10:50am February 17, 2012

Why I’m not involved in fandom.

It seems like the vast majority of people I know are involved in various fandoms. And it’s weird, but I haven’t been. Weird because I have gotten as attached to various stories as anyone: Young Wizards/Feline Wizards, Lord of the Rings/Tolkien, etc. And you don’t even want to know the kind of fanfic I used to write back when I thought I’d invented the concept. Or rather, I’d be too embarrassed to tell you. Not in a sexual way, it was just horrible writing.

The thing that seems to keep me away from it most is that I’m way more clueless than the average fan. This first occurred to me after the [huge spoilery thing] happened in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I conveyed my huge shock to someone who had been heavily involved in various fandoms, and her response was “I knew that would happen because it was necessary for the story to make Harry forced to do things a particular way.” I never told her(*), but the reason I stopped discussing it at that point was that I was too intimidated. I couldn’t believe how people, especially people involved in fandoms, seemed to just know stuff like that and predict storylines accordingly. And I couldn’t imagine what I could add to discussions where people knew such things.

That inferior feeling is coming back as I read a series of online book reviews. Practically all the reviews deal with stuff like what information the author wants to convey to the reader, how the author wants to move the storyline along, why the author puts characters into the positions they’re in, why and how the author says what particular thing in what particular way at what particular time, how the author wants the reader to feel, how the plot needs to work, and so forth.

I can’t do that. It doesn’t matter how many such reviews I read, how long I talk to people who think this way, or how many pages of TV Tropes I read how many times. I can’t think this way. The only time I think of the author at all is when I realize their biases are shaping characters a particular way. Otherwise there is no possible way for me to consider anything of the sort within a story. And the things I notice are usually on a very different level: Not about how the author crafts a story, but about how who the author is affects a story. Very different things, but I still only rarely notice that.

Meanwhile, the few times I’ve tried to venture into fandoms, this sort of stuff makes up a good deal of the conversation. It gets to the point where it seems like people think that this (and possibly writing fanfic) is the highest way people can appreciate stories.

(Meanwhile, I have a sense that few of them even want to know the kind of insights I do have sometimes. I’ve seen what happens to people who point out the most obvious things, like sexism and racism in Tolkien’s work. I don’t think people want to know the scary depths of cognitive disablism I’ve found as an overarching pattern in Diane Duane’s work. Especially since it’s usually not obvious, and can really only be noticed if you read one or two works where it’s very strong and then read tons of single-sentence patterns by reading literally everything else she’s ever written. It goes against her entire philosophy of life otherwise, but that’s how prejudice functions. Reading Intellivore was still like getting punched in the stomach, hard. I still need to quote that one on my other tumblr, I’ve been putting it off.)

So… yeah. That’s most of why I’m not involved in fandom. There’s just some kind of intellectual disconnect between how I read stories and how most fandom-type people seem to. And it ends up making me feel completely inferior and inadequate as a reader/viewer/etc.

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(*) If she’s reading this: Hi. I’m really sorry about not writing recently. I keep thinking of it but then forgetting once I’m in a position to do so. I get “stuck” in particular patterns online and right now that’s here. Also, don’t feel guilty over my response to what you said, it’s more about me than about you.

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