[TSN] Not another fandom wank war, please...

[anyssia]

So, because I want to be able to close all those tabs I opened on my Firefox ;p and because I like to keep track of what I said/where I went those last days, here is a summary.



02/03/2012 (Thursday): via casey_sms's Twitter account, I learned that an article had been published on the 2nd, about the The Social Network fandom and the slash fanfics. It's at Gawker, Dvice and NBC Bay Area (the last two being the same articles, copy/pasted).
I suppose that this article follows the renew interest of the public in Facebook, because of the IPO.

The article mentions the movie briefly, The Social Network, then goes on talking about how we write homoerotic fanfictions featuring Mark Zuckerberg. Then it quote a few fanfics, publishing authors names, link and summary. (links to the community mark_eduardo, AO3 and private journals). The fanfics used as reference are all crack/humor fanfics and/or unusual pairings.
My main point of contention with the articles at Dvice/NBC: they feature several large photographies of the real Mark Zuckerberg to illustrate the fics (I don't know for you, but when I write/read TSN fanfics, MZ really isn't the one I have in mind: it's Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, in their roles of Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin).

I discovered the articles very early the day after, around 6.00 am and I couldn't stop myself from trying to get the facts straight. The comment is a bit rambling and unstructured, mostly because I wasn't completely awake yet ;p

Under cut, you'll find a copy of that comment.

As a member of the fanfiction/The Social Network community, I'll admit that this article isn't too bad (compared to some written on the net about fandom), but two things:

- There isn't a Mark Zuckerberg fandom, really. It's a The Social Network fandom. When we write, we don't have MZ real face in mind, but actually that of Jesse Eisenberg!
This is a really important point, because we aren't exactly writing about a real person, but about a character from a movie, named Mark Zuckerberg and played by Jesse Eisenberg (same goes for Eduardo Saverin/Andrew Garfield and the others.).
It's an important distinction because the movie is subjective. The real MZ said that it wasn't (all) accurate, E. Saverin said as much, and even Sean Parker. From what I've seen, movie!MZ is an unrepentant antisocial nerd with a cutting tongue and an epic difficulty to smile. The real!MZ I've seen in interviews and such isn't really like that, apparently. I've seen him laugh and duck his head with a shy smile. Movie!MZ is an accentuated, caricatural version of the real thing, and fanfictions take him that much farther from the original. Which is the goal of the thing, of course; imagining how else it could have gone.
We can't know what's real or not, what's artistic license, what came from the actors way of playing their roles, or even, what we, as public, saw and interpreted our way.
So yeah, don't mix real!Mark Zuckerberg with movie!Mark Zuckerberg, those aren't the same thing, just as we're writing stories in the world of The Social Network, and not really about real!MZ. (the main reason I'm saying this is because of the photos you used in the article. Those aren't accurate, because it really should have been Jesse Eisenberg, if we go the fandom way ;p )

- And last, not all things are about the erotica (though it's always good fun ^^) and not all are about so improbable plot as Magneto meeting MZ. I think it's important to remind this to your reader, as otherwise it feels like The Social Network fandom is just a bunch of fanatic and weird people. I, for one, am totally normal and average (and I don't even follow the news about J. Eisenberg and A. Garfield :) ).

Following that, a post was added to the community mark_eduardo @LJ, announcing that the community would now friend-lock the posts and asking the users if they agreed that this precaution was enough to protect our privacy.

The post is now 100+ comments long, so I will spare you the whole thing. The idea is that a lot of authors got spooked by being shoved under the spotlights that way, and deleted their fics or locked everything under f-lock.

I posted various answers to those with concerns (links under this paragraph), my opinion being that there is no real need to panic because we aren't the first fandom to be outed (HP, SPN, ...) and anyway, it wasn't even the first article written about the TSN fandom (right after the movie came out, I remember at least one being published somewhere).
As I said,
there's no need to delude ourselves: I'm pretty sure MZ, ES, JE and AG knew all about this. They probably knew it would happen before the movie came out, and if they didn't, they certainly know by now.
THERE IS NO NEED TO PANIC, PEOPLE! ^^
The nature of Internet will make than in two weeks everybody will have forgotten about it. So, yeah, I really couldn't care less and wouldn't have commented on it if I hadn't seen people panic. ;p
(comments here, here, here and here)

Now, for those who are definitively uneasy now to keep their fics up on the web, I would suggested economic's advice: you can lock fic on AO3 so that it will only display to users who are logged in. You can also orphan fic, which leaves the fic on the site but removes your account's attachment to it, which is a useful feature I've considered in the past to keep fic up whilst severing my identity from it.

