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Misaimed fandom. We've become weaponized.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. (Oscar Wilde)
(I started this back in February but didn't finish it because for some reason it descended into gibberish. I'm hoping I've excised the gibberish and tacked on a decent ending in its place.)
I've been reading about misaimed fandom--which I never heard of before. I'm going to summarize it, but I'm sure I'll be inaccurate and snarky, so for someone who takes this seriously, you might want to go here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisaimedFandom.
Misaimed fandom is when fans in a significant number decide we like the badguy as much as--or more than--the good guy. We are Doing It Wrong. There are no examples given in the essay itself, but if you go to the bottom of the page, there's a list of media you can click on that gives examples. The only ones I'm truly intimate with are The Shield, Sopranos, and Gilmore Girls. And I don't think Gilmore Girls really fits. Fans who sided with Vick Macky or Tony Soprano weren't getting how violent and corrupt they were. [Disclaimer: I haven't watched The Shield since Pat died, and I didn't watch the last season of Sopranos.]
Where I read about this was metafandom, in a post where the characters' sins were neither illegal nor violent. They were politically incorrect. The author was concerned about how to write such a character in a way that readers would understand that they weren't supposed to like him.
I think you now have the context I'm writing this in.
The first badguy I remember writing is Ben Horne from Twin Peaks. There was a guy writing a zine that was a continuation of the series, and in his interpretation of the finale, Ben was killed when Doc Hayward punched him and he hit his head on the mantlepiece.
For reasons I no longer recall, I objected to this, and I ended up writing Ben back to life. The zine fizzled out shortly after that--not because of Ben, I don't think.
Now, Ben started off as a bad guy, had a breakdown of sorts, and became a good guy. I wrote him as reverting due to the hit on the head. And you know what? It was a blast writing him. There's something liberating about writing an unapologetic bad guy. I later wrote him again in my Twin Peaks novel. Still a bad guy, still fun.
The next bad guy I wrote was Sonny Steelgrave, and I'm not over him yet. Sonny is a criminal. He kills people, he has people killed, beaten up. He corrupts the the justice system. And he's homophobic, a firm believer in the Madonna/whore binary, and an unrepentant racist.
You wouldn't think it would be hard to write him unsympathetically, but the writers of the show couldn't do it because the actor who played him was both charming and skillful enough to make an audience love Sonny in spite of his moral lapses, let them see his heart and his loneliness. (I could analyze how he did it, and how the writers failed to villain him up sufficiently, but that is for another day.)
The art of writing fan fiction, as I've said before, is getting the characters right. If I wrote Sonny as nothing more than a cold, calculating criminal, I'd be doing a terrible job as a fan writer. Trying to keep other fans from coming over to the dark side of liking people who do things society disapproves of--that's not my job. It's not anybody's job.
Somewhere today I read about skinheads taking some evil characters Pink Floyd's The Wall (the movie) as the heroes. This is an example of misaimed fandom. (And I'd guess that the Manson family's use of the Beatles' White Album would be, too, though [tellingly] it's not mentioned.)
So are we talking about a some kind of sliding scale of misaim? My screen name comes from a Shirley Jackson character who poisoned most of her family when she was twelve years old; I adored her then (when I was twelve) and adore her now, at fifty-one. And she was neither the first nor the last. Badguys have a lot of freedom other characters don't. They don't have to follow society's rules, and by extension, neither do we. We share their freedom, so of course we find them attractive. What could be more attractive than that kind of freedom?
It's not that we long to be sociopaths. It's that we have so little control over so much of what goes on in our lives, that living vicariously through people who take control--even if that means breaking laws or social conventions--is something we need. The very fact that it's somehow considered dangerous of us to like the "wrong" characters proves that. Hell, we live in a society where people think they have the right to tell other people how they're allowed to feel about fictional characters! If we didn't expend real frustration through vicarious rule-breaking, we really would become weaponized.
(Melody, I pulled this quote for you from here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Applicability. "Contrast with The Walrus Was Paul, where the audience tries to find meaning in a work when in fact the work isn't supposed to have a hidden meaning — the author's just fucking with them.")
(I started this back in February but didn't finish it because for some reason it descended into gibberish. I'm hoping I've excised the gibberish and tacked on a decent ending in its place.)
