Why the ending of Life on Mars US fails

My previous post on LOM US is here.

1. Life on Mars US finale

[1.1] Several months after the April 1, 2009, finale of the US version of Life on Mars, I have finally gotten around to finishing out the season. Although I am a big fan of the UK version, the US version didn’t really catch me, and after the first midseason story arc wrapped up, I didn’t prioritize watching it—and I became even less concerned when I learned that the show had been canceled.

[1.2] Thus I didn’t watch the finale in a timely manner, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. Yet out of a sense of obligation, coupled with a friend writing and saying, “OMG, what did you think of the LOM US finale?”, I finally sat down to view it, after, perhaps shockingly, remaining totally spoiler-free. And oh my. The ending…sucked. I actually spoke to the screen: “No!” I screamed, rendered incoherent with betrayal. “You…you…you idiots! I cannot believe you did that!”

[1.3] Let me say it again: I cannot believe they did that. It would have been better if the entire team had died in a blaze of glory on Gauda Prime. Now that’s a series ending!

[1.4] After the jump, I’ll tell you exactly why I think the finale for the US version of Life on Mars betrayed the entire setup of the series. Obviously there are major spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.

What to watch in British SF/F TV

1. British TV

[1.1] At the SFRA 2009 meeting the weekend of June 11, I was on a panel moderated by my fearless coeditor, Craig Jacobsen, about what to watch for SF TV. The panel was quite large, so Craig held us to a strict 2-minute time limit. He asked us to prepare remarks about which shows were must-watch shows, and why. Here, I present my choices and briefly explain what I find interesting and worthy about the shows.

[1.2] Because I am particularly interested in British TV, I staked out this area as my own, leaving the usual suspects—Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Heroes—to others. But during our panel’s conversation, I was able to articulate why I had specifically earmarked certain shows as being of interest. Sadly, it wasn’t because of the shows’ uniform excellence: some are virtually unwatchable. Rather, what I found interesting had to do with intersections of these texts with other texts. This makes sense. I am, after all, interested in shared worlds and fan artifacts, and these pro texts feel like fan works: derivative crack that says something about the originary text.

[1.3] After the jump is my roundup of fun-to-think-about shows (if not fun-to-watch shows, unless you like things that are so bad, they’re good). Several haven’t aired in the United States yet. I discuss the following: Demons, Spooks Code 9, Merlin, Ashes to Ashes, and Primeval. And I briefly mention the Doctor Who franchise: Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane Adventures.

Fandom research methods

Madeline Ashby has started a blog that aims to round up details about research going on in fandom. Interested in seeing what sorts of questionnaires researchers are using? Wondering whether someone else already taken that great idea and started a project? Fandom Research wants to be the go-to place to answer these questions. It’s early days yet for the site, but the more people who contribute, the more useful the site will be.

Today I contributed a guest post entitled Fandom research methods that discusses, among other things, AOIR’s ethics guide, which is the de facto guide for people working on research in human subjects via the Internet in the social sciences. While writing it, I was reminded that the impetus of many guidelines is to prevent the subjects of study from harm, and to ensure that they understand exactly what will be done with the responses they provide.

“Verbotene Liebe,” soap operas, fansubbing, and YouTube

1. Introduction

[1.1] Fansubs—fans who subtitle TV shows, DVDs, anime, and other visual texts, as a labor of love, for other members of their community—are mostly associated with anime, but fansubs translate all kinds of texts, be they the latest episode of Lost for release in China or a Japanese-language anime series subtitled in English. Although the legality of this activity is questionable, the work of fansubbers serves to promote a media source that many viewers would not otherwise have had access to. Early fansubbed anime in particular permitted this art form to get a toehold in the American market [1]. Their transformative work makes the text explicable and available. Without fansubbing, it’s virtually impossible to access the text. The language barrier means that some mediation is required to permit understanding.

[1.2] Although I was peripherally aware of the fansub phenomenon, I’m not a big fan of anime, and so I thought little about it—until I discovered Ollian. Ollian (also known as Chrolli), or the Oliver/Christian homosexual relationship on German soap opera Verbotene Liebe (VL; Forbidden Love, 1995– ), is made explicable for me and all the other fans by a kind fansubber who creates Ollian clips and uploads them to YouTube. The fansubber cuts together a day’s worth of soap opera plot, focusing only on Christian and Oliver and excising all else. The condensed plots, which are usually about 7 to 9 minutes long and which are sorted by air date, are available two ways: in the original German, and subtitled in English [2]. I have found the subtitled versions absolutely riveting and have spent many happy hours clicking through the carefully ordered, dated clips to advance the narrative.

