I’m fascinated by the extent to which fandom has become a source of identity categories, whether it’s people including the franchises that they’re attached to in their social media biographies, suggesting that loving Doctor Who, for example, is as important a thing for people to know about them as their place or category of work, or their status as a parent or spouse. But it’s clear that sometimes those attachments can become unproductive in their intensity, as Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels became the basis for HBO’s series True Blood, found out when she decided it was time for her to focus on a new set of characters:

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

“I’m very fortunate that people are so invested in the series,” Ms. Harris says. “At the same time, it can be a source of some anxiety to get emails that say, ‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

The prickly dynamic between Ms. Harris and some of her followers highlights how hard it can be to kill a successful series. For the first time in years, Ms. Harris isn’t touring to promote the book. She doesn’t want to be berated by readers who hate the ending or want vampire spinoffs.

I’m fascinated by this sense of obligation, or by the sense that it’s appropriate to lobby creators not for substantive things like more diverse casting or more diverse writing staffs, but for certain plot points, like the development of romantic relationships between certain characters. As a critic, I’m always comfortable saying that I think one choice or another might be more effective. But the idea that someone owes something to me, whether it’s a certain event, or simply more of whatever it is that they’re producing, is very strange. It makes me wonder how fans relate in different ways to products and to the people who create them, as if the latter serves some sort of kind of grand design that governs the former, rather than being the deity of the particular universe they’ve created.

By Alli Thresher

When I first came across Joe Peacock’s “Booth Babes Need Not Apply” post on CNN’s Geek Out blog, I was intrigued. Here, I thought, based on the title alone, is a self-professed geeky guy delving into the problematic nature of a culture that promotes and uses models as marketing bait. “Excellent,” I thought to myself, “rad even – it will be cool to hear the perspective of a male consumer on this issue.” Boy was I disappointed. The title of Peacock’s post is horrendously misleading. He notes that he’s bothered by booth babes – but doesn’t really delve deeper than that. Instead, the readers are presented with a long, rambling, screed about “fake geek women” and how they’re ruining geek culture for everyone (everyone being dudes like Joe and his friends).

There are so many things problematic with Peacock’s piece–the fact that he rates women on a 1 to 10 scale, that he conflates professional booth staff with models and promoters and regular old cosplayers. That he talks about his own attraction to “real” geek girls but maligns anyone who might be at conventions doing the same thing:looking for a date. And then there’s the ranting and ranting and ranting against “fake geek girls.”

Let’s just get one thing out of the way here. Fake geek girls? They don’t really exist. Seriously. Leigh Alexander has some amazing things to say here. But I searched far and wide, but could not find anyone who’d ever met one of these supposedly toxic, nasty, creatures.

There are some decent points buried in Peacock’s post, but they’re barely touched on and mostly obscured by his complaints about all the nefarious fake women who are apparently ruining conventions for him. For example, he’s right that booth babes are a problem– but, counter to his complaints, they’re not a problem because they’re “fakes” or teases or whatever. Their use is problematic because it lends rise to attitudes like Peacock’s. When the most visible women in a male dominated space are, largely, promotional staff and models, it becomes really easy to write off most other women on the floor–as Peacock and his supporters, do.

As I wrote in another piece, when I’ve spoken to fellow gamers about their issues with booth babes, I’ve found, surprisingly, that male-identified gamers, their ostensible targets, are the ones most vocally opposed to the use of booth babes as an advertising gambit. I hear over and over “they don’t belong here, they don’t play games, I can’t talk to them.” When the women working the floor are written off, immediately, as not worth talking to, it lends to an attitude of models, promoters, and other female staff, developers included, being treated not as people but as, well, something less. It’s telling that Peacock called out both the Frag Dolls, a group of professional gamers, and Olivia Munn, former co-host of Attack of the Show, as “fakes” – I’d warrant that most geeks and gamers count all of these ladies as having more “cred” than the average geek dude, Joe Peacock included. And if Peacock hates the use of booth babes so much, he shouldn’t go after the models, go after the companies that hire them, or the content creators who build a market for hypersexualised, unreal, versions of women.
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The excellent Emily Hauser was kind enough to invite me on Bloggingheads with her to talk about pop culture. We taped this before Rotten Tomatoes shut down their comments section in reaction to commenters threatening critics who didn’t like reviews of The Dark Knight Rises, but we ended up talking about fandom as identity and the need to move towards an ethic that values discussion and critique in fan communities rather than fealty or affirmation:

There is no one unified fandom, which is why it’s both lame for critics like Anthony Lane to paint all people who like superhero movies as mouthbreathing basement dwellers, and for fans to turn on people, within their community and outside it, who want to analyze material rather than bow down to it. More genuinely self-confident, self-critical fandoms will be healthier fandoms in the long run, and more respected ones, too.

