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homestuck-info · 5 years
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The Homestuck Epilogues: Bridges And Off-Ramps
Andrew Hussie has released a massive explanation of his intents behind the Epilogues and plans for the future of the franchise. Fitting to his theme on subverting delivery of content, its in the newest episode of Pgenpod.
You can listen to the full episode here, with the message around the 1 hour mark, or read the transcript below:
The Homestuck Epilogues: Bridges And Off-Ramps ; By Andrew Hussie:
The history of printed version of The Homestuck Epilogues is also the history of The Homestuck Epilogues themselves, because I originally envisioned releasing them only as a book like this, to even further emphasize their conceptual separation from the main narrative. If you know anything about the epilogues, you probably already understand that conceptually distinguishing themselves from the story by their presentation as "fanfiction" is an important part of their nature and what they are trying to say. In the form of a book (which you can read from one side, or flip upside down and read from the other) it somewhat carries the feeling of a cursed tome. Something which maddeningly beckons, due to whatever insanity it surely contains, but also something which causes feelings of trepidation. There's an ominous aura surrounding such a work, probably for a few reasons. The sheer size of it means the nature of the content probably isn't going to be that trivial. The stark presentation of the black and white covers, its dual-narrative format, the foreboding prologue combined with an alarming list of "content warnings", and even the fact that an "epilogue" is delivered with a "prologue" first, all adds up to a piece of media that appears designed to make the reader nervous about what to expect from it. Such is the nature of a cursed tome retrieved from a place which may have best been left undisturbed. It is also the nature of any creative inclination to reopen a story which had already been laid to rest - a reader's desire to agitate and then collapse the bubble which contained the imagined projection of "happily ever after", simply by observing it. There exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble, or to crack that tome. There is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. It's a risk for all involved. It should be.
Obviously, it wasn't released as a book, until now (the plans for printing it had already been made, but were just delayed until well after its release on site). We decided to just release it all on the site so everyone could read it right away if they wanted. There was a long tradition of making all content freely accessible on the site, and we just produced one utterly enormous update which we were perfectly aware would cause a massive amount of discussion and agitation in the fandom. Overall it was probably better to just get it out there, let people read it relatively quickly, form their opinions on it, and then begin discussing it critically. In other words, people were going to feel something from all this, so it seemed better to just let it out there, allow the maximum number of people feel whatever it would cause them to feel, give people time to process those feelings, and then move on to whatever comes next.
But what comes next? That's a good question. I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes. In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. Because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes: new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. There can be no sense of emotional gratification later without first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. And by peeking into the imagined realm of "happily ever after" to satisfy our curiosity, we discover that our attention isn't so harmless, because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored. Nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch, when several teenagers are handed god-status. It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. So they spring into action, and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative. But "implied" is all it was. There was no immediate announcement for followup content, and I'm not announcing anything here yet either. More time was always going to be necessary to figure out what to do next, including what form it takes, the timing, and all those questions. For now I think it was alright to just let things simmer for a while, and give people an extended period of time to meditate on the meaning of the epilogues and why they involved the choices they did. But regardless of anyone's conclusions about it, I can at least confirm that it WAS designed to feel like a bridge piece since its conception.
Is it this way because an epilogue SHOULD be this way? No. It is this way because I thought that was the most suitable role for an epilogue to play in the context of the weird piece of media Homestuck has always been. The story experiments a lot with the way stories are told, and in particular messes with the ways certain stretches of content get partitioned and labeled. Playing with the labeling I think has ways of bringing attention to those labels, what they actually mean, and how they affect our perception of the events covered under certain labels. It can even get us to wonder why certain labels exist at all, and can expose "flaws" in the construction of stories which include them. For instance, "intermission" is such a label. But perhaps another way of saying intermission is, "whoops, the story is getting too long, here's a break from the real story with a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't matter". It's seemingly a tacit admission to a problem. And by continuing to toy with that label as the story rolls along, you start to unpack the nature of that problem by implicitly asking questions about it. If you have one intermission because the story got long... can you have two if it gets longer? Can you have even more than that? Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively? And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant. It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements.
So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more". And we know right away this label will be subject to the same kind of trickery, since there are two story paths of eight epilogues each, prefaced by a shared prologue. It's already an unhinged implementation of the label before you even read it, which means it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide. Before you read it, it's already an invitation to start questioning what an epilogue even is, and whether it's kind of a silly idea even if applied conventionally. Take a 50 chapter novel with an epilogue, for example. Why isn't the epilogue just called chapter 51? Why was the choice made to label that content differently? Should we consider it an important part of the story, or should we not? If it's not important, why are we reading it? And if it is important, why is it given a label which is almost synonymous with "afterthought"? Is it a simple parting gift to the reader, to provide minor forms of satisfaction which the core narrative wasn't built to provide? Is it actually important to deliver those minor satisfactions? If it really is important, why didn't that content appear in chapter 51? And if it isn't, why bother at all? What are we even doing here?
By going down this path of questioning, it sounds like we're assembling a case against writing epilogues altogether. But actually, there's really nothing wrong with them. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to include in any story. It's just that the more you ask questions like these, the more you are forced to think about the true nature of these storytelling constructs, the actual purposes they're meant to serve. And with something like Homestuck, where issues like this are heavily foregrounded, like what should be considered "canon" vs. "not canon", or even more esoteric concepts like "outside of canon" or "beyond canon", then the issues you uncover when you ask such questions about an epilogue can't really be ignored. My feeling is, there's almost no choice but to turn the conventional ideas associated with epilogues completely inside-out, because of the inherent contradictions involved with crossing the post-canon threshold and revealing that which was not meant to be known. Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.
These are the types of things the epilogues let you to think about, along with a few other ideas. Like the fact that all narratives have perspectives and biases, depending on who is telling the story, even in the case where it's unclear if the narrator has any specific identity. The suggestion that all narratives are driven by agendas, sometimes thinly disguised, other times heavily. There's also stuff to think about just due to its presentation as fanfiction, and that it's the first installment of Homestuck which included other authors (contrary to some speculation I've seen, every word of all seven acts were written by me alone). By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires. If the epilogues really prove to be the bridge media they were designed to feel like, then I expect this trend to continue. The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action.
I also think many of the negative feelings the story creates isn't just an urgent prompt for the reader to imagine different ideas, or ways to resolve the new narrative dilemmas. It's also an opportunity for people to discuss any of the difficult content critically, and for fandom in general to continue developing the tools for processing the negative emotions art can generate. Sorting that out has to be a communal experience, and it's an important part of the cycle between creating and criticizing art. I think not only can creators develop their skills to create better things by practicing and taking certain risks, fandom is something which can develop better skills as well. Skills like critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time. Fandoms everywhere tend to get bad reputations for various reasons, maybe justifiably. But I don't see why it can't be an objective to try to improve fandom, just as creators can improve their work. And I think this can only happen if now and then fandoms are seriously challenged, by being encouraged to think about complex ideas, and made to feel difficult emotions. I believe when art creates certain kinds of negative feelings in people, it can lead to some of the most transformative experiences art has to offer. But it helps to be receptive to this idea for these experiences to have a positive net effect on your life, and your relationship with art.
So now I'm looking to all of you on the matter of where to go next. Wherever the most conscientious and invested members of fandom want to drive this universe, as well as the standards by which we engage with media in general, that will be the direction I follow.
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not-terezi-pyrope · 5 years
Text
Andrew Hussie writes into Perfectly Generic Podcast about the Homestuck Epilogues
Transcript below comes from Reddit as well as the PGenPod wiki.
The Homestuck Epilogues: Bridges And Off-Ramps
by Andrew Hussie
The history of printed version of The Homestuck Epilogues is also the history of The Homestuck Epilogues themselves, because I originally envisioned releasing them only as a book like this, to even further emphasize their conceptual separation from the main narrative. If you know anything about the epilogues, you probably already understand that conceptually distinguishing themselves from the story by their presentation as "fanfiction" is an important part of their nature and what they are trying to say. In the form of a book (which you can read from one side, or flip upside down and read from the other) it somewhat carries the feeling of a cursed tome. Something which maddeningly beckons, due to whatever insanity it surely contains, but also something which causes feelings of trepidation. There's an ominous aura surrounding such a work, probably for a few reasons. The sheer size of it means the nature of the content probably isn't going to be that trivial. The stark presentation of the black and white covers, its dual-narrative format, the foreboding prologue combined with an alarming list of "content warnings", and even the fact that an "epilogue" is delivered with a "prologue" first, all adds up to a piece of media that appears designed to make the reader nervous about what to expect from it. Such is the nature of a cursed tome retrieved from a place which may have best been left undisturbed. It is also the nature of any creative inclination to reopen a story which had already been laid to rest - a reader's desire to agitate and then collapse the bubble which contained the imagined projection of "happily ever after", simply by observing it. There exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble, or to crack that tome. There is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. It's a risk for all involved. It should be.
Obviously, it wasn't released as a book, until now (the plans for printing it had already been made, but were just delayed until well after its release on site). We decided to just release it all on the site so everyone could read it right away if they wanted. There was a long tradition of making all content freely accessible on the site, and we just produced one utterly enormous update which we were perfectly aware would cause a massive amount of discussion and agitation in the fandom. Overall it was probably better to just get it out there, let people read it relatively quickly, form their opinions on it, and then begin discussing it critically. In other words, people were going to feel something from all this, so it seemed better to just let it out there, allow the maximum number of people feel whatever it would cause them to feel, give people time to process those feelings, and then move on to whatever comes next.
But what comes next? That's a good question. I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes. In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. Because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes: new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. There can be no sense of emotional gratification later without first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. And by peeking into the imagined realm of "happily ever after" to satisfy our curiosity, we discover that our attention isn't so harmless, because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored. Nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch, when several teenagers are handed god-status. It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. So they spring into action, and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative. But "implied" is all it was. There was no immediate announcement for followup content, and I'm not announcing anything here yet either. More time was always going to be necessary to figure out what to do next, including what form it takes, the timing, and all those questions. For now I think it was alright to just let things simmer for a while, and give people an extended period of time to meditate on the meaning of the epilogues and why they involved the choices they did. But regardless of anyone's conclusions about it, I can at least confirm that it WAS designed to feel like a bridge piece since its conception.
Is it this way because an epilogue SHOULD be this way? No. It is this way because I thought that was the most suitable role for an epilogue to play in the context of the weird piece of media Homestuck has always been. The story experiments a lot with the way stories are told, and in particular messes with the ways certain stretches of content get partitioned and labeled. Playing with the labeling I think has ways of bringing attention to those labels, what they actually mean, and how they affect our perception of the events covered under certain labels. It can even get us to wonder why certain labels exist at all, and can expose "flaws" in the construction of stories which include them. For instance, "intermission" is such a label. But perhaps another way of saying intermission is, "whoops, the story is getting too long, here's a break from the real story with a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't matter". It's seemingly a tacit admission to a problem. And by continuing to toy with that label as the story rolls along, you start to unpack the nature of that problem by implicitly asking questions about it. If you have one intermission because the story got long... can you have two if it gets longer? Can you have even more than that? Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively? And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant. It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements.
So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more". And we know right away this label will be subject to the same kind of trickery, since there are two story paths of eight epilogues each, prefaced by a shared prologue. It's already an unhinged implementation of the label before you even read it, which means it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide. Before you read it, it's already an invitation to start questioning what an epilogue even is, and whether it's kind of a silly idea even if applied conventionally. Take a 50 chapter novel with an epilogue, for example. Why isn't the epilogue just called chapter 51? Why was the choice made to label that content differently? Should we consider it an important part of the story, or should we not? If it's not important, why are we reading it? And if it is important, why is it given a label which is almost synonymous with "afterthought"? Is it a simple parting gift to the reader, to provide minor forms of satisfaction which the core narrative wasn't built to provide? Is it actually important to deliver those minor satisfactions? If it really is important, why didn't that content appear in chapter 51? And if it isn't, why bother at all? What are we even doing here?
