Snowflake Challenge: Day 11
Mar. 3rd, 2018 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanI had a lovely day, but I’ll post about that tomorrow...
Day 11
Share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
This is gonna sound like it’s cheating but I’ve been meaning to post about it for a while, so…
Obviously being in fandom has changed my life in innumerable ways - I mean, many of my close or best friends are people I met through fandom. But being in fandom, and especially reading fanfic and meta, has influenced my ethics. A lot.
Which sounds terrifying, haha, and the start of some kind of clickbait article about fandom ruining young people - which will definitely become more of a thing as fandom gets ever more mainstream.
I was sixteen when I entered fandom and I’m about to turn twenty-eight, so those are some influential years. Now I don’t exactly mean that fandom has influenced what I think is right and wrong - it probably has, but not in any way I could easily unpick, and I suspect that it’s a feedback loop to the extent that it’s true. Like, what I already thought was right and wrong was perhaps settled and entrenched by being in fandom - after all, fandom has lots of disagreements within itself, we’re a bunch of people who often strongly disagree more than a monolith, even when we’re just talking about the smaller communities I’ve been part of within wider fandom. I was already interested in fighting inequality, I already had ideas about responsibility and community-building and kindness in the face of vulnerability, and fandom just gave me new ways to express them and new examples of them.
But there has been a change: the way fandom looks at characters influences the way I look at people.
Characters are not real people and that’s important in sooooo many ways. But fanworks and meta have this big focus on looking at the whole person when you look at a single interaction they have or decision they make. So for example, analysis of Dark Willow will often refer back to Willow’s urge to revenge, or her desire for control and wish for social harmony, with examples of her interactions with classmates from season 1 and 2. No discussion of Draco Malfoy would be complete without discussion of his family background. Natasha Romanov’s childhood is assumed to be relevant in all conversations about her approach to the teams she’s on and her ethics.
That’s something that feels so obvious as to be hardly worth saying, but it’s not at all a universal approach. Particularly not in the UK, where that kind of approach is really associated with the US and its self-analysis and personal growth and therapists. (Assume a sarcastic tone there.) And it’s far more prevalent in fannish thinking than in other places, I think.
Literary criticism and academia will do this, because they’re the only other people who are so steeped in characters that they have this whole library of quotes and moments in their head - you need such deep knowledge, as well as certain habits of mind, to be able to draw an arrow-sharp, appropriate-quotes-using distinction between Black Sails’ Jack Rackham and John Silver’s approach to mythmaking and how they both change. But fannish thought doesn’t make any pretence at objectivity in the way academia still sometimes does; these characters are our friends, they live inside our heads, we write and draw them more stories. Those stories are often ways of arguing back with the text, but even more they’re ways of arguing with other fans about the ways these characters should be interpreted and what they deserve. Ways of judging characters.
So this is why I was thinking about all this. In October last year I had a conversation with my fannish friend Dee about my mother, and my family, and our difficult relationship. I was specifically thinking about how as a teenager, after screaming fights, I repeatedly heard my mum say to my younger sisters and my dad that she didn’t understand why I had this wall up. I was so angry, and she could see the wall go up the moment she said anything critical, and she didn’t know why.
And as an adult I find that completely ridiculous. Why is your teenager angry and defensive and putting up “a wall”? Well, maybe because she can hear you talking to the rest of the family about how something is wrong with her and she’s so angry! That would make people defensive! And you know she can hear you, because she brings it up!
That is not difficult analysis. Dee, in this conversation, both blew my mind by saying that she thought my mum wasn’t good at people - which had never occurred to me before - and very helpfully extending my idea about the effect of fandom; that because my/our particular interest and even expertise involves analysis of people and how their whole pasts influence what they do, we’re of course going to be more attuned to that. That it’s more unusual than we might expect.
Another family example. I’d had this really fraught adolescence full of me arguing with my family, fights that fairly often became physical. In the case of my parents and I, it was mutual; with my youngest sister I didn’t even defend myself after a certain point, because she was five years younger. When I was twenty-one, I moved back in after uni - it was 2011 and I was unemployed and things were difficult for all of us. My mum very sincerely, in two fights, said that if I swore at her she’d kick me out.
After a long weekend away with friends, I was exhausted. She and my youngest sister woke me up to yell at me about post. I asked to do this later after I’d slept; they refused and stood very near me, making me feel threatened. I slapped my sister incredibly hard, and I got immediately kicked out.
