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Going medieval
1 December 2011 11:12 pmWhen Spouse started playing World of Warcraft, I wasn't so much interested in the game itself as I was in how he and other people interacted with it. How did players set rules, enforce them when there's nobody "in charge"? How do guilds evolve norms for their members? And so on and so forth. Yes, it's all very anthropological, and he's been very patient about answering my questions, as long as I allow him to vanish for hours into the Feast of Wintervale, appreciate his reindeer mount and laugh when he sheeps someone.
My involvement with fanfic has been much more, shall we say, "hands on" since I enjoy writing it and reading it, but I've also had a long-standing curiosity about why we write it. Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers does a good job describing the world of fandom but doesn't really explain the motivations. (It's a great book though and I highly recommend it -- I'm not remotely any kind of media scholar so I can't speak to the accuracy of his theories or analysis, but it was great fun to read.)
So what's the appeal? Why do some fandoms spawn literally thousands of fics and others only a few hundred? Why is slash mostly written by women? More fundamentally, why does this stuff exist at all?? It can't be just that we're bored, or that we're frustrated novelists, or that we're sekrit sex addicts (pr0n evidence to the contrary). And obviously it has NOTHING to do with the fact that I find two particular Death Eaters impossibly sexy *ahem* *ahem*
Turns out it all goes back to the Middle Ages.
( long post of longness behind the cut, possibly not of interest except to other nerdy people like me )
Hmm. Sensing a "heroic gap" and filling it by drawing on existing material, well mixed with your own imagination. Well, if that doesn't sound like fanfic, I don't know what does. So there you go: none of this is new: it's positively medieval. What a nice feeling, to be part of such a long and noble tradition :)
My involvement with fanfic has been much more, shall we say, "hands on" since I enjoy writing it and reading it, but I've also had a long-standing curiosity about why we write it. Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers does a good job describing the world of fandom but doesn't really explain the motivations. (It's a great book though and I highly recommend it -- I'm not remotely any kind of media scholar so I can't speak to the accuracy of his theories or analysis, but it was great fun to read.)
So what's the appeal? Why do some fandoms spawn literally thousands of fics and others only a few hundred? Why is slash mostly written by women? More fundamentally, why does this stuff exist at all?? It can't be just that we're bored, or that we're frustrated novelists, or that we're sekrit sex addicts (pr0n evidence to the contrary). And obviously it has NOTHING to do with the fact that I find two particular Death Eaters impossibly sexy *ahem* *ahem*
Turns out it all goes back to the Middle Ages.
( long post of longness behind the cut, possibly not of interest except to other nerdy people like me )
Hmm. Sensing a "heroic gap" and filling it by drawing on existing material, well mixed with your own imagination. Well, if that doesn't sound like fanfic, I don't know what does. So there you go: none of this is new: it's positively medieval. What a nice feeling, to be part of such a long and noble tradition :)
