1. A Portrait of the Author as a Young Fan
I got my first computer when I was fourteen, the summer before my freshman year of high school. It was a Dell, and it was blue, and it weighed around as much as my little brother. I don’t remember how long it took for the intoxicating freedom of private internet access to translate into the discovery of Harry Potter fanfiction, but it can’t have been longer than a few weeks. I used to creep downstairs after my parents had gone to sleep to plug my laptop into the dial-up cable in our family room and load all seventeen chapters of a story in different windows before scurrying back upstairs and reading them all in bed until three in the morning, always ready to snap the computer closed and pretend to be asleep in case anybody came looking.
Some years later – when my family had upgraded to wireless internet, and I had upgraded from FanFiction.net to Livejournal – I started telling myself that at some point I would outgrow fanfiction, and fandom in general; adults did not read or write fic, and those who did were weird. They wore capes and rarely cut their fingernails. I was not going to be one of them – I was going to read exclusively Serious Works of Literature, and discuss them in sophisticated coffee shops.
I kept telling myself this until I was around twenty, or twenty-one, and then I decided that persistent self-delusion wasn’t cute.
2. The Author Fails to Install Tumblr Savior in Time to Save Herself from That Dumb MTV Werewolf Show
Teen Wolf is the sort of show that I would have disparaged mightily as an actual teenager: high school isn’t anything like that! These “teenagers” are clearly all in their mid-twenties! Werewolves are stupid! Fortunately, I’ve gotten considerably less discerning as I’ve aged, and I can assure you that Teen Wolf, despite being a phenomenally dumb television program, is also totally awesome.
I mean, okay, yes, none of the kids on the show seem to ever have any homework (do you really want to watch fictional high schoolers do homework, though?), several of the actors are around twenty-seven, and werewolves are still pretty stupid. I mean, maybe that’s just the super embarrassing makeup. But whatever, guys, whatever. This is a show that actually included this shot of my Imaginary Boyfriend Tyler Hoechlin, resident adult on the show (he is, in reality, several years younger than some of the actors playing teenagers) as it is that delightfully, gratuitously dedicated to shirtlessness. (Also, it is really funny, and really heartbreaking, and just generally a highly enjoyable way to pass the time.)
But I digress, because I did not start watching Teen Wolf for the humor, or the emotional destruction, or the shirtlessness, and as eminently praiseworthy as those things are, they are not the subject of this essay. I started watching watching Teen Wolf for one reason and one reason alone: the fandom.
It didn’t all happen at once: it was a slow build. Last summer, pictures and GIFs and general insanity relating to the show started springing up like a particularly invasive species of mushroom on my Tumblr dash. At this point, I had no idea what Teen Wolf even was, and I was…confused. Hoechlin was too muscled for my taste, and I did not understand the big deal about Dylan O’Brien, Tumblr’s Imaginary Boyfriend, at all. But the posts accumulated, and in spite of myself, I started to get curious – not so much about the show itself, but about the intense enthusiasm for it. People cared about these characters so fucking much. There were lots of feelings! Screaming! Sobbing! Flying into the sun!
Then, in early October, 12,600 words of pure beauty were delivered into my inbox, like a sign from God, and I was pretty much screwed:
“Oh my god,” Stiles says, the first time Derek takes off his shirt. “Wow. Can I—” his hand hovers over Derek’s chest for a moment, close enough that Derek can feel the heat of it.
“That’s kind of the idea, right?” he says, like he hasn’t thought about it, gone back and forth over it in his mind, whether it’s creepy and fucked up to get involved with Stiles or kind of okay, maybe. The rest of his life is so creepy and fucked up it’s hard to get a clear picture about whether it’s truly wrong to make out with Stiles, to seek him out when he needs help, to like the curve of his mouth, his impulsive, reflexive kindness, the gangling shape of his body that’s slowly resolving into something newly adult, narrow and tall, a body that he’s grown used to having at his back, that can swing a crowbar, fire a gun, make Derek lose what little resolve he has.
“Goddamnit,” I said to myself, miserably, and proceeded to read the rest in one sitting.
3. The Author’s Rapid Descent into the Land of Magical Thinking
Derek is played by Hoechlin; Stiles, by O’Brien. The hypothetical relationship between the two characters, known colloquially as Sterek, is by far the most popular aspect of the fandom; of the 19,845 stories classified as Teen Wolf on the Archive of Our Own, 13,313 of them are classified as Stiles/Derek – and that’s not even counting Tumblr. These characters are not, in fact, the leads of the show – unlike Tyler Posey’s endearingly moralistic hero, they are snarky motherfuckers with tons of fucked-up psychological problems, much better suited to supporting roles.
