Occasionally Snarky and Meta

It'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?