missmediajunkie

Another chapter of online media fandom is about to end, fellow media junkies. The beloved website Television Without Pity (TWoP), that had a big hand in creating the TV recapper culture we know and love today, is scheduled to be shut down in April, with its famously boisterous forums following at the end of May. It's an old, familiar story by this point. A media website attracts a loyal, fervent following for a few years, they're acquired by a major company that doesn't really know what to do with them (in this case NBC Universal via their Bravo unit), the original folks responsible for the early success moved on, and the site slowly withered away until the plug was finally pulled.

I wasn't a very consistent visitor to TWoP, but I did visit fairly regularly for a few years. A lot of people did. What drew me to the site wasn't the recaps, which have now become industry standard, but the forums. I have a long history of loving obscure little genre shows that have almost no fandoms to speak of, and no matter how obscure a show was, the TWoP forums could be counted on to have a thread for nearly everything you could think of. Even if it was a single one-season reality show, late night time-filler, or a foreign cult import, if it was airing somewhere on American television, someone on TWoP was talking about it. On the other hand, it was also the only place I regularly found a decent level of discussion going on for shows that didn't really attract traditional media fandoms - the crime procedurals, the family sitcoms, and even news programs.

So the TWoP forums were where I went to look for reactions to new episodes of dubbed late night anime (from viewers who weren't part of the usual anime crowd), "Law & Order: SVU," "Project Runway," and occasionally even "60 Minutes." It was where I went when I first started working my way through older shows, because I could follow along with the archived discussion threads simply by keeping track of when posts were made relative to the original airdates for the episodes I was watching. I always preferred old fashioned message boards to social networking based sites for media discussions for this reason. It was so much easier to find things. And, of course, there were always far fewer technical glitches than with "talkback" style comments like Disquis.

I also appreciated that the participants were mainly casual viewers like me. There were certainly big fandoms on the forums, often with their own separate subforums and subcultures that generated lots of activity, but I tended to stay away from those. Certain media fandoms are notorious for generating drama, and I was always wary of getting too involved with them. I also knew where to find forums and message boards devoted to specific shows, like "Project Runway," but they tended to be more insular and myopic about their particular fandoms. The TWoP crowd could be counted on to be a more laid-back, more eclectic crowd that was interested in a variety of different shows.

Most of the write-ups I've been reading about the end of TWoP have focused on the recaps, naturally, on the snarky, obsessive, yet refreshingly self-aware brand of criticism they helped to popularize. It helped the mainstream to realize that there is an audience for good television writing, and that even the most heinous pieces of pop culture detritus could be good material for serious dissections. There have also been some inches devoted to the site's brushes with fame over the years, as various TV showrunners have dropped by to engage with their audience directly over the years, with mixed results.

The obvious successor to Television Without Pity has been the A.V. Club, which takes a more curated approach to television recaps and reviews, and has also nurtured a great little community. However, it hasn't got quite the same verve or the same breadth of coverage as Television Without Pity. Few media sites do. That's why there are still a significant number of regular users on the site, and they're debating over where to migrate the community next. This is a common occurrence now, fandoms moving from platform to platform and site to site as the internet chugs along.

I can't say I'm going to miss Television Without Pity. Though I had the site bookmarked for ages, I haven't been by in years. I'm far too busy to follow along with message board discussions of the shows I watch anymore. However, in its own way TWoP was an institution, one that gave TV fans a place to be TV fans for well over a solid decade and changed the way a lot of us watch and engage with television.
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It's always fascinating to see which initially ignored and panned films manage to endure the test of time to emerge as cult classics a few decades later. There are a heap of early 90s children's films that have become cult favorites, sparking a lot of recent discussion. Barely anyone remembers that "Hook," the 1991 Spielberg fantasy film, was met with mixed and downright hostile reviews. There hardly seems to be a Millennial out there who doesn't love it. Was "The Nightmare Before Christmas" too dark and scary for children, as the LA Time fretted back in 1993? Disney sure doesn't think so these days, with "Nightmare" merchandise now a ubiquitous presence at their stores and parks.

Usually I get why one of these old kids' films has become a perennial, but sometimes I don't. I watched "Hook" as a kid like everyone else, and while I love the score and a few standalone scenes, it's become all to clear to me over the years that the movie is a mess. But still, I can understand the appeal. It's a big budget spectacular, stuffed with action scenes and humor and kid-friendly thrills. It has endlessly repeatable one-liners, and Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman hamming it up with all they've got. The special effects still look pretty good, and the loud, noisy, raucous atmosphere must have been irresistible, for little boys especially. When you're ten, you're not paying attention to things like shoddy plotting and bad characterization.

However, the cult status of another 90s kid film that has re-emerged recently has left me scratching my head. Apparently there's a whole generation that has grown up loving the Disney live-action Halloween film "Hocus Pocus," which came out twenty years ago to absolutely dismal reviews. It didn't last long in theaters, though it did make its modest budget back. I remember the movie pretty well, because it was used as convenient holiday time-filler for much of the 90s, particularly on the Disney-owned networks. It also shared a couple of actors - Omri Katz and Jason Marsden - with "Eerie, Indiana," which I was a big fan of. I must have been too old when I watched "Hocus Pocus" for it to get a grip on my affections, because I remember it as a remarkably campy, silly, and all too often awkward children's movie that felt like it had been slapped together out of spare parts.

