That'll really grind their corn
June 17, 2016 7:07 PM Subscribe

Outlander fandom had reached epic levels of drama. William Shatner has intervened as fans harass the actors and production staff . Shatner's assistant has created a website dedicated to fighting online bullying among Outlander fans. It's not like Outlander fans are alone, One Direction fandom has contributed a lot to the tinhatting phenomenon. Of course, long before 1D, Supernatural fans have always been pretty inventive in their creative take on reality. PS, we talk about Outlander over here on FanFare, without the drama.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork (119 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite

You have explained this to me like five times and I still don't understand.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:08 PM on June 17, 2016 [46 favorites]

God I'm glad I'm not famous. I am 100% in favor of fanfic, but real-person fiction is creepy and weird.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:15 PM on June 17, 2016 [22 favorites]

This is exhausting.
posted by thatone at 7:16 PM on June 17, 2016 [8 favorites]

My only response upon learning of this whole Outlander thing is that we need to burn it all down. Social media, fandom, fiction, narrative, romance, the grand project that is human civilization. Everything. Burn it down. We've failed as a species.
posted by chrominance at 7:17 PM on June 17, 2016 [12 favorites]

I am 100% in favor of fanfic, but real-person fiction is creepy and weird.

I completely agree. It's even creepier that they're tagging the actors/actresses on Twitter and actively engaging them in their fantasy.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 7:17 PM on June 17, 2016 [9 favorites]

Previously and very relevant to this conversation.
posted by Fizz at 7:18 PM on June 17, 2016

(Also, Shatner does not pay a lot for web design.)
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:18 PM on June 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I think there have always been creepy fans who built active fantasy lives around actors, but they're probably more visible with social media. Plus, social media may fuel their sense that they have a personal relationship with the actors. It's all very weird and I think potentially dangerous. I would really not enjoy being an actor in the kind of show that has an active fandom right now.

What exactly is the "bullying," though? Does it relate to the whole real-person fiction thing, or is it separate from that? Because I don't really care that much if people are rude about which characters they ship, as long as it's all just about characters.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:23 PM on June 17, 2016

You do have to start to wonder about what structural factors in television production and mass culture enable this kind of thing, though. Honestly, I believe that people are terrible and should be replaced by giant cats with opposable thumbs, but there's got to be more to this kind of thing than just terribleness. After all, I know lots of terrible people who don't do all this "but why aren't you admitting that One Direction is gay" stuff.

I feel like the way people are encouraged to interact with mass-media fandoms always sort of teeters on the brink of excessive-fandom. One is supposed to be passionate-but-not-too-passionate, buy merchandise, prioritize viewing, accept that television is an Event!! and so on. And this is pervasive - when I was growing up I knew very little about current television because we could not afford cable and were not allowed to watch much TV anyway. Now I know quite a lot about television even though I watch very, very little - maybe once or twice a year at a friend's.

And celebrity culture - there's a really thin line between real and fake celebrity "news", most relationship/feud stuff is very stage-managed and it's also pervasive. Again, I am a horrible frosty snob of a person and I can recognize all the Kardashians, Taylor Swift and various actresses even though I have never seen anything they are in, because celebrity news is so pervasive and so entwined with the rest of culture.

So it shouldn't be surprising that as television and celebrity stuff in general becomes more and more pervasive and is taken more and more seriously (that's another change - when I was growing up, there wasn't nearly as much made of "artistic" television) it shouldn't be surprising that the pool of people who engage in excessive television fandom behavior gets larger and larger where once it was just a tiny corner of the internet.
posted by Frowner at 7:27 PM on June 17, 2016 [13 favorites]

What exactly is the "bullying," though?

I think the bullying is that people who are for and against real person shipping are doxing each other, threatening to dox each other, and generally being... mean? to each other online. They're also outright harassing the actors. For Outlander it seems extra weird, because the fandom is heavily skewed towards a middle-aged-to-older-ladies crowd, lots of whom have never participated in online fandom before, so it seems strange that it's run so completely off the rails so fast, and it's not even teenagers who don't know better.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 7:29 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Someone needs to write an anachronistic fanfic about William Shatner living in a camper parked in an orchard in the 1970s and secretly brawling on Twitter in the name of justice.
posted by ethansr at 7:31 PM on June 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

And then I feel like we live in a time where conspiracy is a thing and also where politics has basically collapsed. The whole idea that there's a secret that is being kept from you by the powerful, but it's a secret about a relationship. And where there's either the love/hate relationship with the stars (why won't they tell the truth!) or this fantasy that the stars are sort of a stand-in for the average, disempowered person, forbidden from doing something entirely reasonable (being public about their relationship) because it would be commercially damaging.

Straight women fans seem to project that particular one onto imaginary gay men, too - I always feel like that's very much about the projection of feelings of trappedness under heteropatriarchy, but at the same time it's not really fair on actual queer people.
posted by Frowner at 7:34 PM on June 17, 2016 [10 favorites]

*reads article*

"Real Person Fiction"

"TInhatters"

"Truthers"

*smashes lamp*

I'm sorry, I don't know what just happened there. Everything just went grey for a minute, and something tasted like copper.

I don't even know where I got that lamp.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:42 PM on June 17, 2016 [40 favorites]

the fandom is heavily skewed towards a middle-aged-to-older-ladies crowd, lots of whom have never participated in online fandom before, so it seems strange that it's run so completely off the rails so fast, and it's not even teenagers who don't know better.

Based on some other places I hang out online, there's definitely an age bracket I'd call "not-young-enough-to-know-better." There's nothing more fierce and vicious than a middle-aged woman experiencing her first online drama.

I kinda hate-watch Outlander, purely for the costumes. I DESPISED the first book, which is all I read of the series. It's SO middle-aged woman porn, and I say that as a woman approaching 40. The show is so full of TERRIBLE sex, too. (1.5 minutes of heavy thrusting with no foreplay at all. Yay!)
posted by threeturtles at 7:44 PM on June 17, 2016 [12 favorites]

The costumes are lovely, though. Especially the ones in France.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:46 PM on June 17, 2016

This kind of thing is why I exclusively ship Hercules Mulligan (a tailor spying on the British government).
posted by zachlipton at 7:50 PM on June 17, 2016 [24 favorites]

He is with the sons of liberty, and he is loving it: obviously a signal to the true fans, right there.
posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName at 7:54 PM on June 17, 2016 [15 favorites]

I dunno, the whole "it's middle-aged-women-porn-so-it's-bad" thing again seems to neglect the structural. Like, what is the horizon of possibility for [certain kinds of] middle aged women that makes these themes* so meaningful. I have the horrible suspicion that much of the romantic porn (as opposed to porn that's just about, like, the porn) that is created for straight women is really about romanticizing the conditions of heteropatriarchy. Like, the idea that you can even find a sensitive yet manly yet faithful dude who will also, like, love you really deeply for who you are. The idea that you can have a social role where you're valued for your skills instead of exploited/looked-down-on. (no coincidence that Claire Randall is from 1942 and a nurse not a doctor, because she embodies a feminized occupation that is not respected and by starting things off in 1942 we can forget a little bit about how even now feminized occupations are not respected). How would Outlander be different if Claire were a surgeon, for instance?

So basically, I tend to think of it not as "oh middle aged ladies so frumpy and unhip" as "oh, by the time you're a middle aged straight lady, you have come to the realization that your gender is held in contempt and that your possibilities are limited (and your fantasies are limited) because of that". That is, that this type of romantic pornography is about trying to manage your experience under patriarchy, romanticize it, eroticize it, fantasize about being valued and loved because your actual situation is deeply unfair.

*I assume that one means the truuuuuuue love with a sensitive yet manly hunk, the particular type of adventure that's involved, the multiple men competing for one middle aged lady lead and probably the use of rape threats as a plot point, plus the "I guess you're just going to have to marry this dude [and then you'll be really into it after all]" thing.
posted by Frowner at 7:54 PM on June 17, 2016 [65 favorites]

This kind of thing is why I exclusively ship Hercules Mulligan

Yeah, but it's hard to have intercourse over four sets of corsets.
posted by middleclasstool at 7:58 PM on June 17, 2016 [28 favorites]

The fandom is heavily skewed towards a middle-aged-to-older-ladies crowd, lots of whom have never participated in online fandom before, so it seems strange that it's run so completely off the rails so fast,

Speaking as a recently middle-aged person, middle aged people are just awful people, I think. I used to think it was the baby boomers generation, but then I came to the conclusion that only seemed to be it because those were the cohort of adults who were middle aged when I first noticed how awful they behave. Seriously. We're like teenagers from middle school, but with money, social, and political power. Beware.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:00 PM on June 17, 2016 [32 favorites]

Frowner, Claire becomes a surgeon after she goes back to her original time.
posted by brujita at 8:01 PM on June 17, 2016 [5 favorites]

I read the first book and filed it under Ok, But Probably Not My Thing. I really want to like romance novels, and I like some shallow historical epics that are a little less romance-y, but I mostly don't like historical romance. Also, I am vaguely annoyed by Gabaldon's insistence that she doesn't write romance novels. Actually, every single thing about her strikes me as annoying.

