, that they are invited to engage fannishly by creating content and engaging within an imaginary online community. Does this mean that the old subcultural stance of media fandom has become obsolete in the face of a general shift in media consumption? Moreover, if such convergence can allow fans to become parts of the media industry, should fans embrace these options? And how are these economic issues deeply gendered if predominantly female spaces embrace gift cultures while men are more likely to turn their fannish endeavors into for-profit projects?
  • Fandom is always more complicated than the stories we tell about it, and scholars need to be careful not to create an imaginary feminist idyll. Simply inverting the gaze may keep subject/object relations unquestioned—a concern that has become especially important as queer and trans studies have complicated any naive feminist binaries that may have held sway during early years of media fandom. Likewise, as [End Page 106] De Kosnik and Russo illustrate, an unequivocal embrace of noncommodified fan work remains problematic within a world that requires paying the bills.
Nele Noppe

A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture - 0 views

  • Fan community clearly cannot be constituted by anyone other than the fans themselves. This tenet remains central to the constitution of fan culture, just as it is continually renewed by the exchange of symbolic gifts.
  • they exchange personally charged aspects of themselves in a gift culture whose field of value specifically excludes profit, further separating their community from the larger (male-gendered) community of commerce.
  • To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over there—to become part of a larger metatext, the off-putting jargon and the unspoken rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain. Within this circle of [End Page 113] community—and in media fandom, women overwhelmingly make up this community1—learning how to engage is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • At the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation. The general understanding is that if no money is exchanged, the copyright owners have no reason to sue because they retain exclusive rights to make money from their property
  • The notion of the gift is thus central to fan economy as it currently stands, although, as Abigail De Kosnik argues in her essay in this issue, it may be time for the community to consider creating an alternative model that will permit women to profit.
  • This exchange in the fan community is made up of three elements related to the gift: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.2 The tension and negotiation between the three result in fan creation of social relationships that are constructed voluntarily on the basis of a shared interest—perhaps a media source like a TV show or, perhaps, fandom itself. Fan communities as they are currently comprised, require exchanges of gifts: you do not pay to read fan fiction or watch a fan-made music vid.
  • Fans insist on a gift economy, not a commercial one, but it goes beyond self-protective attempts to fly under the radar of large corporations, their lawyers, and their cease-and-desist letters. Online media fandom is a gift culture in the symbolic realm in which fan gift exchange is performed in complex, even exclusionary symbolic ways that create a stable nexus of giving, receiving, and reciprocity that results in a community occupied with theorizing its own genderedness.
  • But the items exchanged have no value outside their fannish context. In fact, it is likely that they do not literally exist; fandom's move to the Internet means that the items exchanged are hyperreal and capable of being endlessly replicated.
  • Money is presented less as a payment than as a token of enjoyment.
  • The items offered as gifts are not destroyed but are incorporated into a multivocal dialogue that creates a metatext, the continual composition of which creates a community, and the rhetorical stance of that dialogue is to create a gendered space.
  • The gifts have value within the fannish economy in that they are designed to create and cement a social structure, but they themselves are not meaningful outside their context.
  • Each proffered item represents an aspect of the giver: time, talent, love, desire. The result—"personally charged"12 gifts, responses in kind—generates a female-gendered community, but the role of the individual within that community is equally crucial.
  • When the rules of exchange are broken, the punishment is swift. One recent incident that exemplifies this was the attempt of (male) venture capitalists to profit financially from (female-generated) fan fiction.
  • The FanLib debacle illustrates that attempts to encroach on the meaning of the gift and to perform a new kind of (commerce-based) transaction with fan-created items will not be tolerated. Henry Jenkins notes, "They simply hadn't really listened to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction."17 The site attempted to bypass the artwork-generating [End Page 117] fan community altogether—a serious misreading of FanLib's audience. FanLib broke the rules of the community's engagement by misreading "community" as "commodity," and the site failed thanks to intense backlash, an expression of fannish defense of their field of value.
Nele Noppe

