Adjuncting

This semester, I am adjuncting an online-only science fiction class at a nearby university that caters to full-time workers, bringing my number of simultaneously held paid jobs to three. Because I am primarily a freelancer, I think of things in freelance terms: maximizing money earned, minimizing time and effort. It all comes down to the hourly rate you command. When I taught before, I agonized about every decision: what books, what organizational scheme. This time? Not so much.

Here’s a rundown of how I approached adjuncting.

1. It’s not about the money.

Everyone knows this, right? Nobody adjuncts for money; the pay is pathetic. I ran the numbers. I make more money teaching aerobics.

But working for the university system has its rewards: they take taxes out for me. That is a huge bonus for quarterly-tax-paying me. I decided it was worth it because it provided me with practical online teaching experience, which I may be able to parley into something later. It also connects me with some colleagues, thus expanding the academic side of my network.

2. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

The first thing I did when I got the online class was contact a colleague, a fellow member of the Science Fiction Research Association who regularly teaches online-only classes, and ask him for advice. I was able to modify my colleague’s syllabus: he’d found the perfect textbook to replace lecture and to organize the readings.

I’d done prep work before—and I’m an expert in my field. I’ve taught face-to-face SF classes many times. I had a pile of desk copies. Rather than agonizing over every title, I selected an anthology with historical breadth, and novels that I knew well that were short, famous, or both. It was easy to fit readings into the textbook’s rubric.

Forget the students and their reading load; it was all about me. Bonus: I won’t have to rewrite modules and quizzes from scratch next time I teach the course. I can just reimport the entire class into the online teaching system, Blackboard, and tweak it.

3. Don’t be afraid to drop things that aren’t working.

I spent hours—hours!—doing link roundups for every unit, to provide extra sources for the students to look at, to make up for the lack of face-to-face opportunities for questions and discussion. I even offered students the opportunity to do the link roundups themselves in lieu of another assignment, because creating them was so enlightening (no takers, alas). I found audio recordings of primary sources! I found cool YouTube vids on aspects of the science! I found gorgeous illustrated covers! I linked to authors’ personal Web sites! I found other teachers’ pages on the texts!

My students didn’t look at any of it.

Similarly, I kept online chat office hours, except the interface was annoyingly buggy and only one student visited me—and that was to, well, chat, not talk about the class.

I no longer create link roundups, and my office hours are now by appointment.

4. Go for generalities, not specifics.

In my midterm survey, students asked for study guides. Study guides? I thought. (I had linked to some in the links roundups, but see above.) I dutifully wrote two study guides, only to discover that they prepared you to take the quizzes, which are open book and open note. So it duplicated effort: I had two tools for a single learning objective.

I inferred that a request for study guides really indicated a desire for strategies to know how to pinpoint what is important in a text. So I wrote a general 2-page study guide for our nonfiction book. It can be used to help understand what is important in every chapter. And I stopped providing specific prompts for the discussion board posts, because it was constraining discussion around a single topic. Instead, I replaced it with a single general question: “What insights into the week’s subject stories did the reading from the textbook provide?” I requested that student responses consider why I assigned a particular story to a particular unit.

It’s the student’s job to link the specifics of the readings to the generalities of the unit, not mine. Once I realized this simple fact, everything fell into place. I provide the overview and organizational structure, and they populate it. And I guide them as needed.

5. It’s an online class, but don’t assume online knowledge and skill.

About half my students don’t seem to have reliable Internet access, and some don’t even have computers. I had these Grand Ideas of promoting media literacy, but my students seem barely able to keep up with the minimum weekly requirements: taking a quiz on the reading, and making two discussion posts. I’d love to ask them to create artwork, or do a group report on works derived from Wells’s War of the Worlds, or, heck, even do link roundups, but with this population of students? It’s not going to happen. And that’s okay.

