Fandom Has Made Me a Bigger (and Better) Fan
So I guess there’s some kind of holiday situation going on, and people are buying presents and stuff? In which case, I just wanted to point out that you can get any of my books from Green Apple Books in San Francisco. I will sign them! I will personalize them! (Please specify in the comments section of your order.) I will draw a terrible doodle! I will do whatever you want, within reason. You can get my YA trilogy, my short story collection or my writing advice book, Never Say You Can’t Survive. You can even pre-order my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster for yourself and/or your loved ones! Your family, friends, coworkers, pets and household spirits will cherish receiving a signed copy of one of my books as a gift. I think.
With that out of the way…
Being Part of Fandom Has Made My Life So Much Better
I feel as though I owe everybody an update about my tumultuous relationship with Captain James T Kirk.
The last time I checked in about this, I was going through a period of disenchantment with the good captain, because his attitude towards his subordinates reminded me of too many terrible bosses and overbearing men I have had to deal with in my life. Kirk seemed to me to be an avatar of a certain kind of dude that we're all going to have to deal with for the next few years.
But now, things have changed! I've found myself softening towards James Tiberius, for a couple of reasons.
First, I was stuck in a hotel room on my own a while ago, and was too tired to watch anything new that would require too much attention. So I ended up watching a few episodes of original Star Trek, and was just struck once again by how smart and thoughtful the writing in that show is. And how much Kirk's swagger is offset by his love of nerding out about abstract topics, in a way that very few people on television do nowadays.
Second, and far more importantly, I have been spending more and more time on Tumblr lately. It’s the only form of social media that doesn't make me want to barf up my own eyeballs. (Don't ask — it involves the eyeballs sinking down into my skull until they find their way into my gullet. Social media can indeed accomplish miracles.)
I have subscribed to a number of tags on Tumblr, most of them having to do with some fandom or other. I've also followed a lot of people in fine communities. Somehow that led me to looking at a lot of Spirk fan art, showing Spock and Kirk madly in love. Sometimes Dr. McCoy is part of a ménage a troi with the other two officers. Once I subscribed to all of the Spirk tags on Tumblr, I stumbled on people posting snippets from officially published Star Trek novels, in which Kirk and Spock do perfectly understandable things like hold hands naked, and vow unending devotion to each other. There are also excerpts from fanzines of the 1970s and 1980s, which are utterly delightful.
The existence of a robust community of Kirk/Spock shippers should be a surprise to almost no-one. This was the O.G. ship, from which “slash fiction” got its name. It was studied endlessly back in the day, and helped to codify a lot of fandom as we know it.
And yet, I had never really immersed myself in Spirk culture before, and I became pretty obsessed. It's probably no accident that a lot of recent Spirk fan art looks a bit like Heartstopper, with Kirk as Nick the bisexual rugby lad and Spock as Charlie, the lovable gay kid who struggles with mental health issues. Seeing Kirk as Nick definitely gives me a whole new appreciation for his character, especially when there are gifs and screencaps of classic Star Trek in which Kirk is seen to be gazing raptly at Spock in the exact same way he does in the fan art.
Spirk art and writing presents a very different view of Captain Kirk than one the you generally see on television, but it does point to something real about the character in canon: Kirk has intense, passionate relationships with the men in his life, and his emotions are never far from the surface.
This isn't the first time that fan art and fan writing have changed my feelings about some piece of pop culture. It's not even the tenth time. For the most part, seeing fans express how much they love a piece of pop culture, and explain all of the meaning they derive from it, make me love whatever that thing is more.
Back in the day, I was sort of interested in superhero comics, but wouldn't really call myself a fan. Until I started spending way too much time on certain Usenet forums, message boards, and email lists, where everybody geeked out — and sometimes screamed — about the latest issues of various comics. Likewise, I was kind of drifting away from Star Trek fandom after Deep Space Nine ended — except that I got obsessed with certain fan forums and the reviews being posted by people like Jamahl Epsicokhan for each episode. I enjoyed the discussions about Star Trek, and even when I wasn't as enthusiastic about certain incarnations of the franchise, I liked what the people who did appreciate Enterprise had to say. And sometimes, they made me reconsider my views. I might not have become a fan of Buffy at all if I hadn't seen an episode and then gotten sucked into reading the fan message boards.
And of course, I've written before about how becoming part of Doctor Who fandom, and being around other Doctor Who fans, helped me to have a whole new relationship with my favorite show.
It's a bit of a cliche to point out that fan-fiction, in particular, often makes the original works better by exploring aspects of characters and their relationships that were largely glossed over in the canonical text. But it's also really true! Fans can pick up on things that the creators intended but didn't get into in enough detail, or stuff that was clearly going on under the surface of the text. Sometimes fans will notice something awesome, and be vocal enough about it that creators will start to lean into it more, to the benefit of the story.
The power of fandom is remixing and reimagining — but it's also close reading, noticing and teasing out connections that are already there. I know I talk about community a lot, but fandom is some of the purest experience of community I've ever had, transforming a solitary experience of consuming media into something shared with a lot of other people.
Even when fans are critical of the things they love, which does happen and sometimes for good reason, there's still something positive and wholesome about the process of making sense of something and figuring out how it relates to all the other stories that have been told in that world.
A while back, I wrote about so-called super-fans who demand that large entertainment companies cater to them personally, often to the exclusion of a larger but less screamy fan base that might actually like something different. And yeah, fandom can turn nasty. It can be pretty abusive, in fact. In some cases, the exact same people who are ruining absolutely everything else in the world right now have taken it upon themselves to ruin fandom as well.
But if we start seeing fandom as hostile, or purely as a rage vortex to be placated, then these screamy babies win. For this is what the Toxic Super-fans™ want: they want to create the illusion that they speak for all fans, or that they represent fandom. They do not. They may make a lot of noise, but they are also a tiny pimple on fandom's butt.
So yeah, Tumblr has been my happy place lately — in large part because it reminds me of how beautiful it is when people come together to create new something new celebrating something they love. That's the kind of attitude I want to fill my life with, as we clamber into a janky handbasket and slide downward into a suspiciously fiery pit. I want to spend more time paying real attention to my favorite stories, picking up on all of the beautiful subtext — while not being afraid to say when something is not great. And I want to channel that awareness into creating new things that make other people feel the way these stories made me feel. That's what I want for all of you as well.
As Captain Kirk said (quoting Spock!), “I like to think that there are always possibilities.”
Music I Love Right Now
I’ve been a fan of jazz-funk guitarist Melvin Sparks for ages, ever since I heard his cover version of “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin” by Sly and the Family Stone. But lately I’ve been utterly obsessed with his 1971 album, Spark Plug. It features the incredible Idris Muhammed on drums and Grover Washington Jr. on saxophone, and all five of the tracks on this album slap so damn hard. It starts out with a cover version of “Who’s Going to Take the Weight” by Kool and the Gang, which takes the already frenetic original to a whole new level as Leon Spencer Jr. starts soloing wildly on the organ while Sparks and company lay down an intense groove. There are there Sparks originals, which each pack a huge punch, including the slithering, slick title track. There was a lot of great jazz-funk in the early 1970s, which built on the revolution happening in funk music at the time but added a whole extra layer of jamming and intense soloing, but this record is now one of my favorites.