By going down this path of questioning, it sounds like we're assembling a case against writing epilogues altogether. But actually, there's really nothing wrong with them. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to include in any story. It's just that the more you ask questions like these, the more you are forced to think about the true nature of these storytelling constructs, the actual purposes they're meant to serve. And with something like Homestuck, where issues like this are heavily foregrounded, like what should be considered "canon" vs. "not canon", or even more esoteric concepts like "outside of canon" or "beyond canon", then the issues you uncover when you ask such questions about an epilogue can't really be ignored. My feeling is, there's almost no choice but to turn the conventional ideas associated with epilogues completely inside-out, because of the inherent contradictions involved with crossing the post-canon threshold and revealing that which was not meant to be known. Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.
These are the types of things the epilogues let you to think about, along with a few other ideas. Like the fact that all narratives have perspectives and biases, depending on who is telling the story, even in the case where it's unclear if the narrator has any specific identity. The suggestion that all narratives are driven by agendas, sometimes thinly disguised, other times heavily. There's also stuff to think about just due to its presentation as fanfiction, and that it's the first installment of Homestuck which included other authors (contrary to some speculation I've seen, every word of all seven acts were written by me alone). By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires. If the epilogues really prove to be the bridge media they were designed to feel like, then I expect this trend to continue. The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action.
I also think many of the negative feelings the story creates isn't just an urgent prompt for the reader to imagine different ideas, or ways to resolve the new narrative dilemmas. It's also an opportunity for people to discuss any of the difficult content critically, and for fandom in general to continue developing the tools for processing the negative emotions art can generate. Sorting that out has to be a communal experience, and it's an important part of the cycle between creating and criticizing art. I think not only can creators develop their skills to create better things by practicing and taking certain risks, fandom is something which can develop better skills as well. Skills like critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time. Fandoms everywhere tend to get bad reputations for various reasons, maybe justifiably. But I don't see why it can't be an objective to try to improve fandom, just as creators can improve their work. And I think this can only happen if now and then fandoms are seriously challenged, by being encouraged to think about complex ideas, and made to feel difficult emotions. I believe when art creates certain kinds of negative feelings in people, it can lead to some of the most transformative experiences art has to offer. But it helps to be receptive to this idea for these experiences to have a positive net effect on your life, and your relationship with art.
So now I'm looking to all of you on the matter of where to go next. Wherever the most conscientious and invested members of fandom want to drive this universe, as well as the standards by which we engage with media in general, that will be the direction I follow.
192 notes · View notes
skylerrroses-blog · 4 years
Text
Should Adaptation Adhere to the Source Material: An Analysis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its Fandom
This essay intends on exploring the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s relationship to media theory, in particular the ideas of fidelity in adaptation through the lens of Bakhtin’s Heteroglossic Approach (Bakhtin, 1934) and fandom reception and interpretation generated by the films via Jenkins’ ‘Textual Poachers’ theory (Jenkins, 1992) and other such sources to demonstrate how both fidelity and non-fidelity are valid ways in which to consume media, whilst also illustrating the shortcomings of both methods, and how embracing a balance of both is important for fandoms.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a series of films produced by the Disney-owned Marvel Studios, a branch of Marvel Comics dedicated to creating films and TV shows adapted from the popular and long-running connected Marvel comic book universe. These comics have been written and printed since 1939 with the release of their first issue, ‘Marvel Comics no. 1’ dating back to October 1939. Since then, the comic company has developed and held a large and passionate fanbase of readers up until the modern day. Many film and television adaptations of these comic books were created from this original source material, but it wasn’t until 2008, when Marvel Studios released ‘Iron Man’ (Favreau, 2008), that the idea of a Cinematic Universe was truly realised on the silver screen.
Since ‘Iron Man’, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown from one film to twenty-three, and with this growth came an increase in worldwide appeal and profit, becoming the single highest grossing film franchise in the world, according to statistics website ‘The Numbers’. However, the original Marvel Comics fans have still persisted amongst this massive growth of fanbase, and due to the diverging paths the narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (henceforth to be referred to as the MCU) from the Marvel Comics Universe (henceforth to be referred to as ‘Marvel 616’, the name of the universe in the comics), the fandom began to compare and speculate on the MCU through the lens of Marvel 616, expecting and anticipating certain storylines to be adapted to film. However, this created a dialogue within the fandom questioning whether it was important for the films to adhere to the source material, or whether it was just as valid, if not more creative to change elements of the story to better suit the differing tone of the universe. For example, in Cosmonaut Variety Hour’s video “The Marvel Cinematic Universe - All Marvel Movies reviewed and Ranked (pt. 2)” (2018), he criticises ‘Captain America: Civil War’ (Russo’s, 2016) by directly comparing it to the comic story ‘Civil War’ (in Figure 1).
In this clip, he admits that he often attempts to distance the story of the comics from the story of the MCU, but in cases where he perceives the original material to be superior, he cannot separate the adaptation from its original source material.
This brings up an interesting question: is fidelity necessary and important in adaptation, particularly of the comic book medium to film. Fidelity in adaptation is the idea that adaptations should adhere as closely as possible to the source material of that adaptation to satisfy fans and properly honour the original story. An example of this done to an extreme degree is ‘Watchmen’ (Snyder, 2010) which was praised by fans as being a ‘comic book come to life’. This approach is quite safe in terms of fan response; however, it creates a more intense expectation of quality and fidelity in the final product.
The MCU, however, tends to stray from the source material, instead employing the ‘Heteroglossic Method’, a method coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (Bakhtin, 1934). This method, employed by writers adapting material to other mediums, states that an adapted text that is reflected through the metaphorical lens of other creatives and creative visions will be different and reflect different themes and ideas of the story that may not have been explored in its original incarnation. The MCU heavily takes this route, as it veers away from the specific events and story beats of the Marvel 616 story, instead opting to tell their own story while adopting the familiar characters, locations, and broad plot structures of the source material.
This approach has become invariably successful, as while it portrays characters fans will recognise and latch onto, it creates its own story and world for the audience, fashioning its own identity outside that of its source material. In ‘Hunting the Dark Knight” (Brooker, 2012), Will Brooker analyses adaptation in the Batman universe by saying, “Nolan’s Batman movies were released into a complex network of existing, ongoing narratives, which continued during and after their cinematic exhibition. These narratives offered similar but distinct representations of the main character, his world, his history, and his supporting cast.” The idea of a separate distinct world that has similar and familiar elements to others running alongside can be reflected through the viewing of the MCU in relation to Marvel 616, as the latter of the two has continued through the 10+ year run of the MCU, with sales rising due to the films’ popularity. This distinct representation of these characters has resulted in a mixed opinion among fans of Marvel 616.
In Figure 2 by Twitter user @moonlillies, they criticise the MCU iteration of superhero Hawkeye by directly comparing him to his Marvel 616 counterpart and criticising the differences in his character. In contrast, below is a tweet from user @ParkerBMovies (Figure 3), who expresses their preference for the MCU iterations of the characters, claiming they “are the best incarnations of the characters, even better than the comics.”
This large variation in opinion between individuals within the fandom is only natural due to the sheer size of fandom groups on the internet on sites and forums such as Twitter or reddit, but the existence of a discourse around this topic paints the idea of fidelity in an interesting light, as it portrays fidelity and heteroglossia as both inherently neutral and up to interpretation of the individual and is therefore subjective to the individual.
However, another element of the fandom is anti-fans. Anti-fans, which are the topic of Jonathon Gray’s article “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans” (Gray, 2003), are a group of non-fans who consume certain media in order to criticise it and express their vitriol towards it. A Twitter user with the display name ‘milo’ in Figure 4 below criticises a sect of Marvel 616 stans (a term for super-fans) who deem themselves better than MCU stans “because they read the comics”, while also stating “not everyone has access to comics. Not anyone has the money to buy them”.
The concept that this Twitter user is criticising overlaps with the academic journal “
Modelling the Marvel Everyfan: Agent Coulson and/as Transmedia Fan Culture” (Scott, 2017), in which the author, Suzanne Scott, analyses the transmedia franchising model that the MCU developed, and how this franchising model is to the benefit of the ‘everyfan’, a concept that implies that the majority of fans are an “avid consumer, collector and completionist”. This concept fundamentally benefits middle-class male-driven methods of fan engagement and ignores other methods that are more commonly employed by women or minority groups. This imbalance in the fandom can create animosity between its members
due to a perceived superiority of Marvel 616 by some sects of fans due to the MCU being an adaptation.  This shows an inherent bias for some who prefer the original material as they can often be influenced by nostalgia and may not be able to see the strengths of adapted material. Due to the subjective nature of the topic, the preference to older material is acceptable, however many view the putting down of other fans due to their own preferences as veering into the ideology of anti-fans, and so heavily discouraged within the fandom.  Another concept within fandom that is important when talking about the MCU is the idea of ‘Textual Poachers’, a term coined by Henry Jenkins in “Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture” (Jenkins, 1992) that describes a certain group of fans who take the existing material of the text, and in this case the films, and builds off of it with their own creative ideas and stories; this can include art, fanfiction and fan films. This fan-created content in an important factor to consider whilst analysing adaptation through the lens of fandom, as fanfiction and fan content is its own form of informal adaptation that is consumed by the fandom itself. Due to its widespread appeal within the fandom thanks to its quicker production, higher quantity, and relatively easy distribution along with its often free cost, fanfiction and fan content is viewed and consumed much more readily by the fandom, and therefore expectations of quality and potential content are formed in the eyes of the fan.
These pieces of fan content can often be inspired by events from Marvel 616, as there is far more potential content to draw from, even when in the context of the MCU, which creates a set of desires for where fans want to see the actual story go. Since expectations are set, they can often not be met by the films in the MCU being underwhelming or simply not playing out how people may have hoped. Therefore the MCU is further compared to Marvel 616 as an inferior adaptation of the original source material. However, this building of expectations can also be very enriching and exciting to many fans, as being validated by the films can be a very positive experience.
This is often the case with pairings known as ‘ships’, where people speculate for romantic relationships between two characters and voice their support in favour of them becoming a couple in the narrative. Often, however, these ships are not validated, and some fans tend to become passionate when their pairings do not come true. For example, in Figure 5 below the user @CROWLEYBEANS criticises the MCU on how their favoured pairing, “Stucky” (a romantic relationship between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes), was not canonical because of its nature as a non-heterosexual couple. In fandom, seeking representation through media is exceedingly common, as observed again in “Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture” (Jenkins, 1992), where Jenkins studies the fanfiction created by fans of ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’ (Roddenberry, 1966-1967) that pair Captain Kirk with his crewmate Spock. In this, he speaks on how fandoms can often create their own representation through the interpretation of media to feel as though they have a voice and an identity that can be seen in the media that they watch and look up to. These fans would argue that adhering to potential source material is not always the best story option, as it deprives the text of representation that could have a positive impact on fans and straying from the original material for adaptation can be advantageous for the overall quality.  
The fandom that has developed around the MCU encompasses many types of fans due to its sheer size, such as Marvel 616 fans, avid consumers of all content, MCU-exclusive fans, fans on a casual level, and so forth. This means the fandom itself cannot truly come to a unified consensus about fidelity in adaptation from Marvel 616 to the MCU, however a concrete measure of success for the MCU can be seen in the general size of the fandom, along with its popularity in modern pop culture. The unequivocal success of the MCU lends to the idea that regardless of fidelity in adaptation, so long as the adaptation in question is enjoyable and presents interesting characters and a compelling narrative, a fandom will generate around it to support and consume it. As a consumer of the MCU member of its fandom, I am sympathetic to those who seek representation through media as I often find representation from similar social groups to mine in mainstream media to be important for many fans, including myself. In terms of adaptation, I am not insistent on fidelity, as I believe that many of the stories told in the MCU are better than many of the stories within Marvel 616 due to being far more character driven over spectacle. As a consumer, I am happy with the direction the MCU is taking in terms of narrative, however I would appreciate more representation as it is an important aspect of the films for the fandom surrounding it. In conclusion, fidelity in media is a valid way of consuming media due to a connection to the source material, however it is also important to embrace the heteroglossic approach when consuming media such as the MCU, as creatives seek to tell their own stories through adaptation and fans may desire other forms of representation through stories that were not originally present.     
