Escapade Con Report--part two

The 1pm panel was Cabals and Conspiracies and Conflict: The Myth and Realities of Fannish Status. A discussion of fannish status and how it affects (and doesn't affect) fandom. My main fandom is Stargate and while it's currently up to its ears in conspiracies and conflicts, I was still curious as to what issues exist in other fandoms. I had the impression that this had been a hot topic in certain circles--possibly in the LJ crowd--and at times I felt like I had come into the middle of a conversation.

There are three ways to become well known in fandom. The first is by being popular which equates to being accepted. The second is through leadership and the third through notoriety. There was a spirited discussion about BNFs (Big Name Fans.) It was perceived that some BNFs got more strokes/validation/feedback than was thought was deserved to them because of the BNF status. What actually came first? The feedback or the BNF status? Status was to be envied because it could be turned into better connection and access to the "cool kids" of fandom.

I think it was here that groups were noted to fight for ascendancy with the example of a series of Highlander Duncan/Methos lists that became increasingly more restrictive in content. Also, just because you could be a BNF in one fandom, that status did not necessarily transfer into your next fandom.

Slash fans have always been nerds, but within our own society, we still have the possibility to become the popular "cheerleader." Fandom as a meritocracy was discussed. Status is fluid--"what have you done for me lately?" There was laughter over whether Escapade was a cabal. Personally, I think of it more as a summit meeting as it certainly isn't a secret.

So, I'm left to ponder what else goes with fannish status? You get name recognition; you get a bigger splash anytime you toss something into the fannish pool (whether it is perceived as a "quality" endeavor or not,) you get to hold court at cons or in your mailing lists (large or small.) Does it also mean your opinion has more value? Does it mean that you expect that your opinion to have more value? If you have pursued status, does this mean that only people on your own status level--or those above you-- have any value? Are other fans with lower status worth knowing? Does it give you permission to dismiss their presence and efforts? Would you bother writing a loc to someone of lesser status than you or do you fear that that could make you lose status? If you think of yourself as high status, do you still take risks with your projects or do you feel the need to behave in the same manner that won you this status? Does the number of BNFs increase with the length of time a fandom exists? Does having lots of high status fans become a detriment to fandom, causing an increased competition and friction between them as they work to stay at the top? Does being a high status fan encourage the practice of mocking/attacking/ridiculing those with lower status? Does all this work together to decrease variety in fandom?

But I digress....

The next panel was Don't Know Much About History and it was a flurry of information, some of which I'm just going to list. Go, explore.

Rough Medicine by Joan Druett (for the Hornblower crowd)
Sky Coyote by Kaye Baker
Authors Connie Willis, Mary Renault
Michael Jerks 13th Century

Costumers manifesto at www.costumes.org
www.daedalusbooks.com
searchedu.com (a search engine for .edu sites)
alltheweb.com
netserf.org (for Medieval resources)

Writers Digest of Everyday life in Ancient Egypt
Greenburgs History of Homosexuality


Next was the panel on Real Person Slash. I went to this to try to understand what this craze was all about. Obviously, lots of folk were very enthusiastic about this, even about things that still seemed to embarrass them to admit to. It was fun to watch . They did acknowledge the arguments against it as well as the concern/fears about the possibility that this genie could decant rather disastrously.

At 5pm, I gave the Generation Gap panel a miss to meet up with some SG fans. The group was rather large and when they decided to go down to dinner to the hotel restaurant, I had to take my leave as I had a previous engagement for dinner. My roomies and I have a tradition of having a Thai dinner on Friday night. We had picked a restaurant out of the yellow pages that promised "The best Thai food in town." It was a claim we'd decided to challenge. Chai's Thai Cusine was tucked away in a unimpressive strip mall, but it really did have the best Thai food I'd ever had. We ordered five or six dishes and were mightily impressed with most of them.

The Friday night vid show started late, but since I shudder at the thought of trying to get all that machinery to work together, I don't complain too much about that. This was a Viewers Choice/request show and there were lots of vids I hadn't seen before and many that I remembered fondly. The room had plenty of seating--even if the chairs made me wriggly after a few hours. I do enjoy the experience of watching vids in a room full of folks.

