Musings on fandom, convergence culture, and geek chic

Clearly I have nothing interesting to say, so instead I'm going to toss out a bunch of random links to things that have been amusing me over the holidays:

http://fuckyoupenguin.blogspot.com/
For I Can Has Cheezburger and Cute Overload fans who enjoy good snark.

http://io9.com/5125082/best-zombie-nazi-fight-scene-in-history
O.M.G. I am insanely excited about this!!!! Nazi zombies! Evil Dead 2 homages! Castration! (OK, less excited about that one, but in context it is pretty damn funny [see clip]). Plus, "Dead Snow" is a fantastically funny name for a zombie film.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=40431849&l=aa709&id=3409446
This is less about posting a funny picture of me and more about marveling once again at how cool a girlfriend my friend Caitlin is to get this as a present for her boyfriend. Makes me want to play Gears of War 2.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=quantum_of_phallus
Mostly because this movie provoked such ire, and this is one of the funnier angry reviews I've read (crass, but funny). Also, I am genuinely upset that Marc Frakking Forster is directing "World War Z," and this review puts it best: If Marc Forster was an X-man, his super power would be ruining brands. Seriously, the news that he had been assigned to direct "World War Z" ruined my holiday.

...aaaaaand, that's all I have for now. Enjoy, or post fun links for me to peruse!

It's well-documented how much I hate "Twilight" and the entire phenomenon. No offense, Twihards, but I don't just think its bad fanfic (which it is), I think it's arguably a dangerous text for young women to be attracted to (somewhere between "suicide attempts will help me win back my one true love" and the bruises=sexy domestic abuse parable of the honeymoon, my mere failure to understand why people love it evolved into overt annoyance). Plus, Bella and Edward are running neck and neck for my "most grating character in recent memory" award.

I'm planning on seeing the movie opening weekend, but mostly to watch the spectacle of fangirl hysteria firsthand, as my impressions of the Twilight fandom ranges from batty to downright unstable (and has been exacerbated by reports of women actually making their necks bleed before getting their photo op with RPatz). I was in Westwood Sunday evening, where the Twimoms were already camping out for the LA premiere, and I found myself engaging in the sort of eye-rolling that I absolutely abhor when it's directed at other fandoms or fan practices. It's shameful, really, but there you have it- I still find certain fannish behavior as "over the line," or at least as having the potential to set the social constructions of "fanboy" and "fangirl" back a few decades. I guess what I'm getting at here is that fandom has been so mainstreamed in recent years, and fan practices so normalized, that I wonder what the last fanboos are, fan practices or behavior that causes fans to pathologize the actions of their fellow fans. Hypocritical? Absolutely, but better to be honest about it than deny the bias.

( Here's my top two, feel free to add your own... )

So, I'll admit it, I went to see "Eagle Eye" on opening day, motivated by my long-standing Shia appreciation, the absurd heat wave, and the sheer awfulness of the trailer.

I can't imagine any of you care enough about this flick to get uppity about being spoiled, but just in case...( SPOILERS AHOY )

Sigh.

So, this is good news. Great news, in fact. Still, I sort of loathe to admit it, because I promised myself I'd never be one of those people...

( I've officially changed my dissertation topic. )

This was a week where all my media consumption thematically coalesced in interesting ways. Among them:
-Finally slogging through "Breaking Dawn," despite already knowing everything that happens courtesy of fandom wank and Cleolinda's amazingly entertaining recaps
-Watching the media fallout from Sarah Palin's nomination and speech
-Re-watching "Rosemary's Baby" for the 100th time, as I'm considering it for an upcoming syllabus I'm putting together
-Attending Howard Shore and David Cronenberg's "The Fly: The Opera"

