Meta: What Is it? It's a Story. What Am I Going to Do? Read It.
Recently, there's been some femslash meta (including metameta about why there's so little femslash meta...) and I commented in a post about why a heterosexual woman might be interested in femslash. Cut for interminability and ability to unite vast swaths of disparate groups by pissing them all off.
Basically, my point was that it's quite possible that the poster doesn't have romantic and/or sexual relationships with women, but there are plenty of interesting stories that could be told about women who *do.* Rosalind and Celia! Emma and Harriet!
And fanfic is an especially suitable place to find these stories--not just because This Kind of Fandom* is mostly female, but because professionally produced media properties are usually about men. And, at that, about a subset of men--young, white, able-bodied, from mainstream culture. Also, far too many media properties are evidently made by airheads for airheads, or by intelligent people who despise their audience and assume that it's just circuses to aggregate an audience for the bread commercials.
I don't want to deny or minimize that the Digital Divide still exists, but online "publication" is far closer to equality of opportunity for outsiders of all kinds than pro media. It's a lot easier for a writer or vidder to get an online audience for stories that aren't mainstream in content or style than to get a TV show or movie made, or even a novel published. Is there full equality? No, and that needs to change. But is the situation better than in conventional media? Yeah.
From the creator's point of view, the question is, can I get the tools I need to express what I want to express? And, having created something, can I reach an audience? Will the audience reject my work out of hand because I'm not Mainstream Guy, or will they pay attention to what's actually being communicated, isntead of their preconceptions?
But there's also the consumer's interest in, well, getting to see something interesting and fresh instead of the same old crap over and over again. I've always been puzzled by the extent to which identification with characters is assumed to be primary in approaching media.
I really thought that the hand-wringing about "Twilight" was silly. In fact, it's TOO BAD that there aren't real vampires to take girls off the board who think that it's a good idea to base your dating behavior on trashy vampire books. A lot of interesting fiction is precisely about bad decisions and morally ambiguous characters--there's no suspense if you know which characters will always be immaculate and which will always be despicable.
I'm not sure if it was Mel Brooks, or Neil Simon, but someone of that ilk, who said that the process of bringing in a show would be a lot easier if he could cast his Aunt Esther. She would show up for rehearsal on time, perfectly sober, with all her lines memorized. And nobody would come to the show.
What I'm looking for in a story is something interesting. Not necessarily anything like me, or reflecting my experience. In fact, I already *know* what happened to me, so an important value of reading (or watching tv or movies) is precisely to see something different; and one reason that people who value art do value it is that it can provide a more powerful imaginative connection to someone else's reality than any number of bluebooks. And not necessarily something about people who do the right thing, or who get a happy ending, whether or not they deserve one.
I didn't watch the first two seasons of Buffy when they were on because I didn't think I would be interested in a show about a vampire-killing cheerleader. I didn't watch Firefly when it was broadcast because I didn't think I would be interested in a space western. I really, really hate doing headers and summaries because I think fandom pays far too much attention to the label and too little to the contents of the can. As I've said before, there are a million Italian Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child, with wide variations in quality, so just knowing it's a Madonna and Child doesn't really tell you much.
Look at all these first-person singular pronouns! Cut them out, and you'd have an entry shorter than the airline version of The Sopranos! But in a sense, non-fiction works the opposite way from fiction. That is, reading about other people's experience is a powerful way to learn. But in a meta post, I can tell you what I've seen, or believe, or have deduced--I think that it's an easy way to embarrass one'sself is to tell other people what their experience has been, and what it means. (Well, that can disappear up its own ass, but you know what I mean.)
*This Kind of Fandom = fic-based fandom, centered around media properties and RPF, and also centered around electronic communications and zines--no implication intended that other kinds of fandom are less valuable, just that they roll differently
Basically, my point was that it's quite possible that the poster doesn't have romantic and/or sexual relationships with women, but there are plenty of interesting stories that could be told about women who *do.* Rosalind and Celia! Emma and Harriet!
And fanfic is an especially suitable place to find these stories--not just because This Kind of Fandom* is mostly female, but because professionally produced media properties are usually about men. And, at that, about a subset of men--young, white, able-bodied, from mainstream culture. Also, far too many media properties are evidently made by airheads for airheads, or by intelligent people who despise their audience and assume that it's just circuses to aggregate an audience for the bread commercials.
I don't want to deny or minimize that the Digital Divide still exists, but online "publication" is far closer to equality of opportunity for outsiders of all kinds than pro media. It's a lot easier for a writer or vidder to get an online audience for stories that aren't mainstream in content or style than to get a TV show or movie made, or even a novel published. Is there full equality? No, and that needs to change. But is the situation better than in conventional media? Yeah.
From the creator's point of view, the question is, can I get the tools I need to express what I want to express? And, having created something, can I reach an audience? Will the audience reject my work out of hand because I'm not Mainstream Guy, or will they pay attention to what's actually being communicated, isntead of their preconceptions?
But there's also the consumer's interest in, well, getting to see something interesting and fresh instead of the same old crap over and over again. I've always been puzzled by the extent to which identification with characters is assumed to be primary in approaching media.
I really thought that the hand-wringing about "Twilight" was silly. In fact, it's TOO BAD that there aren't real vampires to take girls off the board who think that it's a good idea to base your dating behavior on trashy vampire books. A lot of interesting fiction is precisely about bad decisions and morally ambiguous characters--there's no suspense if you know which characters will always be immaculate and which will always be despicable.
I'm not sure if it was Mel Brooks, or Neil Simon, but someone of that ilk, who said that the process of bringing in a show would be a lot easier if he could cast his Aunt Esther. She would show up for rehearsal on time, perfectly sober, with all her lines memorized. And nobody would come to the show.
What I'm looking for in a story is something interesting. Not necessarily anything like me, or reflecting my experience. In fact, I already *know* what happened to me, so an important value of reading (or watching tv or movies) is precisely to see something different; and one reason that people who value art do value it is that it can provide a more powerful imaginative connection to someone else's reality than any number of bluebooks. And not necessarily something about people who do the right thing, or who get a happy ending, whether or not they deserve one.
I didn't watch the first two seasons of Buffy when they were on because I didn't think I would be interested in a show about a vampire-killing cheerleader. I didn't watch Firefly when it was broadcast because I didn't think I would be interested in a space western. I really, really hate doing headers and summaries because I think fandom pays far too much attention to the label and too little to the contents of the can. As I've said before, there are a million Italian Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child, with wide variations in quality, so just knowing it's a Madonna and Child doesn't really tell you much.
Look at all these first-person singular pronouns! Cut them out, and you'd have an entry shorter than the airline version of The Sopranos! But in a sense, non-fiction works the opposite way from fiction. That is, reading about other people's experience is a powerful way to learn. But in a meta post, I can tell you what I've seen, or believe, or have deduced--I think that it's an easy way to embarrass one'sself is to tell other people what their experience has been, and what it means. (Well, that can disappear up its own ass, but you know what I mean.)
*This Kind of Fandom = fic-based fandom, centered around media properties and RPF, and also centered around electronic communications and zines--no implication intended that other kinds of fandom are less valuable, just that they roll differently