Vincent Peebles
I immediately clocked Lundin’s Ship It! after, or rather while, reading the first twelve chapters—I knew how it ends, and I knew that, if I had a choice, I wouldn’t read it. This in itself isn’t special or particular to fan culture. Speed reading in all of its various forms is, of course, a skill a lot of today’s readers pick up to sort through the immense amount of written material that humanity has accumulated. Pretty much everyone does this: anyone browsing a social media feed like reddit, or academics in search of evidence speed reading to pick out the thesis and conclusions, or editors needing to create journalistic headlines that speed read for you.
Still, I clocked Ship It!. It smacked of one of my most reviled fanfiction categories. No, not shipping; that’s unavoidable. How I clock Lundin’s novel is as wish fulfillment. That, too, is unavoidable in fanfiction. In fact, the aggressive desire to self-aggrandize is one of the main purposes of fanfiction.
Personally, I have a drastically more negative impression of fans pushing into creation spaces than most involved in fanfiction.
In addition to the usual traumas of dross self-insert stories, reincarnation stories, characterXreader stories, happy-ending stories, ASBs with wholly positive effects stories, ISOTs, ROBs, etc. etc. that I and any other reader may speed read past, my first fandom was Korean pop music.
K-pop has a special relation to aggressive fans (sasaeng) . That video is not an isolated incident. Contrary to typical Western expectations of female vulnerability, boy groups are actually more common victims of these stalkers, and sasaeng behavior is coded female. Still, I led with Taeyeon’s kidnapping incident because it’s the most shockingly blatant.
(There’s a fair amount that could be written about how male fans have traditional handshake/meeting events with girl groups while no parallel exists for male groups and their fans, partly rhetorically because of and partly causing sasaeng fans. But that’s another topic…)
This sort of negative fandom is significant enough that English sites, like the one I’ve linked, often leave sasaeng untranslated despite ‘stalker’ being a fairly close analogue. (In fact, sasaeng is a significant enough phenomenon that it has a Wikipedia page.) Other terms that are left untranslated are Korean-culture-specific (i.e. maknae or sunbae) or have special connotations within K-pop fandom even in Korea, such as aegyo. (You don’t need to know what any of those are. They’re just examples) Of course, I recognize that some of this non-translation is in the same spirit of aggressive emulation or fandom that I’m deploring in Ship It!, which annoys me, so from here on I’ll stick to ‘stalker’.
People write explicit fanfiction about the members of these groups, by the way. That’s considered ‘normal’ behavior, due to stalker fans pushing the envelope so far. Compare to the banning of DeepFake porn videos on Western spaces like reddit—the admins of reddit decided DeepFake was ‘involuntary pornography’, and belonged in the same category as subreddits dedicated to getting upskirt pictures. (You should care about DeepFake for other, still developing, reasons too, especially in an increasingly multimedia world, but this is the relevant one for now.)
Fans pushing into source spaces, in the way that Claire does, reads similarly to me as Montraville or Belcour reads to most modern readers. There are, of course, differences, as the rakes are aggressive from a position of relative individual power. But there is always power in numbers—that’s the very principle behind democracy, that power belongs to the people—and no matter how much Korean pop groups spend on security these incidents continue. I for one have no desire to read about thoughtless fans, no matter how young and immature they may be, and no matter how apparently empowering and educational the experience of being predated upon is supposed to be for Forest; I already know the stalker stories.
To a huge degree, these types of preferences shape fan cultures. Each series’ fan-milieu has their own ticks and trains their participants into accepting or rejecting particular things, and each individual fan will have a series of fan-cultures in their fan-past that, to some degree, controls what they find tasteful and not. This is some kind of extension of the typical reader-response theory, one that I’m sure has been made elsewhere, but one that highlights the degree to which fan spaces are separate.
(You can stop here for 700 words. Everything above is fairly coherent. The rest is speculative and purposely unsourced.)
Of the specialized terms related to fandom, some are nigh-universal; others highly specific. If I asked you to perform aegyo you wouldn’t know what I meant unless I explained further. But that alone doesn’t show how distinct fanspaces are from each other.
If you head to spacebattles.com (no link—I want you to work) you’ll find an outdated website dedicated to, well, space, which belies the depth of the attached forums. Ostensibly for discussing such wide topics as real life politics to…you guessed it, ‘creative writing’, the forum is absolutely filled with fanfiction, a driver of site activity to the degree that I would call it the primary function of the forums.
However, Spacebattles is much smaller than it could have been. Many years ago it split over a personal dispute, spawning another site, called Sufficient Velocity. The sites are aware of each other, naturally, and have many cross-users. However they also have specific differences and specializations. These are only two of the many forums that exist, and they are the two of the most closely related possible, literally drawing from the same userbase, and yet they still have specialized lingo to differentiate themselves. Other forums that don’t have such closely intertwined histories will diverge even more, or worse, converge, spawning different terms for the same thing in the same way that spots camouflage both cheetahs and octopi. I can call one piece of fanwork with a particular style an RP or RPG, a tt (tabletop), a quest, an MSPA, a CYOA, a free-form, or a collective game, and these terms would all describe supposedly different genres that have the same expectations and conventions. This doesn’t even include the terms that I personally don’t know, which are surely many.
You’ll also note that Sufficient Velocity-preferring users and Spacebattles-preferring users give different histories of their split. Their separate senses of historical fact is often, in my experience, derived from a sort of oral ‘I heard that…’ instead of an academic ‘I read the threads involved’. At this point the arguments have lost their vitriol, because it doesn’t really matter to anyone what actually happened. What matters is that users that prefer one over the other have different mythologies of the schism. Any single unitary truth has fallen away in favor of whatever any individual reader generates from their personal experience. Indeed, the very nature of fan culture, so spread as it is, forbids any kind of total familiarity or common culture and instead we only have these extremely separated broken communities. Arguments and splits and foundings are more common than mergers—most common of all is abandonment.
Fandoms are somewhat like the mythological gu jars: filled with poisonous animals and insects constantly attacking each other to produce a curse. They are aggressive and violent self-assertions, and therefore creative and simultaneous sources of self.
Well, something like that. Maybe a little teensy tiny bit less melodramatic?
Hm. Nevertheless.
That’s how I aggressively categorize aggressive fandom.
Word Count: 1276
Representing Adolescence @ Pitt 