*Disclaimer: Opinions stated in article belong to the author and may not reflect those of WinchesterBros.com
Author: Lynn Zubernis (@FangasmSPN)
Website: http://fangasmthebook.wordpress.com/
In the wake of last week’s emotional Supernatural episode, fandom has been left flailing, sobbing, conjecturing, analyzing – and fighting. I saw a tweet earlier today that said “I think the real challenge of the Hellatus is keeping us fans from tearing each other apart on break.” (Thanks @SPN_ExEm). I think a lot of us try to avoid wank whenever we can, but it’s a part of fandom and it always has been. It was one of the most confusing things for me when we first started researching fandom and I had to take off my rose-colored Utopian glasses and realize that while fandom is one of the most amazing, accepting, supportive, wonderful communities I’ve ever encountered, it’s not without infighting. Writing “Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls” was a lot of fun, and much of the book is about the joys of discovering fandom, a lot of squee about Supernatural, and a lot more squee about going behind the scenes and discovering what the actors think about the Show and the fans (how could chatting with Jensen, Jared and Misha not be fun??) But when we wrote that book and our other books on fandom, we also wanted to try to figure fandom out – and for that we put our professor hats on and did some research. I thought I’d share some here, since figuring things out can go a long way toward making humans feel better.
Since last Tuesday, Supernatural fans have been discussing ‘The Purge’ on every online platform in existence, which has brought some of the different viewpoints in fandom to the forefront. I haven’t wanted to stop discussing it either –I had a great time calling in and chatting with the WinchesterBros gang on their podcast, and my review of that episode on fangasmthebook.wordpress.com had 70 comments at last count. (They were all respectful even in disagreement, so yes, fandom IS capable of that!)
Not always though. So I thought it might be helpful to an emotionally raw fandom to look at why that is. As we spent year after year researching the SPN fandom, the more I understood about why wank exists, the less it bothered me. It’s like most things – once you ‘get it’, you aren’t angry anymore. You might not agree, but you can agree to disagree. Especially if you realize we’re not that different after all.
At first glance, it doesn’t seem like it. Right now, Sam!girls are defending his actions and accusing Dean of perpetrating a lot of bad things on his little brother. Dean!girls (once they picked themselves up off the floor and stopped bawling) are accusing Sam of equally bad things. BrotherFans are sending reminders to the writers that the Show is about the Epic Love of Sam and Dean, while DestielFans are sending reminders that the heart of the Show is also the profound bond between Dean and Cas. People who don’t ship are hurling accusations of bias at shippers, and shippers are voting like crazy at the Geekiary’s ‘Vote your favorite ship’ Valentine’s poll. People on both sides are accusing others of not being “true fans.”
But that’s exactly what we all are. Being a fan means being passionate about something most people wouldn’t look at twice – in this case, a television show that the majority of people in the world still haven’t seen. Passion gives us the energy to stay up all night penning insightful meta, to launch postcard campaigns to ‘save our show’ when it’s threatened, to vote 6,000 times a day for a People’s Choice award. It gives us the determination to save all our pennies for years to fly across the world to a convention, to tirelessly convert others to our Little Show that Could, to raise money for amazing charities that can change the world. That passion is a wonderful thing that has saved more than one fan’s life – literally.
With that great passion comes an overwhelming need to keep loving what we love – to make sure that whatever it is we’re getting from the Show keeps on giving. When fans are threatened with that source of inspiration and satisfaction going away, it’s effing terrifying. No wonder we react so strongly when we think things aren’t going our way – sometimes we plead with The Powers That Be to make things the way we need them, sometimes we lash out at other fans who want the Show to go somewhere else. It’s because we’re scared, not because we’re awful. And not because we’re all that different.
We all want (like I’ve said before, it feels more like NEED) different things from this amazing little Show. I know one fan who wrote a thoughtful meta about why she doesn’t ship and needs the Show not to be about that – in her real life, she was the victim of accusations of a relationship that were both false and hurtful, so it makes sense that’s not what she wants/needs from her favorite Show (people essentially falsely shipped HER). I know another fan whose life has been turned around (for the better) by Misha Collins and Castiel, and who sees the bond between Dean and Cas as inspiring and beautiful, and as a reflection of her own sexuality that has the potential to be both normalizing and validating. I know another fan who fell in love with the twisted, tangled, unrealistic epic love of Sam and Dean and finds in that relationship a fantasy that has deep meaning and symbolism. All of these investments have real life consequences, because fantasy is important to real life. It’s a healthy coping strategy that we all use to make sense of the real world in a safely displaced way, both the good things and the bad. And nothing makes a human more panicky than someone threatening to take away your coping strategy!
I know fans who just want to play in the sandbox Kripke created, for whom the fanfiction and fanvids and fanart are all that’s needed to make them happy. I know others who are invested only in canon, and are devastated when canon turns away from what they’re watching for. Either way, we’re all fans. We’re all passionate. We all care (let’s face it, people outside of fandom would say too much….). We’re all, to some extent, at the mercy of a narrative we can’t control, and that can be pretty terrifying when it’s something that important to us. Sometimes it’s so frightening that we turn on each other, trying to silence others in an attempt to prove to TPTB that our way of seeing the Show is the way it should go. I’ve certainly felt that pull – nobody likes not feeling in control of something that means so much.
