Fannish families

I re-watched Children of Men this weekend, something I’d actually been putting off doing for a while. I loved this movie the first time around but now I have a vid idea for it I was afraid of that getting in the way. Instead of just appreciating it, with half my mind I’d be hanging over it like a vulture looking for bits and chunks of usable footage. Fortunately, it didn’t work out quite like that, I got caught up in the story just like the first time only more observantly (I think I was also worried that it wasn’t going to stand up to my initial impressions but if anything it was better, thematically and visually it’s an incredibly tight piece and the way it uses music is just inspired).

It did make me think about fannishness and how it affects the experience of art. In many ways non-fannish things are simpler, the relationship between you and the creator of the art is quite straightforward. It’s very easy to become immersed in the experience because it’s impersonal, a chance encounter between two strangers, no strings attached. With fannish things the relationship between creator and fans is more like family, a family of adolescent children struggling to become adults in their own right. It’s dynamic, very personal and inherently unstable. Some fandoms, SGA seems to one, have come to an amicable agreement with their source texts, the fans have grown up and left to start their own homes. They call in every so often but are more likely to argue amongst themselves. Others, X-files perhaps, have had such a cataclysmic falling out with their parents that they’re are no longer even on speaking terms. And then there’s BtVS fandom, a large unruly clan famous for constant internecine wars that had just begun to settle down when the Jossfather decided to hold a big drunken re-union in comic form. Fist-fights are already threatening to break out on the lawn.