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Post by happyshep on Jun 16, 2009 11:03:16 GMT -5
This question has similarities to the other which I just put up, only this time I'd like to focus on actual fanfiction communities -- whether at LJ, FF.net, forums or print-based connections. I'm not really sure how to word my question, so once again I'll let an academics do the talking: - "The entire community is based upon the friendship bond and its reification through all the source products."
- "Members often percieve strength in each other; they know they are stronger in their community than they are outside of it."
Both lines from Bacon-Smith. From my personal experience within "Friendship fic" communities I would suppose that due to the nature of the stories and the values which they promote, there seems to be a similar undertone resonating throughout the community; loyalty, dedication, affection. Am I correct or have you experienced otherwise?
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Post by E Fish on Jun 19, 2009 7:57:35 GMT -5
Are you speaking of ff communities dedicated to writing friendship fics or do you just mean friendships formed within fanfiction communities? I'm not sure I'm following.
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Post by happyshep on Jun 19, 2009 19:13:35 GMT -5
Sorry not to have specified. It appeared to me as though most hurt/comfort stories featured friendship as a main theme, and that within communities which produce this sort of fiction there was often a similar unconditional bond between its members. I suppose that I am questioning the nature of the communities themselves. If I seem naive on this subject then know that this is why it is necessary for me to conduct this research -- I simply do not have the personal experience to understand the topic fully.
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Post by E Fish on Jun 20, 2009 7:58:44 GMT -5
Ah, I see. Generally, it is the case, in my own experience, that H/C fics do involve friendship. Many of mine also involve the added twist of discovering the friendships even exist at all.
I would say both yes and no to your assumption of the unconditional bond between members of communities. Large multi-fandom sites such as ff.net lack any real bonds in my experience. It's too large and too spread out...and there's little opportunity to form the kind of bonds you are talking about. There are forums, but those are still less effective than the smaller fanfiction communities such as the one I belong to (NFA). Even on NFA, the bonds are only between the most active members...and mostly among those who follow the same thing. Some of the members have petty disagreements about the running of the site or about the purpose of it. We almost had the entire site shut down because of that.
I don't think that the bonds are unconditional. What it is, to me, is the fact that we immediately have something in common: a TV show we enjoy and the fact that we write about it. Even if I don't read the stories by some of the members (which is often the case), I have friendships with them formed because of the site we both belong to...but I get annoyed at them and occasionally avoid some of them just like I do in real life; so I think ff sites are more an extension of real life relationships (not a replacement thereof).
I should mention, however, that I have only been writing fanfiction for just over two years, and only in a single fandom (NCIS) and my perceptions could be different from those who have written for a long time in multiple fandoms.
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Post by ChildofSheba on Jun 21, 2009 11:35:37 GMT -5
As a woman of color, the fanfic communities I patronize do promote a sense of friendship, simply because sites that substantively include characters of color are scarce and I value those I find. Prominent African-American women are virtually nonexistent on television except in the roles of best friend/sidekick or wise earth mother sage. Science fiction is even worse. So for me, a site that portrays the dynamic, no-nonsense women I know in my everyday life is one that tends to make me open to getting to know the authors of such works.
Like all other friendships, the relationships range from very casual to close (with all the drama in between).
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ozgeek
New Member
NCIS fanficer
Posts: 4
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Post by ozgeek on Jun 22, 2009 23:21:18 GMT -5
I think the hurt/comfort stories look at things like - discovering the value of friendship
- forcing people to treasure what they have in the face of losing it
- seeing the hidden caring side of people (especially distant or nasty characters
There's a definite sense of "we are all the same despite our differences" which tends to come out when the chips are down, such as in fanfic hurt/comfort. The writers on our site are quite diverse from the deeply conservative to the morally ambiguous but we all do seem to find a common point in fanfiction and our love of one particular show and its characters. In the admin team, we try to monitor any bad blood on the site and we have a law of absolute acceptance. I know Special Ops suffered "Shipping Wars" and had to confine all ships to one forum. We would never allow that. If it's legal, it's OK. The 'modal' NCIS fanfic fan is a 26 year old single, childless, female American (I did a study). Maybe those are the types of people who crave marriage and kids and go for hurt/comfort to fill that need (ducks the barrage of fire from happy, contented single, childless women).
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Post by alleyskywalker on Jun 23, 2009 1:49:18 GMT -5
It really depends on the community, I think. Especially the size and how specialized it is. When you have something as huge and multi-fandom as FF.net, especially the way it’s set up – achieve style rather tan forum style – there aren’t very many bonds. They may form between certain individuals – usually mutual readers/reviewers, betas, co-writers, etc – but the whole site isn’t bonding, not even the entire fandom. When you have something more fandom-focused, especially if it’s set up as a forum, like TFN, it is easier to make friends and bond, yet again ppl tend do divide into clicks by era, or ships, or favorite characters though the community as a whole is better bonded. The most “bonded” communities, I think, are something like LJ comms focused on a specific fandom and paring – i.g. Hayden/Ewan (a.k.a. Obi/Ani) communities. These tend to be a LOT smaller than the upper mentioned examples and they focus very narrowly on a specific interest. I mean, you can’t have “shipping wars” in a comm that focuses on only one ‘ship right? There friendships tend to form quicker and more easily, plus there’s a lot less space for disagreement.
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Post by happyshep on Jun 23, 2009 6:29:24 GMT -5
So the more specialized a community is, the more likely its members are going to set aside their differences and focus on what they have in common? These conditions don't guarentee perfect harmony, but I'm generalizing.