I've been reading about misaimed fandom--which I never heard of before. I'm going to summarize it, but I'm sure I'll be inaccurate and snarky, so for someone who takes this seriously, you might want to go here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisaimedFandom.
Misaimed fandom is when fans in a significant number decide we like the badguy as much as--or more than--the good guy. We are Doing It Wrong. There are no examples given in the essay itself, but if you go to the bottom of the page, there's a list of media you can click on that gives examples. The only ones I'm truly intimate with are The Shield, Sopranos, and Gilmore Girls. And I don't think Gilmore Girls really fits. Fans who sided with Vick Macky or Tony Soprano weren't getting how violent and corrupt they were. [Disclaimer: I haven't watched The Shield since Pat died, and I didn't watch the last season of Sopranos.]
Where I read about this was metafandom, in a post where the characters' sins were neither illegal nor violent. They were politically incorrect. The author was concerned about how to write such a character in a way that readers would understand that they weren't supposed to like him.
I think you now have the context I'm writing this in.
The first badguy I remember writing is Ben Horne from Twin Peaks. There was a guy writing a zine that was a continuation of the series, and in his interpretation of the finale, Ben was killed when Doc Hayward punched him and he hit his head on the mantlepiece.
For reasons I no longer recall, I objected to this, and I ended up writing Ben back to life. The zine fizzled out shortly after that--not because of Ben, I don't think.
Now, Ben started off as a bad guy, had a breakdown of sorts, and became a good guy. I wrote him as reverting due to the hit on the head. And you know what? It was a blast writing him. There's something liberating about writing an unapologetic bad guy. I later wrote him again in my Twin Peaks novel. Still a bad guy, still fun.
The next bad guy I wrote was Sonny Steelgrave, and I'm not over him yet. Sonny is a criminal. He kills people, he has people killed, beaten up. He corrupts the the justice system. And he's homophobic, a firm believer in the Madonna/whore binary, and an unrepentant racist.
You wouldn't think it would be hard to write him unsympathetically, but the writers of the show couldn't do it because the actor who played him was both charming and skillful enough to make an audience love Sonny in spite of his moral lapses, let them see his heart and his loneliness. (I could analyze how he did it, and how the writers failed to villain him up sufficiently, but that is for another day.)
The art of writing fan fiction, as I've said before, is getting the characters right. If I wrote Sonny as nothing more than a cold, calculating criminal, I'd be doing a terrible job as a fan writer. Trying to keep other fans from coming over to the dark side of liking people who do things society disapproves of--that's not my job. It's not anybody's job.
Somewhere today I read about skinheads taking some evil characters Pink Floyd's The Wall (the movie) as the heroes. This is an example of misaimed fandom. (And I'd guess that the Manson family's use of the Beatles' White Album would be, too, though [tellingly] it's not mentioned.)
So are we talking about a some kind of sliding scale of misaim? My screen name comes from a Shirley Jackson character who poisoned most of her family when she was twelve years old; I adored her then (when I was twelve) and adore her now, at fifty-one. And she was neither the first nor the last. Badguys have a lot of freedom other characters don't. They don't have to follow society's rules, and by extension, neither do we. We share their freedom, so of course we find them attractive. What could be more attractive than that kind of freedom?
It's not that we long to be sociopaths. It's that we have so little control over so much of what goes on in our lives, that living vicariously through people who take control--even if that means breaking laws or social conventions--is something we need. The very fact that it's somehow considered dangerous of us to like the "wrong" characters proves that. Hell, we live in a society where people think they have the right to tell other people how they're allowed to feel about fictional characters! If we didn't expend real frustration through vicarious rule-breaking, we really would become weaponized.
(Melody, I pulled this quote for you from here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Applicability. "Contrast with The Walrus Was Paul, where the audience tries to find meaning in a work when in fact the work isn't supposed to have a hidden meaning — the author's just fucking with them.")
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The thing about Joey was how badly he handled the whole thing. His manager confronts--and threatens--Sonny in public? Even if Sonny had wanted to say yes, he couldn't have, it would have made him look weak. Word would have gotten back to Patrice and Mahoney and who knows who else that Sonny could be threatened by *a manager* and he rolled over? It would have been the beginning of the end for Sonny.
