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author_by_nightIt's from 2010, when I was still in college. (I went to college for a very long time.) It's an issue I faced when a college professor incorporated fandom into a class of people utterly unprepared for it. I was talking about it with a friend, and decided to repost to look at the issue from current lens.
This post had very little context. I took a class on Digital Media, which ended up being about social media and various facets of online culture, including fandom. None of this was in the course description, so we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. The course descriptions were always so vague, they were the academic equivalent of clickbait articles at time. Except you know, we spent thousands of dollars instead of clicking and wasting a few minutes...
On to the entry. Italics is what I originally wrote.
You know that class I'm taking on digital media? Well, we're discussing Harry Potter fandom, and a few of my classmates were all "OMG THOSE WEIRDOS."
... My brain told me to keep quiet. My mouth, however, opened. "It's no different from people who obsess over sports."
Yeah, so everyone in the class probably thinks I'm crazy, but you know, oddly enough, it made me realize that I really do fit in as an English major. I'm not saying you have to be one to understand that sort of thing, of course - I don't know how many people on my flist were/are/will be. And I'm sure there's English majors who do think it's weird too. Still, we've had the same discussion in some of my literature/writing classes, and... it's always gone much differently. I feel like we already obsess and analyze over My Antonia and Pride and Prejudice, so Harry Potter is nothing.
That said, I also feel like people were given way too much at once. One girl went to ff.n and found - wait, do I actually have to say anything more than that? And we watched We Are Wizards, which was mainly about Wizard Rock, and yeah, okay, even I think WRock is a bit... out there, shall we say? Not to mention the guy who talked over the movies, replacing lines with cuss words. I understand the humor, but people who truly just associate Harry Potter with their kids, kid siblings, nieces and nephews won't. I think we should've just stuck with The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet, and it would've been fine. Or at least a little better.
I'm not saying I don't think Harry Potter fandom's weird - you'll never see me deny it, actually. Heck, forget WRock and cussing to the sound of Hedwig's tune - what can we not say about making up a bunch of false identities to bring down a website and trying to publish an online encyclopedia? But I don't like people being judgmental about people they know nothing about. Especially when amongst those "freaks" are some of my best friends.
I'm not surprised, of course - I knew this was coming. :P And you know, if you'd told me on my last day of middle school that I'd be spending the summer analyzing Harry Potter with strangers and would eventually meet some of those strangers, I would've asked you "just how nerdy do you think I am?"
I don't know if we already had done this when I wrote the entry a gazillion years ago, but at some point we also watched a documentary on LARPers, where one LARPer admitted he sometimes forgot he wasn't really his character. Even I found that disturbing, but then again, I don't know LARP culture. Maybe that's a common inside joke I didn't know. Or maybe it really was disturbing, maybe he needs some help, but I know enough LARPers who know they're not their characters that I didn't take him as a representative of all things LARPing.
To expand on that, I think ultimately our professor just wasn't a good teacher. I remember not being overly impressed with him in general. Meanwhile, a friend of mine worked alongside him at the library (I think he was also a tech assistant), and apparently he was a living nightmare to work with. I believe he was overly confident, and part of that overconfidence meant assuming people would just "get" what he was putting out there, even if it was not a subject they knew anything about. He also wore a hoodie Mark Zuckerberg style, and I think he kind of thought he WAS Mark Zuckerberg. So. Yay.
I still think it's a shame though, because in the right context, there could've been great discussions. Instead everyone just stared at him all "lolwut" the entire time.
Have any of you tried explaining fandom to people, and/or been in a situation where it was discussed with a large group of people?
Also, am I the only Harry Potter fan who never got into WRock or the Harry Potter Musical?
This post had very little context. I took a class on Digital Media, which ended up being about social media and various facets of online culture, including fandom. None of this was in the course description, so we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. The course descriptions were always so vague, they were the academic equivalent of clickbait articles at time. Except you know, we spent thousands of dollars instead of clicking and wasting a few minutes...
On to the entry. Italics is what I originally wrote.
You know that class I'm taking on digital media? Well, we're discussing Harry Potter fandom, and a few of my classmates were all "OMG THOSE WEIRDOS."
... My brain told me to keep quiet. My mouth, however, opened. "It's no different from people who obsess over sports."