Word Count: 2,208                            
References: 
Bakhtin, M., 1934. Discourse in the Novel. Austin and London: University of Texas Press
Jenkins, H., 1992. Textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. New York: Routledge.
Brooker, W. 2012. Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman. New York: I.B. Tauris
The Numbers, 2020. Movie Franchises [online]. California: Nash Information Services LLC. Available from: https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchises [Accessed 1 June 2020]
Cosmonaut Variety Hour, 2018. The Marvel Cinematic Universe – All Movies Reviewed and Ranked (Pt. 2)[video, online]. Youtube. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUl7y9qNZqQ&t=1843s [Accessed 28 May 2020]
Cox, G. & Steinberg, B., 2017. Comic Book Sales Fly on the Capes of Hit Movies, TV Shows [online]. California: Variety. Available from: https://variety.com/2017/film/news/comic-book-sales-superhero-movies-1202499029/ [Accessed 1 June 2020]
Rosy Maple Moth Stan Account, 2019. Clint having a family in the mcu. Twitter moonlillies [online]. 8 February 2019. Available from: https://twitter.com/moonliIIies/status/1093881781147836418?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]
Parker B, 2018. Hot Take. Twitter ParkerBMovies [online]. 8 December 2018. Available from: https://twitter.com/ParkerBMovies/status/1071226507123703808?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]
Gray, J., 2003. New audiences, new textualities: Anti-Fans and non-fans. International journal of Cultural studies [online]. 6(1), 64-81.
Milo, 2019. comic stans that think theyre better than mcu stans. Twitter fuckclub [online]. 17 December 2019. Available from: https://twitter.com/fuckcIub/status/1207086328778756096?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]
Scott, S., 2017. Modelling the Marvel Everyfan: Agent Coulson and/as Transmedia Fan Culture. Palabra Clave [online]. 20(4): 1042-1072
blacklivesmatter, 2018. If Steve or Bucky was a woman. Twitter CROWLEYBEANS [online]. 9 May 2018. Available from: https://twitter.com/CROWLEYBEANS/status/994314360171397122?s=20
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dahniwitchoflight · 5 years
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a-well-toasted-brain mentioned you in a post “did you hear Hussie's massive explanation on the epilogues?”
send me a link dahniwitchoflight
https://www.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/cuywff/the_homestuck_epilogues_bridges_and_offramps_new/
Alright something about Hussie calling his own work a cursed tome is hilarious to me
that’s really amazing he first intended the epilogues to be written as books because like, I’m so sure that if a third one does come out, it will be on an actual hardcover book, even just for the book eating jokes in homestuck and the fact that a book was in calliope’s offerred picnic basket of food choices to John
“I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes.“
Yeah like, Homestuck in it’s current state is certainly finished and done and over with, but he’s right that the things presented in the epilogue do at times feel like cliffhangers leading to something new
but not something entirely new, new in the sense of a remake new
I wouldn’t be surprised if the old proclamation of homestuck 2.0 was just homestuck remade/retcanoned into a new different format and re-telling the story over again but different this time
“ In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. “
Yeah!! Exactly! The Epilogues are leading into more things, but it’s not just gonna be a continuation of the story so far, even using in character retcon mechanics
it’s not like it would be out of place for Homestuck, Homestuck already did that once upon a time with Homestuck Beta, the idea of reimagining what the story of Homestuck is overall, isn’t something new to the media
“It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined.”
“Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. “
That’s really ominous though, it’s sort of implying that that everything fucked up that happened in Candy was through our gaze of wanting to read more being that eternal endgame Sun is what caused all the character skewing, not necessarily that John had leftover bits of canon power in him when everyone else didn’t
We wanted to see the drama and problems that would arise therefore it did
Kind of implies that the longer this continues on the more an original neat happy end is out of reach, what could have been a simple story of 4 kids playing game turned into something much more complicated and dramatic
But I don’t think that’s true, if the story is hinging on what hussie imagines we as an audience want to see, if we all want to see that original neat happy simple end, that hardly feels impossible
Yeah like something else is definitely coming, Hussie gave up the epligues as a way to zap our attention, make us talk, get feedback, get passionate about things he didn’t know we would, get ideas of what it is we wanted to see, and now it’s gonna simmer for a while while he uses some time to cook up something new
“Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively?”
yes!
“And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant.”
“It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements.” 
Ah, so them being called “Epilogues” doesn’t really matter, in fact, it’s clearly being used specifically to mislead us, even their current state of canonical-ness doesn’t matter. It’s not a status handed down from on high that they have no choice but to simply accept.
Everything is both within their power and within the audience and author’s power to change, which he has already admitted as such when he designed the “epilogues” stories labelled as such to in fact feel like “intermissions” in application, so the author has already now changed what an epilogue means in Homestuck, so what will the audience and then the characters change about that?
“So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more".”
whoops indeed lol so yeah, “Epilogue” absolutely doesn’t mean the story is over, it means quite the opposite, it’s a guarantee the story is going to continue
“it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide.”
See, this is the sort of thing why I still have a sliver of faith in the author, he’s admitting he knew the expectation of his audience so clearly that he specifically wrote something to come across as unsatisfying as possible to stoke the flames as much as possible to get people to want more so that he could make more
so he didn’t write the epilogue with any sense of thinking that anyone in the audience was really going to fully accept this is how homestuck ends, it wasn’t presently simply as “well, here’s the end here you go, this is canonically how it ends”
he’s fully aware of the dissatisfaction, in fact it was dissastisfaction he was hoping to cultivate on purpose
I think PesterQuest clearly ties into and jokes about with MC straight up reacting the way a lot of fandom did when they first popped out, right on Hussie’s que
“Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.“
By Homestuck’s been doing that this whole entire time, so it’s really not unexpected here as well
Whatever happened to that original flash of Bark Tier Jade doing things with the planets that ended in candydust? The interruption of that dust made it so we might never know (yet)
“By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires.“
So Hussie is even aware that of the original problem of having a sole author for the kind of story he is making, perfectly represented in story by his self insert being and acting the way it does, trying to diminish it’s presence as much as possible, but still inescapably being there and affecting things
and even showing how a character like John rising to a similar position due to circumstances, can’t help but come to the same conclusion of self isolation as the only way
“ The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action. “
So at this point, Hussie I think is actually admitting he might be out of ideas, so in his role as sole author, that means the story is over it’s dead, wherever it managed to end up dying, but at the same time he doesn’t want to let Homestuck die, so he’s opening up canon to be influenced by other people not just himself, fandom has to start creating new content or rearrange the pieces in ways that feel satisfying to them
That’s not to say though that if we like Homestuck we should all write our endings however we please and that that’s the real true ending of homestuck
but rather he’s probably going to be expanding his team of Homestuck creators to include more people than just him, bigger the bigger sample size of people who want homestuck to live and be satisfying, the more accurate it will be to the overall fandom vision of what it means to be satisfying
So dang then, really cool
Right now, If I were to put myself in this role, I can definitely think of things left unaddressed that I want to be handled in a satisfying way, and I can definitely think of things that have been handled unsatisfactorily, and can think of more satisfying ways to meet their ends
it makes sense though that this can’t be handled by one person alone though, that it has to be a communal effort
because there are also things that I personally have no opinion about, or even worse, a negative opinion about, which means if I were in charge, those parts of the story would be handled in an unsatisfying way to those who were hoping to get satisfaction out of
For instance, it’s not impossible for a character even like Gamzee to have a satisfying conclusion or character arc, if a significant part of fandom so desires
It wouldn’t even have to be that hard, Candy already lampshaded the most obvious/most likely ways in which it could be done seriously
a) play up what happened in his childhood having an affect or non affect on him
b) play up the substance abuse angle or how the drugs might have irreversibly altered his personality
c) play up how his Ultimate Self may have been tainted by the part that became LE similar to Dirk through that “Combat, Philosophy, Life, Love” line
heck even the gross unmentionable part at the end half of Candy has a super dark joke that you could even twist Gamzee’s story as him being the one being abused in a relationship having an affect on him, not the other way around
but THAT would be one hell of a contortion of his character as it is now in the story
and since it’s mostly Gamzee being the one to make these jokes about his own character, it even comes across as darkly self aware on his part, especially with his whole redemptions handed out like Candy thing he’s got going on
that if enough people forgive him and start liking him it’s essentially the same as him not having been a villain in the first place, in “canon”, which it would be if audience had control over canon
but whether that’s due to him wanting to simply, get away with the shit he’s done scot free and not have to feel any repercussions for his actions, or some core of genuine remorse that he doesn’t know how to express properly but has access to the power to change if he wants
I think it’s the first most likely because I dislike him, but people who do like him would obviously feel differently
So, I end this all with
“I want to see what happens in Hiveswap and Friendsim, and PesterQuest, and I want to see if the effects of that has repercussions on Homestuck, and changes it further in ways that satisfy me” with my eyes gleaming, staring like sunlight, changing the way it’s perceived by burning holes into parts I don’t like and welding together the parts that I do like
I ended that pretty ominously, but for real I think the better way is a more light-handed touch
use what’s there as much as you can, tweak small details by your own hands and let the rest change naturally like a butterfly effect, leaving as little a footprint as possible
it’s like how sometimes in order to heal your meat-sack you need surgery, which might involve making new cuts to it, which sounds bad, but if the way those cuts heal and scar over overall causes the health of the body to increase and remove things like rot and poison, it’s done an overall good, especially if it’s good surgery and you manage to do so in the smallest amount of cuts possible
Like those surgery robots who simply go in through holes in the skin and do everything unseen under the surface
Hussie’s left a pretty big important plot hole already, probably better to start from there if anywhere
My immediate thought is what’s the best way of explaining the story of the cursor juju? How it’s created and how it’s meant to be used and etc it’s role in the narrative as a weapon against the final villain
Dang, good read though overall thanks for linking it to me!
I definitely would say though that my gaze isn’t filled with wanting to see more drama and problems pop up, it’s wanting to see the resolutions of past drama, wanting to ease tensions rather than create more, wanting to patch things up rather than create more holes, just simply wanting a satisfying resolution to things I care about
If Homestuck is a piece of art, I’m a small blowtorch welding the delicate bits back onto their proper places so that I can look at the finally finished metal statue with satsifaction
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The Homestuck Epilogues: Bridges And Off-Ramps: pgenpod ep52
by Andrew Hussie
The history of printed version of The Homestuck Epilogues is also the history of The Homestuck Epilogues themselves, because I originally envisioned releasing them only as a book like this, to even further emphasize their conceptual separation from the main narrative. If you know anything about the epilogues, you probably already understand that conceptually distinguishing themselves from the story by their presentation as "fanfiction" is an important part of their nature and what they are trying to say. In the form of a book (which you can read from one side, or flip upside down and read from the other) it somewhat carries the feeling of a cursed tome. Something which maddeningly beckons, due to whatever insanity it surely contains, but also something which causes feelings of trepidation. There's an ominous aura surrounding such a work, probably for a few reasons. The sheer size of it means the nature of the content probably isn't going to be that trivial. The stark presentation of the black and white covers, its dual-narrative format, the foreboding prologue combined with an alarming list of "content warnings", and even the fact that an "epilogue" is delivered with a "prologue" first, all adds up to a piece of media that appears designed to make the reader nervous about what to expect from it. Such is the nature of a cursed tome retrieved from a place which may have best been left undisturbed. It is also the nature of any creative inclination to reopen a story which had already been laid to rest - a reader's desire to agitate and then collapse the bubble which contained the imagined projection of "happily ever after", simply by observing it. There exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble, or to crack that tome. There is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. It's a risk for all involved. It should be.
Obviously, it wasn't released as a book, until now (the plans for printing it had already been made, but were just delayed until well after its release on site). We decided to just release it all on the site so everyone could read it right away if they wanted. There was a long tradition of making all content freely accessible on the site, and we just produced one utterly enormous update which we were perfectly aware would cause a massive amount of discussion and agitation in the fandom. Overall it was probably better to just get it out there, let people read it relatively quickly, form their opinions on it, and then begin discussing it critically. In other words, people were going to feel something from all this, so it seemed better to just let it out there, allow the maximum number of people feel whatever it would cause them to feel, give people time to process those feelings, and then move on to whatever comes next.
