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"If you build it, they will come."
We've all heard it at some point. Many of us have given this wisdom to someone who said "there's nothing in the bit of fandom that I want to see grow!" and thought nothing of it.
As someone who's pretty much made a name for herself in fandom by writing the less-popular characters and pairings, I can tell you that while the basic premise is true, the implicit ongoing implications are a lie.
It's difficult being the only producer in a corner of fandom. Or one of maybe a handful of people, where the others have multiple loves - usually including a far more popular pairing or character.
The accepted wisdom is "make what you want to see in fandom".
What the people telling you this (usually from bigger, more popular sections of fandom which have no trouble in getting fanworks about the pairings/characters they love) don't tell you is that it doesn't always work.
I have loved at least two female characters in megafandoms ('secondary' female characters, never The One Girl In All The Canon whom everyone loves) - fandoms where one might expect the "if you build it, they will come (and they will help you build it)" truism to actually hold: hundreds of thousands of fans, surely there are some people who'll like the same character and pairing that you do, right?
Yes. And no.
There are people who like the same character or pairing, but usually as a secondary interest. And when their primary interest is a far more popular character or pairing, they'll spend 95% of their time gushing over their favourite...and 5% tossing a bone or two your way.
If you built it, people will come, yes. But they will mostly stand around and compliment you on your building skills. If you invite them to help you build, they will mostly put up their hands and say, "oh, well, I'm no good at building what you're building" and then go off and happily develop castles to their primary interest.
Which is absolutely their right to do so, but when you were sold the line that "if you build it, then they will come" with the unspoken implication that "and they will help you build it so you don't have to do all the work yourself", then it's very demoralising to realise that you have, in fact, been sold a lie. People will come and watch and praise you, they might even 'help' a little, but rarely will they take the initiative themselves.
(This, in fact, matches a lot of discourse I'm seeing about the way that a husband 'helps' by asking his wife exactly what she wants him to do instead of looking and seeing what needs to be done and then letting her know she's doing it. That might be why I have so fiercely come to dislike the 'well, maybe if you organised more fic exchanges, or set up more avenues for people to participate' angle of fandom. It's so tiring. You chivvy people into doing something they don't really want to do, and at the end you have hardly anything more - some new fics, sure, but the people who wrote them are no more enthusiastic about writing them off their own bat than a husband is about doing chores around the house without someone treating him like a child. In the end, it's easier just to go off and create it youreslf.)
The people who told you "well, don't complain that there's nothing in fandom, go and create it yourself and you'll make other fans!" slapped a bandaid on your wound so they wouldn't have to see it. They're not actually interested or invested in helping you sew up the gash, they just don't want to have to see it. People missing out in fandom makes them queasy, because fandom is supposed to be a happy place for all.
A. Happy. Place. For. All.
(And if you're not happy and satisfied by fandom, then obviously there's something wrong with you because Fandom Is A Happy Place For All.)
I present Stargate Atlantis fandom, Teyla Emmagan as a favourite character, and John/Teyla as a pairing.
Over eight years, I wrote a lot of fic about Teyla, featuring John/Teyla, featuring the team. I commented on a lot of posts. I ran ficathons and exchanges, asked for my favourite characters/pairings at every turn.
In the end, I was still one of only a handful of Teyla and John/Teyla fans who were producing fanworks about them. Why? Because the people who liked Teyla or John/Teyla could get so much more interaction by producing fanworks about Elizabeth or Rodney or John, or whatever combination of pairings they preferred. There's a reason The Algorithm of modern social media exists: likes and comments and clicks and reads drive interaction, which drives both advertising revenue and human notice. We are all Pavlov's dogs when it comes to people paying attention.
What you will find is that people will come to you if you build it. They will like you and your take, but they will not participate in what you like.
That's been a tough lesson to take in, and I'm still unlearning the habits and thought patterns I learned twenty years ago when I first came into fandom.
