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January 2011

[META] How a fan sub battle is fought

Guest post by Mikhail Koulikov

I published a paper in the September 2010 volume of TWC that modeled the interaction between fan groups that create and distribute unauthorized, non-commercial translations of Japanese animation (‘anime’), and the for-profit companies that do the same under license from the original creators as a ‘net war’ (an emerging mode of conflict…, in which the protagonists use – indeed, depend on using – network forms of organization).

In my article, I highlighted several particular forms that these interactions have taken. In some cases, the for-profit companies have essentially ignored the fan group activities, for both strategic and tactical reasons. In others, they have taken specific actions, ranging from flat-out offensives such as issuing cease-and-desist letters, to adopting the fan groups’ skills and methods and hiring the fan translators to produce authorized translations, to appealing to audiences directly to educate them that access to anime is ‘not a right’ and that the interaction has to occur on commercial terms.

If you know where to look, over this past week, a major battle of this ‘net war’ has occurred.

Although the Japanese animation that most Americans are familiar with is major theatrical productions, such as the first Pokemon movie (1999, U.S. gross of $86M; $136M worldwide), or the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2002), the vast majority of the anime that is actually released in the U.S. are television series. From the late 1980’s to the late 00’s, these were generally licensed, translated and then distributed on VHS and DVD by a small stable of specialized companies. Over the last couple of years, as the home video market essentially crashed, many of these have shut down. Several others, though, have been able to transform themselves into content management and distribution shops, with actual physical production of DVD’s being only one of their functions. The largest and most successful has been Funimation (a subsidiary of the Navarre Corporation, which according to its website, “provides computer software, home entertainment media, consumer electronics and accessories distribution, third party logistics, supply chain management and other related services for North American retailers and their suppliers.”).

Funimation’s current business model is based on acquiring the U.S. broadcast and distribution rights to a given Japanese animation series while the series is still in production. As soon as the series airs on Japanese television, Funimation is ready with an authorized translation (using the skills and services of former fan subbers now gone ‘official’); within hours of a Japanese television broadcast, English-subtitled episodes are made available on the proprietary Funimation.com website, as well as on several third-party sites (Animenewsnetwork.com, and Hulu.com, among others). Much later – usually, several months – Funimation releases the series on DVD, complete with a marketing campaign, English dub, various extras, and attractive packaging, to appeal to both the hard-core collectors and the casual watcher.

The hitch in all of this is that while Funimation and the other companies that are still operating in the field are pursuing their business models, fan groups are still pursuing theirs – the key difference, of course, being that while Funimation needs to pay licensing costs to acquire the rights to a series, pay their staff to translate and produce it, and then deal with distributors to actually get it to viewers, the fan sub groups may incur some expenses, but they are simply not thinking about revenues.

And so, we have a battle in the fan sub war.

Unlike in the U.S., the Japanese television broadcasting year is divided into four seasons, with new shows starting roughly in January, April, July and October. And every season sees the launch of a dozen or more new anime series. One that launched earlier this month, and was anticipated most eagerly, is Fractale – a fanciful story about a future where most humans choose to interact with each other using CG avatars, and a boy who decides not to, and navigates the avatars’ world in his own body. Fractale gained immediate “fan cred” by consciously referencing Hayao Miyazaki’s classic images, designs and settings; that the original story is written by the philosopher and literary critic Hiroki Azuma doesn’t hurt either.

The first episode of Fractale aired in Japan on January 13, and that same day, starting at 10:45 a.m. (CST), Funimation made a translation available on its website.

So far so good.

On January 19, the production committee that is the official copyright holder for the series informed Funimation that because unauthorized videos of the episode were available elsewhere on the Internet – on streaming sites, file-sharing networks, and file servers – it was requesting that Funimation suspend its authorized simulcast of any further episodes.

When the announcement was made public on the Anime News Network forums, it drew almost 400 comments. Speaking privately to both fans and industry professionals, though, it was clear that some perceived the situation as a rather typical instance of Japanese content-holders misunderstanding the American market. Others saw the entire situation as a well-designed attempt by the content-holders to act in an expected way. One fan comment described the situation thus: “Japanese company can look upset, Funimation can make public announcements about clamping down on unauthorized distribution. Then after a few days or a week they can then resume the simulcast and we go back to the status quo.”

In fact, it appears that this is exactly what has happened.

