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Aja Romano

About Aja Romano

Aja (pronounced "Asia") is a writer and a fangirl. She blogs at bookshop and sometimes writes for TheMarySue.com. She swore for years she'd never enjoy manga or anime, and then naturally fell in love with about a jillion different series and dramas and bands at once, and now she can't hear you over the sound of this 2NE1 MV. Despite having been in fandoms large and small, Western, International, het, slash, femslash, and everything in-between, she has no idea what she's doing here at MB. But she can't wait to find out!

TV Will Break Your Heart

June 21, 2012 by Aja Romano 5 Comments

My very favorite thing in all the world is a bowl of raw blackberries on a hot July day, but a very close second to blackberries (never cooked, straight off the vine) is a good Stephen Sondheim musical. And my very favorite quote about Stephen Sondheim is a quote from Frank Rich, who, writing in the NY Times of the flop that was Merrily We Roll Along, said:

“To be a Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.”

 

I’ve held this quote close to my heart, but I never equated it to the actual act of being a fan until a month ago, when I was reading about creator Dan Harmon’s exit from NBC’s Community, scrolling past endless wailing and wearing of sackcloth on Tumblr (read: gifs of Abed and Troy having freakouts).

 

If you’ve never watched Community, then you’ve probably still heard from Community fans talking about how great it is. The diverse cast includes PHDs, Oscar-winners, rap stars, Betty White, and Omar from The Wire, and if that isn’t enough to sell you, it’s also an ongoing geek dream in meta-riffic serial narrative form. It’s every bit as good a show as you’ve heard it is, but what’s most important to its ultimate success or failure as a tv product is that its tailor-made for you. Yes, you, the person reading this article. You like smart, savvy stories that are steeped in meta-awareness of their own conventions but still have a deep emotional core. You access shows via all kinds of methods, and you never pay attention to ads on the rare occasion you’re accidentally suckered into watching one. At any given time, you’re probably mainlining 2 or 3 shows at once. Community knows this about you, and it loves you just as you are.

Which, of course, is the problem.

Tumblr has a large swathe of die-hard Community fans who’ve only recently gotten over the trauma of cancellation rumors, and the eleventh-hour notice that Community would return for at least a final half-season, and perhaps more. In the middle of celebrating a truly flawless 3-ep season finale that many feared would be a series finale, fans learned that Harmon, the show’s creator and show runner, who exerts a huge influence over the show and its direction, had been fired and replaced by two dudes from another statistically “quirky” show called Happy Endings. The immediate fan feeling was that the departure of Harmon, who’s spoken in the past of his incredibly hands-on relationship with the show, would kill everything that makes it special and unique. Writing bitterly on his Tumblr Saturday morning after the season finale, Harmon said, “I’m not saying you can’t make a good version of Community without me, but I am definitely saying that you can’t make my version of it unless I have the option of saying “it has to be like this or I quit” roughly 8 times a day.”

NBC and Sony view Harmon’s forced departure as a chance to “broaden” the show’s appeal to a “wider” audience.

 

“Wider Audience” is a Lie

 

These are words that will send every Community fan into a blind panic, because if you’ve ever been on the internet, you know that Community already has a huge audience. On May 17 during the finale, two show references trended worldwide on Twitter; Saturday during the outcry over Harmon’s departure, “Dan Harmon” trended for hours in the USA and even worldwide.

The internet tells me that even though Twitter has roughly half a billion users, it only takes somewhere between 1200-1500 people tweeting about a topic for it within a short period of time to become a “trend,” and that specifically the topic has to reach people who haven’t normally tweeted about it before. So the famous Community hashtag #sixseasonsandamovie can only become a worldwide trend if it starts reaching a new segment of Twitter’s active population. Presumably, all of this makes a “trend” in roughly the same way that a Nielsen rating makes up a quantifiable percentage of America’s tv-watching population: that is, if 1500 people are tweeting about watching Community, then presumably at least that many millions of people are watching Community.

The problem with this analogy is that the people tweeting about Community are not the same group of people Nielsen is tracking. There are 115 million tv owners in the US, but that doesn’t mean that all of us actually watch tv. In fact, recently released Nielsen data reveals that 17% of Americans never watch tv at all. I’ll be the first to admit that my own ambivalent relationship to my tv has created a bit of a cultural gap for me, but that gap shrinks all the time, because with the advent of the internet there’s been a huge generational shift in how people use a tv set. It’s become just another tool for many people. It’s one of many ways in which we control access to what we want to watch, and how/when we watch it:

People use television sets for watching tv, screening films, for surfing the web, recording things, listening to music, and for gaming.

People get access to television shows from Hulu, from iTunes, from Netflix, from their Roku, from the dvd-rs their friend burnt, from TIVO, from live streaming sites, from tv sets, from the box sets they bought at Best Buy, from Amazon, from torrenting and file-sharing hubs, from Youtube, from network websites, from Crunchyroll, from other sources that are probably being invented as I type this.

How many of these avenues make it into Nielsen ratings? Two–Live + Same Day: the viewing from your actual tv set, and the TIVO, or “time-shifted” view (but only if the time-shifted viewing occurs before 3am the day the show airs). According to the Nielsen website, it has an “extended screen rating” that allows it to track certain streaming sites, but this is a dubious claim with very little affect on ratings numbers. So 115 million people owning a tv set no longer means that 115 million people are going to be using it as their primary source of access to shows, but even though Nielsen hasn’t figured out how to quantify this huge cultural behavior change, Nielsen ratings are the only things networks care about.

The reason for this, of course, is advertising.

 

Advertising and Content Control.

 

Along with the huge disconnect that goes along with the assumption that means of access haven’t changed is that the means of control over content hasn’t changed. A TIVO-less or DVR-less television set gives you no control over when you view the show. While I have fond memories of college Thursday nights when my BFF & I would convene for Will & Grace come hell or high water, it’s no longer possible for everyone to carve out weekly, regularly scheduled time for sessions with their favorite TV shows. And what’s more, the number of people I want to watch tv with is also expanding. For the last several months a few of my online friends and I have been gathering in Campfire chat to watch Avatar, Korra, and Due South whenever we have free moments. It’s harried, irregular, and tv-set free. Of these three shows, only Legend of Korra is currently airing. We streamed Avatar from Netflix, and bought DVDs of Due South. Each of the networks who provide these shows has profited from our consumption of them; but none of these modes of access are part of an advertiser’s business model.

It’s not as if any of us made a conscious choice to reject exposure to ads in these shows when we got together to watch them. But we are located, respectively, in Philadelphia, Indiana, and Glasgow. We’re not going to prioritize company ad revenue over our ability to watch shows easily together–to form a community and have amazing bonding experiences around those shows. A Nielsen-compliant, advertising-friendly distribution model literally can’t give us that. We are part of the generation of people who, along with rejecting corporate-controlled content, are also rejecting advertiser-dictated content, as well as the ads themselves.

On the rare occasions I find myself watching tv–usually when I’m home visiting–I always mute commercials. This actually has caused fights with family members before, because even though turning the radio dial when commercials come on is something they don’t question, they don’t understand why I don’t want to watch the ads. The reason for me is that advertising is sexist, homophobic, gendered, ethnically profiled and stereotypical. When I watch tv, I have control over what I listen to and am exposed to, in a way that I don’t when bombarded with highway billboards, wall flyers, pamphlets on my car, and other advertisements in public spaces. And I have no problem with making the choice to filter the kinds of ads and harmful messages I’m exposed to. Why not? I make it in every other area of my life.

This fight family members and I keep having over my refusal to listen to advertisements is directly relevant to why Dan Harmon was fired. The networks and the advertisers who sponsor their shows want my mom to believe the only content she can have is the content that’s filtered through the box in her living room. But the price of accepting that content is that it comes with regular advertising that reinforces all kinds of harmful heteronormative shit about the world we live in–that girls like pink and baking and boys like action figures and building things; that women want to lose weight and find a better laundry detergent and wear makeup, and men want to objectify women, drink beer, bulk up, and live charmingly privileged lives. That queer characters don’t exist except as comic relief, and genderqueer and disabled people don’t exist at all.

It’s a bit wondrous that shows that actively question these types of stereotypes are able to sell to advertisers at all. (Mad Men is undoubtedly genius in this regard, with real-world companies lining up for ad space and major product placement on a show that’s actively critiquing everything their marketing companies are meant to do to begin with.) It’s possible that Community‘s ability to exist at all in these circumstances is a modern miracle, because as a show it sits at the crux of an entire generational and cultural gap. People who’ve killed our figurative television sets have also rejected the world advertisers try to sell us, because it doesn’t line up with reality, and because we actively operate within this culture of questioning and scrutinizing the content we intake–ads included. This description definitely applies to the audience of Community, which is a show that is 100% built around the concept that pop-culture-savviness and a pervasive rejection of outdated sociocultural values go hand in hand. As hard as NBC tries to make Community fit the mold that will allow advertisers to reach its audience in real time on Thursday Friday nights, it’s never going to happen.

To put it bluntly, you can get TV-set-controlled culture to watch bland, unironic, problematic shows like Whitney and Big Bang Theory, and you can get those shows to land significant advertising revenue, because the vast majority of people who still watch tv, much like the vast majority of people who use Facebook, are not a part of the culture of consumer-controlled content, genre savviness, remix culture, talking back, and active participation that makes up the rest of internet culture, the culture of fans who watch Community. Producer-controlled, ad-controlled-media is only as sustainable as the unreflective, unthinking, passive “couch potato” mentality people have about the act of media consumption, and that culture that is fast eroding. Community represents a paradigm shift. Community‘s success lies with an entire generation of people who don’t even register on Nielsen ratings because they don’t intake shows in ways that expose themselves to advertisers.

In order to make sure their message gets across to this “invisible” group of people, advertisers are demanding product placements directly within shows. When Community had to do this, it lampshaded the whole thing by naming a character “Subway,” turning him into a villain, and promptly disposing of him. The show that NBC wants Community to become is a more broad, bland, “mainstreamed” comedy, one that the Facebook set, the passive box-in-living-room-watching audience, can enjoy. That show is dying. That show is unsustainable. That show is dreck.

That show looks like this.

 

TV Shows Will Break Your Heart

 

I was watching the incredible outpouring of grief on Tumblr over the loss of Dan Harmon to Community, and thinking about how one of my internet friends has this tag for the media posts she makes on her journal, and it’s called “tv shows will break your heart.” For years this tag has puzzled me, because my own tv-less background has left me extremely disconnected from the culture built around following and investing in a tv series. In addition to Avatar, the only other Western television series I’ve watched until the end of their runs are Buffy and Gilmore Girls, and I discovered both series late in their runs and caught up after the fact. For a long time, it was just so utterly foreign to me, this concept that you could invest so heavily in a serial tv storyline that it could impact you this way. That tag made me want to understand what television had to offer that I’d somehow missed all my life. I’ve watched a lot of tv shows since in an attempt to plug into that feeling.

Then I watched Community. And then I spent most of April and all of May in a frenzy of dvd-buying, reading about Nielsen ratings, trying to understand why this show that’s so popular isn’t popular at all, trying to race home from work on Thursday nights to make sure my measly little tv set is turned on at 8pm, ready to mute commercials, but mostly just wanting to be counted.

And I understand, now, that it’s not the serial storytelling that breaks your heart. It’s the mode of storytelling. It’s the knowledge that a story being packaged and produced this way is only as good as the advertisers who support it and the execs who allow it to have its own voice without stifling it because of their fears that it won’t appeal to the “mainstream.”

It’s the knowledge that you aren’t who they think they’re making this show for. It’s the knowledge that your active, questioning, challenging, critique-filled, collectively-tuned-in fannishness are all qualities that the show’s producers don’t want you to have, because they’re the same qualities that drive you to want control over your own content, that drive you to reject shitty advertising, that drive you to seek alternative avenues of content consumption. “Being a fan of Community is so emotionally draining,” one frustrated fan said the night after the season finale. And I’m remembering all the outrage that still exists over shows like Beauty and the Beast, Firefly, Stargate: Atlantis–how it’s not just that the storylines were killed, but that the fanbase wasn’t the right fanbase–too female, too geeky, too old, too all of the above.

And maybe this gets at the heart of what being a fan is about, ultimately: holding your heart in your hands and investing in something that’s ultimately out of your control–with trepidation, because maybe your faith is totally misplaced, maybe the thing you’re allowing yourself to love will let you down, maybe the creator will go on a bender or fuck off for 6 years mid-series *cough* or quit halfway through the best arc, or die before it’s done; and maybe, perhaps even more likely, the people on the other side of that ugly consumer/production wall will let you down by refusing to see your value, or even refusing to acknowledge that you exist, that you matter.

________

MB, I have a confession to make: you could have had this post 5 weeks ago when I originally wrote it if I hadn’t been angstily sitting on it all this time, as if I hoped the circumstances would change and Dan Harmon would magically return to Community, and television networks would realize that the way to get people to watch tv again is to stop treating tv like it’s still a cultural source and start treating it like it’s just another tool for people to access media they want to watch.

But we live in a world where constant innovations in technology and an increasingly savvy, selective consumer culture are constantly battling corporate interests who are just trying to get the shows you love in front of your dad’s football buddies and your stay-at-home grandma–i.e., the only people who still watch tv like tv is the only thing they have to watch.

Several times during the furor over Dan Harmon’s firing, fans only-half-jokingly suggested, “Can we start a Kickstarter for Community?” Oddly enough, that’s what this conflict may boil down to: will fans of creative projects be able to directly support those projects financially in the future? Or will they continue to see the artistic and cultural merits of shows they love pitted against the priorities of advertisers who want “brand-safe content”?

The positives here may be that when push comes to shove, we can start a Kickstarter for Community–or, at the very least, for shows like it. (There actually already is a Kickstarter for a Community spinoff, the adorable Dr Who parody Inspector Spacetime.) The nature of creative consumption and production/distribution/profit from creative works is shifting so quickly that it’s difficult to say what the limits are. In fact, let’s just go ahead and assume there are no limits. As bleak as the current outlook for Community‘s future as a network television franchise may be, the outlook for consumer-generated content is brighter than ever.

And although the outlook for television and advertising companies is arguably bleaker than ever, this is the kind of cultural paradigm shift that can pave the way for a whole new kind of marketing, based on entirely new ways of reaching people where they live. And maybe the simple solution is for television networks to stop asking shows to conform to an idea of what’s “mainstream,” and instead start thinking of all streams of human contact, creativity, identity; to stop insisting that consumers of shows be advertiser-ready and start insisting that advertisers be consumer-ready: ready to deliver products for all people and speak to all people, without attempting to fit them into binaries, stereotypes, and socio-cultural pigeon-holes.

Maybe then advertisers would understand exactly how valuable a show like Community, with its ability to embrace diversity and still deliver a quality narrative product that everyone loves, can be.

Filed Under: FANBATTE Tagged With: community, fandom, fannish travails, musical theater, western media

Fannish Drift: All We Are Is Lust In the Wind?

