To Fandom or Not to Fandom

When the season finale of House (or Dexter, or The X Files, or whatever single TV show I’m into) airs, I promise myself: next season, I will not fall for the same old trap. I will not seek out spoilers from Wikipedia or fanboards. I will not skim through fanfiction.net to see what curious things other people have come up with for these characters. I will not read reviews, blogs, or comments on the episodes and get worked up that other people seem to have interpreted the same story in a completely opposite manner (or that some of the posters seem to disagree with me on what stories are and why one should care about how they’re made).

I did OK on the spoiler front this past season of House — the one or two I read were entirely by accident, and they mostly turned out to be false. I did manage to spoil plenty of episodes for myself by deciding that next week’s preview looked like it could be an awesome episode about X only to find it was really a boring episode about Y, but that’s neither here nor there. I did slightly worse on the fanfiction front — didn’t read any stories, but occasionally scrolled through the summaries to find out what people thought of recent developments.

(Fanfiction is better than essays for that, IMHO. What people really think floats to the surface of the plot and characterization. For example, it’s pretty easy to tell when many fanfiction authors a) hate a certain character; b) see themselves in a certain character; or c) believe two characters should hook up.)

And up until the finale, I was doing pretty good at divorcing myself from fandom. I hadn’t checked out message boards, internet forums, or comments on various places that review the story.

*sigh* Yes, that was in past tense. Which leaves me wondering: is it more fun to be part of an online fandom or not?

I mean, my first fandoms were solitary occupations. The Internet simply wasn’t ubiquitous when I was a C. S. Lewis fangirl; even if I’d known there was such thing as fanfiction and that I wanted to read or write it, I wouldn’t have been able to click over to fanfiction.net and devour various stories about Susan dealing with the aftermath of her family’s death or Edmund and Peter making out*. Instead, I just read the books and watched the BBC movies over and over and over again; imagined all the really cool plotlines that could happen with the Pevensies and co. after the end of the seventh book; and occasionally began stories about me and my cousins on our way to Narnia**.

Likewise, although the Star Trek fandom was one of the first to make its way online, ten-year-old me had no idea how to go onto listservs and newsgroups, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to define the word “fanzine”, let alone know where to find one***.

But when I became an X Files fan in eighth grade, my family had just got a dial-up connection. I still wasn’t comfortable talking on message boards to strangers, but, well, one thing led to another, and by the end of the series, my friends and I ran a humour website where we wrote comedy lists, archived parody fanfic (our own and other authors’), ran a letters column, collected spoilers, and put up episode “reviews”.

It was nice to have people who shared my obsession — although the ones who were most fun were my real-life friends, not my online ones. And I didn’t encounter much that frustrated me, except the show’s sometimes goshawful writing. Sure, there were opposing camps of “MSR shippers” and “noromos” and people who wanted Krycek and Mulder or Scully and Doggett to hook up and have an orgy, but we were having so much fun poking fun at everything that I barely noticed if someone praised an episode I thought was terrible or belittled a plot twist I thought was great.

To be fair, looking back, I don’t think the characters on The X Files inspired the same sort of divisiveness as do the characters from a lot of my current favourites. It was pretty obvious who was going to finish the series OK, who was going to be the bad guys and lose, and who was going to end up as a couple. (Protip: if you kill someone in the teaser, you bleed green acid, and/or your nickname has “Cancer” somewhere in it, you are probably the villain.)

But fandoms like Harry Potter and House inspire hella Internet arguments, maybe because the characters and plots symbolize such extreme worldviews and exist in such ambiguous moral universes. For instance, it’s easy to make the case that Gryffindors are good and Slytherins are evil; that Slytherins are better than they’re painted and Gryffindors have a lot to apologize for; or that Slytherins and Gryffindors are all buttwads who don’t pay attention to the rest of the human beings they claim to be fighting about. Depending on how you feel about responsibility and freedoms, there’s evidence to argue that Wilson and Cuddy are jerks who don’t deserve a friend like House… or that House is a jerk who doesn’t deserve friends like Wilson and Cuddy. Or both. Or neither.

Maybe it’s just that I’m older now and better able to find my way around online. (Read: I no longer have scheduled time commitments, like classes or a 9-5 job, and therefore can spend lots of time online when I should really be doing my work.) Or maybe it’s that everyone’s got  a whole lot more used to the idea of the Internet and fandom became mainstream. But I feel like my current fandoms have eclipsed the original series which brought them to life. Unfortunately for y’all, I spend a lot more time pondering House and Harry Potter than I ever do actually watching or reading the stories.

Not that that’s a bad thing — in theory, it should make stories more enjoyable, right? Well, at least for people like me who take pleasure in dissecting them and trying to figure out what makes them tick, or for fans who like to interact with other people. And yet, every time I delve into a message board or spoiler site, I come away feeling like I’ve just eaten too many Timbits: bloated, overstimulated, sick.

I think, in the end, the reason I find fandoms, online or otherwise, more off-putting than they’re worth is that they make it easy to take a mis-step off the edge of “we all agree to pretend these are actual individuals living in a self-consistent universe whose activities we’re privileged to watch/read about” into “this is all made up, pfui” . Sure, it’s fun to read that one piece of fanfic that skilfully illuminates one of the character’s psyches, or to observe debaters on the message boards mulling over what’s going to happen next, just like it’s fun to eat one Twinkie or sip a single mojito****. But too much of these sorts of fun can make you sick, especially when you either don’t know your own limits or can’t stick to them.

So I think I’ll do my best to stay out of fandoms for as long as I can, even though the summer hiatus is long, and it’s so easy to trawl the Internet for spoilers instead of working on treasure hunts or novels or papers. Fanfic and online discussion is a quick and easy fix to wanting to know what happens next, but my satisfaction with canon when it finally comes out always decreases proportionally to the amount I consume beforehand.

* I don’t mean to judge other people’s imaginations, but… wait, what?

** Curiously, we never actually reached Narnia. I got bored too soon.

*** Although now, due to legitimate research topics and lack-of-warnings on non-fiction books of essays, I do know what mature-rated Kirk and Spock slash fanart looks like. Thanks for that, academia.

**** And they’re not “bad for you”. Neither a fanfic nor a dessert nor a drink is inherently harmful just for being what it is, like it’s some malicious knock-off of the “real” food/stories you should be consuming. What’s harmful is deciding what you want, figuring out what you need to do get what you want, and then doing something different. Some people legitimately need more fats and sugars. Others need the kinds of stories on fanfic.net.