Since the show ran long, the Escapade Party was truncated, which is a shame. I do enjoy circulating and having a chance to meet people for the first time or have a brief chat with others I haven't seen in a long while. And the free booze. There just aren't enough hours in a day for all the fun to fit into, unfortunately.

Wow. All this and I'm only finishing the first day of the con!

Escapade Con Report Part 3

Saturday started out with breakfast at the hotel and the unexpected meeting of a friend, both of which conspired to cause me to miss both Is The Personal Political? (what role do peace, gender and class differences play in slash fan fiction?) and the Palm Pilot tech panel. Damn and double damn.

But I did make Fannish Entitlement (No, actually "Write More!" doesn't count as a Letter of Comment.) This was a great panel. Very, very thought provoking on a number of levels. I'd say that entitlement is pervasive throughout all areas of fandom.

Fans feel they are entitled to product (stories, vids, art,) community, feedback, author written thank you notes to the feedback, access to the "cool kids," bitching, warnings, disclaimers, a certain type of story ending, not to be hurt by a story's content (with the reader defining what is harmful.) Warnings--are they an entitlement or a courtesy? A writer is entitled to not *have* to please her audience (but of course, she shouldn't be hurt when her audience is displeased. It's a two-way street.)

Fans feel they are entitled to a specific relationship (D/M, J/D...) and to clear rules concerning things such as the presence of het vids, story warnings and non-fannish content slipped into fannish venues. Fans may feel entitled to opposite things and get aggressive in their defense of their entitlement. Fans think they are entitled to a con called Escapade, for instance (guilty as charged here.)

If the product that a fan creates is given to the fannish community as a gift, then logically there should be no expectation of feedback or to thank you notes for the f/b or for any expectation of specific content.

But I feel fandom is a society and societies do have rules. It is a not unreasonable to expect compliance to the rules. The trouble is that as an ad hoc society, the rules are mutually agreed upon by the inhabitants of each little fannish village. The Bunny folk want story warnings and their characters together, unmaimed and reasonably sane. The fen who like gritty, depressingly realistic stories/endings don't want warnings and delight in stuff that makes them feel intensely.

Water will find its own level and fandoms predictably fragment into ever tinier sub groups whose members share similar values. At some point though, their numbers become small enough that their production level doesn't come close to meeting demand and so they moan that there isn't enough "quality" product any more--with quality defined by them, of course. Ninety percent of everything is crap, but it's plain what is one fan's crap is another fan's gourmet dinner. As people go out of their villages in search of quality fic, they invariably come across groups with different values and probably their fiction will be judged as having a much higher crap content.

And to continue with this rant, I have to ask why do people insist on reading what they classify as crap? Doesn't that just reinforce their perception that so much crap is around? Why aren't they using their time to writing "good fic?" BTW, that's rhetorical question; I have a very good idea why they do that.

But to get back to the panel, the quick conclusion was that one should expect nothing; you are not entitled to anything! This is so true but so hard to do.


My next panel was Stargate: What's Wrong With This Universe? Since the original title was: Stargate -- The hypocrisy: "The show won't be ruined without Daniel; it's an *ensemble* cast" vs. "Die, Jonas, die!" this was actually an improvement. So, determined to see what the current opinion of the show was, I took a seat...and was surprised to find I enjoyed the panel. There were 40 odd people there off and on, and spoilers weren't allowed for season 6, except for titles. The moderator asked what the worst episodes were and Nightwalkers won out over The Other Guys. There were complaints from the crowd about the Stargate being underused, that things were so bad that they were taping over the episodes instead of saving them, that the writing had declined. The M&Ms were mentioned and the mod agreed, stating it would take at least an hour to complain about them. Someone mentioned Jonas and the crowd groaned. The mod said, "wait" and asked if there was anyone who liked Jonas? One person said yes, and when asked what they liked, they qualified it and said he was less obnoxious now. It was pointed out that a character could be obnoxious and still liked, like McKay. Other descriptors for Jonas were limp dish rag, super boy, weasel, Wesley Crusher and that he was now Exposition Boy. The mod said she had heard some online fans said Daniel was boring; she was puzzled and asked if anyone felt that way. The dynamic group response was "no." People mentioned they did not like "Incompetent Fanon Danny" but like "Competent Canon Daniel." There was a mention of Luminous Daniel, but I was so caught in that imagine, I never figured out if this was a good or a bad thing. The mod asked if anyone actually liked Jack and there was hearty agreement that they did. The many facets of Jack was brought up and Dumb Jack wasn't liked so much. I *think* there was an observation that 6th season Jack was Capt. Dunsel (from the Star Trek reference). I could be wrong about that though. Someone was mentioned to be Capt. Dunsel though.