Yeah, so everyone in the class probably thinks I'm crazy, but you know, oddly enough, it made me realize that I really do fit in as an English major. I'm not saying you have to be one to understand that sort of thing, of course - I don't know how many people on my flist were/are/will be. And I'm sure there's English majors who do think it's weird too. Still, we've had the same discussion in some of my literature/writing classes, and... it's always gone much differently. I feel like we already obsess and analyze over My Antonia and Pride and Prejudice, so Harry Potter is nothing.
That said, I also feel like people were given way too much at once. One girl went to ff.n and found - wait, do I actually have to say anything more than that? And we watched We Are Wizards, which was mainly about Wizard Rock, and yeah, okay, even I think WRock is a bit... out there, shall we say? Not to mention the guy who talked over the movies, replacing lines with cuss words. I understand the humor, but people who truly just associate Harry Potter with their kids, kid siblings, nieces and nephews won't. I think we should've just stuck with The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet, and it would've been fine. Or at least a little better.
I'm not saying I don't think Harry Potter fandom's weird - you'll never see me deny it, actually. Heck, forget WRock and cussing to the sound of Hedwig's tune - what can we not say about making up a bunch of false identities to bring down a website and trying to publish an online encyclopedia? But I don't like people being judgmental about people they know nothing about. Especially when amongst those "freaks" are some of my best friends.
I'm not surprised, of course - I knew this was coming. :P And you know, if you'd told me on my last day of middle school that I'd be spending the summer analyzing Harry Potter with strangers and would eventually meet some of those strangers, I would've asked you "just how nerdy do you think I am?"
I don't know if we already had done this when I wrote the entry a gazillion years ago, but at some point we also watched a documentary on LARPers, where one LARPer admitted he sometimes forgot he wasn't really his character. Even I found that disturbing, but then again, I don't know LARP culture. Maybe that's a common inside joke I didn't know. Or maybe it really was disturbing, maybe he needs some help, but I know enough LARPers who know they're not their characters that I didn't take him as a representative of all things LARPing.
To expand on that, I think ultimately our professor just wasn't a good teacher. I remember not being overly impressed with him in general. Meanwhile, a friend of mine worked alongside him at the library (I think he was also a tech assistant), and apparently he was a living nightmare to work with. I believe he was overly confident, and part of that overconfidence meant assuming people would just "get" what he was putting out there, even if it was not a subject they knew anything about. He also wore a hoodie Mark Zuckerberg style, and I think he kind of thought he WAS Mark Zuckerberg. So. Yay.
I still think it's a shame though, because in the right context, there could've been great discussions. Instead everyone just stared at him all "lolwut" the entire time.
Have any of you tried explaining fandom to people, and/or been in a situation where it was discussed with a large group of people?
Also, am I the only Harry Potter fan who never got into WRock or the Harry Potter Musical?
no subject
Date: 2021-09-26 07:33 pm (UTC)I wouldn't even know or want to approach the topic in a large group, I think. A lecture sounds like it could have been such a good opportunity to open people's minds a little and make them curious, it's too bad it didn't work out that way at all.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-27 11:38 am (UTC)On the plus side, I WILL say I actually learned quite a few things in that class. So it wasn't a total loss for me. But I definitely didn't love feeling awkward, and I still wish I'd been able to talk about those things in a more understanding environment. Ah well.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-27 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-27 11:11 am (UTC)I know my dad told my cousin, whose young daughter had gotten into Harry Potter, about fanfiction. I started frantically trying to interject, and fortunately he caught my head shaking and amended: "But a lot of them are very mature, so you should be careful." (My parents knew what was out there, because I was a teen when I got into fandom, and decided it was better they hear from me, rather than see the kinds of sites I was going to and think I was reading that stuff. Which I honestly wasn't, it was just... all there.)
no subject
Date: 2021-09-27 09:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-27 11:07 am (UTC)I mean, I can personally see it going either way - I feel like I did know a lot of fandom types, but I also knew kids who were very much the other way, who might've actually frowned upon it. So I'm not sure how it would've gone over. But I do think it would've been better received. Or maybe they just needed to use a better course description. (Do professors get to choose those? Because IIRC, the course description and what we got were wildly different, and that certainly didn't help.)
