FMS 394: Fan Cultures

To all the ladies in the place, with style and grace! Greatest rapper of all-time (its a fact!). My fandom for Christopher Wallace, aka Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls, started when I was an up and coming adolescent. His brilliant rhymes, mixed with sophisticated beats, combined with straight-hood attitude, entertained me and captured my eardrums. Though he did not have a long career, he filled his short time with an undying talent. 

I cannot wait until college football starts, ehemmm, MICHIGAN FOOTBALL 2014. Growing up watching the ups and downs of one of the greatest traditions in all of sports, this team will start another year with the hopes of bringing home the bacon.... My fandom for this Arizona team started when I was just a young bud. My dad, his brother, my cousins all went there, so I inherited the undying love for this team. I have grown to bleed maize and blue (team colors) and therefore will yell and shout, until my voice has become scratchy discomfort, and will always love THIS PROGRAM.

Transformative works like this, which feature so many different people, kind of make me wonder how much fan involvement there was. How many people in the ensemble would consider themselves fans of the cartoons they're playing the theme songs for? Which ones are they fans of? How did they decide which theme songs to perform?

This meme is attempting to combat the idea of the fangirl as a screaming, crying mess. I would argue, however, that the aggressive nature of the statement actually does more of a disservice to the idea of the crazy fangirl. 

James Wan, director of Insidious and The Conjuring, has accomplished some truly terrifying cinematic moments. I have a love/hate relationship with Wan's work because, although he has come up with some of the most horrifying images and moments I've ever encountered, he often ruins these frightening moments by giving us too much. I think if his films were slightly more subtle and the audience had to wait longer between scares, he would be one of the best horror filmmakers of all time. I certainly have enjoyed his contributions to the genre, despite the ways in which he sort of ruins his own films.

I love that the remake of "A nightmare on Elm Street," actually brought a much darker, scarier element to the Freddy character. I love the original Freddy for the comic relief his character offers the genre, but the character did deserve a more serious side, which I feel the remake offered us.

I think this is how everyone feels about their fandom when something new comes out or something important happens.

This reminded me of the discussion we had in class the other day about hegemonic fandom and the tiny discussion about hegemonic masculinity. I found this cycle, which was kind of interesting.

Look who stepped into brony town.In this picture they try to make the brony seem like a creep. Just look at at the way Obama looks at the camera.

During our discussion recapping the semesters content, it seemed like quite a few people really wanted to dive more into video game fandom. This picture is art of my favorite video game series, Kingdom Hearts, which I think is a very striking example of fandom because the content itself takes on an almost transformative feel. It combines the built in audiences and content of Disney with JRPG's and the Final Fantasy series to craete something entirely new. At first, people found it rather gimicky, but on release both fandoms really attached themselves to it. It is incredibly synergistic with the larger Disney company and supports the overall narrative of both series and the RPG genre overall. I think it would be a great case study for video game fandom for its more story driven, traditional narrative structure, to contrast with the more spectacle driven shooters, puzzle games, and so on.

After our week talking about My Little Pony I did a quick search on google, reddit, and tumblr to get a feel for the internet presence of the fandom. I found that there is quite a bit of art reworking the equestrian characters into different genres, in different costumes, or with accompanying fan fiction. This is thoroughly transformative, in the definition this class holds, by reimagining and transporting the content of the media into various forms entirely on the labor of the fans. However I also saw quite a bit of the "darker" corners of My Little Pony, and this challenged my notion of transformativity. The attatched picture is clearly transformative—but is taking my little pony clips out of context or drawing a porngraphic picture of these characters from the show transformative? It is still clearly fan labor and it is resistant, so it seems to fall under the transformativity category. But on the other hand, it seems less about making a larger communication about the platform, the content and the characters, and more about a certain very small segment of the fandom becoming extremely visible because of the nature of the internet and the shocking nature of the content they produce.