me + richard armitage status report #RABlogReunion

Suggested by Nat (her blog, here, was a major gathering point for the blogging fandom back when I started blogging). The first fanstravaganza was populated by Nat, Mulubinba, Traxy, Avalon (blog has been deleted), Reviewerama / Starheart, and Skully (blog has been deleted). They were sort of gen 1.5 as (I’ve been told) there had been a lot of people on LJ before that, although by 2010 it was hard to find them. At the point of F1, I had just started blogging about a month earlier, and Nat had invited me. It’s weird to be the survivor that updates fairly regularly and still about Richard Armitage. Even at the blog’s low point in October 2019, I was still blogging approximately twice a week.

So I don’t fit the prompt to talk about what I’ve been doing especially well, as I’ve been blogging this whole time. As of right now: I was able to see Uncle Vanya in January. I taught five classes this spring. One was finished the last week of January, and the other four went virtual / remote after Wisconsin went on “lockdown” in March. After what was easily the most brutal semester of my life, I finally submitted grades on Tuesday (and I am still numb about that). The U.S. news this week (as so often since January 2017, but especially in the last two months) has just been one slap in the face after another. So there would be plenty to write about, and the prospect of looming unemployment (as expected for summer, but due to the circumstances in the fall) means that I probably will.

So what affects blogging now?

Factors external to fandom:

Work: In the last two months, I put four history courses that had always been face to face into an online format for the second half of the semester. It’s not just a matter of somehow putting the material you had planned online, one to one — much of the material had to be developed again to fit the medium. According to my new computer, I have been spending twelve to fourteen hours a day on screen since I bought it. It consumed almost every waking moment; but of course, the longer I worked, the more inefficient I became, too.

Reality: Keeping track of current events has been a full time job on its own: I’ve always been personally and professionally interested in news but there’s been a lot of history unfolding in front of our eyes this year.

Dad: The biggest logistical thing is my father’s stroke and the consequences (June 2018). If you’re a regular reader here you know some of that story. Living with a person who’s living with dementia is harder than I would ever have guessed. He came very close to having to move into assisted living last fall — and avoided it because he was finally able to accept the home health aids in the end — but now, of course, given the startling statistics (40 percent of COVD-19 victims in this state were residents of long term care facilities) it seems unlikely that he would do that, or that we would want him to. One takeaway from all of this: no problem is ever “solved” — as his condition changes, so do the “solutions” we find to deal with it. It really is an additional full time job on its own.

Factors internal to fandom:

Richard Armitage: I’m in a weird place — spent a ton of money to go to London to see Uncle Vanya, and yet when I made a list recently of all of the recent Armitage work I haven’t consumed (Castlevania 2 & 3; My Zoe; The Stranger; all the audiobooks; the second half of the second Wolverine podcast) I realized that I actually haven’t even looked at the majority of his recent work. Uncle Vanya really recharged my fandom and my fantasy life, and ensured the continuation of this blog (I had thought about closing it down on my tenth anniversary last February) as I realized there was still stuff to say. At the same time, at a time when I had so many things clamoring for my attention, I just couldn’t make time for things that I either suspected or learned were schlock [a lot of the audiobooks: Joy Ellis and CJ Tudor, I am looking at you] or simply not of especial interest, no matter how well done [Castlevania]). I may catch up on some of that this summer. In Fall 2016, after a year negatively impacted by the Cybersmile crap and things Armitage said about his fans during Hannibal, after seeing Love, Love, Love, and getting fully drawn in again, I decided that I needed to stop letting Richard Armitage interfere with my crush. In the wake of other stuff that has happened since then, and especially seeing Uncle Vanya, I’ve concluded that my crush on Armitage is probably going to persist despite potential, ongoing and recently intensifying negative influences on my feelings about being a fan (see next two points). In the end, although my views of him have changed over the years, I don’t think that my fundamental judgements about him in January 2010, or the reasons for the crush, were either mistaken or have changed. I’m still fascinated. That may be good or bad, I don’t know.

Twitter: What we’ve gained since Armitage sucked the fandom onto Twitter is nothing in comparison to what we’ve lost. This has happened both on the front of the general information about Armitage himself (Armitage’s Twitter presence is a catastrophe and in fact it’s mostly turned into exactly what he said he didn’t want it to be: largely a publicity stream for his own projects) and in terms of the conversations we have as fans. A significant piece of this is due to the lousy Audible marketing campaigns, which exemplify exactly the meretricious qualities of the platform: Twitter makes you think you’re talking to someone or have access when you’re actually not (and when you realize the implications of this fully, it becomes infuriating). Maybe there’s something to be gotten from the programmed replies to their non-statements or frankly offensive remarks to fans or to Armitage himself, but the best I can say about this whole experience is that it’s more insipid by the day, when it’s not concretely disgusting. Yes, I have found a handful of friends via Twitter, but that’s more or less been drowned out by the constant flood of marketing, supersatured goo, platitudes, and downright offensive statements. As I knew a thoughtful, mostly incredibly kind, intellectually interesting and reflective Armitage fandom before Twitter took over, I’ll reduce my analysis down to a Mcluhanesque “the medium is the message.” It’s really impossible to fit the kind of messages we had before Twitter into that format, but on Twitter, format is all. Earlier this spring I decided to put my own Twitter presence more or less on ice and that’s been a great decision. I am no longer the first person to know what’s happening with Armitage but I’m also no longer slowly suffocating in the toxic cloud, either, and I have felt my spirits recovering, which has made it totally worth it.

