Who owns Richard Armitage’s fan messages? (part one)

[Background to this in terms of my mood is learning yesterday that George Soros was funding the Ferguson protests and that Richard Armitage “won” another Anglophile Channel prize. Yes, I realize this post is likely to be controversial and that some readers won’t like that. It also attempts, however, to be point-blank honest about my feelings. My theme of 2015 is “liberation” and I’m really optimistic that the prospective forthcoming expansion of our fandom will guarantee the ongoing possibility of greater diversity of opinion. All I ask is that people who leave reactions do not make personal attacks on me or other fans. As I still cannot tell whether Marlise Boland is a fan or a journalist, I leave you to your own consciences on that one. I remain conflicted.]

me + richard armitage fandom wank

So, remember this, last December? I knew that move would be controversial and that even some friends of mine would disagree with me or be angry, but I had no idea that going down that road would have the effect on me that it had. I want to talk about it now because of how it’s made me think of my role and investment in the Richard Armitage fandom in the time since. I was just thinking, should it be “the Richard Armitage fandom” or “Richard Armitage’s fandom” and I think I am going with the former, because I don’t think it belongs to him, but rather to fans, even if I no longer believe in a “we.” I reached some kind of turning point last December, without realizing it immediately, or really being able to characterize it now. And as much as I want to feel independent of the presence of @RCArmitage, I see that I am affected by it despite my resistance. So I hope writing this post will help me figure it out.

First, the backstory (as I saw it / see it)

When Marlise Boland announced she’d have an interview with Richard Armitage during the Los Angeles publicity for The Battle of the Five Armies, I thought, oh, no, not again, and I knew I wanted to say something, but I needed info first. I asked which she was, fan or journalist, and closed comments to see what the readership thought on a knee-jerk basis, without committing to my own position. I’d read her own statement on facebook that she was a journalist. And, I admit, I’m a captive audience — if Boland is the court press secretary, I’m going perforce to watch any interview at least once, no matter how I feel about her work. When part one of the interview went public, I was at work, but a friend with whom I talk to privately about Armitage things these days had sent me a message that it had appeared, mentioning that apparently Boland was completely unaware of the history of fan giving efforts on behalf of Richard Armitage beyond what her own friend had done.  So I went over to download the interview and watch it.

I had almost nothing positive to say about it other than that I loved the teacup, so I discussed it solely with a few friends behind the scenes. My reaction was above all: boredom. Is it really possible that she can make Richard Armitage boring? I messaged my friend, so far this is an astoundingly boring interview. I mean, the guy says he doesn’t ever want to be asked about being tall and getting cast as a dwarf ever again and then they go on to speak about scaling, something fans in particular have heard about ad infinitum. This seems like a counter-productive interview strategy — I was yawning. Yawning! Then I got to the moment where she calls following the Internet traces of the Armitage press junket (which was created precisely so that fans could follow it and draw their friends in! so now participating in a marketing effort designed for that purpose makes one a stalker, except of course that she was doing it too!) “stalkerish” and I hit pause to make time for a loud snort about the irony that precisely she would make that statement and to let my blood pressure fall. Yeah, no matter what anyone thinks, she’s not a fan, she’s a journalist, I thought, that’s what they do, rely on us to bolster their audience numbers, and then diss us in conversations with people whom we’ve come to really care about, like Banksy says, they’ve got us coming and going. As I continued to watch, my friend and I got to talking, and I said to my friend, he surely knows more about the history of the fandom than she does, maybe he’s too nice to say anything, or too tired, and we got to talking about the way she made the statement — obviously she thought she was trying to represent “the little people,” of which she does not see herself as one, of course, except that she was only aware of one segment of fans. As this post notes, however, Boland spent a disproportionate amount of the interview talking about fans. Why was she so uninformed, then, if that was what she wanted to talk about? I tweeted her after that to let her know about the history my friend was concerned about.

The second part came out, and everything that bothered me about the first part seemed just as bad or worse, along with some snarky comments about what fans will do with things Richard Armitage says or does — if you’re a fan, Ms. Boland, like everyone seems to believe, then why are you criticizing fans? How are you any better than us? — but there was a new wrinkle — a sort of cryptic cut-off statement to the effect that there would be an exclusive Christmas … something. I was still wavering about writing anything about it until I saw this post, which made me think, okay, those of us who are chatting behind the scenes about this are not alone in our frustrations, maybe we should be a little more vocal, see if we can get something better than what we’re being given now. My behind-the-scenes conversation was considering the meaning of that information and turning to the whole question of whether Boland “got” Armitage’s Christmas message and how we would feel if that happened. I did not pause long enough to reflect on that relationship, as it seems now, but I’d decided the time had come for me to speak my piece.

In three posts I wrote that night, I broached the topics of Boland’s ambiguous status and the problems it created for a fan commentator in speaking about her work, the direction from which I anticipated criticism of that position would come, and the extent to which the desire for a deceptive access was damaging the best parts of our fandom. I was on a bit of a high after I published; some of these topics had been on my mind for years (“the Gospel of Friendship,” in particular) or months (fan responses to Armitage on Twitter), and I felt like I’d let go of some stuff that bothered me having been honest and direct. When I saw a post that went in the other direction, I also reblogged it so people were aware I thought there could be a rational defense of Boland’s work, even if I didn’t share it. My statement was construed as mean, just as I’d predicted, oddly confirming the things I’d asserted previously.

I’d probably have left it at that point, because I wasn’t enjoying the discussion all that much, and I wanted to go back to watching the movie, and not Boland. If watching her work gave me high blood pressure, having to talk about it didn’t have a significantly different effect; that sense of liberation evaporated relatively quickly. But then two things happened. After making a statement intended to shame us on Facebook, Boland blocked me and Perry, and I saw a conversation in which she confirmed (and appeared from perspective to boast) that she was going to have Armitage’s exclusive message. My head was kind of spinning at that point — and I thought, she is a fan — a journalist doesn’t care what audiences say about her — this is some weird kind of rhetorical quicksand where I think I can write about a journalist, or someone who behaves just exactly like a journalist, but then she turns out to be someone with whom I’m supposed to have stuff in common and now I’m perceived as having been a jerk to a fellow fan. If she’s a journalist, I’m allowed to write what I’ve written; if she’s a fellow fan, then I’ve just massively broken my own rule about policing.

And at that point I stopped writing about her because it had become rhetorically impossible for the moment — but I had definitely reached a low point in terms of my self-esteem as a fan. First, I thought, I needed to have shut up about this two posts ago at the very latest, if she’s a fan. And then: Is she going to have the message? I wondered. I had several hours of feeling despondent — again talking to people behind the scenes about the feeling, something I’ll discuss a bit more in a second, before Armitage appeared on Twitter.

pic.twitter.com/4KDUvFcjWi

— Richard Armitage (@RCArmitage) December 23, 2014

It turned out that Boland didn’t have the message — she had outtakes from the earlier interview that she glued together as a Christmas “exclusive.” Richard Armitage tweeted his own Christmas message to fans ahead of her piece — along with a tweet of a picture by Sarah Dunn in which he asserted “no favouritism.”

A little Christmas experiment for everyone to enjoy, no favouritism I promise (apart from @studiobaby for the photo) pic.twitter.com/7x89wBI8Be

— Richard Armitage (@RCArmitage) December 23, 2014

I felt a lot better about him — and myself — when he tweeted his own message.

And then I went off to brood.

Continued here.

~ by Servetus on January 19, 2015.