May 8, 2012 by Aja Romano 6 Comments

Hello, Manga Bookshelf!

It’s the time of year where everything turns into a frenzy, and I haven’t had much opportunity for reflecting upon fannish things; but lately something has been on my mind, and that’s the syndrome of Fannish Drift. In this case I’m speaking in the fandom sense–how people move from one fandom to the next.

There are several reasons this has been on my mind: the primary one is that May 5th, the flagstone day for my previous fandom, Hikaru no Go, has come and gone without my doing anything to commemorate it, other than allowing the fandom at large to take over the “Let’s Five!” meme that I began 6 years ago. As you may remember from last year when it was hosted right here, the meme had been hosted in numerous places, and I didn’t have the heart to move it to yet a 4th location when it could have a permanent home. And while I love the canon as much as ever, I’m just not in the fandom anymore. I’ve stopped participating in the community and devoting large sections of my headspace to thinking about board games and the ghosts who play them. :D

Since 2010 I’ve been happily esconced in the fandom for Inception, which is an unlikely fandom to have survived this long because it’s a film fandom, and film fandoms tend to have very small fandoms and very short afterlives. For whatever reason, luckily for us, Inception fandom has been the exception, and is still going strong as a mid-sized fandom nearly two years later. Still, it’s inevitable that there’s been a decline in size over the years as people move on, and in a fandom whose largeness was always a surprise, it’s impossible not to notice the change. Which brings me to my second reason–watching fannish drift occur in my current fandom, and the accompanying experience of feeling overwhelmed by the current “trendy” fandoms.

As far as western fandoms go, I seem to be a bit of a strange bird because while I’ve dabbled in all kinds of fandoms during down periods, I tend to be very fandom monogamous. Literally for the last two years I’ve read nothing but Inception fanfic, because it was all I wanted to read, and it’s hard to get me to participate actively in multiple fandoms at once. I am, of course, aware of other fandoms and general fandom trends, but I don’t really invest in them heavily when I’m pre-engaged. :) My experience with Japanese fandoms has been totally different, however: during the period I was most heavily involved in Japanese fandoms, I was involved in, or at least actively conversant in, several at once: Tenipuri, Hikago, Nobuta wo Produce, Death Note, J-pop and J-rock. There have been moments when I’ve engaged with western media this way (most notably every year at Yuletide) but I also think there’s more of a culture, with western media fandoms, of movement from one fandom to another, rather than inhabiting multiple fandoms at once. I think that’s why lately I’m experiencing more of a disconnect between fannish social platforms: on tumblr, where it’s incredibly easy to reblog evidence of 20 different fandoms a day, fannish activity seems endlessly diverse; but in most other fandom corners I inhabit, the evidence for “active” fandoms–the fandoms people are talking about the most, the fandoms people are actively engaging in–seems largely confined to a handful at the moment: primarily, of course, Avengers, but also Teen Wolf, Sherlock, and hockey RPF.

Of course, the active fandoms I’ve just listed all have a white male bromance at their center, and many fans talk about this trend of movement between fandoms as being linked to the constant desire to seek out endless repetitions of this dynamic.* You might hear this phenomenon termed “Migratory Slash Fandom” or “Random Militant Slashers.” I have incredibly mixed feelings about this, honestly. I think it’s a very valid depiction of how many western media fans respond to canons, and a valid depiction of what kind of canons gain fan followings quickly. But I also think it’s a) sexist, because it’s usually used as a way to judge other female fans for doing fandom wrong, and b) limiting, because it presupposes that the only reason for fannish drift–for this movement from fandom to fandom–is because the fans are just moving around in search of more hot white guys to ship.

(Though for today, at least, the popular pairing seems to be F/F. I am speaking of Creamsicle, everyone’s new favorite OTP created in under 24 hours entirely from an unlikely internet meme!)


(Source = Tumblr, possible (?) credit to whileothersreap)

 

I’ll use my own fandom as an example: Inception fandom primarily revolves around the Arthur/Eames ship, which is a relationship between two characters who have literally three minutes of total screentime together. But they fit the formula for what pulls in the Random Militant Slashers completely: hot white guys, banter, easy chemistry, and: voila! Instantly popular fandom. But is that all there is to it? As I’ve said earlier, everyone was surprised by Inception’s popularity, and two years later, no one expected the fandom would still be this active, much less thriving. To me, that’s all the credit to the incredible possibilities the film gives us for worldbuilding and creation and literally endless interpretations of the canon universe and its alternatives. In other words, Arthur and Eames may arguably be cardboard stock characters dropped into a heist film ensemble, but if everything else about the film weren’t so compelling, none of us would be writing fics for it.

Still, when I see people moving on from Inception fandom predictably moving into other fandoms where the “two white guys + banter” phenomenon holds sway, I wonder what a more accurate set of criterion is for what pulls people from one fandom to the next, or if maybe there just isn’t one.

So tell me, MB: in your experience, what creates fannish drift? What draws you to a fandom initially and what keeps you there? Does it change over time, or does it change with every fandom? Is it easier to be in lots of fandoms at once or to devote yourself just to one until you’re done with it, then move on? Is there a culture divide in how we perceive fannish movement between Eastern and Western fandoms? I have no idea. But as I’ve already said, I’m an odd bird.

(Then again, I might just spend the rest of my day writing Normal Girl/Other-Girl-san~.)

Filed Under: FANBATTE Tagged With: fandom, slash, Western

50 Shades of Morally Unambiguous, Part 4 (The Final Post I Swear!)

April 4, 2012 by Aja Romano 3 Comments

Hello, MB! This is the last post in a series of posts rebutting last week’s Dear Author series on fanfiction. (That is, I think it’s the next-to-last. Either way, I just really like saying ‘penultimate.’) It’s also the 4th and final of a sub-set of posts responding to one DA post in particular: “Fanfiction: A Tale of Fandom and Morality.”

(I know, right? you thought it was never going to end and I was never going to move on from rebutting that post. WHAT KIND OF COLUMN IS THIS, you wondered. That makes two of us, guys, that makes two of us. WELL. THIS IS THE LAST ONE, I PROMISE.)

Before I dive in here, let me just issue, once again, the disclaimer that everything I write here is based on my own experiences and encounters with many different elements and aspects of many different kinds of fandoms. I have what I believe is a pretty broad perspective on fandom in general, but none of my thoughts on fandom should be taken as declarations of universal truth. If anyone wants my full and complete fandom bibliography I’ll happily provide it, but you really don’t want it because it’s long and boring and also includes this really awkward year where I was in the Kevin Spacey fandom. Trust me, let’s just not go there.


J/K, Boy-o, it’s cool.

 

In the previous three posts, I talked about the ways in which trying to police how influence works itself out in fiction is nearly impossible, and ultimately bad for the works on either side of the equation. I also talked about how it’d be a bit hypocritical for us to do that in the case of 50 Shades of Grey, our current controversial work of fanfic-turned-pro, given that one of the things publishers want writers to do is to appeal to the audience who shelled out for Twilight. In my last post I also discussed the potential for remix culture to change the way we think about creativity and the origins and ownership of creative ideas.

Now. There are a couple of potential negative aspects to this admittedly warm-fuzzy and optimistic scenario of industry free love. One of them Has mentions in her original post, and others I’ve had conversations with fans about throughout the past couple of weeks. They seem to boil down to the following arguments:

  • pro-fic can threaten fandom by damaging the implicit “no profiting off fanwork” code between fans and creators, thereby causing authors to be, as Has puts it, “more proactive in protecting their books from fanfiction.”
  • pro-fic can damage the quality and kind of fannish output, because instead of writing in order to critique specific canons, writers will come to fandom purely to exploit it and gain fanbases for their original works. We have already seen a bit of this in the Twilight fandom, according to Twilight fans themselves.
  • pro-fic can alter the nature of fandom by jeopardizing the free-exchange and alternative profit structure that fandom has going for itself.

I think these are all really good points, and there’s precedent for each of them. However, the construction of each argument removes autonomy from fans–millions of fans–who have been operating within their own spaces long enough to know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Take, for instance, the case of Fanlib, which was an infamous site begun in 2007 which attempted to exploit fan creativity in order to make money for corporate creations. The backlash from my corner of fandom against the whole idea of Fanlib was so strong that it partially fuelled a movement within fandom to create multiple platforms, blogging communities, archives, and even the non-profit organization for fan advocacy that would become the Organization for Transformative Works. All because many of us realized that if we didn’t create our own spaces that people outside of fandom would be all-too happy to exploit it. Former Fanlib user aurimyonys has a great post about realizing what was problematic about the site she loved:

In the end, what is niggling at me here is the idea of corporate invasion into fan fiction – making the things we write fit their molds rather than ours (there was indeed a brochure from the Fanlib company referring to the fan scripts and contests they ran, separate from the Fanlib website, that said fans’ creations were made “to fit in the lines, as in a coloring book”). That basically destroys fan culture. Fan culture allows fans to play with worlds in unique ways. If what we are permitted to do suddenly is assigned a strict formula, that kills fandom. Really and truly.

And that, my friends, scares the hell out of me.

Fandom has a proven track record of withstanding attempts by outsiders or TPTB to take it over, shut it down, or dictate to it. But is professionally written fanfic a kind of corporate invasion? I don’t think so, and the main reason I don’t is because the overlap between pros and fans, as I’ve previously discussed, has always been there. Policing the interplay between them is literally impossible whether the policing is coming from fandom or from copyright holders. The other main reason is that just like with every other creative field, one or two breakout successes don’t suddenly create an entire overwhelming trend of for-profit fics. The reason 50 Shades is getting this much attention is because its success is so unprecedented; there have been plenty of other bestsellers based on fanworks, absolutely, but always tacitly so. Fanfiction that was openly converted into original work which then became a bestseller? This has never happened before. To me, the far more amazing and phenomenal fact about all of this is that members of Twilight fandom actually built and created their own publishing houses in order to truly bypass the gatekeepers of publishing; but that aspect of 50 Shades’ success isn’t really being talked about in the media to any degree. And even when you look at the dozens of dozens of Twilight fics that have been converted into original works, they’re absolutely nothing against the millions of Twilight fanfics that are happily co-existing for free alongside them. Literally, millions. I haven’t actually counted the number of Twilight fanfics over on FF.net, but it’s probably at least 3 million or so. Probably much more. One bestselling fanfic-turned-original work, balanced against all of the others that are still being produced within the culture of free exchange that the majority of fandom is happy to uphold? That’s just simply not a threat to fandom, any more than it is to Stephenie Meyer.

This is also the part where I point out that nearly half a million people on Tumblr alone know what “OTP” stands for. Fan culture is evolving and changing all the time, but it’s converging with mainstream culture in ways that actually strengthen it, not weaken it. Tumblr fascinates me because the whole site is so synonymous with fandom at this point that you really can’t extricate fans who identify themselves as being part of “fandom” from all of the other fans who simply reblog, like, and participate in fandom jargon and culture without realizing that’s what they’re doing. And when you consider that all of this fandom activity is directly supporting the creators, it becomes clear that outsiders don’t need to exploit fandom, because fandom is already a juggernaut of profit-making for any creator with sense. If it wanted to, fandom could prove a formidable enemy to copyright, but it clearly doesn’t want. Its own internal resistance to the idea of for-profit converted fic makes that abundantly clear. (I am telling you, thank goodness Sherlock Holmes is public domain, because if he wanted to, Benedict Cumberbatch could probably summon his own mini-army of fans to overtake copyright and leave it squirming on the floor begging for mercy. )


(Twice.)

 

What’s more, fandom’s respect for its canons actively works to protect creators from those who actually would infringe upon their copyright. Anyone remember Kaavya Viswanathan? When fans of Megan McCafferty got their hands on copies of the book, they instantly twigged that there was plagiarism afoot, and they helped document passage similarities while the story was still breaking. The irony here, of course, is that Viswanathan herself was a huge fan of McCafferty; and not to apologize for her plagiarism, but if we take her statements–that she unconsciously internalized McCafferty’s novels and reused her language accidentally– as being true, then I can’t help but feel that if she’d been a part of a fandom where there was a community around McCafferty’s language and story concepts, then she would have been more self-aware when writing her own works, less likely to plagiarize whole chunks of language and scenes from McCafferty, because that impulse would have been channelled into the creative transformation that fanwork affords.

There’s one final thing that I’ve not yet touched on in each of these posts, and that is the basic question: is for-profit fanfiction ethically wrong?

I say no, and here’s why. I have written numerous articles and blogged many times about how the publishing industry does all of the following things to books because they think it will make them more marketable:

  • whitewashes book covers
  • tries to erase queer and genderqueer characters from narratives, and often succeeds
  • queerwashes book covers to make butch, trans, or androgynous characters appear more binary gendered
  • thinwashes narratives and book covers
  • puts most of its financial and marketing support behind primarily white narratives
  • perpetuates the idea that minorities and women will read stories about white men, but white men won’t read stories about minorities and women, which turns into an awful catch-22 of a self-fulfilling prophecy that has nothing to back up a compelling contrary prevailing belief, because none of those other stories get told.
  • contributes, generally, to the danger of a single story

I believe that all of these extremely common occurrences within the publishing industry are immoral. I also believe that reclaiming heteronormative narratives, making them our own, and diversifying them, offering up alternatives to them, is far more ethical than supporting a hoary traditionalist system that wants to erase me, my friends, and other cultures besides my own. Which is why I believe that taking narratives out of the hands of the gatekeepers of traditional publishing–agents, editors, publicists, book-buyers–and putting them directly into the hands of people who want to read them can only ever be a good thing.

It doesn’t matter that most people wouldn’t find a book of BDSM erotica like 50 Shades of Grey particularly progressive or groundbreaking. To me, its function as a response to a literary phenomenon, its creation entirely within a fandom community, and its being placed directly into the hands of people who wanted to read it are all hugely progressive events. I believe every 50 Shades that a fandom produces actually paves the way for us to have more voices telling more stories, doing more things with narrative and modern technology, and telling more stories to more and more people. I believe that all of these things work to diversify our existing pools of literature, whether we’re writing the next Wide Sargasso Sea or the sixth millionth iteration of a SasuNaru fic where one of them gets turned into a bunny.


Source: Pixiv.Net

 

Plenty of people within fandom disagree with me, incidentally: there are many people who feel that trying to prove that all fanfic is transformative or empowering is a snooty and constricting activity, and I think that’s a valuable viewpoint too. To me, fanfic that is just produced for purposes of escapist entertainment is still transformative, because it’s still free work that’s being published for love and joy, and that still is a kind of response to established traditional means of producing literature. What gets me really excited is the idea that the millions of fanworks that exist can be all of these things at once: dialogic, monologic, pure porn, escapist, profound, literary, shallow, something in-between, or none of the above. And it’s still, all of it, working to increase the number of perspectives that get heard, the number of voices that get to speak. Fanfic that gets converted and published is still helping to do all of these things.

