Some fandoms puzzle me

[petronia]

What is wrong with IniD ficcing fandom? When will the competent writers who're into the series stop complaining that there is no good fic and start writing some? By this I mean myself as well. I find that every time I watch the series nowadays I frown at the screen and mutter, "The buck has got to stop." I have reams of character analysis in my head. But it seems to be a question of momentum, or something; like there never was a precise moment where a bunch of ficcers were into it all together, egging each other on.

One interesting thing, though: at some point I started to understand the car lingo. Not the dictionary definition of understeer or anything like that, but the "feel" of why the vehicle would respond in the described manner, in the given situation. I'm not sure what triggered the insight. I have odd holes in my spatial-reasoning ability; I was incapable of reading a map until I was twelve, in the sense of taking the overhead plane view and "rotating" it to match a mental image of the streets in which I was moving, though I could say "turn left at Pine and go straight until you hit Stanford". And then, one day, the ability appeared. This feels much the same way.

Comments

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Heh. So would you say that one instrument of having good fic would be needing a group of people to write together with?

(Hmm, so another point for the social theory of writing)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Oh, certainly. Lip service is paid to the idea that one writes primarily for oneself, but I don't think that's precisely it - one only writes what one wants to write and is capable of writing, true, because it's impossible to do otherwise. But most people I know who write well, write perhaps one fic for every ten story concepts, and a lot of what determines the choice is whether there's a) friends to chat with about the series/fic and b) a readership for the fic that at least includes a). If a) and b) don't exist, I may as well go write origfic on my own, or fanfiction for which a) and b) do exist.

IniD is a redheaded stepchild of a fandom, basically. Like it or not, fic is what holds fangirls together around a shounen/seinen series like that; it creates the social relationships that make the difference between a fandom and isolated people who happen to like something. Normally what you have is a couple of brave and prolific writer types who dash out a few stories in the heat of enthusiasm, just well-written enough to get the ball rolling. In IniD all the stories that were written were so bad that the only ball it set rolling was the Ficbitches'. ^^; And ficbitching, even when well-deserved, discourages writers from joining a fandom. It certainly discouraged me: I'm not afraid of being found wanting, but I do dislike the idea of being judged when I'm out to entertain maybe ten people on my flist.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

I don't really know if it is possible to state that people write 'primarily' for either reason (self or social) in general. In the particular, maybe, but there is in general an ideological underemphasis on the social theory. (For various reasons, I am sure, but not being someone who really wants to write, I probably don't know why.)

Mmm, I would be careful overgeneralizing like that. There are entire fandoms (Meril could tell you about em) where people write no fic whatsoever, and it is possible to enjoy a series and the chatter about it, without touching the fic (as I do with FMA). I would also say that there is no reason why it needs to be shounen/seinen either. If you look at things, shoujo series of the Cheese/Margaret/HtY/Sho-Comi sort often have zero ficcing activity, and a bunch of people who are just reading the series in scanlation (hey, do all the people reading things in scanlation, or all the people who hang around on animesuki.com who can summarize every single ep of the series count as fandom?) or Chinese or Japanese. Of course, that could explain why they are such small fandoms. (Or were you just talking about ficcing fandoms?)

So out of curiousity, have you been discouraged from joining any fandom because of the people in it? (not necessarily fic critical attitudes).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm talking about potential ficcing fandoms, I think. That is to say, um, the sort of shounen/seinen series where it's obvious that the vast majority of the female fen is in it for the slash factor. ^^; Like TeniPuri, where if you take away the crack and the fanservice and the character overanalysis there's really not all that much to talk about. I mean, TeniPuri has a lot of male fans (male is an overgeneralisation too, but you know what I mean...), and so does IniD, but they just watch/read and enjoy it, in the same way as the female Margaret/HtY fans just read and enjoy those gakuenmono romantic comedies and whatnot. There's next to no discussion, and thus no sense of social community - to me, anyway. Then you have series like Death Note, AnSanc, FMA I think - even GB - where you can basically discuss thematics and try to predict plot twists until you've killed a forest of virtual trees. But that's really a different case.

I mean, of course in the strictest sense as long as something has individual fans, it has a "fandom". I guess it's stereotypically female, this idea that the fandom doesn't exist unless it talks to itself a lot (counting fic here as a form of discourse). XD

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I guess that is all valid if you are just talking about the fic, but you know, there are people who do watch TeniPuri without reading fic, and buy a lot of the merchandise. I am pretty much in TeniPuri for the crack and the character overanalysis myself. Hmm, I think I have killed more trees for PoT than for DN, because in some senses DN demands to be discussed post facto...]

As for the shoujo, I suppose I count it as 'fandom' if I can talk about it to two people on my flist, but that might be because I am totally ignoring nearly all of the comms. (In any case, anyone who isn't literate in Japanese or Chinese needs a fandom to exist in order to even get into the series in the first place).

I think that LJ has sort of killed off the social community thing. An individual and his/her friends may just talk about FMA on their blogs, according to their own standards. I mean, three quarters of the people on my flist have 'left' or 'withdrawn' from fandom in one way or another. Thinking about it, I think it is that people do not actually like the existent social community, for an variety of reasons.