My guess is that Bond’s thesis overestimates how much mileage fandom gets from defending the relevant works against outside criticism—maybe his theory represents an outsider’s view?
The only true fandom I’ve spent a lot of time inside was not at all dedicated to defending its object of focus. The segment of Harry Potter fandom I knew consisted of people (>90% women) writing slash about Harry Potter characters. In meetups people would usually spend more time discussing derivative works (and obsessing over ‘pairings’) than the original work. To the extent that the original work was discussed it was often to poke fun of its glaring flaws. Most people I knew did not think the Harry Potter books were actually great books. Some thought they were pretty good, some thought they were downright awful—that wasn’t the point. The quality of the books wasn’t the reason why they were in the fandom.
The only time this fandom would be visible to outsiders was when we did things like dress up as Harry Potter characters and go to a new Harry Potter movie. I’m sure people who saw that thought, “My, these people sure must like the Harry Potter films”. In a way, of course, we did—but not in the way the typical cinema-goer liked them. The main object was to mine the new material for suggestions of sexual tension between the male characters.
Maybe this is atypical, I’d be curious to know the inner workings of fandoms that are not sex-based.
Everything is targeted by ficcers, slash and otherwise. If you mean what causes a work to get a lot of fic written about it, I seem to find that it’s a function of how many characters there are (greater odds that any given fan of the story will find some pairing appealing), how popular the work is (ficcers feed off each other—feedback, beta readers, “challenges”, community websites on which to post their fics), how well-developed the world’s setting is (the more little, underused details, the more gaps there are for ficcers to fill; a setting that uses every element it has to the fullest has less “left to do”), and how much of a closed loop the plot is (I’m sure someone could write fanfiction on 1984, but it would not be a widely appealing challenge; it’s pretty self-contained).
I think that sums it up pretty well. Male-male romantic elements can be thought of as a special case of “gaps to fill”. Many women would prefer the stories they read to have more gay sex in them—in the case I know best we’re talking about teenage gay sex in particular. Maybe there’s a sort of market failure here.
My guess is that Bond’s thesis overestimates how much mileage fandom gets from defending the relevant works against outside criticism—maybe his theory represents an outsider’s view?
The only true fandom I’ve spent a lot of time inside was not at all dedicated to defending its object of focus. The segment of Harry Potter fandom I knew consisted of people (>90% women) writing slash about Harry Potter characters. In meetups people would usually spend more time discussing derivative works (and obsessing over ‘pairings’) than the original work. To the extent that the original work was discussed it was often to poke fun of its glaring flaws. Most people I knew did not think the Harry Potter books were actually great books. Some thought they were pretty good, some thought they were downright awful—that wasn’t the point. The quality of the books wasn’t the reason why they were in the fandom.
The only time this fandom would be visible to outsiders was when we did things like dress up as Harry Potter characters and go to a new Harry Potter movie. I’m sure people who saw that thought, “My, these people sure must like the Harry Potter films”. In a way, of course, we did—but not in the way the typical cinema-goer liked them. The main object was to mine the new material for suggestions of sexual tension between the male characters.
Maybe this is atypical, I’d be curious to know the inner workings of fandoms that are not sex-based.
Out of curiosity, what causes a work to be targeted by slashfiction authors? Are the deciding factors commonly known/believed within your community?
Everything is targeted by ficcers, slash and otherwise. If you mean what causes a work to get a lot of fic written about it, I seem to find that it’s a function of how many characters there are (greater odds that any given fan of the story will find some pairing appealing), how popular the work is (ficcers feed off each other—feedback, beta readers, “challenges”, community websites on which to post their fics), how well-developed the world’s setting is (the more little, underused details, the more gaps there are for ficcers to fill; a setting that uses every element it has to the fullest has less “left to do”), and how much of a closed loop the plot is (I’m sure someone could write fanfiction on 1984, but it would not be a widely appealing challenge; it’s pretty self-contained).
I think that sums it up pretty well. Male-male romantic elements can be thought of as a special case of “gaps to fill”. Many women would prefer the stories they read to have more gay sex in them—in the case I know best we’re talking about teenage gay sex in particular. Maybe there’s a sort of market failure here.