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silveradeptPrompt 7, the final prompt for this Sunshine Challenge, is the promise of growth and new life: Zephyrus, the West Wind.
Having had to memorize and analyze some part of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Zephyrus's name reminds me of that unfinished work first, rather than the stories of Greece, where the winds are occasionally loaned, directed, or loosed foolishly with consequences to the one who unties the sack containing them. And the wind I'm used to hearing about most, in my upbringing, is the North Wind, the old, cold one that brings snow and ice. Which, in the way that my brain works, then jumps to the parody of Richard Wagner that is "What's Opera, Doc?" for these lines spoken by Elmer Fudd:
There's also a Calvin and Hobbes strip that references zephyrs, the light west winds named after the god, when Calvin and his mother speak vaguely Shakespearian, since that's what they're watching, and in the last panel, we find Calvin is not a fan. (He's six, why would he be? That he is looking for a "cop show" where people talk "normal" doesn't age as well.)
The prompt seems to want to ease us into the end. After all, we've been at the trivia, down to see Hades, pursued by Poseidon, tried to navigate Scylla and Charybdis, been to the wilds of Pan and hoped that the kindly ones didn't take too much interest in us. We also saw the dawn, so it wasn't a full on dark type of experience, but a lot of the domains of the gods involved lent themselves to introspection. (Well, okay, I'm introspective about these things.) And out in the world, it has been pretty much premature to expect the arrival of spring after the long winter that started right at the beginning of spring last year. We could all use some gentle rain and blooming flowers and plants (preferably without triggering allergies).
It's not an exaggeration to say that fandom is, for a lot of us, supposed to be that warm and sustaining wind that offers blooms and the promise of rain, either after a cold winter or a scorching summer. Especially in transformative fandom, it can be really exhilarating to discover that there are other people out there creating new stories for characters that you've come to love (and possibly decide they were hard done by their narrative) or crafting entire new universes for those characters to participate in. The early Web experience seemed to be that you would get home from the physical world around you and dive into a digital world full of generally friendly strangers with similar interests as yours, including those interests that you were sure nobody else in your area (or your school) had. And there was a lot of showcasing different parts of ourselves to those friendly strangers with similar interests, using the corporate sites and hobbyist spaces equally well to find and create communities and play games with each other.
Because of the possibilities that the early Web and networked games offered, there was a period in time where (like so many other periods in history) there were dire warnings about people becoming addicted to the online world and leaving the world of meatspace behind. Not the "you wouldn't engage in property crimes against faceless corporations" advertisements that were roundly mocked even contemporaneously, but stories of people who preferred their "fantasy worlds" to the world of embodiment around them. You know,
I can't blame them for wanting to spend more time in a place where their contributions were acknowledged and their achievements were celebrated, even if it was only by the sound of a level up or a pop up recording the accomplishment. Before the corporatizing of the Web and the swift invasion into their social feeds of all the people that someone was trying to escape, there was still the general feeling that there wasn't enough to go around for every man to have what he had been socialized to believe was his entitlement. For as much as the α/β/ω dynamic has been thoroughly debunked as happening in nature among the wolves, it sticks around as a decent indicator for the ways that humans raised in my capitalist cultural context view each other, though. And it was pretty clear, even at a younger age, that some people were going to get those things that were promised and others weren't, possibly with a side of bullying or other explicit indication of someone's place in the main social hierarchy. So those who weren't going to be at the top in the hierarchy everyone else subscribed to developed their own cultures.
This isn't a new thing brought on by the Web, as there have been plenty of alternate social hierarchies developed over time. Seanan McGuire tells stories of having weighted dice and learning specific motions for dice rolling for her early experiences with tabletop RPGs. Why would she need such things? Because sometimes, when you're the only girl at the table, you need to rattle off a string of improbable 20s so as to avoid having your character be sexually assaulted in detail. (And when that's the only table in town, you understand, you'll put up with a lot more than you should.) So now I can, with hindsight and greater wisdom from experience, see that the concern should not have been whether those boys would abandon the social order put in front of them and stay in the virtual where they could at least achieve some amount of prestige and social acceptance, but whether the social structures those boys were building online were good ones that would help them thrive as moral and ethical people in their interactions with others. Many of those boys who felt rejected out by their society kept the idea of entitlement and instead built the same society with the rules favoring them, declaring themselves the involuntary celibate or devoting themselves to pushing out women they felt had been promoted in their fandoms over them, simply because they were women. I don't blame them for feeling rejected or like they couldn't succeed at a system that promised them prizes and wealth and turned out to be rigged against them by people they can't possibly punish directly for it. I do blame them for creating G*m*rg*t* (a manufactured scandal if there ever was one) and for creating competitive environments and pushing game design in the direction of "git gud" and social environments making fun of people who don't want to be as ultracompetitive as they are. There's also a fair few of these types in the curation style of fandom, according status and importace to people with more encyclopedic knowledge or more complete collections of canon or goods. Replication of social dynamics that don't suit you unless you're the person on top doesn't seem like a good idea, but if you're the one on top, you might be loath to give up that relative power and privilege, even if it would be better overall for everyone if you did.