Anyway, I read the first one and thought "gosh, that was ok until it got really weird and rapey." And then I started on the second one and couldn't deal with the fact that the prologue was set in a 1968 that was literally devoid of any historical sense of what was going on in the world in 1968. All those people talking about colonialism in the abstract, without anyone saying "yes, another interesting thing is that on clear nights you can see the flames in Derry from my bedroom window" or "gosh, I wonder if North Vietnamese people view us the same way that these historical Scottish people viewed their British oppressors." Also, Clare's 20-year-old daughter was prissy in a way that I don't think literally any 20-year-old person in America was prissy in 1968. She won't drink alcohol in Scotland, where it is legal, because she is not going to turn 21 for a few weeks, and it would not be legal to drink alcohol at home in Boston. Seriously? It's lazy writing intended to let you know how old she is, but it makes literally no sense historically.

Anyway, I gave up on the second book and haven't gone back, but I don't think there's really anything wrong with Outlander. It's not my thing, but my things don't appeal to plenty of other people. I think that popular fiction aimed at women gets dismissed in a way that popular fiction aimed at men doesn't, and that's a function of sexism rather than a thing about quality.

How would Outlander be different if Claire were a surgeon, for instance?

Erm, how do you feel about spoilers, Frowner?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:01 PM on June 17, 2016 [10 favorites]

Precisely! But she starts out as a nurse, she doesn't begin her adventures as a surgeon - she gets a second career that requires a lot of education and is much higher status. Again, fantasy that reveals the limits of the horizon of possibility.

(Spoilers? I try not to reveal them directly.)
posted by Frowner at 8:05 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

When I was in Doctor Who fandom (a hoary old fandom if ever there was one) looking out onto the rest of the fandom scene, it was frequently observed that fandoms that, for whatever reason, lacked a basis in generally accepted Ye Olde Time Fandom norms were prone to go off the rails, and fast. I think something that maybe people not in fandom don't realize is that a lot of people aren't just in a fandom, they're in several, either serially or simultaneously (don't ask me how they keep it all straight, I've always been fandom monogamous). A lot of BNFs are previous BNFs of other fandoms. And in that way, general basic standards of acceptable fannish behavior get reinforced, even in new fandoms. But every now and then a fandom sprouts up where most of the fans have never been in any other fandom before, and then shit gets real.

RPF is one of those things where it's not like there's a ban on it in polite fandom society or anything but a lot of people have a very clear line that RPF is over (I am one such), so tinhatters and real person shippers generally know to, like, at least pretend to keep a lid on it and segregate it to where Grandma BNF won't have it sullying her Twitter feed and giving her the vapors. But feral fandoms (yes, this is actually the term) kind of skip all that and make it up as they go along and Grandma BNF who was writing Age of Sail fic before you were even born, child, just shakes her head and tsks and make a mental note to avoid avoid avoid.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:06 PM on June 17, 2016 [38 favorites]

Color me unsurprised that Shatner's intervention was ham-fisted and kind of clueless. I'd believe that he meant it all for the best, especially as he's mellowed with age, but yeah.
posted by Scattercat at 8:11 PM on June 17, 2016

Damn I am so glad I can just enjoy things without having to get all het up about who fucks who.
posted by Sternmeyer at 8:14 PM on June 17, 2016 [11 favorites]

Color me unsurprised that Shatner's intervention was ham-fisted and kind of clueless.

Of course, that speech was a re-creation of the *evil* Captain Kirk from episode 37.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:19 PM on June 17, 2016 [10 favorites]

Also, now that I am an old, I feel like I have a different relationship to escapist fantasy - when I was younger I hoped I could actually escape so it got me all wrought up. Now that I know that what you see is what you get, I enjoy it in a much gentler way. I think this has to do very much with being a pink collar worker and having many of the experiences of being a woman even if not identifying that way. I don't expect a better career or to be able to do important things in the world as I might if I were richer; I recognize that I am a surplus quantity romantically and sexually speaking. So daydreaming a bit about having a swashbuckling life with romance added is pretty much on a par with daydreaming about winning the lottery - purely an occasional mental recreation.

For this reason, I am much more sympathetic to romance as a genre than I was as a hard-edged young person.
posted by Frowner at 8:21 PM on June 17, 2016 [14 favorites]

I feel like this is a subject I should know about, but the area of my brain that handles that sort of thing is filled up with knitting wank so I've got no storage space. And at my age I have to keep the wetware organized or I never find my keys or reading glasses again.
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 8:38 PM on June 17, 2016 [10 favorites]

See, yes, knitting wank. That's exactly what I mean. It's the same demographic. And that shit is next level. (We might know each other in another life...)

I'm a serial fandomist of the old school, where yes, we had rules, dammit. Kids today and whatnot, even when many of them are older than me. One of the most important was Do Not Tell The Celebs About This. And then the twitter happened. We used to corral people in their own livejournals and groups and listservs and now it's all just Out There. In Public.
posted by threeturtles at 8:59 PM on June 17, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm old enough to remember, as a wee baby fan, hearing stories about the Ray Wars that came with a thousand-yard stare you could see through the Internet. so yes, feral fandoms are alarming and To Be Avoided.
posted by nonasuch at 9:12 PM on June 17, 2016 [7 favorites]

Shatner is a trained and accomplished American Shakespearean actor, considered at one point to be the equal of Steve McQueen or Paul Neuman. His largest fault is that he could never say no to a role that let him talk, and it wound up with him on the rocks, washed up...

...and Captain of the USS Enterprise.

So, of course he's slow on the draw, as he's pushing 90. Slack! Give some?

Well, no, as he's still sharp as a tack, and OF COURSE has opinions on shipping in an obscure fantasy TV series.

I am giggling gleefully that Captain Kirk ships in his fave shows. And kinda rolling on the floor at the dedicated subfandom that's furiously intent in telling Captain Kirk he ships wrong.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:13 PM on June 17, 2016 [10 favorites]

Get a life.

(Kind of amazed I was the first one to make that reference. Also kind of amazed Shatner is involved in anything this fannish, it so does not seem like his style. I'm kind of wondering if this is some deal where one of his assistants has gotten a little ambitious and is posting stuff under Shatner's name, while the real Shatner is off riding his horses or something.)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 9:17 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Just beat me to the reference, UH. And it's relevant because it was from an SNL sketch from nearly thirty years ago, before Eternal September and the phenomenon of fans reinforcing each other's behavior (including each other's worse behavior) in real time, but still managing to go overboard, and was written from the perspective of someone who cared about his fans but was concerned about that precise sort of somewhat unhinged obsession. (One of the minor but telling details of the sketch was that Shatner was talking to a fan who knew that one of the mares on his horse farm had given birth before he knew.) I think that it may not be so much from Shatner the Outlander fan so much as Shatner the guy who's been alternately flattered, amused, and somewhat alarmed by fan obsession.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:27 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

I actually didn't comment on the previous thread about Fandom because I had just caught wind of the existence of real-people-shipping in Outlander fans, prior to which I somehow had managed, naive innocent that I was, to not know that RPF was even a thing. And frankly I just found it all too creepy for words and couldn't articulate why at that moment I was feeling intensely anti-fandoms. I really don't care what shows you enjoy or how you enjoy them; you can interact with fictional characters however you want. But actors are people doing a job. Even if part of that job has increasingly become "having interactions with fans on social media", I don't understand how people can fail to see/comprehend the distinction between shipping two fictional characters and "shipping" two real live human beings who have their own autonomy, agency, and feelings.

It's got nothing at all to do with Outlander specifically (and I like the "feral fandom" explanation) but yeah, I really do find this RPF stuff deeply disturbing, on possibly a deeper-than-entirely-rational level. Like, there's a deep failure of empathy at work there when it doesn't even occur to you to consider how the real people at the center of your "ship" might feel about you constantly broadcasting your ship at them, even while they go about their lives trying to work with their co-workers and date whoever they're really dating and just do their own thing as non-awkwardly as possible. And yet right next to that failure of empathy you've got these intense conceptions of love and romance that are at the heart of the ship. (Intense ideas about romance rubbing right up against staggeringly obvious failures of empathy? Suddenly I get why people automatically associate this stuff with teen girls, fairly or not.)