And what could be more “moral” than that?

Filed Under: FANBATTE Tagged With: dear author, fandom, fanfiction

50 Shades of Morally Unambiguous, Part 3: The Sparkle-Fairy Edition

March 28, 2012 by Aja Romano 6 Comments

Hello, MB! This is the 4th (or 5th, but who’s counting) post in a series of posts rebutting last week’s Dear Author series on fanfiction. And it’s the third of a set of posts responding to one post in particular: “Fanfiction: A Tale of Fandom and Morality.” TODAY IS THE VERY SPECIAL FAIRY EDITION OF THIS POST.

In the previous two posts, I talked about the ways in which trying to police how influence works itself out in fiction is nearly impossible, and ultimately bad for the works on either side of the equation. I also talked about how it’d be a bit hypocritical for us to do that in the case of 50 Shades of Grey, our current controversial work of fanfic-turned-pro, given that one of the things publishers want writers to do is to appeal to the audience who shelled out for Twilight.

In the original post, author Has asserts, “Taking an entire fanfiction story and turning that into a published book is:”

  • ethically wrong
  • a cynical ploy to market books… an easy way to cash in because there’s already a built-in fanbase that is able to market the book via word of mouth
  • [an indication] that the author does not believe what they wrote is strong enough to stand on its own merits but decided to publish it so they could profit by exploiting their fanbase
  • disappointing
  • might start off an ever-crazier circle of fanfiction based on fanfiction.
  • very detrimental to fandom and fanfiction

I’ve already pointed out, in the previous posts, how the “marketing ploy” argument is hypocritical to criticize a fan author for doing exactly what publishers want them to do in terms of appealing directly to a rich consumer base. As for the second bullet point: the whole weight of history is behind the act of spinning old works and characters into new versions and iterations. The idea that the fan author’s writing can’t stand alone/isn’t good enough to be publishable is one fanfiction authors have been saddled with for decades. I’ve already rebutted this argument very thoroughly, so I’ll just add: this argument, that fans surely couldn’t write an original plot, not only debases fanfiction, but it seems to target members of female fandom spaces. It also completely sidesteps the whole point that in most cases, the fanfiction that gets converted into original fiction winds up far removed from the source material. And in many cases already was to begin with.

Okay, now for bullet #4 (I’m skipping around, okay): might start off an ever-crazier circle of fanfiction based on fanfiction.

Hahaha. Okay, well, for one thing, people have been writing fanfiction based on fanfiction for fucking years. How is that bad? I’ve had several works of fanfiction written for my own works of fanfiction, and like every other member of fandom I know, I’ve never been anything but extremely flattered. Just like getting fanart or a podfic of your story, fanfic based on one of your own stories is seriously one of the best things ever that can be gifted to you in fandom. There are even remix challenges that invite authors to write fanfic of fanfic, all over fandom. This is not a serious criticism of the “danger” of published fanfiction, and no one who understands how remix culture works would ever offer it up as one, because the whole point of being in a remix culture is that we’re all gleaning, transforming, and passing on what’s come before.

Which brings me to fairies.

 

Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert has an amazing 2009 TED talk entitled “A New Way to Think About Creativity,” where she talks about trying to find new ways to “manage the inherent emotional risks associated with creativity.” ((transcript) I would never encourage you to read EPL but I would urge all of you to watch her talk because I think it’s completely brilliant, and her ideas, while they are offered in the context of taming genius, also are extremely relevant to the way we frame the argument about fanwork. Gilbert asks if we can “go back to some more ancient understanding of the relationship between humans and the creative mystery:”

[In Ancient Greece], people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit… a “genius” was this sort of magical divine entity who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio—kind of like Dobby, the house elf. So, brilliant, there it is, that distance—that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. ….

And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sorts of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized.

But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he’s speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, you know, it’s gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn’t have a piece of paper, he doesn’t have a pencil, he doesn’t have a tape recorder.

So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, ‘I’m going to lose this thing, and then I’m going to be haunted by this song forever. I’m not good enough, and I can’t do it.’ And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, ‘Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.’

And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it kind of back where it came from, and realized that this didn’t have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. ….

This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you’re finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way it starts to change everything.”

I like this idea a lot. I like it because it makes ideas a community process of receiving, sharing, and passing on. I like this idea for its potential to revise the way we think about storytelling and narrative theory. I like it because it’s anti-capitalist! I like it because it reconfigures creativity with communal narratives at the center of a kind of group process in which we all give and receive ideas as they come to us. And I like it because it implies an equal balance of agency between us as creators and the fairy-like muses that gift us with stories and ideas.

What if we viewed creators as being strands along a larger, interconnected web of ideas? What if we could agree that original works and the works they inspire could co-exist alongside of one another—since we know they already do—and that maybe that’s okay? And what kinds of new business models could we derive from thinking about creativity this way? What if I write a book that I am willing to openly claim is based on an idea that I drew from your book, and instead of you sueing me, we work out a deal where “Inspired by (Your Book)” goes on my cover? What if, after a certain number of copies sold, both of our books are reprinted and we share the wealth?

What if taking inspiration from someone else’s works didn’t have to get conflated with “plagiarism” (which is when you explicitly copy something and don’t credit) but could instead be seen as a form of literary sampling? Dear Author actually has a post from 2010 arguing for compulsory licensing for ALL fanfiction (um, how about no); but what if a conversation about licensing and royalties could be had without thinking of these things as a way to proscribe the boundaries of fanfiction? What if they could be seen, instead, as potential ways to make it easier for attributed transformative work to be sold openly and linked back to its source inspiration, for the mutual benefit of all parties?

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the down-side of this new world of Free Love And Published Fanfic! But for now:


(source)

Damn straight!

Filed Under: FANBATTE Tagged With: dear author, fandom, fanfiction

50 Shades of Morally Unambiguous, Part 2

March 24, 2012 by Aja Romano 15 Comments

Copyright, Transformative Fiction, and Value

Continuing the series of responses to the Dear Author series on fanfiction; this is Part 2 of a 3-part response to “Fanfiction and Morality.” (Part 1 is here!)

To recap, the author of this post, Has, argues that “Taking an entire fanfiction story and turning that into a published book is:”

  • ethically wrong [in part because the fan code of conduct is never to profit off fanfic]
  • a cynical ploy to market books… an easy way to cash in because there’s already a built-in fanbase that is able to market the book via word of mouth
  • [an indication] that the author does not believe what they wrote is strong enough to stand on its own merits but decided to publish it so they could profit by exploiting their fanbase
  • disappointing
  • might start off an ever-crazier circle of fanfiction based on fanfiction.
  • very detrimental to fandom and fanfiction

 

The CoC (my oh-so-hilarious abbreviation for ‘fan code of conduct’) is a lie meant to keep fandom protected from copyright holders, but the reality is that it’s the copyright holders who aren’t protected—not because of any malice on the part of fans, but because of the fact that modern copyright law upholds the value of transforming existing works.

Copyright will always deter straightforward derivative rip-offs of your work, but it doesn’t guarantee your work can’t be really transformed and that money won’t be made off that transformation. The copyright holder can be legally subject to having their work taken and revamped and published in (at least?) 4 ways:

  • The copyright holder can have their work revamped and published as parody under the Fair Use clause—which allows, of course, for the commercial sale of parody, even when works aren’t parodies but are in fact serious, like the famous case of Alice Randall’s bestselling African-American critique The Wind Done Gone.
  • The copyright holder can have their work inspire a new universe with new settings, contexts, and characters, the way Twilight inspired 50 Shades.
  • The copyright holder can have their copyright expire and enter the public domain—at least 50 years after their death for countries following the Berne Convention.
  • The copyright holder can drop off the face of the earth and be unreachable when the remixer comes calling. This is called the orphan works clause, and it allows for your copyright to be overruled if no information about the work can be traced back to you as the creator after a good faith effort has been made to find you.

Obviously the law doesn’t think transformative fair use threatens the copyright holder. And historically the copyright holders themselves haven’t seen it that way either. I just happen to be re-reading Jerome K Jerome’s classic satirical memoir Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), which was originally published in 1889, sold a bajillion copies, and has never gone out of print since. For the 1909 edition (which is printed in my copy, which incidentally was published by Barnes & Noble), Jerome writes:

The world has been very kind to this book. Mr. Arrowsmith speaks only of its sales in Great Britain. In Chicago, I was assured by an enterprising pirate now retired, that the sales throughout the United States had exceeded a million; and although, in consequence of its having been published before the Copyright Convention, this has brought me no material advantage, the fame and popularity it has won for me among the American public is an asset not to be despised.

I find it wondrous and wonderful that one hundred years ago the concept of copyright could so amiably co-exist alongside the idea that monetary value was not the only kind of value that mattered in the dissemination of an author’s works and reputation throughout the world. And it still can and does.

In contemporary Japanese culture, copyrighted manga is sold in stores right next to fan-produced doujinshi of that manga. Wiki notes that doujinshi artists “rarely secure the permission of the original creator,” and that the largest doujinshi con has over a million freaking people in attendance. Nothing about the practice of fanwork is secret or hidden, and neither are fans prevented, either legally or socially, from making money off what they do. As MB’s own Brigid Alverson writes:

Current copyright laws allow publishers to tolerate a certain amount of remixing of copyrighted characters. …on balance, many observers think that the doujinshi phenomenon is good for the manga market, because it builds interest for the series and characters and provides a training ground for new creators—perhaps the best known being Rumiko Takahashi, creator of InuYasha and Ranma 1/2, who got her start creating doujinshi under the guidance of Lone Wolf and Cub artist Kazuo Koike.

Let’s make this even clearer: in Japan, E.L. James could write and sell Twilight doujinshi and no one would prosecute her for it because the culture, production, and sale of doujinshi adds value to Stephenie Meyer’s original product. In Japan, she wouldn’t even have to change the names to a) profit off her work AND b) increase the value of SMeyer’s work.

I’m not making this point to argue that SMeyer shouldn’t get to prosecute people who infringe upon her copyright. I’m arguing that what’s happening here is not really infringement, because even when it is for profit, it still increases the value of the original product.

My friend Silvia Kundera has a quote on my ‘fanfic is okay‘ post that I think is relevant here:

I am actually the proud owner of an authorized & published One Tree Hill Brooke/Lucas, implied Peyton/Nathan novel that I bought at fucking Borders. And it’s ‘real’ fanfic, man. It’s a pairing-centric fix-it that does a shippy re-write on Season 2. for the author’s preferred couples. It’s exactly what I’d expect to bookmark on delicious when I’m in the mood for het. The only difference between this and a 50k Sheldon/Penny fanfic is that:
— one of these is on my bookshelf & someone got paid for it;
— one is on my computer & someone did it for love.

Has’s argument that publishing fanfic as origfic is “a cynical ploy to market books” fails to take into account the value-added worth of a book that can be tied back to a previous source. The One Tree Hill franchise obviously thought that paying an author to write a shippy fix-it fic would add value and meaning to its overall product. How, in theory, is this any different from EL James publishing 50 Shades and then linking it back to Twilight?

For that matter, in what kind of warped thought process does a for-profit novel with no obvious connection to a franchise get branded as less legitimate than a for-profit novel written directly for a franchise? One is a series tie-in, one is a bestselling novel that you would never connect to the Twilight series if you didn’t already know through word of mouth and the media that it began as Twilight fic. The book 50 Shades of Grey has literally nothing to do with the book Twilight.

I said I wasn’t going to tackle Dear Author’s examination of 50 Shades itself, because it’s a maddening, dishonest red herring of a post, but—okay. Look. Dear Author focuses a lot of time on attempting to decode how transformative the new, names-changed version of James’ fanfic is compared to the original version. They devote an entire post to the task of comparison which starts by doing a literal find/replace count on the character names. This is an EPIC example of missing the point. The side by side comparison never once considered how similar the work of fanfiction itself was to Twilight, and how far removed the characters may have been from Meyer’s to begin with. Because honestly, most people picking up 50 Shades of Grey would never be reminded of Twilight—prolly because Twilight is about TEENAGE VAMPIRES AND NOT BDSM PORN, JUST A THOUGHT.

And I’ll add: the DA side by side comparison is also an epic example of rudeness, since they obviously acquired their copy of the fanfic after the author had removed it from the web. In other words, they dug up her deleted fanfic just because they could. There is absolutely no reason for a side-by-side comparison of MotU and 50 Shades except to attempt to humiliate and shame the writer, and to imply that all she did was change some names around, AND to imply that changing some names is all ANYONE does when they convert their fic to original fic. That is. just. SO INSULTING. It’s so insulting that I’m not going to devote a whole separate post to responding to it because I think it’s completely duplicitous.

Because you know what words they didn’t do a find/replace on? VAMPIRE. WEREWOLF. SPARKLE. FORKS. Possibly because none of those central elements of Twilight are anywhere to be found in 50 Shades. Oh my god I just. okay. moving on.

Is the argument here honestly that the success of E.L. James’ novel is somehow a shameful thing because it dares to piggyback on Twilight’s success?

Um. Then what the hell has the publishing industry been doing since 2005?

Because correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought we’d spent the last 7 years seeing hundreds upon thousands of Paranormal YAs flooding bookstores. I thought I’d spent years seeing bookstore displays using “If you liked Twilight, you’ll love this!” as a promo to sell books. I thought I’d seen dozens of books being reprinted specifically to have iconic red and black covers. I thought I’d seen Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and Romeo and Juliet all being explicitly appropriated and repackaged for teenagers as books Bella and Edward love. Did I just make all these things up?


Er. No?

It is intellectually dishonest to handwring about undue influence because a few dozen of Twilight fandom authors are owning up to doing, explicitly, what the publishing industry has been blatantly encouraging the entire industry to do for years. Why on earth shouldn’t E.L. James market her book’s appeal to Twilight fans, given that that’s exactly what publishers want a book to have?

And the thing is you usually never know what the sources of influence are as long as they aren’t disclosed and aren’t completely overt or apparent in the work itself. What if Left Hand of Darkness really is a Star Trek fanfic? What if Inception really is unauthorized Paprika fanfic? After all, Nolan calls it one of his “principle influences.” What if “Firefly” really is unauthorized fanfic of “Cowboy Bebop? After all, Joss said it had anime influences. I’m pretty sure no rights or attribution was ever given in these cases. Does that mean the influence wasn’t felt? Nolan even said he based the character of Ariadne on the main character of Paprika. But it’s okay, because clearly they’re just general tropes, right? Much like the character trope of a young spunky heroine falling in love with a seductive, dominating hero….

In all of the cases I mentioned above, there is a documented influence because the creator was familiar with the previous work and its genre conventions. Are these things fanfiction? A better question is how aren’t they fanfiction? And what’s more, how don’t they add value to the original work? I like these specific examples because I watched Cowboy Bebop after I heard Firefly was based on it. I watched Paprika and the film Dark City because I heard Inception was based on them both. I finally decided to take the plunge and watch Original Trek after I read Left Hand of Darkness. Even when influence isn’t openly claimed and owned up to, value still reflects upon the original inspiration.

