fandom musings
Jun. 25th, 2003 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321I met ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ukcalico for lunch today and we talked about that book "Theorizing Fandom" and then proceeded to theorise fandom ourselves. She has such interesting things to say about popslash, and the history of fandoms. And this'll have been the last time I'll have seen her in Cambridge (good lord, what happened to the tenses in that sentence?).
I miss her already!
Anyway, I immediately had more musings on the way home in the car.
Fandom
I once mused about the four feet of fandom. Of community, fic, fandom and boy-on-boy I concluded that community was the most important and the glue that held all the other three together.
I still hold to that. And Cal broadly agreed. I asked her to think of the three or five most important and most-often talked to Friends on her Friends page. Then I asked her to think of her most drooled-over actor in LotR. Then I got her to imagine losing one or the other: drool-object disappeared forever into hermit's cave in the Andes, never to be seen in movie or pic again - or Friends self-deleted from LJ, email gone, mobile defunct, never to be heard from ever again. Which one to choose?
I think everybody I know would choose to keep the Friends. Sitting on a desert island drooling is no fun. It's the talking about the drooling that's the fun. We need each other!
However, then I backpedalled a bit on my way home. Not completely, but I started thinking, well, what of the drool aspect? In what ways am I a fan? I'm not just pretending to be a fan, after all. Sure, there's a certain amount of psyching myself into it because of the other fans. (As Calico pointed out, it was *Lazulus* showing me the Sneakpics and *Jenn* grinning on the sidelines and screeching at them that got me going about the Orli-Sneakpics. Not me on my own in a newsagent's.) Still, I do also have an indepent relationship (for want of a better word) to these actors and my image of them (and of course to the permutations of them once transformed into fic characters). I can sit alone in my car and think of Orli (and also think that I'm thinking of Orli way too much these days...) and have little squeeish feelings. It's a sort of triangular set-up: fan to other fans, fan to object of fandom, other fans to object of fandom. (If html would allow it, I would now insert a little triangular diagram.)
I will muse further upon the difference in belly-squeeishness between musings upon Orli as such and musings upon Orli as imagined into a fic-like scenario.
Also, heh, I have just realised that my first impulse upon having had these orlish musings was to run upstairs to my computer and let the world know about them!
Community wins out. *You* win out!
ukcalico for lunch today and we talked about that book "Theorizing Fandom" and then proceeded to theorise fandom ourselves. She has such interesting things to say about popslash, and the history of fandoms. And this'll have been the last time I'll have seen her in Cambridge (good lord, what happened to the tenses in that sentence?).I miss her already!
Anyway, I immediately had more musings on the way home in the car.
Fandom
I once mused about the four feet of fandom. Of community, fic, fandom and boy-on-boy I concluded that community was the most important and the glue that held all the other three together.
I still hold to that. And Cal broadly agreed. I asked her to think of the three or five most important and most-often talked to Friends on her Friends page. Then I asked her to think of her most drooled-over actor in LotR. Then I got her to imagine losing one or the other: drool-object disappeared forever into hermit's cave in the Andes, never to be seen in movie or pic again - or Friends self-deleted from LJ, email gone, mobile defunct, never to be heard from ever again. Which one to choose?
I think everybody I know would choose to keep the Friends. Sitting on a desert island drooling is no fun. It's the talking about the drooling that's the fun. We need each other!
However, then I backpedalled a bit on my way home. Not completely, but I started thinking, well, what of the drool aspect? In what ways am I a fan? I'm not just pretending to be a fan, after all. Sure, there's a certain amount of psyching myself into it because of the other fans. (As Calico pointed out, it was *Lazulus* showing me the Sneakpics and *Jenn* grinning on the sidelines and screeching at them that got me going about the Orli-Sneakpics. Not me on my own in a newsagent's.) Still, I do also have an indepent relationship (for want of a better word) to these actors and my image of them (and of course to the permutations of them once transformed into fic characters). I can sit alone in my car and think of Orli (and also think that I'm thinking of Orli way too much these days...) and have little squeeish feelings. It's a sort of triangular set-up: fan to other fans, fan to object of fandom, other fans to object of fandom. (If html would allow it, I would now insert a little triangular diagram.)
I will muse further upon the difference in belly-squeeishness between musings upon Orli as such and musings upon Orli as imagined into a fic-like scenario.
Also, heh, I have just realised that my first impulse upon having had these orlish musings was to run upstairs to my computer and let the world know about them!
Community wins out. *You* win out!
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Date: 2003-07-01 10:25 am (UTC)This is only slightly... okay, well, hardly related, but I did a poll (http://www.livejournal.com/poll/?id=135853) a few months ago, and attempted (and failed) to summarise the results. They still confuse me a bit, but then that's probably because I didn't ask the right questions. But if you're interested, my little write-up is here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/hjartad/160697.html).