Another signal boost post

Signal boosting: someone wrote a horribly racist J2 fic set in post-quake Haiti. You can read the unfunnybusiness write-up here, a collection of offensive quotes from the fic here, and a collection of links to relevant discussions here. The fic is pretty much made of racist tropes and the apology is a textbook fauxpology. *sigh*

If you don’t get what’s wrong, bookshop linked to this page about privilege, which is one of the best I’ve seen.

Also glockgal wrote this ridiculously fantastic racebending SPN comic. (If you don’t know of the racebending revenge ficathon, it’s here.)

(Between the recent Wincon thing and now this, I’m sort of going back and forth between “Why did I choose to get into this failtastic fandom?” and “Hey, wait, racism and sexism can happen in any fandom, it’s not an indictment against SPN fandom as a whole, just against the people in it who fail.”)

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

In which I discover podfic

I’ve been facing a dilemma, which is that all winter I’d been looking forward to walking around NYC once the weather warmed up, but for the past month and a half I’ve been so obsessed with Supernatural that I can’t seem to tear myself away from my computer/television.

Yesterday I found the solution. I decided to walk partway home from work, but after about five minutes the fanfic withdrawal became too intense. So I pulled out my Android phone, typed in “Supernatural podfic recs,” downloaded the first interesting thing that came up, unzipped it with a free app, and listened to it as I walked along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, over the Brooklyn Bridge, up Mulberry Street, up 2nd Ave, to Viva Herbal Pizza, to the L train, to home.

The fic was We Walk The Same Line by poisontaster; the podfic is read by twasadark and can be downloaded here. This story is ideal for audio form, an atmospheric adventure with perfectly in-character dialog, just enough humor and action to keep it interesting, and absolutely superb show-not-tell characterization of Dean and Sam. I love how the author shows how much the boys love each other underneath their snarky banter and the fact that they drive each other crazy. Her characterization of Dean’s martyr complex and protective instinct toward Sam is particularly excellent.

I had never listened to a podfic before–I guess I always thought it would be weird. But that was awesome! Listening to it in audio form forced me to slow down and really immerse myself in the world of the story in a way that reading doesn’t. Now I need to download more podfic! Does anyone have Dean-centric recs? I spend an hour and a half on the subway every day and this would be a great way to kill time. (I’ve been reading fic on my phone, but the tiny bright screen is not really made for long-term reading and is starting to give me headaches. Podfic definitely sounds like a better plan.)

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

Have you read those posts about affirmational vs transformational fandom?

http://rusty-halo.com/wordpress/?p=3451

I went to a meeting of the Supernatural NYC Meetup Group a couple weekends ago. We met at 11am in the childrens’ resource room of the Brooklyn Heights Public Library (srsly) and marathoned several Dean episodes via a laptop hooked up to a projector. It was a bit… surreal. (Also I’d slept only three hours and got up early on a Saturday, so I was barely functional, in addition to my usual pathological shyness in social situations.)

It was fun to watch the show with other real life people. The organizers obviously worked hard to run the event, and everyone was very welcoming to me. I’m not sure if it was the right place for me, though. I’ve been trying to put my finger on why and I think it ties into the posts I’ve been reading recently on metafandom about two different approaches to fandom, affirmational vs transformational. I’m pretty firmly on the transformational side, especially when it comes to something like Supernatural, which I find incredibly problematic, and which I’m into for the fandom and fanwork and fan criticism at least as much as for the text itself.

The Meetup group was pretty firmly on the affirmational side, at least as far as I could tell (some of the others were shy, too). Only one person acknowledged being into fanfic and she did so like there was something embarrassing about it. There wasn’t much discussion and what there was wasn’t critical* or analytical–it was very positive and focused on the actors and on behind-the-scenes trivia.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this–it just hit me that what I wanted wasn’t just real life people to watch the show with, it was real life people who share something closer to my approach to fandom. (Again, I mean no offense to the people there.)

ANYWAY. The point is that I’ve been absolutely fascinated by the discussions about the differences between affirmational and transformational approaches to fandom, because they put names on phenomena that I’ve been aware of for a long time but haven’t been able to articulate. If you’re interested, this post by obsession_inc is a great starting point. I’d also recommend this post by oliviacirce and this particular comment thread, and also this post by damned_colonial. Obviously, there’s overlap between the two approaches, and the definitions are still being hashed out, but there is definitely something really interesting to explore here.

Also, kaigou took this as a starting point for a post about the structural differences between the two approaches to fandom–how affirmational fandom places the author at the center and how transformational fandom is far more decentralized and chaotic, complete with these amazing diagrams. (It takes a while to figure out but they’re definitely worth looking at.) I’m not sure if I agree with her conclusion about anti-fanfic pro-writers feeling threatened by BNFs, but I love her illustrations of how fandoms evolve to center around fan-created ideas, and how far removed these fan-created zones can be from the canon’s creator or hir intent.

It really rings true with my experience of Supernatural, which is that I’m far more interested in learning what soundingsea or netweight think about the show than about what Eric Kripke does, and I’m infinitely more interested in reading jolielaide’s fanfic recs than in reading tie-in novels (the Meetup group is also doing a tie-in novel book club, which I couldn’t be less interested in). I think it also explains why I’ve always felt so much happier at fan-run conventions, the ones focused on fanworks and the voices of fans themselves, rather than at those pro cons where you worship at the altar of your superiors and if you’re lucky they’ll validate your life by acknowledging your existence (often for an offensively large sum of money). (Sorry, some residual bitterness there.)

( a bit more about the meetup )

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.