Last year, Andrea Horbinski wrote a self-introduction post here that started out like this:

There’s a certain propriety to the fact that I’m sitting in an apartment in Kyoto, Japan, as I write this post. Three and a half years ago, on a Fulbright Fellowship to Doshisha University in Kyoto, faced with a lot of free time and nothing in particular with which to fill it other than reading manga, biking around the city, and searching for interesting things on the internet, I fell (back) into fandom, and thence into the Organization for Transformative Works. I didn’t know it then, but that was a transformative moment for me.

I suppose there’s a certain propriety to the fact that I’m sitting in a graduate student office at Doshisha University in Kyoto as I write my own self-introduction post. My road to Doshisha, and into the OTW, was completely separate from and unrelated to Andrea’s, but unfolded so similarly that I almost feel like I can point at her post and just skip my own introduction. She even likes the same titles I do.

But I’ll take this opportunity to assert my individuality. I’m Nele Noppe, a Japanologist by trade, currently in the middle of a PhD fellowship at a Belgian university but spending a few years in Japan to learn about doujin culture (doujinshi and related fanworks). My research compares how English-language and Japanese-language fandoms exchange works. More precisely, I’m interested in the architectures and circumstances of those exchanges: what technology is used, what the legal limitations are, what languages are used, what the involvement of non-fans is like, and how all that influences what sort of works are made. I’m endlessly intrigued by what happens when technology, law, and large groups of very determined and enthusiastic people collide.

As for the fannish side of things, I grew up on Franco-Belgian comics, but the American Elfquest was my first really active fandom. After buying a Zetsuai 1989/BRONZE mook at a con, I tumbled into yaoi and never looked back. I spent my last years of high school poring over dearly-bought Japanese-language BRONZE and Kizuna tankobon with a tattered kanji dictionary in hand, and enrolled in a Japapanese Studies program as soon as I could. More than half of my fannish life was spent memorizing everything on Aestheticism, roving around the old Anime Web Turnpike, and chatting on Yahoo! mailing lists. LiveJournal, fanfiction.net, and other big fannish hubs only came onto my radar after I wandered into Harry Potter fandom sometime around 2006. Right now, I write, read and draw mostly about Avatar: the Last Airbender, and lurk in a variety of manga fandoms.

Avatar is a good fandom to be in right now, and not just because the new series The Legend of Korra rocks and I found a bunch of people who share my tiny OTP. As mentioned above, the clash of technology, fans, and law fascinates me no end, and parts of Avatar fandom have been getting into some pretty interesting clashes lately. Take the neverending string of online leaks from the new series, from clips to whole episodes. At first it seems to have been an insider who was smuggling out clips, but once they stopped, others took over and started tricking Nickelodeon’s website into giving up upcoming episodes early. Unless I’m mistaken, last week’s episode 5 was the first one that managed to air without being preceded by any leaks whatsoever. And of course everything that was leaked or uploaded to the official site was immediately re-uploaded elsewhere so fans outside the US could access it as well. Leaving aside the dubious legality of everything that’s been going on around Korra, what strikes me the most about this ongoing situation is how utterly unprepared Nickelodeon turned out to be to keep the leaks from happening, and people from sharing them around. (Viewer numbers for Korra were fantastic, leaks or no leaks.)

Amazon met with a similar fate. The first part of the Avatar tie-in comic The Promise was supposed to be published only this January, but it was circulating online by November last year. Amazon made the issue available for pre-order and enabled the “look inside” feature, which shows every visitor a couple of pages from any book. A bunch of Avatar fans descended on the site, saved the handful of pages each of them could see, and started putting their puzzle pieces together. Nearly the whole comic had been reconstructed on Tumblr before Amazon realized what was going on and put some brakes on “look inside”. (Sales for The Promise were fantastic as well.)

This is the sort of creative loophole-exploiting that, to me, is typical of the interesting times we live in. Individuals have technologies at their fingertips that even large companies couldn’t dream of just a few decades ago – and apparently can’t really grasp the significance of even now. The laws that govern the use of those technologies are completely out of sync with what people can actually do, or think they should be allowed to do. And there are a lot of people working together all around the world in order to communicate better and route around whatever hurdles are in their fannish paths. I expect that I’ll spend most of my Symposium posts talking about those things, and often from a transcultural perspective, given my focus on doujin. I’m thrilled to be here and get a chance to learn from you all.