To some degree, the biggest thing that transformative fandom offers is getting away from these replicated dynamics. There's a possibility (even if not necessarily the reality) of setting down power relationships based on arbitrary categories and instead existing as creators next to each other, encouraging each other to finish things and giving each other kudos and comments in support. I mean, there are still going to be numbers and stats and people comparing their numbers to others, either as a way of asserting their superiority or despairing about their inferiority, but transformative fandom often officially and overtly runs on the qualitative at least as much as it does on the quantitative, if not more. A lot of fanworks are (primarily) created for an audience of one, whether it's the creator or the intended recipient for a fanworks exchange. Many of them turn out to be enjoyable or resonant for more than the audience of one, but there's no inherent superiority involved in creating a work for a megafandom that receives a lot of kudos over creating one for a small but vibrant fandom that won't ever receive a lot of kudos but will generate a lot of happy comments from the people who are in that fandom. The numbers, I've found, are often a question of how big the fandom is and how much the source canon either carries on or resonates in the minds of its fans. They can be pursued, certainly, but transformative fandom offers all sorts of off-ramps and different ways of making meaning that have nothing to do with the numbers themselves.
That's the warm and gentle breeze, the promise of flowers and rain and spring, I think. The ability to step away from the things that everyone else seems to prize and create something for yourself (or someone else). Even for people who make works for a living or a side hustle, the promise of Fandom is of being able to enjoy a thing unabashedly (and without anybody bashing you, even if there have to be conversations about the choices you're making) with others who enjoy the same thing. A community for people who are (sometimes desperately) in need of one to help them thrive, and for those who want to share their experiences to others through the creation and enjoyment of works. It's not perfect. A lot of the systemic problems from the world outside fandom have found their way in all the same, but there's definitely the promise that things can be better every time a new work gets created.
The child of Dawn (Eos) and the Titan Astraeus, Zephyrus represents the West Wind. Zephyrus was considered to be the gentlest of the Anemoi (wind gods representing the cardinal points of the compass), and the beneficial bringer of Spring. The gentle springtime winds of the West indicated an end to Winter and the new growth of plants and flowers.
Having had to memorize and analyze some part of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Zephyrus's name reminds me of that unfinished work first, rather than the stories of Greece, where the winds are occasionally loaned, directed, or loosed foolishly with consequences to the one who unties the sack containing them. And the wind I'm used to hearing about most, in my upbringing, is the North Wind, the old, cold one that brings snow and ice. Which, in the way that my brain works, then jumps to the parody of Richard Wagner that is "What's Opera, Doc?" for these lines spoken by Elmer Fudd:
North winds blow! South winds blow! Typhoons! Hurricanes! Earthquakes! SMOOOOOOGGGGG!!That last line is delivered in a Mel Blanc yell (think Yosemite Sam yelling and you've got the idea) to cap it all off.
There's also a Calvin and Hobbes strip that references zephyrs, the light west winds named after the god, when Calvin and his mother speak vaguely Shakespearian, since that's what they're watching, and in the last panel, we find Calvin is not a fan. (He's six, why would he be? That he is looking for a "cop show" where people talk "normal" doesn't age as well.)
The prompt seems to want to ease us into the end. After all, we've been at the trivia, down to see Hades, pursued by Poseidon, tried to navigate Scylla and Charybdis, been to the wilds of Pan and hoped that the kindly ones didn't take too much interest in us. We also saw the dawn, so it wasn't a full on dark type of experience, but a lot of the domains of the gods involved lent themselves to introspection. (Well, okay, I'm introspective about these things.) And out in the world, it has been pretty much premature to expect the arrival of spring after the long winter that started right at the beginning of spring last year. We could all use some gentle rain and blooming flowers and plants (preferably without triggering allergies).
It's not an exaggeration to say that fandom is, for a lot of us, supposed to be that warm and sustaining wind that offers blooms and the promise of rain, either after a cold winter or a scorching summer. Especially in transformative fandom, it can be really exhilarating to discover that there are other people out there creating new stories for characters that you've come to love (and possibly decide they were hard done by their narrative) or crafting entire new universes for those characters to participate in. The early Web experience seemed to be that you would get home from the physical world around you and dive into a digital world full of generally friendly strangers with similar interests as yours, including those interests that you were sure nobody else in your area (or your school) had. And there was a lot of showcasing different parts of ourselves to those friendly strangers with similar interests, using the corporate sites and hobbyist spaces equally well to find and create communities and play games with each other.
