Who is our fandom for?

Continued from here.

Going back to my comment that I never wanted to find myself writing this blog, I’ll expand on that for a second to say that the reaction I always had to it was that the author constantly felt that things used to be better. As a former professional historian, I am fundamentally opposed to that point of view as a sort of conceptual argument. O tempora, o mores! goes back to the Romans and probably further; I just happen to know the Latin. And frankly, I was bothered by the implicit suggestion that those fans from 2004-5 were just better fans, more interesting people, and above all more polite and virtuous. I’ve learned over the years that there are generations in this fandom. There are 2-3 generations of legacy fans who are “older” than me, and while I am friends with a few of those people, my bonds to them may never be as tight as they are with the people with whom I started. Part of this is because different generations in this fandom tend to shame each other. Some friends and I laugh when we read someone who is probably a teenager shaming our behavior. After we vent, that is.

As much as we get frustated, though, we also make new friends. I concluded that more fans with more diverse nodes and more diverse views actually creates a better fandom, if a different one, and that there was no reason to think previous permutations of our fandom were better than the current one. Just different. Most of the people I knew at the beginning of writing this blog are not blogging anymore or even especially intense fans, although there are a few exceptions. Many are still friends and facebook or email me from time to time. But I think the super intense phase of Armitage fandom for the average person I know has lasted about twelve to fourteen months. Which is fine. Fandom without obligation. There’s no contract for the Armitage Army. But it means if we didn’t have a pattern of getting new fans, the fandom would die. Social media have helped us, and the coincidence of the emergence of new forms of social media have been particularly noticeable as phases in Richard Armitage’s career have emerged — so that from crashing discussion boards to forums to youtube blogs to facebook to tumblr and twitter, as he has completed new projects, new forms and modes of communication have emerged that have enhanced, rather than detracted from, our fandom experience(s). Most people find a place they like best — one that fits their form of expression. Some of us are present in multiple spaces, or interact in one space and simply broadcast in others so that people who might be interested in what we have to say can be aware of it. This has been fine because the fandom has always been multi-nodal: even in the years when only forums were available, very quickly there were multiple forums to choose from. And new modes developed new cultures of what could be said and thought.

I admit I picked blogging and have stuck with it because it has allowed me the most freedom to do what I wish. I am not a casual fan; I need to think, and write, and discuss. I need to be serious about it — which is one thing that can get you put on moderation on this blog is accusing other fans of being too serious — because that is an inherent way of delegitimating someone else’s statements. Fandom has had its fun and escapist moments for me as it has for many people, but if I want to just turn off my brain, alcohol is a much quicker, less strenuous option. Since I have been a fan, the impulse to want to turn off my brain in that way has been a much less frequent one. As I have said so many times, it is a fundamental moment of fandom for me that this all turned out to be about being able to feel feelings that led to creativity — so I needed to create and protect my own space. Now, I have issues with Twitter as a medium — 140 char seems to me the ideal space in which to be misunderstood — so I mostly stay away, apart from having a presence there so I can talk to a few people who prefer to Tweet or DM.

My frustrations with Twitter communication aside, the fundamental challenge to our fandom doesn’t come from Twitter per se so much as from the fact that by means of Twitter, Richard Armitage or someone claiming to be a representation of him suddenly arrived in our fandom.

I was reading a lot this summer in various places about how social media have changed the fundamental power dynamic in all fandoms from one based on knowledge and expertise to one based on access. This transformation is causing tumult everywhere, and we observed it this summer, the problems that emerged between people who could go to London and those who could not, for instance; between those who could live out a desire to meet Armitage at the Old Vic stage door and those who could not; or even between those at the door who had encounter they were dreaming of and those who did not. I’ve been able to benefit both from the knowledge economy (I’m good at amassing information and presenting it) and from the access economy (I could afford to go to London this summer) so I don’t count myself as disadvantaged at all in either regard. That is one piece of what’s going on in Armitage Twitterverse, and while many fans love what they think is increased access, or the hope of increased access, and I am not writing this post to diss anyone who loves the experience around @RCarmitage — certain aspects of it are not pretty. As people vie for access to the crush, they have stepped on each other verbally in ways that are much more long lasting and painful to the psyche than the minor physical blocking that occasionally occurred in Webber Street toward the end of the run of The Crucible. Even so, that’s nothing new. Fans criticized, policed, bullied (and those are three different things in my opinion) each other on social media before Armitage on Twitter and they will do so when Twitter is long gone.

The problem is not the fans, and it’s not Twitter — I’m going to say it bluntly: The problem is @RCArmitage.

If what you want is access, the primary, perhaps the only place to be, is on Twitter because it is the only place where it’s demonstrable that @RCArmitage is looking. There have always been suggestions to me from both opponents and well-wishers that Armitage was reading this site, and I have always ignored them because he’s not in the audience for what I have to say. I cringed every time a fan told me she had printed something out and given it to him or sent it to him — not just when I was being “reported” but people who sent that stuff with approval because they wanted him to see it. Because I did the Legenda series for so long, I was one of few people who really had a good idea how long it would take him to follow all of his own fan reaction — the equivalent of a half-time job if he read only the stuff in English. (And it got much worse for a while, because of tumblr, although tumblr seems to be subsiding a bit — one of my concerns, frankly.) I don’t want access to Richard Armitage — if you read the comments of this blog for any amount of time you’ll witness my resistance to the suggestion that I should interview him (and I’ve got more to say on this theme after London, if I can ever finish writing that series) — but I find this dynamic of his potential ubiquity affects me, too. The top visited site in my search history is now @RCArmitage, above my personal facebook, and that is the place I go first when I open my blogging laptop. Even if I don’t want to talk to him, I want to know what “he” said.