Similarly, I had hoped to prepare slide shows and record lectures for presentation online, but the university’s accessibility requirements put the kibosh on that. I am supposed to provide all such media to the university at least 2 weeks ahead of time, so that they may create DVDs of content to give to the students upon request—and I’m honest enough to say that this kind of forethought is not going to happen.

6. Caveats

I am able to cobble together all these jobs because I am on my husband’s health insurance. This puts me in a huge position of privilege, one I know is not shared by many adjuncts. And I’m also privileged because I do not rely solely on adjuncting for my income. As copyediting work increasingly goes offshore, I have to decide how I want to proceed: retrain, perhaps in the fitness industry? write? get a job teaching? accept an in-house job, which would require my moving away from my husband? Part of my decision to adjunct a class came from my exploration of these possibilities.

Despite my relatively privileged position, the drawbacks of adjuncts affect me as much as anybody. I get no special library permissions or access to locked library holdings. Even if my class had a face-to-face component, I wouldn’t get an office, even a shared one. I feel isolated from the larger university. And I engage with everyone via e-mail asynchronously. The only reason I’ve had contact this semester with my department and the dean is, I had to handle a plagiarism case and was required to do considerable paperwork.

The problem with my current workload is that it is crushing. I thought that adjuncting would permit me to reconnect with the text-based, English-teacher side of me, but I’m too overwhelmed with keeping my head above water to make more meaning out of the experience—a situation I imagine many adjuncts are in. To free up time, I’ve dropped every single thing I can, and I’ve streamlined so extensively that I can streamline no more. I’ve ruthlessly applied Getting Things Done techniques to freelancing and teaching. I’ve sacrificed some interpersonal engagement on the altar of expedience.

However, one thing has become clear: I need to decide how adjuncting fits into my larger goals. I suspect it may not fit at all; my goal is not, and has never been, to seek a tenure-track job. Considering the poor rate of pay, I would probably be better off teaching a few extra aerobics classes a week—at least that helps me with my presentation and personal fitness goals.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. The image by is Ms. Tina and is copyrighted under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. If you duplicate the post, please also copy the pictures and host them yourself. This post was originally written on November 25, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

In which I teach an online class

This semester, I am teaching an online-only science fiction literature class at the University of Maine at Augusta as an adjunct. I requested to teach the class for a number of reasons, some having to do with my day job: copyediting medical manuscripts. If I want to go further in the copyediting field, positioning myself as an educator, particularly one with experience in distance learning, may go a long way. Partially, it’s an attempt to bring together some disparate threads of my life. I have been surprised that people find what I do as a day-to-day job interesting, and certain intersections between publishing and my academic interests are valued. So teaching a SF class may end up bringing together literature and copyediting in some intriguing ways, just like I’ve been able to link copyediting and my extensive experience in the publishing world with the academic journal I coedit, Transformative Works and Cultures. In addition, I can see the writing on the wall: copyediting is increasingly being offshored, and I may soon run out of work. Although I am pretty sure that I would prefer not to teach full time (although maybe this class will let me know otherwise!), I would welcome the opportunity to teach occasionally and work with topics that interest me.

I last taught in 2002–2003, face-to-face English classes on the topic of SF that met once a week. I taught two semesters in a row at two different local universities. I like adjuncting because I get to teach in my field, SF literature, without having to teach service classes like Composition or Intro to Literature. I’m particularly excited to be teaching again at UMA because I really like the student body: UMA is a nonresidential school, all their face-to-face classes meet once a week, and the student body tends to be less the traditional 18-year-old just out of high school and more the full-time worker who has decided to get a college degree, and they’re doing so one class at a time. The ideas that the student body comes up with are much different than the ones I see when I teach a more traditional student population.

