characteristics of "old" fandoms

[cimorene]

statistics: the class that makes you get up at six twice a week and trek halfway across town for computer practise from 5-7 pm. the faculty of social science is nearly 50/50 in terms of gender, with women leading slightly, but it's another matter over in the humanities complex. finding two guys in one ethnology class today gave me a bit of a shock. although i'm sure guys don't account for fifty percent of the grades in social science. in statistics i overheard one of my classmates from sociological methodology saying how he'd passed it with a 1 (out of 5, so that's like below a D, or 'barely not failing').

for one reason or another, i've been re-reading the professionals slash at the circuit archive - a fandom for which i've never seen more of canon than a handful of bad fanvids, from a period in my life when most of the slash i read had to do with tv shows i'd never seen, and wax_jism had just started watching the show when they aired it on finnish tv, and talked about it enough via aim that i caught the bug. it's funny, as i was telling her, how i resent badfic in old fandoms less. of course it's probably partly because i don't know the canon, but also i just find a lot of it endearing - purple prose, injudicious use of modifiers and epithets, and comma and semi-colon abuse that falls about ten miles outside the boundaries of 'artistic license' alike. (i've seen all these things in the past week, too.)

i started thinking about this peculiar tolerance, and also about the peculiar qualities of "old" fandoms, a few weeks ago at yuletide, when i read that delightful poirot/hastings story and then craving led me to rifle the internet's pockets until some others, not quite as delightful, fell out. one of them was long and possessed of an entire mystery plot but, as i described it at the time, had "old fandom" written all over it, which led me to ponder some of the most outstanding characteristics. i think what a lot of them boil down to - the purple prose, the loving lingering over emotions and the much more explicit discussion of them (often in dialogue), the highly palpable influence of harlequins and other members of the romance genre, the need to see everyone married by the end of the story instead of fading to black after it's established that they've made it into bed - boil down to what you could call postmodernism. that is to say: an ironic or meta attitude to what we do is what is now in vogue in the main body of media fandom. to borrow a metaphor from wax, the harlequin genre and old fandoms would be tackiness, whereas modern fandom is not tackiness, but kitsch: what happens when tackiness, thoroughly in love with itself, grows hip and gains an elaborate theoretical education and joyously rediscovers, refurbishes, and restores its roots. (this isn't to say that old fandoms weren't witty, intelligent, or highly educated; it speaks, rather, to a general paradigm shift, and obviously to the fashion and not to the whole population.)

either by way of illustration or by way of a slight change of topic (you make the call!), today i've been reading some stories by someone named lizzie who really seems to have a thing for ghosts. first there was the story where doyle the travelling salesman saw the ghost of bodie the war veteran and fell in love, then there was the one where doyle fucks ghost!bodie in the woods and when he meets bodie the next day (he turns out to be a caterer) bodie dun-dun-dun does not recognise him, and finally the one where bodie is a victorian gentleman retired in cornwall for the birdwatching and runs into what i figured from the title was doyle the ghost!librarian in a library, only it turns out doyle is a paranormal enthusiast who is  ironically unable to see ghosts. (i'm afraid she had no more ghost stories after that, but there were some other crack aus.)

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Yeah, for me it just means that I really can't read any old fandoms at all. XD I have such a low tolerance for that sort of fic.

pros

[laceymcbain.livejournal.com]

Hm, I do know what you mean, but there are new stories continuing to be written in old fandoms, which do inject a new life into things. You might want to check out summer_of_78 which had a summer fic exchange for the Pros this year. There were some excellent stories produced there. Not a ghost among them - I think. *g*

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

I always found AU!Pros much more entertaining than the show itself, so it wasn't really a problem. Desert nomads? Trapeze artists? Bring it!

[cimness.livejournal.com]

desert-roaming trapeze artists?

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

I would totally read that.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

mmm, so would i.

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

what happens when tackiness, thoroughly in love with itself, grows hip and gains an elaborate theoretical education and joyously rediscovers, refurbishes, and restores its roots.

That. Was just so awesomely phrased. ♥

[cimness.livejournal.com]

XD

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

Do you think the tonal shift in fandom's collective writing style is partially because of Joss Wheedon? I mean, I know it can't really be narrowed down that simplistically, but his writing style somehow does seem like a major contributing factor.

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

::eyeroll:: Whedon. I meant Whedon.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i can't say i'd ever given that a moment's thought. he was already in television when i started reading fanfiction, but on the other hand, i've never been a particular fan of his.