Slash – i.e. male/male – pairings tend to stretch the limits of plausibility a little due to underrepresentation of queer characters in the media, but they are usually based on something. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered, upon watching the actual show, that Stiles and Derek only shared between four and five minutes of screentime alone together in the entire first two seasons of the show. (The third season, which premiered at the beginning of June, has given them some banter, but no alone time.) Most of these minutes constitute Derek threatening Stiles, slamming him against hard things in a distinctly unsexy manner, and otherwise appearing to find him deeply aggravating. When, in a recent episode, the characters believed Derek to be dead, Stiles was indifferent. They have a good rapport, but basically no sexual tension: this really is one of our greatest achievements in delusion, as a subculture. I was impressed, in spite of myself.
But despite the fact that there are a whole lot of rabid Sterek fans out there who are incredibly invested in their pairing “becoming canon” – many of whom have turned against a new female character introduced as a love interest for Derek in a decidedly ugly fashion – the simple fact of the matter is that it really, truly doesn’t matter whether the characters ever express more than aggravation for each other on the show: those episodes are merely the jumping off point for an incredibly rich and creative community that produces writing, art, and thoughtful commentary and criticism at a truly extraordinary speed.
The characters on Teen Wolf are well-sketched outlines of psychologically complex beings: their childhood traumas are the core of the show, but they spend more of their time running around and trying to avert danger than talking about their feelings. This is appropriate for a teen action show but not as moving as, say, a novel that probes the depths of a flawed consciousness. What fandom does, essentially, is provide the psychological depth necessary to achieve that kind of emotional catharsis, and it has done so in this case by creating a relationship that really doesn’t exist on the show at all.
Fandom is a hive mind: it’s the ultimate communal creative experience. There has got to be somebody out there who was the first person to suggest that Derek and Stiles should get together – hats off to you, Random Internet Stranger – but it doesn’t really matter who that person was. What matters is the fact that the hive-mind seized on this idea and fucking ran with it. There are thousands of people across the globe living with Stiles Stilinski and Derek Hale in their heads, not as stagnant finite entities (as is the case with, say, well-known characters from classic novels) but as eternally dynamic and changeable, if distinct, beings. With some substantial help from showrunner Jeff Davis, we have made up these people, worked out how they interact with each other, and produced massive quantities of fiction backing up our vision. Who’s to say that’s less real than what we see on TV?
4. The Author Grows the Fuck Up
I got into fandom because I was a lonely teenager, and because thinking about fictional people seemed preferable to thinking about my own messy, complicated life. In thinking that I would outgrow it, I think I was imagining a future version of myself who was completely content with her life, who didn’t need any kind of distractions, a kind of Platonic ideal of myself that seemed inevitably, distantly attainable – but only once I grew up.
I am only twenty-three – hardly all grown up – but that idea seems both hilarious and kind of pitiable to me, now. I spend a lot of time thinking about my problems, but I also spend a lot of time thinking about fiction. I don’t really know how to be a person without filtering my life through stories, as a creator and an audience member. I like Teen Wolf because it’s entertaining and the actors are hot, but I like Teen Wolf fandom because the characters are all fucked-up messes replete with childhood trauma. I wound up writing two long pieces of fanfiction about that very subject, one about Derek and one about Stiles, and at the end of each piece I realized that even though I had been writing about the characters, I had mostly been writing about myself.
I don’t think I ever would have been able to grasp that, as a teenager, but I can now. Fandom, it turns out, is not just a child’s hobby: it’s something like therapy, only a whole lot more fun.
I recommend trying it out.
Next Time: A Brief History of Slash.
Tags: does anyone remember big wolf on campus, dude you had a dell, fandom anthropology, history, morgan davies, teen wolf, television
If anyone wants to also talk about Big Wolf on Campus in the context of this truly wonderful essay, this is a safe space.
My best friend and I wrote half-joking fan letters to the kid who played Merton, and we received signed 8×10 glossies in return. I have no idea what happened to them.
MAIL THEM TO ME FIND THEM AND MAIL THEM TO ME
I own the CD his band put out in 2006 I LOVE MERTON the only fan fiction I EVER wrote as a youth was BWOC fan fiction (and I deleted it all and I REGRET THAT NOW)
If they weren’t lost in the Great Cleaning Purge of 2005, I will definitely let you know and send them along!
Ahhhh, I just created an account just to reply to this. I probably read your BWOC fan fiction because I’m pretty sure I read every BWOC fanfic on the Internet! That show was amazing.