Abstracts - 0 views

  • Different periods of literary and philosophical thought place emphasis more strongly on either continuity or originality, and thinkers of modernity often privileged originality and artistic genius as they laid the groundwork for a value system that still affects the landscape of contemporary popular culture.
  • Countering this ascribed modernist valuation of originality, postmodern theorists and artists have emphasized pastiche, appropriation, and intertextuality.
  • copyright laws and marketplace expectations have helped establish aesthetic discourses within fan communities that often mirror modernist emphases on originality and authenticity.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • despite a cultural value placed on repetition, fandom still remains at least tenuously invested in more traditional notions of originality and uniqueness.
  • In contrast to Eliot's model of artistic genius, emphasizing originality and ownership of individual creativity, I’d like to foreground the fan community as a collective creative culture that values sharing, allusion, and repetition as aesthetic (and affective) choices.
  • Rhetoric is basically a pedagogical discipline comprising a number of pedagogical principles, where one is the principle of imitatio. According to the imitatio principle you have to, very actively, collect an arsenal of different strategies in the process of learning how to write and present a material.
  • With focus on imitatio and from perspectives such as genre, intertextuality, narratology, semiotics, we discuss the creation process of fan fiction in general and slash in particular.  
  • Further, and crucially, fic is a form of discourse that does not just analyse canon – it has the power to add to and change it as fanon and canon mix, encouraging ongoing reinterpretation and reframing of canon within the fanon/canon ‘verse as a whole.
  • Reading and writing fic remains a more popular online activity than taking part in meta discussion, but are the two activities so very different?
  • Harry Potter
  • from a close reading of a set of French potterfictions, my presentation will try to identify and compare the typical “scripts” used by the authors:
  • However, the various academic accounts written about yaoi have a tendency to pathologize yaoi as well as its female fans in terms of gender displacement, female sexual oppression, or sexual starvation.
  • how Queer Theory can assist the academic discussion of yaoi and slash, and counter the tendency to pathologize.
  • The British television show Torchwood has generated a vast amount of fan fiction. Among these stories are some which involve human-animal transformations.
  •   In this paper I intend to study how the human-animal transformations are described in a selected number of fanfic texts.
  • Can these stories be read as a comment on the relation between human and animal, or should the animal in this context rather be read as merely a symbol or a plot device?
  • Ludology, the academic study of games, has maintained a critical distinction that, fundamentally, a game cannot contain a narrative, as its focus is more oriented toward necessarily non-narrative interaction between the game and its players.  Fan fiction seems capable of exploding, or at least complicating, this claim, as the process of a writer’s active and creative engagement with a previously existing storyworld, expressed through fan fiction, appears clearly to meet the requirements both for a game,
  • close readings
  • In existing studies on fan fiction, it has been established that the majority of previous studies have been ethnographical or social in nature. Only very recently have studies on the literary aspects of fan fiction begun to emerge.
  • Harry Potter
  • helps us shorten the gap between literary practices of 'high' and 'low'.
  • Fan Fiction – ‘The Logical Extension’
  • The Love Song of T.S.Eliot and fandom  
  • Fan Fiction – as Dickens (Might) Have Written It
  • Redefining the EveryFan? Implicated reading and janeites on-line
  • Flexible Dancers: How Doctor Who fan fiction subverts and confirms the elements inherent in the romance novel genre
  • A Revamped Lover? The Limitations of the Romance Format in Black Dagger Brotherhood Slas
  • ”This Man Is My Friend – Nobody [Else] Touches Him”: Paris/Kim Fan Fiction from Star Trek: Voyager
  • Sex, power and kittens – human-animal transformations in Torchwood fan fiction
  • “It takes a real man to have a baby”: heterophobia or heteroflexibility in Supernatural mpreg
  • t fan fiction is a form of derivative or appropriative fiction
  • I suggest that we need to look toward tropes, the use of familiar plots, scenarios, and characterization as central organizing and generating principles for fan fiction communities.
  • yaoi and its Western fans are more receptive to a queer interpretation than slash and its fans are. Other key points raised by the research included fans’ rejection of ‘mainstream’ characterization of females, a strong awareness of legal and ethical issues and a desire to challenge contemporary accounts of ‘their’ fandom.  
  • Polish fans unlike their American or European colleagues are quite puritan.
  • Should the fan fiction writer be seen first and foremost as a reader, which is undoubtedly an essential role in fan fictions?
  • where a general rule is to stay true to the canon’s descriptions of characters,
Nele Noppe