But what comes next? That's a good question. I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes. In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. Because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes: new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. There can be no sense of emotional gratification later without first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. And by peeking into the imagined realm of "happily ever after" to satisfy our curiosity, we discover that our attention isn't so harmless, because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored. Nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch, when several teenagers are handed god-status. It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. So they spring into action, and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative. But "implied" is all it was. There was no immediate announcement for followup content, and I'm not announcing anything here yet either. More time was always going to be necessary to figure out what to do next, including what form it takes, the timing, and all those questions. For now I think it was alright to just let things simmer for a while, and give people an extended period of time to meditate on the meaning of the epilogues and why they involved the choices they did. But regardless of anyone's conclusions about it, I can at least confirm that it WAS designed to feel like a bridge piece since its conception. 
Is it this way because an epilogue SHOULD be this way? No. It is this way because I thought that was the most suitable role for an epilogue to play in the context of the weird piece of media Homestuck has always been. The story experiments a lot with the way stories are told, and in particular messes with the ways certain stretches of content get partitioned and labeled. Playing with the labeling I think has ways of bringing attention to those labels, what they actually mean, and how they affect our perception of the events covered under certain labels. It can even get us to wonder why certain labels exist at all, and can expose "flaws" in the construction of stories which include them. For instance, "intermission" is such a label. But perhaps another way of saying intermission is, "whoops, the story is getting too long, here's a break from the real story with a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't matter". It's seemingly a tacit admission to a problem. And by continuing to toy with that label as the story rolls along, you start to unpack the nature of that problem by implicitly asking questions about it. If you have one intermission because the story got long... can you have two if it gets longer? Can you have even more than that? Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively? And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant. It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements. 
So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more". And we know right away this label will be subject to the same kind of trickery, since there are two story paths of eight epilogues each, prefaced by a shared prologue. It's already an unhinged implementation of the label before you even read it, which means it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide. Before you read it, it's already an invitation to start questioning what an epilogue even is, and whether it's kind of a silly idea even if applied conventionally. Take a 50 chapter novel with an epilogue, for example. Why isn't the epilogue just called chapter 51? Why was the choice made to label that content differently? Should we consider it an important part of the story, or should we not? If it's not important, why are we reading it? And if it is important, why is it given a label which is almost synonymous with "afterthought"? Is it a simple parting gift to the reader, to provide minor forms of satisfaction which the core narrative wasn't built to provide? Is it actually important to deliver those minor satisfactions? If it really is important, why didn't that content appear in chapter 51? And if it isn't, why bother at all? What are we even doing here?
By going down this path of questioning, it sounds like we're assembling a case against writing epilogues altogether. But actually, there's really nothing wrong with them. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to include in any story. It's just that the more you ask questions like these, the more you are forced to think about the true nature of these storytelling constructs, the actual purposes they're meant to serve. And with something like Homestuck, where issues like this are heavily foregrounded, like what should be considered "canon" vs. "not canon", or even more esoteric concepts like "outside of canon" or "beyond canon", then the issues you uncover when you ask such questions about an epilogue can't really be ignored. My feeling is, there's almost no choice but to turn the conventional ideas associated with epilogues completely inside-out, because of the inherent contradictions involved with crossing the post-canon threshold and revealing that which was not meant to be known. Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.
These are the types of things the epilogues let you to think about, along with a few other ideas. Like the fact that all narratives have perspectives and biases, depending on who is telling the story, even in the case where it's unclear if the narrator has any specific identity. The suggestion that all narratives are driven by agendas, sometimes thinly disguised, other times heavily. There's also stuff to think about just due to its presentation as fanfiction, and that it's the first installment of Homestuck which included other authors (contrary to some speculation I've seen, every word of all seven acts were written by me alone). By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires. If the epilogues really prove to be the bridge media they were designed to feel like, then I expect this trend to continue. The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action.
I also think many of the negative feelings the story creates isn't just an urgent prompt for the reader to imagine different ideas, or ways to resolve the new narrative dilemmas. It's also an opportunity for people to discuss any of the difficult content critically, and for fandom in general to continue developing the tools for processing the negative emotions art can generate. Sorting that out has to be a communal experience, and it's an important part of the cycle between creating and criticizing art. I think not only can creators develop their skills to create better things by practicing and taking certain risks, fandom is something which can develop better skills as well. Skills like critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time. Fandoms everywhere tend to get bad reputations for various reasons, maybe justifiably. But I don't see why it can't be an objective to try to improve fandom, just as creators can improve their work. And I think this can only happen if now and then fandoms are seriously challenged, by being encouraged to think about complex ideas, and made to feel difficult emotions. I believe when art creates certain kinds of negative feelings in people, it can lead to some of the most transformative experiences art has to offer. But it helps to be receptive to this idea for these experiences to have a positive net effect on your life, and your relationship with art. 
So now I'm looking to all of you on the matter of where to go next. Wherever the most conscientious and invested members of fandom want to drive this universe, as well as the standards by which we engage with media in general, that will be the direction I follow.
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wepon · 5 years
Text
the homestuck epilogues: bridges and off-ramps, by andrew hussie*
the history of the printed version of the homestuck epilogues is also the history of the homestuck epilogues themselves because i originally envisioned releasing them only as a book like this to even further emphasize their conceptual separation from the main narrative. if you know anything about the epilogues, you probably already understand that conceptually distinguishing themselves from the story by their presentation as fanfiction as an important part of their nature and what they're trying to say. in the form of a book which you can read from one side or flip upside-down and read from the other, it somewhat carries the feeling of a cursed tome, something which maddeningly beckons due to whatever insanity it surely contains but also something which causes feelings of trepidation. there's an ominous aura surrounding such a work, probably for a few reasons. the sheer size of it means the nature of the content probably isn't going to be that trivial. the stark presentation of the black-and-white covers, its dual narrative format, the foreboding prologue combined with an alarming list of content warnings, and even the fact that an epilogue is delivered with a prologue first, all adds up to a piece of media that appears designed to make the reader nervous about what to expect from it. such is the nature of a cursed tome retrieved from a place which may have been best left undisturbed. it is also the nature of any creed[?] of inclination to reopen a story which had already been laid to rest, a reader's desire to agitate and then collapse the bubble which contain the imagined projection of happily-ever-after simply by observing it. there exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble or to crack that tome. there is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. it's a risk for all involved. it should be. obviously it wasn't released as a book until now. the plans for printing it had already been made but were just delayed until well after its release on-site. we decided to just release it all on the site so that everyone could read it right away if they wanted. there was a long tradition of making all content freely accessible on the site, and we just produced one utterly enormous update, which we were perfectly aware would cause a massive amount of discussion and agitation in the fandom. overall it was probably better to just get it out there, let people read it relatively quickly, form their opinions on it, and then begin discussing it critically. in other words, people were going to feel something from all of this, so it seemed better to just let it out there, allow the maximum number of people to feel whatever it would cause them to feel, give people time to process those feelings, and then move on to whatever comes next. but what comes next? that's a good question. i feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes. in this sense, i think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative and conceptually optional by its presentation, which allows it to function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of homestuck were perfectly sufficient. but for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes, new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. there can be no sense of emotional gratification later without us first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. and by peeking into the imagined realm of happily-ever-after to satisfy our curiosity, we discover our attention isn't so harmless because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored, nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch when several teenagers are handed god status. it turns out the gaze we cast from the skies of earth c revisited aren't exactly friendly like warm sunlight. it's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this so they spring into action and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative. but implied is all it was. there was no immediate announcement for follow-up content and i'm not announcing anything yet here, either. more time was always going to be necessary to figure out what to do next, including what form it takes, the timing, and all those questions. for now i think it was alright to just let things simmer for a while and give people an extended period of time to meditate on the meaning of the epilogues and why they involve the choices they did. but regardless of anyone's conclusions about it, i can at least confirm that it was designed to feel like a bridge piece since its conception. is it this way because an epilogue should be this way? no. it is this way because i thought that was the most suitable role for an epilogue to play in the context of the weird piece of media homestuck has always been. the story experiments a lot with the way stories are told, and in particular messes with the ways certain stretches of content get partitioned and labeled. playing with the labeling, i think, has ways of bringing attention to those labels, what they actually mean, and how they affect our perception of events covered under certain labels. it can even get us to wonder why certain labels exist at all, and can expose flaws in the construction of stories which include them. for instance, intermission is such a label. but perhaps another way of saying intermission is "whoops, the story is getting too long, here's a break from the real story with a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't matter". it's seemingly a tacit admission to a problem, and by continuing to toy with that label as the story rolls along, you start to unpack the nature of that problem by implicitly asking questions about it. if you have one intermission because the story got long, can you have two if it gets longer? can you have even more than that? once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly irrelevant and the other important? and if that's true, then is it possible for the irrelevant thread to accrue more importance, throwing it's entire identity as optional content into question retroactively? and if that can happen, is it possible that two threads can flip roles with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? then once the story goes through the motions of answering yes to all this, isn't it also fair to ask "why bother with this examination at all"? was it pure horseplay and trickery? actually yes, sort of. there is a trick involved. the gradual realization that intermission content is non-trivial forces the reader to re-evaluate their perception of the material which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material and what they believed that label meant. it relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content, such as relevance, and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. in other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes about stories to control the perception of what they are reading just by shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well-trained to expect from certain elements. so now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which supposes an apparent flaw with the label. or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. if another way of saying intermission is "whoops, the story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, i forgot some shit, here's some more", and we know right away this label will be subject to the same type of trickery since there are two story paths of eight epilogues each, prefaced by a shared prologue. it's already an unhinged implementation of the label before you even read it, which means it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide. before you read it, it's already an invitation to start questioning what an epilogue even is and whether it's kind of a silly idea even if applied conventionally. take a fifty-chapter novel with an epilogue, for example. why isn't the epilogue just called chapter fifty-one? why was the choice made to label that content differently? should we consider it an important part of the story or should we not? if it's not important, why are we reading it? and if it is important, why is it given a label which is almost synonymous with afterthought? is it a simple parting gift to the reader, to provide minor forms of satisfaction which the core narrative wasn't built to provide? is it actually important to deliver those minor satisfactions? if it really is important, why didn't that content appear in chapter fifty-one? and if it isn't, why bother at all? what are we even doing here? by going down this path of questioning, it sounds like we're assembling a case against writing epilogues altogether, but actually, there's really nothing wrong with them. it's a perfectly reasonable thing to include in any story. it's just that the more you ask questions like these, the more you're forced to think about the true nature of these storytelling concepts, the actual purposes they're meant to serve. and with something like homestuck, where issues like this are heavily foregrounded, like what should be considered canon versus non-canon, or even more esoteric concepts like "outside" of canon or "beyond" canon, that the issues you uncover when you ask such questions about an epilogue can't really be ignored. my feeling is there's almost no choice but to turn the conventional ideals associated with epilogues completely inside out, because of the inherent contradictions  involved with crossing the post-canon threshold and revealing that which was not meant to be known. stories end where they do for certain reasons. answering the questions which were thematically important to answer and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of those decisions. under the "whoops, i forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium due to all these considerations that went into which questions to answer and which to leave ambiguous, and these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse. these are the types of things the epilogues let you think about, along with a few other ideas, like the fact that all narratives have perspectives and biases depending on who's telling the story, even in the case where it's unclear whether the narrator has any specific identity. the suggestion that all narratives are driven by agendas, sometimes thinly disguised, other times heavily. there's also stuff to think about just due to its presentation as fanfiction, and that it's the first installment of homestuck which included other authors. contrary to some speculation i've seen, every word of all seven acts were written by me alone. by deploying it as mock-fanfiction and including other authors, i'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires. if the epilogues really prove themselves to be the bridge media they were designed to feel like, then i expect this trend to continue. the fanfiction format is effectively a call to action for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues or to pave over them with their own ideas, and i believe the direness in tone, with some of the subject matter, suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action. i also feel that many of the negative feelings this story creates isn't just an urgent prompt for the reader to imagine different ideas or ways to solve the new narrative dilemmas. it's also an opportunity for people to discuss any of the difficult content critically, and fandom in general continuing to develop the tools for processing the negative emotions art can generate. sorting that out has to be a communal experience, and it's an important part of the cycle between creating and criticizing art. i think not only can creators develop their skills to create better things by practicing in taking certain risks, fandom is something which can develop better skills as well. skills like critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time. fandoms everywhere tend to get bad reputations for various reasons, maybe justifiably, but i don't see why it can't be an objective to try and improve fandom, just as creators can improve this work, and i think this can only happen if, now and then, fandoms are seriously challenged by being encouraged to think about complex ideas and made to feel difficult emotions. i believe when art creates certain kinds of negative feelings in people it can lead to some of the most transformative experiences art has to offer, but it helps to be receptive to this idea for these experiences to have a positive net effect on your life and your relationship with art. so now i'm looking to all of you on the matter of where to go next, wherever the most conscientious and invested members of fandom want to drive this universe, as well as the standards by which we engage with media in general. that will be the direction i follow.
