This essay was written and published between season three and four, and thus contains spoilers for Yellowjackets up until the season three finale.
You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question “Why?” Why are we as a people worth saving?
Commander Adama, Battlestar Galactica
I liked it. I was good at it. Really, I was… I was alive.
Walter White, Breaking Bad
Yellowjackets is about the slow process of realizing one of your friends is deeply toxic. Please forgive the otherwise meaningless cliche of the word ‘toxic’, because it’s necessary to convey the idea behind the show – it set out to be a female equivalent not only to Lord of the Flies but to the masculine antihero stories that dominated the airwaves in the wake of Breaking Bad, and from this perspective, it succeeded admirably; I have seen convincing arguments that each of the main survivor protagonists is a riff on an equivalent LotF character, even in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. There are plots and even characters that are intentionally reacting to older plots from a female perspective; early on, there’s a plot where Nat (played by Sophie Thatcher as a teenager and Juliette Lewis as an adult) sleeps with Travis (Kevin Alves) and is deeply frustrated by his contradictory, confused anger at her for having lied about her sexual history, expressing righteous anger at slut-shaming.
Early on in the present-day plot, Jeff (Warren Kole) is played as a well-meaning but self-absorbed and emotionally shallow dunce who struggles to recognize when a problem is happening and gives easy but useless answers; this strikes me as a fairly normal view a lot of women have of their male partners and of men in general, and his presence a way to represent that feeling in television. These ideas are fun – Jeff in particular is almost unique, somehow managing to be a bumbling dad without hitting any of the standard Homer Simpson-esque beats – but they give way to more nuance. Misty (played by Sammi Hanratty as a teenager and Christina Ricci as an adult) is one of my favourite elements of this, being a Weird Girl who is sociopathic but impossible to either completely dismiss or completely redeem – they’d all be rescued if it weren’t for her and they’d all be dead if it weren’t for her.
Shauna (played by Sophie Nélisse as a teen and Melanie Lynskey as an adult) is my favourite of all of them though, and if there’s any justice, she’ll go down in the annals of most interesting television characters, and specifically as a true feminine counterpart to masculine characters like Walter White. There was a short fad for a while of presenting female characters as ‘the female equivalent of Walter White’; I was initially sold on Deborah and Ava of Hacks as fitting this, but both are closer to Don Draper of Mad Men, in that both, while deeply flawed, are ultimately banal in their evil and as a result redeemable.
Shauna is much closer to Walter White in that she’s genuinely an evil person, and her arc matches Walter in that I was shocked and delighted by the gradual revelation of her depravity; the show tricked me into thinking she was the normal one of the group and gradually pulled the wool from my eyes – and even more impressively manages to do it twice, as both timelines show her crumbling in two different ways. The delightful thing about her is that she is initially detached from the petty arguments and idiosyncracies the others engage in, but when she’s actually forced to act, she’ll be even pettier and more impulsive than any of them, and then when facing the consequences, she’ll whine and get defensive.
You can compare her to Misty’s particular brand of sociopathy; Misty will kill a person and then explain why she did it (and then at most get annoyed that you don’t appreciate how useful it was), but Shauna will do the same thing and whine that you don’t get her. Shauna’s arc is one of slowly falling prey to her impulses until they take her over; put her in literally any kind of emergency situation where she has to think fast, and she’ll do the worst thing you could possibly do in that situation (funniest example: her brakes fail and she drives straight into a park).
By season three, both young and adult Shauna have gotten so deep into what they’re doing that they’ve started losing their minds. Adult Shauna has simply gotten deep into the consequences for her actions and the justifications for why they weren’t so bad, and besides were someone else’s fault, and were completely justifiable if you were there because you’d do the same thing; young Shauna is embracing a kind of gothic madness. The major way the show expresses femininity is in the way the girls explore witchy, folk horror tropes (a phase I’m told many young women go through), and by the end of season three, she has literally been crowned as a folk horror figure.