According to a statement that Funimation issued on Monday, January 24:

“In recent days we have been diligently tracking the online illegal distribution of the anime series Fractale and on behalf of the rights holders we have been taking the appropriate legal action. As a result, we now have the approval of the Fractale Production Committee to stream episode 2 of the series starting today.”

Will this resumption of streaming necessarily stop the fan sub groups? Probably not. But it serves as a good example of the delicate dance that takes place on a daily basis in a particular corner of the transformative works and cultures universe.

[META] The Social Network Fandom: RPS of Professional RPF?

Over at Obsidian Wings, Doctor Science has posted an analysis of The Social Network using a fannish vocabulary. I’ve been overwhelmed by the range, quality and quantity of fan activity surrounding the film, and I thought that Doctor Science’s post would provide me with some great material to discuss in my first post for the Symposium Blog.

The idea that The Social Network can, strictly speaking, be understood as as Real Person Fic (RPF), is, in the words of Doctor Science, complicated. The argument in favor is fairly common, and can be a frustrating conversation to have with outsiders to fandom: there are discrete traditions of professional fiction written about real people and RPF; this film belongs to the former, hence the easy and ubiquitous comparisons to Citizen Kane. I don’t say this to undermine the extent to which the film’s depiction of real situations made Doctor Science “uncomfortable,” but surely there is a difference between this huge-budget Hollywood film and the fanfiction inspired by it, only some of which is, strictly speaking, RPF. (And much of the Social Network RPF is actorfic, e.g. Jesse Eisenberg/Andrew Garfield, rather than RPF about the real people behind the real facebook.)

The author nevertheless points out an interesting irony in Aaron Sorkin’s decision to write a kind of story that could be understood as more properly belonging to female-dominated fan communities online, considering the writer’s fraught history with online media fandom. I wasn’t a West Wing fan myself, but the story of Sorkin’s reaction to the TWOP messageboards is widely-circulated as an example of why creators shouldn’t crash the party. Doctor Science is shrewd to draw attention to the connections between the sexism of the film’s narrative of the founding of Facebook and Sorkin’s history of misapprehending the gender politics of digital space.

Unlike the real Mark Zuckerberg, I was not concerned with the movie’s refusal to display the actual mechanics of building Facebook, although I would have liked to see more from the perspective of users, particularly female users. Certainly, as Doctor Science outlines, the film represents female characters as more interested in actually using the site than male characters — it’s not LiveJournal/Dreamwidth, but certainly women are at least as active on the site as men.

But I’m less interested in critiquing the film in this post than I am in drawing out this connection between the gender politics of the film and the gender politics of storytelling in the age of the internet. I don’t believe that it’s helpful to label The Social Network as RPF, because it does a disservice to the thriving RPF being produced in response to the film, and thus inadvertently discounts users once again.

Aaron Sorkin made specific decisions about his representation of the founding of Facebook , presumably in collaboration with legal advisors with experience in communications law, intellectual property, and libel. Fic writers are beholden to a different set of standards, and thus, produce a different kind of work, a kind that, it should go without saying, is at least as addictive as Sorkin’s dialogue. One of Doctor Science’s critiques of RPF in general, here referring to the larger concept of stories based on real life, is one that has been voiced repeatedly by critics of the film; the Doctor describes the erasure of Mark Zuckerberg’s real-life long-term girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, from the story as “cringe-worthy.” In the context of the film, this erasure was necessary for Sorkin to tell his story about the palpable connection between Facebook’s surveillance culture and the anxious masculinity that he believes drives innovations in tech.

But the critique has been made in the context of RPF proper, too, particularly RPS (Real Person Slash, e.g. Mark/Eduardo). There are those in fandom who find it just as cringe-worthy that primarily female fic writers would repeatedly produce situations in which real-life wives or girlfriends are erased in the name of two (or more!) attractive men finding True Love with one another. There are few enough complex female characters in mainstream media, the argument sometimes goes, and fic should serve as a space of rectifying mainstream media’s oppressive erasures, rather than taking them to their logical extension by erasing the women altogether. Of course, many fans take the opposite approach: fic should be a space of exploring the fullest possible range of ideas excited in readers by the media texts we love, and there’s no reason to regulate anyone else’s kinks.