And whether or not Twilight fans and critics want to admit it, there’s nothing harmful about 50 Shades’ success. Stephenie Meyer’s fans aren’t going to stop being fans of her books just because 50 Shades exists. But fans of 50 Shades might decide to go back and read Twilight, if there’s anyone out there who hasn’t yet. These two different novels can co-exist, just like they already do in Japan. These works amplify each other, to the credit of all.

Later: Part 3—the “morality” of all this, and new ways to think about creative autonomy!

Filed Under: FANBATTE Tagged With: dear author, fandom, fanfiction

50 Shades of Morally Unambiguous, Part 1

March 24, 2012 by Aja Romano 7 Comments

Hello, MB! First off, in response to requests to expand on a few of the terms I’ve been using in these posts (and thank you all so much for your comments!), I’ve created a glossary here! I will update it as new terms come up, and I will try to give more clarity in posts where concepts may not be clear. :D

Also! I have to say thank you to everybody for giving me such a warm welcome and providing such great comments! I really, really appreciate it and I hope that the gargantuan post I’m about to drop in your lap isn’t enough to permanently put you off this column. IF IT HELPS I am also subliminally recruiting for my cult.

Welcome to the second (or, really third) in a series of posts rebutting this week’s Dear Author series on fanfiction. The post I’m going to address today is a doozie: “Fanfiction: A Tale of Fandom and Morality.”


Not gonna lie, this panda is me writing this commentary. I am this panda.
It’s been a few days of oh god please let the horror end / oh god how is this still not done

 

The entire Dear Author series on fic was prompted by the success of the novel 50 Shades of Grey, which began its life as a Twilight fic called “Masters of the Universe.” This novel is not the first Twilight fanfic to “go pro”—there are in fact a shitload of other ones. I have a more general post about the Twilight pro-fic phenomenon over at The Mary Sue today, so in this post I won’t focus on it so much as the argument around it. Fanfiction has for a long time existed as the elephant in the editorial room, and the wild success of 50 Shades is finally, for better or worse, forcing the conversation about whether or not fanfic is legitimate to move foward after a steady decade and a half of rapidly advancing the argument in fanfic’s favor. Suffice it to say that people on both sides of the argument, within fandom and outside of it, are up in arms about the fact that Twilight pro-fics have the audacity to openly link to their fannish origins and then sell different, “original” versions of themselves.

Things I’m Happy About (A Brief List):

  • that the author of the DA post, Has, is someone on my end of the spectrum of perspectives about fanfiction.
  • I’m happy that finally!!!! there is a NEW ARGUMENT about fanfiction! :D
  • I’m happy because Has’ argument illustrates how overwhelming remix culture is, how it’s confusing everyone, how it’s rapidly calling for paradigm shifts in the way we think about intellectual property, property law, copyright, publishing in the age of digital media, and collaborative creative culture.
  • I’m happy because this whole discussion can be seen as as a call to renegotiate copyright in the age of remix culture.

Things I’m Not Happy About (A Slightly Longer List):
Has makes a wide-ranging argument that for-profit fic converted from fanfiction is immoral. These are all direct quotes from the source post but I’m going to bullet-point them in the interest of simplicity. Has argues that “Taking an entire fanfiction story and turning that into a published book is:”

  • ethically wrong
  • a cynical ploy to market books… an easy way to cash in because there’s already a built-in fanbase that is able to market the book via word of mouth
  • [an indication] that the author does not believe what they wrote is strong enough to stand on its own merits but decided to publish it so they could profit by exploiting their fanbase
  • disappointing
  • might start off an ever-crazier circle of fanfiction based on fanfiction.
  • very detrimental to fandom and fanfiction

Okay, so. We have a number of different arguments being made here about why specifically profiting from fanfiction is dangerous, unoriginal, and immoral. There’s also another argument that’s not explicit, but which gets discussed repeatedly by fans in comments: that profiting off fanfiction is a violation of the code of ethics of the fan community. As commenter “S” articulates: “It’s an unwritten contract – fanworks are not to be made for profit.” Has herself is an active, proud member of fandom. She says that “Fanfiction is a great medium where fans can enrich and be a part of the world that they love.” Then she notes that, “historically, however, fandom has not been about making money, and any attempts to do so by fans were frowned upon.”

I want to start by examining this code of conduct in relationship to copyright. Then, in Part 2, I’ll talk directly about the value-added status of works published for profit under Fair Use, and then in Part 3 we’ll discuss the fears that all of this could hurt fandom. And finally we will cycle back around to morality. But first I’m going to give you a gif which illustrates your horror at realizing how involved this argument will be:


you won’t see the copyright infringement coming til it strikes

 

Which Came First, the Fandom or the Fic?

Fandom developed in the margins of pop culture; western media fanfiction in particular is tied to a sense of illegitimate production, subversive content, and bootlegged distribution. As U.S. and European fans have grown more open about what we do, we all insist that we do what we do for love and not for profit. And it’s true, we absolutely do, and will keep on doing so. But what gets forgotten is that this tacit ethical code grew out of the need to protect ourselves against the stigma of being thought of as “plagiarists;” as “unoriginal,” “untalented,” “only interested in porn,” “immoral.”

In other words, it was a code of ethics that grew out of marginalization, shame, and fear. Keep silent about what we do. Don’t give the creators/rightsholders any reason to care that you exist. Stay underground. KEEP IT SECRET. KEEP IT SAFE.

But all of this was before the age of the internet; before music sampling became commonplace; before Henry Jenkins published Textual Poachers, the first seminal academic work to argue that fanfiction was actually amazing; before Comic-Con became cool and creators started routinely interacting with fans; before fans started creating a discourse around what they did which challenged the pre-existing idea of fandom as shameful; before Youtube made fan response to a previous work literally just a click away; before it became clear to many of us that we are currently living in the middle of a remix culture where the gatekeepers of creative works are being more or less obliterated by the nature of global connectivity and the spirit of communal collaboration. And many fans, having grown up in this culture, naturally don’t see why they should keep fanwork secret and safe. It’s not hurting anyone, and it arguably is helping to create a more diverse world and inject multiple perspectives into discourse about creative works. What’s there to be ashamed of? This is a drastically different view of fandom than many people, fans included, hold even now, because the stigma of shame attached to geek culture is so high. But for a rapidly growing number of fans, what we do isn’t subversive at all. It’s creative, inventive, time-consuming, fulfilling, and cool.

I’m relieved that I don’t have to disagree with Has over the legitimacy of fanfiction; but I think we disagree about the source of this legitimacy. Has seems to feel fanfiction is legitimate because of the fact that it has a culture and community around it, because it has lots of people involved in creating an active thriving subculture. In other words, since lots of people are doing this thing, it’s okay.

I think this is completely backwards; and I feel like this is the crux of why so many arguments about fanfiction seem to many fans as though they’re being framed all wrong.

In my experience, most arguments about whether fanfiction is okay begin by examining the relationship of fanfics to copyright law. From this perspective, the Fannish Code of Conduct is always going to be front and center, because when we, as fans, are constantly seeing our activities framed with a view towards establishing their illegality, of course our first line of defense is always going to be “but we’re not doing it for profit!” and also “but look how many of us there are! You can’t sue all of us!” So endlessly the debate about fanfic cycles back around to the fact that since so many fans are doing it but they aren’t trying to profit from it, it’s okay to let them keep doing it.

But the impulse to expand on other people’s stories occurs on an individual level. It is a fundamental part of creativity. It happens whether or not you realize that it’s happening. I still remember reading an interview with Meg Cabot from years ago where she talked about how she wrote fanfiction on her own, privately, without ever realizing it was fanfiction. And Cory Doctorow claims to have written his first story at age 6—Star Wars fanfic. You cannot tell me, you will never be able to tell me that there are not millions of authors throughout the centuries who have not created books/stories/songs/movies/comics/art/parody in just this way. We don’t do it because we make a conscious decision to imitate other people’s styles, characters, voices; we do it because it comes naturally to us. We do it because we yearn to know more about what would happen if characters we love encountered new situations. We do it because imitation is how we learn to find our own voices. We do it because we want to see ourselves participate in something we love. And sometimes we do it because we get paid to do it.

You don’t have to have a community around fanfic to legitimize it. The community, as I talked about in the last post, just makes it that much more vibrant and wonderful, but the community doesn’t control or cause the flow of ideas. Stimulate, yes. Hamper, lol, often, as anyone who’s ever gotten sucked into Tumblr or TV Tropes and subsequently lost hours of their life will tell you. But the ideas exist apart from the community. Fanfiction will exist even if you take fans away from their fandoms. The fannish code of conduct—that we don’t do this for profit—was developed by our subculture to protect itself. It should not be taken as being some kind of literal restriction on the nature of creating fanfiction, because it can’t be. It is physically impossible to place a barrier between you and an idea simply because the idea might be linked to someone else’s.

Most people in the publishing industry know this, because, let’s face it, everyone knows about novels that began as fanfics, of authors who filed off the serial numbers, of fans who stopped writing in the middle of a work in progress to convert their fic into a novel because they realized they wanted to do something different with it. Some of us even know of editors and agents who explicitly seek out authors of fanfic and request that they convert those fics into originals. I have had editors approach me about existing fic; I have had friends approached by editors about their existing fic, as well as to request new fiction from them on the strength of having read their fanfic. These incidents have been happening for decades, and the only difference is that now a few fans are emboldened enough by the openness of the times we live in to actually claim their novels’ heritage as fanfics. They are actually attempting to give credit to the authors who inspired them, instead of changing names and contexts in secret and shame the way fans have had to do for years, all with the tacit complicity of the publishing industry.

When I say that framing fanfiction in the context of its relationship to copyright law is all backwards, I mean that the framework implies a causal relationship: copyright law exists, therefore fanfic is illegitimate. The opposing argument to this view has always been “but the fans are all right so let them keep doing it!” But transformative literature exists whether or not copyright exists, and the impulse to rework pre-existing stories is upheld and reinforced constantly in our society, be it through Pride and Prejudice and Monster Trucks or through endless revisions and retconnings of superhero myths and other comics universes, constant exploiting and profiting off works in the public domain, and literally innumerable examples of historical RPF which no one can copyright.

All of the agency, all of the sociohistorical evolution of narrative, all the power of creative impulse, stands behind the fanfic writer. It does not stand behind copyright. Just as you can’t place a code of conduct around the act of writing down an idea, copyright can never completely rein in the creative impulse to rework stories, because frankly that impulse is mightier than copyright law and will always be. You can’t order the entire of fandom to cease and desist, because even if you did, those works would all continue to be written. Only they would all be written a) in the privacy of their own homes, shared with no one, b) written and passed around via bootleg methods which would probably be impossible to control, and/or c) written and turned into “original” fic, exactly as they have been for centuries.

The code of conduct—fanfic is not for profit—is a lie. (Lol, THE CoC IS A LIE, GET IT /terriblepuns) It doesn’t suddenly erase an entire cultural history of reworking previous sources, or the publishing industry’s perpetuation of the practice, and it absolutely never has kept, never will keep, fans from turning fanfic into novels for profit. All it does is keep fans from admitting that they’re doing it, and it keeps the authors of the original work from receiving any kind of credit or residual benefit for having inspired the succeeding work.

OKAY I NEED A DRINK HOW ABOUT YOU GUYS.

 

Next up: looking at fair use works that make a profit and still fit within copyright. On to Part 2: Copyright, Transformative Fiction, and Value

Filed Under: FANBATTE Tagged With: dear author, fandom, fanfiction

Fannish Inquisitions: Countering Assumptions About Fandom

March 21, 2012 by Aja Romano 24 Comments


Happy 6th anniversay, KAT-TUN! Thank you for providing us this useful visual metaphor for what often happens when other communities and fandom, er, collide!

 

Hi, MB! This is the first of a series of posts about fandom being written in response to a series of posts about fandom. The romance review site Dear Author is holding a week-long examination of fandom and fanfic—with somewhat confusing results. It’s my goal, through these posts, to argue for a more contemporary view of fandom and fanwork that falls more closely in line with a) how fans actually act in fandom, b) how fanwork actually operates and what it actually does, and c) the actual status of fanwork under the law.

Starting with the first post in the DA series, we have “How I Came to Appreciate Fan Fiction.” This is, overall, a fairly positive post, but it has a lot of outdated assumptions about fandom that I’d like to unpack.

To give Sunita D, today’s contributor, credit where it’s due, there’s probably always a moment of shock upon a first encounter with fanfiction, or doujinshi or yaoi, just like there is with any new concept. Like sporks! Or literal cloud computing! We might think of this first encounter as a moment of simple culture shock. Sunita even describes hers:

Of course I’ve hated certain books’ endings, I’ve wished for sequels, and I’ve thought about the off-page lives of favorite characters. But I’ve never written to authors to ask them to keep writing about a particularly loved protagonist. And I’ve never wanted to write my own versions of books. Not because I thought doing so would be wrong, but because it just never occurred to me.

Whoa, hold on a tic. Already we’ve run into the first of what will be many false assumptions about fandom and especially fanfiction in general throughout the Dear Author series on fanfic.

False assumption #1: All fans long to interact with creators.

“I’ve never written to authors to ask them to keep writing about a particularly loved protagonist.”

Okay, but most fans haven’t either. Most fans don’t need to, because our interaction with a canon has very little to do with what’s going on in the author’s head. This is a key aspect of fandom that many people outside of fandom get wrong. Many fans get very nervous and gunshy when the prospect of interacting with creators comes up, because those fans prefer as little contact with the makers of their canons as possible. Please note that this impulse is often not, not, NOT out of shame or embarrassment or fear of reprisals, but rather from a desire not to have the gatekeepers poking their noses in our business. There are exceptions, of course, especially in RPF fandoms; we are seeing something of a cultural shift happen as Twitter puts celebrities and fans in touch with each other on a daily basis. But for the most part, fans go about their business with little regard for TPTB (The Powers That Be). Which brings me to the next mistaken assumption:

False assumption #2: Fanfiction = Do-Over.

“I’ve never wanted to write my own versions of books. Not because I thought doing so would be wrong, but because it just never occurred to me.”

Most fans don’t want to write their own versions of books either. That’s not what fanfic is. Many people think of fanfiction as the practice of trying to prove a creator got it wrong. Not at all. For most fans, most of the time, fanfiction is not about rewriting canon.

Sure, a fan can write fix-it fic—but then they’ll turn write around and write something completely different. Fans explore their canons and play around with the worlds they’re engaging with in order to do something completely new. Take, for example, what may be the most popular narrative genre of all: the post-canon fic. The canon ends—you write about what happens after. But that’s a story that can be told and retold forever, because the possibilities are endless.

In general terms, fanworks are about expansion, not re-creation.