You know what else is deeply coded as female? Fandom. This is a goofy segue for looking at how the Yellowjackets fandom can use the show to express a morality common to fandom in general but is often alien and confusing to me. The Your Mileage May Vary page on TV Tropes is a useful indicator for this; there are elements of it I get but simply disagree with, like being disappointed that Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) dies midway through season one despite being vivid and memorable, but then there’s the baffling yes-anding of hating on the characters. Now, I certainly take pleasure in being outraged by Shauna’s actions, but that dissipates as the credits roll; I don’t take it goddamned personally when a fictional teenager cheats on an equally fictional teenager.
My boyfriend informs me that people with Borderline Personality Disorder can often be drawn to fandom because it appeals to both their craving for stimulus and their black-and-white thinking; on the one hand, I don’t feel comfortable pathologizing strangers on the internet (said boyfriend has BPD themselves and thus is both more informed and has more skin in the game), but this did remind me that fandom people are, you know, people, and that their perspective is rooted in a shared humanity worth considering. Thinking about it, there are two expectations driving me that I don’t think are present in fandom thinking.
The first is that I approach fiction knowing full well that it isn’t real. This is a television show; it’s an object that was crafted by humans and placed before me for a purpose. Much as a screwdriver could ostensibly be used as a toothbrush, I could use it for something other than the intended purpose, but it’ll be a real pain in the ass. More importantly, I know the character’s actions won’t actually have an effect on the real world and I don’t take their actions on that level.
And building off that is the second principle: I don’t approach fiction with the expectation that it caters to my every whim. Killing off Laura Lee makes sense in the narrative as the first case where a survivor of importance dies, and it wouldn’t mean anything if she wasn’t also memorable. I don’t expect all characters to be completely likeable to me and follow my personal moral code, nor do I expect them to be ‘appropriately’ punished, whatever that means in the first place; they exist not as extensions of my will or personality, but as pieces in a larger machine that serve a greater purpose.
If this sounds smug and superior, I recognize that there are certain things I miss out on because of this. My critical view has often been labelled detached and emotionally distant, which I don’t agree with, but it’s clear that I do often miss out on superficial but intense emotional reactions; I feel more open to different emotional experiences, but that verisimilitude can often be knocked by smaller mistakes that don’t bother other people (for example, there’s exactly one bullshit writing move in Yellowjackets, when a character discovers recordings of their conversation on a phone but somehow fails to forget to delete them before they’re useful).
And I think a small but clear distinction is – and this is a weird thought, so bear with me – I am looking for good things to weave together into a coherent point, whereas fandom types are looking for bad things that they’re trying to avoid. I word it this way because, as I dive further into creativity, I’ve found my detached critical outlook is actually a burden; when I watch a show through the lens of actively searching for bad things about it, I find it easier to generate ideas that I want to play with. As proof, I point not only to creative-based entries under that TV Tropes page (like Fandom-Specific Plot or Fan-Preferred Couple), but also to Base-Breaking Character. Look especially on the Alternative Character Explanations page, where audiences make up rationalizations for their preferred interpretation for events that seemed fairly straightforward to me.
(The flipside is that my seemingly detached perspective also means I’m generally correct in my interpretations of author intent and character motivation, which is less down to me being smarter than anyone and more down to me simply not being as emotionally invested in an outcome and thus more openminded)
Which brings me back to Shauna. I’ve been writing ‘seemingly detached’ and ‘seen as detached’ because I don’t actually believe I’m that detached, and in some ways I’m more invested than people who are more visible in their emotional expression. I aim to empathise with characters and feel what they feel; specifically, I’m allowing myself to feel the emotions even of an evil narcissist like Shauna. To me, blanket condemnation of her feels more detached than going on the journey with her, feeling her feelings with her.
The funny thing about Shauna is that she’s at her most effective when she’s bored. She finds herself bored out of her brains when she’s a wife and mother, but she’s basically competent at the really tedious elements like the cooking and the maintenance. She dives into the gruesome adventures of murder and conspiracy with both feet, but she’s absolutely terrible at it – as characters start pointing out in season three, she’s too impulsive to pull it off (contrast her with Misty, who is equally murderous but is mostly correct in her frustration at the others failing to keep up with her).
