#nomadicfan

http://www.dramafever.com/drama/26/Boys_Over_Flowers/YT/ Starring Lee Min Ho, Kim Bum and Kim Hyun Joong

PLEASE READ BEFORE CLICKING LINK PLEASE:

Our transformative work focuses on gender and how it is portrayed in Korean TV shows (Korean dramas) and American TV shows. We created an infomercial type video where we mostly showcase some of the ways that men and women are depicted in Korean dramas as well as our own footage representing American TV shows. The Korean drama footage is from a show called “Boys Over Flowers” telling the story of an ordinary girl, Geum Jan Di, who is given a swimming scholarship to attend a prestigious school by the name of Shin Hwa High School. There she meets and is terrorized by the leader of a group called the F4, Gu Jun Pyo. The F4 are the four richest and most popular boys at the school. Eventually, love ensues between them and their struggle to be together is what the drama is about. We would like to mention that we chose this drama because it is an extremely dramatic example of the kind of Korean dramas that are available. Not all dramas are as dramatic as this one.

We have noticed that most people like to vlog about Korean dramas and showcase the many tropes that are used in these shows. We decided to go a step further because nobody has ever focused on gender. We want to invite people to try out Korean dramas so that they can have a different viewing experience. We created a flyer to accompany the video to drive home the infomercial element of the video. The main reason we enjoy Korean dramas is because women and men are portrayed differently. Main female leads are allowed to be independent and hardworking and are not immediately in love with the male lead the first moment that they lay their eyes on them. Main male leads are sometimes cold and unattached at times and slowly they break their shell and learn to see things in a different light. In American TV shows, most of the male leads are the nice ones and eventually make a mistake that tarnishes their image.  Female antagonists are more deceptive in the way that they backstab and go about their business unlike in American TV shows where everything is more upfront and direct. Second male leads are usually nice and nearly perfect, but are ultimately friend zoned. In American TV shows, second male leads are usually the ones who are bad-tempered and try to break everything and everyone up.

Our video is transformative because we use the Korean drama footage juxtaposed with our footage to show the difference between what you would expect from an American TV show and a Korean TV show. We are trying to invite and recruit other people into watching Korean dramas or at least trying them out. Our video doesn’t really fall into any specific category of transformative works. The closes it could be is a fan vid, but it is not your typical fan vid. Our flyer can be considered transformative as well because we are using a commonly known marketing tool for our own benefit in order to promote Korean dramas and increase the number of people who know about them.

 As a side note, we were not able to post our video on either YouTube or Vimeo because of copyright issues, so I will attach a trailer of the Korean drama we used.

                Now that technology has been more advanced and has been more facilitated to the people all around the world, much more things that weren’t accessible to the public are now more available. Now we can see things from all around the world; for example, people who love dramas don’t have to see dramas just from their country, but now they have the chance to see dramas from foreign countries with no charge at all. In addition, they also get to chat with people about their favorite drama with other people and not keep it to themselves, they can become part of the fan community. They can also create their own material for their favorite fandom through music videos, writing fan fiction (slash), and many other things. I believe that vidding has influenced the development of remix culture on YouTube and beyond.

            Vidding has become one of the medians in which fans take their fandom, now more than ever since editing tools have been easier to handle. According to Chapter 7,“ ‘Layers of Meaning’: Fan Music Video and the Poetics of Poaching”, fans tend to use “ ‘found footage’ from broadcast television  and re-edit it to express their particular slant on the program, linking series images to music similarly appropriated from commercial culture”(Jenkins, 225). Since these videos are made from fans they contain new text meanings are don’t go with the shows. For example, there can be a slash music video in which the actors from Star Trek; Spock and Kirk are involved in a romantic relationship.

Other forms of fan made music vids could involve, as Jenkins informs, characters of different universes, in other words, “constructed reality videos” (229). The main point is that these music videos share a new text to the audience in which the protagonist/secondary characters of the show share a romantic relationship or show how the characters suffer by not reviling their feelings to the other. In some cases, it doesn’t even have to deal with romantic relationships but just lays out the story before the viewer, while the music plays. The same goes for characters of different universes, however sometime the fans want to see fandoms collide and see what happens if they all knew each other.

            In contrast, fan music videos and MTV music videos are very different from each other. According to Jenkins, MTV videos have a nonlinear narrative, they are mostly about “style and sensation rather than meaning” and they mostly go with the beat of the meaning (233). IN other words, they central mechanism the audience focuses on is the song rather than the characters in the story. Most of the music used in both fan videos and MTV videos are soft rock and pop songs.

             Although many fans make music videos that express their feelings for their fandom, many vids are not for the whole public at all, but for a certain fan community. However, since now we all have advanced technology, some of these videos are copied and shared among others. As a result, the author of the video no longer controls the location of the video. Most of the time some videos lose their author along the way and its high definition. Some medians in which the music video can end up is on YouTube.

this reminds us of another Spock and Kirk slash moment.

Joli Jensen’s 1992 essay “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” she mentions the "us and the "them" multiple times. The "us" referring to professors, student,etc. and the "them" as the loner,obsessed fans, with no distinction between reality and fantasy.She also mentions the "other" which refers to us and she says that we can't judge "them because we are all fans of something, but that we know the distinction between reality and fantasy. To support this case she puts her self in the "others" because she confesses that she is a fan of other fellow colleagues, but that she can't say it because her colleagues wouldn't take her seriously anymore. Moreover, when she mentions the "them" category she states that there is a huge difference between how the gender is being viewed. Female fans she states are viewed as the hysterical, fainting, and touchy kind, and the fanatic guys are viewed as the fist fighters like in a football game for instance. Also she mentions how crowds of fans can do unimaginable things like for example,create angry mobs.

I think that I am still in the "us" category or perhaps in the "others" category because i know where to draw the line between reality and fantasy. Although, I will admit that Korean dramas did make me take the decision of learning the Korean Language, in which right now I am taking a Korean Language class. I hope that by being in this class I learn plenty about fandom and  the extremes of it. Especially, since I'm a film and media studies major. In addition, I also connected with some of the things that she states about fans creating their own version of shows because I remember doing that often now and then. I think that I probably am a real fanatic if I reflect and connected with all the things that she was mentioning.

"There are a...number of people  who have been active in fandom  for most or all of their...lives and who are now raising children  who are active fans"(Jenkins, 49).