Before I was permitted to teach an online class, I had to take an online class about teaching online. This class was organized through Blackboard. I found the experience valuable: I learned how to structure the class, how to handle Blackboard’s administrative tools having to do with various sorts of assignments and quizzes, and how to deal with asynchronous discussion. However, I was definitely not impressed with Blackboard as a tool. It’s nonintuitive (and, at least on my computer, agonizingly slow), and it seeks to replicate certain aspects of teaching without really pushing the envelope with possibilities inherent in online pedagogy. Students are familiar with Blackboard because it is used for their other classes, and there is tech support provided by actual university employees, so I, as the instructor, won’t have to troubleshoot.

I had mad, wild ideas about how to incorporate some of Henry Jenkins’s core competencies for engaging in participatory culture (read about them here), which involved choosing a text we were reading in class and studying remixes—perhaps with students even making remixes of their own! (Yes, we’re reading that classic upon which a number of remixes have been based: Wells’s The War of the Worlds.) I wanted to use the online experience as a metaphor for SFnal engagement with technology, and I wanted to bring into the class my own interest in derivative artworks.

However, on the basis of the feedback I received from fellow instructors in the online class, and on the basis of certain pesky requirements having to do with access (notably, making available to students a DVD of any visual media I might want to incorporate, such as me lecturing on something—this requires about 2 weeks’ lead time, which I am, realistically speaking, not capable of), I radically ramped back my desires and expectations. The class, as it currently stands, is largely text based, and it will revolve around reading and discussion. The feedback I got from my contact person indicates that such English classes are the norm, so the way it’s currently structured will be acceptable to the students.

I’m thus going to use this class as a test, to see how far I could go in the future. For example, rather than Blackboard, I would like to use certain Google tools, such as Google Documents, that permit collaboration; and I like the idea of a public class blog. Some instructors ask students to edit or create Wikipedia entries, thus incorporating research into the class while simultaneously letting students see exactly how much weight should be given to Wikipedia when considering it as a source. I hope to incorporate some of these elements into the class, but I’m playing a wait-and-see game first, so I can assess the students’ computer access, comfortableness with other media, and ability to generate non-text-based transformative artworks.

The class as it currently stands revolves around Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom, second revised edition. This book is a proxy for lecture. It’s a short, simple book that defines SF, provides its history, and then delves into topics such as race and gender. In addition, I’ve chosen Thomas Shippey’s The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories for our short-story anthology. It’s not that recent, but it’s in print, it has a nice historical overview, and I’ve used it before—plus I’ve shared beers with Tom and he’s really cool. Add to that five short novels, and that’s the reading for the class. Students are required to make two discussion posts a week, a long one on a prompt I write about the reading and a shorter one in response to another student. The midterm and final will be longish essays on a broad prompt. And staying current (attendance, keeping up with the reading) will be assessed by weekly machine-graded quizzes. The overall goals of the class are to read some classics in the field and come to some understanding of what SF is, and to consider SF narrative as cultural product.

I must acknowledge my colleague, experienced community college instructor and online pedagogy expert Craig Jacobsen, for providing me with advice and a sample syllabus, and for turning me on to Roberts.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 24, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

Two very different fan productions: “The Hunt for Gollum” and “Battlestar Redactica”

1. Introduction

[1.1] Two fairly high-profile transformative fan artworks hit my radar a while back, and I’m finally getting around to blogging about them. Both are firmly within fannish traditions, but they have very different sensibilities: “The Hunt for Gollum” and “Battlestar Redactica.” I encourage everyone to view them both, to compare and contrast. Both fan productions are available to view for free.

2. The Hunt for Gollum

[2.1] Chris Bouchard’s “The Hunt for Gollum” is a 40-minute live-action vid (it calls itself an “independent film”) with a cinematic feel and a mostly male production team. Gollum comes out of the Lord of the Rings film fandom, as opposed to the book fandom, and the production is geared to evoke Jackson’s films. Indeed, the production values are fabulous: wonderful acting, great costumes, original incidental music, the whole nine yards. The script fills in some missing time: Aragon tracks Gollum to find the truth about the Ring. The plot elements are pulled from Tolkien’s Appendices.