The witches, played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker are clearly the best the movie has to offer, playing a trio of goofy baddies with magnificent costumes, but they're so cartoonish that they never come across as a real threat. Everything is against them in the movie, from the insanely specific circumstances required for their resurrection to their unfamiliarity with the modern world. I know that they're supposed to be comedic figures, keeping it light for the littlest kids and amusing for the grown-ups, but the plot needs them to be at least a little scary by the third act. But good grief, the CGI "Casper" two years later was more intimidating.

The stuff with the teenagers running around, trying to stop them? Pretty dire. The actors aren't bad, but the characters are sketchy and the scenarios are bland. The teen romance was especially bad, and I cringed through a lot of the tin-ear dialogue about virgins and Vinessa Shaw's yabbos. For a movie meant to be safe for the very smallest tots, it's got some weirdly sexual elements in it that make me suspect that "Hocus Pocus" was initially a very different movie. Perhaps a musical of some sort, as this is the only movie directed by Disney regular Kenny Ortega, who made his name as a choreographer, that is not a musical.

I do like some bits and pieces of the movie. The talking cat is great. Doug Jones as a zombie is great. The best sequence is almost certainly when Bette Midler gets to sing "I'll Put a Spell On You," and vamp as only Bette Midler can. But those things aside, I can't work out what it is kids saw in this movie that stuck with them. "Hocus Pocus" looks like every other generic kids' Halloween movie from the same time. The effects are mediocre. The story isn't all that exciting. Were the Sanderson sisters really all that appealing to kids?

Familiarity is the culprit, I suspect. As I previously mentioned, "Hocus Pocus" has been a staple of Disney Halloween programming for years. Kids saw this movie over and over and over, until it became something nostalgic and fondly remembered, the same way that I got hooked on terrible old Arnold Schwarzenegger movies from the '80s. Young kids really have no sense of whether a movie is good or bad, but they respond well to bright colors and exaggerated characters, which "Hocus Pocus" has plenty of.

So, I suspect the same thing might have happened with any number of other movies if Disney gave them the same treatment. The far superior "The Witches," perhaps, or "The Halloween Tree." But Disney had the rights to "Hocus Pocus," so they played "Hocus Pocus," and twenty years later it's a little scary how many twenty-somethings can quote it verbatim.

Ultimately it's all about distribution.
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My laptop decided it was no longer interested in functioning like a rational computing machine a few days ago, requiring me to upgrade my operating system to something more current. In the process I had to move everything off my hard drive, which has around 100 GB of storage capacity, to a spare removable drive that was around 32 GB. I was 20 GB over, and didn't have the time to try any alternate online options. This meant I had to clean house.

As you might expect, video files were responsible for the bulk of the clutter. I have some personal videos, but the real problems is that I have a habit of saving videos from the internet I like, especially when it's not certain that I'll be able to access them again. I've got a pretty big collection of fan-made Anime Music Videos (AMVs) from my otaku days, for instance. There's no formal distribution for these things and creators can disappear off the face of the earth without warning, taking their content with them. Because of the legal gray area these works exist in, a fan-made video posted on Youtube might get suddenly pulled down or rendered unwatchable on without any warning. I've made Youtube playlists to bookmark interesting fan videos, and came back after a few months to find half of the entries removed. There are a couple of dedicated archives devoted to AMVs and fanvids and mash-ups, but these can disappear quickly too. The only way to be sure you'll be able to access to fan-made content whenever you want is to hold on to a copy, just in case.

Of course, I didn't just save fan-made content. I kept a brief four-minute clip from a 2005 episode of "The Daily Show," where one of my old employers made an appearance (incorrectly identified, to our office's amusement). It's currently available through the Comedy Central website, but who knows for how long? The clip is part of a rambling opening monologue, not the kind of content that can be bundled onto home media and sold, as "The Daily Show" has done with some of their other pieces. Viacom could decide at some point that it's not worth their while to keep the eight-year-old clip online, and I'd lose the proof of a near-brush with fame. Lots of other memorable content is ephemeral and often hard to access after the initial broadcasts - commercials, award ceremony clips, idents, news reports, talk show segments, specials, local programming, and more. And there are always those obscurities that never make it to home media, or quickly go out of print. "Mickey Mouse in Vietnam," the famous 1960s underground anti-Vietnam protest cartoon resurfaced online a few months ago after decades of rumors and whispers about who might still have one of the rare prints. Better make a backup copy, before it disappears again.

Then you come to the realization, as I did, that this is hoarding behavior. Most of my fears about losing access to all this content are unfounded. The Internet has done a great job of preserving all sorts of unlikely media bits and pieces, just waiting to be stumbled over and rediscovered again. More and more old movies and shows find their way to some kind of official release every day. With the new prevalence of streaming services, the costs have come down across the board. Many of the long-forgotten shows I watched as a kid are on Netflix and Hulu right now. The fan-created content has also been making plays for increased legitimacy, and it's exceedingly rare that something worthwhile will disappear without a trace forever. In fact, I keep coming across kids sharing older AMVs that have been in circulation for over a decade by now.

So I commenced the long-overdue purge of my hard drive. I dumped the clips I knew I was never going to rewatch. I dumped everything that was high-profile enough that I was confident I'd be able to find them online again, with a little digging. Official music videos, movie trailers, election season parodies, and most of the commercials went into the Trash Bin. Goodbye, epic Blackcurrant Tango advert. So long, "Mickey Mouse in Vietnam." I still kept that "Daily Show" clip, though, and a good chunk of the AMVs - many of them unlabeled or mislabeled to such an extent that reassembling the collection would have been a massive undertaking. In the end I cleared out enough to transfer the rest to the external drive with a lot of room to spare.

