What is scary about transformative fandom is that it’s a place where young women love their media without reservation, and where they can make stories for themselves. That’s why as a culture we’ve decided that transformative fandom is weird and gross and morally wrong, and that’s why all the articles in the world explaining that transformative fandom is a totally legitimate way to interact with a text aren’t really making a dent in the never-ending stream of repulsed investigations of fandom. Because fandom is the province of young women and, culturally, we find young women terrifying.
If you think mainstream culture hates YOUNG women (it truly does, especially women who value or please themselves as noted above), just imagine how much it hates MATURE women.
We write and draw a very significant portion of the fanfic and fanart out there, and even people here in Fandom are amazed and unpleasantly surprised to learn that fans over 25 exist.
(P.S. Devin Faraci tried to fight with me and subsequently blocked me on Twitter because I retweeted a bunch of things he’s said over he years about fan culture, which are handily quoted in this Tumblr post! Please enjoy! 😀 )
So as we all know, movie critic Devin Faraci caused a minor internet brouhaha Tuesday with a controversial piece about online fandom. “Fandom is broken” — which piggybacks off a milder but similar article published last week by the AV Club and argues that fan culture has entered an ugly phase — was largely met with solemn nods of agreement by everybody except, uh, anybody who’s actually in fandom and actually knows what the fuck fan culture is about.
The main target of the piece is fan entitlement, which Faraci believes is the result of fandom being “post-fanfic.” That is, he thinks the current state of fandom — which can be overwhelmingly polarized and activist — is a natural result of fans having so much personal autonomy over their own fanfiction and other fanworks (including fanart, fan film, fan meta, shipping, and fan theories). Consequently, they seek to have the same level of creator control over their canons, too.
Before we go any further, let’s be clear here. Some people should be told at all times that their diminishment of cultures they don’t understand only makes them look small, petty, and ridiculous. Faraci is one of those people. He has demonstrated again and again that he has only a cursory understanding of what fanworks-based fan culture is, and utterly no interest in examining it to a closer degree.
Faraci’s consistent response to fanworks and remixing in general is to be cavalierly dismissive. Please enjoy this litany of Faraci being cavalierly and unilaterally dismissive of virtually every fannish practice, from shipping to fan films to fanfiction:
To anyone who’s spent any amount of time immersed in fan culture, Faraci’s attitudeabout fandom is unilaterally tone-deaf, laughably inaccurate, and full of hubris. He is jawdroppingly secure in his opinions, and when you attempt to suggest that fanworks are far more complex than he’s acknowledging — as I once did in a brief exchange after one of his derisive tweets about fan theories — he typically dismisses you out of hand or ignores you altogether:
And then there’s this gem:
When I retweeted all of these tweets just now, Faraci responded by a) calling me out to his 40,000 followers, most of whom are apparently male and who naturally began brigading and harassing me on Twitter; b) blocking me, and c) tweeting this:
So. Now that we’ve established that Devin Faraci is a dismissive demeaning sexist shitbag and everything he says about being “concerned” about “fan entitlement” is concern trolling because he HATES fanworks and fans who create stuff and overanalyze and generally actively engage with texts, let’s move on, shall we?
Billie raids the Veil for souls to put in the bomb. Rowena pours those souls into Dean’s heart. When nothing explodes, Chuck sucks the souls back out of Dean. Chuck takes Amara’s hand, and only then does she say she wants to leave Dean a parting gift. Amara and Chuck make their swirly smoke-commingling exit into the sunset. Dean eventually wanders out of that wedding venue and into the bushes, where he finds his mother.
Hypothesis: what was left of Mary has been in the Veil since her showdown with the poltergeist. Her soul (or the fragments thereof) got caught in Billie’s sweep, and then went from Rowena’s crystal to Dean’s heart to God’s hand. Some combination of the powers of God and Darkness turned what was left of Mary’s soul back into a corporeal woman.
You can whine all day about how sam stans are really angry and bitter, or about how we’re all taking this too personally, but I’m just gonna go ahead and say it:
An entire fandom vilifying a character for leaving an abusive home-life, spinning that act of agency as a betrayal or abandonment, affects me personally.
People loathing a character because he was an addict, as though that too was some kind of betrayal of trust, affects me personally.
Being told by the masses that someone shouldn’t stand up for himself, should be more considerate about the feelings of the person who violated his bodily autonomy, affects me personally.
Treating a character’s mental illness as a joke,affects me personally.
Dismissing physical abuse as ‘tussles’ and ‘banter’ and ‘not a big deal’, affects me personally.
Seeing an entire fandom vilify a character for trying to make a healthy choice by trying to move on and build something for himself, affects me personally.
And having to hear over and over that a character I identify with needs to ‘get over it’ after he’s been abused, berated and stripped of his bodily autonomy MULTIPLE times, affects me personally.
So yes. I take it personally. I take it really damn personally. I probably take it too personally. But don’t assume that I don’t have a damn good reason.
Eric Standley,a Virginia-based artist who works with laser-cut paper, creates amazing and awe-inspiring layered paper cuts of extraordinary complexity that successfully marry Gothic and Islamic architectural elements in tiny cathedral-like spaces.
Manhattanhenge, the astronomical phenomenon when the setting sun lines up perfectly with the street grid of Manhattan in New York City, is happening again this weekend. Watch Neil deGrasse Tyson explain it:
Hearseeno 