[2.2] As a fan artwork, this is in the relatively unusual genre of live-action fan vids [1], and it’s further rarified by being incredibly slick, more pro than fan. In fact, this short film straddles the pro/fan divide. On the pro side, it’s clear from remarks on the Web site that the people on the team are either professionals in the film industry or they want to be, and the level of excellence reflects these aspirations. Their dedicated URL also signals their serious intent. Further, Gollum’s Web site notes that the production team came to some sort of unexplained understanding with the Tolkien estate. All these signal professionalism.

[2.3] On the fan side, the story it tells is pure missing scene, a well-known fan genre whereby the fan artwork seeks to fill in a gap in the canonical source, usually in terms of story or character—here, story. Further, the cinematographic sensibility is clearly meant to evoke Jackson’s films; the final shot of the film only clinches it. The fannish transformation is of an original cast and script into a Jackson-esque tag, yet it is clearly a derivative story (because from Tolkien) told in a derivative way (because channeling Jackson). Also embedding it in the fan realm is its disclaimer, which, in fannish tradition, emphasizes the nonprofit nature of the endeavor.

[2.4] One important thing about Gollum is that it can be viewed completely independently of the films and it makes perfect sense. Like all derivative texts, it gains extra layers of meaning when viewed in conjunction with the primary source, although in this case, the story isn’t really crucially necessary. The extra meaning I obtain upon viewing isn’t some insight into Aragon’s or Gollum’s characters, or some “aha! so that’s how they found out that information!” moment that made explicable a formerly confusing bit of the film. Rather, the meaning I obtain has to do with faithfulness to cinematography and world building. For me, it’s a primarily visual fan artwork about world building meant to dazzle—more homage than site of extratextual meaning. A die-hard fan embedded in the LOTR film fandom might read it completely differently (and more usefully).

3. Battlestar Redactica

[3.1] CVM_Productions’ “Battlestar Redactica” is a rerendering of the last half-season of Battlestar Galactica, created by a single person who recut clips together, thus greatly changing the story. The artwork is made up of two vids of recut aired footage: part 1, “Battlestar Redactica: A Fan-edited Mutiny” (1:46:34), and part 2, “Battlestar Redactica: A Fan-edited Resurrection” (1:09:12). Short-form fan recuts—particularly of silly TV or film trailers—are popular on YouTube. Longer fan recuts such as this, based on TV shows, are more rare, although there is a site dedicated to mostly movie recuts, Fanedit.org. In the long-form genre, the best-known example is undoubtedly Mike J. Nichols’s 2000/2001 The Phantom Edit, a fan recut of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace that hit the media hard and itself spawned a thousand edits [source].

[3.2] CVM_Productions credits several people who helped her by providing feedback, but this artwork was not created by a team of people, as was Gollum. Rather, it was created by a fan embedded in her larger fan community, and like many such artworks, it itself has resulted in at least one derivative fan work: a music vid about Redactica’s version of Kara Thrace, one of the characters whose story is greatly altered. Further, CVM_Productions has placed her Redactica-specific site on LiveJournal, a friendly home to various fan communities. In short, Redactica feels fannish to me in a way that Gollum does not.

[3.3] Where Gollum is additive to story, Redactica is transformative of story: the tagline of the Web page associated with the artwork reads, “I reject your Battlestar and substitute my own!” CVM_Productions took the last half of season 4 of BSG and recut it to a preferred reading. Certain plot elements, notably the romance between two major characters, are excised altogether; other elements are downplayed. Some scenes are reordered to place certain plot elements next to each other, or to indicate altered reaction. CVM_Productions has posted extensively about the journey she took creating the two vids that comprise the Redactica, thus providing valuable insight into her artistic process, and I recommend reading the text associated with the artwork after viewing it.

