When Worlds Collide

In string theory, the universe is given as being composed on a gigantic membrane, a large flat surface that ripples, flows, and in some cases, runs into other membranes like it, causing the universes (yes, in string theory there are multiple universes) to collide. If you watch Fringe, you know that funky things happen when universes collide, like what happened in last week's episode, Jacksonville.

Yeah, I know, string theory. Something you probably thought would never be mentioned on this blog. But it's interesting stuff, though, really. If you are looking for a book, I recommend The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Good stuff.

Back out in the real world, we don't necessarily have worlds colliding on a quantum level, but I at least have my internet life and my real life colliding quite a bit this week over the matter of reviews.

Normally I'm pretty open about the fact that I lead this 'other life' on the internet. I write a blog that I love to tell everyone about. I use Facebook. I Skype. I write a lot of fanfiction. And, perhaps more importantly about the fanfiction, I review other people's stuff. Not as much anymore as I probably should in order to remain an active and participating member of my community, but enough. And I start running into trouble when people from my real life outside the internet tell me they'd like me to read their stories and review them.

Okay, that's not the troubling part. The troubling part is when I read them and I don't like them.

It's one thing to get a review from someone you don't know saying "I didn't like this for reasons A, B, and C listed below" and another thing entirely when you get a review from someone you DO know saying "I don't like your story for reasons A, B, and C listed below." When someone asks you to read something in person you feel obligated to like it and say nice things.

Especially troubling is when the person you're reviewing for is older than you (so theoretically you should be defering to them in matters of style and expierience) and you have more experience in the online community. I've been writing (and publishing, the publishing-and-exposing-for-critique part is important) online for six years -- the person in question has been writing and publishing online, as far as I can tell, for two.

Let me explain for the fanfiction laypeople in the audience-- In the online community, because many participants lack what in the real world might be called credentials to show that they're experinced in the field and because the age of the participants ranges across such a wide continuum, legitimacy is defered to those members of the community who have been participating the longest. I've been writing for six years. I have well over three hundred reviews on those stories, with several of them having a chapter to review ratio of 1 to 20. Chapter to review ratios mean that not only have a lot of people read it, but a lot of people have liked it enough to review. It's one thing to have a hundred chapters and six hundred reviews -- that's six reviews a chapter. Nothing special. It's another thing to have twelve chapters and 150 reviews. That's twelve reviews a chapter, a much more respectable number. The LOTR rewrite is averaging seven or eight reviews a chapter, not surprising given that the fandom is large and the original population has moved on to writing and reviewing other things.

Ergo, six years of writing fanfic and review ratios like that give me...well, I don't know, something like a bachelor's degree, maybe even a master's degree equivalent in fanfiction. At least that's what I like to think of it as.

And so we're at a bit of an impass. I'm supposed to defer to her in real life, but in online life, she should be defering to me. Meaning it's going to be hard for her to take my critique and it's going to be hard for me to give it. I don't want to write a long and disinterested review because for reasons of online etiquette no one gives those disinterested reviews and for reasons of proximity I don't want to tell her flat out that I didn't like it because then she can come up to me in person and say "Why?"

I'm also having the same problem not with fanfiction but with editing and workshopping we're supposed to be doing for my Writing Essays course. This week we turned in copies of our essays to our workshop groups and this afternoon we'll be getting together to discuss revisions. There are three other people in my group.

I had no problem finishing and editing two of the essays.

The third was a disaster. Okay, maybe I'm overstating a little bit. The first two were funny, relatable. The third was...an essay. We had a topic, and Essayist Number Three wrote about his topic. It was neither funny nor engaging nor even very well written. It was words on a page, and they weren't even cleverly placed. And I don't know how I'm going to tell him that in workshop today after I'm in raptures about the other two essays.

Anyway, we'll report back this afternoon and tell you how it went. Meanwhile, I think I'm going to type up my notes to my online/real-life freind and see how rocky that road gets. Maybe worlds colliding won't have to be a diaster after all.

Warning, This Content May Not Be Suitable for Young Adults

Yeah, I put that as my title in a joking sort of way, but I'm actually serious. Some of this content may not be appropriate for young adults. I'd hide it behind a cut or something like you can do on LiveJournal, but Blogger has its limitations, and that's one of them.

So I'll write it again in LARGE RED LETTERS.


SOME OF THE ISSUES ADDRESSED IN THIS BLOGPOST MAY NOT QUALIFY FOR A PG13 RATING.


Okay, best I can do. Anyway. It's my job both as an academic and as a member of the fanfiction writing community who takes her appropriative art form kind of seriously (as seriously as you can take fanfic, anyway) to question why my community does the things they do and what that says about its component members. You may remember my post on marginality a few days back.

No sooner had I written about why fanfiction is often used to involve or emphasize overlooked populations when this little gem crossed my LJ flist. (A flist, for those of you not familiar with the term, is a portmanteau of freind-list)

chichuri (chichuri) wrote in oliviaandpeter
Entry tags:fic
Fic: A Minor Adjustment (Olivia/Peter)
Fandom: Fringe
Characters/Pairing: Olivia, Peter, Olivia/Peter, male Olivia/Peter
Word Count: 3105 Rating: R
Summary: Olivia runs afoul of a pathogen that changes her from female
to male.
Warnings: Smut, some swearing.
Spoilers: Through Season 2.
Disclaimer: I don't own Fringe or its characters.
Author's Note: Written for Porn Battle IX.
Prompts used: genderswap, secret.