First, a couple of observations about The Fly: The Opera: I've seen the original 1958 film once, many years ago, and it's a foggy memory. I'd assumed that the opera, considering Cronenberg's involvement, would be a transmedia riff on his 1986 adaptation, and was a bit taken aback to realize that the opera is set in the 1950s. The original film has been bumped to the top of my Netflix queue, so more on the adaptation once I re-watch the film. The key distinction, at least in terms of this post, is that the opera (due to the constraints of the medium as much as the period the opera is set in) moves away from the body horror of Cronenberg's film to a large degree, ending with Veronica ("Ronnie"), vowing to keep Brundlefly's spawn currently gestating in her belly. The tone of the moment is strikingly romantic (not that Geena Davis unloading a shotgun into Jeff Goldblum's face *isn't* romantic), an affirmation of childbirth/motherhood as the ultimate in romantic devotion...even when the woman in question has a strong idea about the horrors that will burst from her womb. Easily the most gripping moment in the stage production is Ronnie's embodied nightmare of the birth of her "child," prompting her to seek out an abortion.

The connections to Rosemary and Bella here are clear, and I lump in Bristol Palin only because of the discourse surrounding her pregnancy (I'm not suggesting that she's gestating a mutant because I read her boyfriend's myspace page or anything, I may be a Democrat but I'm not *that* judgmental). Essentially, the corollary here is the conservative underpinnings of these supposed "cautionary tales": Bella's self-sacrifice and super-spawn reward, Rosemary's tentative lullaby, Veronica's open-armed promise to Seth to protect their larva, the repurposing of Bristol's unplanned pregnancy as an embodiment of "family values."

Bottom line, these narratives scare the hell out of me as a woman, particularly that of Bella. I'm beginning to wonder, though, if we're meant to view these women as martyrs rather than maniacs. I don't know of anyone who hasn't taken issue with "Breaking Dawn" and Bella as a highly problematic (or downright dangerous) heroine. Somewhere between playing the happily abused spouse ("The sex was great, and look! No bruises on my face! He DOES love me!") who "brought it on herself" and her sunny suffering pregnancy routine ("No, seriously, I can barely feel that broken rib...the little scamp..."), Bella has to lose her Mary Sue romantic status, no? I can't imagine anyone wanted to "identify" with such a character, or forcing themselves to question their alignment with her for the prior 3 novels. Frankly, I've never found Bella likable or her coupling with Edward romantic in the slightest, but clearly "Breaking Dawn" is banking on residual affection for the character and blind devotion to their heteronormative, oppressively conservative coupling (yes, I realize he's a vampire, but I see that as more an excuse to discuss his "marble sculpted chest" and "angelic beauty" at length rather than have any real, interesting bearing on how their coupling plays out).

Considering the Sarah Palin fallout is just starting, it will be interesting to see how Bristol's pregnancy plays out in the media in the wake of Jaime Lynn, and, to draw on a deplorable analogy, how Sarah's own child's "difference" is being fetishized by the campaign.

Henry's recent blog posts on his first time at SDCC have prompted me to post a long overdue recap of my own experience at Comic-con. Unfortunately, a series of unfortunate events (Luke not being able to get Wed/Th off work, my sudden bout of food poisoning in the middle of the masquerade that killed Sunday) cut our time at the con short. Our experience in 2007 involved a lot of time in Hall H and fighting our way into panels, too much time spent fighting for swag (though Luke did get hooked up with a free Force FX lightsaber after we became pals with some of the guys over at Master Replicas. So this year, there was a strict game plan, as we were only planning to be there Fri/Sat/Sun:

-Friday: Watchmen panel, scope the exhibit hall for got-to-have-it swag and have-to-buy-it-Sunday merch, hit any panels we can without driving ourselves crazy waiting in lines, meet up with various friends who were working in booths and/or attending the con.
-Saturday: cosplay Silk Spectre and Comedian, aka the most perverse couples cosplay in history, plus the Starship Trooper 3 panel (Luke just edited the "It's a Good Day To Die" music video extra for the DVD, plus I'm a massive ST fan...the return of Rico!!!)
-Sunday: this was meant to be a shopping day exclusively, before the encounter with the bad shrimp

So, for the sake of brevity, I'm just going to go point-by-point rather than day by day:

( Swag...Or, land of the big frakking bags and bigger t-shirts )

( Watchmen panel...or how Patrick Wilson singlehandedly quelled my fears )

( Silk Spectre for a Day...or what it feels like to be a comic-con celebrity )

Whew. Long time no see. I have so much I'm dying to discuss...