On the other hand… she’s right to be bored. The murder and cannibalism part of the show is exhilarating; I generally find the present-day plot more exciting than the survival aspect because it’s the fastest-moving in plot, but in season three, young Shauna starts embracing revenge and mysticism, and it makes her commit more extreme actions that are deeply fun to watch and drive me to keep watching to find out what happens next.
If this show is about anything, it’s about mysticism versus rationalism. Nat, surprisingly, ends up representing pure reason; when she navigates the cannibal cult the other girls have established, it comes off as her making the choice she has to in order to survive, using community to keep herself alive. Shauna and Lottie (played by Courtney Eaton as a teenager and Simone Kessell as an adult) sit at the other end of the spectrum, driven by the mysticism of the wilderness and the sense of purpose it gives them. It’s this, more than reason, that drives them to initially eat a person; they justify it as a gift from the wilderness and a way to honour their fallen friend, and while these justifications become more and more bizarre as time goes on, they end up being the ‘happiest’ characters on the show.
By ‘happy’, I mean ‘able to justify being alive’. Coach Scott (Steven Kreuger) shows this spectrum by existing outside it entirely; he loses a major part of his identity in the second episode when Misty cuts off his leg, and the show for him is a slow loss of any identity or reason to live. His authority over the girls slowly erodes as they stop listening to him; he’s the only character not to eat another person no matter how hungry he gets, and he becomes more contemptuous of the girls as time passes, until he’s begging the last girl he has any respect for to kill him and end his suffering (after which they eat him, of course).
Whatever you say about Shauna, she has successfully clung onto living, even if her rationalizations have become increasingly abhorrent. Her letter to her family at the end of season three reads as an awful justification of her crimes on the basis that, of course, deep down everyone agrees with her, would do what she does, feels the exact way she does. But then, I’ve been riding this track with her the whole time, and I could see a universe where I did do all this stuff on my own recognizance.
What Yellowjackets captures is how the things that rationally help us in a long-term way and the things that make life feel worth living tend to be two different things. Human beings have a remarkable way of mistaking things that feel good for things that are actually effective, and vice versa; agreeableness tends to be the most effective way to navigate the world but feels much worse for a person than aggressive posturing. You need a little bit of ineffectual posturing or life just isn’t any fun.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Ratatouille
This was more interesting than I remembered because it’s the first real point in Pixar’s existence that one of their movies becomes about the process of making their movies – where their collective thoughts on creativity and the creative process become text in the story. There’s the idea that Remy is uniquely talented and objectively making the world better by expressing it, and there’s even the nuance of Linguini openly describing himself as unambitious in his first scenes and still ending by finding his own personal talent and place in the world. Where it was and is annoying is that this is also a tipping point where the message is becoming the main goal as opposed to being a logical part of building melodrama; there’s down incredibly cheesy, almost Dreamworks-level dialogue of Remy defending his dreams from his father.
There’s also the incredibly annoying presentation of criticism as both a byproduct of art and in competition with it, as opposed to its own craft with its own goals. I do not, in fact, see my work as below even the lowest junk – in fact, I see it as in communication with it. Criticism is dependent on original art, but it’s something with value beyond blowing smoke up someone’s ass (and indeed, some of the worst criticism is that).
I do like that the animation is becoming slightly more subjective, like Remy tasting multiple tastes. I also like that Stephen Furst is in it, giving me a chance to show my friend his character in Babylon 5.
This is a metaphor for Pixar’s creation process but it conveniently elides the part of that process where the original director got booted off the movie and Brad Bird came in with some fairly heavy rewrites, I believe. And Bird is great! But there are definitely seams showing (the Dreamworks shit you mentioned, the general reliance on voiceover at the start). And I think Bird’s preoccupation with teamwork within a leader/non-leader framework, where everyone is dependent on each other, is something that Pixar people believe in but also undermine a lot in their own creation (see the aforementioned booting, the ongoing sequelization and fear of distinct work, etc.).
