More Than Just Surviving

So I like hot stuff. I’m not like, a dick about it. I don’t brag because there are people out there that can handle waaaay hotter foods than me. It’s not a competition. So I’m at Tijuana Flats, a “mexican” food restaurant chain famous for their hot sauce bar. All in all, what they put out on the bar isn’t the spiciest stuff in the world, but you’ll find some delicious gems in there. I immediately look at whatever is marked black as hottest for the day (they change them) and immediately go to pump some into the little paper containers provided when… “Whooaaa, sweetheart you don’t want to do that,” I turned around and there’s this skinny guy in jeans and a logo polo. There’s another dude wearing the same shirt, so they must have come here from some sad IT job. I’m a little taken aback at this dude’s presumption that I am ignorant to what I’m doing, but I blow it off. ”Nah, man, it’s got the black label, I haven’t tried this one yet.” ”Are you sure? It’s really spicy.”  ”I’m pretty sure dude.” ”I don’t think you should, because it was a bit much for me.” At this point I’m feeling patronized. I stare at him.  “It’s fine. Really.” “Oooookay,” He says in this exasperated, don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you kind of voice. I get my hot sauce and sit down. Food arrives, I taste it with a chip first to test. It’s super sweet, actually. I dump the whole thing on my taco. I don’t know if he’s watching.  I go up to the counter and ask the manager to ring me up a bottle of the sauce to take home. It was pretty delicious! Manager says he’ll bring it to my table. They bring it, I pay, and the server asks if I’m into hot sauces - of course I say yes. Hot Sauce Police is now watching. She brings me an assortment of sauces they do not serve at the bar because of liability reasons. One of them was rated at 1.5 million Scoville units. I bought all of them, signing the credit card slip as he watches.

Some of you might have spotted this week’s kerfuffle about how it if was written by a dude it can’t be fanfic, in the guise of an interview with author Lonely Christopher, who claims not to have written fan fiction of Stephen King’s The Shining. The Mary Sue article covers it pretty well (and has a link to the original interview, should you be that way inclined), but we thought we’d highlight some Fan Studies research that could help Christopher put his work in the wider fan fiction context.

Here are a couple of extracts from the interview to get us started:

“LC: The book can be read as a self-contained “novel,” but it’s more than that. I used another text conceptually, structurally, and materially to generate a resultant yet original work. That’s what I mean by “source.”

The text that I was utilizing was the novel The Shining by Stephen King and the subsequent media iterations and interpretations and its cultural ubiquity. So I wrote my story in relation to another, more specifically on top of it. I took the basic tropes of The Shining and replicated and subverted them, and I also took chunks of language and interwove material pieces of Stephen King’s novel.

(…)

Interviewer: You’ve described this book as “intertextual.” Tell us a little bit more about this book’s relationship to other literature.

LC: The book is a concerted rejection of the standards of any type of literature, so in that way it is reacting to the formal elements it eschews, and interacting with readerly expectations as well as the history of the medium.

I guess the reason why this isn’t “fan fiction” is because, first of all, it’s not enjoyable in the same way and then it’s vaguely academic. Aesthetically speaking, it owes much to Stein, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Bernhard. Intellectually, it has a relationship to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Debord, and especially Baudrillard. So it is having conversations with different texts in different ways.”

You may recall a couple of relevant articles, such as this one by Abigail Derecho on fan fiction as “archontic literature”. One of the really interesting points Derecho makes in it is how fan fiction writers will frequently repeat the same motif, explore the same scene, but with a difference. (For those interested in the “vaguely academic”, Derecho bases on Deleuze’s concept of “repetition with a difference”.) So we may look at something from a different character’s point of view, or take a group of characters and put them in a coffee shop AU, or try to work out what would be different if a character had made a slightly different choice. You know what that does? It plays with and challenges the reader’s expectations, and allows readers to make meanings from both the similarities and the differences between the two texts.

You may also remember this paper by Mafalda Stasi which looks at fan fiction as a “palimpsest” - the medieval practice of partially erasing and writing over past manuscripts, creating layers of text and meaning. Does that sound a bit like what Christopher is doung by writing his novel “on top of” The Shining? Maybe a bit.

