hope I never improve my game

[lotesse]

Late-night hypothesis (i had a hard day i'm not thinking about it): might the weird misdirectedness of "sj shipping" and whatnot be a possible aftereffect of the hardcore fannish embrace of the death of the author?

Instead of accepting all fannish responses while questioning the motives/credentials of directors, movie studios, and various financiers, we seem to be ignoring the latter classes of being almost entirely to instead police fannish response.

I am pretty sure that a substantial chunk of this is "women can be easily made to feel badly about libidinal desires," but also think it's interesting that, after having gloriously launched myself into the arms of Barthes during the Harry Potter years, I now find myself endlessly wanting to remind fellow fen about who gets paid for these stories, who has control, and who exactly doesn't (hint: it's us).

Comments

[legionseagle]

Massively agreeing with all of this. It explains, for example, why Mark Oshiro is making such a hellish mess of reading Discworld, which is quintessentially a set of stories in dialogue with the whole of SFF and other forms of literature and popular culture (Masquerade is a satire on the entire oeuvre of Andrew Lloyd Webber) but because of "authro is dead" you get the commentariat going "Yet again this hoary old trope [ ] appears in the story" without the way it's being subverted being spotted at all.

And agreed about the aggressive fan policing, too; people can get to a fellow fan, but if they even get a nasty message past Joss Whedon's gatekeepers, he can just cry himself to sleep about it, pillowed on his sackloads of money.

[starlady]

I totally agree. I think it also explains the attitude that (for example) "reboot Star Trek is still Trek how dare you say it's not Trek!" which to me is like…what? Of course I'm going to criticize the paid content creators' interpretation.

And the (pardon the simplification here) Barthes ==> Marx attitude shift makes sense to me too. We've still got to get paid until the revolution comes, and ignoring money in fandom land doesn't make that go away, or change the economics of who is benefitting financially from fannish engagement.

[anghraine]

I definitely think the fandom idea of the death of the author is closely tied in with all the rest of it. Fans have a fraught relationship with authority at pretty much any time, and there's a lot of blurring of the lines between resisting authority, rejecting authority, and denying that it exists in the world at all. I don't think DOTA really suggests the last at all, but that's where it's taken.

I also think that's closely related to the intensely individualist ethos of much of fandom, too. We obsess over the ethics of our own personal decisions, condemn others for liking/hating/being indifferent about the wrong things in a way that's much more difficult in majority-male spaces. Where we shop, what food we eat, how much water we use, whether we recycle, wear make-up, exercise... And of course, there's the flip-side: personal decisions that lack the power to result in substantive change are completely worthless (aka trash!).

And partly it's that fandom is generally ready to latch onto any justification for why their positions are Right and Just and the haters are unenlightened. The rise of social justice rhetoric--esp individualistic SJ rhetoric--has provided a script for doing so that extends far beyond "I don't like thing."

And yeah, I think it obscures a lot of the actual power structures. A follower of mine actually made an interesting analogy about it.