The Last of Sheila – A year after his gossip columnist wife is killed in a hit and run after a party at their mansion, Hollywood mogul James Coburn invite six friends who were at that party to his yacht for a week of “gossip games.” Is Coburn going to reveal the killer? Is that why he’s killed halfway through the movie? This whodunit is fun, twisty, frothy, and silly, enlivened by an “all star cast” before that was everywhere in the 70s – Coburn, Raquel Welch, Richard Benjamin and his mustache, Joan Hackett, Ian McShane, Dyan Cannon, and James Mason, The script is by the unlikely duo of Tony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, and a lot of the archness about Hollywood clearly comes from their jaundiced insider and outsider views of the industry. The direction comes from Herbert Ross, who does enough to keep the story moving. In some ways very much of its time – one of the guests is secretly a child molester and no one seems to care much – but as whodunit go, it really holds up well. Rian Johnson apparently drew inspiration from this for the first two Benoit Blanc films, and I can see it, but his mysteries aren’t anywhere near as well assembled.
The Practice, “Victimeless Crimes” – What a dumb title. The crimes here are in parallel, and have victims all right. A woman is on trial for killing her rapist. Lucy discovers that her dentist (a cousin of Bobb7) fondled her while she was out cold and bit her breast so badly she was infected. Both women want someone to pay, and both do not want pity. In the trial, Jimmy works desperately to help the woman, sympathizing with her, trying to convince her to tone down her anger, but she is having none of it. It’s pretty harrowing, and doesn’t really take a side. The stuff with Lucy by comparison is a mess – we keep having the dentist telling Bobby he just had to do it, and it’s gross – but for once it’s all of a piece. (That’s twice this season Lucy is victimized this way. This follows all the times Rebecea ended up in the middle of something when she was the assistant. Why does Kelley keep doing this?)
The Last of Sheila is more archly cynical about its characters than Johnson’s films are but doesn’t make a point of having a morally pure contrast to them, which makes it feel less like it’s stoking the audience’s hatred; it solves a mystery and provides a gleefully mean kind of closure without being a fantasy of moral justice. I enjoy the Benoit Blanc movies, but The Last of Sheila is what really has my heart. (And I don’t think there’s anything in Johnson’s movies as emotionally affecting as Dyan Cannon’s mini-monologue about having named names, for that matter.)
Cannon is, to a large degree, skewering her own agent Sue Mengers (hired for the part at Mengers’s suggestion after the agent was offered the part and said no). But the speech is referencing Meta Rosenberg, best remembered now as Jim Garner’s partner in his production company and a producer on Rockford. Either way, Cannon is my choice for best performance here.
Very well said on Sheila vs. the Blancs, it is not only superior plotwise but tonally.
Babylon 5 — some great shit between two long-term characters here, 70 episodes bearing down on a conversation, Tristan will love it. And there is no easy way out. A big space battle does have a fairly easy way out and at least this is acknowledged, and also hooray space battles! Too much diddling around on a major plot before this but we’re in gear now.
Play Dirty — not just bad, as expected, but reprehensible and degrading. More to come, I think.
Puts in a order for popcorn at the threat of “more to come.” (I did warn you.)
I thought the Taylor Hackford Parker set an extremely low bar but it is just loser hackwork, this feels like Shane Black casually discarding his soul.
I am so excited for an essay-length evisceration of Play Dirty.
I feel I should give you a heads up that season 5 is widely considered the worst season, and for reasons that will drive you insane.
But also, very excited to get to whichever episode you’re talking about.
I have heard about Season 5’s badness but not the particulars, I look forward to being driven insane! But I am still in 4 right now, which is messy but finding some focus.
To Sleep With Anger – Danny Glover giving a once in a lifetime performance as Harry, the Satanic guest who doesn’t extend his stay as much as slowly bring his rowdy, violent life into your own, Harry whose friendly gestures and intimations make your skin crawl. Sinners feels like it’s in conversation with this regarding dybbuks and vampires adapted to the Black experience*, though I don’t know the folklore Burnett is engaging with as much. Good movie and the little surreal touches are really striking.