IS THIS SOMETHING I SHOULD BE INVESTIGATING.
AHHHHH YES I WAS THINKING ABOUT THAT
I so remember watching this show. I totally thought that Paul Wesley was the same guy as the guy who played Tommy. I have no idea why.
I am so, so grateful I at least had the sense to not use my actual name on any of the Buffy fanfic I wrote in the late 90s that is undoubtedly still somewhere in cyberspace.
Haha I was just thinking the same thing! Oh, 50+ chapters of “Angel becomes human and so does Spike (somehow?) and Buffy has to choose which one to have a normal life with (because deus ex machina something something WHAT WAS I SMOKING?)” and then of course the millions of one-off “kill a main character” fics I wrote… my teen angst expressed itself in weird, weird ways.
let us not forget the self-insertions!
Somehow, blessedly, I never actually wrote much fic as a teenager, so I never did this. WHICH IS GOOD, BECAUSE THEN I’D HAVE TO WRITE AN EMBARRASSING COLUMN ABOUT IT.
I realise, in retrospect that I did in fact write fan fic – for myself, and then get embarrassed about it. I am simultaneously sad and glad that I never found fandom because I could have had some great times but also hoooo boy there would have been some unfortunate things on the internet.
(I once accidentally wrote half of a firefly/tortallverse crossover, though, before becoming consumed with shame)
…That is a fantastic crossover idea, just saying.
… If you do at some point want to write a column on the Embarrassing Self-Insert Fanfic, and need people who are willing to own up to having written one to interview, I’m game.
GOOD TO KNOW.
Wow, this was fascinating! I really find the concept of fanfic interesting although I’m not particularly interested in fanfic itself, but this may only be because I’m not watching a lot of TV right now.
I find it particularly interesting that a lot of women, straight or otherwise, enjoy slashfic, like Science Bros or Johnlock, because it makes VERY little sense to me that a woman would enjoy a fantasy that by its basic definition can’t include her? Straight men’s fascination with girl-on-girl baffles me in the same way.
although it just occurred to me – Orphan Black fanfic would probably get pretty interesting.
I’m going to be writing about women and slash next time! I mean, you could write a book about women and slash, but I’ll scratch the surface, haha. I think it has a lot to do with exploring sexuality in a way that doesn’t have to involve your own complicated feelings about your body – I was having a conversation with a friend recently about how slash is not really about men at all but about female sexuality. Which can be both positive and negative, I think, depending on the reader/writer’s level of self-awareness.
oh that’s interesting! I look forward to it.
The first time I presented something on slash fiction at PhD Club one of the (female) fellow PhDs asked why women would want to do such a thing and not write stories about themselves…at least it gave me a chance to give a more interesting answer about fandom customs and stuff.
I also always enjoy the theory of slash as queer representation without having to worry about misogyny (society’s or your own, internalized), for what it’s worth. As a writer of the stuff, that was the explanation that felt like a big, ‘oh, duh, of course’ once someone suggested it to me.
Yeah, exactly. Which can be problematic sometimes, depending on the execution, but can also be really fucking freeing. I write a lot of fiction (original and otherwise) and I write a lot about women and feminism (explicitly or implicitly) in my fiction but it is nice to just write about dudes and their manpain sometimes, as a kind of escape/emotional release.
It also really nuetralises the whole male gaze thing – which is obviously a subset of the ‘not worrying about misogyny’ thing.
Personally, as an obliviously queer youth, I was completely obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward and a bunch of male Queer lit, which is really pretty much the same thing. It’s not a different feeling when a different gender has it, but it does come with less baggage and, because there’s less of the male gaze thing it feels more for yourself, somehow. Which is a problem in itself but isn’t necessarily a problem with slash fic, it’s a problem with society.
AND it makes the dynamics different, and it makes writing as an amateur more interesting because it’s easier not to get sucked into those same tropes of how men or women are. You just write two people, interacting.
Yeah, alla this. It IS a problem with society, but so long as society is fucked up (which it is always going to be), you might as well work within it subversively.
voyeurism, and only people with the type of genitals you like. What’s not to love?
(says a voyeur who likes all the genitals)
yeah, I got that from a male friend re the girl/girl stuff, and it’s the closest any explanation has come to making it make sense!
Personally, I don’t necessarily want my fantasies to include me. I’m a voyeur at heart, it seems. But also there are often particular dynamics with slash (whether male/male or female/female) that can’t be duplicated with a m/f couple at the heart of it, at least not for me. I don’t think that’s everyone’s reason, but it’s something I’ve been thinking over for myself.