I always enjoy reading Clive Thompson’s columns at Wired, so it was fun to see him defend fan fiction in those pages this week:

Why would worldplay make you more creative in your career? Probably because, as the Root-Bernsteins point out, it requires practical creativity. Fleshing out a universe demands not just imagination but an attention to detail, consistency, rule sets, and logic. You have to grapple with constraints — just as when you’re problem-solving at work.

This is why I’m so bullish about our teeming world of participatory fan culture. We live in a golden age of paracosmic play. As fandom scholars like blogger and USC professor Henry Jenkins have documented, today’s young people routinely build off their favorite cultural universes — writing new stories, creating game mods, shooting fan videos. It’s not sui generis creativity — they’re working with preexisting worlds — but it exercises the same creative muscles. I suspect society will reap the benefits in decades to come.

I’m of several minds about this. There’s no question that fan fiction’s been a valuable platform for authors like Cassandra Clare, whose Mortal Instruments fantasy series is about to be a big-budget movie, or E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan fiction and has become a smash that’s headed for a film adaptation of its own, to cut their teeth before putting their work up for sale. Like most of us, I get a lot of joy out of mashups and supercuts and remakes, which can be acts of analysis and criticism as much as they’re works of art. And I’ve read After the End, a novel-length sequel to the Harry Potter franchise more times than I am actually willing to admit publicly.

But I’m genuinely curious about the effects of creating a world as opposed to playing in a world created and governed by someone else. Does the impact of the kind of creative work Thompson is talking about come from playing with the characters, or creating the boundaries and rules and keeping track of them yourself? Is there a difference between the maintenance of a private universe that you have to sell other people on, and participating in an established fandom where everyone is on board with not just the rules of the world but the broad riffs on it that most people participate in? I think it’s silly to denigrate people who write fan fiction or read it, but I’m also curious about it as a specific phenomenon, how it intersects with the rise of self-publishing and the decline of book editors, and what it means that we want to spend so much time in these fictional worlds not of our own creations.

By Kate Cox

When Alyssa graciously invited me to hang out in her space again (thanks!), I happily accepted, and then reached out to some wise friends for topic ideas.

A non-gaming friend who is regular reader of my blog said to me, “I would really love to know your thoughts on gamer culture.”

At the very moment she was writing her message to me, the internet was exploding with the story of one man who was very, very bad at his PR job, one customer who pushed buttons, and one webcomic author who decided vengeance was a tool he enjoyed employing. The Paul Christoforo situation rapidly went from bad to worse and by the next morning, a true mob mentality had taken over in many forums.

There I sat, horrified and depressed. When the entitled mob begins to feel wronged, when the legions of Reddit and the armies of Twitter mobilize… bad things happen. Home addresses get published, threats get made, and lives get ruined. I firmly believe that two wrongs don’t make a right, and siccing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of angry nerds on one bully was surely an uncalled-for thrashing.

Is this disaster, I despaired, what gamer culture really looks like?

But then, a couple of days later, Child’s Play announced their 2011 fundraising total. Child’s Play is a charity that the very same webcomic authors started, back in 2003. The core idea? “Gamers give back.” Players and now publishers come together to donate toys and games to children’s hospitals: the grown-ups are reaching out to kids in need. Every year, these efforts bring in more charity than the year before, to more hospitals nationwide and around the world. And every year, I’ve seen more and more gamers and more and more huge companies leap onboard to do good for others.

2011’s total was over $3.5 million.

That’s more like it. Charity! Giving! Maybe this could be what gamer culture really looks like?

But of course, the reality is neither so bleak nor so noble. I am forced to concede a point. Emily, this is what gamer culture really looks like:

Because the internet is for cats. (Avenue Q notwithstanding.) And because this cat is named Guybrush Ulysses Threepwood Cox (usually called “Cat” or “Damncat”). That’s gamer culture, right there and purring: a permanent, nerdy reference in our house.

It’s like the rest of geek culture, really: mixed good and bad, but enthusiastic and devoted either way.