no subject
Date: 2021-09-28 10:10 am (UTC)Each institution has a catalog for each year that lists all the courses with their descriptions and co- + pre-requisites, degrees, and policies. This catalog is updated each year, and students graduate under the catalog of the year of their admission (although students can change their catalog year if it's advantegous to them for graduation). Items in the catalog are rigidly and strictly monitored by a variety of bodies--the accrediting body like SACS, the state system (for us it's the USG and the Board of Regents), and the institution itself. Any change to information in the catalog has to go through committee. Catalog descriptions of courses have to appear on syllabi, and professors are obligated to teach courses according to catalog descriptions. For example, a professional writing course I frequently teach has in the catalog description that students will do a group project, so the class has to have a group project. Of course, we all know some people are shit and don't do what they're supposed to. LOL
The other kind of description to advertise the class might go up on a flyer or out by email and is intended to drum up enrollment in a course. Those are typically made by the teachers themselves but could be made by anybody: a student worker, an admin, the chair.
I have mixed feelings about teaching fanfic. I think fan studies can be taught, and it would be a fascinating grad class. I think trying to teach fanfic itself, especially to undergrads is very fraught. Just on a practical level, fanfic works when people have familiarity with the source material. So you have to be able to assign the source material as well. So no TV shows. I don't think showing an episode of a show in isolation works to truly understand a TV show. You could have students read one or two books and then only read fic about those books or watch one or two movies and then only read fic about those movies, but you start to run into time issues with figuring out source material.
There's Coppa's Fanfiction Reader, but most of the fanfic in there is about those big fandoms like X-Files and Star Trek, and IDK how well reading that kind of fanfic works when you haven't watched a whole bunch of it.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-28 11:28 am (UTC)Interesting! I don't think that was the case here, but I could be misremembering, or maybe the professor broke protocol. He DID leave immediately following that semester, so... that may tell you something.
My impression was that we were going to learn how to build blogs and use social media. We did some of that, but there was way more emphasis on the fannish aspect of things. In fact, we never really learned how to build blogs. We spent a few days on tumblr (which I thought would never gain any traction, lol) and blogger each. That was it.
think fan studies can be taught, and it would be a fascinating grad class. I think trying to teach fanfic itself, especially to undergrads is very fraught. Just on a practical level, fanfic works when people have familiarity with the source material.
That's a very good point. If they're not familiar, of course they'll be lost. To expand on that, passion might also help. For example, my conversations with casual Harry Potter fans are wildly different from my conversations with people who were really into the books. No one matters except the trio and Dumbledore. They barely remember the names and roles of other characters. Which isn't a bad thing, I'm the same way with, say, The Hunger Games. I liked the series. Then I moved on with my life.
There's Coppa's Fanfiction Reader, but most of the fanfic in there is about those big fandoms like X-Files and Star Trek, and IDK how well reading that kind of fanfic works when you haven't watched a whole bunch of it.
Yeah. We didn't read that book, but we read something similar and that was one of the problems.
Also, even for fellow fans, it's hard to discuss one fandom - especially the big ones. I wasn't into WRock, so that part of the Harry Potter fandom didn't resonate with me at all. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends who were in the fandom were into the kinky fanfic side of things. With all due respect to those who were, I was never into that either. So... you know.
I think the guy should've just stuck with the course description, with some conversation surrounding websites for specific books and TV shows.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-29 10:03 am (UTC)I could see doing a class where you teach a bunch of iterations of the same thing, like find something that has a bunch of published variations and fanfic variations and teach them all and that could be very cool.
I also teach a lot of minors; we have dual enrolled high school students which adds another layer of consideration to the mix.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-29 11:05 am (UTC)Oh, for sure - now that I've given it some thought, I don't think it was a coincidence that he taught a class against the description and then left after that semester. The only other possible explanation is that he was always there for a quick stint, and since it was a very temporary position, he just did what he wanted. Now that I'm thinking about it, it's possible he replaced another professor, but I may be conflating that with a different situation.
And yes, it was an accredited private college.
I could see doing a class where you teach a bunch of iterations of the same thing, like find something that has a bunch of published variations and fanfic variations and teach them all and that could be very cool.
I like that!
no subject
Date: 2021-09-30 10:03 am (UTC)