Kaden

Kaden

@Kaden

Art Page .:. Games .:. Writing

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Kaden
@Kaden
sans-sarif
@sans-sarif
prisma
@prisma
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sans-sarif
@sans-sarif

sitting and thinking on this a bunch

we're reminded of a piece that someone once wrote on, tumblr or a forum like, 15 years ago - it was discussing how fan communities tend to cleave in of two ways.

(HOLLY NOTE: THIS POST WAS FOUND. THIS POST IS THIS POST BY A REDDITOR DISCUSSING WHY REDDITORS OFTEN BASH TUMBLR FANS OF DR WHO. YOU ARE WELCOME TO READ THAT, AND IN FACT WE ENCOURAGE IT, AS IT LENDS A VERY SPECIFIC TONE TO THE REST OF THE REFERENCE THAT THIS POST IS.)

The first option is that the community is largely transformative - artists, writers, musicians taking a base material that affected them in some way and changing it. Classic examples being fixing what they didn't like, expanding on material they wanted more of, retreading the material but with explicit queer themes, transposing it to an alternate universe to explore character dynamics with different stakes. This is where you get those 50 billion alternative sanses in undertale aus. it's where you get coffee-shop kylo kissing someone, or an extended alternate take of a show/movie that changes major points to meet the creator's desire. it's your fanart of the wolf and the snake from bad guys kissing exactly as passionately as i'm led to believe their on-screen chemistry would imply.

the other type of fan culture is archival - the wookiepedias, the dark-souls wikis, the rivet counters. these people don't want to create, they want to record a perfect library of everything that happens or could have happened or will happen in a media as if they were creating a sistine chapel ceiling fresco of the exact shape of the silmarillion. you can argue whether or not these people have experienced any feelings about the materiel they have interacted with because they seem dead set on not actually grappling with whatever themes or morals the media had.

these are the people who cannot be reached by the question of "why does it matter what the author meant, what does it mean to you" - they don't want it to mean anything to them at all and resent you for asking them to weigh in on such a matter. if it's not the "true and correct" meaning, then what value does it have to an archive? if someone can find value in interpreting the catcher in the rye as being about the loss of innocence in war, which runs counter to salinger's own personal insistence that his time serving was of no matter to the book, what does that mean in an archival sense? you can't put that on a shelf. it doesn't fit into a neat web of interconnected wiki pages, it doesn't slot onto a timeline.

archivalist fan culture breeds a sneering anti-intellectualism by way of said intellectualism being unable to be slotted neatly before or after the battle of yavin 4.

Kaden
@Kaden

I watched a vod of a streamer who became repeatedly frustrated by the lack of meaning to all the symbols and imagry in a game and someone in their chat said:

"Why have themes and meaning when you can have wikis and lore?"

And that phrase has been rattling around in my brain ever since

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in reply to @sans-sarif's post:

bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

*quietly raises my hand*

I am not sure if I am the kind of person you mean by "archival" - a large part of my engagement with various fandoms has been all about documenting, hunting down every detail and recording it precisely in wikis, blog posts, and the like.

For me, this comes from two places. Primarily, much of the media involved has been some flavor of live service game, often with all sorts of little discoveries to be made off of the beaten path. I'm keenly aware that one day, the game will not be around anymore - and when that day comes, I want a record of all of these neat little details that the creators poured their hearts into, so that they won't simply vanish into the void. I want them to be around for future people to see, because I've lost count of the number of times a tiny detail has inspired a whole world of speculation from me (as someone who likes to approach worldbuilding as a kind of puzzle) and I want other people to have a chance at that even when the game is gone!

So, I understand your frustration with the prescriptivists of the fandom world, but I wanted to give my 2c as someone who does work on wikis and absolutely does consider "archivist" a key part of my identity in fandom. And fwiw, I don't think there's anything wrong with like... personally approaching fiction like cartography, like mathematics, where you try to build something in as close alignment with the shape of All Things That Exactly Exist as possible - it's just an issue when this gets presented as the Only Right Way to engage!

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sans-sarif
@sans-sarif

this is a discussions of patterns of behaviour in aggregate and about tendencies. when you're at a concert and the lead singer holds their microphone towards the crowd, the aggregate result is that people start screaming the lyrics - drilling down to the individual misses the greater point

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bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

I suppose I'm inclined to approach this from several angles:

  • Is this the kind of mindset that makes up the majority of archivists - or is it a particularly loud and annoying subset? (Which, as we're all familiar, tends to be heard the most even if they are a minority.)
  • Is it helpful to approach this as a matter of transformative vs archival work, or is there a better way to slice this topic? (I am inclined to say that this is not exclusively a problem among the archivists of fandom - the deeper problem, the idea that there is One True Interpretation (Which Is Conveniently The One I Have), is something that I've seen among non-archivists as well. It's just that instead of "it's not Explicitly in the text so it's Wrong," you see things like "these characters can be read as brothers so it's Actual Incest to ship them.")