Anyways, maybe it's just that I know enough actual actors IRL, but I am well aware that trying to have long-term relationships as a working actor is in fact very difficult already and I wish people would leave other people alone and if for whatever reason you feel you must "ship" Real Live Actual Humans please do them a favor, consider their feelings, and keep it to yourself.
posted by mstokes650 at 9:32 PM on June 17, 2016 [17 favorites]

Why, I used to have to pay $5.99 for shipping AND handling. But it was worth it for those Ronco™ products. Now it's the future and I have Amazon Prime and the shipping is free! So, last time I was on the computer, I bought a rocking chair, and I chose FREE 2-day shipping, because I need to get out onto my porch as soon as possible, so that I can yell at you goddamn kids to get off my goddamn lawn!
posted by not_on_display at 9:47 PM on June 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

Yeah RPF has always been a thing that has squicked me, and I've been part of at least one major fandom brouhaha dealing with whether to allow or disallow RPF into a forum. (I was of the "Live and Let Live, but Please Do It Over There" opinion.)

On the one hand, I understand it, because celebrities, particularly those who tend to have mostly female and mostly young female fans are sold so intensely to the fans as a commodity to begin with. I mean, when all the press is "Oo, look at HIM, isn't he DELICIOUS" obviously they are encouraging this kind of objectification. So it shouldn't be entirely surprising when someone decides they are "in love with" the actor, not the character. And it's not that far to imagining the actor having sex. And imagining the actor having sex with OTHER ACTORS.

The part where things get super weird IMO is when the actors become aware this is a thing and start playing to it, which absolutely happens. That's the point where people become obsessed that They Are Really Doing It.

So basically, I see RPF as a somewhat logical extension of celebrity gossip culture colliding with fandom and fanfiction culture. I still try to get as far away from it as possible, but intellectually I get why it is a thing.
posted by threeturtles at 9:48 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Umm, thanks for your opinion Mr Shatner, but I think the guy who plays Johnny Depp in all those films needs to know the only thing which could make him feel better right now is chaste tummyrubs from Harry McGraw. Why must you stand in the way of true love?
posted by comealongpole at 10:01 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

RPF (a term I just learned) isn't new, though, right? That's the itch that was scratched by the publicist who dreamed up the ~~financial arrangement~~ relationship between Kristin Stewart and Robert Pattinson. I'm sure there are lots of historical examples too.

Is the thing that makes it so anathema to fandom the fact that people @ the actors on Twitter?

This is a great post! A window into a world I was totally unfamiliar with.
posted by purpleclover at 10:06 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Years ago I stumbled acrossva forum for politically conservative adult fans of Twilight, which was cool with the rapey stuff because, since marriage naturally involved painful sex under duress, it was healthy to fantasize the guy being really romantic about it.
posted by clew at 10:06 PM on June 17, 2016

RPF has been around for a long time. It had generally been considered not quite the thing, though, at least until Supernatural, when, as a friend of mine put it, the prospect of Wincest gave the RPF fans the moral high ground.

But between the LotR tinhats and the boyband shippers (and the SPN RPFers), there's a good 15 years of open RPF out there. And it's always been there in the background -- I remember the scandalized response of the mainstream XF community to the Gillian/David shippers.

But I haven't the foggiest clue what to do about the tinhats who insist on bringing the actors into their shared delusion. It's so intrusive, and icky. You couldn't pay me enough to be a (relatively young or attractive) actor on a genre show nowadays. Give me grumpy character parts!
posted by suelac at 10:23 PM on June 17, 2016 [11 favorites]

I am convinced that while humans have had weird-ass ideas and conspiracy theories and fan dreams for probably the entirety of history, the Internet has allowed these things to fester into gaping holes of terribleness. Suddenly you can collaborate all your terrible ideas with other people who have terrible ideas. You share your justifications, you get backup for whatever you're thinking, you bounce your terribleness off of each other, and before you know it you're harassing a guy's girlfriend because you're convinced he's gay. Or you become a 9/11 truther. Or you're voting for Donald Trump. So much terribleness that compounds on account of immediate access to other people's terribleness.
posted by Anonymous at 10:24 PM on June 17, 2016

God, fans are the worst.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:24 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Good lord, this is why I'm not a joiner. That, and there are very few things I've ever been that obsessed with.

Are there fandoms for William Gibson novels?
posted by lhauser at 10:29 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

RPF has been around for a long time.

No kidding. This reminds me of the siege of Troy leading to the Iliad being composed in subsequent centuries and then further onwards to Achilles becoming deified and temples being built and dedicated to him all over the Hellenic world. Maybe the next step here is for the Outlander actors and other RPFed people to be wor/shipped as gods.
posted by XMLicious at 10:30 PM on June 17, 2016 [3 favorites]

Speaking of knitting wank, totally off-topic: I'm moving this week and can't get anyone to help me move the furniture until tomorrow. Since I can't put the yarn in any of its usual places right now, I literally just stuffed a bunch of it into my new kitchen cabinets (the one thing larger in the new place is the kitchen and the amount of shelving) and on top of the refrigerator. So....yeah.

Back on topic, I think it's kinda sweet that Shatner is friends with the Outlander folks (would not have figured that) and wants to defend them from crazy. Unfortunately, crazy outnumbers everyone else and wins.

But seriously, folks: figure out the difference between reality and film. We don't need more of that Stewart/Pattinson crap again, do we?
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:41 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

RPF fandoms get so weird, so fast. Add feral fandoms to the mix, and good god, you couldn't pay me to wade in those piranha-infested fandom waters.

The one thing about RPF fandoms/ships I'll never get is, why, if you have a canon where your faves are like, in space or superheroes or time traveling or whatever, do you care about their comparatively boring actors? Don't get me wrong, I love giggling over cute gifsets of Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan being hilariously flirty together as much as any MCU fangirl, but my interest does not extend beyond hoping they're paired together for press tours for all time. All my actual investment is reserved for contemplating the rich comic and romantic possibilities of a Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes buddy road trip movie. (MAKE IT HAPPEN, MARVEL)
posted by yasaman at 10:42 PM on June 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

i feel like anyone who lived through the x-files era of the gillian/david shippers and noromos would have a face of extreme non-surprise.
posted by cendawanita at 10:42 PM on June 17, 2016 [7 favorites]

I feel like anyone who lived through the early-aughts rise of LOTRPS (remember the wank about somebody confronting Ian McKellan in person with their RPS possibly while he was attending an event with his boyfriend/partner????), along with anyone who has been through the next-level drama to be seen in virtually any fandom with a high proportion of old fans like non-reboot Star Trek or Doctor Who or certain AOS fandoms, has a face of extreme non-surprise.

Fandoms full of middle-aged people have been terrible for a long, long time, and have always given, to me, the lie to the knee jerk UGH YOUNG ONES AND THEIR TWITTERS THESE DAYS SO TERRIBLE THEY ARE RUINING FANDOM

Please. I remember Snape Wives on a Plane.
posted by joyceanmachine at 1:10 AM on June 18, 2016 [9 favorites]

i thought i knew a little bit about Reverse Path Forwarding, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation certainly seems to be having more fun that i'd previously realized. Or maybe it is the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Middle-aged kids these days.
posted by nickzoic at 1:19 AM on June 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

When I was a wee lad, the tabloid papers were all shipping Kylie and Jason. So this kind of thing was pretty mainstream in the 80s I guess.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 1:48 AM on June 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

One thing I noted early on during my thesis-writing process—my undergraduate thesis was about how to critically assess interactive phenomena in the ways we critique art—is that feedback loops are powerfully addictive, and not commonly recognized as such. The sorts of euphoria we receive in response to our actions are much more powerful than the sensations we provoke themselves, and often lock us into a particular interpretation of the world in the process.

Fandoms aren't new, but fandoms of massive heft were rarer before the Internet, and the weird niche fanstuff stayed weird and niche. Even so, you have Beatlemania eventually begetting Paul's Not Dead, so occasionally these spontaneous semi-cults break to the surface. And you wonder why anybody would believe this shit so fervently, let alone care—but, when you're surrounded by enough people who do, then you're encouraged to amplify the things that get you feedback (conspiracy, emotionally-charged behavior) and everybody surrounding you ups the ante as well.

On the Internet, you can always find a group to fit your niche. That group will escalate its belief structure rapidly and without much thought. And its core participants are likelier than ever to be young and immature, or old enough to assume everything they do is adult and proper even when it's wildly not.

This goes beyond fandom. When you get mothers telling their daughters' acquaintances to kill themselves, or the Tumblr intersectional feminist crowd telling people on the Internet to, uh, kill themselves, or all the other people fervently wishing death and violence upon each other, it's the same thing at play: tunnel vision narrowing itself to a deadly point, and rewarding people more the more they submit to such a narrowing.