Camille Bacon-Smith, who supplied the two quotes in the first post, was talking about fanfic communities in the 80s, when stories were exchanged in person or distributed to a local audience via fanzines. Bacon-Smith had only positive things to say about fan communities in this time, and I'm interested to understand why her views are no longer relevant. Do some of the older members of this discussion think it might be fair to assume that in the time before the internet, meetings with other fan-writers generally involved smaller groups and were therefore more harmonious?
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Post by dchann on Jun 23, 2009 13:54:44 GMT -5
They definitely involved smaller groups. Fanzines, which were only printed on paper back then, had to be sought out: you bought them at conventions (Star Trek, science fiction, specialized TV shows, etc.), or knew who published them and contacted them for a subscription. That was one way of sharing fanfic writings.
The other was on a more personal level: you met with a group of like-minded fans and passed around the fanfic you wrote. That was how I started, as a Man From U.N.C.L.E. fan at the age of 12 or 13. I got to know a group of girls in my school who were all fans of the show, and quickly we started writing stories in notebooks and sharing them everyday.
Science fiction fandom arose in the US in the 1930s because the pulp magazines carrying short sf stories were happy to provide a letters column, and print full addresses of correspondents. Fans started writing to each other, and then planning get-togethers (conventions) and doing fannish publications of their own fiction (fanzines).
Now just because we have the internet, that doesn't mean that stories aren't still passed around that way anymore. Probably there are people who are emailing their stories to their friends, not knowing that anyone else might want to read them. (Or being shy about sharing them.)
Like most things, how much personal contact a community has will dictate how anonymous it feels. fanfiction.net, despite having author profiles, still feels very anonymous. No one updates those to say that they've had a lousy day, or just got a promotion at work. In smaller communities, like message boards such as this one, there's more opportunities to tell about oneself.
I don't know that I'd say that pre-internet days were more harmonious. Interactions involved people, after all, and people sometimes get along and sometimes don't. In a larger group, it's easier to ignore someone you don't like.
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Post by mpbrennan here on Jun 24, 2009 0:22:14 GMT -5
Hi happyshep, I'm back. Sorry it took me so long. Not logged in because I'm lazy. Interesting discussion, as always. Speaking as someone who's participated in a variety of communities from several different fandoms, I see where everyone is coming from. There are communities where all or many of the members grow very close. These tend to be the smaller forums. I've seen it in specialized communities like the gaeta_squee community on LJ and the OAA Yahoo group, but I saw the same thing at the Pretender Centre, which is just a generalized forum for the Pretender show. It's my experience that in smaller communities members get the sense that they have to stick together. This is sometimes due to specialized interests, but in the case of the Pretender forum, it may have just been a product of the shrinking fan base; since the show had been off the air so many years, the remaining active fans all know each other and try to get along. In small groups people tend to grow close, even if their interests are diverse. (A qualification: Pretender Centre has seen a little drama similar to what the NFA members are describing, but it burned out quickly.) I haven't really seen a link between friendship within communities and the production of "friendship fic." Both of the communities I mentioned above focused on characters who were essentially loners in canon. Some authors choose to create strong noncanon or loosely canon friendships for the purpose of fic, others choose to focus on the ramifications of a life lived alone. When members of a community form close friendships, those relationships can remain strong even if the members have different interpretations of the character in question. In tP fandom, Jarod/Parker 'shippers peacefully coexist (for the most part) with Jarod/Parker friendshippers and the Jarod-and-Parker-hate-each-other camp. The trick to fitting in a community like this, where members are diverse but few in number, is understanding the unwritten rules of engagement. In a very specialized community you can gripe and vent about the rest of the fandom as much as you want. A community of hard-core Tolkien purists, for instance, can engage in endless diatribes about how they hate LotR slash, confident that slash authors will probably never read their remarks. As long as everyone in the small community dislikes the same things, it doesn't upset the harmony of the group. In a diverse community it's more difficult. Fans of one 'ship have to be respectful of other conflicting 'ships and modes of thinking. To form close bonds within the community, the group must either be extremely specialized or place heavy emphasis on diversity and acceptance. Wow, this is starting to sound like a sociology paper. The quotes seem a little off, but that's not surprising if they were based on 80's fandoms. Large fandoms with frequent member disputes seem to be a product of the internet. It's much easier to be a jerk to someone if you only know them as words on a computer screen. Even essentially mild-mannered human beings (like me) sometimes get a thrill out of "pwning the other guy" in a debate. Close-knit internet communities do exist, but they don't just happen. Forums that place a high premium on civility seem to do better than those that encourage lively debate. Shutting up before I scare away the new people with my incessant rambling.
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Post by happyshep on Jun 24, 2009 0:29:30 GMT -5
Thanks for your post dchann. You've mentioned a lot of things that I hadn't thought or known of.
Before she conducted her study, Bacon-Smith had experienced very little exposure to fan-fiction. With an outsider's eyes she seems to portray the world of fandom as some sort of sanctuary for opressed women. Happily my markers will appreciate this sort of criticism in the final project.
edit: i didn't even see your post mpbrennan, we posted nearly at the same time. your discussion is very helpful, particularily the point you make about the consequence of internet anonymity.
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Post by ddddyyyy on Aug 6, 2009 3:28:48 GMT -5
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Post by afda on May 5, 2010 7:27:36 GMT -5
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Post by afda on May 5, 2010 7:28:38 GMT -5
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