Analysis, emotions, fannishness.
May. 7th, 2007 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfToday I decided to take up my old, abandoned experiment in excavating my own livejournal past again, so I visited my journal at greatestjournal.com (acquired ages ago in case LJ ever goes belly up or becomes inhospitable to fandom or whatever). I was using/will be using that journal to post old entries from my livejournal. As luck will have it, the very first ancient entry I posted there contained this:
I've been thinking a bit about my viewing and thinking habits, and I've discovered they differ quite a bit from those of many other fans. My thoughts do revolve around Farscape pretty much all week, but they are not really analytic. I've just checked some weblogs of other FS fans, and I noticed that many people really have great thoughts and interpretations for each ep. I can't provide that kind of thing here 'cause my mind works differently. I'm not even sure that I'm significantly more stupid than the people who post these great thoughts and analyses all the time... (a bit, maybe, but not much. *g*) I'm just dealing with a show I love quite differently from them. Most of my thoughts focus on reliving and intensifying the experience of watching an ep, not *understanding* it better. That's why I usually have little of import to say on mailinglists and messageboards, too. But I mainly watch Farscape simply to empathize (mostly with John, but also with the others). I'm not a very intellectual viewer at all, I hardly ever dissect anything.
Anyone who's been following my contributions to the recent LOM debates, and especially, I think, this post, will find a certain irony here. ;-)
Actually, these two posts do *not* contradict each other, although they very much seem to. Yes: for me, being a fan is primarily about emotional reactions to a source text. I've never been one to post long, involved analyses and interpretations after watching or reading something. My preferred fannish mode is squee. Often slightly cerebral squee, but squee nevertheless.
However - my way of deciding what it *is* that I'm emotionally reacting to, i.e. my way of watching, decoding, making sense of a text - now *that* is analytical.
It's not *conscious* analysis, though - i.e. I don't watch tv going 'hmmmm, that line the actor just said means that A is the case, but the camera angle and the lighting indicate that B must be the case, so if I put that together with A, we get C" or something. It's an almost entirely subconscious process - it could be compared to reading: you don't have to decipher each letter consciously and then laboriously put letters together to form words, and then put words together to form sentences; there's no conscious effort involved in all this at all for a reader beyond primary school level. I 'read' tv shows like I read a written text - deciphering a multitude of signs without conscious effort. And, maybe because I have a good deal of training in literary analysis and also film analysis, I usually really get a fairly 'accurate' version of what a film or show is trying to say out of this subconscious process - unless it's by David Lynch, perhaps *g*. (I know it's popular to say that all interpretation is subjective, but there are limits to that; 'anything goes' is *not* a legitimate approach to literary analysis. Most texts have a fairly definite core.)
Well, and once I've done that subconscious analysis, I react. That reaction is what my fannish life centres on, usually. However, my awareness of the rules that I use in my subconscious decoding of the text allows me to *also* analyse *why* a certain text has a certain effect on me, should I feel a need to do so. To return to the example of reading: while you may not need to put conscious effort into deciphering words anymore, you *can* 'analyse' a word by identifying its component letters, and you'll notice if one of the letters is in the wrong place, too - even if you'd subcconsciously put it in the right place when reading at normal speed.
Usually, as long as a show (or other text) I'm 'in a fannish relationship with' ;-) works the way it's supposed to work, I don't have to do any conscious analysis. If it works, I take it for granted, and concentrate on the squee. I'm also perfectly capable of ignoring smaller flaws, as long as they don't interfere heavily with my fannish focus (usually: my focus character's characterisation and development).
However, if something like the ending of LOM happens, something that just screams 'wrong! wrong! wrong!' at me on *so* many levels, and most importantly, completely destroys my focus character; then I do feel a need to make the analysis conscious and explicit.
(Would like to continue, but I need to shower and go to bed, it's already midnight... Maybe tomorrow.)
I've been thinking a bit about my viewing and thinking habits, and I've discovered they differ quite a bit from those of many other fans. My thoughts do revolve around Farscape pretty much all week, but they are not really analytic. I've just checked some weblogs of other FS fans, and I noticed that many people really have great thoughts and interpretations for each ep. I can't provide that kind of thing here 'cause my mind works differently. I'm not even sure that I'm significantly more stupid than the people who post these great thoughts and analyses all the time... (a bit, maybe, but not much. *g*) I'm just dealing with a show I love quite differently from them. Most of my thoughts focus on reliving and intensifying the experience of watching an ep, not *understanding* it better. That's why I usually have little of import to say on mailinglists and messageboards, too. But I mainly watch Farscape simply to empathize (mostly with John, but also with the others). I'm not a very intellectual viewer at all, I hardly ever dissect anything.
Anyone who's been following my contributions to the recent LOM debates, and especially, I think, this post, will find a certain irony here. ;-)
Actually, these two posts do *not* contradict each other, although they very much seem to. Yes: for me, being a fan is primarily about emotional reactions to a source text. I've never been one to post long, involved analyses and interpretations after watching or reading something. My preferred fannish mode is squee. Often slightly cerebral squee, but squee nevertheless.
However - my way of deciding what it *is* that I'm emotionally reacting to, i.e. my way of watching, decoding, making sense of a text - now *that* is analytical.
It's not *conscious* analysis, though - i.e. I don't watch tv going 'hmmmm, that line the actor just said means that A is the case, but the camera angle and the lighting indicate that B must be the case, so if I put that together with A, we get C" or something. It's an almost entirely subconscious process - it could be compared to reading: you don't have to decipher each letter consciously and then laboriously put letters together to form words, and then put words together to form sentences; there's no conscious effort involved in all this at all for a reader beyond primary school level. I 'read' tv shows like I read a written text - deciphering a multitude of signs without conscious effort. And, maybe because I have a good deal of training in literary analysis and also film analysis, I usually really get a fairly 'accurate' version of what a film or show is trying to say out of this subconscious process - unless it's by David Lynch, perhaps *g*. (I know it's popular to say that all interpretation is subjective, but there are limits to that; 'anything goes' is *not* a legitimate approach to literary analysis. Most texts have a fairly definite core.)
Well, and once I've done that subconscious analysis, I react. That reaction is what my fannish life centres on, usually. However, my awareness of the rules that I use in my subconscious decoding of the text allows me to *also* analyse *why* a certain text has a certain effect on me, should I feel a need to do so. To return to the example of reading: while you may not need to put conscious effort into deciphering words anymore, you *can* 'analyse' a word by identifying its component letters, and you'll notice if one of the letters is in the wrong place, too - even if you'd subcconsciously put it in the right place when reading at normal speed.
Usually, as long as a show (or other text) I'm 'in a fannish relationship with' ;-) works the way it's supposed to work, I don't have to do any conscious analysis. If it works, I take it for granted, and concentrate on the squee. I'm also perfectly capable of ignoring smaller flaws, as long as they don't interfere heavily with my fannish focus (usually: my focus character's characterisation and development).
However, if something like the ending of LOM happens, something that just screams 'wrong! wrong! wrong!' at me on *so* many levels, and most importantly, completely destroys my focus character; then I do feel a need to make the analysis conscious and explicit.
(Would like to continue, but I need to shower and go to bed, it's already midnight... Maybe tomorrow.)