(Not that this story is quiiite there yet, but, give it a month.)
posted by rorgy at 2:40 AM on June 18, 2016 [24 favorites]

As weird as the concept might be in a general sense, shouldn't Shatner's perspective here hold a lot of weight? After all, Kirk/Spock was the first modern OTP that got so big that studiously ignoring it had to take a lot of effort. He has been on the receiving end of fandom for 50 years now, and I think could easily be considered the world's foremost expert on what thats like and what the norms have always been. Perhaps he should also should have a meaningful say in what the norms aught to be as the context of what is possible changes.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:04 AM on June 18, 2016 [12 favorites]

rorgy, that's what I was trying to express, but you said it way better
posted by Anonymous at 3:42 AM on June 18, 2016

I'm unclear--are Shatner and Camuso getting into the debate anywhere other than twitter and their own websites?

I thought I had seen about everything in fandoms but this whole 'Big Name Fan' thing is new to me. I'm a little bothered by the idea of a celeb strolling into that space and using their sway and following to steer the conversation, just as I am bothered by the rpf truthers getting in actors' faces. Jesus, leave the actors alone. (I know nothing about Outlander and am just imagining this happening in fandoms I am familiar with.)
posted by heatvision at 3:46 AM on June 18, 2016

The struggle within fandom to keep a lid on their crazies and reinforce that the first rule of fandom is that you don't talk about fandom to the creators (or at least you do so in very vague, nonthreatening terms) has been real for years. Definitely Twitter (so so SO glad that the main objects of my affections eschew it because they are my age or older and Don't Get It) and to a lesser extent Tumblr (NO PRIVACY SETTINGS WTF) have been factors in the increasing difficulty of socially corralling these people and letting them know that we're not kinkshaming them but yeah we kind of are, please stay over there.

Is there even a Fandom Wank any more? For all its awfulness it served a useful purpose as a big searchable clearinghouse for fandom standards and practices which, if you eschew them, you will get soundly mocked.
posted by soren_lorensen at 4:08 AM on June 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

We mostly hang out at fail-fandomanon these days.
posted by tavella at 4:12 AM on June 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

We mostly hang out at fail-fandomanon these days.

Awesome, thanks, tavella! I went looking for the old Fandom Wank site last night and was sad to get the 404 message.

Also, I get small doses of fandom wank material from the Oh No They Didn't LiveJournal community (you have to wade into the comments, which can be... interesting).
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 4:17 AM on June 18, 2016

> there's definitely an age bracket I'd call "not-young-enough-to-know-better."

I'm definitely stealing that, and don't you dare post on facebook accusing me of stealing it or I'm totally going to snub you at the school fundraising committee
posted by nickzoic at 4:27 AM on June 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Frowner, I'm a not quite middle-aged straight lady, but my love for slash fic, especially the type you mention of men who have to overcome both internal and external factors just to be together (internalized homophobia! Having a "straight" public image! What if the other person is straight! Angst!!!!!) is 100% all about coming to terms with my kinkiness. There's a LOT of grossness in this kind of fic that's basically awful to queer people, I agree, and I try to be conscious and avoid the cesspools. I haven't found tons of fanfic using this trope that deals with unacceptable kinks, rather than orientation, so.

RPF is a whoooooole other level of awful, and I hate it. It's bad enough to be perving my kinks all over fake people; the idea of doing it with real humans makes me want to puke.
posted by chainsofreedom at 4:41 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

the solution is obvs RPF AUs.
posted by cendawanita at 4:59 AM on June 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

So if I understand this correctly, RPF is basically just Tina Belcher's Erotic Friend Fiction, except the writers aren't even friends with these people?
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:17 AM on June 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

scully_unimpressed.gif
posted by No-sword at 5:40 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

The fandom is, in my opinion, besides the point. What is more concerning is the broken dynamic of having 2 sides on the internet. This is a microcosm of what is happening in the Democratic Party in the US right now. The escalation, hyperbole, accusations of minor wrong doing blown up into criminal charges, criticism cast as harassment, cricticsm descending into harassment etc. It's toxic and irrational.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:54 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm having a bit of a problem with some of the implied "middle-aged woman = non-online-savvy" equivalence in comments above. Some of us middle-aged women have been on the Internet for 20 years and up. It kinda feels like when people say a computer thing is "so easy your mom can understand it."
posted by matildaben at 6:04 AM on June 18, 2016 [37 favorites]

the solution is obvs RPF AUs.

Which is all RPF at least to me.
posted by ZeroAmbition at 6:05 AM on June 18, 2016

Matildaben, sorry for the casual ageism. I'm 37, I consider myself part of Outlander fandom in an outskirts kind of way, I was totally counting myself among the demographic I'm poking fun at. I am internet savvy, like, professionally. I think what I meant was that our demographic largely hasn't grown up with the culture of online fandom, which I feel has changed in tenor even in the past five years, let alone when my experience with fandom as a teenager was dialing into AOL so I could link through Smashing Pumpkins webrings and log into lame chat rooms where we just wrote song lyrics back and forth over 56K modems.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 6:11 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Anyway, I gave up on the second book and haven't gone back, but I don't think there's really anything wrong with Outlander. It's not my thing, but my things don't appeal to plenty of other people. I think that popular fiction aimed at women gets dismissed in a way that popular fiction aimed at men doesn't, and that's a function of sexism rather than a thing about quality.

I made it through the first two books and decided it wasn't my thing, half because the sex scenes were profoundly unerotic, and half because the entire narrative momentum seemed to come from repetitions of people not talking to each other about something, with complications ensuing. But I can see why the series and the show are popular and why so many fans would identify so closely with it.

Fan fiction is a thing I've known about since at least the 1990s and I don't feel like I understand it any more now than I did then. There is an interesting thing that it does in terms of turning people from consumers of popular culture to creators of it, as well as being of a type with literature that reworks older classics, so I get the writing side of it. But the reading and community sides, not so much. I'm glad it works for people and they have fun with it, but I've accepted that I will never really get it.

That it seems to sometimes turn into bullying and creepiness is sad. Is the surprise here coming from the issue that the bullying and creepiness are being done mostly by adult women, rather than the Gamergate younger men, or teenagers in general?
posted by Dip Flash at 6:13 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, I should have added in my comment to maltiben, Outlander fandom has actually existed online for a really long time. I spent part of my hard-earned AOL hours (I had a 2 hours of studying : 1 hour of AOL time exchange rate going on as a teenager) scrolling through Outlander webrings and the Ladies of Lallybroch page. If fanfic for Outlander had existed at the time I would have been all over that. And it was largely internet-savvy middle aged women creating those websites. So, Outlander fans have a long history of online fandom, and middle aged women have been into it from the start, but it's the tv show that has brought the craziness out. People obeyed pretty strict internet etiquette rules in the fandom prior to the show. There wasn't any fanfic to speak of for decades because fans took to heart Gabaldon's [I think ridiculous and overwrought] anti-fanfic stance. So to see the mores of the fandom crumbling so dramatically is interesting.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 6:24 AM on June 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

My wife loves this show, it's one of our trade offs. I'll watch Outlander and Poldark with her, but she has to watch Daredevil and Better Call Saul with me.

Now I'm worried. I should've asked her for Preacher.
posted by T.D. Strange at 6:37 AM on June 18, 2016

Kee-ripes man, Bill Shatner's 90?!?

*eyes 2016 warily*

Uhh, someone wanna go over there and give him a hug for us? And, look, if he could drop the knowledge about how to build the warp engines, that'd be great too. I had a pen and paper out anyway.
posted by petebest at 6:42 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Shatner's 85.
posted by I-baLL at 7:00 AM on June 18, 2016

Speaking of MCU and Anthony Mackie & Sebastian Stan, there is also a thriving community of Chris Evans/Sebastian Stan shippers, intersecting with people who have taken Chris Evans' refreshingly honest remarks about his anxiety at big red carpet events and completely infantalized the man. There was a fast-moving fandom drama incident a couple of weeks ago in which it was alleged that a fan got too handsy with Evans and kissed him at a con, which then supposedly gave Evans a 40 minute long panic attack. The rumors about it intensified and raged around Tumblr and Twitter like wildfire. Apparently the rumor made its way to a baffled Chris Evans, and I just cringe for the poor guy reading things like "protect him at all costs" when he's a grown man trying to live a life. And of course, there are people in fandom who think the Tweet was "damage control" and that it happened, despite his denial. Shaking my head, fandom, shaking my head.