*The latter is almost anti-Christianity, with it’s Samuel character actually leaving town and joining the sinners rather than rejoining old familial structures and pulling up his bootstraps
Malice
This got some discussion in last week’s Happy Hour, so it became the much-needed sleazetastic send-off to a very long, very sad week. (Afterwards, my wife said, “This is exactly what I needed right now,” and such is the magic of cinema.) Glorious, unhinged trash, and every time the film cut to that house on the cliff, I burst out laughing at all the all-caps ATMOSPHERE. Mainstream movies just don’t come with this kind of exuberance and commitment anymore.
Alec Baldwin is a powerhouse of charisma here, and he even survives Sorkin’s determination to make his character quote Gilbert and Sullivan, when no, he fucking wouldn’t.
Awesome, this is exactly the kind of insane trash that is perfect to take your mind off things — dopey enough to not make you feel bad about anything that happens to the characters but bonkers enough to engage you if only on a what-the-fuck level, and made with a fair amount of craft so that engagement is enjoyable. Drunk Baldwin in the townie bar picking up college girls is hashtag lifegoals, referencing his famous monologue in 30 Rock is not just funny but brilliant because he’s tuned Jack Donaghy’s charisma to “evil” here.
Happy Hour gets results! So glad you enjoyed the bonkers-ness of Malice. Few actors got to monologue like 90s Alec Baldwin.
Dead Reckoning – Not up there with Bogart’s great noirs, but has a great Bogart performance. Several of Bogart’s key classic noirs came before this (but some were still ahead), so at this point it feels like a collection of tropes. The convoluted plot takes its time coming together, spending time on plot points that don’t really make sense. That’s par for the course in noir stories, isn’t it? Sometimes. Side characters are killed off, whereas Bogey is knocked out and returned to his hotel so he can keep putting his nose where it doesn’t belong, otherwise, no movie. Like many other noirs it has the conceit of starting the story in media res going into flashback so Bogart can lay down some colorful voice-over, but though the monologuing is good, they never do anything with the priest Bogey confesses to. Bogey standing in the middle of the apartment throwing fire bombs with no fear as flames go up around him is great to see. Lizabeth Scott gets grief as a Bacall-clone. But I like her here. She’s gorgeous on her deathbed even after going through a windshield into a tree. The fantastic final shot is lovely and poetic if a little unearned on her character who wasn’t a paratrooper. The obligatory Sadistic Goon role is well played. I liked Bogart’s safecracker/armsdealer friend. After slamming a phone booth door in a beautiful doll’s face Bogart apologizes, “Sorry, gorgeous, I didn’t see what you looked like.” With dialog like this it’s still very watchable even if it does remind you of better past (and future) Bogart films.
I loved this one so much. I can’t disagree that it’s not as as “good” as other Bogart films and yet somehow it just completely won me over to the point that I was blind to its faults.
Live Music – played my final gig of the year (probably) on Friday night, it was a horrible rainy night which led to pretty low attendance but it was still a really good one, the headline band (Bean Weevil) are one of my favourite bands from the semi-local area at the moment and this was the best performance I’d seen from them. They do such a good mix of folky stuff and noisy indie-rock guitar stuff and their harmonies sounded great.
Also made a last-minute jaunt out to another city to see Gwenifer Raymond on Sunday night, kinda apocalyptic old-timey fingerpicking guitar, instrumental folk-blues I guess. She played two 45 minute sets with an interval in a cool venue I’d never heard of before and it was great.
Seinfeld, season 4 episodes – “The Bubble Boy” through to “The Virgin”. Didn’t think much of “The Opera”, an odd episode without being particularly compelling. But the other three were all good, and “Bubble Boy” was particularly funny – love how mean-tempered the “boy” is, and George getting into a physical fight with him is pretty inspired escalation. Also in “The Cheever Letters”, George’s girlfriends parents are played by Grace Zabriskie and Warren Frost! This has to be an intentional Twin Peaks thing, right?
Wooo, your own live music! And also other people’s! Aside from the rain, that sounds like an incredible time.
