Oh noes, not the Internet bullies!

[starlady]

H/t to corneredangel, here, for this:

Is writing fan fiction different from writing a tie-in? Yes and no. The risks I can take are. In a tie-in, I am much more constrained in terms of writing sex. But I am much less constrained in terms of writing politics. I can say things to the broader society about the issues of the day, about war and peace, about race and sex, that I could never say in fandom without starting firestorms of wank. It's no longer possible to discuss those things in fandom without tons of abusive comments, whatever one's position, because the issues are too controversial and the Internet bullies on all sides are too abusive. We are going places on those issues in the tie-ins that I certainly would not dare go in fan fics!

[…]

The good thing about the tie-in is the much broader audience. Internet fandom, and especially LiveJournal/Dreamwidth fandom, for all that it likes to think it's diverse, isn't so much. It tends to be highly educated women, and disproportionately American women from the Northeast and California. Its culture is very specific and out of touch with the majority of fans of the show, especially for something like Stargate: Atlantis. How many people in LJ SGA fandom are men who are active-duty military? How many are over 50? How many consider themselves Christian, or are from rural areas? If I want to talk to a broad audience, to talk to a truly mixed audience in terms of gender, race, age, and region, a tie-in will reach a far more diverse group of people than fan fic will. Fan fic skews to female, liberal, and young.

--Jo Graham (interviewed in Transformative Works & Cultures vol. 5)

I don't even want to know what she thinks she can't say in SGA fic, and you couldn't get me to read those tie-in novels if you paid me. And as for her implications about fandom, my instinctive response is that she is wrong doesn't know whereof she speaks. I don't think anyone in fandom has ever claimed that fans are in any kind of cultural majority--which makes it all the more important, I think, that we not give problematic oppressive bullshit a free pass.

Comments

[nan]

I am from the rural southeast, woohoo!

I am not in SGA fandom, though.

I don't understand this interview, though. Is she saying she writes stuff in the tie-in novels that will piss off young, liberal, women? D:

[lian]

I think she's saying these young, liberal women sure are uppity in believing they have any kind of cultural clout with their weird, tribal, bitchy, vicious community here.


...or that's how it reads like to me. I've never met anyone in fandom who would genuinely make the argument that hey! fandom as we play it is the majority of fans of the show~!

I get what she's saying -- hey! fandom isn't all there is of the audience! -- but uhm... yeah, duh?

[starlady]

Yeah, exactly! Fandom is not the majority, and she's saying that's a bug, not a feature--I don't know if I'd call it a feature, but it's certainly not a bug.

"…yeah, duh" was my first reaction.

[lian]

That's... awfully smug. "I can write tie-ins without being called on my shit~~ whee!"


but, anyway, this is a boggling insensitivity to context here. Of course writing medially removed (through publishing) commercial products will garner a very different, distanced kind of response than the unmediated, unvarnished feedback that writing embedded in a community engenders. I don't get how the latter is less valuable? So, yeah, that is an *awfully* shortsighted argument right there.

[starlady]

I think I'm reading it as "mediated response is more valuable because there's less of it and it won't hurt my feelings be critical." Which, you know, if that's what you want, that's one thing, but whinging about Mean People on the Internet and saying that writing in the (fandom) community is less valuable because people aren't afraid to give critical feedback is something else.

[inkstone]

Jo Graham? Wait, is this the Jo Graham who wrote Black Ships?

[starlady]

Yeah, one and the same.

[yifu]

It tends to be highly educated women, and disproportionately American women from the Northeast and California.

Has there been a survey or something? (serious question here)

[starlady]

I'm not aware of any formal surveys--there's a comment in the post at the top of my entry that has DW and LJ userbase statistics, but I don't know what the methodology is there, either. There have been informal surveys that I can recall, particularly the one earlier this year in which the majority of participants who identified as slashers identified as queer, but I think especially in light of SurveyFail last year most people in fandom would be wary of participating in any sort of formal demographic survey, and rightly so.