Well, there’s not the same kind of inherent expected power imbalance, which I think is a lot of what makes it so appealing. There’s an assumption of equality in slash and femslash that means not having to worry about a lot of realistic but not-so-great behaviors, which are important to look at in certain lights but can also be nice to escape, sometimes.
oh my god I feel like someone found my diary or something my two internet worlds have just collided help
“A Brief History of Slash”
excuse me while I collapse on the floor laughing uncontrollably
All of my weird Final Fantasy fanfic from when I was 15/16 STILL EXISTS. I did not use my real name.
Also I am 27 years old and just got really into the Mass Effect fandom (like, I made a dirty Garrus valentine, AND IT IS SUMMER) so it never really goes away.
Seriously. I had such glorious visions of adulthood. NONE OF THEM HAVE COME TO PASS.
We are the same age so if you wrote for FFVII I might have read your stuff and now I have too many embarrassed feelings in my heart, I should have a drink.
Teen Wolf is fascinating because it’s basically like the fandom have written an entirely new show, which in some ways has always happened within fandom, but it’s happened so fast and so totally that it’s really kind of amazing.
AGREED. I actually totally love the show, I think it’s super entertaining and actually pretty good at what it’s trying to do most of the time, but the fandom is a completely different beast. I think a lot of the recent dissatisfaction with the show has basically sprung form people wanting it to conform to their fanon conceptions of what it should be, but it has never been that thing! It has done pretty much the same thing the entire time it’s been on! The show you think you are watching IS NOT ACTUALLY THAT SHOW.
Which is mega interesting to me, as somebody who really likes both the show & the fandom and is pretty academically interested in fandom generally. The hivemind thing is always interesting, but this particular incarnation is really fucking impressively huge/delusional, and I don’t say that pejoratively.
I agree! I hope someone is preparing/writing/submitting a really good article on that now. (Alas, I’m no longer writing on fanfiction, so it’s not going to be me.)
As an outsider with a bunch of friends in the fandom, I remember being astonished when one of them told me it wasn’t about Derek and Stiles and that the main character was actually that adorable Tyler Posey kid.
(This is like when my friends were amazed that Inception was about Leonardo Dicaprio’s manpain, not JGL and Tom Hardy’s characters making out.)
I ALSO HAD A FRIEND OF A FRIEND WHO WAS SHOCKED TO FIND OUT ABOUT INCEPTION. Which is even funnier than TW, because that movie is really ALL ABOUT Leo’s manpain, whereas TW is at least more of an ensemble. Oh, fandom, never change. (There will, at some point, be an Inception column. It is going to be glorious.)
Oh lord, I don’t know if I can handle an Inception column as my bitterness about that fandom is massive and deep. (I am one of the few hetshippers. It’s been… interesting.)
My condolences, dude. THAT MUST HAVE BEEN A TRYING TIME.
As a 25 year old completely obsessed with Teen Wolf, can someone point me to a piece or two of good Isaac fan fiction? He is my favorite. Pretty and so fucked up.
COUGH I MAY HAVE WRITTEN THAT THING COUGH
http://archiveofourown.org/works/853413
It’s actually more about Derek Hale’s Misery, because that is how I roll, but NEVERTHELESS. I would recommend you things I did not, myself, write, but I can’t actually think of any. For such a fan favorite, it’s kind of funny there’s so little fic about him.
I loved this and I am so, so excited for this series!
I wouldn’t consider myself in the Teen Wolf fandom, but I do watch it (though I haven’t seen any of this season yet) and I also started watching it because all of a sudden it was everywhere on tumblr. I also stealthily read HP fanfic late at night as a teen. That, plus our similar ages, makes me really happy that you specifically are writing this series, Morgan, because obviously we are kindred spirits. Though I never had the “I should stop reading this because I’m a grownup” phase. I naturally drifted out of fandom while in college and then got suckered right back in during grad school (thanks, Sherlock!)
Aaahhh, thank you so much! Lots of good stuff to come, I’m pretty stoked about it. 🙂
I think fic is awesome, but I don’t actually read it. It doesn’t really interest me. I’m mostly into fandom for the gifs and pretty pictures.
Tumblr is my favorite thing right now. Half the things I am interested in are due to it – The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Hannibal, Elementary, Orphan, Black – and I have a working knowledge of a whole bunch of shows like Supernatural and Teen Wolf just based on the stuff that rolls through my dash.
Viva Fandom.
I know so much more about Supernatural than I ever wanted to know. SO MUCH MORE.