Inevitably I'll fill up the hard drive again, and I'll have to clean it all out again at some point in the future. But considering how much fun I had this round, going back and revisiting all that content, I'm not too worried about it.
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I know, I know - it's no use dwelling on would'ves and should'ves and could'ves. However, the timing and circumstances just haven't been right to get me back to San Diego Comic-Con, and considering how exponentially more difficult it has become to get tickets and arrange accommodations for the event, I don't think I'm going back any time soon.

Still, it's fun to fantasize about these things. I worked out a loose schedule of events for myself, as if I had gone to Comic-Con this weekend, and I thought I'd share it with you. First thing you'l notice is that I've purposefully avoided most of the big panels for movies and television shows. The reality is that most of these panels are going to find their way online, and most of the exclusive film clips and bits of marketing will emerge into the public's view all too soon. There were a couple of panels that I waited for hours to see live, and ended up with such poor seats that I would have been better off just waiting to watch them on Youtube. Second thing you'll notice is that the schedule is physically impossible to accomplish, because some of the panels are back to back and everything at Comic-Con has a line to get in. But this is my fantasy schedule, so we'll dispense with such inconvenient details.

So which panels caught my eye this year?

Thursday, July 18th

3:30PM - TV Guide Magazine Celebrates The X-Files' 20th Anniversary: Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny are going to be there, plus series creator Chris Carter, plus many of the writers including Vince Gilligan, the Morgan brothers, and James Wong. This has all the earmarks of a real event. More importantly, there's going to be a giant crowd of "X-files" fans in attendance, and as "The X-files" was one of my first major fandoms, it would be a chance to geek out among my own kind.

4:30PM - Geeks Get Published-and Paid!: This is relevant to my interests! I may not want to write books right now, but maybe someday in the future I might manage to cobble something together that people would actually pay to read. And the biggest hurdles are always how get published, find an agent, etc. This panel purports to have the answers, and is using geek authors as presenters.

7:15PM - A New Generation of Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation: As much as I love what these guys have produced and what they stand for, I've never been to a Spike and Mike screening before and I would gladly take the chance to remedy that. Alternately, the "Tournament of Nerds Show" running at the same time sounds fun.

8:30PM - Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Sing-Along: I didn't even like "Dr. Horrible" all that much, but a sing-along screening sounds like a blast.

Friday

10:30AM - Writing for TV: From First Draft to Getting Staffed: I love behind the scenes stuff, and I love hearing how writers and artists work. And frankly, I will take any tips on writing that I can get. So this kind of panel has way more interest for me that the kind where the actors show up with preview clips. Alternates: "Inside The Big Bang Theory Writers' Room," and "The Art of the Cliffhanger."

12:15PM - Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World: Since places for meta discussion of fandom have been pretty scarce, this sounds like an opportunity for a good conversation.

3:00PM - U.S. Pop Culture Abroad: Among other things, they promise to address what makes an American property successful overseas, and that's a question that has a lot of different ramifications for all corners of media. The panelists here look especially promising, including people looking at the question from a business as well as a creative perspective.

4:00PM - ASIFA-Hollywood's State of the Industry: ASIFA is the International Animated Film Society, the non-profit group that puts on the Annies every year, runs outreach programs, and maintains its own archives. And they're always great for an insider's take on what's going on in animation. Alternate: "Motion Picture and Television Illustrators of the Art Directors Guild."

5:45PM - Making Roger Rabbit: 25th Anniversary: There are a lot of tempting things going on in the 5PM and 6PM hours, but Disney geek that I am, I cannot pass up an opportunity to see animators Andreas Deja and James Baxter and producer Don Hahn reminisce about one of my favorite Renaissance Disney films. Alternate: "International Association of Media Tie-in Writers: Scribe Awards," because tie-ins are fascinating and I think I've read the work of every author listed to appear.

7:45PM - Your Opinion Sucks! Rotten Tomatoes Critics vs. Fans: A movie critics' panel! Where I may have the chance to vent my spleen at Ben Lyons! Yes! Alternates: "Worst Cartoons Ever!" for the chance to meet animation historian Jerry Beck, and "Drew Struzan: The Man Behind the Poster." The magic words are "poster giveaway."

Saturday

10:00AM - Comic-Con How-To: Writing Your Superhero Novel - I didn't realize there was such a thing as a superhero novel, outside of tie-ins, but now I'm curious to know more. And as previously established, I'll take any writing pointers I can get.

2:00PM - Art Lessons from Great Illustrators: Arthur Rackham: I love Arthur Rackham's work. I have a print of one of his watercolors hanging in my house right now, and this sounds like a great little art lecture to sit through.

3:15PM - Vertigo: The Sandman 25th Anniversary and Beyond! Neil Gaiman is always a great speaker to see and I'm a big "Sandman" fan. Gaiman and Vertigo have promised new "Sandman" content in the future, and I'd love to get an early peek. Alternate: Pinky and the Brain 20th Anniversary Voice Reunion, because I still spontaneously hum their theme song regularly.

4:30PM - Poppin' Some Tags: There are a couple of panels devoted to Hollywood costume designers, which makes sense considering the highly visible cosplay element at the con. This is the one that fits best into my schedule. Again, I have no experience with costuming, but I love hearing professional artists talking about their work. And the panel is moderated by Ron Perlman too.