The people who like my stories? They don't necessarily like the characters or pairings I write, they like what I can do with a story. They'll suspend their own belief that John really belongs with his One True Love Elizabeth Weir for as long as my story goes. (And then they'll say they feel "dirty" for enjoying it afterwards: trufax.) But they won't write any John/Teyla or Teyla-centric stuff themselves. I am a source of product for the majority of fans, I am not an inspiration to go and do likewise.
And, demoralising as it is, I have to be okay with that.
You can't force people to like what you like, to be productive about what you'd like to see. And when you're an oddball in fandom, like me, and you're fannish about a minor character whom nobody else is fannish about ('fannish' is not the same as 'like': plenty of people like Teyla or Maria but few are fannish about them) nor has reason to be (because why bother with writing something about Maria when you can get thousands of times the interactions by writing about Natasha?) then you just have to twiddle along on your lonesome and accept that You're Just Weird (Nice And Likeable, Sure, But Weird).
--
There could be an argument made that the point wasn't to get other people to build with you - after all the explicit words don't say that people will come and do as you do. But the reason that I'm creating fanworks that don't yet exist is because I want to read fanworks for that character or pairing instead of having to create them.
And even to the people who defend "well, they never said they'd come and do the work with you" there's an underlying assumption that if people haven't joined you then it's kind of your fault.
As a BNF in Stargate once told me, "Well, nobody ever wrote a seminal John/Teyla work that just hooked people's imaginations to get them into the pairing". ie. "You didn't do the work, so you don't deserve the fandom."
Funny how it's always the "Team Gen" (where 'gen' means guys being buddy-buddy) and big-following m/m fans who say this sort of thing. They don't have to work for it to deserve the fandom, but I do.
--
"If you build it, they will come", yes. But they won't build it with you or join in on the work, they will watch you and applaud you and maybe follow you elsewhere to watch you work on other things that might not have otherwise interested them, but they are not interested in participating, only in spectating.
With fandom becoming a spectator sport (facebook/twitter/tumblr likes) rather than a participatory one (LJ/DW comments), this is more relevant than ever.
--
Also for my fannish50 posts
We've all heard it at some point. Many of us have given this wisdom to someone who said "there's nothing in the bit of fandom that I want to see grow!" and thought nothing of it.
As someone who's pretty much made a name for herself in fandom by writing the less-popular characters and pairings, I can tell you that while the basic premise is true, the implicit ongoing implications are a lie.
It's difficult being the only producer in a corner of fandom. Or one of maybe a handful of people, where the others have multiple loves - usually including a far more popular pairing or character.
The accepted wisdom is "make what you want to see in fandom".
What the people telling you this (usually from bigger, more popular sections of fandom which have no trouble in getting fanworks about the pairings/characters they love) don't tell you is that it doesn't always work.
I have loved at least two female characters in megafandoms ('secondary' female characters, never The One Girl In All The Canon whom everyone loves) - fandoms where one might expect the "if you build it, they will come (and they will help you build it)" truism to actually hold: hundreds of thousands of fans, surely there are some people who'll like the same character and pairing that you do, right?
Yes. And no.
There are people who like the same character or pairing, but usually as a secondary interest. And when their primary interest is a far more popular character or pairing, they'll spend 95% of their time gushing over their favourite...and 5% tossing a bone or two your way.
If you built it, people will come, yes. But they will mostly stand around and compliment you on your building skills. If you invite them to help you build, they will mostly put up their hands and say, "oh, well, I'm no good at building what you're building" and then go off and happily develop castles to their primary interest.
Which is absolutely their right to do so, but when you were sold the line that "if you build it, then they will come" with the unspoken implication that "and they will help you build it so you don't have to do all the work yourself", then it's very demoralising to realise that you have, in fact, been sold a lie. People will come and watch and praise you, they might even 'help' a little, but rarely will they take the initiative themselves.