Our interpretations of Sonny are somewhat different, but not so much that I don't thoroughly enjoy reading yours. *g* One reason I went with Sonny's culturally-inbred homophobia is that it was something I wanted to play with in my stories.
The racism is another culturally acquired thing, something I doubt he thinks about, but calling the guys at the Rabid Rabbit mulignanes--it's Italian for eggplant. And it's really more xenophobia than racism per se. I found it amazing, on my trips to New York to see how Indianapolis is in some ways more sophisticated than Brooklyn.
"Mr. Brooks" was wonderful, wasn't it? I wrote a review of it at the time (http://carose59.livejournal.com/138200.html).
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I missed the part about mulignanes in the Rabid Rabbit ep. I thought Sonny treated them just like anyone else, as if he didn't even notice their color. So I missed that small thing. But he was pissed at these guys. He might call white guys who pissed him off mulignanes, too,...maybe?
It is so true that Joey handled everything wrong re: Sonny. Vinnie tried to give Joey advice and Joey ignored it. Sonny was in a corner. I love that ep because it shows Sonny as a vulnerable guy who cares, but stupid people put him in the position of having to teach them a lesson. Maybe it's like saying flies cause garbage to say other people force Sonny to make not nice decisions, but I do see it in that ep. Sonny also came across in the series as wanting to do right by others who do right by him. He's fair in that way. And you cannot tell me that people who deal with Sonny don't know any better. They know who and what he is. They are just plain stupid if they think they can make a contract with him and then break it. Hello! It's a Steelgrave! You don't do that!
I could sit and defend Sonny's actions all day long. And list dozens of his likeable, good traits. Does that make me insane? Does that make me want to be like him? Hell no. I just love, as a writer and viewer, complex characters. Huzzah to writers who can pull off complex characters and make them sympathetic, make us feel for them.
Like you, I like horror, too. But it's not the same to root for hilarious Freddy Krueger as it is to love Sonny Steelgrave. Freddy equals fun/funny. Sonny is, well, I just love the heck outta him.
Oh, and about Vinnie falling for Sonny in your comment to rheasilvia. I couldn't agree more. It feels, at first, like Frank is not on his side. And his family has abandoned him. You send Vinnie in with a guy who is a lot like him feeling all bereft like that and the only guy who shows any amount of caring of him, even if he's the guy Vinnie is supposed to take down, is going to become a real friend. That's fantastic writing, because their friendship was real. More real than anything else for the two of them at a certain point. Whether or not a viewer decides to view it as romantic is up to the viewer, because it's all there if you want to see it that way...the physical touching, the affection, the expensive gifts, the looks, the up/down looks, eye contact, voices going softer when they talk to each other, Sonny being in Vinnie's room early in the mornings sometimes, etc. Even pro reviewers called their relationship homoerotic.
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I think you're right about Sonny treating anyone who pissed him off pretty much the same. But mulignanes is a racial epitet; it means eggplant. I think if Vinnie told him to stop using the word, he'd do it.
In some ways, Sonny was all wrong for the business he was in. He was way too trusting--not just of Vinnie, but of anyone he cared about. The writers wrote a complex character, and Ray was able to embody that. Of course we're going to be fascinated!
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About the racial epithet. My bad! I didn't know. Eggplant? I find it a rather non-threatening plant myself.
I absolutely love that the character of Sonny is so easily trusting...and generous and affectionate. The writers also did it in a way that did not make him look stupid or too naive...just sweet??? How'd that happen?
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I have no idea why eggplant is an insult. I'd mostly be confused if someone called me that. Or any other vegetable. "Radish!" Uh, what? *g*
I'm biased, but I think Ray brought a lot to Sonny's character. He always did know how to bring a warmth to a character who wasn't supposed to be particularly warm or sympathetic.
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Speaking of traveling, this was written on a laptop from So. Lake Tahoe where I have been for a week. Can't wait to get home Monday night. No new writing for me. No time during my busy season, but I have to ask, are you writing? Will you be posting more fic ever? Wondering minds.
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I await them while trying to keep from jumping up and down...with difficulty.
(Let me know if you need my email addy.)