It may be that I am splitting hairs, but in general, I am increasingly cautious of painting broad strokes - it certainly is not something that any of us intend to do, but ideas run away so easily on the Internet.

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sans-sarif
@sans-sarif

having had the time and space away from this post being the thing everyone on cohost is talking about, (y'know, "touching grass")

i don't hate archivally minded fans. i don't even dislike them. the fact that i can go onto the cultist simulator wiki and grab the names of all the lore is useful and pleasant to me as a person who likes to steal known alexis kennedy's work and change it to meet my own desires and writing in other settings.

this post was really, ultimately a 12:30 am railing against the sort of person who uses a wiki as their bludgeoning tool. not to reify "transformative work" in any more sense than i identify with the label - and definitely not to come down on either side of whether or not it is a "superior" form of fan-work, as much as i am partial to it.

i'm someone who really loves 40k. i'm someone who really loves a lot of the sorts of media that appeals to kneejerk types who get mad when you make characters not white, or not men. the sorts of people who go to the warhammer 40,000 fandom wiki and then post eyerolling emojis at me for wanting to do my own thing, and then tell me i'm a tourist in a fandom i've been in since before i hit puberty.

ultimately this post (and several of my follow-on comments) were formulated assuming no one would see them outside of my usual small sphere of people, and this went viral. this was the first post i've ever done that "did severals" on cohost, and it was definitely not intentionally. so a lot of the way i handled the attention was indelicately.

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bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

blob-holding-heart

I appreciate your reply here! It's all good - honestly, I feel like Suddenly Doing Severals is hard on a lot of people. None of us were wired for this!!!

And yeah, I definitely won't deny that there's an Obnoxious Kind Of Fan who looooves to lord Lore Knowledge over everyone else. And it's like, chill, pal! The Significance of art lies in the individual connection each person makes with it, not in having encyclopedic knowledge! It's a story, not a peer-reviewed scientific journal!

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GreenGale2000
@GreenGale2000

I hate how correct you are because I personally really enjoy archiving this kind of stuff. I like taking the contents of the story and putting it on display in an easy-to-digest format for people who aren't into a story to easily understand, and to potentially get into said story as a result. Unfortunately, this way of thinking does result in folks who enjoy of a piece of media to completely dismiss all fan interpretation and, for lack of a better phrase, stunt the creativity of other fans. Not only that but, as you alluded to in the middle, I also tend to not catch the themes and morals of the stories I consume. I very much take these stories at their level, and kind of treat their actions as literal in-story and rarely as thematic allegory for real life. I definitely need to re-train my brain to be more creativity-focused and less fact-focused, but at least I can agree that most archivist fans like myself kinda suck the fun out of what Transformative Fans are capable of by being so literal-minded.

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neckspike
@neckspike

many of us do a little of both, wikis can be invaluable references for details you half remember or when you need some reference screenshots. there's just certain communities that are very up their own ass about being better than that other group that's doing fandom wrong.

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joyeuse
@joyeuse

I just gotta blurt this out: After the Silent Hill Wiki admin entered the picture, there should have been no one left still believing wikis to be the means by which people create (sorry - "find and record") "the objective and true interpretation of art".

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in reply to @Kaden's post:

cthomlan
@cthomlan

if i may "yes, and" in the form of a rant:

because it's pointless if the author didnt put it in there. what matters is the meaning of the text, not interpretations of it

media literacy is so dead, it's not just that the audience isn't engaging with the work beyond what is written. media literacy is so dead that they refuse to engage with what the author did put there.

"the ending was ambiguous" bullshit. the ending was very clear if one pays attention to the hours of story that came before it. when she says "i don't know if i'm dreaming or not, but i never want to wake up if it means losing you," and then at the final shot we see is of her bed being empty? gee i wonder what that means!!!

"there's nothing in the text that says she's gay" bullshit. the entire text is about how it was a gay love story! the set dressing, the camera framing, the lighting, the matching tattoos... there's so much you can point that makes it clear that the author intended for these two ladies to be gay!!!

but then a wiki page will have like, a trivia section at the bottom of the page. "these two characters have matching tattoos, designed by who works at ." and that's the totality of the entry about the tattoos. it's just a footnote to the lore, instead of included as the major thematic component that it is.

(these arent spoilers for any piece of media, im just making up a film and spoiling it on the spot. i may have spent too much time in the goncharov mines. what a beautiful moment, a community coming together to just "yes, and" each other. nobody wants to "yes, and" anymore, everything silly has to be refuted by wikis and lore)

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