(This, in fact, matches a lot of discourse I'm seeing about the way that a husband 'helps' by asking his wife exactly what she wants him to do instead of looking and seeing what needs to be done and then letting her know she's doing it. That might be why I have so fiercely come to dislike the 'well, maybe if you organised more fic exchanges, or set up more avenues for people to participate' angle of fandom. It's so tiring. You chivvy people into doing something they don't really want to do, and at the end you have hardly anything more - some new fics, sure, but the people who wrote them are no more enthusiastic about writing them off their own bat than a husband is about doing chores around the house without someone treating him like a child. In the end, it's easier just to go off and create it youreslf.)
The people who told you "well, don't complain that there's nothing in fandom, go and create it yourself and you'll make other fans!" slapped a bandaid on your wound so they wouldn't have to see it. They're not actually interested or invested in helping you sew up the gash, they just don't want to have to see it. People missing out in fandom makes them queasy, because fandom is supposed to be a happy place for all.
A. Happy. Place. For. All.
(And if you're not happy and satisfied by fandom, then obviously there's something wrong with you because Fandom Is A Happy Place For All.)
I present Stargate Atlantis fandom, Teyla Emmagan as a favourite character, and John/Teyla as a pairing.
Over eight years, I wrote a lot of fic about Teyla, featuring John/Teyla, featuring the team. I commented on a lot of posts. I ran ficathons and exchanges, asked for my favourite characters/pairings at every turn.
In the end, I was still one of only a handful of Teyla and John/Teyla fans who were producing fanworks about them. Why? Because the people who liked Teyla or John/Teyla could get so much more interaction by producing fanworks about Elizabeth or Rodney or John, or whatever combination of pairings they preferred. There's a reason The Algorithm of modern social media exists: likes and comments and clicks and reads drive interaction, which drives both advertising revenue and human notice. We are all Pavlov's dogs when it comes to people paying attention.
What you will find is that people will come to you if you build it. They will like you and your take, but they will not participate in what you like.
That's been a tough lesson to take in, and I'm still unlearning the habits and thought patterns I learned twenty years ago when I first came into fandom.
The people who like my stories? They don't necessarily like the characters or pairings I write, they like what I can do with a story. They'll suspend their own belief that John really belongs with his One True Love Elizabeth Weir for as long as my story goes. (And then they'll say they feel "dirty" for enjoying it afterwards: trufax.) But they won't write any John/Teyla or Teyla-centric stuff themselves. I am a source of product for the majority of fans, I am not an inspiration to go and do likewise.
And, demoralising as it is, I have to be okay with that.
You can't force people to like what you like, to be productive about what you'd like to see. And when you're an oddball in fandom, like me, and you're fannish about a minor character whom nobody else is fannish about ('fannish' is not the same as 'like': plenty of people like Teyla or Maria but few are fannish about them) nor has reason to be (because why bother with writing something about Maria when you can get thousands of times the interactions by writing about Natasha?) then you just have to twiddle along on your lonesome and accept that You're Just Weird (Nice And Likeable, Sure, But Weird).
--
There could be an argument made that the point wasn't to get other people to build with you - after all the explicit words don't say that people will come and do as you do. But the reason that I'm creating fanworks that don't yet exist is because I want to read fanworks for that character or pairing instead of having to create them.
And even to the people who defend "well, they never said they'd come and do the work with you" there's an underlying assumption that if people haven't joined you then it's kind of your fault.
As a BNF in Stargate once told me, "Well, nobody ever wrote a seminal John/Teyla work that just hooked people's imaginations to get them into the pairing". ie. "You didn't do the work, so you don't deserve the fandom."
Funny how it's always the "Team Gen" (where 'gen' means guys being buddy-buddy) and big-following m/m fans who say this sort of thing. They don't have to work for it to deserve the fandom, but I do.
--
"If you build it, they will come", yes. But they won't build it with you or join in on the work, they will watch you and applaud you and maybe follow you elsewhere to watch you work on other things that might not have otherwise interested them, but they are not interested in participating, only in spectating.
With fandom becoming a spectator sport (facebook/twitter/tumblr likes) rather than a participatory one (LJ/DW comments), this is more relevant than ever.
--
Also for my fannish50 posts
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