-the "Twilight" kerfuffle: I finally caved and managed to claw my way through the first three books, and I think it might have been rougher than the time that mutant kid fought its way out of that Mary Sue's womb. *rimshot* Seriously, though, more thoughts once I actually read "Breaking Dawn" in the tentatively titled post, "Belle, Meet Bella: Or, Why Suzanne Can't Understand Why Fandom Won't Tolerate Mary Sues in Fanfic, But Will Build A Fandom Around Them" Does anyone on this flist actually *like* this series? Am I just romance lit. impaired? All snarkiness aside, I would like to understand the appeal.

-"Y: The Last Man," aka the comic that knocked me out on every level...viscerally, emotionally, academically. This hasn't happened to me in quite this way since I first read "Watchmen." I know I'm late to the party, but this deserves its own post, so in the meantime, some other bedside table reading: "Buffy season 8" (per usual),"Runaways" (late to that party too), "Locke and Key" (good stuff), "Gotham Central" (starting that one soon)...as always, recommendations always appreciated.

Okay, down to business. Terminus recap (or, really, muddled collection of impressions). This is the second Narrate event I've been heavily involved in (serving as Programming Chair for Phoenix Rising last year), and the 5th Harry Potter Symposium I've presented at and attended. These events have always been unique spaces where academics and fans converge (and aca-fans can disclose the latter half of their identity by presenting in a Slytherin uniform...yup, I have.)

This one was different. ( Not that there's anything wrong with that... )

...when all I want to do is watch the Watchmen...it's been an awesome week: trailer (seen in IMAX pre-Dark Knight, as God and geeks intended), EW cover story, and then cosplaying Silk Spectre at Comic-Con this Saturday. Yes, I'm happily basking in the first onslaught of content. And yes, I've already got a number of problems with what I've seen thus far- in particular, the hair and costuming of the dual Silk Spectres:
( Wherefore art thou, poodle hair?! )

And now, away from the fannish ranting for a moment and onto something marginally more academic:
( Fandom, meet everyone. Everyone, fandom. Play nice... )

Okay, enough for now. I need to go fluff my poodle hair wig. No, seriously.

Ah, the viewing party. I used to co-host weekly "Lost" viewing parties, but eventually we gave them up as the show started going downhill and haven't yet managed to organize them since its revival. The point is, I'm attending a "Gossip Girl" season finale party this evening, complete with dress code, and it's making me want to expand my definition of cosplay. After all, the evening is bound to include the following: 1. cocktails, 2. cocktail dresses approximating the couture on the show, 3. cattiness, 4. overt alignment with a particular character (dude, if I could dress up like Chuck Bass, I would...love the scarves, love the absurd plaid pants), and 5. embodiment. True, I might not be pretending to be Blair, specifically, but I'm trying to approximate her attitude, aesthetic (down to the trademark headband with bow) and lifestyle with similarly like-minded fans. It's also important to note that our hostess tonight actually lived this lifestyle growing up in NYC, and thus has a kinship with the characters and locations that is deeper than my own. I did go to a very tony private school where I was something of a Dan Humphrey (namely, not "poor" by any reasonable person's definition, but certainly an outsider economically speaking, and there primarily to bolster the school's arts program), so I can relate to/vouch for the quasi-authenticity of the world that "Gossip Girl" creates. Let's just say it's not a coincidence that I have a few dresses hanging in my closet for just such a party.