Now, to me explaining that context is not the same as excusing it. My family did not see it that way at all, so I stopped trying quickly: they were focused on ‘you hit your sister and she is scared to live with you’ and saw any amount of ‘I felt physically threatened but also got angry and lashed out’ as trying to make it okay. This is different from the first example in that it’s not really a question of understanding how context and experience influenced behaviour - it’s more about not caring. Explaining that stuff was the same as excusing it, for my family, and they were not interested in that.
We all know nutjob apologist stans who argue that villains (and occasionally heroes) are really fluffy bunnies who did nothing wrong. But - thanks in no small part to flist/dashboard curation - I see far more analysis that acknowledges and discusses the reasons for bad behaviour without excusing it. It wouldn’t occur to me that saying, for instance, “[the Muggleborn]’re just not the same… I think they should keep it in the old wizarding families” is definitely pre-teen Draco Malfoy repeating what he’s heard from adults around him is inherently the same as morally justifying his deliberate use of slurs when he’s angry. But again, that’s because of habits of thought I developed from being in fandom. Providing context is not the same as apologia.
And meta stories, that are responding to fannish/critical analysis, and to the way we imagine ourselves via story? They tend to do that too. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explicitly discusses the ways Rebecca’s parents have affected her without ever excusing her bad behaviour; The Last Jedi doesn’t excuse Kylo Ren’s behaviour in discussing his perspective, even when Rey is tempted to (“did you create Kylo Ren?” - nope). Those are both characters who define themselves via story very explicitly, just like fans (and others) tend to do; and the creators clearly share at least some of this fannish sensibility around Why People Do Bad Things.
However explicitly I said, “I’m not excusing what I did”, my parents and middle sister responded to it all as me doing just that. Maybe I even was to some extent; maybe they reacted like I was because to acknowledge I wasn’t might have meant agreeing they’d done some Not Great stuff themselves. But I do think it was also down to ways of looking at the world.
And my way of looking at the world has been influenced by fandom.
Day 11
Share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
This is gonna sound like it’s cheating but I’ve been meaning to post about it for a while, so…
Obviously being in fandom has changed my life in innumerable ways - I mean, many of my close or best friends are people I met through fandom. But being in fandom, and especially reading fanfic and meta, has influenced my ethics. A lot.
Which sounds terrifying, haha, and the start of some kind of clickbait article about fandom ruining young people - which will definitely become more of a thing as fandom gets ever more mainstream.
I was sixteen when I entered fandom and I’m about to turn twenty-eight, so those are some influential years. Now I don’t exactly mean that fandom has influenced what I think is right and wrong - it probably has, but not in any way I could easily unpick, and I suspect that it’s a feedback loop to the extent that it’s true. Like, what I already thought was right and wrong was perhaps settled and entrenched by being in fandom - after all, fandom has lots of disagreements within itself, we’re a bunch of people who often strongly disagree more than a monolith, even when we’re just talking about the smaller communities I’ve been part of within wider fandom. I was already interested in fighting inequality, I already had ideas about responsibility and community-building and kindness in the face of vulnerability, and fandom just gave me new ways to express them and new examples of them.
But there has been a change: the way fandom looks at characters influences the way I look at people.
Characters are not real people and that’s important in sooooo many ways. But fanworks and meta have this big focus on looking at the whole person when you look at a single interaction they have or decision they make. So for example, analysis of Dark Willow will often refer back to Willow’s urge to revenge, or her desire for control and wish for social harmony, with examples of her interactions with classmates from season 1 and 2. No discussion of Draco Malfoy would be complete without discussion of his family background. Natasha Romanov’s childhood is assumed to be relevant in all conversations about her approach to the teams she’s on and her ethics.
That’s something that feels so obvious as to be hardly worth saying, but it’s not at all a universal approach. Particularly not in the UK, where that kind of approach is really associated with the US and its self-analysis and personal growth and therapists. (Assume a sarcastic tone there.) And it’s far more prevalent in fannish thinking than in other places, I think.
Literary criticism and academia will do this, because they’re the only other people who are so steeped in characters that they have this whole library of quotes and moments in their head - you need such deep knowledge, as well as certain habits of mind, to be able to draw an arrow-sharp, appropriate-quotes-using distinction between Black Sails’ Jack Rackham and John Silver’s approach to mythmaking and how they both change. But fannish thought doesn’t make any pretence at objectivity in the way academia still sometimes does; these characters are our friends, they live inside our heads, we write and draw them more stories. Those stories are often ways of arguing back with the text, but even more they’re ways of arguing with other fans about the ways these characters should be interpreted and what they deserve. Ways of judging characters.
