(no subject)

[fan_eunice]

Awesome weekend with mresundance and if you're not jealous you SHOULD BE. Because there was Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and I got to pimp him into Community. Also, being with actual internet meant being able to download what I have missed of this season's Community so my plan for the rest of today is to catch up. And then to actually work on my CVV vid some more once there is less glare on my monitor.

Anyway, random thought/question bearing no relation to awesome weekend. I have made no secret of my irritation at the tendency to talk about fandom as though fandom/being fannish=fic. One of the reasons I started kind of avoiding fandom wide meta discussions, really, is getting annoyed with how other methods of being fannish and/or creative within fandom get treated as, I dunno, like sidelines or supplementary to fic when that simply isn't true for many of us.

Which leads me to a thing I have noticed and been pondering. That although I know quite a few people who started out writing fic and then took up vidding, or always did both, what I haven't really seen is people who started in vidding and then later started writing fic in addition. And several I can think of who don't even really read it at all. I know I go extremely long (sometimes years) stretches where I don't read any (or very little fic) at all, and it doesn't have very much impact on my fannishness either way. Which kinda got me to wondering about why there seems to be crossover one way and not really the other, and if that's also true for other creative expressions of fannishness that are *not* fic, and how that affects the conversation/perception of what it means to be fannish.

I don't even know where I'm going with that ramble. Will shut up now and see if anyone has anything actually useful to say :)

Comments

[heresluck]

As you probably know (or could have guessed), I share this irritation big-time. I read some fic when I first got into fandom -- first XF and then BtVS -- but really my first love was meta (I know, you're shocked); the Annotated X-Files site was like catnip for me. When I found vids, my interest in fic pretty much evaporated (though my appetite for fandom-specific meta continues unabated, at least for certain shows). So -- yeah. Fic. Not my thing. And few things get me more riled up than characterizations of vids as fan fiction in video form, because -- no. I mean, sure, some individual vids, but the vast majority? Not so much.

Perhaps it's just the circles I move in, but I see fan art getting even less credit as fannish creative expression than vids. To say nothing of icons, which -- I have tried to make icons! That shit is hard! And LJ/DW-based fandom folks routinely use icons for all sorts of rhetorical purposes, from commentary to affiliation to self-identification. And yet that particular expression of fannishness gets surprisingly little attention in the fandom-wide meta I see.

As for why... I think that for most people fic seems much more do-able than vids at first. I mean, anyone doing internet fandom has to have a baseline comfort with text. All you need to write fic is a text editor or word processor; you don't even need an LJ, since you can post to ff.net or some other archive. Writing GOOD fic requires a lot more than that, obviously, but from a technical point of view there just aren't that many hurdles. Whereas even now that computers come with basic editing software and DVDs are widely available, I think it's not always immediately apparent how you get from raw materials to a vid. So if you want to participate in fandom and you aren't sure how to vid, fic is the most obvious way to do that. Of course there are other ways too -- helping maintain fandom infrastructure, for example, or writing recs -- but I think those are even less obvious and get even less attention and credit.

[klia]

I think that for most people fic seems much more do-able than vids at first.

I think so, too. You don't need much tech savvy to write and post fic, but even experienced vidders run into all kinds of weird tech issues that they need help fixing.

It's funny, someone in my circle (a writer who's never vidded) recently said she had a few complete vids in her head, and thought making them should be "as easy as sleeping." Oh, if only that were true.

[heresluck]

...making them should be "as easy as sleeping."

Well, I totally agree that it *should* be. And then, in this corner, we have reality.

Though I am amused by the possibilities of the sleep analogy. (Vid insomnia!) What would the equivalent of sleep deprivation be, I wonder?

[klia]

Well, I totally agree that it *should* be. And then, in this corner, we have reality.

Heh. Yeah, I've never understood why people who've never vidded seem to think it's so easy. Well, throwing clips at a timeline *is* easy -- if you sat a chimpanzee at an AVID machine, it would probably end up creating a vid -- but making GOOD vids? Not so much.

What would the equivalent of sleep deprivation be, I wonder?

Vid farr! \o/

[klia]

I started vidding before I ever wrote fic. I think I'm just more drawn to and interested in visual media, so I'm more likely to re/watch eps and movies than read fic. Sadly, I lack the imagination to do much writing, anyway.

[marymac]

Me also. Not that I do a lot of either, though I'd vid more if I could force my computer to, well, vid.

[klia]

Same here, though I have actual physical limitations. If only I could connect my brain to my computer -- now that would be awesome! *g*

[franzeska]

I'm trying to learn to draw right now, actually, after having given up art for years, especially drawing. I think, depending on how you got into fandom and when, fic may be a more obvious starting point just because until recently, it was hard to organize online communities around anything but text. (Though I don't think that's true any longer, and it certainly isn't true offline.)

The fandom=fic thing irritates me so much even when lipservice is paid to other "fanworks", since this totally leaves out the kind of obsessive canon-related non-art activities that led me to "fandom" in the first place.