Weekly Wrap-Up - 2 October
Look who is procrastinating editing the bookbinders chapter! This kid. The main body is written, but I’m trying to work in some theoretical background in the introduction to do the academicky-thing of nodding to the other writers who have laid the groundwork for this kind of research. I’m speed-reading Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books and trying to scrounge together some information on Jessica Pressman’s forthcoming Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age, both of which foreground a lot of the points I make about the tensions between digital and print forms of texts.
New Approach to the Weekly Wrap-Ups!
I’m only 2.5 weeks out from turning in this dissertation, so as I move away from giving regular updates about my research, I’m going to change the form of the weekly format to compile all of the things I posted about, recommend, and am thinking about in one place. That way, if you’re ever wondering ‘what is sbooks up to?’, you can go to my research masterpost and click on my weekly wrap-ups to get quick access to fun links and lukewarm takes.
Casey Fiesler’s (@cfiesler) awesome video about fan migration, the oral explanation of her most recent article with Brianna Dym. This is totally worth the 30-minute watch, and Fiesler does an amazing job of tracking the history of fannish media alongside the impetuses of fan migration
a reflection on why fans are the most likely to think critically and expansively about the media they consume, in response to the criticism that fans are content with just consuming the same story over and over again (which is true, but not without reason)
Riley J. Dennis’s Case for the Legend of Korra, which is an excellent elaboration on some popular pro-Korra arguments against the naysayers of the sequel series. I love that Riley talks about Korra’s journey towards humanization via healing from trauma, which is something I think many viewers feel affirmed by.
Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s 'The Sound of Someone You Love Who’s Going Away and It Doesn’t Matter’. What a title! And it really does sound like it.
Things I’ve been thinking about
Takeaways on writing: This has been a week of revisions, with some serious cutting and clarifying. My advisor pointed out that as I am a newbie academic writer, I still rely a lot on quotations instead of paraphrasing my sources for support, rather than evidence. Rephrasing a lot of quotations opened up a lot of room for my own argument. This process made me think a lot about writing guidance in middle school and high school, wherein I was trained to use quotations as evidence rather than as support. Anyone else learn this? That the more people who agree with you, the more right your argument is, instead of drawing from original or revisiting primary evidence and using previous writing as a framework for analysis? It’s a pretty bad habit! And it makes us reliant on regurgitating other work rather than working through our own arguments and examining how they align or disalign with others. Graduate school has been one long re-learning process on writing...and I studied writing in uni.
Different kinds of fan spaces: I hang out, actively participate, and lurk in a variety of fan spaces, mostly in the form of Discord servers (my love) and Facebook groups (bane of my existence). And I’m in a lot of fan spaces for different media: TV shows, books, comics, podcasts, even fan platforms. Though this has been said elsewhere, the difference in attitude and behavior of fans depending on the type of space (and whether fans are masked by a pseudonym or not) is fascinating to me! I’m in one enormous Facebook group dedicated to television show, and without fail, every single post ends up with the comments off because the discourse gets too heated. This behavior is almost definitely a function of:
the impersonal size of the group. In my favorite Discord servers, the smaller size makes the conversation more personable and friendlier (I know these people! I’m not going to harangue them!), and,
affirmational versus transformational fandom: affirmational fans tend to work within the confines of canon, and so when they disagree over the interpretation of canonical elements, the conversation turns to facts (’no, this is how it happened in season 12, episode 472’) over feelings (’this happened once in the spin-off comic and I’m cool w extrapolating this bc I wanna feel warm and fuzzy inside’). Transformational fans are less canon-restricted and perhaps more lenient, and are probably more likely to silo themselves in fan spaces with agreed-upon interpretations (e.g. I’m in a few dedicated shipping servers, and I know other shipping servers exist, but I won’t bother myself with them, because that’s not my cup of tea, so I’ll just save myself the trouble).
This isn’t to say that affirmational fans won’t break off from the main group and form their own interpretive communities, but I think affirmational fans are more likely to want to be a part of the “official” fan spaces, because they are interested in the “official” story.
This is anecdotal conjecture, but I wonder, have you seen differences in fan behavior depending on the fannish space you’re in? I’d love to hear about other fan-space-specific experiences!
