Fanthropology - The Study of Fandom

On CinemaBlend.com, Rafe Telsch opined about "passionate fandom": Passionate fandom can be a great thing, after all, without passionate fandom, we wouldn't have a real Klingon alphabet (complete with a translated version of Shakespeare's Hamlet) or a Serenity movie, or a second season of Jericho. Josh is right – those are fantastic examples of what fandom can do. Unfortunately passionate fandom also gives us Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, Harry Potter fanfic, and pornographic images of Legolas and Aragorn captured in an intimate embrace. Passionate fandom has its ugly downside just as much as it has its good side, and we can't blame that on viral marketing.

Joe Bernstein started a review of the PlayStation Portable game Crisis Core: Final Fantansy VII on PopMatters with a paragraph-long anti-fanfic rant I couldn't parse.

In Los Angeles City Beat, Anthony Miller noted that, in Michael Chabon's essay collection Maps and Legends, [Chabon's] intention to cast us out and off into alternate worlds is made clear from the outset with a deft touch to the book's epigraph, transforming the way we read a Melville quotation about those who have written about whaling before him merely by appending the mischievously explanatory phrase "on the writing of fan fiction."

On film.com, in "Why Narnia Will Never Match Up to LOTR," MaryAnn Johanson opined that Prince Caspian/Peter Pevensie slash fan fiction is kinda dull compared to Legolas/Gimli slash. (Although Peter/Legolas crossover slash would be a totally blond-boy orgy…) Discuss. Just, not here kthx.

( cut for length )

Finally, there was an oblique reference to fanfic in The New Yorker. Tim Wu quoted Steve Vander Ark as saying, "Jo's quit, she's done," [..] "We're taking over now." I assume he was talking about more than the lexicon (though I don't think Wu realized this).

We've reached the middle of the week once more, and that means it's time for WTF Wednesday! Post your small, niggling, not-quite-top-level questions that you're curious about.

I am finishing up research on a paper on Leetspeak - or, hacker/gamer language - and I have also noticed for a long time that fandom uses a lot of words derived from leetspeak. Namely words like:
1. "teh"
2. "I'm in your _____, ______ing your _________."
3. "I can has"
4. "Oh noes"
5. "Pwned"/"Owned"
6. the suffix "-z"
7. "w00t"
8. "epic", "epic fail", "fail"
9. noob
AND 
- just verbing nouns in general (i.e., the noun "fangirl" turns into "fangirling")
- over-capitalization (OMGWTF)
- over-emphasizing (OMG!!!!11oneone).

I've been a Supernatural fan for about a year now, involved in fandom for 8 months. It seems most prevalent in icons. What I really want to know is, how any of ya'll came to know about and use these terms. I am interested in the adoption patterns of these terms from leetspeak to more broad Netspeak usage, and how people come to be socialized into these terms.

First up this week (and my favorite): mercuryblue144 pointed me to a story in the Daily Mail by Daniel Boffey about the inclusion of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on the list of required books for English students preparing for the A-levels. What's of interest to me is that students will also have to write their own 500 to 800-word story inspired by the book.

( And many more! )

Yes it's cliche, but I am doing a Very Serious School Paper (TM) on fanfiction. Well, not so serious, maybe. XD Rather than doing traditional research, the paper will comprise mostly of answers and findings from [this questionaire] I put together. I'd like to have a lot of interesting, varied answers, so if you have a few minutes to spare, please follow the link and answer a few (or all) of the questions.

Thank you very much for your help!

Okay, I wrote these polls for the Iceman community, frozen_breaths, but I've since decided that I want to gather data from people outside the comics fandom community as well, so I'm posting the links for them over here. It adds up to being a five part poll that I posted in my own journal, and these links should take you right over there without any problems, but feel free to let me know if there are any.

I designed these polls in hopes of figuring out what truly does make us prefer reading certain fanfics over others and perhaps even why we read fanfic at all. Let's see if they do what I think they do.

Enjoy!

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

The Addendum Poll AKA Part Five

Once again, it's Wednesday. That means it's time for us to ask those strange, odd, weird questions that don't quite merit a top-level post, and perhaps answer a few.

I hope this is an acceptable post.

I was just watching a trailer for the Dark Knight movie and I'm still not utterly floored by the interpretation of The Joker.

My question is: Do you think fans, critics and the media will be softer on Heath's rendition as the Joker due to his untimely death and the supposed difficulty he had during the role? Or do you think people will be able to separate Heath from Joker and look at the performance itself and not the tragedy surrounding it?

Everyone,
I am writing a term paper on the community aspect of livejournal. I will primarily be focusing on the fandom use of Livejournal.