ceitean: demographics in animanga fandom - no, really, they're important - 0 views

  • The age issue is something I don't usually see addressed in discussions about animanga fandom, at least in a way that isn't derisive. Obviously there are plenty of fans who aren't in the range of the general anime marketing demographic (which is another topic about the way US companies frame animanga), but after the huge boom in popularity/marketing push in the early 00s, the majority of animanga fans have been pre- to late-teenagers. And there is no group in the world that is as uneducated, inexperienced, and defensive about sexuality/gender/cultural issues than pre- to late-teenagers. Better yet, most of those fans in this particular corner of the internet are girls, who are not only inexperienced, but are also the demographic most likely to be scared of their own sexuality. There's meta floating around of the 'why do we slash?' variety, and one of the proposed ideas was that some fans use slashing as a way to explore sexuality without making it personal. It's the best description of a Yaoi FanGurl I've ever heard.
Nele Noppe

popblog: Sex in Polish Sci-Fi Fan Fiction - Part II - 0 views

  • The goal of the study is to determine whether Polish sci-fi fan fiction is promiscuous or puritan. To what extent are fannish creations sexual – do fans write erotica?
  • When considering the topic in more detail one should begin with paying attention to a problem I have mentioned previously - the inability of Polish fans to describe what they created. As I have signaled fan fiction is not labeled in any way and Polish fans are not aware of the existence of specific terminology that would allow them to put their writing in order. Of course because of the specific history of Polish fandom we cannot apply Western rules to Polish fans. It is not my purpose then to compare different regions.
  • Does this indicate that Polish fans are puritan? Although an analysis of terminology is a good starting point it is definitely too soon to establish this. One cannot say anything about sex in fan fiction in Poland only on the basis of terms, especially because a comparison to Western fans is not recommended.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • 44,6 per cent of respondents have ever encountered erotic stories. This confirms that although in minority sexual sci-fi fan fiction exists.
  • Only 12,5 per cent of fans indicated that sex is the core of fannish fiction.
  • Results from Table 6 confirm this premise. Only 13 fans “strongly agree” or “agree” that fan fiction is highly erotic while 65 “disagree” or “strongly disagree”. 30,5 per cent of fans reject the possibility that fan fiction contains a lot of sex.
  • I have examined 51 stories
  • only few are sexual. One will not find any fan fiction that is solely erotic (“pwp”), which depicts sex without describing action or focusing on character development. Erotic scenes very often are just an extension of main plot. To sum up, in the case of Polish sci-fi fan fiction we are dealing with puritans rather than promiscuous fans. Erotica is rare, and although we can encounter stories that are sexual, they are in minority
  • What about homosexual fan fiction? Does it exist at all? Out of 50 fans that encountered erotic fan fiction, 22 did read Polish fan fiction that described sex between homosexuals (gay or lesbian).
  • Most writers of erotica are between 21 and 25 years of age. In fact there is only one fan who is less than 16. It is not true that erotic fan fiction is written mainly by men (that was a general tendency). 58,4 per cent of erotic fiction writers are females
  • One is obliged to say though that despite being puritans Polish fans are tolerant and open. For example they disagree that only heterosexual sex is accepted. They disagree even though they do not believe sexual content is an important part of fan fiction. It may be the case that they have the potential to become promiscuous. Who knows? Maybe some time from now Polish fans will become more sexual
Nele Noppe