So this is why I was thinking about all this. In October last year I had a conversation with my fannish friend Dee about my mother, and my family, and our difficult relationship. I was specifically thinking about how as a teenager, after screaming fights, I repeatedly heard my mum say to my younger sisters and my dad that she didn’t understand why I had this wall up. I was so angry, and she could see the wall go up the moment she said anything critical, and she didn’t know why.
And as an adult I find that completely ridiculous. Why is your teenager angry and defensive and putting up “a wall”? Well, maybe because she can hear you talking to the rest of the family about how something is wrong with her and she’s so angry! That would make people defensive! And you know she can hear you, because she brings it up!
That is not difficult analysis. Dee, in this conversation, both blew my mind by saying that she thought my mum wasn’t good at people - which had never occurred to me before - and very helpfully extending my idea about the effect of fandom; that because my/our particular interest and even expertise involves analysis of people and how their whole pasts influence what they do, we’re of course going to be more attuned to that. That it’s more unusual than we might expect.
Another family example. I’d had this really fraught adolescence full of me arguing with my family, fights that fairly often became physical. In the case of my parents and I, it was mutual; with my youngest sister I didn’t even defend myself after a certain point, because she was five years younger. When I was twenty-one, I moved back in after uni - it was 2011 and I was unemployed and things were difficult for all of us. My mum very sincerely, in two fights, said that if I swore at her she’d kick me out.
After a long weekend away with friends, I was exhausted. She and my youngest sister woke me up to yell at me about post. I asked to do this later after I’d slept; they refused and stood very near me, making me feel threatened. I slapped my sister incredibly hard, and I got immediately kicked out.
Now, to me explaining that context is not the same as excusing it. My family did not see it that way at all, so I stopped trying quickly: they were focused on ‘you hit your sister and she is scared to live with you’ and saw any amount of ‘I felt physically threatened but also got angry and lashed out’ as trying to make it okay. This is different from the first example in that it’s not really a question of understanding how context and experience influenced behaviour - it’s more about not caring. Explaining that stuff was the same as excusing it, for my family, and they were not interested in that.
We all know nutjob apologist stans who argue that villains (and occasionally heroes) are really fluffy bunnies who did nothing wrong. But - thanks in no small part to flist/dashboard curation - I see far more analysis that acknowledges and discusses the reasons for bad behaviour without excusing it. It wouldn’t occur to me that saying, for instance, “[the Muggleborn]’re just not the same… I think they should keep it in the old wizarding families” is definitely pre-teen Draco Malfoy repeating what he’s heard from adults around him is inherently the same as morally justifying his deliberate use of slurs when he’s angry. But again, that’s because of habits of thought I developed from being in fandom. Providing context is not the same as apologia.
And meta stories, that are responding to fannish/critical analysis, and to the way we imagine ourselves via story? They tend to do that too. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explicitly discusses the ways Rebecca’s parents have affected her without ever excusing her bad behaviour; The Last Jedi doesn’t excuse Kylo Ren’s behaviour in discussing his perspective, even when Rey is tempted to (“did you create Kylo Ren?” - nope). Those are both characters who define themselves via story very explicitly, just like fans (and others) tend to do; and the creators clearly share at least some of this fannish sensibility around Why People Do Bad Things.
However explicitly I said, “I’m not excusing what I did”, my parents and middle sister responded to it all as me doing just that. Maybe I even was to some extent; maybe they reacted like I was because to acknowledge I wasn’t might have meant agreeing they’d done some Not Great stuff themselves. But I do think it was also down to ways of looking at the world.
And my way of looking at the world has been influenced by fandom.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-05 12:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 08:13 pm (UTC)I also agree with your point about explanation and context not being the same as excuses. An excuse is something that you can use to say "you shouldn't be upset about this" or "I shouldn't get in trouble for this because this excuse justifies my behavior." Understanding the full context doesn't justify behavior that hurts others or shield someone from consequences. I see people failing to understand this all the time--when someone claims "freedom of speech" should shield them from the consequences of saying and doing awful things that hurt others, for example, and just because I know that they were raised to believe those awful, bigoted beliefs, and that they haven't questioned their beliefs because they have a need for the world to conform to their views, doesn't mean that I will support them by frequenting their business.
I think that this is one of the values/benefits of reading and getting involved in fandom--it grows empathy and the ability to see the world from a non-binary perspective, to be able to perceive and accommodate nuance and grey areas, and to empathize with people who are different from you, without losing the ability to recognize moral right and wrong. So many people are stuck in black/white thinking that I think the way fandom can broaden perspectives is a good thing.
Anyway, that was a fairly rambling response to your post, but mostly I wanted to say that I feel similarly about the benefits of fandom on my world-view, and your post helped me recognize it. So thanks for that. :)