What’s With These Crazy Anti-Fans?
Now, I’m certainly not going to claim there’s nothing about fandom that I don’t understand or from which I don’t keep my distance. The need for cosplay or fanfic, honestly, escapes me. But I have to wonder just how much Ken Lowery actually knows about Joss Whedon’s fans if he breathlessly includes them in this anti-fan screed from a few days ago.
In reality, Joss’ real fans are the ones who take a film of his and turn it into an annual fundraiser which, in its first two years, has raised more than $150,000 for Equality Now.
His real fans are the ones who looked at the writers strike and rather than complain (out of the sense of “entitlement” Lowry ascribes to fans) that the writers had taken away their stories and how dare they do so, showed up in the hundreds to walk the picket line with Joss, his writers, and his actors for four hours straight, steadfastly refusing to abuse the event by trying to turn it into a convention.
Depending on the fandom, Lowery also misconstrues the idea of “ownership”. In this particular fandom, at least, what the fans recognize is that while the work itself is his, the cultural experience and/or importance of it belongs in the shared space between creator and audience.
The reason Joss engages with his fans — despite Lowery’s warning to creators not to do so — is because he grasps this simple idea.
That shared space isn’t about fans thinking they have a right to control Joss’ work, or demand he do this, that, or the other thing with it. That shared space is about the recognition that creative work, ultimately, is meaningless without the cultural experience of it. And that cultural experience depends upon an audience.
As I said up top, we likely all have various aspects of fandom in which we have no interest, or that outright make us recoil. That’s as true amongst Joss’ fans as it is anywhere else.
But to include Joss’ fans in a paragraph with ends by saying that “[y]our average Wookiee Appreciation forum is just one tentative post away from becoming a furry enclave” demonstrates little more than Lowery can’t quite make the distinctions we claims, in his opening paragraph, to be able to make.