Pokémon and international politics? - 0 views

  • She identifies Pokémon as a media form that has defined the current framework, laying the groundwork for peer-to-peer communication and creation of media. While the current generation has outgrown Pokémon, the game franchise shaped how global youth think about culture and gaming. It linked analog and digital media, she proposes, by creating an electronic game that later manifested as a collectible card game, manga, anime, toys and other media. It put portability at the center of the media mix, and helped establish Japanese media content as a transnational source of cultural capital
  • She sees a generation of kids engaging in a set of cultural practices - cutting, pasting, linking and forwarding in spaces like MySpace
  • Individual identity is no longer consumer or producer - there’s a middle ground that includes connoisseur and amateur.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Networks are no longer mass media or purely personal communication - there are community networks that allow communication about niche interests to a large population
  • The work done by the fan community is of impressively high quality and speed - fan substitles are usually distributed to new episodes within 24 hours of their release,
  • Media companies aren’t unaware of this obsessive fandom - their release cycles and their localization of content into different languages often reflects producers watching fan behavior.
  • The Matrix itself is something of a remix, an American film that borrows heavily from the cliches of Japanese and Chinese action films
  • Mimi sees three trends taking place: - a ping-pong back and forth between US and Japanese culture, informing the mass communication aesthetic - a mainstreaming of the otaku aesthetic, a fondness for arcane, complex, richly detailed worlds (think of the popularity of the absurdly detailed universe of Harry Potter, for instance) - remix as a method of localizing and “talking back” to mainstream media.
    • Nele Noppe
       
      a fondness for arcane, complex, richly detailed worlds -love this line!!
  • So here’s a question - does participation in these international joint projects turn into a more generalized form of xenophilia? Do American fans of anime develop a generalized fascination with Japan, which somehow expands from watching Naruto to watching global politics?
Nele Noppe

cupidsbow: Women/Writing 1: How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor, by cupidsbow - 0 views