Happy Free Comic Book Day! Here in Columbus, Ohio, the day has been a huge success. The comic I was most excited about, The Guild: “Beach’d,” was awesome, and the event at which I acquired said comic was surprisingly pleasant. I am an impatient person, and I tend to avoid crowds and long lines, but, for free comics, I figured I could give it a shot. I will never understand people who are energized rather than drained by events such as Comic-Con, or its academic complement, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, but this year’s Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) has given me a taste of the particular pleasure of convening with other fans in person.

My girlfriend and I arrived at the Laughing Ogre comic book shop here in Columbus around lunchtime, and we saw a line out of the store and several friendly, costumed superheroes. Amused, we joined the line, and were heartily welcomed by a man dressed as Superman, who, along with a little girl who was likely his daughter, and who was dressed as Supergirl, entertained the waiting comic book fans. Behind us stood a man and a woman, the latter of whom Superman asked if she’d been “dragged along” to the event. She said she hadn’t, and Superman seemed pleased that they were a comics-reading duo, rather than a fanboy-plus-support person. This was my first FCBD, so I can’t speak for the crowd in past years, but I imagine that Superman’s experience had been to notice particular demographic changes throughout the recent history of the event. Feeling moved by this public assessment of each fan’s authority, I planned a speech about how I was just here for Buffy, fictional feminist role model, and The Guild, authored by real life role model Felicia Day. Nobody asked, and so I didn’t get to give my speech, but it gave me some pleasure to know that I could share it with you in this venue later.

Normally, when I go to the Laughing Ogre, it’s on a Wednesday at 10 a.m. Twice a month, I make the trek to purchase my new Buffy comic (Buffy Season Nine one visit, and Angel and Faith the next), and I’m usually one of only a few people there. However, the staff always greets me kindly, and, knowing what I’m looking for, they never fail to tease me that Buffy Season Nine has been cancelled. I got the same personal greeting today, but I got the further pleasure of seeing some of the rest of the store’s clientele, and hence, some of the rest of Columbus’s comic book-reading community. There were a lot of children, for example, who I assume are in school on Wednesday mornings, and the store had prepared well for this, setting up superhero face painting, as well as photo opportunities with the costumed superheroes. Additionally, the staff members in charge of the free comics tables had divided up the comics nicely, explaining to children, parents, and those of us who are neither, which comics were intended for which audiences. The idea of the separation was not one of censorship, but rather one of clarity, helping visitors to find what they were looking for. In front of me was a kid of indeterminate age (perhaps a savvier observer of people could have determined it, but I couldn’t), who expressed interest in a non-fiction meta comic intended for adults, and he was invited to take it if he wished, but warned that it did not contain a story with action, but rather was more of a history. This interaction reminded me of one of the things I like most about comics, namely, the medium’s flexibility, and its fans’ desire to educate new fans about the form’s many histories and pleasures.

The free comic I was most anxious to read, The Guild: “Beach’d,” was, as I mentioned, an absolute delight, although this review admittedly comes from a reader who has adored every single installment of The Guild’s transmedia universe, and a reader who feels that The Guild: Fawkes comic must have been created as a personal gift. But I feel like this free comic embodies Felicia Day’s mission beautifully for more reasons than my personal enjoyment of this latest extension of The Guild storyworld. The decision to package it with the Buffy comic was wise, as Buffy fans are likely to be familiar with Felicia Day, and might take this opportunity to acquaint themselves with The Guild, her best-executed project to date. Perhaps some of them watched the first few episodes back when they first rolled out, but forgot to keep up with the series. Others might have seen the music videos, but not realized that they were meaningfully attached to an increasingly complex and impressively fleshed out narrative. The Guild: “Beach’d” embodies the greatest pleasures of the series in an easily-digestible format. On its title page, we are reacquainted with all five of the show’s main characters, as well as their in-game avatars. This page showcases the adeptness with which The Guild comics represent the game/life balance as experienced by each of these characters: we see that Codex, Day’s character, responds as viscerally to violence in- and out of game, because she has an uneasy constitution and a low threshold for stimulation. By contrast, Tink, played by Amy Okuda in the series, can happily drink a soda out of game, while attacking brutally in-game. The language of comics works so well for this series, and I love the way this particular comic, offered to us as a free invitation to explore the series’s current stage of development, speaks so easily to a concern central to online fandom. It’s so funny to get up in the morning, walk four and a half miles to a comic book shop, wait in line with strangers who share only my anticipation for free comics, and then be transported back into the storyworld that feels like home. Henry Jenkins once described fandom as a weekend-only world, and, while it’s come a long way since then, my particular Saturday nevertheless revealed a kinship with that utopian idea.

