Fandoms
December 18, 2018 — October 27, 2024
The colour-saturated, light-and-motion-heavy, infinitely-engaging world of popular fiction franchises consumes far more attention than its real-world, physical impact would imply. And yet, the acreage and population of the many imaginary worlds we share are vast for all that it is ethereal. Perhaps that ethereality is precisely why fandoms figure so large in online culture wars; in the realm of the imagination, the primary tools, the primary weapons, are words. We are all very puissant in imaginary battles. Our shared imaginary worlds offer subcultures diverse freedoms and host diverse theatres of proxy war for real-world powers.
Oh and yes, for all that we talk about imaginary worlds, mass media is a big industry and a forge of social ideals, so it is not like these things are wholly decoupled from impact.
I am not a documentarian-of-record for fandom, nor an expert interpreter. It is a far better documentarian of itself than me. This is just a pointer to some interesting corners, and corner-cases, of interest to me.
1 Fanfic
A whole universe. See Fan fiction.
2 Petri dish for culture wars
Fascinating. See e.g. (Bay 2018; Marwick and Lewis 2017).
2.1 Online hate
The example of hounding Kelly Marie Tran out of social media because she played a character in Star Wars is a nicely cut-and-dried example of fan mobs hounding people on explicitly racist grounds. Obviously the internet has opinions about that.
- ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’: With Rey, Daisy Ridley Portrays a Feminist Heroine We Can Feel Good About
- Racist trolls may think they own Star Wars, but the saga’s diversity issues are not cut and dried
- Star Wars’ Kelly Marie Tran speaks out against her Instagram harassment
- The Persecution of Kelly Marie Tran: How ‘Star Wars’ Fandom Became Overrun By Alt-Right Trolls
- Star Wars and the Battle of the Ever-More-Toxic Fan Culture
- Star Wars & Culture War: Critics Focus on Social Justice and Politics over Quality
2.2 Racefail
tl;dr: Author proposes that writing persons different from yourself, especially racially, is both achievable and worthy. She then learns that this concept is a hot button, and that she has pressed it. Everyone piles on. Lessons are learned, although what they are is disputed.
2.3 Isabel Fall
The “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” incident.
2.4 Ownvoices
Interesting case study in several things The OwnVoices Movement, policing who is allowed to portray which identities in their creative works. Who gets to define authenticity, and appropriation? Connection to institutions for angels, movement design, models of inequality.
“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during horrific and life changing times, like the AIDS EPIDEMIC, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?” Jackson’s stated belief, that stories about marginalised people should be written by authors of the same identity group, is a common one in YA fiction. It’s also the central ethos of a movement known as #ownvoices, which aims to improve diversity in the industry by matching authors to subject matter. It’s not hard to see why it caught on: What better way to improve the representation of marginalised authors than to have them write what they know—or what they are? Who better to capture these stories than someone who shares an identity with the main character? Not only would the books be more diverse (the logic goes), but they’d be more honest, too. But in its present form, the impact of this movement on the landscape of YA has turned increasingly toxic, leading to callouts, controversy, and cancelled books—often for the underrepresented authors it was supposed to help. And no author learned this lesson more harshly than Jackson. His debut novel A Place for Wolves, was set to publish March 26, but was cancelled for not being #ownvoices enough instead. The main character in A Place for Wolves is gay and Black, like Jackson himself. But none of that mattered when an online reviewer accused the author of appropriating a setting—war-torn Kosovo in the 1990s—that he wasn’t qualified or entitled to write about.