After all, there are no limits on the amount of fic that can be produced from a sourcetext: if you want to read more about the women of The Social Network, write more. While it’s true that, in some fandoms, certain slash pairings come to dominate, I think that it’s up to members within those fandoms to articulate their own values about what this means, rather than anyone from outside. RPF/RPS writers understand that they are producing fiction, rather than producing an idealized social world. Particularly because RPF/RPS is controversial even within fandom (perhaps especially, because only within fandom are people aware how much of it there is!), I think that it’s fair to assume that writers are aware of potential objections readers might have. This doesn’t mean that one has to like or actively support it, but rather that it deserves to be understood on its own terms, in its own context. As one might criticize Citizen Kane‘s representation of media history, so can one criticize The Social Network‘s. But RPF proper must be understood in the context of other fannish productions, not in comparison with Hollywood films.

[ADMIN] Introduction Post

Hello! My name is Alex Jenkins, and I will be replacing Cryptoxin as Dana’s regular co-blogger here at the Symposium Blog. I’m very excited about posting here, and I hope to continue Cryptoxin’s excellent work creating a bridge between academic work on fandom on the one side, and fannish meta on the other. In my home fandoms (think Whedonverse), these intersect pretty much constantly, but I am just as constantly (and pleasantly!) surprised how much the two worlds have to offer one another, and how much their intersection can deepen our engagements with source texts, as well as with one another.

I’m a dissertating graduate student at Ohio State, where I teach writing classes, as well as classes on film and popular culture, when they let me. I blog occasionally about my dissertation research and teaching here at Fictional Fans. Once you get the joke in my title, you get my dissertation project: It’s not fan fiction, it’s fictional representations of fans. I was drawn to this topic because I felt that fiction offered a cool, as yet-untapped, resource for exploring the limits of FIAWOL — where could we better explore the extent to which a whole world can be organized around fannish engagement, but in storyworlds organized around fan-identified protagonists?

But don’t worry, that’s not what I’ll be writing about here. Here, I’ll be writing about topics that have been generating good conversations in fandom as well as in academic spaces, and working to locate productive tensions that seem to merit closer observation. It’s vague, I know. I look forward to finding my niche here, and welcoming your feedback.

Up next — my first “real” post, on The Social Network and/as RPF!

[META] TWC, style, and meaning

Thanks to the recent release of the 16th edition of the venerable Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), I redid the in-house style sheet for Transformative Works and Cultures, just in time for the production team to start work on the March issue. The style sheet is a document that outlines how information ought to appear so that it’s presented consistently across documents. It specifies such things as how references are styled, what heads look like, and how units of numbers are presented. TWC follows CMOS closely in virtually every respect.

A style does more than simply provide a template that permits many people to work on a single project and be confident of some degree of conformity. The style chosen makes a statement about the kind of information it presents. TWC uses author–year style (CMOS Documentation II), which marks us as falling under a media studies/social sciences rubric rather than a humanities rubric. The presentation of the year in text foregrounds the importance of timely work. Any scholar glancing casually at TWC can infer a lot just by noticing our citation style.

But choosing to style something a particular way can also make a political statement. As an example, take the styling of, for race, Black versus black, White versus white. Depending on context, the capitalized version can indicate anything from official US Census demographic categories to radical political leanings. If it’s capitalized, it’s got to be meaningful. (TWC follows CMOS, which likes down style: black, white.)

Politically speaking, in the small world of fan studies, one could argue that fanfic is used so commonly by fans themselves that TWC ought to style it like that. We don’t. We use fan fic because that is how it appears in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition (MW; updated version available at MerriamWebster.com), which we follow slavishly for spellings, even going so far as to permit it to override CMOS where they differ. One reason is that we don’t want to imply that fan is a prefix—it can’t be, because it is a noun, a word meaningful on its own. But another, more important reason is that we think separating the two words emphasizes the status of the fan herself. Thus in TWC’s style, fan words are almost always open compounds, not solid or hyphenated compounds: fan work, fan artwork, fan vid. It’s not a fanwork; it’s a fan work, a work created by an agent, the fan. By styling it open, we are making a kind of political statement that emphasizes agency.

However, when it comes right down to it, TWC likes to use published reference works to make production easier: team members and authors can look items up and be confident they are correctly styled, and, at least for styling references, conformity to a published style means that bibliographic citation managers, such as Zotero and OneNote, may be used without modifying the output. Despite the political implications of styling it open, if MW changes fan fic to fanfic, TWC will change its style. If MW changes Web site to website, TWC will change its style. Published standards result in pleasing stylistic conformity.* And they make the life of production personnel so, so much easier.