I’ve spent most of the last week at a series of digital events – Innovate/Activate 2.0, the Students for Free Culture Summit, the Swinging and Flowing conference on digital inclusion and diversity, and Rita Raley’s talk on tactical media. Looking over my notes, I don’t think I can synthesize all of it into one coherent post on What This Means for Fandom, but there are some common themes that seem to keep coming up.

One thing that’s occurred to me, apropos of Lev Grossman’s now famous description of fans (“The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language”), is that it’s not just that fans talk back to culture, it’s that fans make their own culture. This seems like an obvious fact, but in the age of digital tools and new media, there’s actually a significant expertise differential in terms of technologies and platforms that fans, by and large, scale with great gusto, confidence, and motivation. Thinking back to my own fannish history, for example, I taught myself html at the age of thirteen to post my very first fanfics on theforce.net back in the time known as the day, and I’ve continued to teach myself a variety of video and web applications and platforms just so the reach of my fannish desire to make things doesn’t exceed my grasp too far. Helen Milner of UK Online Centres, who works to broaden digital equality by connecting first-time users to the internet, mentioned in her presentation today that the most significant barriers to people learning to use the internet are access, motivation, skills and confidence. It’s all of those things that fandom can and does teach, and I’m really not surprised that the only two majority female and female-identified open source projects on the internet, Dreamwidth and the Archive of Our Own, are associated with fandom or are explicitly fannish, respectively. Where else but fandom is there a community that takes it so much for granted that girls and women can learn tech just like men?

Rita Raley, in her talk on tactical media (which she helpfully defined as an “interventionist and critical genre of new media art”), said so many things that seem applicable to fandom that I wonder whether or not there’s an article, or at least a short piece for the Symposium section of TWC, in explicitly comparing the two. One thing that especially stuck with me, as I left campus and went to the grocery store and went home to cook dinner, was Raley’s claim that tactical media teaches that critical reflection is at its most powerful when it does not adopt ostensibly outside spectatorial position, that proximity to the object being critiqued breeds not corruption nor contempt but strong insights. Fan video, in particular, would seem to confirm this insight, as people including Francesca Coppa and Kristina Busse have argued before. Raley also argued that tactical media is a form of radical creativity organized, to some extent, around the notion that “if regimes are perceptible, it becomes possible to work concretely toward structural transformation” and seeking to do just that. Fandom can, at its best, do the same thing, in terms of almost any hierarchy in society – who else has read the one where Tony Stark isn’t rich, and almost everything is different?

Moreover, Raley argued, tactical media art by and large dispenses with the “fantasy of exteriority,” the idea that it’s even possible (let alone desirable) to take some sort of outside, spectatorial position of judgement on the object of critique, and this too seems to me to be a crucial point to bear in mind, not just about fandom but also about digital activism in general. The Friday keynote speaker at Innovate/Activate 2.0 was Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who delivered a rather inspiring talk about the successful anti-SOPA protests earlier this year that nonetheless contained some claims begging for qualification, perhaps most notably his earnestly Silicon Valley faith in the notion that the internet is a meritocracy of ideas in which “all links are created equal.”

There are a lot of people who know better, fans among them, and one of the things that was most valuable to me about I/A 2.0, and talking to my fellow attendees as a committee chair of the OTW, was the renewed sense I had of fandom as one among any number of modes and nodes of online engagement, digital activism, cultural resistance. For example, the OTW is considering strategies to expand its presence and the presence of fan perspectives on fanworks on Wikipedia? (“Disruptive diversity,” one speaker today called this, leveraging digital tools to change dominant narratives.) Maybe we could talk to the Wikimedia Foundation, who are working to increase representation of women among Wikipedia editors and articles. Fandom isn’t isolated, and one consistent theme reiterated by all of the veteran activists at I/A was the fact that, as one speaker put it, “If we organize, we win.” There are a lot of other people who share a lot of fandom’s core concerns, if not our pasttimes, and despite our differences, we’re stronger together.