This stuff just seems so weird to me, where fans are all "protect [rich famous white dude] at all cost", and I'm like, these people are very, very rich. They can hire all the bodyguards, masseurs, therapists and snack delivery that they want. Why exactly is everyone so concerned with their possible responses to very ordinary stuff?

It's weird - there's this fantasy that I think is very capitalist that despite all their wealth, power, getting paid to do a respected craft, personal beauty, etc these people are somehow in terrible emotional pain. And I'm not saying that one can't be a rich actor and be miserable, but it's not a personal misery that fans are concerned with, it's always sort of a fake misery about how either fame is so so hard or Poor Sad Rich White Dude had a photogenically sad childhood and that makes him sad.

And I think there's also something about fantasizing about infantilized men that is really weird. You see it across fandoms, although Sad Kitten Steve is a real classic. I find it disturbing when it's either "Sad Kitten Steve is so sad about being gay that he can't function" or "Sad Kitten Steve's depression is fetizhished" because it feels like straight and generally not-especially-depressed people telling stories about beautiful, photogenic experiences of internalized homophobia and depression. Like, internalized homophobia isn't actually pretty and touching, and most of the time neither is depression.

But again, I also put it down to patriarchy - fantasizing about a man who is so in touch with his feelings that he is really sad, fantasizing about a man who could be immensely powerful and destructive but all that power is held in check rather than used in alpha asshole behavior.

I guess, while we're all responsible for behaving as well as we can, I see the unattractive sides of fandom very much as responses to specific capacities of the internet and to unattractive social reality.
posted by Frowner at 7:01 AM on June 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

I believe I am beginning to understand a little better the upwashing craze for all that vampire and zombie stuff. My task is to live and let live, but I am worried about being the only I in the we group.
posted by mule98J at 7:49 AM on June 18, 2016

My first interaction with fandom was as a teen with the Harry Potter fandom. At that point, I was pretty exclusively a passive consumer of fandom. I'll admit, even as I spent many hours online reading fanfiction, I always saw this as a kind of shameful secret. Partly this was out of some misplaced literary snobbery, which I've fortunately outgrown. I think it also felt more intensely personal because it was pretty much exclusively an escapist vehicle; I was desperate to do anything to distract myself from my toxic family environment and crippling depression.

Fortunately, I'm much happier and more well adjusted now, and my participation in fandom is a hobby that brings me a lot of enjoyment. I primarily write fanfiction, rather than reading it. I've also waded into the broader fandom waters via tumblr.

I took a break from fandom for awhile after my Harry Potter days, and it wasn't until my return that I realized RPF was a whole huge phenomenon. I don't have many hard limits on the kind of fanfiction I'm willing to read, but RPF is absolutely the biggest one. (The other notable ones being alpha/beta/omega and mpreg. If you don't know what that is, I would encourage you not to look it up.)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that RPF should be forbidden, but I do find it profoundly creepy. On the one hand, it's not far removed from fantasizing about celebrities, which is not that unusual or problematic, but when the could find out about, that's what I find disturbing, especially since I've got a fairly good idea of what kind of fanfiction is out there, and I'm assuming the themes in RPF aren't that far removed from other fanfic. And it's not just the actors; it's their friends, family members, god forbid, their children, could all come across this stuff. I can't imagine what it would be like to find yourself featured in these stories, especially if you're unfamiliar with fandom in a broader sense.

I can also see how this would lead to larger problems of fans interactions with each other and with the actors. Once you start conceptualizing actors as characters, rather than real people, things can definitely get weird and intrusive very quickly.

Somewhat ironically, my current One True Fandom, Hannibal, seems pretty placed and harmonious, despite being composed of fans heavily devoted to a series that heavily features cannibalism, murder, and an all consuming dysfunctional relationship. I suspect the smaller size of the fandom helps with that. Quite possibly there's a demographics component as well.
posted by litera scripta manet at 8:54 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

I do get the "the stars of this show have such great chemistry that we want them to be together in real life" thing -- in principle. When I saw an item saying that Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell of The Americans might be dating, I hoped it was true, and when they announced that they were expecting a child together, I was delighted. It does add a little frisson to the show when you know that fantastic chemistry is actually real. I must admit that I did do a single internet search awhile back to see if Heughan and Balfe were dating each other. But to go beyond mildly hoping for a real life relationship and/or being happy for them if it actually happens to the point that you're refusing to believe the actors' denials of it is nuts, and actually hassling the actors about it is way, way over the line. It goes against what I see as a cardinal rule of being a fan, which is that fans can enjoy art in any way they please but should never inflict themselves or any of their fan activities on the creators of the art.

Online fandom is actually something rather new to me. I love FanFare, where we have in-depth discussions of shows and movies, and find it unproblematic, but I have never taken part in any fandom sites for a specific show or a particular person no matter how interested I was in them. This was mostly because I never thought to do so, but once I did consider it I found I didn't want to, because fan sites are pretty disturbing in general. I've had a huge crush on a certain actor for the past three years and though I don't participate at all in the several community websites and individual blogs that have sprung up to celebrate him, I do lurk somewhat, and holy shit can it be an appalling milieu. They seize on every crumb of information about him and his every action like a pack of rabid dogs and analyze it and build upon it, and take each other to task for not acting in a way that they think is appropriate or that the guy would expect from them. Ugh.

Incidentally... because people were hoping for knitting wank... I thought I might just link to the piece I wrote on the knitwear in Outlander's first season.
posted by orange swan at 8:59 AM on June 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

The problem with mildly hoping for actors to get together means that when they almost inevitably break up, it will screw up the show as they have to be artificially kept in different scenes.

I think RPF of currently or recently alive people is pretty gross, but after a certain point it doesn't really bother me and my Ham/Burr stories.
posted by jeather at 9:14 AM on June 18, 2016

My hopes have no bearing on whether actors who don't know me will date or not, and if actors who have been dating break up, it is their responsibility to act like adults and professionals and not let their personal relationship or animosity affect their work. As everyone knows, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson weren't getting along at all through much of The X-Files run because they'd spent too much time together for too long and had gotten to the point that they could hardly stand the sight of each other (Anderson has said they'd sometimes go months without speaking to each other except in character), but they never let it hurt their work.
posted by orange swan at 9:21 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

If only more actors were professional like that and/or more producers forced them to be. It seems clear that no one cares to do that and instead warps plot around personal dislike. (The Good Wife, Castle, The 100, etc.)
posted by jeather at 9:25 AM on June 18, 2016

That is a neat knitting article! It's always so interesting to pick out the ways that contemporary fashion marks nominally-historical costume, and it really foregrounds the whole difficulty with historical representation. Like, since anything we do, however materially accurate, is still representation and metaphor organized around contemporary concerns, where do we draw lines and why? Even if one created a show where the costumes were based entirely on copies of historical garments ( and even if one had a broad range of those garments to work from, rather than just the fanciest kind ) the actors - no matter how good they are - still wouldn't move or stand the way people of the period would, they'd inhabit the garments differently. (This is something I've been thinking about with Mad Men, now that I've seen a few episodes since a housemate is watching it - I'd read a good deal about it, looked at stills, etc and only seen a couple of clips; now what strikes me is that while it's a neat-looking show, the voices, diction and body language all seem off to me compared to period material.)

But there was something else that this thread brought up for me: the way fandom represents marginalized groups when those people are written as main characters by people who are not themselves marginalized and how terribly wrong that can go, and how it is a problem.

I didn't think about this too much despite being uneasy with how straight women often write gay men, but then I kept reading all these stories with one of the main characters being designated as a trans man. (I say "designated" because they're rarely written persuasively.)

It usually feels like the writer is playing with the concept and it's often pretty disturbing. Without wanting to name fics, I'm thinking of things like wild historical inaccuracy about the experience of trans people in, say, 1920 or something; writing trans characters who are totally upbeat, unconflicted and happily confident in their gender identity even though there is no way that their lives in their societies would allow this*; writing characters whose physical transition has been totally easy and complete**; and writing characters who have thoughts and feelings about transness that seem really unlikely for actual trans people.

Like, for instance, I read a story in which the trans male character fell in love with some cis dude, assumed he was straight and actually told him "if you don't want me as a man, I will be a girl for you, that's totally okay". And this wasn't some story exploring how sometimes due to transphobia trans people are pressured to make self-denying choices in order to be loved or anything, it was just "hey, that's always an option for a trans man, right?". And I am like, no, it's not. And the love interest was shown as being a big wonderful person when he accepted the trans character as his real gender, instead of the whole thing being "well, actually I am interested in men, how about a coffee date?"

And I know from internal cues in the stories that these are written from a caring place by people who want to be inclusive, but sometimes it can be kind of upsetting. I - a trans person! - avoid stories with trans characters now, actually.

