fanfic forensics

Why are American cartoonists so bad at drawing hot men? Japanese cartoonists can draw hot men. European cartoonists can draw hot men. Not as hot as the ones the Japanese cartoonists draw, but guys like Moebius at least put in an effort.

I’m thinking that perhaps the most important distinction between the two fandoms is the way that music fans take the resources of their fandom outside of that fandom as part of their self-presentation in other contexts. Think t-shirts with band names (Rob Walker’s excellent book Buying In reports that Ramones t-shirts have outsold Ramones albums 10 to 1). Think playlists embedded on social network profiles. Think bumper stickers

How does a Lost fan dress? Can you spot a Star Wars fan walking down the street? Narrative fandom is invisible unless it’s being discussed. Music fandom is much more likely to be made visible as an intrinsic part of self-definition in a wide variety of situations.

The upshot is that we should be wary of taking the practices of narrative fandom on which most fandom theory has been built as exemplary of all fandom. Different kinds of materials call for different kinds of practices, and if we’re to build theories that encompass all of fandom, we need to account for these distinctions as well as the similarities.

Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley

Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley

On another topic, only tangentially related to RaceFail '09, is the perception I have that Livejournal, as a blogging platform, continues to be considered some weird incestuous second-class place compared to Wordpress or Blogspot or something. I frequently see derogatory comments out in the blogosphere about LJ bloggers, implying that anyone writing on LJ isn't worth paying attention to. (Yes, Scalzi, this means you, and not just for yesterday's post.)And I have to ask, why is a freestanding blog more valid somehow than an LJ? Is it somehow the community nature of LJ? The icons? The friends-list function? What is it that makes LJ so much tackier than Blogspot?... or is it that LJ is perceived as majority female?

then you are So Super Great And Powerful because readers come all the way to look at your blogI think there's something to this. The perception of Manly Independence, even though it's false because they're still using a blogging platform like Blogspot or Wordpress, it's just a little more detached from the other blogs on Blogspot or Wordpress. So they have to use an RSS reader with their morning coffee, instead of a flist.

(I think there's a reason that a lot of the old fan shows, the big ones, were series that never had canon ships, never had any romances that lasted more than a single episode.

A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement.

Something that I don't think anyone raised is the difference between being squicked because of something happening to a fictional character and being squicked because of something happening to a real person. I find the latter enormously worse than the former, and I'm much less likely to be squicked by a fictional character's misfortunes if they're depicted in a cartoony, unrealistic way.

So his intention was to play this scene of assault, with no warning, in the public space of a classroom. Now, this is a class that also teaches Irreversible and Demonlover and other films that involve pretty graphic scenes of rape and assault, but I think there's a difference between being told to watch Irreversible on your own at home, and coming into class, sitting around with a bunch of half-strangers, and being surprised by an out-of-context rape scene.

One thing that I really like about fandom is that we're different from the publishing world, from the academic world, from the world of boyfans even, in that we try really hard to take into consideration the needs and squicks and concerns of the reader.

Professional publishing is about getting people to buy books, and professional publishing is about the rights of the author - so, in the first place, we're often lied to about what a novel will contain, and even when we're not, we're not warned, because the rights of the author to surprise the reader - the rights of his inviolable artistic vision - are more important than the rights of the reader to tailor her reading to her own desires.