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October 2011

[META] OT3s: Disrupting the Intimate Society?

While reading Masamichi Inoue’s fascinating Okinawa and the U.S. Military: Identity Making in the Age of Globalization recently, I came across a reference to Emmanuel Lévinas’ ideas about the nature of love and the “intimate society.” Love, Lévinas argues in Collected Philosophical Papers, is inescapably solipsistic: “to love is to exist as though the lover and the beloved were alone in the world. The intersubjective relationship of love is not the beginning, but the negation of society” (31). The intimate society of love, according to Lévinas, “is dual, a society of me and you. We are just among ourselves. Third parties are excluded” (30). But society in its larger, customary sense, Lévinas declares, “inevitably involves the existence of a third party” (32)–and the tension between the intimate and larger societies can lead to the refusal of the couple, the intimate society, to recognize the harm they or their relationship may do to others in society at large, intentionally or not.

Inoue uses the notion of the disruption of the intimate society of “me and you” by the third, the social, to frame Okinawan activists’ disruption of the intimate society of the United States-Japan security alliance by articulating both global resonances and local consequences in their protests against the U.S. bases and military presence in the archipelago. Being a fan as well as an academic, of course, my own thoughts went immediately to the phenomenon of the OT3.

I had the privilege of attending Con.TXT 2010 in Silver Spring, Maryland last year, which was quite informative in terms of fannish history as well as a lot of fun–a lot of people who’ve been in fandom for decades were in attendance, and were quite willing to talk about their changing experiences of fandom through the years. One of the panels, “Fandom Suddenly Loves the Ladies,” noted in passing that one of the reasons for the apparent recent increase in representation of female characters in fanworks–which still is by no means equitable, merely better–may be the increasing prominence of the OT3, or threesome pairing.

I don’t think I can better illustrate the massive caveat that accompanies this entire post than to link an analysis of the pairings found in Star Trek fic on the Archive of Our Own: overwhelmingly, fan writers are still writing slash (M/M) pairings, with only a relative smattering of het (M/F), femslash (F/F), or other or multi pairings, under which category any OT3s falls. Still, for all that, it does seem that fans lately are more willing to consider writing an OT3 relationship that includes the main female romantic rival to the slash pairing, rather than focusing exclusively on the slash pairings within a fandom.

In fact, OT3s are a prominent feature of fanworks for several popular fandoms, notably the television series White Collar and the new Sherlock Holmes movies. As people at the Con.TXT panel suggested, it’s undeniable that female characters in U.S. media these days tend to be much better written than their counterparts of thirty, forty, fifty years ago, but I don’t think that’s the entire reason for the increasing popularity of the OT3. Fandom’s own social dynamics have to play a role as well.

In its own way, OT3 fic is just as much a rebellion against the narrative conventions of mainstream media as slash is, and I certainly don’t want either to edge out the other in any fandom. But OT3s bring a different perspective to the table, one that critiques heteronormative assumptions from another angle than slash, and I’m quite happy to see that many of these fics do, often unwittingly, add a deeper sociopolitical dimension to the worlds they construct when they add a female character to the male/male pairing. (I’m a historian, I always like my narratives more complicated.) Certainly at its best, OT3 fic does disrupt the solipsistic intimacy of the slash OTP and present an alternate vision of that fandom’s world and characters, one in which the whole is frequently greater than the sum of its parts. That those alternate visions naturally give female characters more prominent roles only makes them more enjoyable, to my mind.

Having said all this, I’ve convinced myself to reread the excellent X-Men: First Class OT3 fic that inspired this entire post in the first place.

[META] Twilight Antifandom: A Case Study

Jacqueline Marie Pinkowitz contributed an amazing article to the Praxis issue of the latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, and it took on a subject close to my heart. In “‘The rabid fans that take [Twilight] much too seriously’: The construction and rejection of excess in Twilight antifandom,” Pinkowitz does important work identifying some of the most common ways in which fannish excess is policed by anti-fans. The author focuses entirely on a single prominent organization of Twilight anti-fandom, namely, the Anti-Twilight Movement(ATM), and argues persuasively that, marginal though such a group may seem, the work they are doing serves to “perpetuat[e] accepted cultural notions about the superiority of the reasoned, the academic, and the elite, as well as of the inferiority of the popular, the emotional, and the feminine,” in ways that merit examination by fans who situate their investments in the latter three terms, whether or not they see these realized most centrally in the Twilight franchise. For those who would ally themselves with the antifans, Pinkowitz notes that the movement works according to this logic”in hopes of rendering its own antifandom safe from similar cultural censures.” This argument is important because it reminds us that the intellectual work of antifandom is serious and entitled to cultural space, but due to its own merits, not as a corrective to affirmational or transformational modes of fannish engagement with the same texts.