*i have no way to verify this statement
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housmania · 6 years
Text
In Defense of TJLC
A response to this Slate podcast and to general misconceptions.
Hello! Call me soe. I like cats, BBC Sherlock, and friendly online communities. I hope you do too.
I also blog about TJLC. So, when a Slate podcast came out this week portraying TJLCers in a jarringly negative light, I was dismayed. What I heard was not the community I know.
This post’s aim is to tell the other side of the story. I’m writing both for people who support TJLC and were shocked to hear of the podcast, and for people outside TJLC whose initial impressions have been skewed by the podcast or other outside sources.
I’ll address four of the most common arguments against TJLC through the lens of the argument presented by Willa Paskin, the podcast’s creator:
TJLC, as a theory, is “far-fetched” and merits no serious consideration.
TJLCers are dogmatic, ideological, and close-minded.
TJLCers have hated on people outside of TJLC to an unusual and appalling extent.
TJLC has brought more harm into the world than good.
I intend to refute these points. In the process, I hope to represent your run-of-the-mill TJLCer: not a hateful extremist, but rather someone who supports a theory, enjoys discussing it, and is happy to let those who don’t live their happy lives.
It also means adhering to the standards of a good TJLC meta writer: going through the podcast thoroughly, addressing Ms. Paskin’s correct insights as well as her failings; reading and acknowledging critics and downright opponents; citing all sources; and remaining civil and open-minded. I wish Ms. Paskin had afforded us these privileges.
I genuinely believe that Ms. Paskin meant well. Nonetheless, the biases of her sources, combined with several misconceptions and imperfect research, result in a piece that portrays TJLC inaccurately.
To understand what the podcast got wrong, we first need to cover:
What is TJLC?
TJLC is the theory that the characters John Watson and Sherlock Holmes will end up in a canonical romantic relationship on the BBC show Sherlock. People who support this theory are called TJLCers. TJLCers write analyses of the show, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and numerous other sources known as “metas”.
TJLC is short for “The Johnlock Conspiracy.” I must immediately clarify that this name is a joke. It began humorously and is always, always used tongue-in-cheek. Keep this in mind: Many misconceptions about TJLC arise from the fact that we take very few things seriously, as I’ll discuss later.
What isn’t TJLC?
TJLC is not the same as Johnlock.
Johnlock refers just to shipping John/Sherlock—thinking they’d make a cute romantic couple, without necessarily having any expectation of that happening on the show.
More fundamentally: Johnlock is about creating transformative, creative content. It’s about making something new. In essence, it’s fiction.
TJLC is about analyzing evidence that’s already there. It’s nonfiction.
Ms. Paskin frequently blurs the lines between the two and mourns TJLC for not having the same level of creativity. She explains, for example, that fandom reads into tiny elements of a show to create a transformative space. But TJLC is not transformative. That’s Johnlock.
Neither is TJLC based on wanting the show to “bend to [our] desires”—i.e., Johnlock shippers projecting wishful thinking onto the show. I’m happy to serve as a counterexample for that! I actually didn’t ship Johnlock at all before discovering TJLC. Rather, I found the theories plausible and loved the idea that a show centered around deduction and analysis could also be the subject of deduction and analysis.
Of course, people who already ship Johnlock are more likely to be attracted to TJLC. But the basis of TJLC is not to “see in the story that you have, the story that you want” (46:40)—that’s shipping—but to analyze the story you already have.
I cannot stress this enough: TJLC is analysis, NOT shipping.
TJLC and the “Great Game”
As the podcast explains, TJLCers aren’t the first analyze Sherlock Holmes. Fans of the originals have been analyzing the stories since the 1880s. These early theorists actually gave the name to two kinds of fan analysis: Watsonian and Doylist.
Watsonian fans played the “Great Game,” treating the stories like a real world. Doyle didn’t exist, so every detail had to be explained in-universe rather than attributed to author techniques or error. They’re closer to your modern shippers, creating headcanons to fill in gaps.
Doylist fans acknowledged that (no duh) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a real person, and therefore analyzed the stories as works of literature. They are essentially literary analysts and critics, the kind that wind up on JSTOR.
TJLCers are Doylists. Obviously, someone made the show. That means we analyze character arcs, cinematographic techniques, and rhetorical devices in the dialogue like a researcher in film studies or literature would.
Ms. Paskin warns that in the Watsonian Great Game, people kept “tongues planted firmly in cheek; TJLCers, not so much.” And yet, that’s the point! You wouldn’t expect a literary analyst to go “lol maybe The Great Gatsby criticizes society but like who knows” any more than you’d want Watsonians to really believe that because John Watson’s wife called him James, his middle name is Hamish (Scottish for James) rather than acknowledging that Doyle just forgot. A ridiculous premise entails a humorous approach. A reasonable premise entails a rational one.
TJLC isn’t quite the same as highbrow analysis, however, for three reasons:
First, we use our analyses to speculate about the future of the show. We don’t have the privilege of analyzing a complete work. In that sense, the closest analogy I can think of is that of political analysts: examining what’s already been said and done to predict what will happen next.
Second, we evolved from a fandom space. That means that the barrier between TJLC and Johnlock, between nonfiction analysis and creative fiction, is never as solid as it would be in academia. Furthermore, a significant number of TJLC meta writers also engage in fictional fanworks, making it more difficult to distinguish where hard analysis ends and transformative work begins. I’ll go into some of the nuances of meta in a bit.
Third, the people in TJLC are generally queer women and often young. And we can’t discuss biases against fandom and TJLC without acknowledging sexism and homophobia. When a film critic writes a theory, it’s deep; when we do, it’s ludicrous. Paradise Lost is fanfiction just as much as AO3, but only the former is treated as legitimate literature. Theories about straight couples are plausible; ones about queer ones are suddenly delusional or fetishization. Adult fanboys are mature content creators; fangirls are hysterical.
Conversations about the implicit biases in media depictions of fandom aren’t my focus here. Nonetheless, it’s crucial to bear in mind that highbrow criticisms of fandom that focus only on its ill effects and ignore the complexity, depth, community bonding, and social change that fandom (analytical and transformative) creates often denigrate fans as immature and delusional without considering whether that accurately represents even a significant minority of a fandom. It’s a bias that we should all keep in check.
As progressive as Ms. Paskin may be, the podcast also falls into this trap. In particular, she emphasizes sensationalist depictions of TJLC theories—highlighting far-fetched theories and glossing over deeper points—and the contemptible actions of very few TJLCers while glossing over the far more plausible mainstream theories and kindness of nearly all TJLCers. As a result, we naturally look hysterical and delusional.
So let’s tackle each of those issues: TJLC as a theory and the behavior of the TJLC community.
TJLC as a Theory
If you don’t support TJLC, I’m not asking you to be convinced by a few paragraphs. The aim here is simply to explain why TJLC is plausible.
Ms. Paskin asserts that (1) TJLC is completely unsupported by the original Sherlock Holmes stories, (2) that romantic coding in the show is simply “a knowing wink,” and that (3) TJLC “is based on an unfalsifiable premise: that the creators are lying to you.” In fact:
1. TJLC is supported by the original stories.
The Sherlock Holmes canon contains significant, documented evidence of queer coding similar to other works of the same time period. It’s also reasonable to theorize, based on biographical data, that Doyle himself was bisexual.
The extent to which the stories were deliberately coded is a matter of debate. Yet Ms. Paskin simply asserts that “Conan Doyle wasn’t trying to create a homosexual subtext when he wrote the characters, but he did write a deep and committed friendship.” As @one-thousand-splendid-stars put it:
How on earth can anyone possibly know if the homoeroticism was intentional or not, when ACD could’ve been persecuted for admitting it, or making it more obvious?
Ms. Paskin’s assertion, which does not acknowledge any evidence to the contrary, again conflates Johnlock shippers with TJLCers. Johnlock is about transformative fiction; TJLC is about nonfiction analysis.
Ms. Paskin also suggests that TJLCers are “queering” the text, except that queering generally implies a queer theory approach to something that wasn’t queer to begin with. Our whole objective is to reveal that the text was originally queer.
2. The basis for TJLC is the show itself.
Ms. Paskin supposes that TJLC is “is based on an unfalsifiable premise: that the creators are lying to you.”
But TJLC isn’t based on anything the creators have said. It’s based on analysis of the show itself.
There’s a whole lot of analysis; good summaries are here and here. Essentially, we argue that given the level of coding on the show, the most probable outcome is that there is deliberate subtext meant to foreshadow that John and Sherlock will become a couple. Elements like Sherlock being indifferent to women, yet “romantic entanglement would complete [him] as a human being” suggest that the subtext isn’t just a “knowing wink,” as Ms. Paskin asserts: it would be poor writing (not to mention queerbaiting) to complete such a setup and not follow through.
3. The creators
Ms. Paskin finds it alarming that TJLCers believe Moffat and Gatiss are deliberately lying when they say that Johnlock will not become canon.
And normally, I would agree! Except that Moffat and Gatiss have a long history of lying through their teeth about plot developments. For example, they vehemently repeated that The Abominable Bride would be a stand-alone episode completely independent of the show, but it turned out to be a drugged Sherlock’s theorizing about Moriarty’s plan. And before Series 4, they said that Mary would become a long-running character, then killed her off in the next episode.
So it’s not a stretch to think that they could be lying about one more thing, particularly when TJLC relies on independent evidence from the show itself.
In fact, Paskin argues that TJLCers, like Watsonians playing the Great Game, base their theories on a “contradiction”: “On the one hand the author might as well not exist, but then on the other hand, this person who doesn’t exist has made this perfectly explicable logical thing.”
Except that unlike Watsonians, we do acknowledge that the creators exist. We analyze the show as a work of fiction, with narrative techniques that can be analyzed just as much as plot elements.
Furthermore, the fact that the creators lie constantly doesn’t mean we don’t pay attention to what they do say. They have large incentives to keep upcoming plot twists secret, but that doesn’t mean they can’t reveal their motivations and influences. A lawyer questioning a lying witness can still gain information from what they do say.
Take a closer example: Say I went back to 1897 and asked Bram Stoker if there’s queer coding in Dracula (which is now well-documented). He would probably respond along the lines of “I’m not a sodomite; also, what???” But he might wax poetic about homoeroticism in Walt Whitman’s poetry and mention that his charismatic but domineering idol Henry Irving was the basis for Dracula.
So no, there’s no contradiction between analyzing the show and the creators’ influences while still believing that they don’t want to reveal upcoming plot points.
The Behavior of the TJLC Community
How Theories Work
Ms. Paskin rattles off several far-fetched TJLC theories that make TJLC as a whole sound ridiculous. Furthermore, she implies that TJLC is a monolithic community with a “dogmatic” belief in all of these theories, such that criticism and discussion don’t exist.
Guess what? I’m in TJLC, and I don’t believe half the theories she mentioned. That’s because TJLC is much less uniform than its detractors would believe. Furthermore, the general level of confidence that people have in a given piece of evidence depends on its strength. In other words, the more evidence for something, the more likely that TJLCers agree on it. The less evidence for something, the more likely we are to treat it as just something cool that could turn out to be coincidence.
