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rsadelleI'm having a midlife crisis/crisis of faith about fandom. (I wrote more about that in the last entry and this thread on Twitter.) One of the things contributing to it is what corporations have been doing to media properties over the past few months and years: canceling well-received shows, deleting shows out of existence, floating draconian password schemes, recreating the basic cable model of paying to watch shows that have ads, and so forth. There's a great Twitter thread about the Trust Thermocline, and I think we're seeing that with media companies. I know that I, for one, deleted nearly everything new off my streaming to watch lists because I'm not going to get invested in something that they can just decide to abruptly end.
There's a Tumblr post that's made me laugh every time I've seen it that says, "Love to be on a website where I can join such hit 2022 fandoms as 'century old public domain novel being read very slowly' and 'half-century old mafia film that does not actually exist.'" The more I think about it, the more I think, yes, of course that's what fandom got into recently. Henry Jenkins said, "If you go back, the key stories we told ourselves were stories that were important to everyone and belonged to everyone. Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk." Thinking about that and the Trust Thermocline issue in current corporate media, then it makes absolutely perfect sense that Dracula and Goncharov were huge in 2022. Dracula is public domain so no corporation can control its existence. I expect there's also something about the space for thought and interaction that having something released bit by bit - rather than dropped in its entirety with the requirement to binge it immediately lest you get left behind or the corporation decide to cancel it for lack of popularity - that made Dracula Daily so popular. Goncharov is in every possible way communally owned. Tumblr users made the whole thing up in a big game of "yes, and," and then they treated it in many ways the same as they would any other kind of fandom. If what we're all looking for is the communally-owned story, then you can't get much more communally owned than that.
There's a Tumblr post that's made me laugh every time I've seen it that says, "Love to be on a website where I can join such hit 2022 fandoms as 'century old public domain novel being read very slowly' and 'half-century old mafia film that does not actually exist.'" The more I think about it, the more I think, yes, of course that's what fandom got into recently. Henry Jenkins said, "If you go back, the key stories we told ourselves were stories that were important to everyone and belonged to everyone. Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk." Thinking about that and the Trust Thermocline issue in current corporate media, then it makes absolutely perfect sense that Dracula and Goncharov were huge in 2022. Dracula is public domain so no corporation can control its existence. I expect there's also something about the space for thought and interaction that having something released bit by bit - rather than dropped in its entirety with the requirement to binge it immediately lest you get left behind or the corporation decide to cancel it for lack of popularity - that made Dracula Daily so popular. Goncharov is in every possible way communally owned. Tumblr users made the whole thing up in a big game of "yes, and," and then they treated it in many ways the same as they would any other kind of fandom. If what we're all looking for is the communally-owned story, then you can't get much more communally owned than that.