Woooooo live music! I’ve been to some terrible weather shows and the low attendance is unfortunate but I do like the vibe from people who did make it out, the bands seem to recognize it and bring their A game.
And I have good news for you regarding Zabriskie and Frost! They return several times and they are always great, this perfect upper-class snobbery that is entirely justified considering who they are dealing with. On the other hand, George’s “Oh noooooooooo!” to the Bubble Boy is also entirely justified, the pettiest shit possible delivered to a petty asshole, it is DELICIOUS.
Ywah there’s definitely a bit of a “we made it through the storm, now let’s PARTY!” vibe that is very fun! We got enough people that the venue didn’t feel empty, and one of the people who DID make it wrote a really nice review, so I’m definitely calling it a win.
I would not have guessed that they would be returning characters, interesting!
What did we play?
A little bit of Hollow Knight: Silksong but I think I might be done with it, the difficulty level has reached a point where I’m making no further progress and I kind of regret the time spent with it each time I sit down to… make no further progress. Kind of a shame that my own skill levels are probably going to prevent me from finishing a game I otherwise enjoyed, but rather that than endless frustration I guess.
Streets of Rage 4 on Nintendo Switch
I beat the final levels on Mania difficulty, which I’d tried some years ago and failed and found much more feasible (but still difficult) now. It might have gotten patched down in the interim but I don’t care, it still owned. That said, I tried the first level on Mania+ and I got pretty far, until the game threw at me two of its trickiest foot enemies at me, plus one of the bosses from the first Sega Genesis game in all his 16-bit pixelated glory. Incredible stuff, got my ass handed to me.
Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse – Castlevania Anniversary Collection on Nintendo Switch
Played the first few levels until getting Sypha. The combo of her and Trevor Belmont is still unmatched, the game remains great, and it hasn’t aged a day.
Haunted Castle – Castlevania Dominus Collection on Nintendo Switch
This was a bad arcade game from the start, and it’s aged horribly on top of that. I’ve tried it before, and this time I managed to get around the bad controls by sheer force of will and stage memorization, until getting stumped by the horrible visuals that actually don’t let you tell apart what is a platform and what isn’t, and what appears to be a limited continues system, which makes little sense for an arcade game that was supposed to just take quarter after quarter. Yes, this has rewind, but having to use it over and over and over again is not my idea of fun.
DOOM on Nintendo Switch
Finished a few more levels and now I’m halfway through the Inferno chapter. The level design remains top-notch, and I’ve accepted now that the game does not intend me to see every room and shoot down every enemy, and that sometimes the best strategy is just to get the fuck out of dodge.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge on Nintendo Switch
A few online matches. Servers are still busy, and it’s still a perfect pick up and play party arcade game.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on Nintendo Switch
Played a few rounds against our niece, won them all. She nearly beat me a couple of times, but fell off the stage at critical moments. Maybe next time.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Nintendo Switch
Played a cup with my wife. She hadn’t played in weeks and did quite well for herself. She finished 7th but honestly deserved 3rd of 4th, if not for some unfortunate, unlucky mistakes.
Dragon Quest II HD-2D remake— like the first one, definitely expands the story and adventure from the previous game (and does so in a way to tie the entire trilogy together), but it had some frustrating stretches where you could hypothetically go anywhere but most of the places you were really underpowered for. The other annoying things for me were… there are a lot of cutscenes, and they’re not even bad for what they are, but I get tired of the gameplay having to stop so often for them. The other annoying thing is that so much of the upgrading / expanding of the game and story just involves stuffing a boss fight in wherever possible.
Even with all that said, the original game felt like not quite a sufficient expansion of I, falling short of the classic III (and then IV starts a new trilogy and is its own thing, but it’s still my favorite), and so this is definitely better in that regard.
This is an interesting, rich article. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve spent a lot of time in (fic-writing) fandom–my involvement waxes and wanes and is in a bit of a wane at the moment, but may come back around–and some of the things you mention here, like the prevalence of people genuinely hating characters, are things that have bugged me too. (Although usually the ecosystems, so to speak, are diverse enough that I can find corners that work for me.) It’s baffling to find that happening with Yellowjackets, though, when I’d always had the darkness and shitty behavior and female antiheroes pitched to me as a major part of the appeal. That’s why I was interested in the first place!