Happily, this is also the conclusion Sunita arrives at: This path isn’t just about creating new romantic relationships or changing unhappy endings to happy ones. What if you think the most interesting character in the Harry Potter novels is Luna Lovegood and you want to read more about her?…. Even if you adhere strictly to canon, there’s plenty of scope for your imagination.

From this point on, Sunita’s post is a plain, fair and positive view of fanfiction; but it’s a simplistic one. It justifies rather than celebrates. Which leads me to…

False Assumption #3: Fanfiction is just a simple, fun creative exercise that has no serious repercussions!

 

My main problem with all of this justification/explanation of fanfic is that it’s just SO DATED. I have been hearing people “defend” fanfic or try to “explain” fanfic in exactly this way for the last ten years. Two thousand-fracking-two, folks (and incidentally those defenses were on the front page of the NY Times, hardly out of mainstream cultural earshot).

And yes, everyone’s experiences are different, and I’m sure Sunita’s explanation is helpful for many people. But REALLY. TEN YEARS, GUYS. COME ON. CAN WE MOVE THIS DISCUSSION FORWARD A LITTLE? How’s this for an advancement:

  • Fanwork is dangerous because it challenges your worldview and makes you think critically about pop culture, literature, art, and the world you live in.
  • Fanwork has serious repercussions because it operates outside of traditional modes of access to ideas, and it is predicated entirely on a culture of free exchange and non-monetary systems of value.
  • Fanwork is complex and diverse. It opens minds, educates, and introduces new cultural experiences to the fan participant. It is anything but shallow.

SHIT JUST GOT REAL AKA THIS IS THE COOL PART OF THIS POST

In lit-crit terms, fandom is the living, breathing embodiment of Bakhtin’s ideas about dialogic imagination. Canon is monologic, expressing a single worldview, because usually canons have single or very few creators with one narrative goal in mind. But fandom? Fandom creates fics within communities, fics that are partly meta-commentaries, fics that arise out of passionate debates, fics that get reworked and turned into original fic, fics that offer serious literary critique, fics that seek to actively engage other fans in responding to them. Fandom is dialogic imagination.

Canon has to stick to the narrative parameters that define its medium. (Unless you are Homestuck and you are your own medium. Yeah, yeah, we know.) But fandom has no defined parameters and expresses itself any way it wants. Fics written in fictional languages? Have several! Fanart? totally and 100% canon compliant! Fanvids? How much is that geisha in the window, Joss?

Fandom constantly critiques privileged narratives, challenges established sociocultural ways of thinking, and expands the parameters of a particular established worldview. Have some of my favorite examples of fics that critique canonical narratives:

  • a fic in which the character of Mary Poppins is reworked as an Indian ayah in order to offer an important critique of British colonialism.
  • A fic written around Avatar: the Last Airbender which tells a post-canonical story of struggles for equality through a simple description of museum artifacts from various cultures within the Four Nations.
  • A Hikaru no Go fic that realistically portrays Hikaru coming to terms with his sexuality despite his best efforts.
  • An Inception fic that redeems the character of Mal (the protagonist’s dead wife) by imagining she was right all along.

WTF is this b.s. about fanwork being derivative? To quote Lev Grossman in his amazing Time magazine article, which you don’t get a link to because you have to SLOG YOUR WAY THROUGH THIS MESS WITH ME FIRST, these works “talk back to canon.” And they show their teeth.

We could have ended this post here (and I could have saved you 500 words, look, I tried, guys), because Sunita was on the right track! We could have worked with this! ugh, we were doing so good, Sunita. we could have been pals.

Except then we arrive at the money quote:

“Whether the changes authors introduce to these characters are sufficient to make the jump from derivative to transformative is not something we can usually predict in advance, but I think it’s important to have a conversation about what such a transformation entails and think about conditions in which authors might succeed or fall short.”

what. I mean. WHAT.

 

lsjdfksadjklad you don’t suddenly GAIN TRANSFORMATIVITY BY BEING THE SPARKLIEST OF ALL THE FANFIC PONIES IN DERIVATIVELAND, WTF.

(this is one of the results I got when I googled “fanfic pony.” Looks legit.)

False Assumption #4 & #5: Fanwork is Derivative / Fanfiction May Or May Not Be Legal.

I hope that at the end of the week Rebecca Tushnet will come along with her shining orb of Transformative Justice and articulate this idea as part of the DA series much better than I ever could (ETA: YESSSS she has!), but in her stead: There are absolutely no court rulings on whether a work of not-for-profit fanfiction is legal or not. None. That means all fanfiction is legal under the fair use clause of U.S. copyright law, safe and legal until proven otherwise. This protection will most likely last as long as the Fair Use clause exists. To quote the OTW, “current copyright law already supports our understanding of fanfiction as fair use.” And as long as current copyright law supports fanfiction, fanfiction is legally transformative.

It’s dishonest to talk about fanworks as if they pussyfoot around the law when they don’t. The ‘sliding scale’ train of thought implies that “transformative” fics have narrowly succeeded in evading the clutches of copyright law while “derivative” fics are just hanging around waiting to be slapped with a Cease & Desist. This train of thought implies shame, illicitness, wrongdoing, and flat-out genre snobbery and elitism. Most importantly, since presumably all fanfics (in the U.S.) currently enjoy legal protection, many fans don’t act as though they’re engaged in something that’s illegal. So the “sliding scale” perspective doesn’t even apply to us.

For comparison, look at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. You don’t see them going “Manga is not a crime! Except for the really, really dirty yaoi, and the shota, and okay, maybe we could really really do without the vore and the bukkake because honestly, people.” Their argument is simple: either all licensed manga, in all its forms, is legal and deserves protection, or none of it does.

By the same token, fanwork does not “succeed” or “fall short” by managing or failing to qualify as transformative.

And here’s the ultimate kicker—a concept that this series of DA posts sadly seems to completely miss: the meaning of ‘transformative’ creative work extends beyond purely legal contexts. It involves the power of creative expression to change the creator and the audience. To many fans, the act of conceiving and creating fanwork is a transforming act, before you ever write the first word. They are transformative because they transform the reader. You and me.

 

Fanworks Cited:

arboretum. “A Resolution of Territory.” Livejournal. May 5, 2008.

Dhobi ki Kutti. “Promise of the पुरवाई.” An Archive Of Our Own. June 30, 2010.

electrumqueen. “i am the hero of this story (i don’t need to be saved).” Livejournal. August 14, 2010.

eruthros. “Ephemera from the Avatar Collection at Republic City University with notes and commentary by the archivists.” An Archive Of Our Own. February 7, 2012.

Glock. “one last thing about Supernatural fanwork” and “Sam and Dean Winchestgopal.” Dreamwidth. June 15, 2010 and July 1, 2010.

Lierduoma. “How Much is the Geisha in the Window? (Firefly).” Youtube. July 24, 2009. (Fanlore listing.)

Shirozora. “So if Castiel was Zoe Saldana…” Dreamwidth. June 10, 2010.

Various authors. “Victorsverse Art and Artifacts. including the Ars Atlantiadae as well as Earth documents.” trickster.org. February 16, 2011.

Filed Under: FANBATTE Tagged With: dear author, fandom, fanfiction

Lofty idealism? Bitter rants? Might as well just call it “fangirling.”

March 20, 2012 by Aja Romano 20 Comments

Hi, MB! I’m Aja! I’m your newest columnist and I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’ve been brought on board primarily to give a pan-fandom perspective to the work being done on this site, and to regularly infuriate you all with my hastily conceived opinions! So let’s just dive right in, shall we? :D


This is F(X)! This is going to be a long post, HERE, HAVE SOMETHING FUN TO LOOK AT.

 

I’ve been in fandom for 14 years. I’ve been active in lit, media, RPF, and Asian fandoms, writing het, slash, and femslash. If this is all fangirl Japanese to you, please let me know, guys, because I am going to be spending a lot of time talking about fandom in this column (which is why it’s called FANBATTE! is that not the greatest name ever) and I want to make sure I start from the same place as the rest of you! I feel comfortable claiming a general acquaintance with fandom history and culture regarding literary fandoms, “western media” fandoms, comics fandom, sci-fi/fantasy fandoms, anime/manga fandoms, and Asian pop fandoms. I don’t claim that my knowledge is universal (lol what is gaming fandom, what is Vocaloid, what is Homestuck*), but I’m here and this is my column, dammit, so it’s enough to be going on with!

My mission statement, in a nutshell:

♥´¨`♥ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Fanfic is okay. Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ ♥´¨`♥

 

Not just okay, but amazing. I believe that participating in fandom is a way of engaging in critical discourse about something you love, and I also believe that fanfiction is part of a huge, centuries-old cultural tradition of recursive literature. Fandom is so cool, and I hope you’ll stick around to talk about it with me, because I’m still learning so much and I hope ! :)

The focus of this column will most likely shift between general topics and discussions of specific canons. I have no idea what those topics and canons will be yet, so if there’s something you’d like me to discuss, please let me know, because I would love to!

* lol j/k no one can explain Homestuck

 


 

Now. Let’s talk for a second about Fandom Perspectives. oh wait hang on Melinda said this should be a header

Fandom Perspectives~

This week, the respected romance review site Dear Author is doing a series on fandom and fanfiction. Unfortunately, they’re doing it wrong. So, so wrong, you guys. It’s like they’re trying to have peace talks while hemmed in on all sides by barbed wire. FACEPALM.

In most of the posts so far, the panelists’ starting assumptions and their conclusions actually highlight many of the problems you run into when you generalize about fandom. And since part of what I will do in this column is generalize about fandom based on my personal experiences, I want to start by talking about why such generalization is tricky.

Dear Author has obviously tried to round up differing perspectives and different topics related to fanfiction, so kudos to them for that, really. However, they have not secured a plurality of experience or even knowledgeability about fandom, so their discussions are proving very unsatisfying to many actual fans I’ve talked to who’ve followed along.

There are 3 main reasons for this disconnect between us (as fans) and the representations of fan experience in the DA posts:

  1. So far, all of Dear Author’s assumptions seem to be built around the idea that fanfiction has to defend itself, that by way of existing it is encroaching on someone else’s space. This is not only a false dichotomy but completely antithetical to the way most fans do fandom and think about their fanfic.

    I can’t say this enough. To most fans, what they do is not shameful, it’s natural. And why shouldn’t it be? People have been reworking their favorite stories for centuries. Why is fanfic somehow any different? But if you start your deliberation of fanfic from the perspective that fans have something to be ashamed of, then you color the entire discussion with all kinds of icky assumptions and negative stereotypes. What I will be doing, in my first week here at MB, is unpacking some of these assumptions and attempting to offer a more balanced and nuanced examination of what fandom is and how it operates in various cultural corners of the internet.

  2. There are no fans from non-western fandoms represented in DA’s list, nor are there any queer fans (at least none I saw representing themselves as queer fans) or femslash fans. If the only voices you hear coming from fandom are from people who are culturally closest to you, then you won’t ever have a well-rounded discussion on what fandom is.
  3. The majority of the DA discussion about fandom is being had by people who come either from outside of fandom, or from within primarily het fandoms. By “primarily het,” I mean fandoms for which major emphasis is given to canon heterosexual ships within the source pairing, and whose discourse encourage their fans to adhere to canon relationships. (This doesn’t mean that there aren’t subsets of alternate pairing fans within those fandoms, but those other fans don’t typically interact with the rest of the fandom.)

    Among these primarily het fandoms, the major ones claimed by the panelists tend to be isolated pockets of fandom that don’t have any interaction with other fandom communities. Fandom, like every other corner of the internet, is as diverse as the people who are in it. So you can have whole communities within fandom that never talk to other communities, and then you can have whole corners of fandom that are focused around being multi-fandom hubs and pan-fandom hubs (like Livejournal or formerly Delicious), that also have their own limitations and cultural expectations that don’t translate out to the “satellite” communities of fandom. And that can become a problem because you can wind up with people who have drastically different conceptions of: a) what fandom looks like; b) what fans are doing fandom for; c) who is in fandom; and d) what kind of fanworks are produced by fandom.

    D) is especially important because the fanfic that you find on, for example, AFF, looks nothing like the fanfic you find on AO3. By the same token, someone who is in an archive-based fandom would not have the same conception of what fandom is as someone who is involved in primarily livejournal communities, or for example Tumblr, where there are natural overlaps and discourse between all kinds of fandoms and fans. The Austen and Twilight fandoms are both represented several times on the panel, probably because of their close ties to the romance industry. While these fandoms are totally different in many respects, they are both well-known for being primarily archive-based rather than pan-fandom-community based. This means that pan-fandom fans don’t talk to them, and they don’t talk to us, which leads to a huge disconnect on both sides about what fandom is for everyone involved.

    As an example, for years every time rare fandom nomination came up during Yuletide, people attempted to nominate Pride & Prejudice, and every year those of us who actually knew anything about Austen fandom would have to explain that Pride & Prejudice is in no way a rare fandom; that it actually has thousands upon thousands of fanfics and hundreds more published fanfics to its name–they just were all tucked away in archives and not in spaces that the typical Yuletide participant played in. So this disconnect hurts communication on both sides of the divide.

All of this translates into a need to recognize that your experiences are not universal. I’m going to spend a lot of time counter-arguing many of Dear Author’s other posts from this week, so I’ll just point to their post “Fan fiction: a personal perspective” as an example of an open-minded post about keeping your own experience in perspective.

If only the rest of their posts took this advice! Instead, the overall impression of fandom that I and others are taking away from this series is that fandom is primarily shamefaced, defensive, and poorly attempting to justify copyright infringement.

To all of which, over the next week, I will be merrily calling bullshit.

Whew! Okay, so that’s me finished for now! What about you guys? WHO EVEN ARE YOU PEOPLE? Where do you come from? What perspectives do you bring to your corner of the internet? Are you in fandom? (Hint: are you reading this site? Then yes.) Oh my god this post is 1300 words long. HERE, HAVE ANOTHER K-POP GROUP.

Filed Under: FANBATTE Tagged With: dear author, fandom, fanfiction

Happy Hikago Day! Let’s Five!

May 5, 2011 by Aja Romano 100 Comments

Hi, Manga Bookshelf readers and friends! I’m Aja, the person who introduced our dear Melinda to Hikaru no Go, and I’m so happy to be a guest here, today of all days.

May 5th is a huge day for Hikaru no Go fans. Not only is the date extremely important in the storyline of the series itself, but the Japanese words for “5” and “Go” are identical. In fact, after he starts getting into the game of Go, the protagonist, Hikaru, is depicted wearing a t-shirt that reads, “Let’s 5!” instead of “Let’s go!”

Four years ago, I accidentally started a tradition on my own livejournal, when I created a meme (really, a game) called “Let’s Five!” The idea is simple: you ask one another for your Top Five lists about the series, the fandom, your favorite characters, fics, pairings, the game, anything you want. The person who answers can then ask you for a Top 5 of your own.

You can read the previous incarnations of this meme here (2007), here (2008), here (2009), and here (2010).