I have GOT to start watching Hannibal and Orphan Black! Everybody keeps telling me they’re great, but I’ve been really busy lately and there is just SO MUCH GOOD TV out there. Which is great, obviously, but STRESSFUL.
Oh I totally understand the onslaught of good tv. And then I feel sort of overwhelmed by how much of a given show there is, because I am a completist and I will be DAMNED if I don’t watch every.single.episode.
Which is why I have never gotten more than six episodes into Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, or Breaking Bad. I know they are awesome, but….ugh. So much to watch.
Orphan Black and Hannibal are good because OB is ten episodes and Hannibal is 12 or 13. I can handle that. I can get through that in a weekend.
Supernatural has EIGHT SEASONS. EIGHT. And I know the quality is variable. So, I just limit myself to Castiel gifs on my dash.
I feel like Supernatural has been on since the birth of television. It feels like it should be an aughts thing that is over and done with now, and yet IT IS NOT?? Let it die, people, let it die.
BREAKING BAD IS PROFOUNDLY GOOD, THOUGH, if you ever feel like losing a month of your life to something it comes highly, highly recommended. It’s easily one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen, and it gets MUCH better than the first season – which is fantastic, but way less dark/interesting than what follows. I am already so depressed about it ending this season, haha. It’s gonna be rough.
Hahah I’ve just realised I guess I used to ‘write’ slashfic on the fly because my sister would watch SPN or Merlin and I would come stand behind her and do a narration making the homoerotic subtext into text and she haaaaated it but it was the most fun.
‘Oh yes, save me, Merlin. Make my lance magic! Oh yes, now I will pierce things with my magic glowing lance!’ Glory days, I tells you.
I’m sure Hannibal would be too gory for me because I’m already distressed about the terrible happenings I have only glimpsed gifs of on my Tumblr dash. I really want Sad Beard Dog Man to feel better soon, that’s all. I clearly can’t handle the actual show.
“I really want Sad Beard Dog Man to feel better soon, that’s all.”
THIS IS THE MOST ACCURATE SUMMATION OF THE HANNIBAL-BY-TUMBLR EXPERIENCE I HAVE HEARD YET.
I can barely handle joke horror movies, but there were few instances of goriness that I was truly disgusted by. I find the sad beard dog man’s story is the element that makes it hard to watch. His life is unraveling and I just want to hug him.
That’s exactly my problem (though I’m a gore wimp too). If, when the series was over, someone told me he makes it out ok, I could probably handle it. As it is, I’m sad about the fate of a character whose name I don’t know, on a show I don’t watch. Hurray for Tumblr!
Hannibal is the BEST. I want everyone on the Internet to watch it, since none of my irl friends can stomach it.
This is me. I don’t read fanfic because you gotta draw the line somewhere and I just don’t really have time for a new world. (Although I am now reading Morgans and I DON’T EVEN WATCH TW but partly I don’t watch it cos I’m scared of Derek and Stiles feels – not Derek/Stiles, but just those two people, separately, being broken by their lives. Anyway so now I’m reading Morgan’s fic AT WORK and having FEELS HOW DARE YOU)
Ahem. Anyway. There are lots of shows that I consider that I am watching through tumblr, including Hannibal and Teen Wolf. Which is a very, very interesting experience. Sometimes I have to message my cousin who watches them and be like ‘what… happened on that last episode? All I see is people screeching on my dash’.
SORRY ABOUT THE FEELS AT WORK, IT’S KIND OF AN OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD WHEN IT COMES TO TW.
The experience of watching shows via tumblr (that you don’t actually watch) is so bizarre, alternately fascinating and maddening. I just blacklist stuff now because I want to watch most of it at some point (e.g. Hannibal) but there’s some stuff I can’t help seeing everywhere that I have no interest in but now know loads about anyway – Hannibal and Merlin come to mind. Of course, there is a kind of enjoyable schadenfreude about watching the fandom process something nightmarish, haha. LIKE THE END OF MERLIN. Oh, that was quite a time.
YES! My tumblr saviour list is about as long as my arm and yet STILL there are always shows that manage to creep through, like Teen Wolf and something called The Fosters which I have still not clearly understood. I gave up on Hannibal because I decided I didn’t want the images in my brain and also slightly because scrolling through tumblr is a lot quicker? After 30 minutes on my tumblr dash I feel like I’ve watched about 4 different shows, but then obviously they’re all through the weird tumblr lens: ie. Teen Wolf, so I know next to nothing about the actual plot and lots about yearning that probably isn’t actually happening in the show.