  • feminist theory
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • scratch the surface and the result of those practices is that women are seriously disadvantaged.
  • If the "wrong" people overcome the prohibitions and manage to write, the work is often made to vanish, usually through the ordinary, polite workings of class privilege. The widespread blindness to the work is based on illogical assumptions that are accepted as reasonable and never questioned. In fact, questioning the silence is considered rude and boorish,
  • certain topics are considered more important than others, based on an idea of how "universal" they are, and therefore art about them is innately more valuable.
  • that books can be misread due to assumptions about the author, so for instance, before Wuthering Heights was known to be written by a woman, it was considered by critics to be about the nature of evil, and afterwards, it was considered a romance.
  • [Pollution of Agency and the Double Standard of Content are clearly aspects related to the general contempt in which fanfiction is held by the wider writing community--it's just porn; it's all about men doing boring domestic stuff; they aren't even men, they're written like fourteen year old girls; only crazy, obsessive stalkers write that stuff; it's all so derivative and unoriginal, such a waste of talent.]
  • This is when works or authors are belittled by assigning them to the wrong category, or arranging categories so that all the "wrong" people don't fit the prestigious ones.
  • When a work by the "wrong" person actually makes it into the canon of Literature or Serious Art, it is only because they are one of a kind who produced this one thing out of the blue.
  • because successful women's writing is isolated from its influences, it is often accused of having a poor or informal style
  • Anomalousness.She wrote it, but there are very few of her.
  • Lack of Models.While it's clear that women don't write in a vacuum, the disappearance of so many "wrong" works from the mid- to long-term literary record means that each new generation of women artists has to find or make a new network of their own.
  • Responses.This is another fascinating chapter, which looks at the ways in which women have faced the silence and decided to write anyway.
  • Fanfiction writers may conceive of what is being made in different ways (art, craft, fun, porn, and so on), but there is no question, at least within the bounds of the subculture, that we can write! That is quite a different expectation to that of the wider world,
  • Aesthetics.This chapter discusses the impact of not having a visible female tradition on art in general. For a start, it means that many of the representations of women within art are deeply flawed, as they are based on stereotypes. It also means the hierarchy of art is skewed so that the "masculine" values are at the top, all others at the bottom, like so:"high art" [means] man, mankind, the individual man, individuality, humans, humanity, the human figure, humanism, civilization, culture, the Greeks, the Romans, the English, Christianity, spiritual transcendence, religion, nature, true form, science, logic, creativity, action, war, virility, violence, brutality, dynamism, power, and greatness.... "low art": Africans, Orientals, Persians, Slovaks, peasants, the lower classes, women, children, savages, pagans, sensuality, pleasure, decadence, chaos, anarchy, impotence, exotica, eroticism, artifice, tattoos, cosmetics, ornaments, decoration, carpets, weaving, patterns, domesticity, wallpaper, fabrics, and furniture. (p. 114-5 Russ quoting Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff)
  • Another consequence of the focus on a male value system, is that associations are made between things like size and quality (the number of pages in a book, for instance, affects how prestigious it is); hence short stories [again: fanfiction!] are not all that important compared to novels
  • Women always write in the vernacular.
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • it's easy for people outside of fanfiction fandom to dismiss the whole thing on a number of grounds
  • There is no doubt in my mind that fanfiction offers an amazing network for women writers, and given the advantages of the internet, it would be almost impossible to make this writing disappear en masse as has so often happened to women's writing in the past.
  • most of them described by Russ: yes, she wrote it, but we don't really know who "she" is; yes, she wrote it, but she totally shouldn't have (only perverts/stalkers/sluts/thieves write it); yes, she wrote it, but it's not important (because it's not about high culture ideas, it's unpaid, it's vernacular, it's just porn, it's derivative, it's bad); yes, she wrote it and it's actually good, but it's a one-off fluke and it's not really fanfiction anyway (it's a homage, a pastiche, a post-modern experiment, it won the Pulitzer); yes, she went on to write successful original novels in spite of her fanfiction beginnings (but she's not like all the others who do it, and let's not talk about it anyway, because it opens us up to copyright violation lawsuits).
  • very hard to combat, as people are sure these biases are "common sense".
  • Do we really want to be part of a culture that endorses a silencing of women by keeping us in our places in the ghetto? Or is this beyond the purview of something we do for fun, as a hobby?
  • It seems to me that part of why fanfiction can so easily be written off is because we so carefully police it, keeping our work in the unpaid ghetto along with other women's crafts.
  • Not just because of the "silencing" issue, but because of the female poverty issue
  • Then again, fanfiction's market isn't the commercial publishing market--fanfiction is part of the long-tail economy of the internet, so the same rules don't apply.
  • I still think that the fanfiction community is the most amazing women's art culture I've ever experienced, and quite possibly the most amazing there has ever been, just in terms of sheer numbers and output. And perhaps that is enough; perhaps one of the foundation-stones of the fanfiction community is that it doesn't have to engage directly with capitalist imperatives, and messing with that ethos might unbalance everything.
  • I do feel angry, though, that this amazing outpouring of female talent is written off as nothing but derivative porn written by a bunch of crackpots. It makes me want to punch things and scream at the world, "Are you all asleep, or just deliberately stupid?"
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Should Fan Fiction Be Free? - 0 views

