Online Fans: Love Them. Fear Them. But Listen to Them?

THERE'S NOT A television writer alive who doesn't have exactly the same relationship with online fan forums that a white knuckle drunk has with the pub at the end of the street. Walking past without stopping in is the hardest thing to do. But you have to try.

Diane Kristine has a fascinating article up at Blogcritics that explores the ins and outs and whys of the problem. Based on sessions and interviews conducted while covering this year's Banff TV festival, the article shows the struggle that many top writers have with their online fans:

Martin Wood, currently executive producing and directing the upcoming science fiction show Sanctuary, reflected on the number of fansites and social networks his previous series, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis, spawned. "You learn that the majority of your audience is not responding on those things," he warned in our interview. "So a relatively small number of people are being very loud about what they want. If you respond to it the way you think you should, it's not necessarily the best thing for the show."

House writer David Hoselton echoed those comments during his festival session on the craft of writing in response to an audience member question. "(House creator) David Shore doesn't care about what people say on the Internet. He doesn't want to hear it; he doesn't want to know about it. He doesn't want to pander to that audience, whatever it is. The idea is that out of an audience of 20 million, I don't know what that represents, half a million or something like that? He wants nothing to do with it."

However, Hoselton confessed he has to browse forum comments the day after his own episodes air, sifting through the "three pages on Chase's pants" to find the insightful ones... until he has to back away when they turn into online fights. Still, "there are these incredibly intelligent, observant people who catch every mistake you could possibly make," he laughed.

Essentially, the problem (and the thing that these vocal, frontline fans never understand) is that it all comes down to math. The online fans are definitely the core -- and they peruse and react far more strongly than the rest of the fanbase. And like any self-reflecting echo chamber, they come to believe that their opinions are the opinions of the majority. They tend to think they are the fans. But the truth is that on a successful show, the fans writing and snarking and dissecting each episode or "misstep" is, at most, about half a percent to one percent of the total audience. And that one percent is often out of step with the tastes of the bigger group -- who actually keep the series on the air.

This can set up an impossible dynamic of disappointment and a potential minefield for writers and creators to thread. On the one hand, anyone who thinks that much about your show is someone you want to venerate and respect. You have to appreciate them.

The problem is that in the fans' minds, the way to "appreciate" them is often expressed as, "why don't they listen to what we want?" And that can quickly metasticize into "they don't respect their true fans."

It's a no win. Which is why so many writers feel that the only way to deal with it -- is not to deal with it - to not engage at all. If you can resist, that is.

Hart Hanson puts the contrast in sharp relief:

"Do we listen to the fans? Oh, no," Hanson said adamantly during the audience Q&A portion of his Master Class. Besides, given the outcry over the finale, "Right now, if we listened to them, I'd have to quit."

He even tells his actors not to look at message boards. "They're really mean about every one of our actors. The ones who have an axe to grind will write and the ones who love them won't. Our Internet presence is fairly negative. But we don't care about that, because they're all watching."

"No, we don't listen to them," Hanson reiterated. "And they're really vociferous and passionate and we are very, very glad they're there."

Diane's full ariticle (with more quotes from Hanson, Alan Poul from Six Feet Under and Entourage's Doug Ellin, can be read here.)

Canon, Fanon & Authorial Intent

FLYING IN THE United States sucks. That's all I'm going to say.

This morning, better rested and all, I came across this interesting article on Firefox News.

Written by somebody with the delightful handle of Merlin Missy, Canon Versus Fanon Versus Authorial Intent explores three sides of how fans react to work, and order their understanding of a constructed Universe. If you've never dabbled or watched genre stuff, this might seem mindblowingly arcane to you, but it's actually sweet -- and her deconstruction of the point is very wise.

Author intent is the personal canon of the person (or people) who wrote the source. When J.K. Rowling said that Harry and Ron became Aurors as adults, that is author intent.

Author intent is not canon.

Let me repeat, because it's going to be important: author intent is not canon.

Most authors know what happens next to their characters, who they marry, how many kids they have, that the grandkids are called Vera, Chuck and Dave. Their favorite breakfast cereal. How they're going to die. Some authors end up giving out all this information, either via writing it in the text or including it as an appendix in the back ala J.R.R. Tolkien. Some writers can't, because the medium (TV, film) won't allow it, but that doesn't stop them from knowing what they want to do. In this day and age, message boards allow them to share with fans what they intended to do, had they time. It's lovely and helpful for fans who want to know more. It is not, however, canon.

