Standing On Boxes

(From Saturday, June 2, 2007)

Just because it is something I want to see/watch and it is cheap (aka ‘on sale’)… is not a valid reason to spend money.

At this point I have enough tv show/anime DVD sets to make it through the summer until new network tv starts again. Let’s count:

• 3 seasons of Stargate SG-1 (I’ve watched a few episodes but not all of them. I like the characters but a lot of the episodes are basically the same thing repeated.)
• 1st Season of “The Rockford Files” (Gritty realism without the modern music/action heavy episodes of modern cop shows)
• Cagney and Lacey – 1st Boxed set/season. (Much better than any other cop show I’ve watched. But I’m taking it slowly thru the set.)
• Firefly – not sure why I haven’t watched it yet. I’ve had it for years. (It was on sale)
• Bones – Season 2 (Okay, it isn’t out yet… but as soon as it hits the shelves I plan to get it.)

And then there’s the anime…

• First couple episodes of “Excel Saga” (Amusing but I don’t think I’ll buy the boxed set.)
• Magic Knight RayEarth – (2 seasons – 49 episodes – 20 minutes each) bought last week. Working my way thru it now. Not what I expected. I find the “mini character” insertions annoying (not sure of the technical term – it’s when mini versions of the characters replace the regular characters for a moment). Excel Saga has similar things but at least MKR has a coherent story I can follow in my old age.
• Escaflowne – on the slow watch.
• Mouse – made it half way thru before the blatant “fan service” got to be too much (it’s only 12 episodes – 15 minutes each. I’ll watch the rest eventually.)
• Jubei-chan: Lovely Gantai no Himitsu – found the entire (4) set of DVD’s at the used bookstore today. Wiki says there’s a sequel, also 13 episodes.

I also have a few single DVD’s (movies, etc.) in the to watch pile… not going to list them here.

My hard drive on my Powerbook is misbehaving… I lost the partition that had my blog stuff on it.
I’ve sort of lost everything since June 2nd. (I did a backup at that point because of all the stuff I deleted (And have backed up somewhere else)
(I’ve recovered a lot of stuff but since the chances are the hard drive will fail completely in the next week or so… I’m only getting the basics running on it until I get the hard drive replaced.
I’ll repost it but I’ve lost the comments tied to the entries. Sorry.

I’m only just barely aware of the whole LiveJournal community thing.
I’ve had a blog for 5 years now, so I didn’t really have any use for LiveJournal. At least not until I wanted to participate in a fic challenge or two that was on LJ.
Seems I’ve been missing a lot of fan fiction related discussion. No more.

Would I ever post any of my fics there? At this point I can’t imagine doing that.
However, I DID create an account there using my preferred user id/name at other fic sites. Reserving it, so to speak. “;->” Just don’t expect to see any fics from me there any time soon.

Okay… I’ve been writing fan fiction for over 5 years now. Really. 99.99% of it can be found here, on my blog.
A link to an interview with an academic type person (Someone at MIT) on BBC radio was posted to the TtH Forum: BBC 5 Live interview with Henry Jenkins.
He (Henry Jenkins) attempts to explain fan fiction in the 3 minute interview. One of the things that struck me is that he said fan fiction is primarily written by women.
Huh. This struck me as odd… The fic writers in the fandoms I read on a regular basis (BtVS (mostly crossovers), Kim Possible, and some anime fic writers) seem to be equally spread between male and female writers. Not sure about the age distribution.
Of course, we’re talking about a small subset of one corner of the fan fiction universe. And he, apparently, has been writing/examining the fanfic community for over a decade. I’ll have to bow to his longer experience.
And… of course… “TtH” is owned/nurtured by a woman. Sure, Jinni lets some of us help out and someone else (jrabbit) does the heavy coding work that makes it such a great archive site, but she’s the ultimate authority there.
Anyway… someone pointed to his blog and I found the article there that directly ties into his interview:
Transforming Fan Culture into User-Generated Content: The Case of FanLib
It makes for interesting reading. And includes anecdotal info on the fan fiction gender issue (Guess I’m going to have to dig deeper – find his books, etc. to get a clearer picture of that. Does he have non-anecdotal evidence?) Sure, he does say more men are writing fan fiction than before but he ties it into the growth of online communities. We’re apparently in a minority of miniscule proportions…
Not sure how accurate it is… but it certainly leaves me feeling like I’ve been clueless for not being aware of the gender disparity in fan fiction because I hadn’t noticed it until now.
Sort of like when I first started reading the feminist websites I now hit on a daily basis (like Feministe). A whole community / range of thought I’d missed.
(Oddly enough, I actually have a degree in English Lit and this kind of thing (fan created media/literature) wasn’t on the radar screen when/where I was in school. It wasn’t something we studied. Only one of my professors even came close to approaching this kind of topic.)
I don’t like that feeling of ignorance. Gonna have to fix it. Now.

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Oh yeah… the topic that this whole thing centers around?
There’s a new-ish web site for fan fiction called FanLib. Someone went out and got VC money to start a fan fiction website similar to YouTube. And the fan fiction community that is aware of it (mostly over on LiveJournal it seems. It’s been going on for over a week and I just heard about it tonight.) is up in arms.
Go read the article above for details. And if you aren’t careful… you’ll be sucked into the ever widening discussion about it at places like metafandom where it and the brief LJ mass banning of user journals in a fumbled attempt to pacify some right wing group of critics are the main topics of discussion.
And.. what does the FanLib issue and the “which gender dominates fan fiction” discussion have in common? Seems the FanLib folks committed the faux pas of aiming their site/sight at that prolific fan fiction demographic – the 15-34 year old male. The same “choice” demographic that Hollywood makes movies for and video games are aimed at.
In the process, totally ignoring the 99% (I might be exaggerating slightly) of the fan fiction community that ISN’T in that demographic. And when this was pointed out to them… the ignored the portion of that 99% that is in the majority. Go read the comments to Jenkins’ article about FanLib to see what I mean. They say it better than I can.