6:00PM - Dissecting Brands: How Do You Know What Makes Batman Batman? Another panel that sounds like it could provide a potentially fascinating conversation, as branding has become a major part of how the industry functions. Notably, the a VP of IP Development from Hasbro is one of the four panelists. Alternates: Batman: The Animated Series Turns 21 and Financing Your Dream: Kickstarter Fundraising

7:30PM - Angry Asian Media Makers: I used to be a regular reader of the Angry Asian Guy blog, and still do my best to ceck in every now and again. So I feel it would be proper to show a little solidarity with my fellow Asian-American geeks. Alternate: ComiKev 2013: Kevin Smith Uses His Mouth on You in Hall H, because who doesn't love Kevin Smith in Comic-Con mode.

Sunday

11:15AM - Breaking Bad: As we go into Sunday, the programming gets more kid-oriented, so the big panels start getting more attractive. "Breaking Bad" is the one big show that I've been looking forward to the most all year, and I'd love a preview.

12:30PM - BBC America's Doctor Who 50th Anniversary: This is the kind of panel that's sure to be so packed, I'd be better off watching at home. But then, I'd miss all the fans, and the "Doctor Who" fans are a legendary bunch that are best experienced in person. Plus, I'm honestly curious as to how they're going to spin Matt Smith's imminenet departure.

2:00PM - 25 Years of the Disney Afternoon: The Continuing Legacy: As a child of the 80s and 90s and a Disney fan, a "Disney Afternoon" panel is irresistable. The "Disney Afternoon" programming has become one of those obscure corners of Disneyana now, barely acknowledged by official channels. And that's probably why the panel is taking place at Comic-Con an not the D23 convention. Alternate: Community: Celebrating the Fans

3:00PM - History of Disney Pins: The Tradition of Disney Pin Trading and Collecting: Most of the toy and collectors' panels don't have much appeal to me, but I ran into some of these pin-trading guys during my last trip to Disneyland, and I am curious as to what the culture is all about.

4:00PM - Everything You Wanted to Know About Live Action Role Playing... But Were Too Embarrassed to Ask: I think that title is self-explanatory. And bonus points for the Woody Allen reference. Alternate: Full-Time Creative Work on a Part-Time Schedule

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I figured that after "50 Shades of Gray" became a success, we'd get more attempts to monetize fanfiction, but I didn't see this latest one coming. Kindle and Amazon Publishing announced today that they're going to offer a service called Kindle Worlds, that will publish fanfiction for certain licensed properties. Submissions will be vetted to ensure that they follow a set of content guidelines (no erotica, no crossovers, etc.) and that they measure up to some baseline of quality. Authors won't get to retain the rights to their work, but they will get a cut of royalties, either 20 or 35% depending on the length of the story. It's a smaller percentage than they would for get for self-publishing original material through Amazon, where the cut is around 70%.

Still, the idea of making any money at all through writing amateur fanfiction is a big change in how the fan community has traditionally operated. It used to be a cardinal rule that you never, ever monetized fanfiction, because that would be stepping on the toes of the original content creators, and their right to create derivative works like sequels and spinoffs. Now three Warner Brothers television shows aimed at young women, "Vampire Diaries," "Gossip Girl," and "Pretty Little Liars" are the first franchises to grant licenses to create legal fanfiction for sale though the Kindle Worlds platform. There have been officially sanctioned fanfiction and other fanworks for quite a few different properties over the years, particularly for contests, but this is the first time I've heard of anyone granting permission to go try and make a profit with them.

Now, is this a good thing for fandom? As always, it's very hard to say. The big worry is that if Amazon and Kindle do make money with this service, they'll have a better argument that non-licensed fanfic is infringing, and be more motivated take steps to shut down everyone else's fanfiction that isn't being written for profit. The worst case scenario is that your "Vampire Diaries" fanfiction, posted on Tumblr or Archive of Our Own, becomes viewed as a competing product, and suddenly there's going to be a real incentive to end the benign neglect that has allowed the fanfiction community to flourish online over the years. However, the argument can be made that it's in the best interest of the properties involved to keep turning a blind eye. Fanworks essentially operate as free advertising, and they're a part of the fandom experience that has become much more visible and accepted over the years. Also, enforcement has always been notoriously difficult, and risks alienating fans.

Fanfiction writers aren't the only ones who are going to be affected. A couple of years ago, I remember there was a notorious published author who would write up these spectacular, hyperbolic tirades against the existence of fanfiction. Lots of people poked fun at him, especially since his name was on several tie-in novels for television shows. Tie-in novels and fanfiction are essentially the same thing, except that tie-in novels are licensed and they're written by professionals. If Amazon and Kindle can start making money off of work that's being generated by amateurs, and get away with paying them less, where does that leave the pros? A lot of notable science-fiction writers depend on the money from tie-ins to keep them going during lean periods. Is the market for this kind of work still going to exist after legal fanfiction? The delineation between fanfic and pro-fic is going to get even blurrier.

Of course, this is all assuming that Kindle Worlds is going to take off, which is not certain at all. Fanfiction has been around for a long, long, time, and the readership is used to getting it for free. The culture around it has often been strongly anti-commercial, and that may be difficult to change. Personally, I can't imagine paying for fanfiction, especially the kind of safe, friendly fanfiction that Amazon and Kindle seem to be the most interested in. I prefer all the subversive, weirdo, boundary-crossing stuff that would never make it into print in a million years. As far as I'm concerned, that's the appeal of these amateur stories.