Being a Buffy fan first and foremost, I am familiar with the vampire fandom hierarchy, and being an English major, I am familiar with the use of literary criticism as a weapon in culture wars, even on the micro-scale of late night comment threads. For these reasons, and because I remember the days of Angelfire and Geocities, I felt happily at home in Pinkowitz’s descriptions of the ATM. In fact, I’d say that one of the things I enjoyed most about the article was the way in which it modeled a close reading practice for websites, which can be difficult to do. So often, when I read academic articles about the internet, I find myself longing for this kind of sustained attention to the authorial voice constructed by the site, rather than assumptions based on mission statements written in the language of advertising. Only then can we grasp that there are people with particular agendas creating these movements, rather than, as seems to be the default interpretation on some political blogs, simply opinions to be agreed or disagreed with.

What fandom and antifandom share is investment, the belief that a franchise like Twilight matters in some way, whether because its narrative, characters, and celebrity para-culture interest and move us emotionally, or because it enforces a morally questionable agenda and replaces more edifying reading and viewing, and therefore needs to be “marked” to the unaware. Pinkowitz does an admirable job tracking the similarities of these two kinds of investment, and also the way in which the ATM specifically tries to present their view as the rational middle ground, between “rabid antifans” and “rabid fangirls,” but still end up affirming arbitrary limits to reasonable engagement with fictional storyworlds, which ultimately punishes those who are identified with the feminine and the popular.

My own story of Twilight fandom is just beginning. I once was a hater, although not one who left a digital trace of my private and groundless negative opinion. Now I love the movies, although I still haven’t read the books. It’s funny how easy it was for me, in the end, to enjoy something, and to let go of second-hand judgment. However, if that was one’s model for everything, one would never find gems that become favorites that become years-long obsessions and whole social worlds, in fandom. And so, I’m glad that there are fans and antifans giving us all kinds of thought-provoking hoops to jump through before (and after, and while!) we get absorbed in something new.

[META] Wankety Wank

In the wake of the announcement from Jared Padalecki that his wife is pregnant, let us here consider the nature of wank. If you want to look into the wankfest to which I refer, you can go here. I don’t want to make this post all about Supernatural or the specifics of this one incident of tinhat craziness. If you’ve spent any time at all in fandom, you have probably encountered this sort of madness. You know how it goes – “X doesn’t love his wife REALLY, he has a secret gay relationship with his co-star Y, so the marriage is a sham arranged by their publicists, to protect their careers”. My understanding is that the most infamous case of tinhattery to date was (is still?) to be found in LOTRips and was centred on the Domlijah (Dominic Monahan/Elijah Wood) fandom. I’m sure that this plot unfolds with varying levels of intensity in many fandoms and, lately, SPN fandom has been carrying the tinhat banner.

I’m fascinated by the tinhat phenomenon. Now, please don’t think this is me trying to set myself apart from those OTHER, crazy fans, but I sincerely wonder why it is so important to some fans to believe that two men who have been slashed in fantasy MUST BE together in reality. It is as though they find it necessary to read the text of these two celebrities as having a slashy subtext in order to justify writing stories about them. And I don’t understand why that would be necessary. Fanfiction is fantasy. It is made up. I really do believe that the vast majority of people in fandom understand this. And RPS, despite being about two ostensibly “real” people, is also fiction. It has its own characters and themes, drawn from publicity material and gag reels and photos, yes, but still it is fiction. So what does it matter, as long as we keep it quiet and don’t push it in the actors’ faces at a con?

To say that the tinhat fringe consists of fans who simply possess a few more emotional tics than the rest of us (and by this I mean “who are nuts”) seems to me too easy. We all have our neuroses and our scars, and for all of our varied reasons, we find something therapeutic or comforting or exciting or fulfilling about exploring our fantasies in an on-line, anonymous forum. I really wonder if the folks engaging in the tinhatting are simply indulging another kind of fantasy, kind of “live roleplaying” a melodramatic RPS story with evil publicists and downtrodden gay actors and self-serving producers. I guess I want to believe that they are fans just like me – a bit eccentric but more or less ordinary.

From the tinhat phenomenon is inevitably derived the wank. The anthropologist in me observes wank – and wank about the wank, and the wanky wank report – with still more fascination. I wonder, if I observe fans being a little “nuts” and I decide to step in and let them know it, am I then joining in the wank? At what point does an intervention in the name of sanity become wank?

I wonder, if I met a wanker in real life, would they seem like a pretty average human being? If that is so, what emotional needs are being satisfied by wankery?