Well now I can’t decide what my favorite series on The Toast will be. Because THIS IS PERFECT.
note: I am not among the Sterek fans. *shoves Scott behind her protectively*
I think if I were to write a Fandom Anthropology post it would be entitled “TV Tunnel Vision In Seven Days or Less” because when I go I go hard oh god what even is The Killing why did no one warn me
Eeek, thank you! I will attempt to continue to achieve perfection, haha.
I love Scott, too! Though I am not into Scott as Werewolf Jesus, I GOTTA TELL YOU. I prefer Scott when he’s doofily fucking things up and then earnestly trying to correct them. Also, when he’s making googly eyes at Allison. (Duh.)
The girls on TW are my favorite part (and talk about perfect skin and Hollywood lighting, Jesus).
Also, I enjoyed this essay!
I do like Stiles and Derek as characters, but I think one way in which the TW fandom creates its own reality is in some of the interpretations or readings of Scott–devaluing his canonical friendship with Stiles, writing him in fic as stupid, etc. in favor of steering the plot and relationship happenings toward Derek and Stiles.
Lucienne–I love the ladies too! At least 65% of my enjoyment of the show is based on what is happening to Allison and Lydia. :B
Oh god that is my teeange years to a T. Except I didn’t have a Dell I had a creaking desktop computer that I never knew the make of.
Also I spent a loooong time thinking Teen Wolf was in fact about one person whose name was Sterek. Damn you tumblr.
I don’t think I ever thought that about Sterek, but I DEFINITELY thought that Larry Stylinson was a person for a while. (THAT COLUMN’S GONNA BE FUN.)
This is such a cool and fascinating idea for a regular feature!
Thank you!! I’m really excited about it – I’ve got some good ideas in store. 🙂
Oh goodness, replace “Harry Potter” with “LOTR” and this was teenage me. Like, right down to the clunky blue Dell.
This all makes me feel so much better about the fact that I joined Tumblr a few months ago thinking “oh, maybe I’ll reblog some stuff” and now I’m 25 and my hobby is blogging about elves.
LotR was my thing in middle school, man. Weirdly my engagement with it was more on the “boy” side of fandom – like, I KNEW ALL OF THE FACTS about the books, the world, etc etc. But I was never interested in fanfic or anything, weirdly. I think it was just not having access to the internet privately, honestly.
I’ve just come to accept the fact that I am going to be blogging about werewolves for probably a couple more years. IT’S FINE, IT’S FINE. WHATEVER. I DO WHAT I WANT.
I don’t know why blogging about werewolves is any less valid than spending your life talking about Greek myths which, frankly, are just as ridiculous.
I don’t really live in the world of fanfic, but I definitely live in fandom, and I get really protective of it. It is people telling each other stories. That is IMPORTANT. Stories are important to our humanity, and I am really overjoyed to be living in a time where individual people can make their own stories and spread them around and share them, and the good ones get popular, and we get to make our own worlds and make them richer, not just wait until someone delivers culture from on high.
Which, really, people have always always done that – told their own version of things, made up silly parts, told stories that weren’t that good narratively but spoke to things they were dealing with at the time*. It’s just that it’s easier to access each other’s worlds now.
Sorry, I know you didn’t need a lecture on this. Button issue :-/
(Also, I appreciate the Loki reference DON’T LOOK AT ME)
*I have a reasonably rich fantasy life, and I always find the meta of my own fantasies really interesting. What am I trying to work out? What is the theme of this week’s fantasies and why do I feel I need that in my life? Who am I trying to become?
Oh, trust me, I have no validity/shame issues about this, haha. HENCE ME WRITING THIS COLUMN. I’d been looking for a place to write about fandom outside of fandom for a while because I think it is legitimately academically interesting but also makes for some pretty amusing personal anecdotes, and some less amusing, more serious ones – the nature of fandom is that it’s incredibly, deeply personal, and if you’re self-aware about your engagement and why you’re reacting to certain things the way that you are, it can be really therapeutic/cathartic. A lot of the time people get very personally involved in fandom without that level of self-awareness, I think, which is what leads to crazy wank all over the place, but if you do reach that place, it is really rewarding.
Also I am eternally fascinated by the creative hivemind and the ways in which writing fanfic in a community differs from writing a novel (which I have done, currently working on getting an agent) in a void. They’re both forms of writing, and in some ways are the same, but in others aren’t at all – I’m always wary of people who try to draw a complete equivalence between fanfic and original writing; part of what makes each appeal to me is that they AREN’T the same. But that is a topic for another column!
