Belated thoughts on the rise of the professional fans
I was inspired to think about the professional fans as a class for the first time last year, when the Broken Fandom debate was raging on, culminating in this patented Devin Faraci piece where among other things he compared fans to Annie Wilkes from Misery. His arguments do not merit debunking here, because they are not so much arguments as vilifications of fans, especially fanfic-writing fans. But what kept me thinking, what was interesting beyond the materials of Faraci’s arguments was the way Faraci positioned himself. He writes:
It isn’t just a sense of ownership, it’s a sense of symbiosis. The fan, I thought, couldn’t tell where they ended and where the thing they loved began. This is why fans send death threats to critics who give comic book movies bad reviews. It’s why my name is like Voldemort’s at the DC Movies subreddit - my criticism of the things they love feel to them like criticism of themselves.
The most telling part is where he identifies himself, a critic, not with the fans but with the creators. See, fans also hate me. Faraci has access to creators, to advance showings and to interviews and he is NOT a normal fan like you. He disdains you. He wants desperately to distance himself from you.
Lost in this is the trite hypocrisy of Faraci’s defense of creators, because Faraci, who famously harassed Damon Lindelof off of Twitter, should not be throwing stones. Of course, we shouldn’t demand too much moral consistency of a man who compared the actual kidnapping and assault in the movie Misery to a death threat:
The story is a very, very thinly veiled metaphor for the relationship between pop fiction creators and their most dedicated, most rabid fanbases and the way the creators can be trapped, bullied and tortured by their own creations and the people who love them.
But what if Annie Wilkes had the internet? What if she didn’t have to kidnap Paul in order to make her displeasure with him known? What if she could tweet hate at him all day, or could fill message boards with personal bile about him or could directly send him death threats through Facebook, email or Tumblr? If Annie Wilkes had the internet she would fit right in with a disturbingly large segment of fandom.
Talk about thinly veiled. This analogy does one thing and one thing only, which is to demean fans. In Faraci’s imagination, fans are overweight, lonely, delusional and violent women.
By why? What incentive does Devin Faraci, a movie critic with a large following, someone who first made his bones at a movie discussion forum, what motive does he possibly have by ingratiating himself with the creators and vilifying other fans? What we are seeing right now and what we have been witnessing for years is this rise of a new creative class, the professional fans, who have come up from the ranks of fandom but desperately want to distance themselves from it.
Who are these professional fans? They are gamers who stream for other gamers. They are movie and TV critics. They are “Internet reporters” who cover fandom beats.
Think about the contradictions of this new figure. Their only, only value for the creator class is that they are clairvoyants for fans. They help creators understand the fans, and they can influence opinions and buying behaviors of the fans. In return they are granted access to the creator, in both formal and informal access control mechanisms of creators for fans. Ordinary fans vie to become professional fans, endangering the positions of the professional fans. In this way professional fans have to keep demonstrating their dominance, simultaneously reprimanding fans and catering to them, because their positions demand it. Is it wonder then that when fandom badly misbehaves, then professional fans would rush to distance themselves from it, even when they themselves might have harassed creators?
I believe this phenomenon is relatively recent. Critics used to have come out of the same creative class as creators. Novelists used to be the ones throwing shade at each other’s books.
Look, I am not condemning Faraci, and even if I were so inclined then it would not be because this article. I am merely describing the social relations, as it were, between the professional fans and the ordinary fans, using Faraci as an example. Nor am I defending fans. In the hierarchy of creators and fans with professionals who badly try to mediate between them, it is always the fans who put creators on pedestals and then find out that we have invested the whole of our passions in corporations, in properties, and in flawed human beings. This hierarchy, if it was not partly built by fans, then it was maintained by us, we who named them The Power That Be.
P.S. I’m also writing this partly because the overwhelming majority of the responses to Faraci’s article have been self-righteous bullshit from people who have been in fandom for years but don’t care to understand how it works. A sample: “It is a radical act for a young woman to love something unashamedly […] Because fandom is the province of young women and, culturally, we find young women terrifying,” “You can’t lump all of your critics together into one big bunch. You need to look at their motivations and what they are asking of you. Hatred and a desire for more diversity in media are two entirely different beasts here.” Many of these are from ~Internet or ~cultural or ~fandom ~reporters, jockeying for the right to speak for other fans.
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