purging via fanfic

[boogieshoes]

you know, i consider myself fairly 'into' fandom, in that i read a lot of fanfic and am interested in dissecting tv characters and such. i know a lot of fanfic authors purge shock and despair via writing after a major disaster - certainly after 9-11, we got a *lot* of fics dealing with the aftermath in various ways. everything from characters onsite to help rescue efforts, to characters going to afghanistan to shoot the bad guys.

NO strikes me as similar enough in scope to produce the same effect. i haven't checked the recent postings, but has anyone who has an even passing familiarity with various fandoms seen/ heard/ read about the first offerings?

it'd be interesting to see how fast that stuff gets out. after 9-11, iirc, the first fic was published w/in days. in sendom, there is a yearly mag for post 9-11 stories. i'd have to check, but i think the profits even go to 9-11 related charities.

-bs

Comments

[briarwood.livejournal.com]

(Saw your post on Prospect)

I haven't yet seen any Katrina fanfic; I think a lot of people are still too shellshocked. While there are human beings to blame for some aspects of the disaster, ultimately this was a hurricane - unless you want to argue it was sent by God, there is no one to blame. 9/11 was a human-created tragedy and I think people needed to find ways of coming to terms with that. I think I saw the first 9/11 fics showing up the day after - mostly characters giving their opinions of the terrorists. Fic dealing with the actual reality - rescue fics, lost people fics and suchlike came later. I noticed people tended to use the more fantasy-based fandoms; there was a noticable number of Highlander fics, for example because the immortals would naturally be among the survivors.

[boogieshoes.livejournal.com]

hi! welcome to my brand spankin' new blog!

you bring up good points - although people always want to blame someone for stuff like this, ultimately, only mother nature is responsible for katrina. there's room for argument (*after* all the people have been rescued, please!) about how well various people could have handled things in order to facilitate whatever. allow me to speculate that when people finally start writing fanfic on the issue, they'll write about characters as rescuers (because most of our characters tend to be in heroic profession of police, emts, etc), and/ or dealing with beaurocratic.... bs. lots of bs. i also speculate you'll be able to tell author political bias based on which beaurocrat's making the most mistakes ::evil smirk::, but that's another argument.

i find it interesting that you mentioned that HL was a prime fandom for post 9-11 fics. i haven't actually read any, as i am just getting 'back into' that fandom. i recall the plots of two senfic off-hand - one had blair 'supposed to be' (he never actually made it, so was safe) in NYC the day of the attack, and the other had jim being re-activated for sniper duties, temporarily. i recall these because they're both very good, although i can't recall the titles, atm. i'll have to find them.

my own post 9-11 piece (which remains drawer-fic thus far) had jim and blair *both* recalled, having speculated that everything we saw on the show was really 'sentinel training camp', while the army tried to figure out what to do with it's new weapon, and how to use it. i was a little tired of evil military programs at that point, too, so i had jim and blair complicit in this, fully aware of what was going on, and just putting on an act for the rest of us while the research and training was developed. i basically had 9-11 as the turning point to go from 'research phase' to 'practical activation'.

i did run across a couple mag7 fics (ATF AU, for obvious reasons) that had the characters doing opportunistic s&r. and one in the little britches au that was evidently a response to a rl kid's questions/reactions - and something i'd never actually contemplated.

you're right that there was a lot more anger at 9-11, and justifiably so. terrorism is not an honorable method of war, and it's certainly not one we expected, and obviously, no one deserves that. it came thru in how a lot of the senfic was written.

it'll be interesting to see how the NO disaster develops in fandom.

-bs, keeping an eye on the future

[briarwood.livejournal.com]

allow me to speculate that when people finally start writing fanfic on the issue, they'll write about characters as rescuers (because most of our characters tend to be in heroic profession of police, emts, etc),

Well, yeah, of course. At times like this we need heroes more than ever. What I remember from 9/11 was a lot of very reactionary political stuff in the days immediately after. I was heavily into Stargate fandom at the time and the military setup was perfect for it. I found it quite disturbing, actually; it was as if by portraying a loved character agreeing that the US should commit genocide in Afghanistan it somehow made that view okay, acceptable. But it's probably best that I not discuss the politics.

i find it interesting that you mentioned that HL was a prime fandom for post 9-11 fics. i haven't actually read any, as i am just getting 'back into' that fandom.

I don't know how many made it to mailing lists. There was some talk-about-it fic, not very successful attempts to use the older characters to get some perspective. There were looking-for-lost-people fics - either Duncan searching for Connor (who canonically lived in NY) or Connor searching for someone in what was left of ground zero. Interestingly I don't remember a single fic that placed a charater actually inside the WTC that day.

Most of it wasn't great as fanfic, but it didn't need to be. I didn't think that was the point.

[boogieshoes.livejournal.com]

cool icon :)

the important part of speculation comment was that the characters would be dealing with a lot of beaurocratic bs. just what i can observe from here, there seems to be a lot of high-level idiocy abounding right now, so i'm thinking that the characters will be portrayed as small competetent cogs in a vast incompetent machine, and a lot of the fanfic will have various chars-of-choice kicking butt and taking names in addition to doing rescue work as a response to that.

i could be wrong, tho. it's happened before.

I found it quite disturbing, actually; it was as if by portraying a loved character agreeing that the US should commit genocide in Afghanistan it somehow made that view okay, acceptable. But it's probably best that I not discuss the politics.

i doubt the authors really felt that genocidal behavior on the US' part was ok. i think we can both agree that fanfic-as-purging means that a lot of stories will have extremist reactions on the characters' parts in order to satisfy angry or despairing wish-fulfillment on the part of the author. i can see how it'd be disturbing. on the bar, (a collection of email lists i'm on, at baen.com) we were so noisily angry that it triggered purges. we had lots and lots of people calling for blood, yelling, 'hitting', and otherwise behaving very badly because they were pissed off. but that kind of intensity *is* frightening, because it's the same sort of intensity that precipitates mob violence, lynchings, maulings, etc.



There was some talk-about-it fic, not very successful attempts to use the older characters to get some perspective.

NO might be a better vehicle for that. i'm sure, frex, that methos has lived thru damn near everything in the disaster cycle, with both more and less loss of life. for that matter, everyone who's lived more than 200 years has probably been part of some great catastrophe or other, and stuck looking thru the dead praying to find loved ones, and hoping not to.

i was a student at texas a&m when bonfire fell. it was horrible, and hurt the aggie family in a very deep and personal way. and the way we expressed that was unique to a&m - tons and tons of personalized hardhats that people used while working on stack were left as memorials. those are all now in an anthropology study, and i think some of them are still on display in the memorial student center, as a reminder.

i look at purge fanfic the same way. you're right that it's not always good, nor is that the point. it's interesting from an anthropological point of view because you have people emoting through their characters. fanfic here is working as therapy, as well as political commentary and all the other things fanfic does. in terms of fanfic studies, if you will, how people use fanfic to purge, and what they choose to focus on for that purging, is an interesting subject.

-bs

[polly-b.livejournal.com]

I do recall at least one 9-11 HL story that placed Methos at ground zero. He underwent such a trauma (buried in the rubble, dying multiple times, dying people all around him, etc) that he ended up in an amnesiac state, forgot he was immortal, forgot who he was (and who he'd been); all causing Joe and Duncan some very anxious moments as they tried to track him down before something bad happened to him ... unfortunately, I can't recall author/title (and I sincerely apologize because I know from personal experience that's like dangling raw meat in front of a starving dog and then yanking it away, lol). It was a well-written and engaging story as I recall and I wish I had the URL for you.