… So, uh, what’s your Tumblr url? Mine is Elsajeni.
I’m swamp-diamonds. Fair warning–it’s mostly rambling text posts about the Silmarillion interspersed with pictures of trees and RL stuff.
This piece seems well-timed to the point that I am suspicious– I have just recently (last week recently) finally given into Teen Wolf. A year or so ago I watched the entire first season in one sitting and hated it so vigorously I complained the ENTIRE TIME (though obviously I kept watching it), but hey– it turns out that 1) I am incapable of learning from my mistakes and 2) season two REALLY IS better. People weren’t just saying that. I’M not just saying that it. IT’S TRUE. (That, or I’ve just lost it and this was one of the first signs.)
I’m not personally on the Sterek train (though I’ll read it occasionally) which makes finding fanfiction aggravating, because even things which include my pairings of choice usually include them as side-dishess to a Derek/Stiles main course. Or, bizarrely, Peter/Stiles, which is also a huge chunk of the fic.
(I’m on the Scot/Isaac/Allison train. Actually, I’m on the Isaac Lahey train. The Isaac Lahey Deserves Love train. The Make This Show About Isaac Lahey Trans-Continental.)
But I digress: what I meant to ask is, oh god how did you know about my life.
SEASON 2 IS SO MUCH BETTER, IT’S TRUE. Though actually once Kate Argent shows up and starts torturing Derek and Hoechlin goes from zero to DESTROYING ALL OF MY EMOTIONS in sixty seconds, I’m pretty much down. I’ve been really enjoying this season, too, even though it’s been pretty all over the place, largely because they’re doing a great job by the girls, and also, NO JACKSON.
I feel like the Isaac Lahey show would be a really great, really morbid sitcom, no? Equal parts sass and trauma. BRING IT ON.
That is my favourite fiction mix! 1:1 sass and trauma.
I repeat. I don’t even watch this show. But tumblr is giving me Isaac feeeeeeeeeeels.
This is also my favorite mix, and the reason I like the show so much. It is genuinely really funny, and also SUPER TRAUMATIC.
I actually find Isaac somewhat incoherent as a character (a friend of mine likes to refer to Isaac Lahey Personality Roulette as a common feature of TW), though his life is pretty awful. Derek is way more consistently, coherently traumatized, haha, which is why he is my favorite. So, so fucked up, oh man.
Good lord this is so exciting.
I was embarrassingly older than you were when I joined the Harry Potter Fandom, so I never had any delusions about giving it up when I grew up, because I was already a grown up, reading all night and writing away upon my fanfic masterpieces.
I knew I’d give up the HP fandom eventually, but NEVER imagined that I would transition wholly and immediately into the Sherlock fandom one Saturday afternoon, never looking back.
I am thrilled to hear about other grown fandom women, and all the things you learn about from Tumblr. Years ago I watched Skins and Misfits because they were always on my dash. Now it’s Doctor Who. I haven’t yet watched Hannibal, but I know it’s coming. Who ever called Will “Sad Beard Dog Man” up there, I laughed very hard, despite never having watched. I know exactly what you mean.
I can’t wait to read more in this series!!
Seriously, that description of Will = the best thing I have read all day. I CRACKED UP and I haven’t seen any of Hannibal yet, either. It’s just a matter of time.
I can’t wait to write more! Exciting things in store. 🙂
oh this is really weird timing, I JUST started watching TW this past weekend (thanks, heatwave!) and… I think I like tumblr’s version where Stiles and his wacky facial expressions are the main characters. Scott just got grounded and lost his Stiles privileges!!! I feel his despair.
Stiles is the main character of the show in my heart, although Derek and his endless manpain are my favorite. Mostly I am looking forward to Dylan O’Brien’s insane Hollywood career, that will surely ultimately yield him multiple Oscars. I’m going to enjoy being a Dylan O’Brien hipster, man. It’s gonna be goooood.
Unless your bio is lies you are not actually me or my roommate yet your experiences are exactly how we got into fandom in general and later teen wolf
I like to think that I am more a normative sample than an outlier in this, haha. Part of what was interesting for me as I met a bunch of new people in college (and, actually, studying abroad) was realizing that SO MANY of them had been involved in fandom at some point and in some cases still were – it’s just not as unusual a thing as I think it is tempting to think of it as, or at least that was how I felt a few years ago; it’s much more mainstream now. But, I mean, seriously: I studied abroad at Oxford and one of my friends used to take people out to pubs and, once they were tipsy, get them to admit to all the fanfic they’d read/written, and he usually succeeded. It’s easy to think of it as a dirty secret, but it is SO MANY PEOPLE’S DIRTY SECRET at this point that, you know, whatever, I feel like. WHATEVER.
