Bristolcon: The Fragmentation of Fandom?
Oct. 25th, 2014 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylThe Fragmentation of Fandom session, which Karolina Leikomaa, Myfanwy Rodman, Stark Holborn, Ian Milstead, and Jasper Fforde, is a hard one to characterise or write-up because it covered a pretty wide range of subjects. Rather than be comprehensive, I'm just going to pick out a few interesting items from the discussion.
The first part of the discussion focused on the question of what fandom is and how it relates to the producers — principally writers, in this case. Ian Milstead made the point that most consumers aren't fans. They may enjoy a TV show or book or film, but that's as far as it goes. They don't go to cons or dress up as their favourite character or write fanfic or academic criticism. Fans are the ones who go beyond. Karolina made the point that volunteering at a con is as important to an end result as being on a panel: you see the end product and you know that it wouldn't have happened without you. Following on, Myfanwy Rodman made the point that fandom brings friends together, e.g. everyone getting together to watch Supernatural or Dr Who, and creates a shared experience.
Jasper Fforde doesn't really use the term fan: he prefers enthusiastic follower. He came to his first con as a panelist rather than a member and has his own one-man event — the Fforde Fiesta! — and never really met his own literary heroes. But meeting his own fans has given him an interesting perspective. At first he couldn't quite see why the wrote fanfic using his characters — his thought was that they'd be better off working with their own — but he came to realise that fanfic is a celebration of what an author is writing and generate a shared experience between author of the original work and the author of fanfic.
He also said that seeing cosplay for the first time struck him as slightly odd, especially the boundaries between the rules of the convention and those of the outside world — e.g. no weapons outside the convention hotel! — until he realised that it was about providing a space for people to be themselves. What he now found disturbing was not the cosplay, but the idea that people felt so constrained by the outside world that they didn't feel like they could be themselves. Karolina noted that it was especially enjoyable when the convention leaked out in to the world: on the way to Bristolcon she'd seen groups of people in cosplay standing around at Paddington, waiting to go to London Comic Con. Jasper Fforde mentioned that he'd once met a Klingon on the streets of Calgary. Being English and unable to think of anything else, he'd said, "Good evening", and got a reply back in Klingon. He is still not sure whether the reply was a friendly greeting or an insult.
Fforde suggested that part of the reasons that SF is disdained by other writers is because of the enthusiasm of the fans and the relatively close relationship between producers and consumers. He also argued that reading was an inherently creative active, and that to be a good reader, you had to have a good imagination to make sense of what the author has written. He suggested that this explained why some readers were able to cope with speculative fiction and others were not: non-SF readers were unable to cope when confronted with extreme or absurd ideas and dismissed the whole thing in something like a reflex response, retreating to the less demanding territory of the sorts of things that win the Booker Prize!
There was a general agreement that where SF adaptations worked, it was generally because those doing the adaptation took the source material seriously. Karolina contrasted the terrible Dungeons & Dragons movie with the Game of Thrones series as examples of the two extremes. She also noted that when running conventions, it was important to take different aspects of fandom seriously even if you didn't buy into it yourself, because if you don't take the fans' enthusiasms seriously and treat them with respect, why should the want to come to the con? And by understanding the fans' ideas, you could help to expand the con — e.g. Final Fantasy cosplayers used to stage complicated fights as a side part of conventions in Finland, but when they were given their own space, it became an important part of the con experience.
The first part of the discussion focused on the question of what fandom is and how it relates to the producers — principally writers, in this case. Ian Milstead made the point that most consumers aren't fans. They may enjoy a TV show or book or film, but that's as far as it goes. They don't go to cons or dress up as their favourite character or write fanfic or academic criticism. Fans are the ones who go beyond. Karolina made the point that volunteering at a con is as important to an end result as being on a panel: you see the end product and you know that it wouldn't have happened without you. Following on, Myfanwy Rodman made the point that fandom brings friends together, e.g. everyone getting together to watch Supernatural or Dr Who, and creates a shared experience.
Jasper Fforde doesn't really use the term fan: he prefers enthusiastic follower. He came to his first con as a panelist rather than a member and has his own one-man event — the Fforde Fiesta! — and never really met his own literary heroes. But meeting his own fans has given him an interesting perspective. At first he couldn't quite see why the wrote fanfic using his characters — his thought was that they'd be better off working with their own — but he came to realise that fanfic is a celebration of what an author is writing and generate a shared experience between author of the original work and the author of fanfic.
He also said that seeing cosplay for the first time struck him as slightly odd, especially the boundaries between the rules of the convention and those of the outside world — e.g. no weapons outside the convention hotel! — until he realised that it was about providing a space for people to be themselves. What he now found disturbing was not the cosplay, but the idea that people felt so constrained by the outside world that they didn't feel like they could be themselves. Karolina noted that it was especially enjoyable when the convention leaked out in to the world: on the way to Bristolcon she'd seen groups of people in cosplay standing around at Paddington, waiting to go to London Comic Con. Jasper Fforde mentioned that he'd once met a Klingon on the streets of Calgary. Being English and unable to think of anything else, he'd said, "Good evening", and got a reply back in Klingon. He is still not sure whether the reply was a friendly greeting or an insult.
Fforde suggested that part of the reasons that SF is disdained by other writers is because of the enthusiasm of the fans and the relatively close relationship between producers and consumers. He also argued that reading was an inherently creative active, and that to be a good reader, you had to have a good imagination to make sense of what the author has written. He suggested that this explained why some readers were able to cope with speculative fiction and others were not: non-SF readers were unable to cope when confronted with extreme or absurd ideas and dismissed the whole thing in something like a reflex response, retreating to the less demanding territory of the sorts of things that win the Booker Prize!
There was a general agreement that where SF adaptations worked, it was generally because those doing the adaptation took the source material seriously. Karolina contrasted the terrible Dungeons & Dragons movie with the Game of Thrones series as examples of the two extremes. She also noted that when running conventions, it was important to take different aspects of fandom seriously even if you didn't buy into it yourself, because if you don't take the fans' enthusiasms seriously and treat them with respect, why should the want to come to the con? And by understanding the fans' ideas, you could help to expand the con — e.g. Final Fantasy cosplayers used to stage complicated fights as a side part of conventions in Finland, but when they were given their own space, it became an important part of the con experience.