The same thing can be said for authorial interpretation of the source material. Canon is what is in the source material. Reader/viewer interpretation is up to the individual, although the author may have intended something else entirely. For example, Ray Bradbury recently claimed that Fahrenheit 451 was not about censorship, but instead warned against the perils of too much television. In an episode of Torchwood, a character utilizes the alien equivalent of Rohypnol in order to get lucky. Showrunner Russell T. Davies was called on the carpet for this by some female fans, who said these actiosn made the character a rapist; Davies said it was "just a joke" and did not. Authors don't always intend to show what appears in the text, but the text is the canon.

What's more, I completely agree with her about authorial intent -- when the work is over, I mean. The final word on interpretation can't be the author's, or why is it out there to read in the first place? Understandings change. Hemingway was once famously quoted when asked about the symbolism in his books: "I suppose there must be symbols, since people keep finding them."

One of the most famous cases for me of the limitations of "authorial intent" is actually an afterword to George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. There's quite a tart essay at the back about how Eliza could not, ever, under any circumstances, ever wind up with Higgins. And I read it, and I saw what he was saying, and in the end, I thought, "I don't care."

That is the miracle of an art that demands to be interpreted.

Manohla Dargis: We're All Geeks Here

MANOHLA DARGIS weighs in in the New York Times today with a lively, lovely, and surprisingly touching essay from last weekend's San Diego Comicon. It's a strange time for those who create and those who consume -- with blurry boundaries and allegiances, and constantly shifting frames of reference. We may disagree on things from time to time, but there's no doubt that something important is happening in the video arts -- and maybe the relationship between comic artist and fan is the leading edge of that. I'm not sure. I just know that reading this article I felt like it was lapping at the shores of something very new in the artist/audience relationship:

The audiences are openly fawning, but you never lose the sense that they could turn against the presenters. The beast is happy as long as it’s fed, but woe to those who don’t feed it.

Such is the nature of fandom, which demands as much as it receives. That seems especially true of comic book fans, who appear to enjoy a more intimate relationship with producers than most pop-culture consumers. Part of this may be rooted in the very nature of the comic book, which is accessible even to young buyers. Comic books fit nicely in your hand, they’re relatively cheap and humbly constructed: just three staples and paper. Just as important — unlike movies, which until the introduction of digital technologies were almost entirely out of reach for most people — comic books are also something that anybody with a pencil and a slip of paper can create. Their seeming modesty is seductive.

At the same time, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the elliptical form of the comic book — which forces you to make cognitive leaps from panel to panel, jumping across that stretch of white called the gutter — means you have to fill in more blanks than someone watching a mainstream movie...The wild-eyed, worn-out Comic-Con fans fiercely clutching a cardboard “300” shield in one hand and a plastic bag in the other may not have been thinking about aesthetics and intellectual pursuits. But they were actively engaged in the creation of culture.

So much is changing, so fast, that it's almost painful to try and take a quieter, longer-viewed step back look at the state of fandom and creation today. What I think I loved about Dargis' piece is that it's informed by the truth of our times. She relates earlier in the article her engagement with the underground comix of her youth, when her family ran a bookstore. But the transition that happened in the past -- the "growing up" and "setting aside" of that culture as you aged -- it's not happening anymore. And as much as dumb superhero movies with simple hero narratives does nothing to grow our collective imagination -- I still find myself, when confronted with the old geek or nerd stereotype, feeling like it's a relic of another area. The geeks are not disconnected, they are not marginalized, they have, in fact, won. And Dargis says as much. Again...in a lovely, thoughtful way:

The cliché about fans being losers with no social skills, no friends and no clue is essential to its myths, marketing and even its most loyal readers. In the last few decades the emergence of a geek elite has helped legitimize this outsider culture and helped bring legions of 97-pound weaklings into the sightlines of the industrial entertainment complex. In some respects America is now a country of freaks and geeks, self-professed outsiders who imagine themselves somehow different from the herd, perhaps because they are Americans — radical individuals who are united if only by their increasingly narrow interests and obsessions.

This kind of atomization of the culture has its problems, as we know deep in our bones. Yet for all my worries that we are turning into a nation of iPod people, that’s only part of the big, postmodern, late-capitalism picture. Despite all the plastic and dissembling, events like Comic-Con represent something genuine and true and, yes, powerful about how people live in the modern world. Every day we wake up to navigate through a faceless, inhuman, Made-in-China existence. Some of us escape through literature, some of us burrow deep into movies. And some of us find sweet relief in what, to the outside world, looks entirely disposable, useless and — here’s that word again — childish. They find happiness in Hot Wheels, wonderment in Wonder Woman. Superman teaches them how to fly, and they do.