Because of the possibilities that the early Web and networked games offered, there was a period in time where (like so many other periods in history) there were dire warnings about people becoming addicted to the online world and leaving the world of meatspace behind. Not the "you wouldn't engage in property crimes against faceless corporations" advertisements that were roundly mocked even contemporaneously, but stories of people who preferred their "fantasy worlds" to the world of embodiment around them. You know,
With a dreamy, far-off look / And her nose stuck in a book / What a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle.Except that most of the coverage wasn't women and their inner worlds, which had always been painted as mysterious and strange to men, but boys and men who were giving up sports and girls and manly things to live in these digital spaces. So it wasn't quite a concern about boys and men becoming NEETs, not that we knew the term at the time, but more that those boys were taking their cues from who knows what rather than the men role models in their lives.
I can't blame them for wanting to spend more time in a place where their contributions were acknowledged and their achievements were celebrated, even if it was only by the sound of a level up or a pop up recording the accomplishment. Before the corporatizing of the Web and the swift invasion into their social feeds of all the people that someone was trying to escape, there was still the general feeling that there wasn't enough to go around for every man to have what he had been socialized to believe was his entitlement. For as much as the α/β/ω dynamic has been thoroughly debunked as happening in nature among the wolves, it sticks around as a decent indicator for the ways that humans raised in my capitalist cultural context view each other, though. And it was pretty clear, even at a younger age, that some people were going to get those things that were promised and others weren't, possibly with a side of bullying or other explicit indication of someone's place in the main social hierarchy. So those who weren't going to be at the top in the hierarchy everyone else subscribed to developed their own cultures.
This isn't a new thing brought on by the Web, as there have been plenty of alternate social hierarchies developed over time. Seanan McGuire tells stories of having weighted dice and learning specific motions for dice rolling for her early experiences with tabletop RPGs. Why would she need such things? Because sometimes, when you're the only girl at the table, you need to rattle off a string of improbable 20s so as to avoid having your character be sexually assaulted in detail. (And when that's the only table in town, you understand, you'll put up with a lot more than you should.) So now I can, with hindsight and greater wisdom from experience, see that the concern should not have been whether those boys would abandon the social order put in front of them and stay in the virtual where they could at least achieve some amount of prestige and social acceptance, but whether the social structures those boys were building online were good ones that would help them thrive as moral and ethical people in their interactions with others. Many of those boys who felt rejected out by their society kept the idea of entitlement and instead built the same society with the rules favoring them, declaring themselves the involuntary celibate or devoting themselves to pushing out women they felt had been promoted in their fandoms over them, simply because they were women. I don't blame them for feeling rejected or like they couldn't succeed at a system that promised them prizes and wealth and turned out to be rigged against them by people they can't possibly punish directly for it. I do blame them for creating G*m*rg*t* (a manufactured scandal if there ever was one) and for creating competitive environments and pushing game design in the direction of "git gud" and social environments making fun of people who don't want to be as ultracompetitive as they are. There's also a fair few of these types in the curation style of fandom, according status and importace to people with more encyclopedic knowledge or more complete collections of canon or goods. Replication of social dynamics that don't suit you unless you're the person on top doesn't seem like a good idea, but if you're the one on top, you might be loath to give up that relative power and privilege, even if it would be better overall for everyone if you did.
To some degree, the biggest thing that transformative fandom offers is getting away from these replicated dynamics. There's a possibility (even if not necessarily the reality) of setting down power relationships based on arbitrary categories and instead existing as creators next to each other, encouraging each other to finish things and giving each other kudos and comments in support. I mean, there are still going to be numbers and stats and people comparing their numbers to others, either as a way of asserting their superiority or despairing about their inferiority, but transformative fandom often officially and overtly runs on the qualitative at least as much as it does on the quantitative, if not more. A lot of fanworks are (primarily) created for an audience of one, whether it's the creator or the intended recipient for a fanworks exchange. Many of them turn out to be enjoyable or resonant for more than the audience of one, but there's no inherent superiority involved in creating a work for a megafandom that receives a lot of kudos over creating one for a small but vibrant fandom that won't ever receive a lot of kudos but will generate a lot of happy comments from the people who are in that fandom. The numbers, I've found, are often a question of how big the fandom is and how much the source canon either carries on or resonates in the minds of its fans. They can be pursued, certainly, but transformative fandom offers all sorts of off-ramps and different ways of making meaning that have nothing to do with the numbers themselves.
That's the warm and gentle breeze, the promise of flowers and rain and spring, I think. The ability to step away from the things that everyone else seems to prize and create something for yourself (or someone else). Even for people who make works for a living or a side hustle, the promise of Fandom is of being able to enjoy a thing unabashedly (and without anybody bashing you, even if there have to be conversations about the choices you're making) with others who enjoy the same thing. A community for people who are (sometimes desperately) in need of one to help them thrive, and for those who want to share their experiences to others through the creation and enjoyment of works. It's not perfect. A lot of the systemic problems from the world outside fandom have found their way in all the same, but there's definitely the promise that things can be better every time a new work gets created.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-26 08:48 pm (UTC)