  • This situation deserves scrutiny, especially because fan fiction is becoming [End Page 118] increasingly visible to non-initiates through major media outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, indicating that the genre is moving away from the margins of American and British culture
  • The mainstreaming of an alternative form of cultural production is nearly always synonymous with commercialization;
  • Over the past decades of sharing their transformative works, fan fiction readers and writers have generally felt wary of commodifying a form of cultural production that is essentially derivative and perhaps subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Digital appropriation artists have developed a number of monetization models: royalties, distribution agreements, reasonably priced licenses that permit remix practitioners to sell their appropriations legally, and small-scale compensation intended only to reimburse remixers for their outlay. Although fan filmmakers and game modders have experimented with these models, fan fiction writers have not conducted similar experiments in marketing their works.
  • Fanfic authors who think that selling appropriative art is always and absolutely against the law are mistaken. No such case law exists, and many appropriating artists make money from their work today without constantly encountering legal trouble.
  • Why, then, do fic writers resist earning income from their output? Many scholars of fan studies claim that fan fiction is, and must remain, free—that is, "free of charge," but also "free of the social controls that monetization would likely impose on it"—because it is inherently a gift culture, as Hellekson describes in this issue. In fact, even the fan organization, the Organization of Transformative Works, one of whose goals is to redefine fan works as transformative and therefore legal, states: "The mission of the OTW is first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy."
  • Therefore, writing fan fiction for personal gain—financial, psychological, or emotional—aligns with the fact that self-enrichment is already inherently an important motivation for women to produce and consume fanfic. For some women, belonging to an affinity group or discussing stories with fellow writers and readers is not the primary reason for engaging with this type of fiction.
  • The rewards of participating in a commercial market for this genre might be just as attractive as the rewards of participating in a community's gift culture; and the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies.
  • If fans successfully professionalize and monetize fan fiction, the amateur culture of fic writing will not disappear.
  • Although fans have legitimate anxieties about fan fiction being corrupted or deformed by its entry into the commercial sphere, I argue that there is far greater danger of this happening if fan fiction is not commodified by its own producers, but by parties foreign to fandom who do not understand why or for whom the genre works, and who will promote it for purposes it is unsuited for, ignoring the aspects that make it attractive and dear to its readers.
  • However, an even greater danger than this is that fan fiction may not be monetized at all, in which case no one, particularly women authors, will earn the financial rewards of fanfic's growing popularity. Only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain from these writers' volunteer work.
  • if women can formulate a model for the monetization of their artworks, the gap will be narrowed.
  • In the absence of such experimentation, women writing fanfic for free today risk institutionalizing a lack of compensation for all women that practice this art in the future. Woolf asked of her forebears, "What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?" Will our generation answer that we have been giving our talents away as gifts, rather than insisting on the worth of our work?
  • . [End Page 123]
  • [End Page 124]
  • [End Page 122]
  • [End Page 120]
  • [End Page 119]
Nele Noppe

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Acafandom and Beyond: Week One, Part One (Anne Kus... - 0 views

  •  
    As fan communities face members who see their positions as enlightened because of their "superior" knowledge--and as academic conferences, programs, and journals are flooded with people who see fan studies as a justification to make a living writing about their hobby without worrying so much about any critical intervention or generating compelling insights--it's perhaps no surprise that the term has "grown" to the point that people are now questioning whether its use has been stretched past usefulness.
Nele Noppe

Why Heather can write - 0 views

  • Teachers sometimes complain that popular culture competes for the attention of their students, a claim that starts from the assumption that what kids learn from media is less valuable than what schools teach. Here, however, much of what is being mastered are things that schools try-and too often fail-to teach their students. (It has been said that if schools taught sex education the same way they taught writing, the human race would die out in a generation.)
  • such informal teaching occurs across a range of other online communities.
  • we could talk about young anime fans who are teaching each other Japanese language and culture in order to do underground subtitling of their favorite shows.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What difference will it make, over time, if a growing percentage of young writers begin publishing and getting feedback on their work while they are still in high school? And what happens when those young writers compare notes, becoming critics, editors, and mentors? Will they develop their craft more quickly-and develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about storytelling?
  • And writing about Harry offers them something else, too: an audience with a built-in interest in the stories-an interest that would be difficult to match with stories involving original fictional characters. The power of popular culture to command attention is being harnessed at a grassroots level to find a readership for these emerging storytellers.
  • themes that could not be discussed so openly in a school assignment and that might be too embarrassing to address through personal narratives or original characters.
  • Fandom is providing a rich haven to support the development of bright young minds that might otherwise get chewed up by the system, and offering mentorship to help less gifted students to achieve their full expressive potential. Either way, these teens are finding something online that schools are not providing them.
1 - 15 of 15
Showing 20 items per page