I may be the exception though. The nature of media fandom has changed considerably since I first got involved, over a decade ago. Fanfiction is slowly but surely becoming more legitimate content, and eventually people are going to find ways to use it to make money. Kindle Worlds may not be successful, but it's a pretty bold idea. Unlike past efforts, such as the short-lived for-profit Fanlib Archive, Amazon and Kindle are actively addressing some of those thorny legal issues and they're willing to share a piece of the revenues too. I never thought I'd ever see this happen.

Kindle Worlds launches in June.
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"Supernatural" is one of those genre shows that has been recommended to me a few times, because it's similar to other things I watch. I've seen a couple of episodes, but I wasn't impressed. I like plenty of the people who work on the show, particularly showrunner Ben Edlund, but I've decided it's just not for me. But maybe I would have been willing to give the show more of a chance if it weren't for the horrible, horrible reputation of the "Supernatural" fandom. I'm not talking about the randy fanfiction and the wonky photomanipulated fanart, which pretty par for the course for most media fandoms these days. No, I'm talking about the stalkers and the inappropriate fan encounters and the disturbingly large group of deluded nutters who insist that some of the happily married actors are in sham relationships. I'm talking about the very real death threats. And within the fandom itself is a long history of vicious infighting, spectacular overreaction to perceived slights, and drama queens gone haywire. I'm surprised MTV hasn't built a reality show around these people yet.

Now I fully understand that 95% of the people who watch and enjoy "Supernatural" aren't involved in its fandom, and 95% of those who are involved don't act like this. There are plenty of self-aware, reasonable "Supernatural" fans who are just as horrified with the extreme behavior and entitlement of the fandom fringe as anyone watching from the outside. I was a part of various media fandoms for a long time, and I've had my experiences with the crazies. I think everyone has. They exist in pretty much every group built around a common interest, be it sports or politics or your religion of choice. The problem with the media fandom fringe is that the general fandom is pretty far out there on the continuum of acceptable activities already. There are still plenty of people who think the Comic-Con cosplayers are all freaks, and as much as I truly sympathize with the Bronies, I couldn't watch the trailer for their new documentary without getting a major dose of second-hand embarrassment. So the crazy tends to get magnified. And unfortunately for the sane "Supernantural" fans, they're inevitably going to be lumped together with the real nuts.

At this point I should talk about Becky, the "Supernatural" character who the writers added to the show as a commentary on their unusually avid fanbase. In the show, the main characters' adventures have been novelized in a popular book series, and Becky is their biggest fan. She runs an internet fan site, writes incestuous fanfiction of the two main characters, and is portrayed as an overzealous oddball. Compared to the portrayals of other fictional media fans we've seen in shows like "The Big Bang Theory" and "Community," she's much more extreme. She's not a bad person, but she can be trouble. "Supernatural" fans are generally split about the existence and treatment of Becky, but the meta commentary and light mockery that the show uses her for are fairly tame. Nonetheless, she's a good reflection of how the "Supernatural" creators view a particular section of their fandom. And thanks to her multiple appearances on the show, it's how much of their audience views that section of fandom too. And it's contributing to a pretty unflattering protrait of certain female internet-based media fans overall.

Of course this isn't fair, but it's important to remember that fandom isn't just the fans, but the interactions and the relationships of the fans as a group. As well meaning as all the participants may be, you can still end up with toxic fandoms that fight about everything, that make you choose sides in silly disputes, and that take themselves much, much too seriously. Especially online, normally socially unacceptable behavior is tolerated more, or can even be reinforced, so there's often a lack of awareness about crossing lines. Genre shows like "Supernatural" will attract a lot of kids and people who aren't very well socialized, who retreat into media as an escape. It's not rare at all to find that the fans who display the most extreme obsessive behavior do so as an expression of deeper personal problems. These are the people who tend to be the loudest and most visible in fandom conversations, who attract all the attention. These are the people who everyone in fandom knows, if only for their notoriety.

And that's how the fringe can take over, and normal, unassuming fans ends up on the sidelines, wondering if they really want to be associated with so much insanity. The fringe is not a new problem, of course. There have been extreme fans around for ages, inspiring restraining orders, sleepless nights, and Stephen King's "Misery." The dynamics of these big organized fandoms, however, and how they interact with that fringe, are still changing and evolving. And thanks to the internet, that process is a lot more visible. It's been fascinating to watch fandoms like "Harry Potter" self-police and oust troublemakers, and "My Little Pony" fight against being unfairly branded as a bunch of perverts and nogoodniks. As for "Supernatural," they remain the fandom that other fandoms point to as the worst case scenario, the cautionary tale of what happens if you get too carried away with being a fan.
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Last week there were some eyebrows raised at the announcement that Penguin Press was going to publish a popular fanfiction story, "Loving the Band," written about the UK boy band One Direction, by a sixteen-year-old named Emily Baker. It'll have to go through some revisions first, specifically scrubbing all references to One Direction or its band members, a practice known in fanfiction circles as "filing off the serial numbers." The most famous example of this is, E.L. James' "Fifty Shades of Grey," which started off as "Twilight" fanfiction featuring Edward and Bella. There have been rumors of other deals in the works, so it seems like we have the beginnings of a trend here.