IP and Gender convention remarks

I gave my talk at the IP and Gender convention, and luckily, Rebecca Tushnet blogged the entire thing, in real time, as it was happening. You can read her summaries of everybody’s remarks here:

Keynote
part 1
part 2 (includes my talk)
part 3

In addition, the IP/Gender Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property’s official Web site at American University College of Law is here. The panels and remarks were recorded and may be audiocast or webcast, so do please check the official site, because they will put up the content shortly.

I’ll put up a bare-bones outline of my paper in a bit, but Tushnet’s post certainly well summarizes what I talked about!

Catherine Tosenberger talks about “Supernatural”

This is cross-posted to my LJ here.

Sequential Tart’s Suzette Chan has just published an interview with acafan Catherine Tosenberger entitled “Supernatural love: Catherine Tosenberger on Sam and Dean’s transformative love story.”

Tosenberger published an essay on Supernatural in the first issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) entitled “‘The epic love story of Sam and Dean’: Supernatural, queer readings, and the romance of incestuous fan fiction,” and it is among the most viewed articles on the site: 11,020 views as I write this. She is also guest editing a special Supernatural issue of TWC entitled “Saving People, Hunting Things,” planned for spring 2010 (call for papers here, and fannish meta is absolutely welcome).

In ST’s interview, Tosenberger talks a bit about TWC and why it fills an important niche, and she discusses fan engagement with the show. Her call for papers for TWC’s special SPN issue is linked too! She speaks generally about such things as fan fiction, so the article is a good, informed overview of topics of interest to people interested more generally in fan studies, especially those just entering the field.

But for most of the interview, Tosenberger discusses specific things about SPN, such as characterization, fan engagement (and yes, she touches on J2 RPS), and story arcs, including a season 4 arc that dealt head-on with what she calls the main characters’ “emotionally incestuous relationship.” The show’s tight focus on the two main characters provides an emotional center to the show:

When you talk about that externalization, that shows up on Supernatural in the monsters and the ghosts they fight, but it’s always commenting back on Sam and Dean’s own relationship. The concept of two guys who are in some way, shape or form isolated from the rest of society and have to depend on each other is a really common factor in a lot of classic slash fandom, that sense of isolation and the way it can break down the traditional masculine heterosexual barriers. [...] But Sam and Dean? It ratchets it up several notches: they are each other’s entire universes.

The show’s big success, I think, comes from the dual nature of the storytelling: in addition to compelling individual stories that are themselves arranged into season-long arcs, it is also emotionally rich and complex. If a story doesn’t work on the level of story, then the satisfaction that watchers gain from the show’s emotional aspect may suffice.

ST’s interview came at the perfect time: last Thursday’s episode, 4.18 “The Monster at the End of This Book,” was a fabulous meta episode, with the first 9 or 10 minutes of the show being about fan reaction to the series. It directly addresses Sam girls, Dean girls, slash fanfic (Dean: “What’s a slash fan?” Sam: “As in Sam slash Dean. Together.”) edging into Wincest (Dean: “They do know we’re brothers, right?” Sam: “Doesn’t seem to matter.”), and the brothers’ emotional intimacy.

I am convinced that at about 9:15p last Thursday night, that sharp keening noise heard up and down the East Coast was the squee of fangirls, exclaiming aloud in utter joy that SPN knew all about them, and valued SPN fandom enough to write it into the ep as homage and not as freak show. (It doesn’t hurt that we get to see Sam and Dean pretend to be fanboys.) The episode is also intriguing because it’s one of those metaepisodes, where someone is writing existence into being (you can read a spoilery plot synopsis here). I’ve seen this trope used over and over, and I always like its self-reflexivity, but SPN does it one better by cleverly embedding it into the show’s angel–demon milieu…and by talking about fans OMG, even giving a fangirl a face and voice: that of Keegan Connor Tracy. But this isn’t just any fangirl: it’s a fangirl who is fan while also being producer and gatekeeper. She has power by having something Sam and Dean need, and she isn’t going to give it away to anyone unworthy.

In addition, Entertainment Weekly’s latest issue, dated April 10, 2009, has a SPN article. The article focuses more on season 4’s angel–demon arc, which resulted in a 13% audience increase (30), and notes that executive producer Eric Kripke, not to mention the two leads, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, want to end the show after 5 seasons. Although the emotional bond between the brothers is a hugely important aspect of the show, it’s clear—and EW even comes out and says this in general spoilers about the season 4 finale—that the two of them are going to do battle. This article is not as respectful to fans as I might like, choosing instead to go the extreme route so common in mainstream journalism: the article provides an example of a stalkery fan who conned her way onto the set, and it says of the whole incest fan fiction thing, “There’s also a unique and very creepy subset of romantic fan fiction dedicated to siblings Sam [...] and Dean [...] called ‘Wincest’—the less said about it the better” (30).