[ithiliana]

Here from rec in a friend's journal: I can say pretty definitely that there has been no authoritative demographic work done on fandom (pre-internet or post-internet), zip, nada, nothing. I do fan scholarship, and that's one of the big hairy problem elephants in the room (even the surveys done by the hard copy famous big name old sf mags are dubious for multiple reasons -- i.e. they might measure subscribers, but not everybody who read on a subscription like I did on my father's). So, no, anybody who says anything about the demographics of any part of fandom (of which there are many) is pontificating without evidence.

[via_ostiense]

But I am much less constrained in terms of writing politics. I can say things to the broader society about the issues of the day, about war and peace, about race and sex, that I could never say in fandom without starting firestorms of wank.

In other words, Graham's afraid of readers holding her accountable if she writes problematic material in fic. With tie-ins, she's more removed from the readers' responses.

[starlady]

Yeah, note how all criticism = wank. Mean people on the Internet never have actual cogent points to make!

[torachan]

You'd think a published author could suck it up and take some criticism from "internet bullies".

[glass_icarus]

LOL, this!

Also, I love how negative reviews are always "internet bullies" but positive reviews are "criticism"... or something. Funny how that works, eh?!

[darkrose]

Wow. I was looking forward to reading these. But I guess since I'm a highly educated woman from California, it's not FOR me?

[starlady]

Well, maybe if you can keep your mean fannish thoughts to yourself...

Seriously, IDK. I am not sad that she doesn't want to post her fail!fic. I am angry that she blames fandom instead of her own attitudes.

[lotesse]

That's ... a rather bizarre set of statements. Also, I was not heretofore aware that anybody actually read tie-in novels. I mean, I did at fifteen, but that was just because my da wouldn't fix the internet when I asked him to, and I needed that sweet sweet hit of Star Trek, yanno?

And I'm in the rural southern midwest, so there.

[starlady]

It doesn't matter where we are, and it angers me that she thinks that since she's a pro author or wherefore the fuck ever she gets to definitively state who fandom is and what we do. I've had the same fight with different people in other contexts and it never fails to make me see red. They want to pin fandom down and condescend to it, both of which go against what I think are the best things about fandom, and what I love about it.

/passionate rant

The Trek tie-in novels are sort of in their own class, I think. Otherwise, no, I don't read tie-in novels. But we're in fandom and therefore don't count! ARRR.

[kindkit]

There's been a certain amount of excitement about these tie-ins, partly because they're post-series continuations and therefore the authors have more than usual freedom, and partly because of who the authors are: besides Jo Graham, the other main writer in the series will be Melissa Scott, a very important figure in queer sf/f who hasn't written for some years due to the death of her partner and occasional co-writer, Lisa A. Barnett.

I've never seen the show and I still might read Scott's contributions.

[lotesse]

I (somehow) hadn't heard about this; it does sound interesting!

[anatsuno]

Oh, ewww. Seriously.

[langwidere]

Well, I’m black and profoundly rural and only college-educated, so I guess I’m actually allowed to have an opinion here. Neat!

When I was a kid, I had a giant throbbing crush on Lt. Commander Data, and so I read lots of TNG tie-in novels and totally realized they were kind of awful and didn’t care. I have never read any others, before or since. (Canon is more than I can take in most instances, and so I retreat into the palliative refuge of fandom in order to allow my sensitive eyeballs time to repair themselves.)

I assume this woman is talking about the SGA fandom being so cruel and, like, narrow-mindedly sex-obsessed? Which, honestly, baffles the pants off of me. While I do agree that community-wide fandom criticism/discussions can sometimes turn into Random Issuegate for no reason (or else we wouldn’t have all those dedicated wank comms), the SGA fandom is possibly the most inclusive, welcoming place on the internets. I don’t like SGA very much — partially because I am not much fonder of cynical fake homoeroticism when it appears in domestic products than when it shows up in imports — but I’ve read gazillions of SGA fanfic, and I can tell this person definitively that she has no idea what she’s talking about. The SGA fandom is one of the only places where genderswitch and complicated!kidfic edge into the slash mainstream. There are all kinds of amazing examples of fan-writers who use SGA as a way to address important social issues like DADT, gay adoption, and even stuff like the casual cost of ordinary white/Western/human xenophobia. The pointlessness of war! The human price of technocratic social hierarchies! I read an AU fic a few months ago in which Rodney McKay was cast as an autistic violin genius, which dealt sensitively and (as far as I know) realistically with the problems he faced as a performer and a person. I read another really great SGA fanfic once in which Sheppard was transformed into an ex-Air Force transgendered woman — it made me cry! Some of the best short stories I’ve ever read, ever, have been SGA fic, and I say that with a face so straight you could use it to plumb corners. (That’s a rural-person reference to carpentry, for credibility’s sake.)