If you have time, please fill out this meme, and email this to me (copy and paste) (My email is thekatesmeow at gmail dot com):

I, My Name, have filled out this questionaire (otherwise known as a "meme"), and know that my answers will be used by Kate Rothermel in a Anthropology paper for educational purposes. I freely allow these words to be used, as well as any additonal images that I have declared to be freely used."

Thank you!

( Meme!" )

Please feel free to make your answers as long or as short as possible! Thank you! I'll even post my own answers as a comment later!

EDIT: I would like to sincerly thank everyone who contributed. You guys made such a difference in my paper. I have now finished writing the paper, though you can fill this out and distrubute it as a meme if you want. Again, thank you guys so, so much!

I have posted a Poll in my LJ regarding the sharing of geeky stuff, and I thought the peeps here at fanthropology would like to participate.

Please feel free to share your opinions and insights.

In Navy Times, there was an article on child porn charges a Naval Academy midshipman is facing. Chris Amos wrote At the Article 32 hearing, Midshipman 1st Class Mikoto Yoshida testified that the found a video file titled “Boy Party,” of “two naked adolescent boys moving toward each other,” and fan fiction accounts of sexual encounters between the three brothers on the television show “Malcolm in the Middle” on Pollard’s computer when he logged on to watch a television show during a class break. There's more in the article - the student's interest in young boys allegedly goes way beyond the Malcolm in the Middle slash - but I wonder what will happen if the fic is part of his trial?

There was a brief mention of fanfic in an article on flickr in The New York Times Magazine. Virginia Heffernan wrote Let’s face facts: the Web, after nearly 20 years, has failed to uncover new masters of noble art forms like poetry, sculpture and the airport thriller. But it has engendered — for good or ill — new forms of creative expression. Blogs and viral videos are only the most obvious. Fan fiction, wikis, Flash animation and Second Life avatars are a few more. People don’t upload to the Web words and images they had fashioned apart from the Web; they fashion their stuff specifically for online platforms and audiences. The article is actually mostly worth checking out for the pretension and sexual hysteria of its comments.

( another busy week )

( From the Department of Understatement )

( From the Department of You Poor, Poor Thing )

Finally, in an article in the Windsor Star on film cameos, Kat Angus and Ben Carrozza wrote, of Sean Connery appearing in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Using James Bond to bless Robin Hood's wedding might work in fan fiction but not in a real movie -- for shame! I kinda liked it.

On April 24, 2008, the Orphan Works Bills was proposed in the US House and US Senate. I predict another round of fandom activism and failure to understand what this will mean to fandom.

If you spot any interesting fandom links on the topic, please include them in to the external links section on the article about it on Fan History. Thanks!

We've reached the middle of the week once more, and that means it's time for WTF Wednesday! Post your small, niggling, not-quite-top-level questions that you're curious about.

( CFP: 'Whoniversal' Appeal: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference on Doctor Who and All of Its Spin-Offs (English) )

( CFP: 'Whoniversal' Appeal: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference on Doctor Who and All of Its Spin-Offs (Welsh) )

In January, when Fan History was talking with Wikia about the possibility of being hosted on their service, we discussed some of the long term goals of Fan History, of where we wanted it to go and what we wanted to do with it. There was a lot of discussion between the various administrators as to what that was. One of the things that we had discussed was building a comprehensive fandom directory. The directory would be large scale, would allow people to easily edit information, have a large pool of people with basic stub articles that people could easily edit, that would serve as a framework for looking at individual histories in fandom. The issue of individual histories was an important one for Fan History because when you look at a hundred individuals, when you get an idea of their involvement in fandom, you can put together a much clearer picture of fandom. These histories begin to show trends in larger fandom, trends in specific fandoms, establish who important people in fandom are, clearly define who the big name fans are, establish patterns of fandom migration. Another issue that was discussed was Fan History's relationship with FanWorksFinder, how the two complemented each other and that the two should work together more closely.

Two months later, Fan History took a proactive step towards meeting this goal: FanFictionNetBot. FanFictionNetBot is an automated bot that was run to pull some historical information about people who have accounts there. The decision was made to start the directory with FanFiction.Net because, unlike services like LiveJournal, MySpace, bebo and orkut, FanFiction.Net's whole population of fan fiction writers can easily be defined as belonging to fandom. In March 2008, FanFictionNetBot helped Fan History to add roughly 75,000 articles about members of fandom. The purpose of FanFictionNetBot is:

( List of purposes... )

All the information that FanFictionNetBot gathered is public information. FanFictionNetBot was/is in compliance with FanFiction.Net's robot.txt requirements. To date, the bot has created roughly 79,000 articles. At some point in the future, we plan to try to run the bot again to add more information to help us meet our goals and, given the success so far, Fan History may try to do something similar with an archive with an audience that really differs from FanFiction.Net. Additional information on FanFictionNetBot can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/index.php/User:FanFictionNetBot.