In honor of the final publication of this beloved series, Melinda invited me to host my annual May 5th meme here as part of Manga Bookshelf’s Hikago Day celebration.

This is especially exciting for me, because it’s the 5th anniversary of my Top 5 “Let’s 5” 5/5 celebration! (That’s five fives!)

So join me in celebrating today, and Let’s Five!

How to play:
1. Comment to this post!
2. Other commenters will ask you for one of your top-5 Hikago related things! For example: ‘Top 5 favorite characters,’ ‘Top 5 favorite game match-ups,’ ‘Top 5 times Touya and Hikaru were embarrassingly in love,’ and so on and so forth!
3. You answer. There is much flailing. REPEAT STEPS 1-3.

READY?

SET?

LET’S FIVE!

Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: hikaru no go

Roundtable: Hikaru no Go

May 5, 2011 by Melinda Beasi, Michelle Smith, Cathy Yan, Hana Lee and Aja Romano 27 Comments

 


 

MELINDA: Back in June of 2007, not long after having loudly proclaimed in my blog at the time that I would never get into comics, my friend Aja finally convinced me to take a look at a shounen manga series called Hikaru no Go. It was a revelation for me. The series was thoroughly engrossing, poignant, and sincerely optimistic in a way I hadn’t experienced before in any medium. Furthermore, the storytelling was masterful and elegant to an extent I’d previously only associated with prose and a few favorite television series. How was it possible that I could find so much satisfaction in a comic about boys playing a board game?

After that, I tried every manga I could find, discarding some immediately, but becoming hooked on many, many more. By October, I’d started a separate blog for the subject, which eventually became the center of my online life. It would be fair to say that Manga Bookshelf most likely would not exist had I not been so enthusiastically encouraged into reading Hikaru no Go.

This week on May third, after a publication schedule spanning seven years, the series’ final volume has been officially released in English. To celebrate the occasion, I’ve asked some of my favorite writers to join me here for a roundtable discussion, namely Manga/Manhwa Bookshelf contributors Michelle Smith, Cathy Yan, and Hana Lee, as well as my good friend Aja Romano, who got me into all this in the first place.

Ladies, would you share a bit about how you first became fans of Hikaru no Go?

HANA: I first heard about Hikaru no Go when it was still being released in 2002. One of my best friends from high school—the one who introduced me to anime and manga, in fact—had asked me to get her the 18th volume for her birthday. (Unlike me, she had studied Japanese and could read manga in their original editions without waiting for translations.) I went to the local Japanese bookstore to find it and was surprised to realize that it was by the same artist who drew Ayatsuri Sakon. I was watching the Ayatsuri Sakon anime at the time and loved the series, so it interested me to learn that Hikaru no Go was about a ghost possessing a boy and teaching him how to play go.

As I started reading the manga through the fan scanlations (all that were available at the time), I realized that the series was not the sort of supernatural-tinged episodic mystery that I had expected it to be. Since I also enjoyed the Shounen Jump brand of tournament-style shounen manga, I wasn’t at all disappointed. But what came as a real surprise was how Hikaru no Go completely transcended the genre: not only a story about competition, it was also a story about growing up, about discovery and loss, and most of all, about passion. What really spoke to me in the series was all the characters’ intense passion for go, whether they were amateurs playing in their school go club or professionals who had been playing for a lifetime. And getting to experience that through Hikaru’s eyes as he slowly learns to feel the same passion himself was what hooked me into the series.

MICHELLE: I can’t actually remember how I first learned about Hikaru no Go. At some point after the anime wrapped in Japan, I acquired some fansubs of the entire series and devoured them in short order. Titles like Rurouni Kenshin had already converted me to a fervent love of tournament manga, and though Hikaru was certainly very different from others in that genre, it was similar enough to addict me quite thoroughly. Beyond the satisfaction of watching our protagonist learn and grow, the series is also genuinely moving, and some episodes left me with tear streaming down my cheeks.

Then the manga came out. Amazon informs me that volume one came out on June 16, 2004. Because I am anal-retentive, I’ve been keeping track of what I read for about a decade. Guess when I read that volume? June 16, 2004. I got it home and gobbled it up. This is meaningful when one considers the backlog of other things I bring home and then just admire.

I think it’s safe to say that I’ve ardently loved Hikaru no Go for going on a decade now. It’s bittersweet that the manga is finally coming to an end, but I’ve definitely enjoyed reading the material that was not part of the anime and, as I mentioned in our Pick of the Week column, now I’ll have the luxury of indulging in a series-long marathon reread whenever the craving strikes.

AJA: You can thank fandom for piquing my interest in Hikaru no Go; I’d been hearing here and there for about 2 years that if I loved certain slash pairings, I’d like the dynamic between Akira and Hikaru in this anime series. So it was on my radar for some time before a friend finally sat me down and showed me the first half of the anime. I fell completely in love with it. I only had a basic familiarity with most of the iconic shounen manga series out at that time, but I knew enough to recognize that Hikago was unlike anything else that I’d really seen or read to date.

Something that makes Hikaru no Go unique for me, in terms of series and fandoms, is that I actually didn’t finish it for about a year. I balked at the inevitability of Sai’s disappearance, because I am a total wuss when it comes to angst, and I knew it was going to completely break my heart. Instead, I dove into the fandom and read all of the available fanfic I could get my hands on, and I actually didn’t return to finish watching the series or reading the manga until a year later.

Reading the manga, especially the final arc that wasn’t in the anime, for the first time was a complete revelation to me. It was so intense, and it still amazes me that a manga about a board game can carry such fabulous pacing over such a long period of time. And the angst was even more intense than I could have expected—but in that final moment when Akira says, “this isn’t the end—it never ends,” to Hikaru made it all worth it.

CATHY: I too found Hikaru no Go before it was picked up for official release. I was in my sophomore year of high school, I think, and had just started to read shounen manga. I absolutely devoured it. I spent one week reading it nonstop; I remember now pulling an all-nighter during Sai’s disappearance arc, absolutely bawling my eyes out. It’s one of the few mangas I’ve read where the subject material is still so unfathomable to me (if you asked me, I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to play a game of go) but the characters and story of it are enough for me to love it eternally. Even Hotta and Obata’s subsequent works, while good, can never measure up to the sheer emotional power of Hikaru no Go.

Fundamentally, for me, the story is one about the passage of Hikaru from childhood into adulthood. I imagine that’s also a fault of the age at which I read the series, because I felt like at that time, I too was trying to grapple with those issues. Go is so distant to me, as a concept and a real game, but in the series, it perfectly encapsulates so many life experiences for our characters. You can’t help but feel how earnest all of the characters are, even too-cool-for-school Ogata!

MELINDA: I should mention, too, that it was fanfiction Aja used to lure me in, so ten points for fandom!

We’ve already started talking a bit here about how the series transcends its genre, and what I find so stunning about that is how it manages to do what it does within the shounen sports manga paradigm. All the key elements are there—increasingly difficult competition, a powerful rival, strong messages about sportsmanship—but the result is somehow very different than anything else I’ve personally encountered in the genre. What makes this story so special?

MICHELLE: One of my favorite themes in any kind of story is the tale of someone who finds where they belong. It might be finding people who accept them (like Fruits Basket), but it might also be finding their passion. Hikaru no Go is special because it’s not just about a boy who wants to become stronger, it’s about a boy who realizes that he loves something very much and wants to become stronger.

Slam Dunk is kind of similar in that regard, making it another sports manga favorite for me, but that series lacks some of the homey touches of Hikaru. How often do you see the hero’s mother in the periphery, worrying about him and making him bento boxes? It reminds you that he really is just a kid—and often lamentably inconsiderate to his poor mom—which casts him in an endearing light even while he’s accomplishing all these impressive things.

AJA: I think part of it is that despite the mystical element, it’s a series strongly grounded in reality, so you have kids faced with real life decisions and pressures, and having to deal with normal (and not-so-normal) human events like sickness and death along with all the shounen sports tropes like overcoming failure. And even then, there’s nothing over-the-top about the depiction of failure. You have all these characters in the background who struggle with self-doubt like Waya and Nase, Ochi and Isumi—but it’s very understated and they don’t always get a big triumphal tournament moment in which they overcome their inner struggles. It’s a much more subtle story than that, and I think that allows us to really feel the failures and triumphs of these characters (who are all complex and flawed and dynamic) so much more intensely than we do in a typical sports narrative where there’s never any question which characters will win in the end.

I also think part of creating that type of narrative is what Michelle mentions—all of the background characters and especially the adults and their relationships to the children and the story itself. It’s rare in this type of series to have much of the storyline shown from the POV of the adults, much less entire tournament moments devoted to them, but in Hikaru no Go, the adults are much more than fully-developed static mentors. They’re still growing and learning, and even the ones who aren’t involved in playing Go, like Hikaru’s mom, Touya’s mom, and Ichikawa, still have important connections to the story.

It’s a very humanist story as a whole because it allows so many of these characters to develop and then it explores their connection to each other through the game and throughout time and it gradually develops a conceit in which the game of Go becomes a metaphor for the march of the human race. It’s just so beautifully done, and when you first realize that metaphor is unfolding it’s a really breathtaking moment that really transcends genre tropes and becomes great literature.

Which brings me to Sai, who is a character, with a role, unlike any other in shounen manga. Sai is the supernatural Hobbes to Hikaru’s Calvin, but he’s also so much more because he’s a real person with such a charismatic personality, and he carries not only personal history but cultural history on his shoulders. He’s just remarkable! But I have rambled enough now so I will just say that I think the fact that, as Hotta mentioned, real Go players started leaving a seat for Sai in their tournaments, speaks to the beauty of Sai as a character and the richness of Hikaru no Go as a series.

HANA: I agree with everything said above. I’ll add that Hikaru differs from the typical “underdog” shounen protagonist in one important way: aside from what seems like a latent affinity for the game and being taught by Sai, Hikaru is not portrayed as hiding some inborn talent or special ability that only needs to be unlocked by competition. We see that he has to really learn how to play go, and often in the beginning stages of his journey, he isn’t the best and he doesn’t win. Compare to protagonists like Yoh from Shaman King or even Naruto, who are perhaps dismissed by their peers but are shown to actually stand apart from the rest in some way. Hikaru, by contrast, is really just an ordinary boy. I like that the series emphasizes that his surprising growth and progress in go is because he ends up practicing and watching more games than anyone else. I also like that he does lose more often than you would expect from a shounen series, and we see him progressing as a player even when he loses.

CATHY: I think the thing about Hikaru no Go is that on some level, it more than any of the other shounen sports-like series is about the process of growing up and letting go. I always found Sai before his disappearance to be the most touching adult figure out of all them. You know, there are characters like Sai in other stories; one that’s been on my mind lately is Atem, the pharaoh from Yu-gi-oh! who haunts the main character and guides him along just as Sai does to Hikaru. But the thing is that Yu-gi-oh! is ultimately a quest story. The characters end up trying to return Atem to the afterlife, so they can be laid to rest. But Hikaru no Go isn’t that supernatural quest to “put the ghost to rest.” Sai is really another kind of parent to Hikaru. In many ways I think I read the story right when I was realizing that the adults around me were starting to see me as a fully formed person, in my own right, and that I would need to make my own choices. And that’s, strangely, what the character of Sai is for me. He “cedes” his path to Hikaru and lives on in Hikaru just in the way we romanticize our parents living on in us. The moment that always struck me the most was how after Sai disappears, Hikaru wonders if he should have let Sai play more. Because that’s such a fundamentally pure and child-like way of handling grief, to think that you had just listened to them more or been nicer to them, they would come back from the dead. It’s the moment I always mark as Hikaru transitioning from boy to adult.

MELINDA: Michelle, I’m so glad you brought up Hikaru’s mom, because she’s one of my favorite characters in the series! And you know, despite the huge number of supporting characters in this series, not one of them is superfluous or wasted. I think one of my favorite moments in the series is in volume 21 when Hikaru, after hearing about the difficult time Yashiro’s parents have given him over going pro, finally realizes on some level just how lucky he is to have the support of his mom. It’s not a big moment. It’s small, and it isn’t lasting. It’s not like Hikaru has this major epiphany that changes the way he thinks about his mom forever. It’s just one tiny moment in a million tiny moments that are part of Hikaru’s slowly growing maturity. Details like this are a big part of what makes this manga so special to me. I think this may be part of what Hana is feeling, too, when she describes Hikaru as an “ordinary boy.” Unlike Akira, who often seems like an adult in a child’s body, Hikaru is always exactly his age, no more, no less.

Also, Aja, I’m happy you’ve pointed out that Hikaru frequently does not win. And really, winning is hardly the point, is it?

HANA: My favorite moment in the series that illustrates that is the game that Hikaru plays with Hong Suyeong. Suyeong is on a losing streak as a kenkyuusei and tries to pretend that he no longer cares about go and doesn’t want to try anymore. But it takes a go game where he loses against Hikaru, where both of them played the best that they could, which finally breaks through Suyeong’s shell and gets him to admit that he does care about go. That scene when through his tears, he asks Hikaru’s name and says that he wants to play him again so he can beat him is really a perfect example of how the series shows that it’s not winning or losing that matters, but the personal growth and human connections that the characters experience through the game. (And reiterating what everyone else has said, it’s how Hotta develops backstories for even minor characters like Suyeong that really rounds out the emotional resonance of this series.)

MICHELLE: That scene in volume 21 really struck me, too, because he’d been kind of snotty to her earlier about some snacks she’d made for him to take to Akira’s house just a few days before. I wonder why he can seem like such a nice kid most of the time, but then he’s utterly dismissive when she attempts to learn more about what he’s doing with his life. Granted, he does change his mind, but his first instinct was to be a little git.

So, yes, totally an ordinary boy.

MELINDA: Hana, I’ll add Hong Suyeong to my list of favorite characters, too! Also, I appreciate the fact that Hotta takes the time to really flesh out some of the Chinese and Korean players, rather than letting the unavoidable nationalism of the tournaments overwhelm the story.

AJA: Hana, I love your mention of the game against Hong Suyeong. Hikaru no Go is really such an adult story in so many ways because it doesn’t pitch you this idealist fantasy of a boy with special powers—like you and Michelle said he has to work, and struggle, and fail. I love that even Akira, who is a child prodigy by all rights, has to work and challenge himself, and develop the personal strength not to be cowed by superior strength.

And yes, Hikaru is just your average impudent boy through and through, and it’s a lovely thing watching him grow more serious and focused over time and seeing the genki trope sort of fade into something more subdued, self-aware, and adult. <3

CATHY: I have to plug my favorite secondary character, which is Isumi! I loved his time in China, and Yang Hai, and Le Ping, and the process of Isumi’s maturation. I think it speaks a lot to the maturity of Hotta’s storylines, that she devotes this plot to one of the characters caught in between the adults and the kids. You’d think there would be a lot of characters like Isumi in shounen manga, but I think he truly is an individual. He’s strong, but not boastful; an older brother figure, but not overbearing or wacky or a classic show off. He’s just so perfectly normal, and you could see that Hotta and Obata used him to throw context into the world of the insei, just like they occasionally use Akari’s character. Like, the entire story just sort of takes a step back with Isumi, and you watch him evaluate the importance of the game and what he really wants to accomplish with his life and you feel eighteen with him. And that, I think, is an underrated element of the series! Often Hotta and Obata pull back and we sort of laugh at how seriously everyone takes the game, but none of the characters are so far gone that you can’t relate.