Given the reactions of the characters involved, this story should either be categorized as crackfic or as evidence that the Fringe team has become way too jaded. About a ton of thanks go to crazylittleelf , muselives , alamo_girl80 , and vagajammer for enabling me; without them this story never would have been finished.

Okay, so now you all know that yes, I follow the TV show FRINGE enough that I'm part of a group on LJ that ships Olivia/Peter (because come on, after last episode we all know even Walter ships O/P) and you also know that let's face it: fanfiction writers write some CRAZY shit. This is otherwise known as crackfic or crack!fic, i.e., writing you would do if you were on crack. Additionally, you also may have figured out that I'm crazy and liberal enough to give this fic half a chance. I only got about half-way through because I am not a slash shipper and as much as I support the gay rights movement, I don't want to hear about gay sex. Sorry. I have issues with heterosexual couples kissing in public, too, though, so I don't know what that says about me.



Anyway. The mere existence of things like this brings to my mind a lot of questions about fanfiction and the crazy people who propagate it. Olivia and Peter as a m/f pairing is something that is a completely and totally viable plot option within the premise of the show. As I've already mentioned, we even have a canon character rooting for the Olivia/ Peter ship to sail. So why go through the trouble of making Olivia turn male for the purposes of a story? Fringe is one fandom where, oddly enough, things like that might actually happen.


The obvious answer is that some teen girls (and some not so teen girls, for that matter) really like guy on guy sex. Don't ask me why, I'm not one of them. The more subtle and slightly less obvious answer is that fanfiction has always been a way to question the standards of heteronormative society (big word that i'm sure my Human Relations prof would be proud of me using) and this is one more way to do it, by physically changing the gender boundaries already placed on the characters to allow a heteronormative pairing (Olivia and Peter) to be made into something that can question the norm (Oliver and Peter.) Catherine Tosenberger in her 2008 article for Children's Literature magazine entitled "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction" brings in the work of several other authors on why slash is prevelent, saying

"It is unsurprising that most fandom scholar-ship presents slash as a potential
site for women to resist the dominant ideologies of patriarchal, heteronormative
culture. [Constance] Penley draws upon the work of Joanna Russ, as well as that of Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, and discusses slash as a subversive act, wherein women can articulate a fantasy of equality between romantic partners that is difficult to achieve in heterosexual relationships (see "Brownian" 155–57, and
NASA/TREK 127–30)."

Never thought about questioning the heterosexual norm for reasons of equality, but hey, I guess it makes sense. (The rest of this article, by the way, is really interesting, and if you can get to an academic library that can get you an online copy through Project Muse or something, read the rest of it.) Tosenberger goes on to talk in the rest of her article about why Harry Potter fanfiction in particular is a great playground for authors intent on exploring thier identity through fanfiction, gender or otherwise, which is something that I've already explored in other writings.



In the course of my wanderings to make something substantial out of this find I discovered two things. One is the existence a term I'd come across before but never known the meaning of -- acafan. Tosenbeger identified herself at the end of her article as someone who participates in online fandom; like all statements of this nature, I wanted to find out more. A search of her name lead me to 'acafan'. The term can be hyphenated (aca-fan) and appears most significantly in the title of Henry Jenkins' Blog "Confessions of an Aca-Fan." Henry Jenkins, whose work was only some of the source material I used for my fanfiction paper, is an academic at USC currently teaching a course on participatory culture, and the term he uses in his blog title comes from the abbreviated term 'academic fan' an academic who both identifies themself as a member of the online participatory culture community (as either a contributor or observer) and a mainstream academic involved with researching appropriatly mainstream things. (Or teaching about non-mainstream things, as Jenkins' case may be.)



Does this make me an acafan? I consider myself academic, and I consider much of the fanfiction writing I do now to be based in an academically sourced ethos (observe the five books I checked out today on medieval poetry and courtly love for research on where to begin an interesting cultural exercise I'm inserting into the middle of my LOTR fanfic reboot.)



The other discovery (more of a pet peeve, actually) is why my fanfiction, as a perpetuation of the heteronormative discourse, isn't worthy of scholarly articles. Can't I explore my sexuality too and have people write about it? I know that's what I used fanfiction for in middle and high school. It's something I'm revisiting as I revisit this LOTR story that occupied most of my time as a fanfic writer then, too. Two massive (and may I say for the fifteen year old version of me, very racy) sex scenes? Probably not going to be in this version. At least the first one isn't. The second one is going to be toned down on account of a lot of things, not the least of which is me paying more attention to the ROTK timeline.

So that's my two cents worth of research that I'm not getting a grade for. Like so much other research in my life at the moment, unfortunately. But hey, as my pedagogy class is teaching me, the self-motivated learning is the kind you get the most from, so maybe this blog thing might be beneficial after all...