#henry jenkins
Earlier, in this post, we have talked about Jenkins’ idea of how fans, in the process of slashing, might read the body of characters (especially in media fandoms). We also talked about in this post I quoted Cathy Yue Wang on how Real People in RPF can appear as Derivations of the characters they resonate with. Taking these points farther, maybe it can be said that the viewer reads the characters into these bodies that appear on the screen. Martin discusses a fanvid where this happens on a dietetic level: the plot itself turns the bodies of the actors (shots from documentaries or behind-the-scenes footages) into the reincarnated or immortal version of the characters they play.
The final sequence of the vid, in which a shot of Arthur and Merlin looking out over Camelot fades to a shot of Bradley and Colin standing and looking out over Caerleon (from The Real Arthur and Merlin) sums up the layering of “Arthur and Merlin” and “Bradley and Colin”: a shot of two actors, standing where the “real” Arthur and Merlin reunited. Again, the inter-textual (sic!) relationship between various texts and sets of texts is a site of play for fans in exploiting their meaning-making potential. The effect is also one of mythologising James and Morgan: in saturating images of the actors with images of their mythic characters and their narratives; they become the bodies of stars as they are mythologised. This vid and ones like it demonstrate again that it is not alone the industry producers who undertake the project of mythologising. Fans engage in the same thing, though they may not call it that. RP fans are preoccupied with the resonances that produce the star.
MARTIN, ANNA (2014). WRITING THE STAR. STARDOM, FANDOM AND REAL PERSON FANFICTION.
Based on this, it appears that the visual elements not only inspire fanworks (fanvids or fan art) but might even motivate the mythologisation of real people. What are your experiences?
The process of slashing a text is described by Jenkins as reading the body for clues of a relationship.
Here and in other such moments, characters retrace the steps of the fan viewers who have searched the performers’ bodies for suggestions of these same unexpressed feelings.
JENKINS, HENRY (1992). TEXTUAL POACHER, ROUTLEDGE, 213.
We see that in stories, this practice of reading the text and even reading the body for these clues can be mirrored in the narrative where the characters recognise the same feelings the viewer does. Martin observes the same mirroring in how RPF fans read the stars’ body and their texts. They say about a fanfiction that deals with an editor discovering that Viggo Mortensen’s poem are about Orlando Bloom and Orlando Bloom after reading the collection, confronting Viggo Mortensen:
This story is particularly interesting because the narrative reflets the experience of the fan reading the poems (of Viggo Mortensen). David, the editor, can see which poems are about Orlando without having to ask. Upon reading the poems, the meaning is clear to Orlando himself.
MARTIN, ANNA (2014). WRITING THE STAR. STARDOM, FANDOM AND REAL PERSON FANFICTION.
Fans adapt a practice of reading for clues, hidden narratives and that can lead RPF, too. Have you observed the same similarity, too?
Over the last week, we received many responses to the question how RPF can operate without a canon text, the majority of them among the lines of much the same way non-RPF fandoms do: by constantly negotiating fanon interpretations. It looks like then that the question of what constitutes as canon is problematised for any kind of fanon.
(I’m also very glad that my throw out about canon already being problematised when we leave the media fandoms definitions was caught in this post.)
Henry Jenkins’ concept of Convergence Culture provides a useful way of thinking about how RPF communities work together to create their own meanings from transmedia texts, or intertexts, such as The Lord of the Ring and its paratexts distributed across many delivery platforms.
MARTIN, ANNA (2014). WRITING THE STAR. STARDOM, FANDOM AND REAL PERSON FANFICTION, 68.
We can see fans refer to a continuously changing meta-text, both in and outside of RPF. (Something that we might call fanon.)
The „ideal” version of Star Trek, the meta-text against which a film or episode is evaluated, was constructed by the fan community through its progressively more detailed analysis of the previously aired episodes.
Jenkins, Henry (1992). Textual poacher, Routledge, 101.
I’ve found interesting the mention of fandoms with several adaptations here. It was surprising to me, but Martin also talks about this interconnectedness.
In the bonus material, (Gray) points out, the actors as presented as similar to their roles in the film (…). The behind-the-scenes narrative existed parallel to the fictional narrative of the trilogy, and, as Gray argues, it mirrored the narrative of the trilogy, both enriching and being enriched by it. (…) Certain parallels are used to pin these versions together at crucial points, as I will discuss later in this chapter. Many points in the behind-the-scenes documentaries are used to pin the film version to the books. The books, the films and the paratexts link together in various ways to form a complex intertext, an interrelated group of texts that enrich and layer each other in meaning.
GRAY, JONATHAN (2006). Bonus Material: The DVD Layering of The Lord of the Rings=Ernest, Mathjis (ed.) The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context, Wallflower, 238.-253.
MARTIN, ANNA (2014). WRITING THE STAR. STARDOM, FANDOM AND REAL PERSON FANFICTION, 64., 69.
Thank you for all the responses so far! To continue the conversation, I’d like to ask your experiences: have you ever seen something that felt like queerbaiting but with real persons? If you can think of an example, what did you think of it?