The Armitage fandom, behaviors: My basic position on fandom was from the beginning two-fold: (a) what fans do is legitimate, i.e., don’t condescend to fans; and (b) as long as it’s not illegal or in a strict sense immoral, there’s no justification for criticizing what fans do. This position meant that there were always pieces of fandom I was either not interested in or even didn’t agree with, but could mostly ignore — and that attitude even survived my own experience of harassment at the hands of fellow fans in the spring of 2014 and the amount of blocking I had to do later that summer in order to protect myself from exposure to fan-on-fan policing. Looking back, I experienced a turn of sentiment during 2016 during the Love, Love, Love run due to behaviors I experienced at the hands of fellow fans, ones I witnessed, and ones I observed afar in the post-play / stage door atmosphere. A lot of that was my own fault for thinking I could control things that obviously were beyond my control, but it has made me very leery of any kind of meetup with a fan I don’t already know F2F “from before.” In 2019, there were suddenly junior high school age behaviors erupting of a kind I frankly hadn’t seen before (fans behind the scenes urging their friends to shun other fans). None of it was illegal or immoral, but all of it made me not want to associate with other fans or open up to new ones. And now that we have fellow fans who propagate lies, conspiracy theories, and dangerously erroneous medical information as part of their fan presences or former fan presences, I am even less interested in belonging to this particular club. This is not a matter of politics but of fundamental ethics, and our discourse opens up to what we are willing to tolerate. I can agree to disagree about things like the marginal tax rate, transportation projects, the desirable level of SNAP entitlements, what parts of American history should be emphasized in schools, etc., but I can’t agree to disagree about openly racist statements, obvious lies about our governmental leadership or its political opposition, or facts about how viruses are transmitted. If I allow myself to be contaminated by those attitudes and behaviors, I am endangering my moral and intellectual health, and even more concretely, the political and public health of my country. So I’ve gone from a very broad view of fandom to a much more narrow one over the years.

The Armitage fandom, discourse: What I had to say about both my experiences and Armitage was controversial almost from the beginning and on some level I’m surprised I remained at the center of the blogging fandom as long as I did. The fact that the behavioral level of the fandom has changed makes me unregretful about my increasing marginalization in a situation where I so often lack time or energy to blog. But even more than that, I find that the content of the fandom has changed. This probably also has something to do with the medium aspect of the experience, i.e., as the platforms for expression have changed, the types of expression have changed as well. Some of this was been productive (tumblr and images, an increasing variety of fanfic) but much of it has not been. There was a much broader toleration of differences of opinion and different ways of being an Armitage fan five years than there is now, and the consensus of what should be of primary interest to fans, or what it is that fans want to spend most of their time commenting on, has ended up in a place that I find by turns equally unobjectionable and uninteresting. Some of that has to do with my version of recreational time — people will say “I don’t want fangirling to be stressful in any way” and I respect that position, but the thing is that this blog was never a casual activity for me. It was a safety valve and an escape but not because it was fundamentally unserious or frivolous (occasionally satirical posts aside). A lot of that has to do with my longevity as a fan, as well: there are conversations I am either bored by or actively opposed to continuing, and my persistence in a fandom where the mean time of excitement among new people seems to run between eighteen months and three years means that I just can’t force myself to participate in yet another conversation among new fans about facial hair or potential roles and am probably labeled a grump for that reason. But some of it has to do with my fundamental personality: I’ve always pursued my own goals independently of what people thought, I’ve never been interested in going along to get along, I’ve never subscribed to “if you can’t say something nice, be quiet,” and I’ve never had a problem with separating myself from groups whose behavior I find fundamentally boring.

Me as writer: When I started the blog, it was about letting go of a whole flood of feelings, not just around Richard Armitage but around the things that were causing the crush, and then later it was a vent for other things (my mother’s death, my father’s illness). At some point I realized the best posts were those that I was really writing for myself. There was always the issue of fans of the first hour (“legacy fans,” we used to call them) who felt they owned the sole right to speak about Armitage. I usually went out of their way; they were always bothered by me. But then I had an experience, with one of the more emotionally open posts I wrote in the last few years, when I written much less of that stuff, with reading what a group of fans elsewhere were saying about it. I won’t get into it, but it was viciously cruel. Their right, of course, to think and to say what they wanted, and my stupidity for looking at it once I realized what it was. But there were two lessons I drew from that. One was that on some level, maybe the time for what I had been initially writing (brutally emotionally honest posts) was over, as many readers could no longer process it with any good will toward me at all. The other was that when I began to write, I didn’t care what other people thought about it. I was writing for me in the sense that I just needed to get stuff out there. That was the hardest kind of writing, it was part of why the crush on Armitage was so productive (because it made that possible again after years of dormancy), and it was the kind of writing most likely to make me experience flow, which was the point for me. That’s really where I would like to get back to — and maybe the lack of attention to this blog in recent years in the broader fandom will make that sort of thing possible again. Well, that and unemployment. I would really like it to be possible again. We’ll see.

~ by Servetus on May 29, 2020.