In any case, I like switching back and forth between different ways of approaching a work–or finding my approach switched by how the work itself functions for me, mentally and emotionally–so it’s cool to see you lay out how you view the different modes, which overlaps at least somewhat with my own experience/perspective.
Yellowjackets does still sound like very much my kind of thing, and I really have to get around to that.
“this did remind me that fandom people are, you know, people, and that their perspective is rooted in a shared humanity worth considering.”
This is more on me than the concept, but I really dislike the word “fandom” because it does not imply people with shared humanity, it implies a group with a shared approach or organizing principles as opposed to an “audience” of people having their own reactions to art that may overlap to some degree but also may not. Maybe it’s more in how this is used, descriptions of “the fandom reacted badly” or whatever, but it feels like territory to be fought over and appeased, with artists falling into this trap as well. (And TV Tropes language feels less like useful distillations of concepts than legalese used to define this structure.)
I have never thought of “fandom” as meaning anything but “fans of a given thing.” I am part of Trek fandom. That does not mean I interact online with hordes of hypercritical Trekkies, it just means I like to talk about Trek with other people who like Trek. There are of course toxic elements to any fandom, but defining fandom to mean only the most insular and critical fans feels inaccurate. (Though I will admit that I’ve made a habit steering very far away from that subset of fans, and that there are some shows I did not engage with any onlines about since my approach seemed to be unpopular – I am looking at you, Supernatural fans.)
Yeah, it’s unfortunate that a lot of groups–even ones that should, by definition, be only loosely organized–so often end up getting defined by their loudest and most unpleasantly argumentative voices. I get how it happens, of course, but I still wish it didn’t.
I’ve been thinking of doing a ST:TOS rewatch next year and would very much enjoy talking about Star Trek with you.
Will be happy to talk Trek any time, but will have to go from memory unless I can get to the show without adding Paramount again. (Not, mind you, that I can’t go from memory.)
I think “fans of a given thing” is just “fans!” Which are great! “Fandom” is something that to me feels inclusive, not toxic or at least not necessarily so, but with its own structures that become exclusive. Like what you’re talking about with Supernatural. And those structures can be very powerful, just look at Star Trek and how fans kept that alive/advocated for its existence, not a lot of people doing that for Marcus Welby M.D. I just feel annoyed at the idea of joining a group to like some art.
Fair points. We do a lot of dancing about fans and fandoms and exclusivity and inclusivity and sometimes get lost in the semantics.
Though if you dislike needing to be part of a group to like art, try applying that to sports. There is gatekeeping in Mets fandom, too.
“You’ve made your choice! We’ve closed the gate, you’re stuck with the Mets now!”
I was thinking about sports in this regard, there are definitely huge numbers of toxic sports fans. Something Tristan gets into very well above is the creation aspect of art, that ultimately someone made choices that fans are reacting to, and sports is not the same — there’s no one person making a narrative decision, the unknowable competition is what makes sports great (even as narratives are imposed on the competition) and while armchair quarterbacking obviously exists it feels different than the analysis of fictional characters and an artist’s decisions for them. And the competition gives sports fans a clearer unified goal — “I/we want my/our team to win” — even among endless arguments over how to achieve that. “I/we want to enjoy this art” can never have that clarity and nor should it.
I’m downright fascinated by how ‘fandom’, at least as I’ve defined it in this essay, has downright industrialized its process – there are people who really filter their viewing of literally everything through “convert this to Enemies To Lovers or Coffee Shop AU” the way I filter everything through my essay writing. So I know what you mean.
Will be stealing “industrialized its process,” that is exactly the kind of thing that drives me nuts.
Year of the Month update!
This December, we’ll be taking pitches on anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Rope
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery
And there’s still time write about any of these 2018 movies, albums, books, et al this month!
Nov. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Ralph Breaks the Internet
Nov. 24th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Venom
Nov. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Legend of the Three Caballeros