Of course, following the articles, Twitter, LJ and Tumblr got a good work-out in terms of comments and posts with various opinions/questions.
What happened next rekindled the anger of fandom, because it took us that much more in the spotlights:
a girl, over at Tumblr, send an e-mail to someone she thought had written the article (it turned out that she hadn't even caught the right guy).
I'll ask not to send her flame messages, as it won't help and she's only getting on her high horse and threatening to send more e-mails if we didn't leave her in peace. I don't agree with what she did or what she said, but it's over and done with and we can't exactly do anything more about it.
I think what angered the fandom the worst, was that the girl isn't even part of our fandom. She just stumbled over the article and decided that her opinion was needed. So yeah, I can understand that people reacted angrily toward her. It doesn't mean that we have to continue this Wank war!

That said, it doesn't mean that I'm on her side, at all. Frankly, to be very honest, that girl sounds like a bitch who is annoyed because she has been spammed with angry comments after sticking her nose where she doesn't belong. So I won't pity us and she probably deserve it a bit.

The e-mail she sent
The guy's answer
My own comment to the guy's post (also found under cut, under this paragraph)

Actually, the problem that we have with her e-mail, is mostly that it was written by someone who isn’t even in the fandom, and wrote about things that are barely 10% of the fandom itself. Most writers don’t write about Jesse and Andrew, they write about the characters of Mark and Eduardo, played by Jesse and Andrew, based on the script of Sorkin (which is, apparently, not even close to reality, as Sorkin himself said).

So yeah, we probably wouldn’t have been very happy with her for her e-mail, but the fact that she talked about things that have little to no connection with the fandom certainly didn’t help. Her mail was a rambling, contracting piece of fiction and it certainly didn’t help us looking serious.

Also, you say:

I love that these online communities foster a sense of intimacy that lets people behave and speak in ways they wouldn’t in the real world. I’d probably be out of a job without it, given how much I cover the odd corners of the web. But I’ve never understood the moral indignation when someone from the outside takes an interest. When something like TSN fandom happens entirely on the open web, you can’t be shocked when someone else links to it. That’s the internet, and I suspect part of the thrill of taking part in these communities is the possibility that anyone can stumble on it.

and yes, I more or less agree with you: we write on the Internet, so it’s pretty much public.

My main problem with articles written about fandom is that they are often degrading, mocking and written in a way that show us as stupid, moronic ten years old. And the one published at Gawker and those other websites was clearly written to mock us. So yeah, we didn’t like it. That’s fairly obvious.

Another thing: I have nothing against the stories taken as example to illustrate the article, but there are certainly other fanfics that are much, much more interesting and realistic. You don’t quote a Magneto/MarkZ fanfic in a serious article, when the fic itself was already clearly written to make us laugh. It’s called ‘crack’ and that’s certainly not what represent the majority of the fandom. Of any fandom!

Bottom line, whoever wrote the article, didn’t even research it, so we got angry. The article was mocking and insulting and we got angry. The girl wrote an e-mail to someone that wasn’t even the writer of the article, and had us pass for crazy, raving mad unicorn lovers, and we got angry. The article embarrassed and scared a lot of nice people, who decided to move somewhere else, where their privacy and interest would be respected and we got angry. Those who stayed locked everything under ten layers of security and we got angry.

At this point, I’d say that it’s pretty natural for us to become angry, thank you very much.

So far, that's it. I'll remind you once more that I haven't written this to rekindle the flames of Fandom Wank, but to keep track of what happened.

I'll say it again: IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT WE WERE PUBLICLY RECOGNIZED. FANDOMS AND SLASH ARE KNOWN FROM THE MEDIA AND I'M PRETTY SURE THAT MARK ZUCKERBERG AND CIE KNOW ABOUT IT TOO.
PLEASE, DON'T DELETE YOUR FICS, IT ISN'T NECESSARY. A LOCKED AO3 ACCOUNT IS MORE THAN ENOUGH (you can find invites at the mark_eduardo community or ask me for some here) AND IT WOULD BE NICE IF ALL THAT SHIT COULD BE FORGOTTEN AND EVERYBODY WENT BACK TO THEIR FANDOMS/ FANFICS/JOURNALS.

Pretty please with a cherry on top ^^

One good thing that happened because of all of this is: fanfiction!
Someone wrote an hilarious piece of fiction about Mark Zuckerberg and his reaction to the Gawker article. I love it and it feels good to read something making fun of that article, for once ^^
(This is Not Real Life) Life is Stranger Than Fiction

(also, long post is long O.O)

Comments

[tama_abi]

Merlin fandom is having this kind of reactions often enough too -___-
I'm glad for your comments. I didn't know some fics on AO3 weren't view-able when you didn't have an account. I guess I'll have to log in ^^"

[anyssia]

Really? That must quite stressing. I had never realized how much of a thing it is, to be mentioned in the medias, because I usually participate in old fandoms that are all more or less known (HP, BtVS, FFVII, ...). I had heard about the Supernatural fandom, who was proned to flipping off very easily/often, but I didn't think that it was that easy.

I guess it's a bit of the crowd mentality. As Agent Kay said in Men In Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. "

About AO3, I actually didn't know that some fics required to be logged in, because I'm always logged in xDDDD But I guess there must be a message, like in LJ, where it tells you that you can't access that entry, or something