In short, it's the fan-lite version of cosplay, perhaps further evidence that the term has been steadily losing its anime specificity for some time now. As the only person in attendance who has ever actually cosplayed (again, I'm using the looser, Americanized definition- I'm currently planning on attending Comicon this summer as the Silk Spectre [Sally, not Laurie] from Watchmen, with my boyfriend as The Comedian), and one who has seen its popularity as a form of fan production explode in recent years, I have to wonder if events like this screening party are indicative of yet another way that fan practices are being mainstreamed. At any rate, I'll bring up the idea to the group tonight and see what they say- they're all dear friends and colleagues from USC, so I'm sure the responses with provoke interesting discussion. I think they'll all be somewhat surprised to think about this event as a "fannish" practice beyond the "normal" boundaries of collective viewing, as we've all had multiple conversations that expose a clear delineation in their logic between how they engage with media (fannishly to the degree that they discuss episodes with friends, but in no way involved with the "fandom" side of things), and how I tend to. As many aca-fans have discussed in recent months, that gap seems to be steadily closing, and I'd put this event forth as evidence of that. I'll be sure to link pictures.

On a related tangent, a new cosplay cafe opened in LA...anyone interested in checking it out with me?
http://www.royal-t.org/cafe/

Any Waldorf, van der Woodsen, Archibald or Bass would totally approve of the finger sandwiches.

xoxo,
Aca-fan Girl

No GTA IV until finals are over, and that's okay- I haven't found myself caught up in the wave of excitement, even though I was obsessed with GTA III back in the day. I'm sure it's just end of term exhaustion, and Ill happily be spending long hours on my couch stealing cars soon.

Bob's recent post on the subject is full of fantastic insights, and is emblematic of all the ways the GTA series has been/could be approached. It's one of those video games that's equally rich for gamers and scholars alike. I'd also put Bioshock in that camp, but their pleasures are fundamentally different- I'm on the same page as Bob, I never finished GTA III or Vice City, heck, I never even made it a priority to complete missions. I vaguely recall hitting a particularly tough timed mission in GTA III and giving up after 6 failed attempts, content to see if I could outrun the fuzz after stealing cars directly in front of the police station. Simply put, I wonder if anyone cares about the end/closure of GTA IV, the pleasure is in the play. I know Bob takes some issue with the "sandbox structure" qualification, but I think it's apt.

Clearly, I was obsessed with Bioshock when I created this lj (hence the name/icon), though at the time I was spending more time watching my boyfriend play than actually playing myself. And I'm no gamer widow, I watched the gameplay as I might a movie, anxious to see how characters would develop, how choices would impact the plot, where everything would end up. I'm not the first to call Bioshock a narrative masterwork, and I won't be the last, but I haven't heard anyone discuss how this translates into pleasure for spectators of games (or, conversely, how a game like GTA III or IV limits such pleasure).

So, a question and a call to arms: Does anyone know if studies have been done on video game spectatorship? Would such work be considered unproductive, taking video game studies back to the early days of trying to squeeze it into old film studies/narrative theoretical models? Anyone share this interest, or has watching Portal scrambled my brain?

The comments on Bob's blog seem to indicate (e.g. watching Travis Bickle vs. being Travis Bickle) that play and spectatorship are still being seen along the active/passive binary. Maybe video game spectatorship exists in some liminal space that deserves exploration...or, put another way, where's the fun in watching another person be Travis Bickle, and how is it fundamentally different than watching him or playing as him?

What's that, you say? A conference with beautiful weather, thoughtful presentations, and tons of fun people to hang out with? Does such a conference exist?!

( Sure does. With fun jargon upgrades! Part I of the wrap-up... )

I'll be at Console-ing Passions this weekend to participate in a workshop with fellow fan debaters Louisa Stein, Julie Levine Russo, Sam Ford, and Bob Rehak (our fearless organizer). The goal? To revisit the fan and gender debates held on Henry Jenkins' blog last summer and continue the conversation through a series of test cases, which you can read here (thanks to Kristina Busse!):

http://community.livejournal.com/fandebate/

It's shaping up to be a great panel, both in terms of the wide variety of research interests these test cases represent and the intersections between them. I'll be addressing wizard rock and, at the risk of pissing off wrock fangirls, addressing fangirls' (myself included) role in creating and perpetuating a male-dominated star system within the wrock community. I'm planning on refreshing my memory and re-reading some of the debates tomorrow. Never has work/conference prep been so pleasurable!