[3.4] One big change in Redactica is the ending: CVM_Productions ran out of footage to articulate her desired ending, so she obliquely hints at it through montage. Of this new ending, CVM_Productions writes,

[3.5] The fan-edit closes to a new montage of modern technology and our relationship to it designed to offer a more balanced look than simply dancing robots. This is not intended necessarily to clarify the nature of our relationship to the Colonials (although it may do, if you choose), but rather to acknowledge there is one, even if purely metatextual, because their questions are also ours. [source]

[3.6] Redactica can be watched on its own and will make sense, but on the download page, CVM_Productions clearly indicates that the recuts ought to be viewed in context. She places the fan vids in a viewing sequence with extratextual elements. For example, for part 1 of Redactica, she suggests that first one watch 4.11 “Sometimes a Great Notion,” then watch the “What the Frak Happened Official Recap,” and finally watch the fan recut. Informed watchers will get far more out of the recut because the point is that it is different. The reworking of the character of Kara Thrace is particularly audaciously delicious when held against the canonical version.

4. Conclusion

[4.1] I can’t help but notice a big gap between these two fan texts. I like both of them for the obvious care and thought that went into creating them. Both of these artworks prove that derivative fan labor is a labor of love. Of the two, I prefer Redactica because I understand the context and community it came out of. It’s speaking to me as a fellow fan, not really the larger world. It privileges my knowledge of the canonical text. It assumes I have baseline knowledge, and it unapologetically builds on that. It’s…well…private.

[4.2] Gollum, on the other hand, is public: it is meant to be viewed, in isolation, in a public forum, and although knowledge of the films and the story add a layer of meaning, ultimately, this fan artwork is just an extra. Yes, it’s a beautiful extra, but it doesn’t tell me anything new about Jackson’s films, or about Aragon, or about Gollum. Perhaps it gives me some context, but I think that at the end of the day, I’m okay without the context. Redactica, on the other hand, transformed me by transforming the text: it showed me new possibilities inherent in the canonical narrative.

5. Note

1. I have personal experience with live-action fan vids: I was (sort of) a member of Mini-UNIT Minstrels (MUM), who followed Chicago’s The Federation in silly derivative sensibility (think Doctor Who meets the Monty Python crew). I published a paper about these vids after interviewing the cast and crew, a very grad student–y “let’s apply Jenkins’s textual poachers theory to these artworks.” (In my defense, I was a grad student.) Until Gollum, live-action fan vids had fallen off my radar, maybe because nobody has asked me to play the crucial lynchpin role of “secretary,” as I did for MUM, but now I find myself intrigued again. Please comment if you know of any current fan-run production teams who are working on live-action fan vids!

Post slightly updated on August 15, 2009, to add fanedit.org URL as per comment below.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 14, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

A review of Torchwood: Children of Earth

It goes without saying, doesn’t it? I’ll say it anyway: major spoilers. As I write this, only the first episode has aired in the USA, but this covers the full five eps.

1. Children of Earth

Earth’s children [1]

[1.1] I just rewatched, in one long jag, all five eps of Torchwood: Children of Earth, which comprises season 3 of the show. I laughed. I cried. I shook my fist at the screen because something happened that I really, really did not like at all. (More about that under the cut.) If you liked seasons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, all I can say is, it won’t prepare you for season 3, because the stakes are higher and the themes are darker: children, love, commitment, duty, honor. This is the program that had something real to say, in season 2 in particular, about life and death, but T:COE takes the promise of the first two seasons to a whole new level.

[1.2] Season 3 of Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, aired in the UK on 5 consecutive days from July 6 to July 10, 2009. It began airing on July 20 on BBC America, and it will be available on DVD on July 28. (Why, yes, I have preordered my DVD from Amazon!) The plot, in a nutshell, is thus: Aliens announce, by seizing control of and speaking through all the children in the world at once, that they are coming. They want something—something to do with our children. And it not going to be good.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Is there Life on Mars?

Warning: Major spoilers. Read at your own risk.

Life on Mars (US)

[1.1] The burning question on everyone’s lips is: is the US version of Life on Mars better than the original UK version? Ah, you ask such difficult questions.