MELINDA: Since we’ve already sort of launched into discussion of individual characters, let’s continue with that thread for a bit.

In addition to everything that’s been said here about Hikaru’s regular-boyishness and how much that influences the whole tone of the series, he’s also the heart of the story for me, and not just because he’s the main character. Hikaru’s journey makes my heart swell with warmth and affection. I rejoice when he rejoices. I ache when he does. The first time I read volume fifteen, when he really begins to understand loss and regret for the first time in his life, I thought I might die from the hurt of it. I think it’s rare when a story’s hero is its most relatable character, but for me, Hikaru is exactly that. Is it just me?

HANA: I agree! For me, I think what makes my affection for Hikaru all the stronger is that Hikaru is not the character I would normally identify with. (Our personalities are too different!) But I am fascinated by Hikaru because of it, and I think Hotta does an amazing job of making Hikaru’s journey resonate universally. The most heartwrenching scene for me in volume 15 was when Hikaru is playing against Shuhei in Hiroshima. After he wins, he looks back over his shoulder to ask Sai, “Wasn’t I good?” I started crying at his moment of realization when he remembers that Sai is no longer there.

Obata does a wonderful job of showing that scene wordlessly through just a simple change in expression. I think that Obata’s art—and how Obata’s art develops over the course of the series as well—plays as much a role as Hotta’s writing in allowing the reader to feel with Hikaru. All the characters show wonderful expressions, but it’s Hikaru’s faces that stick with me the most: he shows his glee and exasperation, his joy and sorrow with his entire being.

CATHY: I echo Hana’s comments about the art style maturing with the characters! It’s one of the best things about revisiting Hikaru no Go. You can actually see them mature in a way that uncannily echoes the storyline. Sai gets more and more ethereal as Obata settles into drawing him, and Akira in his final form (oh geez, I apologize for talking about him like a pokemon!) is every bit as regal as the son of Touya Meijin should be.

MICHELLE: There are several panels during the Hokuto Cup where it’s literally stunning how grown-up these guys look, especially Akira. I think it’s time for a new haircut, though!

AJA: I love everything you guys have just said about Hikaru, and I completely agree. I love what Hana said about the moment he looks back over his shoulder. That’s the quintessential moment of the series, I think. And this is a series with so many heartbreaking and iconic moments.

But I have to wave my banner for TEAM AKIRA, here. Touya just breaks my heart from day one, with his spirit and his determination to be the best, and his freakouts when he isn’t. He endures hazing, public humiliation, ridicule, alienation, jealousy, and scorn from his peers, bafflement from his parents, and constant confusion about who and what Hikaru is—all in order just to have a partner and a friend to challenge him to grow. Unlike Hikaru, who is outgoing and boistrous and pretty much culturally aware, Akira comes across as a little isolated, a loner who despite his general friendliness is shunned by other kids. I always think about how lonely and uneventful Akira’s life was before Hikaru showed up and gave him something to strive for. And he strives so beautifully!

And best of all, I think because of having grown up isolated and somewhat alone, he’s the ideal person to have around when Hikaru is struggling through the loss of Sai in the latter half of the series. I think the sheer intensity and rawness of Hikaru’s heartbreak (and ours) can sometimes overshadow what a huge leap of faith Akira makes when he decides to trust Hikaru with the secret of Sai’s Go. We don’t actually see that trust rewarded during the series; but we do see Akira warring with his desire to know the truth about Sai, and the decision he’s made to trust Hikaru. That moment in the final arc is such a beautiful testament to how much his character grows over the series, and how he gains patience, calm, and acceptance. He and Hikaru are perfect complements.

MELINDA: When I think about it, my favorite Akira moments in the series are sort of equal parts arrogance and equal parts humility and desperate honesty, and it’s pretty unusual to find those things so evenly distributed in the same person. As a result, Akira’s confidence manages to be endearing, while another character would probably just seem like an ass.

MICHELLE: Aja, reading what you have to say about Akira and his isolation that eventually gives way to more spirited striving reminds me so much of Yuki Sohma from Fruits Basket that I’m actually getting geekbumps just thinking about it. The refined-seeming boy who is set apart due to that very refinement who really only seeks someone who will not be afraid to connect and engage with him on a vital level, you know? Again, this ties in with my love for the “finding where one belongs” story arc, and thinking about how much Akira really needs someone like Hikaru in his life makes me feel kind of sniffly.

HANA: I’m always a little embarrassed to admit that Akira is actually the character that I identify with the most, but he’s my favorite for that reason. What I associate most with Akira is his sense of direction: he’s always loved go and he’s always known that he’s wanted to become a go player. I think that it’s really refreshing that the series makes it clear that Akira isn’t just following in his father’s footsteps but has a vocation for go in his own right. I like to think that an Akira who wasn’t the son of Touya Kouyou may have ended up being passionate about go anyway, although perhaps it might have been a longer road.

But what is also clear is that Hikaru shakes Akira out of his complacence. For the first time in his life, Hikaru forces Akira to question himself. And I love that the series resists the temptation to make it a simple narrative of a prodigy encountering an obstacle for a first time but instead ends up reaffirming Akira’s commitment to the life of go. The relationship is also reciprocal: just as much as Hikaru challenges Akira, Akira also becomes the channel through which Hikaru first connects to the go world.

MELINDA: So, okay, Sai. Aja spoke rather beautifully about Sai earlier on, and he really is extraordinary. She mentioned that part of what’s special about him is that he’s a real person, and wholeheartedly agree. He isn’t just some ancient, wise, supernatural being, sent to be Hikaru’s mentor; he’s fully human, even as a ghost, for better or worse. As much as I love him, I also spent a significant chunk of the series feeling absolutely horrified by him and the lengths he was willing to go to in order to play the games he wanted, even if it meant jeopardizing Hikaru’s future. But even in those moments, I can recognize that this is what makes him an exceptional character. He is Hotta’s greatest creation. And even in his worst moments, he’s an inspiration.

MICHELLE: I really, really, really love Sai. Really. As I write, I still haven’t received my copy of volume 23 from Amazon, and I still continue to hold out a tiny shred of hope that we’ll see him again, even if he’s not really there. (How cruel of Hotta and Obata to deny us even a glimpse of Sai while Hikaru’s thinking about him, which he at least continue to do.)

In my review of volume twelve, I likened Sai and Hikaru’s relationship to, well, a relationship. They’re together, they love and support each other, but they’re also jealous of each other and fail to sometimes understand what the other wants and needs. At the same time, they still want to stay together, so they’re trying to work out a compromise that will make both of them happy.

It’s absolutely gutwrenching to me to think of how Hikaru would ignore Sai’s requests to play and how incapacitated by regret he eventually was because of this. But at the same time, it’s true, that this is Hikaru‘s life and he has the right to pursue his goals.

But I still really love Sai.

MELINDA: I think, MIchelle, I might have never become truly livid with Sai had he not insisted on playing Hikaru’s first game as a pro, when he was set up against Touya Meijin. It was one of the most important moments in Hikaru’s career, and Sai’s insistence on playing not only jeopardized everything Hikaru had worked so hard for, but it also stole the experience from Hikaru. This first game is something Hikaru would never get to do again, and Sai, who had already lived his own life and Shuusaku’s insisted on having it for himself. And though I eventually did forgive him, at the time when I first read the series, I considered this act unforgivably greedy.

Of course, all this just made Hikaru’s desperate feelings of regret later on even more poignant. In volume fifteen, when he tries to bargain with God to get Sai back by promising to let him play all the games… not only did I fully forgive Sai at this point, but I was also deeply moved by Hikaru’s selflessness, which (kind of ironically) I think he might not have ever developed without Sai’s influence in his life. It’s all very complicated and messy and human, and I love this series for it.

MICHELLE: That was definitely a crappy thing to do, but I think Hotta does a good job of showing how Sai just wanted it so much he couldn’t stop to think about how Hikaru would feel and, as you say, that’s a very human failing.

Speaking of Sai and Touya Meijin, is anyone else sort of inexplicably touched that the latter is still biding his time, waiting for Sai to reappear?

CATHY: I really like the way you phrase that as “a very human failing!” I don’t think there’s been another story about being haunted by a ghost where the ghost seems just as alive as any of the other characters, in a very human way. He’s not detached from life at all. He’s just as excited and immersed in Hikaru’s world as Hikaru is, whether it be the technology in the internet cafe or the people Hikaru meets. I’ve always sort of entertained the idea that Sai might never have been able to achieve the Hand of God with Honinbou Shuusaku because he never had to lead and work and bargain and love Shuusaku the way he does Hikaru. Because something about the Hand of God is also about the passage of life. As Sai says at the end of the Touya Meijin battle, “God gave me 1000 years of time to show you this game.”

I have always adored Touya Meijin and his fascination with Sai. During the setup to the internet game, he and Sai really understood each other in a way Hikaru and Sai can’t. Touya Meijin actually tries to bargain with Hikaru for more games with Sai! Probably of all the characters in the book, he’s most like what Sai would have been if Sai were living. Touya Meijin is one of the few people other than Hikaru who from the start sees Sai for who Sai is, and not who Hikaru is. I always felt kind of bad for Akira that in some way he was left out of the Hikaru-Touya Meijin-Sai relationship and only manages to approximate the story that happens between them. Akira spends so much of this time understanding his father from the outside, through his mother, or through interactions with other people who have interacted with his father. It reminds me, actually, a lot of the book The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, which is about a young boy who ends up befriending a brilliant, neurotic boy who was raised to be a messiah among men and his stern, overbearing father.

As a side note, does anyone remember reading Chapter 114, right at the end of the Sai vs Touya Meijin internet match, and Ogata tries to intrude on the game, and the nurse asks him, “Are all go players like this?” Then we flash to all the insei, Akira, and Ogata all hovered around a computer watching the game. All go players are like this!

MELINDA: We talked about Hikaru’s mom a bit earlier, but I’d also like to take a look at some of the other great female characters in the series. I’m especially fond of Akari, and also Kaneko, one of the girls in the Haze Go Club whom I’ve loved for being one of the few examples I’ve seen in manga of (to quote a review of mine), “non-skinny, non-conventionally attractive young female character who is portrayed as smart, athletic, and generally to be admired.” I know you have favorites, too, so do tell!

HANA: Akari and Kaneko are two of my favorites as well! But I have to put in a word for Nase, whom I really grew to like after reading her sidestory, where she skips the insei class to go skating with friends. She’s introduced to a boy who seems interested in her, and they go on a date, only to make a detour to a go salon. Nase is in her element: she’s unfazed by the old men and the cigarette smoke and sits down to play a game. Her date on the other hand is more than a little intimidated, and as Nase grows absorbed in the game, he leaves quietly. I really like the moment when she wins the game and looks around to see if her date had seen her at her “coolest”. When she sees he’s gone, she shrugs and goes back to playing another game.

I love this sidestory because on the one hand, we do see Nase wanting to be ordinary and fit in with her peers, but we also see that she loves go too much to give it up for the appearance of normalcy. It always makes me smile that she’s so confident in thinking that she’s going to look awesome playing go in front of her date; it doesn’t occur to her that he might find it strange. The series does a beautiful job of showing the conflicts and doubts that the insei face: they’re all young and devoting most of their free time to this game that they love, but not all of them are going to pass the exam and enter the pro world. They have to choose, over and over again, whether to stay committed or to give up. At another point in the manga, during the pro exam, Nase wins a game and says that she can’t give up on her dream because she knows she can play games like that. I really like that while Nase does have her moments of self-doubt, the series ultimately affirms her self-confidence.

MICHELLE: I was going to mention Nase, but honestly, I think Hana has expressed her appeal so beautifully that all I can do is nod in agreement! It seems cruel to wish for more of this series, since it was obviously incredibly labor-intensive to create, but I can’t help pining for stories that might have been. Like, a sequel focusing on a girl’s journey to become pro, for example.

AJA: Hana, I love your point about how well Nase fits in among the boys’ club, because it brings up a point I wanted to make earlier regarding the dynamic between Touya Meijin and Sai. Throughout the series, we’re shown again and again the importance of having a rival, someone to pull you further along the road towards the Hand of God. I know that arguably Sai does some unforgivable things, but I think especially the moment you mentioned earlier, Melinda, when Sai insists on playing Touya Meijin, is the perfect example of how desperately that need exists in the main cast of players. We see it between Touya Senior and Sai, between Akira and Hikaru, in Ochi (Ochi!!!!), Waya and Isumi, Ogata and Kuwabara, even Tsutsui and Kaga.

But the interesting thing to me is that we never see anything like that kind of obsessive need for an other half in any of the female players that we see throughout the series. Granted, we only see one female insei, but all three of the female Go players we observe seem completely independent. Not only do they have a life outside Go (how awesome is it that Kaneko plays volleyball?), but we never see them getting fixated on being pulled along by someone else, a rival that they can call their own.

In some ways I feel like that’s almost a gender subversion on the part of the series, because there’s a heavily romanticized emphasis on finding your perfect partner that seems to be delineated to the male cast members in the storyline, while the female characters are almost all kept apart from that aspect of the game by their own interests. It’s a refreshing autonomy.

On the other hand, I wonder if it’s problematic that the female characters aren’t allowed to have more stake in the game. We don’t even know, for example, if Touya’s mother has any experience playing Go herself, or if Ichikawa ever does more than run the cash register and chauffeur Touya around.

But I do think that it’s refreshing that the female players who do play seem to do so entirely for their own sakes. Akari may have started out wanting to play the game so she would have something in common with Hikaru, but she keeps playing for herself, and becomes the leader of the Go club! Kaneko may have had to be coaxed to join, but she still bonds with the Haze team and stays with the club. And Nase, as Hana already said, affirms her self-confidence completely independent of any outside opinion. All of the girls of Go seem confident and independent!

CATHY: Akari is a great supporting character. I love that Hotta and Obata use her as a foil to Hikaru’s progress in go. I’m sure everyone remembers that scene where Hikaru asks her what to do if her piece was surrounded by the opponent’s, and she says, “Run away like this!” Later, right before Sai’s disappearance, Hikaru plays a game with her too, and Sai notes that it wasn’t so long ago that Hikaru was the one being taught, but now he can teach Akari. I love that she cares enough about the game to play with Hikaru, but she knows her life is going another way, the more conventional way. But Hotta and Obata never make that path less important than Hikaru’s — just different.