There’s nothing wrong with that, really, except: because many people want access now — because they can have it, or something that looks like it (we can argue about whether a Twitter exchange with Armitage is really access or just another experience of a wall we can’t find our way through) — @RCArmitage will now draw everyone who wants that to Twitter. As a consequence of that, he will always be the most important and powerful speaker there, and increasingly in other places, because as fans go to Twitter, they leave other spaces. This has been particularly observable with tumblr, I find. So precisely the GIFs that Marlise Boland took the time to make fun of have become scarcer lately, at least in my perception. Tumblr was also one of the best places to find fan art. Some of it has moved to Twitter, but I find much less of it there. And, importantly — what I find there I find to be notably less creative, and I assume this effect is occurring because anyone who tweets anything has to assume that @RCArmitage is more or less likely to see it. Or that it could be tweeted at him from somewhere else, since all the media networks are starting to interface each other.

This is an impossible dynamic for a creative, I would argue. It’s undeniable that we provide our creative work for our audiences, that our audiences are important to us. If the main audience for any kind of fan production about Armitage is going to move to Twitter, because @RCArmitage is there, that means it is moving precisely to the place where the true extent of creativity will be most compromised.

This compromise occurs not just because some fans on Twitter engage heavily in protective activities about fan art or other things they don’t like (beard campaigns). It happens not just because in the Armitage fandom, as we have seen in the last six weeks, Twitter has seemed to provoke a kind of discussion about copyright that has called down the rightsholders on several fan artists — this was always a danger, and the second Armitage started working for Warner Bros. and his work fell into the purview of Sol Zaentz this risk was heightened. Almost all of us are engaged in derivative work of some kind, even writers, and this was always a potential problem. Twitter is not the only place that generates DMCA takedowns. Rather, the compromise of creativity will happen in Twitter most importantly because the discipliners — the policers and the bulliers — can now act in the presumed name of “Armitage.” Don’t say that in front of him! In the name of decency. I have heard it there already; I can hear it now.

This is not to mitigate the enjoyment — and the humor in funny cracks — of people who are tweeting at Armitage primarily for the benefit of other fans rather than in hopes of getting access. The point is the potential possibility of access, not the acces itself. Still, if @RCArmitage is going to take a role as either preacher or policeman, he is feeding the energies of precisely the people he says he wants to behave differently: Let’s all have fun, let’s not take this too seriously, I am doing this so I can be in touch with you and help out some charities that I care about.

Fun, virtuous Armitage. I like this version of you, too. I fantasize about you being my good guy, boy next door partner who helps ladies across the street and can laugh at a sexy joke. I hope you get the younger fans that your publicist is dreaming of, the millennials with their years of earning power ahead of them. But now you will also potentially have an army of fans who will have an incentive, in your name, to occupy themselves telling people who care about you equally as much and who have always made your fandom a fun and creative place to be not to take things so seriously. Maybe not so bad, if what you want to do is exert a sort of subtle control over what is said about you by appearing to be present. And I am not excluding that possibility. We all saw the mean kinds of things said about you this summer.

Except the reason someone is a creative fan in the first place is because something about your work affected her/him so seriously that s/he was compelled to do something that the average person, even the average fan wouldn’t do. I’ve got a conscience; I might be moved by Richard Armitage’s conscience, even if annoyed; but I’m not interested in being moved by the consciences of people who think it’s their job to tell me what I can and can’t say in his presence. I’m a creative because I can think outside those boundaries. The Armitage fandom has been good for me because I have been able to find that audience. I hope I will still find it. But if Armitage is going to implicitly or explicitly — merely by the fact that @RCArmitage is there and can be assumed to be watching — exercise control over the kind of creativity his fans exercise — I am worried.

I didn’t want to be the fan who said everything used to be better. I wonder if I am getting to that place — if it’s inevitable. And I wonder if that means it is time for me to go — despite having things to say still. The fandom will still be there — the people who adore Armitage’s work. I just wonder about what will happen to the creatives if we’re constantly at risk of the regular sort of bombardment that used to be only occasional in the days when Armitage limited himself to one or two messages a year.

To get back to where I started — Marlise Boland is a problem because she stands precisely on this boundary. Marlise Boland is unlikely ever to ask very interesting questions, I suspect, because she stands exactly on that cusp. Yes, she makes him look more human. Yes, she doesn’t have the boundaries of the professional interviewers. But she also doesn’t have their ethics — she is dependent on having resigned her true independent for what she wants, which is the chance to be the person who shows us Richard Armitage. To ask something dangerous, to risk displeasing our crush, is to risk the loss of access. She can never do that.

And I have wondered a few times this summer, if Armitage takes over Twitter, if that’s where everyone goes, how much the longer the rest of us will be able to do so.

Wondering.

~ by Servetus on December 18, 2014.