A shortened version of the new style appears in the instructions for authors on TWC’s Web site. The long version contains a lot of detailed information really only relevant to the production team. If we have done our jobs correctly, the edited documents will read so clearly that meaning is immediately evident, with no distracting errors: do regular readers of the journal even notice that we style it Web site? Didn’t think so.

In a well-edited document, the editing ought to be invisible. Standards are there to help that happen, and that’s why we follow them.

Endnote

* Most words we look up are compound words, not words we don’t know how to spell. Is a term one word, two words, or hyphenated? We need to know. The rule is, if a compound word is not in MW (the only dictionary used in the US academic publishing industry), it’s two words. TWC prefers to style most things always open; it usually isn’t confusing to omit a hyphen to indicate that the terms are linked.

[META] And it is always eighteen ninety-five [1]: Reading Sherlockian Scholarship from a Media Acafan Perspective

The focus of the current issue of media studies journal Flow is acafandom, and most of the essays included share a common theme. At some level, and to varying degrees, each discusses the tensions present in the working life of every acafan: the tightrope-walk of creating scholarship while simultaneously following one’s given fannish ethos, and the constant negotiations inherent in the work of merging and consolidating academic and fannish approaches to knowledge, analyses, and interpretation. More than one contributor cites Matt Hills, who in Fan Cultures (2002) challenges the tenet that academics and fans are effectively doing the same thing, albeit in different circles. Hills points out that as academics we tend to look for ways in which fans do work that is similar or identical to our own academic work, and that we tend to foreground aspects of fan cultures that easily mirror academic cultures; he also makes an argument that academics should resist the temptation to conflate the two.

I’m not sure that I wholly agree with the distinction Hills draws between the acafan and the fan-scholar: he defines the first category as academics who engage in fannish activities, and the second as fans employing academically influenced methods to pursue academically inclined concerns; I am inclined to argue that many of us engage in both modes, switching between them situationally or topically, rather than occupying a single narrowly defined identity. However, I do value Hills’ caveat against imposing our preferred methodologies onto fan engagements, as he neither ignores nor negates the reality that many academics share not only the fannish obsession for detail but also the intense fannish affect toward their chosen field. He also does not reject the compelling and bountiful evidence that many fans regularly interpret and analyze media in ways that are strongly reminiscent of literary and cultural academic analyses. And why would he? An academic’s surprise that fans read source materials in that manner would be disingenuous. After all, that’s the way we have been trained to read and interact with texts throughout our educations, in high school, college, and beyond.

I am finding the relationship between fan and academic reading practices particularly interesting at the moment because I’ve begun work focused on a fandom that has strong roots in both: Sherlock Holmes. Notable in the field of fan studies, Sherlock Holmes is generally given the nod as one of the first, if not the very first, fandoms. Whether we define media fandom as every form of transformative writing within a shared interpretive community from the Iliad and Odyssey onward or whether we emphasize the well-defined fan community that transforms televisual texts owned by various media corporations, Sherlock Holmes fandom must be acknowledged for its scope, variety, and unbroken history. Well-known and long established, activities like the public mourning of Holmes’ death, ongoing fan pilgrimages to 221B Baker Street, and the long-established convention of writing pastiches set in the Holmes universe continue to be enacted by individual fans as well as by the more famous fan circles, including the Baker Street Irregulars.

Sherlockians, however, are unlikely to recognize themselves or their activities in Trekkies, much as a Verdi afficionado might not think of themselves as belonging to the same genus as My Chemical Romance fans. Notably, Roberta Pearson has discussed these very contradictions in her excellent analyses of media fandom and Sherlockians/Holmesians (It’s Always 1895: Sherlock Holmes in Cyberspace [1997] and Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies and Sherlockians [2007]).

The project that has prompted me to look more closely at the fannish spectrum of Sherlock Holmes is an upcoming essay collection on the 2010 BBC series, entitled The Transmedia Adventures of Sherlock, which I am co-editing with my friend Louisa Stein. Over the decades, Holmes has prompted fannish affect and obsession across diverse groups of readers with varying forms of fannish engagements. One of the arguments of (and for) the book is the way in which Sherlock is bringing together disparate fan communities with wildly diverging histories, mores, and demographics — and the consequent clashes this may cause.