[META] Comiket as a market for fanworks

Guest Post by Nele Noppe:

‘Comiket’ has about the same connotations as ‘El Dorado’ among many fans of Japanese pop culture, both inside and outside the country. This fanworks-centric event is said to be the largest regular public event in Japan, and it’s easily the largest comic convention in the world. The edition I attended this summer, Comiket 80, welcomed about five hundred and forty-thousand visitors, thirty-five thousand fan creators come to sell their works, and a small army of three thousand volunteers there to direct the rivers of people through Tokyo’s flagship Big Sight convention center.

One’s first Comiket is a bit of a rite of passage, and I’d like to celebrate by giving a quick overview of this iconic event for those who may have heard about it as a massive fanworks market but are a little unsure of the details. The sale of paper dojinshi – zines, most often in manga format – is still very much an intrinsic part of fannish life in Japan. Dojinshi shops and dojinshi conventions have only become more popular as online fandom developed. Between forty and ninety large and small dojinshi conventions are held throughout Japan every month; Comiket, which has taken place every August and December since 1975, is only the biggest and most famous.

Socializing is a large part of the Comiket experience, but most visitors come to snap up the latest dojinshi by their favorite creators and discover new artists and fandoms. The fannish move onto the internet only seems to have made Comiket even more of an important showcase event for creators. Fifty-two thousand dojinshi creation teams, or ‘circles’, took part in the lottery that determined who could have half a table for one day at Comiket 80. Circles of two or more people are very common, but technological advances and the rise of support services like specialized dojinshi printing companies have leveled the playing field and made it easier and cheaper for single-person circles to create dojinshi as well.

The scale of circles’ activities and sales varies wildly. A majority of circles report that they sell up to a hundred dojinshi while at Comiket and generally lose money on their fannish activities, but some of the more famous and successful circles sell over a thousand dojinshi during Comiket and earn several hundred thousand yen (one thousand yen is about 1300 US dollars or 970 euros) over the course of a whole year of attending conventions. Dojinshi circles that can actually make a living with their fannish activities are highly exceptional. The general sentiment is that dojinshi should be made out of love for their source works and nothing else, so there’s little tolerance for circles who are perceived as deliberately trying to turn a profit.

Exact numbers about the size of the dojinshi market are hard to come by; it’s very much a shadow economy, untaxed and unregulated. Japanese copyright law forbids the sale of unauthorized derivative works, and most scholars and fans agree that what takes place at Comiket is probably illegal. However, rights holders turn a blind eye to the sale of dojinshi at conventions and in dedicated resale shops because they believe that a flourishing dojinshi scene nurtures up-and-coming artists and serves as free publicity for commercial offerings. There have been a few clashes involving individual dojinshi that media companies considered both too popular and too offensive, but on the whole, there’s a tacit understanding that the fans who buy and sell dojinshi are the industry’s biggest supporters and should be left alone.

At Comiket itself, nothing shows that tacit understanding better than the official presence of about a hundred and fifty companies, ranging from manga publishers to anime production houses to dojinshi resale shops and other fan-oriented companies, like Pixiv, the Japanese equivalent of deviantART. To preserve the fannish atmosphere of Comiket, the company booths are located on a separate floor entirely and have to make their own little catalog. (The official Comiket catalog, which has blurbs about all participating dojinshi circles, puts most phone books to shame.) It’s perfectly possible to attend Comiket for years and see nothing more of the company booths than the signs pointing towards the stairs, and some participants report doing just that.

Comiket’s ever-increasing popularity among both fans and companies has caused some new problems of its own. Some fans feel uncomfortable with the media attention that’s invariably drawn by half a million people converging on Tokyo Big Sight. There are security concerns about overcrowding inside the center, and Comiket is unable to control turnout simply by switching to a Comic Con-like system of advance registration. Participation in the event has always been free of charge with no registration required, and any changes that may lead to some participants being privileged over others will probably be seen as a violation of Comiket’s strong code of egalitarianism.

But Comiket’s biggest headache right now is Bill 156, a recent law that aims to prevent the distribution of explicit material to minors in Tokyo. As soon as it was first proposed, this piece of legislation was widely reviled as a possible source of censorship by manga publishers, fans, mangaka, rights activists, and academics alike. These broad protests succeeded in watering down the proposal significantly, but it still passed, and there’s real concern among fans that it could have an impact not just on commercial manga but on dojinshi culture as well. One Comiket staffer I spoke to urged me to spread the word about Bill 156 among non-Japanese fans, and remind fans around the world to remain vigilant about obvious and non-obvious threats of censorship.