not that anon but i also followed after a long scroll through your fandom stuff tag, great insights about the sort of thing i think about a lot but it feels like people don't really think about seriously, it's always either fandom is beneath the notice of people who do this kind of analysis or the analysis of fandom that does happen has to be breathlessly self-congratulatory or in some cases performatively blanket-negative? (c.f. the "critical of my interests"/"ao3 critical" wave) anyway great stuff over here, real breath of fresh air. love to chew on meaty analysis posts about a topic i'm interested in. keep up the good work
thank you!!!! yeah i really get annoyed by the sheer extremities of how fandom/fanworks are treated. on the one hand, i have to be frank, i find the scholarship coming out of otw and related stuff really bad re. fandom - its all self-congratulatory in the way that otw culture tends to foster, but more unforgivably its just really bad goddamn scholarship in the deployment of either really bad study methodologies including really bad use of stats, very limited use of literary studies, and its weird refusal to engage with more suitable methodologies or updated research esp. re. doing digital research. there's also a tendency towards circular citation which i fear just stymmies any new ideas actually entering the system and breathing fresh air into the scholarship.
on the other side, as you rightly say its either not taken seriously OR its treated through this weird lens of "critical" = criticism in the layman sense of the word and not in the technical sense of the term. but then, i do think also in some ways fandom kneecapped itself early on in the fact that a) creators of fanworks do not actually want to be treated in the same scholarly way that a work of literature would, which gives rise to the only form of analysis largely being very clannish glazing of fic, and b) the only avenue of "critical" engagement that managed to make a space for itself in the anglophone part of fandom was "critical" engagement pertaining to embedded ideologies, specifically in the sense of "criticism" in the layman's sense i.e. that a work contains "bad" or questionable ideas, images, representations that must be picked apart. if the only room made for fandom to take itself seriously is the very narrow room for fanworks to be criticised on various isms, that is the only space that will proliferate - and broader explorations / engagements with styles, structures, forms (e.g. fluff, therapyspeak, modern aus, high school aus) will tend towards attaching SOME kind of ism to it in order to validate the process of analysis. this gets us to "the rise of fluff is a symptom of fascism" versus "too much tragedy is a symptom of fascism" when neither of these statements are true.
the less said about the people who don't think of fandom as a potential site of analysis the better. they are not serious people. they have a very narrow understanding of the world and i leave them to the joy of that narrow understanding of the world.
however!!!! i do think that fandom itself has the power to overcome both the challenges i mention above re. "critical" engagement being channelled thru very narrow permitted forms. in an ideal world we get better at making space for more kinds of analysis. and also, in an ideal world, speaking as a fan creator, we get better at practising death of the author on ourselves and looking the other way when people analyse our works, so as to allow the room for that kind of analysis to flourish.