There have been varied reactions to this, some outraged, some despondent, but almost all negative. The biggest complaint has been that these publishers are just chasing after the next popular thing, looking for stories from the biggest, most hyped-up fandoms of the moment in the Young Adult sphere to exploit. They're not interested in promoting real talent, but the writers with the ability to attract a rabid audience of young women. Also, they're not asking the authors to write something new and original, but choosing to publish something that has already attracted attention and been well-received by the target readers, piggy-backing off the success of the source media itself. Would "Fifty Shades of Grey" have taken off if the original fanfiction story, "Master of the Universe," hadn't already been popular with the "Twilight" crowd? Would Penguin be interested in "Loving the Band" if that band wasn't One Direction? Sure they change the names of all the characters before going to press for legal reasons, but there's an understanding with the fans that nothing substantive is different. It's such a blatant cash-grab and such a terribly cynical one. What's really worrisome is how easily publishers could seize on this as a new model to churn out cheap new money-makers.

Many members of the fanfiction community aren't happy either, because the young writers getting all the attention don't write particularly good examples of fanfiction in the first place. Looking over the summary of "Love the Band," it breaks almost all the cardinal rules of good fanfiction. The main character is original, a "Mary Sue" self-insert who becomes the focal point of a love triangle with two members of the band. She exists primarily for wish fulfillment purposes. Being able to "file off the serial numbers" generally means that the author has written something either so generic or so far removed from their chosen fandom, the use of existing characters doesn't actually affect the story. The point of fanfiction is exploring the existing universe in a way that the canon work doesn't allow for. So if you've written a "Doctor Who" fanfiction where you could replace the time-traveling alien adventurer with someone from the cast of "Glee" without having to rework significant amounts of the plot, you're probably doing something wrong.

Then again, I do see a positive side to this. I've remarked before that the first rule of fanfiction is that you don't make money off of fanfiction, but there has been a growing pressure to find some way of monetizing the huge, diverse, fanfiction universe. I think some of the old rules are starting to change. The danger of fanfiction being shut down for copyright violations isn't as great anymore, because it's become more visible and acceptable to the mainstream public over these last few years. Sure, it still gets no respect, but at least it's out in the open and people have a better idea of what it is and who's participating in it. That doesn't mean there isn't still some stigma, since fanfiction is in a legal gray area, there are no quality controls, and a lot of people simply don't understand the idea of writing for fun. However, if fanfiction is seen as a sort of training ground for burgeoning writers, and a potential source of new material to exploit, that gives the publishers a financial incentive to let the community exist on its own terms.

As for more trashy fanfiction being published as legitimate books, well, it honestly doesn't bother me much. I remember a lot of equally poor YA books when I was younger, the sort of trendy, weightless fluff designed to appeal to a certain kind of girl who wouldn't read anything else. Remember "Sweet Valley High"? Or if you liked the kinkier stuff, remember V.C. Andrews? And then of course there are the official tie-in novels written for much of the same media that the fanfiction is written for. Why shouldn't fanfiction share shelf space with the books that would technically be counted as fanfiction if the author hadn't been paid by the license holders?

I should note that there has been a small, but persistent group of "Twilight" fanfiction writers trying to follow in E.L. James' footsteps, self-publishing their "Twilight" fanfiction with the names swapped out, in hopes of attracting similar attention. They've been dismissed as craven opportunists by many in the fanfiction community, and I'm not inclined to disagree, but their emergence is indicative of changing attitudes. Fanfiction and pro-fiction are edging closer together. I can imagine some nightmare scenarios where the lawyers get involved, but if they can figure out how to coexist, it may be to the benefit of both sides.
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This is going to be one of the more self-indulgent posts, as it deals with some of my personal experiences in media fandom, and I doubt it'll be all that interesting to anyone who isn't familiar with fanworks – that odd little niche of media fans that writes fanfiction and draws fanart and edits together video mash-ups and so forth. These are fun and – in my opinion – perfectly harmless activities that unfortunately exist in a rather gray area of intellectual property law, so I've avoided writing about them too often. And until now, I haven't said much about my own dabbling in fanworks. You see, up until about eighteen months ago, I wrote fanfiction. A lot of it.

Now I wasn't some starry-eyed wannabe writer who thought any of her stories were anything special, or would lead to becoming the next J.K. Rowling. I was writing mostly as a form of stress relief. My most prolific period was when I was in a serious rut, very bored, lonely, unfulfilled, and altogether unhappy. So I wrote crummy romance stories about characters in TV shows by the dozens, typing out wish-fulfillment scenarios and what-ifs. I write for a living, but nothing creative or fun. The fanfiction stories were a great outlet. They were mostly terrible, and I took great care in anonymizing every pseudonym they were posted under, but for a while it was fun to play author. There's an audience for everything out there, no matter how obscure. If you have even the slightest amount of competence and creativity, someone out there will read your stuff. I never became a BNF (big name fan), but I did attract a few regulars, and I liked being part of the wild, weird fanfiction community.

After a couple of years, though, I lost interest. My output dropped, my tolerance for the endless drama of fandom culture decreased, and I steadily turned my attention to other activities. Real life got better. I started writing this blog, which I found a more rewarding and versatile channel for my media interests. The real kicker though, was that I wrote The Big One, the fanfiction story that put me directly in the spotlight for the first time. I'm not going to identify the real title, because it's still online and I prefer, like George Costanza, to keep certain activities in different worlds, as far away from each other as possible. When I decided to drop fanfiction writing for good, I went ahead and deleted just about everything I had ever posted, over a hundred different stories posted over the course of about four years. I send saved copies to anyone who asks for them, but I wasn't comfortable leaving them online any longer. Except The Big One.