I sat in on a bit of Alan Sepinwall’s interview with Cougar Town co-creator Kevin Biegel, and I’m particularly intrigued by the idea that what the small, scrappy shows are doing to fight for audiences will be what everyone has to do in the future:

TV now doesn’t just exist from the writers room to the television. People like to be engaged. People like to know that you care about them caring. I really believe that…If I can do these little events and people actually respond to it and feel like they’re getting something special, I think that’s awesome. And I don’t understand why other TV shows don’t do this. And I literally think – I don’t care if I get in trouble; fuck it – there’s a laziness on the part of a lot of TV writers, where they think, “My job is just to write the show and produce the show and that’s it.” Bill and I are on the same page: “Fuck that. That’s not true. Your job now is to go out there and sell the show and tell the fans how much you appreciate them.” Because one little spark – like Katniss in “Catching Fire,” book 2 – can really start a whole big thing…What’s the alternative? I sit on my own in the writers room and the show goes away? That’s so lame! That’s so defeatist! That’s so 1980s, “Okay, we’ll just write a shitty sitcom, and people will like that.” Fuck that! That’s not the world anymore.

In the ABC executive session yesterday, Paul Lee joked that he loves Cougar Town‘s Bill Lawrence because he’s a “pirate,” when it comes to roguishly and independently promoting his shows and “I used to be a pirate when I was a showrunner and now I’m the Navy.” I think the interesting question will be whether all shows, hits and scrappy underdogs alike, have to do this, or whether the willingness of creative folks like Lawrence, and Biegel, and Dan Harmon on Community to fight for their shows mean networks will simply be willing to do less work to support them.

One of the things that has interested me watching the SOPA debate evolve is the role of consumers, whether they’re like-minded tech enthusiasts or fans of certain products, in lobbying against the bill. They haven’t always been successful — some SOPA advocates have, for example, dismissed Reddit advocates as a loud but insignificant minority. But it’s not necessarily the reaction of the lobbied that matters in this one. It’s whether, having gotten a taste of activism, fans decide to become forces on other issues.

I’ve been interested for quite some time in communities that do public service and volunteer work based on the principals of their fandom. There’s the Harry Potter Alliance, of course, which grounds its campaigns in Potter-driven values. The Browncoats volunteer groups are inspired by Firefly. AnimeAid got together fans of the genre to raise money and coordinate efforts around Japanese earthquake and tsunami recovery activities. And I suspect that as fandom becomes an increasingly important basis for identity or community, we’ll see more work and organizations along these lines where the values that motivate service are drawn less explicitly from political parties or religious faith and more from powerful fictional texts.

Of course, it’ll be fascinating to see if, and how, these groups scale, and if they develop into ongoing organizations or function more like loose networks that can be activated when issues are on the front-burner, but don’t require as much maintenance in fallow periods. If nothing else, the SOPA debate seems to suggest a generation gap on Internet policy between legislators and consumers that could be usefully filled with education campaigns and citizen lobby visits. On both sides, this is a battle, not the war. And fans have a lot to offer.

As I am an enormous geek, I cannot even begin to express how excited I am about Knights of Badassdom:

First, there’s the cast. I may be sore vexed with True Blood this season, but Ryan Kwanten is a funny dude who deserves to do more than play a slow Southern stud. I’ve always believed that someday, Jimmi Simpson’s going to break out and I’ll be able to say I told you all back in the day. I’m glad to see Peter Dinklage is getting to put his training as Tyrion Lannister to dual use. Ditto with Danny Pudi and Abed. Steve Zahn is just plain wonderful. Add in Sommer Glau and it’s pretty hard to believe this isn’t some dorky fan video that someone cut together.

But it’s not. Instead, it’s part of a growing canon of movies and television shows, from Big Fan to My Boys to The League to The Guild based on the idea that people form communities less around who they are, or how they worship, or where they work, but what they like. Ultimately, I think this will become fairly routine, and groups of characters who are united by common interests will end up being presented like they’re any other group of folks who hang out at Central Perk or wherever. But we’re still getting used to the idea that cosplay, or video games, or fantasy sports (sports fandom has always been the most accepted form of American fandom, so it’s kind of exempt) can be the basis for durable friendships and friend groups. Movies like this reflect the experiences of those of us who form friendships based on what we love — and translate those experiences for folks who are still getting used to the idea.