Fandom Research

Please join me in welcoming Katie Freund to FandomResearch! When I was first putting the site together, I knew I would have to ask Katie for her input. She’s one of the first people I met in Toronto. I’ve watched her present on misconceptions about slash in Japan, and she’s helped me write pieces for Frames Per Second. This is another peek at Katie’s expertise, this time on fanvids, intertextuality, and how to read both as a researcher.

“It starts with a story, doesn’t it? And then you get the music to fit the pictures.”

“It’s more like visual fanfic, I think—“

“Yeah, exactly – it’s the story I see in my head when I hear the music… It’s taking it out of your head and putting it out there so other people can see it too.”

“It’s closer to making something like art, isn’t it? It’s drawing a picture for people, a visual text for them to follow.”

There are six of us crowded around a table stuffed with junk food and my single voice recorder in a hotel room in England. I am listening to a group of editors I am interviewing debate the origins of vidding, or fan-made remix videos at VidUKon, a fan convention. It’s a story, I am told, a visual version of fan fiction. It’s an individual’s imagination, their art: vids can be complex treatments of race or gender in popular television, in-depth examinations of certain characterscertain characters, or tributes to beloved shows now cancelled. But above all else, it’s fun.

If there’s one thing I have discovered researching this community, it’s that fans are extremely media literate. Among all the other things they do, the fanfiction and art and costumes, first and foremost they watch television and movies. In fact, as Jenkins (1992) argues, they re-watch the beloved shows over and over again. The products of fandom are the products of a deep engagement with their chosen medium, be it film, television, comics, cartoons, or even music. As they re-watch and immerse themselves in a multitude of sources, fans are able to make connections between texts, following writers, directors, and actors throughout their careers. Any and all media has potential to be included in this massive, intertextual “fanon” – the uniquely fannish interpretation of the original, or “canon” text.

Without professional training, vidders draw on their media and “fanon” experiences to edit together complex storylines, and it should be no surprise that vidders use the language of television to tell their stories. Through their extensive media knowledge, vidders come to be aware of the conventions of television genres, editing, music, and narrative in order to manipulate the original footage to tell whichever story they’d like. I speak in more detail on this topic elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post I would like to look specifically at how vidders engage the mediascape as a whole to step outside the confines of one TV series’ narrative, how “fanon” vids are created using “canon” source interspersed with outside footage, and some of the different ways in which that outside footage may be utilized to expand upon the original “canon”.

For ease, I have chosen to discuss videos relating to the CW’s series Supernatural, which stars Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester, who are raised to kill monsters and demons by their father from a young age after their mother is killed in mysterious circumstances. The show combines a standard “monster-of-the-week” format with an overarching plotline regarding the boys’ quest to find the thing that killed their mother and Sam’s girlfriend. Current episodes deal with the boys becoming caught up in a greater battle between angels and demons and Sam’s struggle with demonic powers.

Outside footage is commonly used to fill out a vid when the vidder desires to tell a certain type of story but is unable to find the appropriate images from the canon source. An excellent example of this is Obsessive24’s Fall of Man vid. The vidder notes in the comments that the source footage from Supernatural was unable to convey the sense of grandeur that she had wanted in her vid, which explores the conflicted angel character Castiel, his relationship to Dean, and the battle between heaven and hell which occurs in the series’ fourth season. In order to expand the scale, footage from big-budget, graphics-intensive Hollywood productions (such as Constantine and Sunshine) are used to add a layer of gloss unavailable in the source. In this case, context of the outside footage is generally irrelevant: all that matters is how it visually supports the vidder’s narrative.

Intertextuality, or “the effective co-presence of two texts” (Stam et al, 1992, p. 206), is extremely common in fanvids. This occurs when one vid expressly quotes or alludes between two (or more) series or sources: in this case, it is the relationship between the two that provides meaning, and both must be understood in context. One such vid, the crossover SPN is BSG by Silvia Kundera, is a straightforward comparison between Supernatural and Battlestar Galactica. In this vid, Silvia edits footage from Supernatural to match the opening credits for Battlestar, drawing attention to the similarities in plot and theme between the two.