I have always found stories with trans women characters to be even worse - trans men characters are not generally sexually fetishized by the writers. It's like, it feels bad enough to know that as a trans male person you are a kind of sexual and social zero to society, and then you realize that for trans women you're treated as both a sexual and social zero and a fetish.

*I am totally okay with "this is an AU in far-future luxury community utopia, so people feel totally at ease with gender alignment and/or experience their gender transition really differently from how we do now"; just don't try to set your story in, like, 1988.

**Some people transition and for various genetic-lottery reasons quickly pass as cis to the casual eye and want to be discreet about transness. It's just that I read so many stories where this is the default experience.
posted by Frowner at 9:25 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

having a bit of a problem with some of the implied "middle-aged woman = non-online-savvy" equivalence in comments above

A few comments come across as female fans in general are the craziest ... As in, "we het guys would never do that."

Sure. They don't become obssessed with action-movie actors. Or fantasize about sports stars, their hot GFs, how many women they bang per road trip. And they certainly never intrude on the personal lives of celebrities, do they Jennifer Lawrence? (Let alone actually in-person stalk and in a few horrible instances murder them.)

This is simply about obsession, an ages-old ( but ever more pervasive) celebrity culture, and that newish enabler, da Net. Before it, people were enthralled with Frankie Sinatra and Rudolph Valentino and their love lives. Sarah Bernhardt. Franz Liszt. On and on. It's just that now there's this Two-Way Street that leads common folk enticingly, deceptively "close" to that other world.

Since my Day One online (in '95, as an already grownass woman, thank you) I used to joke people didn't realize "the microphone was on" and they were broadcasting to the world. While my hyperawareness of Who Could Be Reading kept my own thoughts circumspect to a degree.

But now, it turns out, for some fans that's the point -That Person might read what they say.

tl;dr I have my own opinions and fantasies about famous people, but am too much an introvert to overshare the way that many women AND MEN do.

As for fanfiction, yes, don't get that, although maybe I would've done it had there been a net when I was 11. But now? Well, for one thing I'm not going to waste my writing talent putting the equivalent of a show spec script on the web.
posted by NorthernLite at 9:27 AM on June 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

I've had fandom tarnish the viewing experience so many times. That's the main reason I refuse to watch Outlander, even though I've enjoyed the novels and I've heard good things about the adaptation. I'm sure it'll still be around in a few years after all the passions have cooled.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:32 AM on June 18, 2016

This stuff just seems so weird to me, where fans are all "protect [rich famous white dude] at all cost", and I'm like, these people are very, very rich. They can hire all the bodyguards, masseurs, therapists and snack delivery that they want. Why exactly is everyone so concerned with their possible responses to very ordinary stuff?

Eh, I think fans can make rich, famous people's lives honestly pretty terrible. Having a big paid staff, even if you can afford it, doesn't really alleviate the difficulty, the loneliness, the weirdness of no longer being permitted to be a person in the world.

Our (the Internet's) best pal, Lin-Manuel Miranda, just tweeted today about how he's getting kinda freaked out about fan interaction. Having fandom communities encourage differentiating between acceptable and unacceptable behavior seems like a good thing to me.
posted by purpleclover at 9:55 AM on June 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

I'm just gonna point out that 1) magazines who speculate about nonexistent celebrity relationships are engaging in RPF

and 2) in the various ages of Hollywood there have in fact been queer male actors, who were kept closeted, and had beard relationships arranged by their agents and publicists. Like, that's a thing that really happened.

3) the Fourth Wall between fans and creators was not just to avoid embarrassment in both directions, but also to avoid legal reprisal, because that is also a thing that happened. Also virulent homophobia.

As weird as the concept might be in a general sense, shouldn't Shatner's perspective here hold a lot of weight? After all, Kirk/Spock was the first modern OTP that got so big that studiously ignoring it had to take a lot of effort. He has been on the receiving end of fandom for 50 years now, and I think could easily be considered the world's foremost expert on what thats like and what the norms have always been. Perhaps he should also should have a meaningful say in what the norms aught to be as the context of what is possible changes.

I mean, people will disagree on how much weight his opinion should hold, but you're right about the facts. Even ignoring shipping, Star Trek is the ur-example of large, organized, modern mainstream media fandom. And Shatner wasn't just on the receiving end; going to conventions, he was very nearly in the thick of it.

He's been livetweeting certain shows for a few years now, including Supernatural. He had a vague Twitter war with Misha Collins. He has an opinion about Dean/Cas. (One fan tweeted @him "you don't want to get into it with the destiels, you don't know what you're getting into" which is hilarious because he's literally the godfather of slash fandom)

(All that said, he's still an older dude with an oversized ego commenting on discourse that happens primarily between women under 30, and honestly I'm inclined to assume that he misreads some of it. Just on principle I don't give him a lot of my mental airtime.)
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 10:06 AM on June 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

and 2) in the various ages of Hollywood there have in fact been queer male actors, who were kept closeted, and had beard relationships arranged by their agents and publicists. Like, that's a thing that really happened.

I think, though, that that makes me more uncomfortable with a lot of RPF. Like, the odds of an arbitrarily chosen pair of celebrities actually being in a relationship that they're pressured to hide is vanishingly small. But there are actors who feel unable to be out in their work lives and it feels insulting to that reality for (overwhelmingly straight) people use it as a pretext for entertainment.
posted by hoyland at 10:13 AM on June 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

Oh, and I am interested in the fandom defensive attitude about male actors like Chris Evans, but I don't think it's exclusive to men. I first encountered this attitude in the early '00s on Ani DiFranco fan forums. They did NOT like anyone getting up in her business (moreso after a "fan" broke into her house.)
posted by purpleclover at 10:19 AM on June 18, 2016

I'm just gonna point out that 1) magazines who speculate about nonexistent celebrity relationships are engaging in RPF

Yeah, I find all the Perez Hilton/star watching/etc stuff also to be deeply disturbing. And if we're going to get into the effect this has on the actual celebrities, having paparazzi stalk you seems far more intrusive than RPF, as long as the RPF fans don't actively try to engage (which clearly they often do, hence this FPP).

It had generally been considered not quite the thing, though, at least until Supernatural, when, as a friend of mine put it, the prospect of Wincest gave the RPF fans the moral high ground.

I absolutely love this description. I never got into Supernatural but I'm somewhat aware of the going ons in that fandom because of tumblr, etc. Also, I read some articles a little while back (can't remember where) that were discussing friction between fans of the show who felt queerbaited by the show's writers/creators. It also discussed some friction between fans and one of the main actors (can't remember whether it was the one who plays Dean or Sam) who was adamant about not wanting to discuss slash pairings on the show. (Probably it was Dean because Destiel shippers.)
posted by litera scripta manet at 10:37 AM on June 18, 2016

Actually, one other troubling potential complication of RPF that I hadn't thought much about until reading the Vox One Direction article, is that shipping two actors, especially two male actors, can make them self conscious about not adhering to the stereotypical "masculine" friendship norm of not showing physical affection. Apparently that's the effect the Larry Stylinson shipping has had. I imagine this is particularly true for younger celebrities.

I was only vaguely aware of One Direction as a fandom, or even as a band, because that fandom doesn't tend to overlap with the fandom circles I've encountered, so the Vox article was certainly...educational?

Speaking of educational, I thought I was decently well versed in fandom terminology, but this is actually the first I've heard of tinhatting and feral fandoms. I guess I would have been counted as a "feral" fan in my Harry Potter days. I suppose one benefit of spending so much time observing fandom but not participating in it is that it gave me lots of time to get a feel for terminology and customs. Also, I didn't start interacting until I was well out of high school, which in retrospect, I'm very grateful for.

Well, I did have a livejournal, but I can't for the life of me even remember what it was called, and I don't think I did much with it, either with fandom or otherwise.
posted by litera scripta manet at 11:06 AM on June 18, 2016

All I can say about shipping real life persons at present with all its attendant fandoms is that ever since news broke out that the two great meme houses of Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston have come together, I've been carefully staying off tumblr.

Heh. The following RPF-ish news headline showed up in my Google News feed the other day:

Taylor Swift & Tom Hiddleston: Did A Shared Love Of Cats Bring Them Together?

Answer: We don't know anything about the relationship, but boy, they both sure like cats, and here are some photos of them with adorable cats!

I can't really complain about the click-baity aspect of the headline, since I was there for the cute cat photos anyway.