We can divide TJLC meta into five basic categories:
1. Foundational meta
These are well-respected analysis of character arcs, dialogue, and other clearly deliberate plot elements such as this one. Pretty much all TJLCers agree with them. These are your best-researched, most widespread meta; they form the true basis of TJLC. Here are some examples. And yet they hardly show up in Ms. Paskin’s discussion, because they don’t make TJLC sound too far-fetched.
2. Circumstantial evidence
TJLC can stand on foundational meta alone, but there’s also secondary evidence to support it. This includes the “drinks code” (the theory that beverages serve as symbols on the show, supported by subsequent creator remarks) and similar theories that can’t hold up TJLC by themselves, but do provide extra evidence and add nuance to theories about character arcs and plot development.
3. Accessory meta
These are analyses of elements that could well turn out to be coincidence due to scarce evidence. If true, they allow us to establish character arcs in greater depth, but it’s perfectly possible that any given one is coincidence. These include the theories on wallpaper and lighting that Ms. Paskin reports as though they were the pillars of TJLC. They’re theories that I read and go, “Hm, interesting; maybe.”
4. Spinoff theories
These are theories that deal with specific paths the show might take. They generally have groups of supporters within TJLC, but each spinoff theory usually only has a smaller group of supporters within the larger TJLC community.
It’s important to note that many major theories don’t have to do with Johnlock at all. Take M-theory, the idea that Mycroft and other characters are under Moriarty’s thumb, or EMP, the idea that some episodes take place in Sherlock’s mind palace. If, as Ms. Paskin asserts, TJLC is about wishful thinking and wanting Johnlock to be canon, what would be the point of these? Furthermore, if TJLC is monolithic and dogmatic, why do we constantly discuss and critique these theories in constructive discussions? I had to make a whole table of theories after Series 4 because everyone’s opinion was so different!
5. Crack theories
These are usually clearly labeled “crack” and are never meant to be taken seriously. Again, TJLC contains a lot of humor. So sometimes, we goof off and write theories like this one that are clearly ridiculous, usually with an exaggerated conspiratorial tone, to have fun in the spirit of the Watsonians. Unfortunately, some people outside TJLC think we actually take these theories seriously and accordingly treat us as crazy people. Guys… Ctrl+F “crack” first.
To summarize:
TJLC contains theories with varying levels of evidence that are treated with corresponding levels of seriousness.
TJLCers are far from dogmatic. Different people have different views, and that’s OK.
TJLC is founded on criticism and discussion (here’s an example). By disagreeing on meta, we gain better insight into the characters.
Addressing Ms. Paskin: The theories she dwells on are EMP and M-Theory (40:04 and 10:37), both spinoff theories. They do not form part of the main body of TJLC, and fans are far more flexible about that stuff because it’s not nearly as firmly supported as foundational meta. She cites a clip analyzing Mycroft’s theme in the score, which is accessory meta that could well turn out to be coincidence. (By the way, I have serious doubts about all three of these theories. And TJLC is perfectly accepting of that!)
She also talks about loudest-subtext’s meta on the 2009 BBC queer representation report, whose objective was to demonstrate that it was possible for TJLC to happen from a production/permission standpoint, not to prove that TJLC was happening on the show. In that sense, it’s closer to circumstantial evidence.
She also fears that TJLCers “try to find order and logic and reason in every detail.” Again, sane TJLCers treat less solid evidence as less likely to be true. Caveat: Some TJLCers do go overboard. But they do not represent the overwhelming, sane majority.
TJLC Culture
Confidence and Criticism
Ms. Paskin finds it alarming that many TJLCers regarded TJLC as far more well-supported, even certain, than “an opinion or a possibility” or “just one ship among many” (14:50).
And yet, in an academic setting, isn’t it normal to think that the theory you researched and support is correct? Again, we hit the boundary in how the public perceives highbrow research and fan analysis. TJLC was not “just one ship among many” because (again) it’s not a ship, it’s a theory based on research and analysis. So naturally, we had a higher level of confidence in TJLC becoming canon than a shipper with an unsupported ship would.
Ms. Paskin implies that this confidence led directly to TJLC being unable to take criticism and therefore hating on people outside the community, since “denying [TJLC] was denying the truth” (14:55). But—first off—confidence does not directly lead to thin skins. Again, we debate everything. If good meta writers couldn’t change their minds given new evidence, TJLC wouldn’t exist.
Yet even when some TJLCers were more certain about TJLC than could be reasonably expected, the overwhelming majority was perfectly nice. We can, in fact, agree to disagree with others.
But this brings us to the most painful part of the podcast:
Fandom Toxicity: The Broad Picture
The podcast, having painted TJLCers as delusional, dogmatic crusaders, goes on to argue that TJLCers hated on people outside TJLC to an unusual and deplorable amount, such that TJLC’s main effect was to increase toxicity in the Sherlock fandom.
For starters:  Yes, a few TJLCers did fit this despicable mold. I universally condemn people who went out of their way to attack people outside or inside the community. They are an insult to TJLC’s values of inclusivity and rational debate. And my heart goes out to the people who suffered as a result of them.
But guess what? All the TJLCers I’ve talked to agree with that. Because the fact is that awful people form an incredibly small minority of TJLC.
Most of the TJLCers who listened to the podcast found this to be the most insulting and painful part. They’ve reiterated time and again that the community as a whole is not a toxic place.  @artfulkindoforder put it best:
So many TJLCers were never mean to anybody.
You can think we’re unrealistic, immature, delusional—fine. But at the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of us stuck to our circles of courteous people and just had fun.
In broad terms, there were several inconsistencies between the podcast and what I found. First, the podcast attributes toxic behavior to large swathes of TJLC, when in fact it tended to be a small group of repeat offenders, many of whom would attack people inside TJLC as well as outside it. loudest-subtext, a longtime TJLC blogger, discussed this here.
Secondly, the podcast makes absolutely no mention of the hate that TJLCers—often perfectly civil ones—received, which makes it easier to paint TJLC as engaging in vicious, one-sided attack. TJLCers, especially at the beginning, received shocking quantities of anonymous hate. Like attacks on people outside TJLC, I’m sure that the attacks on TJLCers were also due to a tiny minority of toxic people. But to gloss over them entirely is to paint an incomplete and biased picture. As @one-thousand-splendid-stars put it:
I’m not going to pretend that there was never nasty behavior from TJLC, but I’m also not going to say her description of us was accurate. She presented the TJLC fandom like it was a toxic cult.... She talked about fandom bullying as though we were never on the receiving end of it, and weren’t ever ridiculed, or called stupid, or sent anon hate, or harassed. To imply that tjlcers were only dishing it out is just flat out inaccurate.
The anonymous attacks on TJLCers had several results. First, TJLC developed a culture that stresses avoiding confrontation with outsiders: leaving other shippers be, unless they seek out TJLC posts. For example, some of the first things I learned were to misspell other ship names on TJLC posts so they wouldn’t show up when people wanted content promoting that ship, and not to reblog posts from outside shippers’ blogs with TJLC-related comments. Far from attacking outsiders, the whole point is to let people who disagree with TJLC do their own thing.
Second, the vast majority of TJLCers despise anon hate because they receive it unusually often. I’ve never seen a community with so many posts reminding people never to resort to it because they’ve seen how it hurt TJLC bloggers.
Third, a handful of TJLCers who got repeated and unwarranted hate did get more combative. But when looking at their later behavior, it’s important to understand that many of them became less willing to compromise on TJLC because they’d seen toxic fans remain unwilling to compromise or debate with them. And most of the conflicts I’ve seen as a result came from anti-TJLC people coming specifically to comment on TJLCers’ posts, not from TJLCers going out of their way to fight non-TJLCers.
Specific Incidents
I didn’t want to rely on secondhand knowledge about hate to write this response. In the spirit of TJLC, I wanted to be fair and impartial. That meant looking through the blogs of people who had received hate inside and outside TJLC. So here’s what I found out:
First off, it was awful. I was looking 4-5 years back to find the worst instances of hate in the community, and I wasn’t used to it because the bloggers I interact with are universally inclusive and civil.
Ms. Paskin discussed three specific incidents on the podcast: top/bottomlock, the 2015 221BCon incident, and post-Series 4 anger.
When top/bottomlock came up, I was baffled. First off, that discussion is ancient. It’s so old that by the time I joined TJLC in late 2015, it had practically died out. More importantly, a “debate” that Ms. Paskin describes as “very specific and dogmatic fanon” was—as I’ve understood—never taken seriously. Again, TJLC is not a very serious place, and people outside it are bound to misinterpret inside jokes. 99% of TJLCers saw top/bottomlock as nothing more than fodder for crack theories, and yet Ms. Paskin’s sources on this issue—none of whom are actually in TJLC—describe it as a debate of monumental importance.
The 2015 221BCon, on the other hand, was a serious conflict. As far as I can tell, people like Emma genuinely suffered, and the fact that neutral fans received anonymous attacks is shameful. But the results of this stretched to TJLCers as well as people outside TJLC, something that the podcast conveniently neglects to mention.
The end of Series 4 disappointed people throughout the Sherlock fandom. I’m not talking about Johnlock: plot inconsistencies, weird characterizations, and plot pulled from a horror movie resulted in its lowest Rotten Tomatoes rating ever. TJLC is too small to have that kind of clout, so to say that TJLCers were the only ones disappointed is clearly inaccurate.
Ms. Paskin claims that Series 4 “seemed straighter, not gayer, than before” and yet John telling Sherlock that “romantic entanglement would complete you as a human being” is uh…pretty gay. For many TJLCers, the problem wasn’t that there wasn’t Johnlock; the problem was that the quality of the show seemed to have drastically decreased.
TJLC immediately split into two groups. One group left TJLC, believing that Moffat and Gatiss had been queerbaiting. Many of them began constructive anti-queerbaiting discussions. Unfortunately, a few took their anger out on the creators.
The resulting hateful messages do not represent the views of the vast majority of former TJLCers, let alone people who still support TJLC. The fact that Amanda Abbington received a death threat is disgusting; and yet in TJLC, she’s always been regarded as a sort of beloved “fandom aunt”. In addition, Ms. Paskin cites an article that claimed that fans “dampened [Martin Freeman’s] enthusiasm.” But that interview has already been revealed as a clickbait-seeking misinterpretation—by Freeman himself.
The second group—those remaining in TJLC—were a bit desperate, and I’ll be the first to admit that several theories with scanty factual basis became more popular then than they would have in calmer times. The Apple Tree Yard theory, for instance, is clearly ridiculous in retrospect. But even I was willing to consider it. (Not my finest moment.) As a side note, however: the far-fetched “China cancelled Johnlock” theory she mentioned is by someone who’s not only outside TJLC, but also notorious for hating it
But regardless of the quality of these theories, 99% of the remaining TJLCers were certainly not hating on people—because who was there to hate, if there was no queerbaiting?
Ultimately, the podcast’s descriptions of hate related to TJLC are one-sided, distorted, and do not reflect the conduct of the overwhelming majority of TJLCers.
Podcast-Specific Errors
There’s a reason why the podcast comes off so different from reality: its research is seriously flawed.
For a podcast about TJLC, Ms. Paskin interviewed a whopping one (1) actual current TJLCer, whom she apparently interviewed after building much of her argument. Every other interviewee was outside TJLC and specifically disliked it. That will hardly make for an unbiased final product.
As a result, she culminates with several remarks that are genuinely insulting. She likens TJLC to “any other standard conspiracy where you have a Judgment Day,” suggesting that we’re irrational and fanatical. She summarizes the entire community as “people being cruel to one another because they disagree about how a fictional TV relationship should turn out,” combining every misconception of (1) TJLC being a ship instead of hard analysis, (2) blaming every TJLCers for the actions of very few, (3) TJLC being a silly fan thing rather than a starting point for meaningful research into queer representation and literary analysis, and (4) ignoring TJLC’s vast contributions to TJLCers’ lives while overemphasizing those who were harmed by it. Both remarks are in keeping with standard media portrayals of fans as irrational and immature. I expected better of her.
Ms. Paskin says that she “had a dream about…digging deeper, talking to more people, ones who could perfectly explain the allure of TJLC to me.” She had the opportunity to interview more actual TJLCers, but didn’t take it.
