WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:02.100 --> 00:00:08.369 Fandom, at the very basic level, is one of the dominant modes of engagement online. Fandom is something that has become really 00:00:08.369 --> 00:00:12.359 pervasive. Whatever your interest is you can probably find a community of 00:00:12.359 --> 00:00:14.179 people into that same thing. 00:00:14.179 --> 00:00:18.800 We're in a culture that "I read you, you read me." We're all in it together. It's a smaller 00:00:18.800 --> 00:00:25.800 community, much more personalized. If you want to be in fandom, fandom wants you. 00:00:28.880 --> 00:00:33.200 Fandom is saying that I really like a much more active participation with my culture. 00:00:33.200 --> 00:00:36.930 That I don't just see a movie and walk away from it but I wanna discuss it afterwards. I want to 00:00:36.930 --> 00:00:40.250 write stories it. I want to draw fan art. What we had is a kind of aberrational 00:00:40.250 --> 00:00:44.510 hundred years of mass media culture where the idea of how to enjoy stories 00:00:44.510 --> 00:00:47.920 has become really passive and that fan culture and the internet is a return to 00:00:47.920 --> 00:00:50.650 the kind of previous culture that you saw going through to the end of the nineteenth 00:00:50.650 --> 00:00:53.640 century where people retold stories to each other because there was no mass 00:00:53.640 --> 00:00:54.360 media. 00:00:54.360 --> 00:00:57.710 Fans are drawn to texts and universes that are really complex. 00:00:57.710 --> 00:01:01.150 Creative worlds where you get a sense that what you saw was only the merest 00:01:01.150 --> 00:01:06.330 sliver of what was possible. And so one of the things that fans do is like to explore 00:01:06.330 --> 00:01:09.410 the cultural levels of a universe, adding different kinds of characters, more 00:01:09.410 --> 00:01:13.440 representative characters: by giving bigger roles to women, by creating 00:01:13.440 --> 00:01:16.500 different kinds of roles for queer people and racial minorities, for portraying 00:01:16.500 --> 00:01:19.820 disabled people. So all of these have been really important loci for people 00:01:19.820 --> 00:01:23.540 to come together and to tell stories that express political values, social 00:01:23.540 --> 00:01:26.440 values, cultural values that are very different from what the mass-market 00:01:26.440 --> 00:01:31.820 can offer and so to self identify as a fan is to say that you're interested in engaging 00:01:31.820 --> 00:01:37.150 culture in this really broad and rich way. 00:01:37.150 --> 00:01:41.390 Bronies are males fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Generally between 00:01:41.390 --> 00:01:45.479 the ages of sixteen to twenty-five. And they 00:01:45.479 --> 00:01:50.509 fiercely love the show. For a man in today's society to tell someone you're a 00:01:50.509 --> 00:01:55.329 fan of My Little Pony a lot of the times they might cock their head a little bit and be like well what's wrong 00:01:55.329 --> 00:01:59.770 with you. One of the most appealing things is how much it directly challenges our 00:01:59.770 --> 00:02:00.579 heteronormative 00:02:00.579 --> 00:02:04.420 expectations of what it means to be a man. The bronies that I've encountered in real 00:02:04.420 --> 00:02:06.970 life have mostly been completely earnest, 00:02:06.970 --> 00:02:10.500 more than ready and willing to talk about their favorite episode, their 00:02:10.500 --> 00:02:11.399 favorite pony. 00:02:11.399 --> 00:02:15.120 They want to bro-hoof and they want to welcome you to the herd. Men traditionally 00:02:15.120 --> 00:02:16.190 have certain 00:02:16.190 --> 00:02:20.220 societal expectations and really that comes down to a larger problem with 00:02:20.220 --> 00:02:25.900 homophobia. Andrew W.K's on your side, you're still masculine. I mean who doesn't want to imagine a 00:02:25.900 --> 00:02:28.119 world with magic and happiness 00:02:28.119 --> 00:02:35.019 and awesome flying ponies. 00:02:35.019 --> 00:02:38.499 We've got this very heavily gender segregated world we're living in in America 00:02:38.499 --> 00:02:42.699 and I think a lot of women are drawn to Transformers because we can step outside 00:02:42.699 --> 00:02:43.510 that. 00:02:43.510 --> 00:02:47.800 I write almost entirely in the Transformers fandom. Our canon has one gender, there is one 00:02:47.800 --> 00:02:52.250 female character. That makes everybody who's not female some sort of gendered- 00:02:52.250 --> 00:02:56.239 other and I like exploring the idea of what does it mean if you are free of 00:02:56.239 --> 00:03:00.849 those dynamics that we see so often, like heteronormative. This is sort of a chance to 00:03:00.849 --> 00:03:04.280 push back against that. You can play around with that idea of who is the 00:03:04.280 --> 00:03:08.680 receptive one is that really feminized in any way or is the one who's 00:03:08.680 --> 00:03:13.080 using the male analog part, is that the male, is that the sort of top emotionally 00:03:13.080 --> 00:03:14.529 in the relationship? 