This isn’t any fucking pioneering, it’s nobody wanting to admit they’re taking fanfiction seriously because fanfiction is for the WOMENS and the GAYS and the WEIRDOS and it’s INHERENTLY BAD AND STUPID and therefore a cis man doing it and being successful must be something TOTALLY DIFFERENT

Christ on a cracker, first they feed people the line about fanwork being inherently worthless so hard that “it’s just fanfiction” and “it’s just fanart” is uttered in apology over every fanwork in existence, including pieces of unspeakable skill and beauty that are 10000% “academically correct”, then when it finally hits a tipping point of fanwork being so competent they can no longer ignore it as an art form, they try to go “no this is NEW and GOOD because a MAN invented it”

Guess what?  Fuck you.  Is there bad fanwork?  Of course there is.  There’s an equal amount of bad art and writing (or moreso) not based on pre-existing comics.  There’s a woman in my fandom who draws comics so intricate that each panel is a full resolution painting and it’s “just fanart” because the idea of a hobby seen as inherently female is so threatening to the world that you tried to stomp it out for literally decades, to the point that it doesn’t matter how much hard work and emotion is put into something, if it has a pre-existing character it “doesn’t matter”.  And now you’re trying to make it matter even less.  How.  Fucking.  Dare.  You.

If you clicked on this post, I’m gonna guess you did because maybe depression has touched your life in some way. Either you’ve been diagnosed with it, think you might have it, or you know somebody who does and you’re concerned. Before we get into this, just to be clear, I’m not that kinda doctor. That is to say, I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist. I’m a person who was diagnosed with…

Another year of missing Lexa goes by and while I’ve taken my pain and sadness and channelled it into good work, I still wish she was alive (and being written by Javi or Emily Andras. ;)). The surge of pure joy and raw completeness I felt watching her on the show has changed me forever. I gained an awareness and confidence two years ago today that I hadn’t known I was lacking.

“Why her?” It’s the question everyone in the Clexa fandom has gotten at least once, I imagine, and everyone’s answers are different. For me, it was because she was the perfect embodiment of what I’d like to see myself as: a strong, protective leader, devoted partner, and a flawed, vulnerable, and adorable human - a hero.

We all deserve to see ourselves as heroes: to feel pride for solving the nagging math problem or carrying our neighbor’s groceries up the stairs. Similarly, in the fictional world, we deserve to see our likeness in strong and laudable characters in books, advertisements, movies, and on TV shows: Women are Powerful because we have Supergirl and Olivia Pope, Black is Beautiful because we have King T’Challa and Nova Bordelon, and Gay is Good is because we have Nicole Haught and Josh Rosza .

But on current American TV women, people of color, and queer people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming) aren’t always written as heroes. Quite the opposite. On most shows in the 2017-2018 television season, for example, as in most shows going back to the beginning of television in the 1930s, the majority of heroes are male, white, heterosexual, and cisgendered (“cis”). Broadly, this trend exists because American society developed as white/straight/male and cisgender-dominant, and remains so today, and because writers’ rooms in which TV shows are created and written reflect this false societal “norm” by employing mostly white, cis, hetero male showrunners and writers.

And so, given this “norm,” it’s no surprise that people in all other categories - so-called “marginalized” communities - are predominantly written as villains, buffoons, dangerous, non-sexual, or mentally ill, and are often the first characters killed off if a death is needed to further the show’s plot. These narrative “tropes” - a common or overused theme or device (that relies heavily on established cultural stereotypes) - are so popular, in fact, that some of them have names: The Black Guy Always Dies First, and Bury Your Gays, for example. Both are tropes describing the frequency with which such characters die. It is the Bury Your Gays trope and it’s negative effects on vulnerable queer TV viewers that I will focus on in my upcoming documentary film, “Clexa Is Ours: On the Need for Balanced Cultural Representation in Television.”

This morning my girlfriend, knowing what day it is, turned to me and asked how I was feeling. While thinking I’d say something pithy to toss-off my swelling emotion I realized that was silly, so I responded: “You know what? Fuck it. It still hurts.”

The Utopian Masculinity of Queer Eye

Since I’ve been more “out” about my involvement in media studies the last couple of years, at any given time I get a lot of people asking me “What are you watching?” For the longest I’ve been recommending Wynonna Earp and the like. It’s still a very fun show, and I continue to advocate for it, but we’ve gotten a new crop of LGBTQ rep featured on network shows like Black Lightning (Stop sleeping…