A much more complex use of intertextual footage can be found in I Want You (She’s So Heavy) by Kiki_miserychic. (Please be warned: this vid contains some graphic violence, gore, and nudity.) Drawing on Planet Terror and Zombieduck in addition to Supernatural, this vid has many, many layers and could probably be best described as an alternate universe (AU) crossover slash incest vid (phew). Using the outside footage and advanced video manipulation techniques, the Winchester brothers are inserted into a zombie movie, but Kiki_miserychic decided to include manipulated footage of the brothers engaged in an incestuous affair with each other as well. In the commentary surrounding the vid, Kiki relates her intention to comment on recurring tropes in fanfiction, and what she sees as an implicit misogyny in fandom, by making it even more grotesque and obvious. Its appearance in the VidUKon vid convention programme describes it thusly: “Forcing fandom to take a good look at its hidden desires, despite the protest.” Here, the vid’s use of outside footage is used to amplify themes found in the original, perhaps even beyond the point of recognition.

Another type of outside footage is the paratext, or the messages and commentaries surrounding the original text. In terms of a television series like Supernatural, we may include source such as behind-the-scenes footage, outtakes, interviews with the actors or staff, and public appearances. Paratextual footage is particularly useful for the Supernatural slash fandom, as there is a great deal of RPS, or real person slash, in the fanon. RPS consists of stories which place the actors (rather than the characters) into a homosexual relationship, and the prolific public appearances and convention footage of stars of SPN have proven to be excellent fodder for “J2” (Jensen/Jared) slash vids. For example, I Fell in Love by Melissa uses paratext to create a love story between Ackles and Padalecki, drawing on the DVD extras and interviews with audio quotes from the pair interspersed with the song.

The vidder Fabella widens the paratext for Supernatural to such an extent that the term can still hardly be used. In Documentary, she crafts an elaborate web of relationships between the actors, hypothesizing a fictional past relationship between Padalecki and his co-star from Gilmore Girls, Chad Michael Murray. The entire vid is shot in black and white, with grainy footage in the style of a behind-the-scenes documentary on their relationship. Timestamps are added to shots of Murray speaking and still images of him in pain, intercut with images of Padalecki with Ackles, to give the impression that he is adding commentary to Padalecki’s new relationship and lamenting his loss.

Luv Song by Danegen is another RPS vid, but this one addresses the online fan constructions of the pairings with the tagline: “Hey fandom, there goes your boyfriend.” This vid deals with the addition of the actor Misha Collins to the cast of Supernatural, playing the angel Castiel who has a close (and thereby automatically slashy) relationship with Dean. “Luv Song” includes not only paratext from SPN itself, but also past series starring Misha Collins, screen shots of Collins’ Twitter page, Livejournal communities dealing with this new pairing, and other online commentary by the viewers in addition to regular episode footage. Through all these sources, Danegen is able to craft a story above and beyond the canon to directly engage the fanon interpretation.

Following Nancy Baym’s work on soap operas (2000), we can see how the vidding community utilizes distinct interpretive processes in their crafting of vids. First, there is the ideological code, a common frame of experience which allows the view to decode the story on a surface level. Secondly, there are the video-cinematic codes which help the viewer to decipher the logic behind the filming. These codes are foregrounded in the vidding practice, which uses traditional cinematographical tools to create their narratives. In “I Fell in Love”, for example, notice how Melissa has slowed the footage on shots of the boys touching each other to make it appear as though they are lingering, or has cropped the images to draw the viewer’s eye to the lips or hands in the frame. The third type, the generic codes, refers to the genre and form and includes the specific uses of time, space, style, and narrative. In vidding, the generic codes are frequently manipulated to suit the new genre of the vid: compare the use of SPN footage between “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and any of the slash vids, and the influence of the imposed genre shows heavily in the selection of clips, type of music, and visual effects used.

Finally, there are the intertextual codes, which create implicit connections between Supernatural and other genres and texts. The vid Channel Hopping by Ash creates the ultimate intertextual narrative, as it edits footage from Supernatural into the theme songs from eleven different television series. “Channel Hopping” seeks to highlight the variety influences on Supernatural, such as Starsky and Hutch, Twilight Zone, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for humorous effect. It is an extremely media-literate commentary on this particular series, and on the similarities in genre television as a whole. In this sense, it is useful to consider Raymond Williams’ notion of “flow”. Unlike film or theatre, television is always cuing the audience for what is on next, and cannot be fully understood as discrete programming. Rather, it flows from series to series. As avid television watchers, vidders are able to make these connections between shows and see how they all influence each other, and relate them further to their own fannish desires and interpretations.

Katie Freund is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong in Australia writing her dissertation on vids and their online communities. She also researches online worlds such as Second Life. You can follow her research on Fanthropology, Twitter, or Livejournal. She would like to extend her thanks to Madeline for inviting her to contribute.

References

Baym, Nancy K. Tune in, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. New Media Cultures. Ed. Steve Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.