I’m focusing primarily on a particular form of Sherlock Holmes fan, representing a fandom that is tracing itself for a century and that prides itself on its shared traditions as well as its focus on scholarship, in order to make a specific argument on academic and fannish reading practices. Unlike Hills’ distinction between academics and fans, most Sherlockians seem to consider their fan endeavors as fundamentally different from that of other fandoms because their subject matter is: in the best tradition of high brow vs low brow, Doyle’s work is literature (though maybe not necessarily with a capital L) whereas whatever we media fans are using as our source text isn’t.

But is that really the central differentiating feature? I think I am most fascinated with the Sherlockian pastime of “the great game” (see here for a good NPR piece on it), in which fans discuss Sherlock as if he were a real person, doing research and analyzing the story as a historical document. I’ll admit to enjoying postmodern historiography and Hayden White’s important insight that the process of selecting and narrativizing facts in order to create history always and inherently requires story telling. But even if all history is a story, not every story is history. Ultimately, Sherlockians know that; however, the fact that “the game” remains a favorite shared way of doing Sherlock Holmes scholarship is certainly noteworthy, and I am strongly reminded of some of the more contentious debates in fandom: tinhats, gen-is-canon, and Rowling’s authorial interpretations are all good illustrations. In my opinion, what these and other wanks have in common is their demand of a single interpretation over all others, whether it’s the one that sees the stories as real, the one that insists their own interpretation is the only valid one, or the one privileging the author’s interpretations of her text. In the end, all of these debates come down to literary theory, scholarship, and the ways that we approach texts.

Literary analysis is the bread and butter of literary scholars like myself, but the thing that fascinates me most about the game is that Sherlockian scholarship effectively continues to engage in a form of criticism that was never considered academically appropriate or, at the very best, one that was always highly contested. In the academy, the problem of treating characters as real people is often short-handed via L. C. Knights 1933 essay “How many children had Lady Macbeth?,” which juxtaposed traditional character criticism such as A.C. Bradley’s with newer forms that eventually developed into the more formalist New Criticism. (For a historical account, see here; for a defense of Bradley, see here.) Clearly, given the rapid changes we’ve seen in literary criticism, current academic scholarship is a far cry from treating the characters as real people–if it ever did so.

Even though the annotated Sherlock Holmes editions by William S. Baring-Gould or, more recently, by Leslie S. Klinger look a lot like my Annotated Ulysses, I’m not sure the conceit behind these different works is the same. Perhaps all Sherlockians play the game in the same way that RPF fans play within their fandoms; maybe they play at the game with a constant underlying frisson of Holmes’ fictionality, in the same way that popslashers pretend that Justin and Lance were gay and together, even as they know better. (Or do they? )

In the end, academic scholarship extrapolates and interpolates potential information and facts in order to support an interpretative argument, whereas Sherlockians seem to enjoy the data for its own sake. In that they are a lot like media fans: we like to imagine our characters’ childhoods not solely in order to support or explain adult behavioral traits within the text but also simply for the pleasure of the exercise. But unlike the Sherlockian game where evidence is used to winnow information down to a truth, fan fiction writers build up and out from canon evidence to create myriad fictional scenarios, all of which are equally and simultaneously both true and false. By not privileging any supposed reality, single personal preference, or authorial intent, and by encouraging individual extensions that fit canon in varying degrees, media fandom offers a postmodern variant of engagement with and reading of texts that differs from the more modern desire to establish the single authoritative text and sole valid interpretation.

I hope that Sherlock fandom will be able to successfully bridge these different approaches, that it can bring together affirmational and transformational fandoms and allow fans to imagine John and Sherlock as real, regardless of whether it is to establish just how much time passed between the events of “The Red-Headed League” and Watson’s account of the story or whether it is to explore one’s favorite Victorian OTP that didn’t just cohabitate in 221 B Baker Street.

Literary scholarship has undergone myriad variations since Doyle created Holmes and Watson, and yet the Sherlockian approach to Doyle’s canon has remained the same. Maybe that’s not altogether surprising from a fandom that celebrates the idea that “it is always eighteen ninety-five.” In a way, for me, Sherlockians combine the best and the worst of both academia and fandom, and, as such, are indeed exemplary of the contentious relationship between the two–even as they distance themselves from either.

[1] “And it is always eighteen ninety-five” is the final line of the famous 1942 Sherlock Holmes fan poem, 221 B by Vincent Starrett.