There was a brief discussion earlier about the fan fiction favorite scenario of Daniel being raped by someone in the SGC. I kind of got the idea that there were two camps here. One camp dismissed that as unlikely to ever happen and if it did, Daniel certainly would NOT hide the assault from Jack and he would actively press charges. The second group brought up the current scandal at the Air Force Academy and put forth that maybe it might be a possibility and a real threat after all. Personally, I'm not sold on the idea that Daniel would go straight to Jack or Hammond or immediately file charges. That's a question of characterization of a complex character in a complex situation. And if he didn't come forward that does not automatically make him Fem!Daniel, either.

But enough of that! The next panel was Whose Fandom Is It? The rights of the individual vs. the right of the group (such as it is.) The moderators related an interesting account of how some Smallville fans took out a banner ad on Television Without Pity to advertise a SV archive (slash, I think.) Since Television Without Pity is frequented by Hollywood types, the fear of being on their radar made a number of authors pull their stories. The good intentions of some fans ended up infringing on the space of other fans and threatened their activities. Fandom seems to be an anything goes environment except for doing something that brings the "outside world" into our space--that seems to be the ultimate taboo. Our perceived sense of safety was questioned, that it was really an illusion and that fans had different strategies to achieve safety. For some, it is being invisible and for others it is being "out" and visible and challenging the copy write laws. I remember the profound statement that fandom is either being fed or it is being starved...but now I can't recall how that fit into this discussion!

Oh, then there was a whole thing on shunning the folks that had committed offenses against our society. That shunning was a great thing, but it didn't really work in this situation. From the examples given, I'd say that if the person violating the rules was supplying a product of some kind (stories, zines, etc...) that person would more than likely retain their status and not be shunned by enough people to make a dent in their behavior.

My next panel was Minotaur's Gay Boy Tells All. He was as helpful as ever, and started off polling the audience on kinks as he was preparing to update his site. He has the domain of slashdom.com and is intent on building quite a site there. He also recommended www.mgleather.com.

I went to half of the computer vidding workshop and took lots of notes, but now, two weeks later, all I'm left with is the impression of how complex it all is. And after seeing some awesome vids that weekend, I'm definitely feeling dubious about constructing and show vids in the future.

The vid show on Saturday was delightful and well-run. It started on time and efforts had been made to mix up the show for mood and content. My favorite vids were Voodoo (incredibly cool looking) and Closer (stunningly edited.) Other very impressive vids were Acceptance (very poignant and emotional), Learning to Fly (love to see this again as I have a hard time absorbing all the multiple levels on the first showing) and Salome. Bawitdaba was unique cause I don't like the song or the show, but nevertheless was impressed with how well crafted it was. Just don't ask me to view it again!

Humorous stand outs were the opening credits, I Kissed A Girl, Green Acres, Something to Talk About and Ouch!

I was glad to be able to show my vids at this show. There were enough positive comments on the comment cards that I feel my vids will be appreciated when they get to the right audience. I'm a niche producer so I'm happy if a few people manage to enjoy my projects. I have to share the funniest comment though: "Too many Stargate vids--other shows are around guys." Talk about entitlement! I must have missed my memos from the Vidders Cabal, not to mention foolishly not archiving multiple other shows just to provide variety to the viewers. When I think of all those other vid shows where I sat through an hour of other fandom shows just to see the one or two I really was into.... For the record, there were 31 vids, of which 7 were SG, two of which were very short and funny. 22%. This comment still makes me laugh two weeks later.

That takes me up to the end of Saturday night. One more post to go....