core response 01_jacqueline maldonado

I clearly and frequently talk about what keeps me from watching “new” things. Lucky for all of us, Henry Jenkins has reminded me of another glaring fear: the fandom. Granted not every series has an in-depth following like Star Trek, the modern MCU, or Harry Potter, but every piece of fan promotion for a series of any capacity calls attention to the group behind it. As frequented by Jenkins there always lies a sense of ownership from members of a fandom, a personal stake and “commitment to some degree of conformity to the original program material as well as a perceived right to evaluate the legitimacy of any use of those materials” (486).

While fans may ingrain themselves in the direct narrative through a “fix it fic”—to which Jenkins touches in discussions of fan writers describing themselves as “repairing the damage” of the original programming’s issues regarding female character work—the material as flawed as it may be to them becomes as much their intellectual property as the actual creators (479). The content at hand stands to feed a “desire to remain faithful to those aspects of the show that first captured their interests” contributing to the poaching metaphor Jenkins runs the essay on and the ultimate toxicity that underlines the very existence of a fandom (486). Ownership over fiction dominos into ownership of a world and a decided status quo from which a fandom may break apart like a dispute in the crypto blockchain. Interestingly, the very communities and hive-minds early fandoms were built both on and against seem to have been thwarted; every show is fraught with the normally harmless shipping arguments, opposing character analysis, and even random headcanons.

The resulting participatory culture, while contributing to another means of consumption and entertainment, stands as much as a roadblock to a series as a bad trailer. My hesitance from starting Wednesday comes less from genuine disinterest and more the fear of what’s going to happen when I choose to ruin my heteronormative friends' view of the series and very clearly ship Wednesday Adams with the blonde chick in the pink coat, like, ugh, the power of romantic foils right guys?

While the concept of fandom ownership of original material may serve as the basis for modern communities and spectator practices, the reality is it has dangerously evolved as much as any organized sport. This is coming from someone who spent their high school years apart of the Netflix Voltron reboot fandom, a group that somehow both saved and demolished the trajectory of an entire series with a single homoerotic analysis. Jenkins is nothing but correct in his analysis of this growing culture along pure viewership, but the inevitability of participatory culture has its drawbacks when you just want to watch a show as it exists and not as it stands as a cultural object. 

But, more importantly, I must ask: who else here ships Kirk and Spock?