schemingreader

This is a sequel to my birthday meta for cordelia_v, here. I kind of sort of promised to write a sequel. I always do that. D'oh! I have to stop doing that. Anyway, here it is:



Winning at Fandom, the sequel: Why Most Right-Thinking Fans Do NOT Want to be BNFs, Don't Like BNFs, and Generally Use BNF as an Insult

This is a sequel to my birthday meta for cordelia_v, here. That meta was about who becomes a BNF ( "Big Name Fan") and why.

This meta is about why the relationship between BNFs and other fans can get so unpleasant. I chalk this up to two factors: BNFs, who are leaders in fandom, abusing the implicit reasonable expectations that put them in that position, and fans who don't take BNF positions having unreasonable expectations of fandom leaders.

Who's in Charge Here?

Fandom is a voluntary activity. It is also diffusely or loosely organized. There is no one single leader or organizer of all of any given fandom. Rather, many people take responsibility for making some of the fannish activity happen. Fandom is non-hierarchical; only the individual fan can privilege one fan activity over another. You might always read the community from your favorite pairing, or always read the fandom newsletter, or always read the fandom news site.

In a smaller fandom than Harry Potter (which I believe, is all of the rest of the fandoms! Harry Potter is a behemoth!) there might be fewer choices. But you still have a choice: to read one archive or another, to look at fan art first, and like that.

Therefore, the BNFs: the people who have been in fandom the longest, done the most work, made the prettiest fanart or written the best fic, or had the most social success—aren't really the leaders of the whole shebang. No one is.

But if you stick your head up and take on leading something, you effectively become a lightning rod for other people's irritation with things that are going wrong. We have all seen this in real life volunteer situations.

Really Ugly Stuff!

Before I make this into a problem of diffuse responsibility and differing expectations, let me say that I know as well as you that some people who did a lot of work for fandom went on to abuse the trust of other fans. I don't have to name names here, I don't think. There are many horror stories out there about very well-known writers who plagiarized large chunks of popular stories. Some BNFs asked for money or material goods. Some lied about their real lives, in dramatic and crazy ways. Obviously, these are egregious breaches of trust.

Even just to make a commitment to do some fan work, like a fest or an archive, and not living up to that commitment, can hurt people's feelings and just leave a bad taste in the mouth. It is a reasonable expectation that people will do what they say they will.

Of course, there is also some much less terrible BNF behavior that upsets fans and falls into an ethical gray area.

Popular Girls

Obviously, yes, I know, not all BNFs are female. But the problems that people have with BNFs look a lot like popular girl behavior.

You know what I mean:
• Stuck up/full of herself
• Cliquish
• Plays favorites/only promotes or cares about her friends
• and the catch all, general meanie!

So let's talk about these.

Full of yourself much?
There is a certain amount of self-promotion that everyone has to do to get their work read on the internet. In HP fandom, we come from a lot of different cultures—even those of us who are from the same country! So there's bound to be some serious differences in our judgments of what is okay for a person to say about her own work to promote it—or even, what it's okay to do.

In a recent wank, I saw a fan accuse another of padding his flist. I don't even know what that means, exactly! We regularly discuss whether it is bad form to promote our stories on too many LJ communities, whether we are spamming our flists when we do so, etc.

It seems to me that this is one no one is ever going to get right—too many conflicting expectations.

Clique!
As I wrote in my other essay, I believe that relationship building is a necessary component of becoming a BNF. But on the other hand, an individual can't really be a close friend with an infinite number of people. Unless she never sleeps, I suppose.

We are always going to have a problem with this issue, too. The BNF effectively commits herself to being friends (and LJ even uses the word friends! Argh!) with a very large group of people. But then she or he can only really have close relationships with a subset of those—and there is a hierarchy of tenure on friendships, too.

On the other hand, some BNFs seem to like having a clique. Maybe they didn’t have one in school. Perhaps the behavior you see as cliquish really is. That's what I meant by "gray area."

Playing favorites
This is stuff like making sure your friends get the assignments they want in first-come first-served exchanges, promoting your friends' work, and promoting fanwork or meta theories that meet only your tastes. Another one that gets fuzzy, I think: people really might be engaging in this dubious sort of behavior, or we might all see it that way because it's something that worries us.

It's a basic structural feature of fandom that everything is shaped by the individual tastes of the people doing all the work. That's a problem that irritates us all mightily if we think individual leaders are abusing the power that comes with doing all the work. But it might be inevitable. I don't know.

You meanie!
Okay, well, yes, some people who wind up as leaders really are meanies. Can't deny it. So far I've been pretty lucky and haven't suffered much more than a little personal cold-shouldering.

Again this is a problem of the mechanism for becoming a BNF. You think just because the person doing all the work calls other people "honey" and "sweetie" and "darling" she should call you those things, too. But do you really want her to be your honey darling sweetie, or do you want to write and draw and make friends with other people who share your interests?

Remember, you didn't come to fandom to make friends with "the important people." Well, okay, maybe you did! But I thought you came because you wanted to join in the fun and the creativity and win at the internets by making friends who share your interests.

BNFs are both important and not really that important

As I wrote in my previous essay, BNFs are the people who started your fandom. They are the people who make the comms and fests and archives happen. They write the stories and make the art that you love. They also know how to schmooze people in an LJ comment and can navigate social systems.

They do a lot for the atmosphere in fandom. But what they do really isn't that mysterious. They aren't in charge; no one person is. They have taken leadership by taking responsibility for work. Anyone could do that.

In some measure, we are all big name fans—we know each other and we like each other and we value each other. Let's let go of the queen bee syndrome. BNFs deserve a lot of appreciation, but really, they don't deserve a lot of power. If we stop giving them power, they can't abuse it, and we can't feel bad about ways we merely think they've abused it either. Then fandom can be the love-fest we've envisioned in our wildest dreams--or at least, our corner of fandom can be--and we can WIN AT FANDOM AND WIN AT LIFE!

THE END!