But the offer still stands! Come talk to us! Learn about what we’re actually like! Criticize our theories, if you think we’re dogmatic. Ask us what we think of TJLC, if you think it ruined our lives. Our ask boxes are wide open!
What the Podcast Left Out
Swimming in descriptions of TJLC as a source of hatred, the podcast glosses over one tiny little detail: that TJLC genuinely improved the lives of the vast majority of TJLCers.
I came out because of TJLC. I learned how to analyze literature because of TJLC. I discovered new parts of history and the queer people who have always been part of it. I found a community of curious, passionate, funny, and kind people who I could talk to.
And I’m just one person. I know people who found lifelong friends because of TJLC, wrote books because of it, became students of gender and sexuality studies, found a community of support when they had mental health, financial, or other personal problems, and had a blast theorizing about the possibility of landmark LGBT representation. Heck, Rebekah of TJLC Explained filmed hours of people talking about how much the community meant to them. And I even know former TJLCers who, though disappointed with the show, still appreciate how much it taught them about queer theory, queer history, and themselves.
Evaluating TJLC as a whole, it’s not far-fetched, dogmatic, or primarily a source of “darkness.” It’s a legitimate theory, supported by debate and rational analysis, that improved the lives of far more people than it ever hurt.
You’ve read this. Now what?
If you’re in the media:
This Slate podcast is now the #1 result when I search The Johnlock Conspiracy. Thousands of kind and logical voices on Tumblr and other sites are immediately silenced by well-known publications. So yeah, I care what the media thinks. Few voices have widespread effects. I want people trying to find out about TJLC to get a well-researched, less biased view of it.
Please, take your research seriously when discussing fandom. Interview actual members of the community. Be aware of the public bias of fans as unworthy of serious attention and unable to construct rational, legitimate arguments. And fight against it.
If you’re inside TJLC:
Researching for this meant a trip into the darkest parts of TJLC. We need to acknowledge that not everyone in this community is nice to everyone all of the time, and this resulted in incidents that seriously hurt some people. Remaining civil, especially when faced with disagreement or outright malice, means we keep this community friendly for everyone.
If you’re outside TJLC:
Thank you for taking the time to learn about a topic from someone you don’t necessarily agree with. We need more of your open-mindedness in the world.
If you completely disagree with me, please don’t send me anon hate. Constructive criticism is cool. Anon hate is lame. Be cool. But I welcome questions, comments, and constructive debate. My ask box is always open.
 Thank you for reading.
-soe
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@thesaltofcarthage @devoursjohnlock @waitedforgarridebs @one-thousand-splendid-stars @garkgatiss @shinka @witch-lock @jenna221b @sarahthecoat @inevitably-johnlocked @the-7-percent-solution @artfulkindoforder @warmth-and-constancy@marcespot@whtboutdeductions@tjlcisthenewsexy @bluebluenova @heimishtheidealhusband @tendergingergirl @sagestreet @ebaeschnbliah @221bloodnun @marcelock @watsonshoneybee @victorianfantasywatson
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back2beesness · 3 years
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A Mini-Disseration on Fanfiction
So I’ve been reflecting a lot recently about why people write fanfiction and make fanworks, and I think I’ve kinda sorted it in to a couple of categories. I’m positive I am not the first, but I still wanted to put my thoughts down somewhere.
My subcategories:
Canon was cut off abruptly
Canon is lacking something
Canon is one genre, but the core ideas would be interesting to explore in another
I know this doesn’t seem like many categories, but the more I tried to add, the more I realized they all fit somewhere under these three. I’ll start with the first one
#1. Canon was cut off abruptly.
This is a fanfiction classic. Your show was cancelled, the author of the book gave up on the series or died, there was a cliffhanger for something that was never finished, networks screwed up, so on and so forth. Often times, these works try to stay as true to canon as possible, because the core material cuts off and therefore the works are trying to fill in the missing, vitally important finale/info. (There is also an interesting subcategory of fics written following other unfinished fics. Very cool phenomenon.)
Notable fandom examples:
Unfinished book/book series (Game of Thrones, Dune, anything with a suuuper long hiatus)
Cancelled tv shows (The Society, Sanditon, I Am Not Okay With This, The Get Down, Sense8, Agent Carter, Firefly, Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, Angel)
#2. Canon is lacking something.
This category covers a variety of sins. It’s important to note that this isn’t the same as #1 because the source material has been concluded, and the body of work is finished. There can be some blurred lines, especially with shows like Sense8, where they were cancelled and then had a special to round off what was supposed to be another few seasons, or original source material where the story technically didn’t end on a cliffhanger, it just ended when there was supposed to be more originally, but primarily this is for shows/material that had the amount of run time they wanted and were purposefully ended, or at least not against the will of the creators. So, this category includes a number of the most popular branches of fanworks including the following headcanons or au’s: more LGBTQ+ characters, more characters of color, more neurodivergent or mentally ill characters, scenes that could’ve been really cool if they had been included and/or not skipped over, scenes that never happened but fans think they should have, characters meeting that never did, crossovers, alternate universes where one thing changes (ie. canon divergences), different endings/retcons (happy ending or not), explicit content, and so the list goes on. A lot of my favorite types of fanworks are included in here.
Notable fandom examples:
Any and all non-canon LGBTQ+ relationships (John/Sherlock, Dean/Cas, Rizzoli/Isles, Remus/Sirius, Harry/Draco, Stiles/Derek, Xena/Gabrielle, Poe/Finn, Steve/Bucky or Steve/Tony or literally any combination of those characters)
Most Homestuck fanfiction
Any popular canon relationship that ended (HIMYM, most of Grey’s Anatomy, all of Glee)
Any show with a horrible ending/unpopular recent episodes (Sherlock, Game of Thrones, DW, Star Wars)
Any work with a popular character that died (Torchwood, Grey’s Anatomy again, Game of Thrones again, Buffy, OITNB, The 100, The Hunger Games, the entirety of Harry Potter, TFIOS)
And, finally
#3. Canon is one genre, but the core ideas would be interesting to explore in another.
Now, once again, I feel the need to specify why this category is separate from the last. So, I think the biggest difference between categories 2 and 3, is that while #2 expresses a lack of satisfaction with the original work, #3 is all about a deep adoration and love for the content that inspires a re-make or an au with canon events most intact, if not twisted to fit the new genre. Again, I can see the lines blurring somewhat. After all, there is content that I deeply adore, yet also feel like changing certain aspects of it. And to be clear, I think you can have fics that fall into multiple categories, if not all. But this sub-characterization relates specifically to honoring and reshaping the core content and ideas of the original work without major changes to the characters or messaging. And by this I absolutely do not mean headcanons about character ethnicity, race, culture, sexuality, or gender. I am specifically referring to someone taking a character like, say Frodo in LOTR, and rewriting the story with him as a wizard. A surface level change at first, however it changes the entire foundation of his character, which is that he goes on a journey from a humble, small, overlooked character to become a hero, proving the value of the everyman, and the quiet strength of peaceful people. Now, if someone wrote a fic where Frodo was thrown into a superhero au, where one day he gets superpowers by chance, that would fall under category #3. The first example would fuel an idea of what the story would be like if Frodo was immensely powerful, while the second maintains the character’s foundation, simply placing them into a new genre or setting in which those characteristics and themes can play out. This includes au’s that maintain canon events/character backstories even in slightly modified au’s.
Notable fandom examples:
Hogwarts au’s (not HP crossovers)
Coffeshop au’s
Historical au’s
Tattoo/Bookstore/Florist au’s
*provided all these examples purposefully maintain key elements of canon*
So, what’s the point?
There isn’t really a single point, I’m an academic weirdo who likes categorizing media and understanding the impulse that drives me and so many other people to consume and create fancontent, specifically fanfic. But, what I will say is that all three categories of work fulfill some need of a fan/consumer, and they can all be incredibly cathartic and/or a continuation of a deeply beloved original work. #1 appeals to those mourning the incomplete and premature ending of a show/book that they thought had a lot of potential. #2 appeals to people mourning the incompleteness of a finished work that could’ve had a lot more potential with some minor (or major) tweaks. #3 appeals to people who are mourning the ending of something they feel has the potential to be explored more, even if it was already explored well in the first place. This is how you get people writing novel length and longer fics, because they’re driven by dissatisfaction, even if they loved whatever the work is based on. I completely understand angrily rewriting an ending or a character, incorporating personal details or making a character more similar to oneself through the inclusion of various non-canonical identities. And, by no means am I implying one category contains better works than any other, but the creators who exist within the third category truly blow my mind at times, because this is often where you get people re-writing an entire series or movie from a different characters perspective, or people who write 300,000+ word coffee shop au’s or hogwarts au’s or spy au’s. This level of dedication honestly inspires me, because to go through the effort of re-intepreting and altering slightly an original work purely out of love and with little intent to directly contradict canon requires a level of devotion I can only aspire to. 
TL;DR 
And, finally, I want to say that I see all fancontent in any of these three categories as truly beautiful, because they are expressions of the human inclination to see the best in everything, and moreover, to try and leave things better than we found them. So yeah. That’s my word vomit for the moment. Happy writing.
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Departing Now from Platform 9 3/4: Harry Potter Movie Fan Pilgrimages
The following was delivered in March 2018 at the Popular Culture Association National Conference. I’m posting it here to give a sense of my investment in this research project and how I use concepts like pilgrimage and sacredness in the context of fandom. Text and photos © 2018 J. Caroline Toy. All rights reserved. 
Abstract:  Harry Potter movie attractions are complex places that integrate money-making businesses and fan participation (ritual and original). There is a tendency to assume that commercialized destinations are somehow less “authentic” or sacred than traditional pilgrimages. However, while degrees of commercialization affect visitors’ experiences, this dichotomy is a false one. I argue that even sites that are heavily mediated--shaped by official signage, layout, or websites--still have qualities of the sacred about them. Major British Harry Potter destinations like the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, Platform 9 3⁄4 at King’s Cross Station, and the Great Hall of Christchurch College are no exception. Reflecting on fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2017, as well as earlier personal visits, I explore the intended visitor experience and significance of these sites. Like other fan pilgrimages, they rely on the interpretive choices and activities of fans to become (for some) sacred points of contact with imagined worlds and film production, as well as focal points of fannishness. 
When I first visited the Warner Bros Studio Tour in 2014—and when I first saw the line of Harry Potter fans waiting to get into Christchurch College Oxford in 2012 and decided not to visit—it never occurred to me that I would end up writing about those visits in any form but a facebook post or a blog entry. Likewise, when I first went on a journey that pretty much everyone can agree to call a pilgrimage—walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain—I had no idea that that experience would collide with my identity as a fan and my background in religious studies. But they did, and here I am. So today I’m going to talk about fan pilgrimage—my area of research—and specifically pilgrimage places related to Harry Potter that I visited before and since re-entering graduate school. I draw on both the connections between my experiences as a fan and as a peregrina (or Santiago pilgrim) that initially led me to this research, and studies of fan pilgrimage that may be familiar to this audience.
I will explore how different HP destinations with different degrees of commercialization can be seen as sacred. Referring to fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2017, I discuss several places in the United Kingdom—the Warner Bros Studio Tour, Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross Station, and two sites in Oxford--that I approach as pilgrimage sites. I argue that these HP sites contain the same types of complex relationships between ritual, narrative, geography, and commerce that historically religious pilgrimage sites do. They are made sacred by special status granted them not only by owners, but by fans’ choices and agency.
It was an accident that I first visited the Warner Bros Studio Tour and undertook pilgrimage to Santiago on the same extended trip in 2014--but perhaps no accident that this happened as I was transitioning out of a career in wilderness education and into a graduate program in which I would focus on (I thought) religion in science fiction, and/or fanfiction. As it turned out, what I did in the interim both changed my research and colored my perspective on what pilgrimage is, regardless of its association with religious tradition. I’m relating this experience partly because it is a common one, as we all know, in fan studies, and it is also common in pilgrimage studies: the position of scholar is also that of pilgrim, and the experiences themselves and intellectual approaches are deeply intertwined. Thus I come to the approach I’m using in this paper both through personal experience and the way in which I’ve narrativized my pilgrimages to myself, and through theorizations of pilgrimage that recognize its entwinement with tourism and the porousness of the category.