In April 2008, Fan History came back to the issue of a FanWorksFinder. FanWorksFinder's purpose really complemented Fan History's long term goals. In talking with Heather, the decision was made to turn the ownership and management of FanWorksFinder to Fan History. The current time frame for completion of this goal is mid-May 2008.

If anyone has concerns regarding their personal privacy in fandom, the privacy article on Fan History was written to help people learn how they can maintain their privacy while participating in fandom.

From the Orac list (and please pass it along):

<http://eugie.livejournal.com/364858.html>

To All You Book-loving Atlanta Locals:

I just got a note from Sean Wallace, Publisher/Editor with Prime
Books/Wildside Press. It seems that SF/F publisher Meisha Merlin,
which declared it was shutting down in November, has a rather large
amount of stock (tens of thousands of books) in its Stone Mountain
warehouse (1440 Kelton Drive, Stone Mountain) that needs to be rescued
or it will all be destroyed/recycled.

Sean is renting a truck which can fit fifteen pallets, single-stacked,
or thirty double-stacked, but there's no forklift available, only a
pallet jack. So he has to fill the truck by hand. He'll be in town
Tuesday and Wednesday (4/22 and 4/23) to load up, and he's asked me to
spread the word that he's desperate for volunteers to help him. Anyone
who volunteers can cart off any books they want that don't fit into
the truck.

If you can help out or know of folks who might be able to, email Sean
at: seanwallace at comcast.net

There were a number of references to fanfic this past week in articles about the Rowling/HP lexicon court case.

( And here they are! )

In other news:

On the Ohio entertainment site Valley24.com, Bob Mackey wrote While most agree that readable text is essential, having a solid color background on your Internet web page can cause “World Wide Web Fatigue,” a symptom commonly brought on by a lack of stimulus while searching for Deep Space Nine fan-fiction. I'm pretty sure he was being facetious; and, yeah, the sentence doesn't quite make sense. But I actually like this sort of reference - it's an acknowledgment that reading fanfic is something people *do.* I don't need it to be cool, just present. (And the piece is worth checking out just for the dancing camel. Or is that a duck?)

Is it possible to review Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End without mentioning fanfic? Well, actually, I haven't really checked; but Diane White's review, in The Boston Globe, includes the sentence, Meanwhile, her obsessed fans speculate and gossip on the Internet about why the reclusive and secretive author hasn't written anything lately and what her famous detective character, Maxwell Lane - who has a life of his own in many readers' imaginations - might be doing. They even write "fanfic," original fictional adventures featuring Lane, and post them on websites and chat rooms devoted to him.

And, finally, a reference I really liked: On the Columbus, Ohio-focused website ColumbusAlive.com, Chris DeVille wrote, regarding Videogum.com, Some of the gold they dug up within the first day: an alternate opening credits sequence that recast Lost as an old-school TV action show, theme song and all; a piece of fan fiction that casts Stephen Colbert as a character in season one of The Wire; and a delightfully creepy clip of Dateline's Keith Morrison interviewing an accused murderer.

Been a bit busy to post one of these, but I finally have some time, so here goes!

Our subject today is Forgotten Cool Things. What are things you remember from your early fan days you don't see enough of, or meet enough people who remember it?

For me, Micronauts, a surprisingly cool line of toys (of course with a Japanese origin) with plenty of interchangeable parts to let you combine things.

Hi there,

In honor of WTF Wednesday, I've posted a question over at my journal, concerning how you read. specifically, how you conjure up a scene in your mind, as you read.

What prompted the thought was slash specific, but the general question is, I think, interesting in and of itself. I'm wondering if it's common to imagine a scene through the given POV character's perspective, or if, like me, you might 'see' a scene as if it were being filmed. Or something else entirely.

Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. It's one of those mysteries I'd never thought of before.

My name is Jennifer Young and I am an undergraduate at the University of Maryland. I am in the Honors Humanities program there, a two year research program where all members must complete a research project. For my project, I am choosing to write a paper on fandom. I am also choosing to pull mainly from meta essays. This is because I sincerely believe meta essays are an extremely rich resource for knowledge about fandom, and  should be a primary source in scholarship about  fandom.

As I move on in the writing process, I need to let the authors of the meta essays I am referencing know and provide a space for them to object to being cited.

So, I decided to do this for now (later I will hopefully send emails, but we will see): I created an LJ in my own name (I am a member / long time lurker of the HP fandom, and do have one for fandom use), and posted stripped down bibliographies, my abstract, and some more personal information on there. One particular post has links to all the others along with a better explanation.

http://jenoldyoung.livejournal.com/769.html#cutid1
If you are a meta author, please check it out, see if your name is listed or a piece that you wrote is listed. Let me know if its ok or not okay to use your work!