So what did we find in our research while we were writing “Fangasm” and “Fandom At The Crossroads?”
First, a little bit of science. Why do we love so hard? From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re built to become deeply connected to outside entities. The brain’s mesolimbic system functions as a reinforcement circuit between the opiodergic system (which influences what we like) and the dopaminergic system (which influences what we want) – so when we like watching Supernatural, we want it again, and again, just as soon as it’s available – if not sooner. The system developed to help us find our next meal, not our next fix of Sam and Dean and Cas, but obviously things other than food can trip the same circuits. Liking something can trigger an unusually high degree of wanting.
Fans’ emotional investment in fandom is also high because fandom can be an important coping strategy, offering escape from stress and a sense of belonging and validation. I’ve never experienced a supportive, inspiring, intellectually challenging community like fandom. As a woman, finding a place to ‘be real’ and share a passion for something that might not be valued by the rest of the world is a rare and beautiful thing.
So fandom, and our passion for whatever we love, is important. Fandom is also a community, and that makes it a group. If you’ve ever taken a course in Group Dynamics, you know that jockeying for position and influence occurs in every group. Fandom is no exception. In fact, because most of us interact with some anonymity online, fandom is a group which is even more vulnerable to bullying and marginalizing. Anonymity encourages us to depersonalize, and that allows us to be harsher than we would be in face to face encounters where we can see others’ reactions and have to deal with the consequences.
Aggression isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a group – it helps to enforce group norms, build cohesion between group members, and defend the in-group against outsiders (the out-group). All groups identify enemies, which works well when the “enemy” is something outside the group. The Powers That Be or the network or even another television show – we can all unite against them. This dynamic can create a strong sense of community within fandom, vilifying the ‘outside world’ who ‘doesn’t get it’. However, the dynamic is different when the out-group is not composed of outsiders. What happens when the perceived “enemy” is also part of the fandom? That’s when wank gets ugly. Essentially, we create in-groups and out-groups within the fandom, and then we police our in-group with the same aggressive fervor that is more often reserved for outsiders. Ouch!
The more involvement we have with what we love – the “degree to which individuals are cognitively and affectively engrossed in a situation or activity”—the more strongly we identify with our in-group. Just thinking of ourselves as part of a group is associated with a positive emotional state that researchers call “collective happiness”. (You can hear it in every convention hallway, or see it on every online platform before every new episode). On the other hand, emotional investment is also connected to aggression. The more invested we are, the harder we’ll fight for what we love.
Of course, this is normal human behavior. We evolved to form and defend the boundaries of social groups in order to survive – belonging was the difference between life and death when a village was threatened by a marauding saber tooth tiger, so we all retain a powerful and pervasive need to belong. We feel especially good when we can differentiate our in-group from others and be assured of its superiority and status – this is the driving force behind some fan-on-fan aggression. There’s actual research that shows this, which I won’t bore you with here, but you can find in our books if you’re curious. We are most intolerant of someone who’s part of our group (fandom) but doesn’t behave in the way we think they should – we react by trying to bully that person into falling in line, or we kick them out of the group for their deviance from group norms. Thus the popular fandom sayings: “Get out of my fandom, you’re making us all look bad!” and “Fandom: You’re doing it wrong!” This so-called “in group homogeneity effect” explains a lot of what happens in fandom wank.
One of the researchers we quoted in the book put it this way: “Being a geek is about loving something so much that you open yourself up to ridicule. Fans tend to be opinionated people who are quick to defend whatever they’re passionate about. …But it also has a dark side. One of the things I really don’t love about fandom is the underlying “you’re doing it wrong” attitude that so often runs through it….If you like something I don’t like, you’re wrong. If you don’t like something I like, you’re wrong. If you disagree with me about some point of whatever we both like, you’re really wrong.”
There’s also research on why we’re passionate about something, in this case a television show. Sometimes it’s about love – we have a desire to find the perfect image or story that fulfills a favorite fantasy. The researchers call these “love maps” — we’re all motivated to seek out depictions of our individual love maps, since finding them allows a pleasurable escape from stress that is both helpful and healthy. However, the desire to find them means we all become frustrated when we can’t – and pissed off when someone else’s love map is instead played out on our Show.
Other times it’s about what we don’t love – fantasy allows us to examine and rework the bad stuff that’s happened to us in our own lives, safely displaced onto fictional characters of course. We feel just as passionately about this use of fantasy, and just as invested in wanting the story to be rewritten the way we need it to be. No wonder it’s important – it’s helping us make sense of our own narratives too.
Research suggests that fandom won’t stop wanking any time soon – but next time I find myself overwhelmed with my own desire to see Supernatural go the way I wish it would and think it should, I can at least see the passion of the person who’s arguing for the opposite direction as more similar to me than different. That makes me much more likely to say “we’re all in this together” than “Fandom, you’re doing it wrong.” At the end of the day, I do believe what I’m fond of saying – SPNFamily, it’s more than just a hashtag.