I'm also apparently chairing a panel on Feminist responses to Slash on Friday morning...news to me, a friend called my attention to it after spotting my name in the program. Unless I'm suffering from memory loss (Aliens? Wizards? Hmm.) I don't remember being asked, though I'd be thrilled to serve as chair (despite the fact that I could reel off about 5 names that would be better suited for the job). We'll see how that pans out...

And now for the shameless plug...

For any Obama supporters out there (or anyone with an interest in political user-generated content), please check out my lovely boyfriend's contribution to MoveOn.org's "Obama in 30 Seconds" contest. If you feel so inclined, please submit your name so that he has a chance of making the finals:

http://obamain30seconds.org/vote/?v=view-1130-EdhAH9

As you may have guessed, the spot is meant to serve as a counterpoint to the now-infamous 3am ad, and is also a love letter to our Echo Park neighborhood.

Bonus: I can safely say, after having viewed about 100 of the submissions, that Luke's is one of the only spots that doesn't just shoot a multicultural collection of kids reciting Obama speeches. We get it, kids are cute, hope, future, change, yes we can, etc. After the 20th or so, they kinda start to get old.

PS: Just because you rip of a PC/MAC ad does not make your Obama ad hip and/or relevant. Sigh.

First, thanks to everyone for commenting...lots of food for thought (or moisture to farm, choose your SW allegory, hopefully one that isn't so patently gross).

Check out the spin on the lack of attendance over at the official Stop Darth Weinstein site:
Hey, someone did show up to the LA protest! In costume!

Now, I never saw this guy. He either A. showed up over an hour and a half late (possible), or B. (and the more likely option) he got cornered by security at the top of the escalator out of my eyeline and was immediately sent back down. In either case, despite reports that fewer than 20 people showed up to the NYC protest and I'm fairly sure less than 5 showed up in LA, I find all the self-congratulatory hype on the website a little odd.

But back to some half-baked musings on the topic at hand:
On a purely practical level, I'm sure that the lack of attendance was due to a website/rally cry that failed to build community (or even allow basic communication between fans/potential protesters, as luminousmarble pointed out). This, oddly enough, extends to the protest's representation on (in this case, inappropriately-named) social networking sites: I posted to the protest's facebook wall about the lack of attendance that has yet to get any response, and there's been minimal posting/chatter. cryptoxin brought up fans potentially "slacktivist" (love that!) modes, and that's a big factor here as well, and probably exacerbated by the website's claim that "hundreds" of fans were already confirmed to protest and that, as projectjulie noted, so many recent, successful protests have gone virtual.

Finally, though, we get to the issue of space. Reading conob relay her conversations overheard on BART (which clearly make a case for these concerns about being publicly perceived as deviant), I have to wonder whether IRL protests have gone the way of the dodo. Or, more to the pathologized point, if it's one thing to don your costume in the "safe" space of the con or meet-up or premiere, but quite another to hang out in an upscale mall dressed as Yoda waving a picket sign. I do agree with projectjulie- I think that, to some degree, that fandom is increasingly being used as a model for "good" media consumption is shifting the cultural construction of the fan away from the unbalanced, socially stunted, hermetic creatures they were once constructed to be.

That said, I think that this hinges on visibility, and that visibility makes for an easy return to the fandom-as-pathology model we're (happily) moving further and further away from. It made me think back to the success of Fans for Writers. projectjulie brought up their pencil drive, and how this virtual component of the protest allowed for fans from all over the country to contribute their support. True, but importantly the end result was that video of RDM and Joss dumping thousands of pencils into carts to be sent off to the studios: in short, at the end of the day we all still wanted the spectacle of the pencils, wanted to see virtual action materialize into something tangible (same goes for the hundreds of fans who showed up to picket on behalf of their favorite shows). I think that the aforementioned case (and the fans who ran it) understood perfectly how to synchronize a virtual and RL protest, and that's where the Fanboys protest failed (arguably, they failed on both fronts, aside from spamming Wesinstein employees).