Getting back to the subject of the post, I now feel lucky that the biggest fandom wank I've witnessed in my favorite fandom was a faked death. It was unpleasant to the people who were taken in by the deception, but nobody got doxed or harassed in real life.
posted by creepygirl at 11:16 AM on June 18, 2016

Ugh, you're not wrong, hoyland, I wasn't thinking, but

Maybe you were talking specifically about Outlander but I need to publicly quibble with the "overwhelmingly straight". It's impossible to take a good survey of fandom, but when people have tried, the results have indicated that within slash fandom, something like 35% are bi/pansexual women and only 30% are straight. Largest one is the AO3 census here. Results may not apply to other subfandoms, subcultures, etc. Like-minded fans tend to clump together, so you have some circles that are more straight and some that are more queer. Those still aren't gay men, and I'd entirely agree that slash fic is generally not for or about gay men, but neither is it written by, for, or about straight women.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 11:24 AM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

There was a fast-moving fandom drama incident a couple of weeks ago

Honestly, this sounds like one of the pre-chosen forms of Gozer the Traveler.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:38 AM on June 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Creepy thing to me is how this stuff encourages seeing real people as objects of fantasy amusement and their personal lives as public property...
posted by saulgoodman at 11:44 AM on June 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

And now, thanks to social media, almost everybody seems like a public figure, so it seems like there's a greater risk of crossover of these habits of thought and behavior to ordinary life.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:47 AM on June 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

I remember the early 00s when LOTR slash and then slash about the actors went through the roof. A member of my family was deeply into reading that stuff. I had to endure listening to the play by play about the true believers. The gay gossip site, Datalounge, got overwhelmed by a group called the Prancing Ponies who were crazy obsessed with the comings and goings of the male cast members and hoping, praying, insisting on every imagined hint that there were member of the cast in deep relationships with each other. Datalounge was always a hotbed of reading clues in the behavior of every attractive male celebrity anyway but the behavior of the Ponies took it to another level. And most of the Ponies were straight women. It got to be a pretty ugly.

So yeah, it's not like any of this behavior is a new phenomenon.
posted by Ber at 3:15 PM on June 18, 2016

My only foray into RPF fanfic was indeed during the LOTR epoch, although I was just reading one particular author who wasn't writing the messy big ships that were at the center of the tinhattery. In a lot of ways it seemed to be due to the behind-the-scenes documentaries that almost became their own movies - there were these people spending a lot of time together doing something difficult and fun and all-encompassing and it made for a tempting arena to write in. It was like it gave a little distancing to it all. I was reading a fic about a movie about the making of a movie. In any case, it seems that the appeal for me was that particular writer, because I've never been tempted by RPF in any other way. I still feel like as long as people don't start mistaking their fantasies for real life, it's fine, but it seems like that's just too hard for a lot of people and then you get horrible harassment of the actors themselves.
posted by PussKillian at 3:37 PM on June 18, 2016

As a middle-aged woman this makes me so very embarrassed. But it does give me some kind of schadenfraude variant that reassures me that perhaps my social life isn't so barren after all. Geez, ladies. Get it together.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 3:43 PM on June 18, 2016

Those still aren't gay men, and I'd entirely agree that slash fic is generally not for or about gay men, but neither is it written by, for, or about straight women.

In some ways that makes it worse for me. Gay slash fic tends to shove its male characters into extremely infantilized, stereotyped, heteronormative boxes that's makes it extremely clear the author doesn't know any gay men and is dreaming of one day having their very own Team Of Fabulous Gays. It's bad enough when a heterosexual woman is doing it, but I would expect a queer woman to know better.
posted by Anonymous at 4:14 PM on June 18, 2016

I'm not going to waste my writing talent putting the equivalent of a show spec script on the web.

You know, that's actually really dismissive and shows zero understanding of fanfiction in general?

The idea that the amazing talented writers who choose to write fanfiction are 'wasting' their talent is just tired.
posted by Windigo at 7:02 PM on June 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

The idea that the amazing talented writers who choose to write fanfiction are 'wasting' their talent is just tired.

Indeed. A friend of mine wrote an epic Merlin AU set at St. Andrews College, The Student Prince. More than a quarter million people have read it, and thousands more have listened to the audiobook version, which she recorded herself, because she's she's also an actor.

I hardly think that the pleasure she provided to all those people was wasted.
posted by suelac at 9:28 PM on June 18, 2016 [6 favorites]

Regarding Swiftleston (or whatever the portmanteau winds up being), I liked Genevieve Valentine's observations, starting here:

@GLValentine: Looking at Hiddleston/Swift photos; researching PERSONA & ICON broke my "candids" meter forever. (The Crucible's less staged than those.)

posted by Lexica at 9:42 PM on June 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

The idea that the amazing talented writers who choose to write fanfiction are 'wasting' their talent is just tired.

I also think a lot of this is tied up in the fact that fandom is free.

I know there have been several ideas by (usually male) outsiders who go "holy shit, look at all this stuff fans are producing - for FREE! Gosh, someone should take them by the hand and show them that they can make a little bit of money from it, while I will make a lot of money from the platform where they will be doing it on."

And then they are surprised when fans tell them to go the fuck away.

(I also just realized that the archive.org copies of the fandom_wank wiki has now been erased, which fills me with sadness, because otherwise I would have linked to the knitting wank I remember, where someone on a knitting board made a comment about the price of some yarn and added that it better be made out of god's pubic hair for it to be this expensive.)
posted by ari_ at 2:24 PM on June 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Creepy thing to me is how this stuff encourages seeing real people as objects of fantasy amusement and their personal lives as public property...

One of the Big Names in the Outlander fandom uproar is reputedly the same woman who maintains a site insisting that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are secretly married and have two children (who they also manage, somehow, to keep secret). The members of the site mock disbelievers, and anyone who asks questions is banished, but that wouldn't really matter if they didn't also direct constant abuse at FKA twigs (who is currently engaged to Pattinson). Her Instagram is a horrorshow of racist comments and namecalling, and the comment threads on articles about her or about her and Pattinson (particularly on sites like Gossip Cop) are jaw-droppingly awful. I stumbled on all this because I became a huge twigs fan after she released EP 2, and I've had a hard time tearing my eyes away from it since. I think Twilight fandom must the most dysfunctional and toxic I've seen, but it sounds like Outlander is giving it some competition.
posted by jokeefe at 2:28 PM on June 19, 2016

Taylor Swift & Tom Hiddleston: Did A Shared Love Of Cats Bring Them Together?

Betteridge's law: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
posted by Sparx at 6:16 PM on June 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

purpleclover: "h, I think fans can make rich, famous people's lives honestly pretty terrible. Having a big paid staff, even if you can afford it, doesn't really alleviate the difficulty, the loneliness, the weirdness of no longer being permitted to be a person in the world."

Yeah. If anything, the "very capitalist fantasy" is that rich people aren't lonely or depressed or sad because they're rich, and money solves all problems like that.

Don't get me wrong, it's not an anti-capitalist fantasy, either. It's more in the middle: "being wealthy gives all these creature comforts, which must be great, but it can't give comfort to the soul, because money isn't everything. Instead, he/she needs me to bring comfort to his/her soul."
posted by Bugbread at 6:37 PM on June 19, 2016

I think "protect the artist" is really "don't make every artist interaction about your ship because it annoys the rest of us."

And yes, masculine fandoms have their own flavors of hooliganism.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:53 PM on June 19, 2016

I think the problem isn't so much fandom as the internet makes targeted harassment very easy. You can use Google to follow your target across multiple platforms. Comment systems are lightly moderated. And you can create your own callout site in five minutes on tumblr, (which can create rewarding echo chambers of likes and reblogs.)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:13 AM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I just cringe for the poor guy reading things like "protect him at all costs" when he's a grown man trying to live a life

Although that isn't something I have written (or would write), I guess I am one of those (does 35 count as middle-aged?) women who feel a sense of protectiveness about a rich, famous, white actor in their fandom of choice. This is a guy who has spoken very candidly about his struggle with depression and anxiety, and as a result, many many fans came forward to share their own struggles with him - on social media, but also in person at conventions.

I attended a meet & greet at one of those, and it got very heavy - multiple people telling him about their suicidal thoughts and letting him know he was responsible for them being still alive. I spoke to a fellow fan afterwards about it and she told me "don't worry about it, he is a grown man, he can handle it".

And this is where I started feeling defensive - I am a grown woman and I used to suffer from anxiety which was, at the time of that comment, pretty well under control. And I had visited message boards for a while, thinking I could support people, and found I just couldn't do it - it just started dragging me down to the same place I used to be in.

I don't know where I am going with this comment - I am not very familiar with Chris Evans or his fandom and this situation. I guess I just want to say that sometimes, that reaction comes from simple empathy, or, admittedly, projection of our own issues onto someone who seems to share them.
posted by Lost Sock at 2:04 AM on June 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's just that for me, all the hyperbolic stuff I see on tumblr about "protect Chris Evans" is part of the problem. "Let's leave this dude alone a little bit" is not the same as "protect Chris Evans at all costs!!!!!" and that is certainly phrasing that goes around.