Despite being written for a very obscure old media fandom, The Big One has been read by hundreds of people. I've received dozens of comments and E-mails about it, almost all of them gushing and emotional. People have posted recommendations for it everywhere. They're still posting recommendations, over a year and a half since I first put it online. The latest one from a few weeks ago claimed that the story had changed her life. A link to it popped up in an online lesson plan from a private school last year. Someone turned it into an audio podfic, with permission. Readers told me they'd printed The Big One out and saved it. They told me they were truly touched and grateful that I had written it. They told me that it mattered.

And I said you're welcome and I was happy that they had liked it, but frankly the attention spooked me. I thought the story was pretty good and was gratified that people liked it, but I knew it was amateur work. I knew it wasn't nearly as good as the people putting it on a pedestal were saying that it was. Call me a cynic, but I know my own limitations. And being around that kind of praise and being subject to that kind of hype is a little dangerous. It's much too easy to fall for that kind of easy adoration, to take it too seriously. I wasn't interested in that, and I decided at that point that I'd gotten just about all I was ever going to get out of being in that corner of fandom. So I quit.

Looking back, it was the right thing to do. Toward the end of my fanfiction writing stint I was mostly writing out of habit. Once I stopped, I was never hit with the urge to go back to it. I took down all the other stories I had written and rarely hear a peep about them. I left The Big One up because I worried that taking away access might upset some people. Now, I'm not so sure. Fandom has a short memory, and there's always the next, nicely-formatted piece of melodramatic fannish indulgence for people to get worked up over. There's always the next newbie author looking for a creative outlet, willing to put in the time and effort.

I got a lot of good writing practice and good times from fanfiction, but in the end it wasn't something I was ever entirely comfortable with, and I knew when it was time to stop. I'm glad I got to go out on a high note, though, that I got a little taste of being internet famous. But honestly I think I'd rather be known for this blog than being the author of The Big One.
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Well, somebody finally did it. An enterprising Spider-man fan named Louis Plamondon edited together all the footage from all the different trailers and commercials and other previews for "The Amazing Spider-man" into a 25-minute short version of the movie. This was to prove the point that marketing for blockbusters has gotten out of hand, and the studios are releasing way too much spoiler-laden footage in advance that ends up negatively impacting the actual experience of watching the film. I haven't seen the video myself, as Sony was quick to quash most of the copies online, and I actually would like to be able to watch "The Amazing Spider-man" with some of the mystery intact.

However, as reported by Variety, Plamodon's mini-epic contained about ten minutes of the finished film according to Sony (Note that only ten minutes or ten percent of the running time of a film, whichever is shorter, is the maximum allowed to be shown in a nontheatrical medium prior to the film’s theatrical release under Academy Award eligibility rules). The rest is a mix of unfinished scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, b-roll, repeated footage, and padding. Still, the fact that you could piece together a coherent narrative out of all the released clips is pretty telling. It's not just not the amount of footage that we're seeing, but so many of the best shots and sequences, repeated ad nauseum in so many different bits of promotional material. This is going to be a great discussion piece for copyright law classes for years, as the message of the video is inextricably tied to its length and the amount and variety of footage it contains.

Of course spoilerific trailers detailing exactly what happens in a movie have been around forever, and I understand why the marketers frequently want to oversell movies so zealously. I've mentioned before that my significant other responded very poorly to the first "Amazing Spider-Man" trailer from last year, but after seeing a couple of the subsequent ones and the commercials, he's slowly come around. A Spider-man reboot has been a very hard sell for many viewers, me included, who think that Sony should have waited a couple more years for the memory of the Sam Raimi "Spider-man" films with Toby Maguire to fade a little more. In such cases, showing off the good parts can make a difference in the mind of a doubtful moviegoer. However, when you've already been convinced to see a movie, and you're actually anticipating it, oversaturation can have very negative effects.

It was only after I saw "Prometheus" that I finally went and watched some of those later trailers. I'm glad I kept my distance, because they do show a little too much. A lot of the film's best shots and sequences work so much better if you don't have any foreknowledge of them, and I can see how some elements may have misled viewers to expect something different from what the movie actually delivered. Of course all advertisements deal in false hype to some extent, but "Prometheus" was one of those cases where I think they went too far. Some "Alien" fanboys got worked up into such a lather, and were then so disappointed when they got to the theaters, it "Prometheus" helped become one of the most divisive and polarizing films of the summer. Good grief, does anyone else remember when the "Alien" movies were just big dumb action/horror flicks?

And then of course, there's "The Dark Knight Rises" coming up. I have this growing dread that the film is not going to live up to these crazy expectations that some fans have for it, and the fallout is going to get ugly, maybe even worse than saw for "Prometheus." "Dark Knight Rises" doesn't even need all the trailers and the marketing, which there's plenty of, in order to reach saturation levels. The fans are doing it by themselves. I've come across multiple articles making the case that one of the new characters is secretly Robin, even though director Christopher Nolan has stated repeatedly that Robin won't appear in his Batman universe. Like with "Prometheus," there are fans who are doggedly trying to piece all the details of the plot together from previews and interviews. Reams of analysis are being written about bits of footage totally without context. It's getting a little scary, to be honest.