00:03:14.529 --> 00:03:19.730 To use the idea of domination and control and sort of reinscribe those tropes. It really 00:03:19.730 --> 00:03:23.730 allows for that kind of thing when we're taking, in a sense, gender norms that 00:03:23.730 --> 00:03:28.239 we are living with. In fandom, we're a community. We're no longer inscribed in 00:03:28.239 --> 00:03:35.239 that men do this and women do this. It's everybody is, in a sense, gender equal. 00:03:35.889 --> 00:03:39.369 Holmies arose out of the Aurora shooting tragedy. 00:03:39.369 --> 00:03:42.789 After it happened, on tumblr, a group of people in their fan-ish 00:03:42.789 --> 00:03:47.389 engagement started to post strange photoshop stuff that seemed to 00:03:47.389 --> 00:03:50.540 be in support of James Holmes, who was the shooter. 00:03:50.540 --> 00:03:53.259 Within a few hours of that, Buzzfeed 00:03:53.259 --> 00:03:57.299 posted a listicle about look at all this stuff that the holmies are doing 00:03:57.299 --> 00:03:59.269 and then suddenly it became a story. 00:03:59.269 --> 00:04:02.979 Originally it was about six to ten people but the way that it was reported 00:04:02.979 --> 00:04:06.669 it sounded like there were tens of thousands of people. The resulting 00:04:06.669 --> 00:04:10.909 media attention meant that more people we're gonna be brought to that space. And the media 00:04:10.909 --> 00:04:12.489 attention guaranteed 00:04:12.489 --> 00:04:15.909 that the holmie phenomenon would turn into a trollish phenomenon. 00:04:15.909 --> 00:04:19.899 One of the great facilitators of community is having an outside. You can 00:04:19.899 --> 00:04:24.449 only define a community in terms of borders and so, with holmies, they were 00:04:24.449 --> 00:04:29.639 playing into that trope in an extreme way where only a handful of people would get it. 00:04:29.639 --> 00:04:30.550 I would argue 00:04:30.550 --> 00:04:33.889 a lot of trollish behavior is actually a kind of fandom. 00:04:33.889 --> 00:04:38.580 So where do we draw that line, how do we cordon off what's faniish and what's not? It's really 00:04:38.580 --> 00:04:45.580 important to consider that spectrum because it's what people do online. 00:04:46.879 --> 00:04:50.619 Most corporations want to do a kind of branding. They don't want anybody to 00:04:50.619 --> 00:04:54.749 think about their product in a way that doesn't fit with their take on their 00:04:54.749 --> 00:04:55.770 product. 00:04:55.770 --> 00:04:59.970 The fanfiction that they're objecting to the most is the fan fiction that is most protected 00:04:59.970 --> 00:05:02.189 under law because it's the most transformative. 00:05:02.189 --> 00:05:05.789 It's a specific part of copyright which basically says that even though 00:05:05.789 --> 00:05:10.619 somebody has the right to control their intellectual property, the rest of us 00:05:10.619 --> 00:05:13.529 have certain rights to respond to that, 00:05:13.529 --> 00:05:17.259 whether it takes the original work and does something different, changes the 00:05:17.259 --> 00:05:21.250 meaning of it, changes the form of it, as opposed to simply copying. 00:05:21.250 --> 00:05:25.460 Most fanfic writers are not actually interested in going commercial. They want to share 00:05:25.460 --> 00:05:29.630 their work for pleasure with other fans and that's the amazing thing that we 00:05:29.630 --> 00:05:31.199 want to protect. 00:05:31.199 --> 00:05:34.169 If you're a fan doing this just for love and you get a cease and 00:05:34.169 --> 00:05:36.379 desist on Warner Brothers letterhead 00:05:36.379 --> 00:05:39.719 saying you were going to be sued, every violations has a hundred fifty thousand 00:05:39.719 --> 00:05:40.860 dollar fine. 00:05:40.860 --> 00:05:44.380 You're like "oh my god, I have to take all my fan fiction off the internet. I have to 00:05:44.380 --> 00:05:48.410 erase my website. I have to vanish completely." Except, of course, these stories 00:05:48.410 --> 00:05:53.040 that entertainment corporations tell enter our consciousness. You know, you can't say don't have 00:05:53.040 --> 00:05:57.560 Harry and Hermoine get together. You can't tell people not to have that thought. 00:05:57.560 --> 00:06:02.050 That's why fan culture is important. To be able to nurture creativity and share 00:06:02.050 --> 00:06:05.879 our stories and our art with other people. Why wouldn't we value that? Why 00:06:05.879 --> 00:06:11.319 wouldn't we let people have this kind of expression? 00:06:11.319 --> 00:06:13.360 Fan culture really depends both on 00:06:13.360 --> 00:06:16.619 free speech and fair use. And free speech means sometimes taking speech that you 00:06:16.619 --> 00:06:17.430 don't like. 00:06:17.430 --> 00:06:20.020 It challenges people's expectations of 00:06:20.020 --> 00:06:22.719 what they consider to be acceptable in society. 00:06:22.719 --> 00:06:25.689 Here's this space with the rules are different, the world is very different from 00:06:25.689 --> 00:06:28.009 the world I live in and there are set rules and 00:06:28.009 --> 00:06:29.620 there are set characters and we 00:06:29.620 --> 00:06:33.120 relate to each other on a different level. And it's something that someone can switch between; 00:06:33.120 --> 00:06:35.169 different fandoms, different communities, different 00:06:35.169 --> 00:06:37.050 platforms. It lets many more people have 00:06:37.050 --> 00:06:40.239 a voice and it lets many people tell stories that 00:06:40.239 --> 00:06:47.239 would otherwise not get heard.