On the other hand, I had no idea I’d been blogging alongside a bunch of hard-hearted Marxist white-lady professors for the last ten years. Awesome!

[starlady]

Iknorite! Those DADT fics are basically an SGA genre in their own right, and the fic consistently does the show many better in exploring the implications of its own worldbuilding. Or at the completely opposite end of the Srs Bzns spectrum, this is the fandom where there is a "they're rainbows!" AU. Fandom = niche audience? Yes. That doesn't mean it's not engaged with "the issues of the day..."

...I read a lot of Star Trek novels before I really grasped the concept that not all books were good. And I mean a lot of Star Trek novels. Heck, Star Wars too.

[dhobikikutti]

::boggles::

I had Graham's fan identity friended for a long time, and I love some of her fanfiction. These statements are... baffling. Now I must go read that whole interview. :/

[starlady]

I boggled too. It is the last thing I would expect from someone who acknowledges her fandom history.

[seekingferret]

Oops, how dare I not consider myself Christian?

[ithiliana]

Here from Darkrose's link!

WOw. I am just. WOw.

I read the whole interview, and she got worse:

Here's a jewel that may explain things: "5.2] JG: To me, fan fic is absolutely not part of a communal conversation. I'm not in fandom for community. I'm not particularly interested in taking part in community activities, and I frankly read very little fan fic. It's like a musical coffeehouse. I don't come to the coffeehouse to hang out with my friends. I come to the coffeehouse to perform. I play the musical instrument because I love to play, and I love to play for an audience. I would play if the house were empty."

If she's playing, I'm sure not gonna be hanging around the house (I never even heard of her before this post!).

[starlady]

Oh yeah, that was really awful too!

To me, fan fic is absolutely not part of a communal conversation.

Dare I say, UR DOIN IT RONG? "I don't want to engage with people, I just want adulation for free!" or something.

I don't know her fandom name; I liked her first book quite a lot.

[jibrailis]

Huh. I mean, besides the obvious "huh" of Graham's statements, she also seems to assume that SGA fandom is representative of all fandom. She seems to kind of treat them interchangeably, which...I mean, I don't know that much about SGA fandom, but to me it is a very skewed approach.

[starlady]

That's another excellent point. SGA fandom is a subset of media fandom, I think we could reasonably say it shares some traits with media fandom in general, but it's definitely not a one-to-one correspondence. (I have this vision of a big circle or sphere with little smaller spheres inside it.)

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, Jo Graham is in fandom under another name. Which doesn't mean she's not wrong in what she's saying, but she's not an outsider talking about fandom without any knowledge whatsoever.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know she's in fandom, which is why I find such assertions as "fan fic is absolutely not part of a communal conversation" to be doubly boggling.

[arha-chan.livejournal.com]

I rarely comment in things about fandom, because even if I like reading about it, i'm pretty ignorant abour a lot of things so I prefer to read a lot much first before writing anything but... this:

"But I am much less constrained in terms of writing politics. I can say things to the broader society about the issues of the day, about war and peace, about race and sex, that I could never say in fandom without starting firestorms of wank."

what? does fandom point a gun at her if she writes something about these themes? :/ or is she so afraid of getting flame comments? i don't understand at all.

Also, I'm latinoamerican, female, atheist and living a VERY RURAL area. I guess i'm not a part of fandom then :/