It's nice to know that there are other fans out there who have had enough, who don't want to be inundated by all this information, and are getting fed up with the over-aggressive sales pitches and having to hide from marketing campaigns. The irony is that I love trailers. I thought the first "Prometheus" teaser was brilliant, but I didn't watch any of the others for fear of ruining the movie for myself. And I've been sitting through many previews lately with my eyes screwed shut, thinking back to the days when I used to look forward to the coming attractions.
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There's a Slate article that was posted yesterday about Before Watchmen, a series of prequel comics about the origins of the major players in Alan Moore's "Watchmen" universe. Alan Moore has made it clear that he does not approve of this, and while some fans are rejecting the new stories sight unseen, most have been fairly ambivalent. Everyone agrees that the move is a cash grab by DC, meant to capitalize on the higher profile of "Watchmen" after the recent movie version. Not many particularly care.

What caught my eye were the comments about fanfiction, first comparing a "Before Watchmen" cover image to "fan fiction detritus," and then suggesting that fanfiction was a more suitable avenue for this brand of derivative works than the "official" comics, and noting that Moore essentially wrote fanfiction himself with "Lost Girls." Cue multiple comments in the discussion section arguing the proper use of the term fanfiction, which I'm not going to reiterate here, because I've already had that argument and written those posts. Instead, I'm going to try to answer the question nobody quite managed to ask here - what makes a derivative work, a piece of intellectual property based off of a previous piece of intellectual property, a legitimate extension of the original? Where is the border between the canon work and the fanfiction? And what is the mechanism for granting that authority?

Well, you start with the original author first as the prime authority on their own work. If J.K. Rowling says that Dumbledore is gay, even though it was never stated anywhere in the "Harry Potter" books, then Dumbledore is gay. If she decides to anoint a new author to continue the adventures of the Potter kids, her word carries more weight than anyone else's. Film and television series, which are more collaborative mediums, often depend on a creator incorporating the work of others. There are only a handful television creators, for instance, who will write every episode of a show themselves, but if they retain creative oversight over the finished product, the show is still considered their work to a large degree.

However, you can't call something a derivative work until the original author is out of the picture. These days that's very common, as many creators of popular media don't have the rights to their creations. Legally, whoever controls the rights to the property controls the official canon, the right to add or change a story as their see fit. So DC can hire other creative talent to write "Before Watchmen" comics without paying any attention to the wishes of Alan Moore. When Bryan Singer made "Superman Returns," he chose to ignore the third and fourth theatrical "Superman" films and pick up the story after "Superman II," with Warner Bros' backing. In the case of comic book characters, they’re often passed around between so many different writers and artists, each making their own contribution, it’s hard to say who really was really the primary creator.

When most people think of fan fiction, they think of the amateur stories passed around online by hobbyists. However, what professional writers do when they work in one of these existing universes isn't any different, except for the money and the legalities. They're using existing characters and concepts to tell new stories. However, what the money and the legalities give them is immediate legitimacy because they also get the right to profit by the work's association with he original. Anything written for profit is taken more seriously than the stuff written for fun and self-indulgence, and the involvement of whoever is holding the rights, even if it's as licensor for a bad tie-in novel, will at least give the appearance of oversight. Something "official" suggests that there's quality control at work somewhere, that there is a protective gatekeeper acting in the best interest of your favorite franchise, Of course, most of the time it's really about exploiting a piece of IP to the fullest extent possible. Do you really think most "Spider-man" fans are all that excited about the new reboot?

Now when the rights holder and the original author clash over the canon, who wins? It depends in each case. J.K. Rowling’s reputation is such that she’d easily win out in the court of public opinion over any company that managed to wrest the “Potter” rights away from her, and try to launch additional sequels with a different writer. Her writing is so integral to those books, she is irreplaceable. However, there's hardly any fuss when Marvel plays musical chairs with the writers and directors of its "Avengers" universe movies, or make decisions about their content that any previous creative talent would disagree with. In the television world, fans raised a fuss when Dan Harmon was fired from "Community," but nobody blinked an eye when "Whitney" got a new showrunner.

The final arbiter is really the audience. They're the ones who draw a lot of the lines between what is considered canon and what isn't, who will challenge the authority of the people who control a beloved media property, and sometimes even the original authors. They're the ones who ignore lesser movie sequels, who pretend that "After MASH" and the third season of "Gargoyles" never happened, and are quick to remind you that Han Solo shot first, despite what George Lucas thinks. No amount of hype or marketing was enough to convince them that George Lazenby was meant to be James Bond, or that Halle Berry was Catwoman. The fans are the ones who care the most about what is and isn't canon, so it makes sense that they often have the most say over the matter in the end.

There are very few instances of something originating purely from the fans being incorporated into canon, because the amateurs and the professionals exist in separate universes to everyone's benefit. but it does happen once in a while. There's Derpy from the "My Little Pony" cartoon, "Figwit" in "Lord of the Rings," and Lt Uhura's first name. And of course that's not counting the number of fans who ended up writing for "Dr. Who" or "Batman" or "Star Trek" officially, with all the money and the legalities. You'll hear writers for many of these properties touting fan credentials these days, and for good reason. If the original author is out of the picture, and the motives of the rights holders are suspect, sometimes a derivative work can still be good and worthwhile if the new creator is significantly invested in it.

In the case of "Before Watchman," DC did one thing right. They put some of their best talent on the project, including J. Michael Straczynski and Brian Azzarello. You can argue that DC is disrespecting Alan Moore and that they're only doing this for the money, but nobody can say whether or not the miniseries are actually going to be any good. If the quality is up to par, and they're accepted by the fans, they'll become a part of the "Watchmen" canon whether Moore likes it or not. And if they're terrible, then the fans will reject them, like the "Psycho" sequels no one remembers, or "The Blues Brothers 2000," and we can all move on.
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