But why “pilgrimage” and not “tourism” when we talk about fans going to places of narrative, production, or celebrity significance? I use the term with full acknowledgement that it is a sub-category of tourism, and one that some scholars working on what they prefer to call “media tourism” reject. But in turn, I reject the notion that some supposed sacred/secular divide should be at the heart of how we define and distinguish pilgrimage--especially because of the difficulty of defining religion and spirituality. Scholars of pilgrimage Eade and Sallnow (1991) acknowledge that one of the primary inspirations of pilgrimage is narrative (religious or not); Alan Morinis (1992) also argues it may also be motivated by a host of emotional, religious, narrative, or socially obligatory forces in a pilgrim’s life. According to Avril Maddrell, Alan Terry, and Tim Gale (2016) a pilgrim may move in and out of “pilgrim” versus “tourist” roles during their journey, underscoring that the sacredness of pilgrimage is dependent on affect and agency. These perspectives are not only intellectually sound, but also in line with my own experiences and people I’ve observed at the sites I’m discussing today.
One of the problems, however, in using a category whose distinction from tourism is so hotly debated is that it tends to suggest a greater degree of authenticity in pilgrim experiences--especially religious ones--than in tourist experiences. Debates about what (if anything) constitutes authenticity in tourism must also be brought to bear on pilgrimages, particularly pilgrimages that are already based on fiction and often structured by commercial interests. Even in studies of fan pilgrimage, it is much easier to recognize the pilgrimage-like characteristics of journeys to fan-created or historical shrines--the shrine to Sherlock at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Elvis’s Graceland (Alderman 2002; Doss 1991), or the memorial to Torchwood’s Ianto Jones in Cardiff--than it is to see pilgrimage in a place like the Warner Bros Studio Tour.
Fortunately recent studies of both tourism and pilgrimage have successfully upended this type of distinction. Folklorist Michael Dylan Foster (2013), writing of cultural tourists visiting a Japanese namahage festival, writes that tourists seek out not an authentic cultural encounter but the “authentic inauthenticity” of the tourist experience. Elsewhere such visitors are referred to as “post-tourists”, who actively seek out inauthentic encounters. It might seem logical, then, to explore fan pilgrims as “post-pilgrims”, but in fact, as Ian Reader (2014) shows through religious pilgrimages in Japan, pilgrimage has never existed--indeed cannot come to exist--without supposedly inauthentic mediations, commercial ventures, and a prioritization of performing pilgrimage over the supposedly inherent sacredness of the site itself.
This is not to say that a pilgrim going to Santiago, for example, could not truly believe the bones of Saint James lie beneath the altar and visiting them can create religious merit or even miracles. Rather, it suggests that, just as the Santiago pilgrimage has always been a product of careful marketing (even as early as the 12th century!), fundraising, and ritual performances, pilgrimage is defined not by purity but by the significances that both pilgrims and institutions attach to it, and what they make of it. Therefore I use the term pilgrimage not because it implies authenticity or superiority in certain types of fan experiences, but because it indicates a journey or site that involves ritual, narrative, special geography, and commerce together, as defined by both the site and its normative practices, and the motivations and actions of individual visitors. It suggests not impurity of sites like the WBST, but ways of exploring how sacredness may be created by fans and producers in the most commercial of places.
So for today, I am more interested in mediated sites than in fan-created ones. The Warner Bros Studio Tour, arguably the crown jewel of quote-unquote geographically authentic Harry Potter movie sites, is the most carefully constructed, blending specific imagined and real geographies, encounters with narrative, reenactments and rituals, and commerce to coach a certain type of visitor engagement. (I reiterate--this is not a bad or inauthentic thing.) The visitor begins with a film message from the cast, visits the set of Hogwarts’ Great Hall, and proceeds through a vast space of prop displays, set reconstructions, and behind-the-scenes information, often blended together. Near the Gryffindor common room--complete with Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s costumes displayed to evoke their presence, a flight of Hogwarts’ moving stairs is displayed in a way that highlights the green surfaces used to enable digital manipulation of the filmed image. A reconstruction of the Forbidden Forest (complete with Aragog) is intended to be so realistic there are warning signs and a bypass for people who, like Ron Weasley, are afraid of spiders. But the same space includes an explanation of how an Irish wolfhound stood in for Harry’s patronus during filming. The Hogwarts Express area includes both a recreated filming set (with lighting and cameras) and the more immersive experience of walking through the train--both facing a special Hogwarts Express gift shop. 
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[Image: Three visitors with their backs to the camera examine the filming set for the Hogwarts Express train. Beyond them, lighting and camera equipment is visible. The set, consisting of door-less compartments with blue seats and green-screen windows, is seen in the background.]
Near the end of the tour, fans visit the enormous scale model of Hogwarts castle used in filming, with videos available that document the model’s construction. A viewing point from the boathouse allows fans to look up at the bulk of the castle, exaggerating its size and evoking awe that encompasses both the level of detail and the experience of first-year students gazing up from their boat ride across the lake.
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[Image: The Warner Bros. Studio Tour’s large scale model of Hogwarts School under blue-toned light simulating dusk. The greenhouses are in front, with the Great Hall on the far left.]
In these cases and others, production fakery and the “reality” of the story-world are presented side-by-side. Visitors are immersed in both the real-world history and fictional narrative of the Harry Potter films where the two intersected during studio filming. I have argued elsewhere (Toy 2018) regarding the Sherlock shrine at St. Bart’s Hospital that this peeking behind the curtain is not a matter of distinguishing fiction and reality, as some media tourism scholars have argued, but an opportunity to activate the entanglement of story, production, and fan experience. As such, this highly mediated site is a sacred place in the sense of religious studies scholar JZ Smith’s (1982) “focusing lens”, at which special designation and construction of a place by individuals and institutions highlights intersections of the ordinary and an extraordinary mythos. Collective rituals like entering the Great Hall together, always surrounded by gasps of excitement and amazement, enhance this experience of set-apart-ness. What’s particularly interesting here is that the exhibit is designed to do this--allow the visitor to trouble the distinction between the imagined and the real--but the experience depends on fans’ imaginative and emotional engagement. One chooses, after all, to stare up at Hogwarts from the point of view of an “ickle firstie”. To a more casual fan--and the intended audience includes many of these--the Warner Bros Studio Tour is interesting, but does not automatically create a sense in the visitor of direct encounter with Harry’s world. That depends on us.
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[Image: Under a sign reading “Platform 9 3/4, a man and woman wearing Hogwarts scarves pretend to push a half luggage trolley mounted on the wall. In the foreground, a uniformed photograph takes their picture while other visitors wait in line.]
Platform 9 ¾--the Harry Potter destination in the middle of the real King’s Cross Station in London--is not as thoroughly designed to create an extraordinary experience. The site consists of half a luggage trolley attached to the wall, a long queue of people waiting to be photographed “pushing” it (complete with professional photographers and aides who toss one’s borrowed Hogwarts scarf to create an illusion of motion), and, of course, a gift shop. (I’m going to come back to gift shops in general later.) It is not intended to produce the kind of self-contained immersive experience or sense of geographic exactness that the Studio Tour does. It’s worth noting here that the King’s Cross scenes were filmed between platforms 4 and 5, not in the main hall where the trolley is located today--but that area is not accessible without a ticket on a train using those platforms. Visitors are constantly confronted with both the banality of the Muggle train station and the staged nature of the attraction--and indeed, the lack of immersion may make it less powerful for some (which was my first experience with the site). And yet, it is enormously popular--and perhaps telling that while we don’t enter Harry’s world at Platform 9 ¾ the way he himself does, we can stand on the cusp of it, tangent to the Hogwarts Express--and photographically document our proximity.
Of the examples I’m discussing today, filming locations at Christchurch College and the Bodleian Library in Oxford are arguably the least mediated. At Christchurch, model for Hogwarts’ Great Hall, there is almost no signage or acknowledgment on site--though there may have been more in the past when the films were still newly released. 
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[Image: the Great Hall of Christchurch College at Oxford, a large room with three long tables extending away from the camera toward a raised dais at the far end. Lower walls are wood-paneled with many closely hung historic paintings. Upper walls are arched leaded glass windows. The tables are set for a formal dinner. This room was the model for Hogwarts’ Great Hall.]
I observed this past summer that visitors obviously coming to see Potter sites were far fewer than the line of families with excited children I saw there in 2012. But interestingly, Christchurch has long been a site of religious pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Frideswide, patron of Oxford University, so it may be no accident that the university treats pilgrims of all kinds with nonchalance as long as they do not disrupt the College (although they are happy to take your £10 in any case). The Divinity School at Oxford’s Bodleian Library--site of the Hogwarts infirmary and dueling practice--has somewhat more interpretive material, including stills from the films that clearly show the Divinity School’s distinctive architecture and the layout of Duke Humphries’ Library, aka the Hogwarts library. Some of these details are also related by tour guides. As at Christchurch, there is no obvious line of Potter fans waiting to get in--but nonetheless, the site quietly attracts them.
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[Image: View of the Divinity School at Oxford University, a long room with a carved medieval Gothic vaulted stone ceiling, large arched windows, and flagstone floor. Several tourists sit on wooden benches around the edges of the room.]
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[Image: A clear plastic panel sitting on a stone ledge holds six film stills from the Harry Potter films, including dueling practice, Harry and Hermione in the Library, Harry and Dumbledore in the Infirmary, and dancing practice for the Yule Ball. The panel also reflects the surrounding windows and floor of the Divinity School.]
In these three examples, we see a sort of sliding scale of mediation that both shapes the boundaries of what visitors can do and enables certain types of individual affective experiences. This mediation takes the form of displays--carefully constructed or simple--videos, audio tours, live guides, photography, restrictions on access, and managed activities. Such strategies facilitate commercial interests (both moneymaking and marketing), but clearly do not create homogeneous experiences. They do create boundaries around acceptable or normative fan pilgrimage experiences--a topic I cannot fully explore here--but this itself is in keeping with pilgrimage experiences across contexts, especially in heavily visited places. Fans, like many other pilgrims, generally go along with such restrictions--but that doesn’t mean they don’t inflect sites with their own experiences. Furthermore, through reviews and photos posted online, they re-mediate these sites for fellow and future visitors, in ways that may or may not concur with the goals of owners.
I want to end by turning to the gap I’ve left in these examples: “stuff”, by which I mean merchandise, souvenir photos and videos, themed food and drinks, and so on. “Stuff” at fan pilgrimage sites deserves its own paper, so I raise these points more as provocations for future work than a way of wrapping up. Though it often seems to be taken as an impurity by onlookers, pilgrimages are rich with material goods and gift shops. (In fact, on my desk I keep a minifig of the Eleventh Doctor acquired on my first visit to Forbidden Planet in London next to an image of St. James the Pilgrim purchased in Santiago--the patron saints of my research.) This stuff does more than make money for Warner Bros. or restrict the way fans view the material culture of Harry’s world. According to Susan Stewart, souvenirs "authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and, at the same time...discredit the present" (139)--that is, once the pilgrim goes home, merchandise in a sense makes the pilgrimage real, even more real than “the real”. Souvenirs render the narrative of pilgrimage a part of personal mythos rather than simply a trip. In fact, gift shops--which in the Potter pilgrimages cited carry site-specific goods--may make the pilgrim’s experience more real, more sacred, in retrospect. These souvenirs authenticate and mythologize a specific journey and moment of intersection between fan and narrative. While fan pilgrimages may begin at the ticket desk, their endings are ambiguous and worthy of deeper study.
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[Image: A gift shop display of brightly colored Harry Potter merchandise at Christchurch, including mugs, house-themed journals, phone cases, and Hedwig plushes.]
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Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. 3rd ed. London: SAGE Publications. See also: 
Larsen, Katherine. 2015. “(Re)claiming Harry Potter Fan Pilgrimage Sites.” In Playing Harry Potter: Essays and Interviews on Fandom and Performance, 38-54. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co.
Potts, Liza, Melissa Beattie, Emily Dallaire, Katie Grimes, and Kelly Turner. 2018. Participatory Memory: Fandom Experiences Across Time and Space. Intermezzo. http://participatorymemory.org/book/index
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