God dammit, I keep reading TW as ‘trigger warning’ (appropriate??)
HAHAHAHA oh man, KIND OF??
Looks like we have a lot of kindreds spirits here, which is so refreshing compared to the capitalized, badly spelled “FIRST MOFO” comments I’ve come to expect on websites. I rarely read comments anymore because of that, but I’m happy to see it’s not like that everywhere!
Like you I too had this idealized adult version(s) of myself, which of course didn’t turn out that way. By now I have accepted I cannot do without escapism, so I just have to make the best of it and not procrastinate too much on the rest of my life, haha.
Anyway, super interesting stuff. And well written too, but then I’ve come to expect no less from you Morgan! Fandom is seriously the biggest reason I get hung up on a show. For example, I didn’t really get into Supernatural until Ridley C. James made this huge, engaging AU storyline about it that basically suckerpunched me emotionally (and still does.) I still don’t really watch the show, I just keep up with it a bit for that.
As for slash, I’m very late to that party. To be honest, I was basically in the anti-slash camp most of my life. Not vocal, mind you (I don’t give negative rants about stuff other people enjoy), but I didn’t give it a chance and therefore didn’t understand it. I tended to just read gen fic or just fics about friendship and loyalty with those pairings, because I’ll be honest, sometimes regular heterosexual romance tropes can get boring (especially the damsel in distress one).
Then one of my fave authors dabbled into the whole slash genre and well, my life is a mess now. I think the reason I read it has to do with equality, like you mentioned. Slash fic to me is romance fic without all the baggage you usually get m/f pairings. Plus, the fun thing about slash pairings that haven’t become canon on shows (do they ever) is that it’s a slow burn thing. Because it never started out with the goal of being romantic. And I think that’s why the fandom has so much to work with, because they can fill the off-screen void.
OMG I’ve rambled on far too long, sorry about that. I’m looking forward to your next piece!
Eeee, THANKS LADY. <3 <3 <3
I was actually late-ish to slash, too – by which I mean, I didn’t really get into a slash pairing until I was… seventeen, maybe? (Remus/Sirius for life, yo.) So not exactly LATE, but I had been in fandom for a few years prior to that, reading lots of het stuff, and I didn’t get slash at all because it wasn’t ever going to HAPPEN – I liked ships that seemed like they might plausibly one day happen (on a TV show or in Harry Potter or whatever). Which now isn’t how I think about fandom AT ALL, haha. As you say, the slow-burn this-is-probably-never-gonna-happen thing is actually where a lot of the enjoyment comes from! The harder fandom has to work to make the pairing plausible, the more enjoyable it is, I think. Plus, as you say, m/f romance tropes are soooo boringgggg. Variety is nice!
I love you and cannot wait for the next one.
On that note, and on the Cassie Clare note from the 50SOG article: isn’t it interesting how the dominant genre(?) in fandom is m/m slash, but fandom as a whole tends to be a bunch of women feverishly engaging with a source and with each other -fandom is collaborative to its core. And sure, some of it is to do with the dearth of female characters in popular media, but the result is still these mono-gendered spaces, where women talk to women about men talking to men.
THANK YOU! This is actually going to be the subject of the next installment in this series, date tbd. I think m/m slash is way more about women than it is about men, but there are definite positives and negatives to the way it functions/the way people engage with it. You could write a book about this, but I’ll try to condense it into 2,000 words, heh. WE’LL SEE HOW THAT GOES.
THIS IS GOING TO BE SO EXCITING.
Wow. This two bits really hit me hard.
There are thousands of people across the globe living with Stiles Stilinski and Derek Hale in their heads, not as stagnant finite entities (as is the case with, say, well-known characters from classic novels) but as eternally dynamic and changeable, if distinct, beings. –> I was so totally gone on fanon!Draco once upon a time, he was so *real* to me and because I stayed in HP fandom for years, I still feel closer to him than I do to plenty of people in RL. That is to say, I understand him better not just that fictional characters but that real people I know well. It’s kinda messed up and kinda great. Definitely can predict fanon!Rodney’s behaviour better than Elizabeth Bennet’s or Gypsum LaZelle’s. Very good point, is my point :p
I don’t really know how to be a person without filtering my life through stories, as a creator and an audience member. –> THIS.
I think if I were to write a Fandom Anthropology post it would be entitled “TV Tunnel Vision In Seven Days or Less” because when I go hard oh god what even is The Killing why did no one warn me