One of my absolute favorite moments of Hikaru no Go is Akari in chapter 154. That was the chapter where, for the first time in a long time, we check in with Kaze Junior High! Akari is going through a period of self-doubt as well, because she isn’t doing as well in cram school as she would like, and she gets this feeling that everyone around her — Kaneko and Hikaru especially — are leaving her world behind. On the way home, she stops by Hikaru’s house and sees that the light is on in his room, and, cheered up, she runs home shouting, “Fight! Fight!” That chapter still brings tears to my eyes now. I was in high school then, feeling sort of out of my element, convinced that I would go to a crappy college and do crappily forever, and seeing Akari go through the same troubles, that her worries and self-doubt were just as real as Hikaru’s troubles (this was right before the North Cup and Hikaru’s re-match with Kadowaki), moved me inexpressibly. In that scene, I think there’s this great sense of meta, that she’s us reading Hikaru’s story too and taking strength from the hikari of Hikaru. Which is fitting, since both their names mean light!

I’ve been reading a lot of discussion in chess forums, interestingly enough, about the difference between male and female chess players, that I think is directly relevant to Aja’s point. In 2009, some researches looked at titles held by men and women in chess and concluded that crunching the numbers, women hold just as many chess titles are they’re supposed to, given how few women chess players there are. In other words, there are more male players than female players, so there are more male players at the far end of the bell curve, thus giving us the false impression that men are inherently better than women. And it can’t help but remind me that in the world of Hikaru no Go, almost all the role models to go players are males: the teachers, the professionals, the reporters. In fact, during the Meijin games, the only female you see is the one who runs the live board, right? I think it speaks to this false logic we get in real life, that we start with an inherently gender-skewed system which discourages/disincentivizes girls from joining, and then we conclude from it that girls just don’t have the interest, or even worse, the skill, to participate in the game. Isn’t there even an exchange where someone tells Akari that girls can’t learn go?

So, yes, I think there is a problematic representation of women in the series, but it actually reflects the problematic nature of games like go and chess in reality! Hotta and Obata clearly have done their research into the world of go, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they found most of it is male dominated. I don’t think it’s a subversion at all, really. But then again, I don’t think it is because I think when it comes to female characters, Obata, at least, has a very troublesome history. Bakuman, I’m looking at you.

HANA: I remember when I was doing some research on female go professionals in Japan, I found that there are separate women’s tournaments for many of the major titles as well as a separate women’s pro exam. (I should note that women are not limited to competing in women-only tournaments or taking the women-only pro exam.) I think there are two ways to look at it. On the positive side, having these separate arenas for women does address the issue of the extreme gender imbalance and helps increase the visibility of female professionals in the go world. On the negative side, it does seem to reinforce the idea that women can’t directly compete with men.

I think Hikaru is the one who tells Akari that girls can’t learn how to play go, and I do think it was a positive sign that Sai immediately contradicts him and says that many women of his acquaintance in the Heian era were masters of the game.

AJA: There’s also the fact that the manga was overseen by a female Go pro, Yoshihara Yukari, and that not only was she the instructor of the Go-Go-Igo! segment that aired along with each episode of the anime, but she also featured a girl student along with a boy student.

So I think they definitely did go out of their way to show that girls could be involved with and part of the game of Go.

MELINDA: Since we’ve started inching towards it a bit already, let’s take a moment to discuss the end of the series. I’ve seen some disappointment from other manga bloggers over this, and though I had a mixed reaction the very first time I read the ending, I’ve come to like it very much.

My impression of the ending the first time I read the series was that it felt abrupt and maybe a bit weary. It seemed so clear that Hikaru’s journey was not over, and though I realized that the manga couldn’t last forever, I didn’t understand why the creators decided to stop telling me Hikaru’s story at that particular point. To me, it seemed like his story had just barely gotten started, and I felt almost a little angry that I wasn’t going to get to see him finish growing up. I’d never get to see how he learns to deal with being an adult, winning a title, or even just winning a pro game against Akira, which it seemed he must inevitably do sometime as both their careers continue on. I’d never get to see him move out of his mom’s house. I realize that much of this is unrealistic to expect of a shounen manga series, but he’d grown so much right before my very eyes, I felt like I’d been witness to his entire life up to that point and I didn’t understand why I was suddenly being cut out of it.

My second read-through of the series left me feeling completely different about the ending, which was quite a surprise to me, but because I had that initial reaction, I can understand where other manga bloggers (who are just reaching the ending now) are coming from. They’re feeling like it ends with a whimper instead of a bang, and I get that. It’s unexpected. I’ve come to appreciate that very thing about the ending now, but I’ve been there, so I understand.

I know Aja, at least, has some things to say about this (UNDERSTATEMENT), and I’d love to hear what you all think about the way the series ends.

MICHELLE: I read the ending for the first time yesterday. Though I could use a little more mulling time, I have to say that I like it. I like the parts where Yang Hai (the leader of the Chinese team) and Touya Meijin sit around, discussing the hypothetical possibility that the Sai who briefly appeared on the internet was, in fact, the spirit of Shuusaku. They got it right, but they’ll never know they got it right. Still, Sai’s presence inspired both of them, and seemingly reinvigorated the Meijin’s joy in the game.

I like that Hikaru doesn’t win his game against Ko Yeongha, because it prompts Akira to say those wonderful words to him: “It doesn’t end here, y’know. In fact, it’s barely started.” Geekbump city! Would I have liked more? Sure! Would I have liked Sai to come back? Sure! But sometimes what fans want and what a story needs are mutually exclusive concepts, and I’m not dissatisfied at all by what we get.

The one thing that puzzles me is the quote from Sai at the end. “Can you hear me? Can you hear my voice?” This is hearkening back to his first words to Hikaru in the first chapter (though not exactly the same, I note), and so though this is probably a reinforcement of the idea that the distant past will continue to affect the far future—as further shown by the second bonus story, in with those insei are inspired by Hikaru and Akira—part of me wonders, “Wait, what? Is he back? Is no one noticing?!”

HANA: It came as a complete surprise to me to learn that people disagreed about the ending. Thinking on it further, I see where the complaints may be coming from: on a structural level, it did seem to end a little abruptly, just after several new characters had been introduced. Often, the shounen manga convention is that an ultimate goal is introduced at the beginning of the series, and despite the many plot arcs, the series as a whole is expected to achieve that goal. (E.g. winning the nationals in Prince of Tennis or becoming the titular Shaman King in Shaman King.) However, Hikaru no Go completely subverts this genre convention: the initial “goal” at the beginning of the series, Sai wanting to achieve the Hand of God, is never reached. In fact, the series presents the Hand of God as an unrealizable ideal that humanity approaches like an asymptote. One of the most powerful moments in the series is Sai’s realization that the purpose of his afterlife is not to reach the Hand of God, but to pass on the dream to Hikaru, his student, thus becoming part of a larger human story of striving for perfection. When Sai relinquishes his desire to personally find the Hand of God, he is finally able to be at peace. There’s almost a Buddhist quality to how the story transforms the classic shounen quest to “become stronger” into a story about letting go and transcending one’s individual limitations by connecting to others. The ultimate move or power-up has value not because it is an end in itself but because of the journey it inspires.

I think that the beauty of the ending lies in how it ties together these thematic threads and ends on a powerful message about continuing the journey. As we see so often throughout this series, Hotta does not take the easy route of ending Hikaru’s story with a triumphant victory. He loses to Ko Yeongha in a game that he bitterly wanted to win. But in that loss, he reaffirms his purpose in playing go: to remember the past and to look forward to the future, to be part of the unbroken, collective endeavor to reach the Hand of God. I also interpret that last line, echoing Sai’s first words, “Can you hear my voice?” in the context of this message. I think of it as an invitation to the reader to not merely consume the story but become part of it.

MICHELLE: Ooh, I like your interpretation of Sai’s final line very much. I shall promptly adopt that way of thinking of it. It’s sort of like, “How about you? Do you hear the call?”

CATHY: Hana already said everything and so beautifully that I could have said about the ending. For me, I felt the story had already ended when I read chapters 147 and 148. Those are the chapters covering the lunch break of the Hikaru vs Touya preliminary game to the Meijin tournament, where Touya remarks that there’s another person inside of Hikaru, and that person is Sai. Then, in 148, he tells Hikaru that it doesn’t matter because Hikaru is the go he plays! And the rest of 148 is this wonderful dream Hikaru has of Sai. I think that chapter has a similar feel to the real ending of the series, in that we return to Sai’s voice, how Sai’s love for go became Hikaru’s love for go, and thus an extension out to the world of go that Hikaru becomes a part of. There’s even a similar feeling of how the story is just now beginning, because the Weekly Go office talks about how exciting Akira, Hikaru, Ochi and the rest are, as the new generation of go players! So in many ways I felt like for me everything after that was merely icing on the cake. I was pleasantly surprised that the Meijin games didn’t end the story, and as Aja mentioned, that’s exactly where the anime ends it!

I do understand how the manga could have seemed abrupt, but I think you could feel during the North Cup that the story was wrapping to a close, what with bringing back characters like Yang Hai, Suyeong, and even Tsutsui, Yeongha’s potshot at Shuusaku, and finally Hikaru and Akira switching First and Second board. One thing I found great was that Hotta and Obata ended the story with the young players of Japan, Korea, and China marching forward. It’s Korea versus Japan, and it’s the Chinese team commenting on the side. This is no longer the world of Sai and the Fujiwaras and Heian Japan; it isn’t even just the Hikaru and Akira being the rising stars of Japanese go. It’s this wider feeling, an embracing of the rest of the world, a vastness that’s alluded to throughout the story. And that more than ever echoes the final speech given by Yeongha, translated by Yang Hai, concluded by Akira, and mused over by Hikaru. If there was ever a story about how hope springs eternal from the fountain of seishun, I think it’s the final chapter of Hikaru no Go.

AJA: Everyone else has perfectly articulated the richness and the scope of the ending, and I hardly know what to add.

It’s not just that the story subverts the typical shounen trope: Hotta made Hikaru’s loss at the North Star cup even more unspeakably heartbreaking than it would have been on its own, by tying his matchup with Ko Yeongha explicitly to the loss of Sai: the match takes place on May 5th, the anniversary of Sai’s disappearance; and Ko Yeongha insults the memory of Shuusaku. So for Hikaru, this moment isn’t just about failure, or the attainment of a higher level of skill: it’s about honoring Sai’s memory.

To me, all of the ending’s wonderful elements of international connection, cross-generational connection, and metaphysical connection come together in the image of Hikaru weeping, not only for his loss, but for his lost friend. Akira’s reminder, “this isn’t all there is,” is a fully layered statement, because he’s not only acknowledging that there is more to Hikaru’s Go than this loss, but also stressing that the outcome of the game isn’t what keeps Sai alive: it’s the act of playing. And just as Sai needed courage and maturity to accept that his path isn’t about attaining the perfect hand, Hikaru, in that moment of acknowledging Akira’s words and following him out of the room, is showing us how much courage and maturity he has gained over the series—something he couldn’t have gained without also witnessing and being tied to the struggles and losses of everyone around him who is playing the game with him.

In the wake of that moment, Sai’s words in the final panels always wrap around me like a blanket of comfort and hope. I hear them, just as Hana said, as a request to the reader to acknowledge, along with Hikaru, our ever-present connection to the universe and the world and people around us, the past, present, and future. Sai’s acceptance of his intrinsic connection to the rest of humanity allowed him to find peace; and it is our acceptance of our own shared roles as players in the Game that will allow the spirit of Hikaru no Go to live on in each of us.

MELINDA: That was beautiful, all of you.

So, I know I had a slew of things I wanted to talk about, and I haven’t gotten nearly to all of it, but before we wind down, let me ask all of you, is there anything you’ve been dying to talk about?

CATHY: I just wanted to add that for those of us who enjoy cardgame based anime or manga, while Hikaru no Go is obviously the best I’ve ever read or watched, there are a few other series I would recommend. Fukumoto Noboyuki does a series of excellent manga about games: Akagi and Ten, both of which are about mahjong, and Kaiji, which is about a number of different games, some of which are more, shall we say, gladitorial than others. Akagi was made into a very enjoyable 26 episode anime with a cliffhanger ending, and it’s actually the series that made me start learning mahjong! Fukumoto’s work is much, much darker than Hikaru no Go, though and, sadly, they’re only available right now for those of us who can read Japanese. But if you ever get a chance to check them out, I highly recommend doing so, or at least making a clamoring for someone, anyone, to license them in the US.

MICHELLE: Actually, something Cathy said back at the beginning reminded me of a question I wanted to pose… has anyone been inspired by the series to take up Go? I have! I used to play every lunch with one of my coworkers, and have since purchased a nifty (and largely unused) magnetic board. The problem is… I’m really bad! If only reading the series could impart strategic knowledge to a person!

MELINDA: I have! Sort of. I bought a small board and stones, but since I didn’t have anyone to play it with, I tried to learn from a computer game, which was a *big mistake*. The game didn’t teach me; it just slaughtered me over and over until I lost the will to go on. I still haven’t gotten up the nerve to ask a real person to teach me, which I think is the way to go, so my cheap, little board remains unused. It’s very sad.

MICHELLE: Oh, I had the same experience with a computer game! You know, Hotta mentions a supplementary book that has the characters’ game records in it. How awesome would it be to get that and have fun recreating the games ourselves?

Okay, yes, I am a big nerd, but this sounds like much fun. Pizza would have to be involved, as well.

AJA: I’ve gotten as far as playing tutorial games online, but I’m so fuzzy on the concepts that I haven’t gotten very far! It’s still fun, though.

HANA: I had the dubious pleasure of my father attempting to teach me go several times, starting from when I was around eight or so. Unfortunately, these lessons always ended in my father playing an even game without any handicaps with me, and I’d lose by at least 40 moku. (I did get very good at playing omok—gomoku in Japanese—though!) So I did go into Hikaru no Go knowing the very basics of the game, but I had always thought of it as an intimidating game that I could never master. Reading the series encouraged me to try learning how to play again. (If Hikaru could learn, surely I could as well!) My father was thrilled at my renewed interest, and he even agreed to give me a four-stone handicap. (I still lost by 40 moku.) I haven’t played very much though; I practice occasionally against a computer game. I also have a magnetic go board that is gathering dust on my shelf.

CATHY: My inability to play go is frankly laughable. The thing is, early into the series, I decided I was never going to understand go and decided I wasn’t going to try too hard to solve the go problems or understand the game! I didn’t know anyone around me who played it either, and I just have such terrible spatial logic that I was never able to grasp the flow of the game. I did, however, memorize a lot of the terms related to go, so I once surprised a real player by talking about playing tengen as a first hand — let it never be said that reading manga will impair your social skills!

MELINDA: So, pizza and Go, anyone?

 


 

Never-ending thanks to these fun and brilliant ladies for joining me here to discuss Hikaru no Go. Look for more Hikago-related fun over the next two days, and please join us in comments!

Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: hikaru no go, roundtables

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