What would life look like for Chris Evans if fans didn't protect him but looked inside themselves for the willpower to maintain appropriate boundaries? Probably a hell of a lot better, frankly.

"Protecting" someone suggests that you are putting yourself between them and harm and, unless you are literally Captain America it is a way of centering yourself. "Let's try not to use Chris Evans as a personal therapist more than necessary" directs the issue right back at the fans; it does not suggest that there's a tug of war between "good" and "bad" fans, with the "good" fans "protecting" Chris Evans from the others.

The idea of "protecting" a celebrity is a way of locating yourself in the middle of the same drama that causes problems for the celebrity.

This is not the same as feeling like "here's a famous guy who is a decent human being, I hope constantly being told about people's suicidality is not overwhelming to him, it would be totally overwheming to me and I certainly sympathize with him".

Also, honestly, every time someone uses that kind of phrasing, I am reminded of the people who are not protected even when protecting them is very cheap. "Protect [...]" is a phrase I am used to hearing as "protect Black girlhood", "protect indigenous lands", etc. To hear it turned into "protect this guy who is basically famous because he's cute and not a raving misogynist, with the emphasis on cute" (after all, we're not "protecting" character actors who are feminist but have less by way of pecs, right?) is kind of a drag.

The hyperbolic phrasing and the self-centering are what bother me, particularly as they've become fandom tropes instead of isolated random things.
posted by Frowner at 5:17 AM on June 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

The thing about "protect the celebrity" is that it sort of feels like a species of real-person fiction, in which the fan is inserting him or herself as a Mary Sue in an invented story about the celebrity's life. It's like white knighting: it makes the fan the center of a heroic narrative, and there's a kind of power and pleasure in it that doesn't really have to do with what's best for the celebrity. But I don't think that's true of every instance of concern about a celebrity. Sometimes you genuinely just see something and think "oof, that's creepy and would creep me out if it were me."
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:44 AM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

To digress a moment - upthread I was saying that CE, for instance, has access to all the snacks and massage and therapy he wants; my point was not that because of this it doesn't matter what happens to him but rather that actively"protecting" him is intrusive since he has the resources to decide for himself what he wants.

Which comes back to part of what bothers me about both RPF and the whole "this celebrity must actually be gay, in love with the actor he worked with for a couple of films and married to a beard" thing - the idea that consent doesn't matter if someone is famous enough. (And "famous enough" seems to be a very slippery thing on the contemporary internet.)

It is really inappropriate to involve non-consenting people in your sexual fantasies. I am personally kind of squicked by RPF, but if it can be possible to keep it amongst people who want to read it, then fine. I am troubled both by how some fans seem to write it as a way of engaging with the outside world and by how it tends to leak out into the rest of the world regardless. We would never think that it was okay to write, like, RPF about the hot new actuary at work and then put it on the internet in such a way that that person could find it - that would be gross and creepy and probably harassment.

I would also argue (as a very visibly queer person - I always think of the phrase "one-stop coming-out party" that some butch writer used on Autostraddle) that actively looking for people to out is unhelpful and inappropriate. If someone is doing harm to GLBTQ people and is closeted then sure, out them - but "it would be better if everyone could be out, therefore I can force you to be out" is not the same thing. You don't know what keeps someone in the closet and unless you feel that their closetedness is actively harmful you don't get to make the choice for them. Even if the members of One Direction are all closeted and have vast secret make-out parties in undisclosed locations, it's not our job to try to out them.

And of course, this is all predicated on the cuteness of the actors in question - nobody cares whether non-cute actors are closeted, whether they are miserable, whether their fame is hard for them to handle, whether they are secretly in love with a co-star, etc. So the idea that intruding into the lives of fantasy-material actors has some kind of allyship aspect is just nonsense.

What's more, a lot of the "but these two actors must be in lurrrvvvv" thing generates a lot of queerbaiting. I am really, really uncomfortable watching two straight* actors do fanservice-y things so that fans will have more material for porn and manips. I do not want to see two straight guys act as though they are going to make out - pretend to be gay! - for an audience that is overwhelmingly women who at least sometimes sleep with men. It positions gay men's sexuality as something that basically exists as entertainment for women - and that's already something that a lot of gay men experience IRL. (I know from IRL conversations that young fannish women do actually sometimes urge young gender non-conforming men (regardless of their sexuality) of their acquaintance to make out with other guys - in one instance, because "you are so bishonen" - this isn't something that is confined to the famous.)

Basically, I wish people would stick to regular old fanfic, stop telling other fans to kill themselves even if those fans are genuinely doing something wrong and just...have the same kinds of boundaries with celebrities as a well-behaved person would have with any interesting stranger.

*Okay, maybe they are not literally straight, but when people describe themselves as straight and engage in exclusively straight relationships, they are straight enough for social purposes.
posted by Frowner at 6:43 AM on June 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think tinhatting is, if not anti-gay more signaling than supportive. It's not the 1960s or 1980s when coming out could be career death and studios did go to great conspiracies to provide cover. More people are out in entertainment than ever before. Some have been out for years now.

And tinhatting a straight couple makes no sense.

But, some elements of fandom are more interested in supporting the ships they want to be queer instead of supporting LGBTQ people and media.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:51 AM on June 20, 2016

Indeed. A friend of mine wrote an epic Merlin AU set at St. Andrews College, The Student Prince. More than a quarter million people have read it, and thousands more have listened to the audiobook version, which she recorded herself, because she's she's also an actor.

One of my favorite YA novels is actually a work of fanfiction. It's an alternate-universe Steve/Bucky fic set in a suburban high school. It's roughly based on/inspired by Middlemarch, and it has the most controlled use of third-person omniscient point-of-view I've seen in a really long time. It also portrays parenting in such an accurate way that I was astonished to find out how young the author was when I bumped into her on twitter. And it resists the happily-ever-after ending.

I give you: Middletown, A Study of Suburban Life, by M_Leigh.
posted by not that girl at 8:59 PM on June 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

I wish m_leigh had actually made that into a original fiction, because I got so put off by how out of character everyone was (I felt!). And I think that's indicative of the different story niches fanfic and orific and even rps fanfic fulfil for different readers. For that one in particular for example, it struck me as too self-indulgent, even while I can recognise the writing skill. There are plenty of other massive AUs that would still honour characterisation. But that's me I suppose - tbh I would only entertain this kind of tangent in RPF, because nothing is real anyway! It's just like reading original fiction but with the casting already done for you, afaic. But I realise ymmv.

(and if we're on the subject of the psychology of 'protect Chris Evans at all costs!!! Because anxiety!!!', then her and her mates circa 2014 really made that whole trend memorable for me)
posted by cendawanita at 11:03 PM on June 20, 2016

Sorry, I should have actually linked the more concise 2014 SDCC reporting from her. All it taught me is that a great talent at writing can almost seduce you into believing anything.
posted by cendawanita at 11:38 PM on June 20, 2016

Okay, so, see, there was this woman, and I had no reason to doubt her sincerity. I actually met her in person once, because it somehow came up that we lived in the same town. She was an academic and an author with a husband and children, and we got along fine on the occasion. But she told me once with no hesitation and no trace of insincerity that I could see, that she felt truly sorry for me because I didn't see the chemistry she did between the two characters she was shipping (who were not romantically involved on the show, or even personal friends) because that must mean that I had never seen nor experienced real human love or friendship in my lifetime. "It's just THERE, and anyone who doesn't automatically see it must have something terribly wrong with them!"

Things like that go so deep with some fans and that any kind of reason or objectivity just flies out the window.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:02 AM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not that girl, I LOVE Middletown so much! It's my favorite Cap fanfic, and I have read a lot of Cap fanfic. It's fascinating how different people respond to the same piece, cendawanita, because I thought all the characters were perfectly transposed as teenagers and each one kept their inherent personality. Also, that Toast article about the 2014 Comic Con was awesome!
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 2:53 AM on June 21, 2016

She is an engaging writer. As to any other opinion, I'll let others make up their minds, especially in view of what we've been talking about.
posted by cendawanita at 6:21 AM on June 21, 2016

« Older DJ Earworm 2015½ | "What if I pretended like I didn’t know what nails... Newer »

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments

MetaFilter

That'll really grind their corn
June 17, 2016 7:07 PM Subscribe

Tags

Share

That'll really grind their corn June 17, 2016 7:07 PM Subscribe

Tags

Share

That'll really grind their corn
June 17, 2016 7:07 PM Subscribe