Spring is here, at least in Ohio, and the world is buzzing with life. It’s a time when I start to realize how grateful I am to those people who sustain me during the winter, when trees are bare and not yet flowering frantically. Those people are fans, and I have the Organization for Transformative Works to thank for connecting me with more fans, fanworks, and fannish opportunities than I ever imagined existed.

I’ve been aware of the organization for two years, and I’m constantly learning new things and finding new content. Every issue of Transformative Works and Cultures feels like a gift to me, and I genuinely look forward to sharing new articles with my non-academic friends in fandom. (The others already read the journal!) I was pleasantly surprised just the other day to discover that Fanlore had a whole page devoted to one of my all-time favorite vids. The OTW does good work, and I look forward to working with the organization for many years to come. It’s always spring in online fandom, and I am so grateful for that. I’m making my donation today.

Please support the OTW if you can.

I had the pleasure of participating in the Mutated Text workshop, celebrating “informal informalities, strange writing, and eclectic ties,” yesterday at Berkeley. As usual, going as a historian to anything even vaguely non-traditional — even as a historian whose heart is firmly in the nontraditional — and going as a fan to anything academic is always a bit of a dissonant experience for me, but my fellow participants were an eclectic bunch of brilliant people who instantly put me at ease, at least as an academic uncomfortable with, in the words of co-convener Martha Kenney, how the norms of academic writing “force self-severing and ignore our personal entanglements with our research.”

As I’ve learned just since my last post, part of the constraints I sometimes feel in academic writing are assuredly unique to my chosen discipline, and perhaps even to my own subfield — certainly my colleagues in Chinese history express a positive paranoia about using the “I” in text that, thankfully, my department head (a professor of premodern Japan) has never felt. English and critical theory, a friend of mine assured me after last time (“I agree with your general argument but I disagree with you on every particular!”), are perfectly comfortable with the personal interpolating into the scholarly. More power to you, my friends!

Part of what we talked about at the workshop yesterday, however — and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a practicing feminist sff writer (Naamen Tilahun, in this case) try to explain the concept of “meta” to a roomful of academics and casual genre readers — put me in the mind of Alex Jenkins’ last post, and her thoughts on the place of love for one’s work, and enthusiasm, in work. I commiserated with enough people at the workshop to know that the constraints people feel in academic work are real enough, even as we see more and more academic works that, as Mel Chen put it later in the day, “resist those constraints.”

Possibly even more than on the question of enthusiasm and being personal, however, I left convinced that one vital feature of fandom, and part of why, as Alex Jenkins argues, it is such an important alternative sphere of pop culture criticism and enjoyment, is that fandom is much more process-oriented than academia may ever be. From the question of works in progress [WIPs] to vidders trading tips and gripes about software and vidding workflow, fandom offers an extraordinarily transparent view on the way the creative process works. I mean “creative” here in its broadest sense, because anyone who doesn’t think that scholarly writing is creative has clearly never cudgeled their brains to pull out the better sentence, thesis, structure, conclusion that you just know is in there somewhere, if you could only find it. Whereas academics frequently feel alienated from each other while working (especially, I daresay, during that dreaded period of time in which one writes a dissertation), fandom has a lot of mechanisms to make people feel that they’re not alone — indeed, I think part of why we as fans love fandom is that it shows us that we’re not alone in our improper informalities and eclectic enthusiasms. Even if no one else has ever heard of your tiny fandom, just about everyone can understand your undying love for it.

I think the other thing is that fandom is also much better at tolerating failure. Your WIP may break off mid-chapter, and people will still read and even recommend it. Your vid or your AMV may not be all that it was in your head, but people will watch it and love it anyway. Dead ends and loops and wandering pathways are a part of what it’s about — iteration and reiteration and obsessive reworking and rereading of trope, character, plot elements. We as fans eat it up with a spoon, whereas as scholars we’re supposed to get it right, right out of the gate, every time.

Co-organizer Margaret Rhee, in her opening remarks, expressed the hope that the workshop could offer participants a supportive space for experimental writing, and it certainly did that; for that alone, to know that I’m the only one who’s willing to follow her passion where it leads, both in terms of form as much as of content, Mutated Text was awesome. And it’s that aspect of fandom, ultimately, that the academy could most stand to emulate.