Actually not, as Tosenberger’s interview makes plain. The more said about that, the better, if you ask me: the whole notion of Wincest begs for analysis—like this remark by Tosenberger:

This show is putting the incest really front and centre. In the first two seasons, whenever they referenced the Sam/Dean subtext, it was always in this jokey way. It was always, a-ha-ha, the boys are being taken for a gay couple: isn’t that funny? It was always there, but it was always played for laughs. But this season, it’s starting to get deadly serious. “Sex and Violence” didn’t play off the connections between Dean’s love for Sam, and how every single other model of love that we saw the siren invoking was romantic, sexual love. It just played it absolutely straight-faced and very tragic and miserable.

I had to be dragged into SPN kicking and screaming, but now that I’m caught up, I’m with Tosenberger and the other fans of the show: TV is the best genre for densely layered, emotionally rich, long-form storytelling, and these texts show us that it’s possible to link storytelling with nuanced, changeable human characters. Thanks to ST for running the interview, and thanks to Tosenberger for taking on the role of acafan ambassador.

Female fan culture and intellectual property

I’m delighted to say that I’ll be presenting at the the Sixth Annual IP/Gender Conference, “Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property,” held in collaboration with American University’s Center for Social Media, at the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, DC. The conference runs Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24. More information about the conference is available here.

My topic is “Intellectual Property, Transformation, and Academic Journals,” and I’ll be talking about how Transformative Works and Cultures deals with intellectual property in terms of the copyright the journal uses and the way the journal handles things like embedded videos, screenshots, and photographs. TWC bucks many established trends in the publishing industry, from our insistence on open access to our Web-only presentation, and I’ll be talking about why that is important and interesting—not only for access in the field of media studies, but also as a way to shake off the print-first mind-set so prevalent in the publishing industry.

Registration information is available here.

The evening of April 23 begins the conference, with a showing of multimedia works by conference attendees. On April 24, there will be a full day of presentations and discussions. Here is the listing of those presenting:

Ann Bartow, University of South Carolina | Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College | Casey Fiesler, Vanderbilt University | Melissa Tatum, University of Arizona | Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa |Tisha Turk, University of Minnesota | Ann Shalleck, Washington College of Law | Laura Murray, Queen’s University | Jordan Gilbertson, University of La Verne, College of Law| Karen Hellekson, Transformative Works and Cultures | Peter Jaszi, Washington College of Law | Kristina Busse, University of South Alabama | Abigail De Kosnik, University of California, Berkeley | Zahr Said Stauffer, University of Virginia School of Law

Fan studies 101

This originally appeared in SFRA Review No. 287 (Winter 2009) as part of the “101″ series, which seeks to provide a broad contextual overview to various fields of interest to SF scholars. The complete issue is available for download here.

The recent explosion on the Internet of fanlike activity has given fans and fan studies a higher profile. When journalists and media studies scholars speak about fans engaging on the Internet, high school students spending their time on FanFiction.net, or fans of soap operas gathering at an online forum to discuss their favorite plotlines, they are engaging in fan studies, even if they don’t seem to know it. Web 2.0—that is, an interactive, networked Web, not a static, read-only Web—lends itself well to visible fan participation, and thanks to an explosion of copyright-ignoring, music-downloading, remix-happy Gen N–ers, interactivity of fans within and outside communities has generated a lot of journalism and scholarship. Fan studies as a field is still scrambling to catch up. It’s done relevant work on fan-created works and fan communities over the years that is being ignored by current scholars, and those in other fields who tangentially run across fans seem unaware that an entire body of scholarship already exists to study fans and fan artifacts. In a parallel activity, women-dominated, old-style active fans and their contributions are now in the process of being erased by studies of (male) online fandom, although recuperative work is underway to write histories of these fans and preserve their artworks.

TWC No. 2 released

Transformative Works and Cultures No. 2 has been released! Please visit our special Games issue here.

The next issue will be a general (that is to say, unthemed) issue.

Calls for papers have been released for two special issues: “Saving People, Hunting Things,” about the popular TV show Supernatural (spring 2010), guest edited by Catherine Tosenberger (CFP here); and “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (spring 2011), on the topic of history, guest edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein (CFP here).

Philip K. Dick award

I’m pleased to say I was asked to sit on the committee/jury for the 2009 Philip K. Dick award, which is given for the best novel originally published in paperback. It’s given annually at Norwescon. If you’re interested in past winners, Wikipedia has a list here.