As for the debate about contemporary fans being more/less concerned about their portrayal by the news or popular culture, I'm leaving that open for debate.

PS: And now for something completely different, I have earned a new nickname from the Professor I'm TAing for: "Mildred Fierce." Hilarious. Who knew he was a Project Runway fan...(I did know he was a Joan Crawford fan, aren't we all!)

Having just presented a paper this afternoon at the AEGS "Getting Obsessive: Culture and Excess" conference on Roger Nygard's 1997 doc "Trekkies," and the fandom-as-pathology model that so often pervades "ethnographic" documentation of fandom and fan practices, I headed over to the AMC in Century City to participate in a protest on behalf of "Fanboys." It seemed a fitting way to end the day.

For those of you who don't peruse Defamer or BoingBoing, you can catch up on the controversy HERE.

Admittedly, I did not see the rough cut that was screened at Celebration this past summer, though I did hear good things about the film. Weinstein's decision to excise the cancer subplot (thus drastically shifting the titular fans' motives for infiltrating Skywalker Ranch, once again falling back on the antiquated stigmas surrounding fannish affect that continue to pervade the mass media despite the fact that fandom has been mainstreamed and "normalized" to a large degree in recent years) concerned me, to say the least.

At any rate, I showed up to lend my support, talk with fellow Star Wars fans (hopefully some who had seen the rough cut at Celebration), observe how the newsmedia was covering the event, etc.

My boyfriend (arguably the bigger SW fan) and I waited outside from 6:45pm to approximately 8pm. Alone. Not a member of the 501st in sight. Clearly, the theater expected a crowd, because the security guards lingering about outnumbered us 4:1. So, it begs the question: what happened?

The few rogue film crews that showed up expecting spectacle were visibly disappointed, and started asking us a series of unanswerable (if fascinating) questions: Where were the hundreds of fans that had pledged to attend? What did this utter failure to draw a crowd say about fandom's ability (or lack thereof) to mobilize? Do people simply not care about Star Wars anymore, now that the prequels have come and (thankfully) gone? etc.

As one might expect, the few media outlets in attendance were hoping for the spectacle of fannish affect- girls dressed up as slave!Leia makes for great TV- and this was the double-bind of the protest from its inception. By invoking the spectacle of fandom (so easily and frequently pathologized by the newsmedia) in a protest of pathologized portraits of fandom, the organizers of the protest constructed a lose-lose situation. Sitting here a few hours later, still marveling that NO FANS ATTENDED, I have to wonder if it was for the best, and muse about the implications of this mass boycott of the boycott.

The questions that were posed above deserve further contemplation and address, and I'd add one more to the list: Has participatory culture and the mainstreaming of fandom not only diluted fandom's "Othered" status, but brought about a lack of concern within fandom about how fans are portrayed within the media and understood by culture? Are pathologized portraits of fans and fandom no longer a relevant concern? Discuss amongst yourselves...

I've been meaning to create a proper acafan lj for some time now, and my fanboy/fangirl debate post going up on Henry Jenkins' blog sealed the deal. So, without further ado, here it is:

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fifteen): Bob Rehak and Suzanne Scott (Part I)

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fifteen): Bob Rehak and Suzanne Scott (Part II)

Consider this post one of those annoying teaser trailers that tells you everything, yet without any of the depth or texture...some topics I'd like to broach in coming posts include:

-Comic books, transmedia storytelling, and Star Wars: Legacy
-Bioshock and videogame spectatorship
-Mrs. Ron, her place in the BSG fan community, and gendered definitions of "fan practice"
-Wizard Rock and filking in the MySpace era
-Comicon (and the shifting face of cons in general)

Until then, go read all the collected fan debates here: fandebate

Insightful, fascinating stuff...