Okay, yes, I'm spending my Saturday evening getting caught up on the recent explosion on metafandom. What of it? After this, I'm probably gonna marathon some more BtVS. Hey! Staying in and watching off-the-air cult fantasy TV shows is cool, dammit!

Anyway, if you missed the latest fandom to-do, here's a pretty good summary of it. Basic recap if you're too lazy to click the link: Couple supposed science guys think our brains function strangely, want to prove it, make up some half-assed, problematic survey for fandom folks, then proceed to FAIL in massive doses when called on their skeevy research methods and "theories". And, as with any good fandom story, it ends in a complete flounce and deletion of all the evidence (Oh! Except for the screencaps that astute fandom folk snapped).

It's amusing.



And you know, I don't get it. I mean, I suppose I can see how some people might look at fandom, as a whole, at a distance and go, "Huh...weird." Because, you know, hey! We're social misfits! We like weird, sci-fi stuff! We write insane amounts of text about TV shows and books! We seemingly randomly pair up completely nonsensical characters, often in gay and kinky ways! I mean, what a bunch of freaks. Obviously, there must be something about the way our brains are wired that makes us all do such crazy, crazy stuff!

But then I look at the dude who obsessively collects Dallas Cowboy memorabilia, paints himself silver and blue to visit Cowboy games, can effortlessly cite every past game and statistic about the team EVER, and has a light-hearted collection of player bobble-heads in his dining room. And...yeah, I don't get that.

Cause every community looks a little strange from the outside.

But from the inside, it's all the same. It's all people. People talking about things they love. People creating. People becoming friends. Sharing lives. Sharing excitement. It's just like any other community.

When I was in 8th grade we read the short story, "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. Then our teacher had us write a short story about what Charlie did after the end of the story. And that...was fanfiction. It wasn't labeled as such. But it was fanfic.

When I worked as a supervisor in retail, one of our cashiers got bored during a slow day and started writing stories with various other employees cast as the characters. These included us supervisors, and often included romantic pairings (that did not exist in real life). They were a big hit, got passed around, and other cashiers tried their hands at using the staff as characters in stories. That was RPF. It was, in some form, fanfic. And these were being written by teenagers who usually did not write.

People have a desire to create. This isn't weird or unusual or anything that needs to be explained as if it were abnormal.

Fandom is a community that includes people that have this desire. And this desire manifests around the object of our fannishness, whatever that may be in a particular fandom. Around that, you get, as in all communities, the people interacting and laughing and joking and sharing and just being people. That's what communities do. Yeah, there's some sexiness. All communities have that, too. All communities have strange rules and rituals and habits and practices that are perfectly understandable to the community but look strange as hell to outsiders. Fandom...strangely, not that strange.

Seriously, we don't need a "cognitive neuroscientist" to explain that.

I think the final lesson in all this is: Fuck not with fandom for it will totally pwn your ass.