Homework: Discuss Synergy & Smut

[Alyrenee]

Okay class...your homework is to read this article and discuss it. Each month I will post a different article and we can spend some time mulling over the vast wealth of critical and academic discourse on the wide world of Whedon.

I thought this was a great one to start with seeing how its all about what we are doing at this very moment..meeting online to discuss Buffy...


slayageonline.com/essays/slayage4/stengel.htm

Synergy and Smut: The Brand in Official and Unofficial
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Communities of Interest

[scullow]

None of the actresses would enact this story. I've asked.

I love that coment from a slash author. I have never checked out PlanetX but I might have to now.

Wendy has a point about any publicity being good publicity. If it wasn't for the forums would DST & Sideshow still, many years after the shows completed their runs, be making a fortune from us poor sods who fell in love with the shows (Buffy & Angel) when they first started and are still watching the reruns now. I watched Smile Time on the SciFi chanel last night. Still funny. :-)

I have also read a lot of the slash fiction. Most of it is of a very high standard and well worth reading depending on your sensibilities. If you are easily offended you need to steer well clear. But if you have an open mind and have time to spare it can be a fun time to while away the hours.

I shall watch this space with interest for further comments.

cheers

Paul

[Alyrenee]

"building loyalty to the brand of the show" Well that sums up many of the goals of this board and others out there. We own the figures, wear the t-shirts, and create new content/merchandise in the form of fan-fiction, custom figures, banners, podcasts, etc. The idea that this "synergy"...or the need to cross-polinate the internet and tv and marketplace in order to build a brand name is a really interesting one. It seems to be something crucial especially to genre shows, which seem to have an inherently smaller audience. One can only speculate how a show like Buffy would have done in the 80s before the internet was king.

But this idea of "synergy" is not limited to genre television alone. You can see the fruits of merchandising in straight dramas as well. Grey's Anatomy has CD soundtracks. The Sopranos had a cookbook. CSI has puzzles and media tie-in fiction. I have even seen a CSI toy kit in which you reconstruct a victim's face based on a skull, tissue depth markers, and clay. Each of these shows has a rabid fan-base though i am not familiar enough with it to make comparisons to the Buffy fandom. from my perspective...the buffy fanverse seems vast, limitless, and all-powerful. We all know for a fact that forums like btvsfigs, whedonesque, and the various firefly sites had a huge part in convincing several companies out there to continue producing whedon-verse paraphrenalia including a feature film, action figures, comics, toys, and one stuffed pig. One can only imagine what would have happened to properties like the original Star Trek had there existed an internet when it was cancelled. Or think of all the random genre shows that come and went that might have had a foothold in the current cable market and age of rabid fandom. Perhaps we would be reading fanfiction and making action figures based on shows like Manimal or Misfits of Science.

As for fanfiction, I was just telling my boss...who is in her mid-fifties and just purchased her first computer...about the wealth and wonder of the internet. About things like podcasts, fanfiction, itunes, meeting boards, blogs, etc. I was relaying the idea of fan-fiction to her and the fact that i used to write my own Star wars and V stories as a young girl. But they never left my little composition notebooks and were only seen by my 10 year old eyes....but now those stories, even as a youngster....would have had a wide and varied audience. Those stories could have been entered in forum fanfiction contests and I could have had a livejournal community about my silly little V alien stories. I was a rabid star wars devotee as a child and forced my parents to take me to the movies multiple times. Our dog was named chewy. i had all the toys and listened to the star wars radio drama with rapture. I was one of those sad geeks who had their heart broken in a post-phantom menace haze while wearing my hair in Leia's cloud city braids and a queen amidala kimono. Hell my current cat is named Salicious Crumb. I cannot even imagine what a crazy geeky mouthbreather i would be right now had i an internet connection as a 6 year old and the ability to chat about Star Wars all day long and play Knights of the Republic all night long... sigh.

As for smut..hey i am all for it. I agree that there really isn't bad advertising (to a point). I haven't had much opportunity to indulge in slash or much fan-fic at all at this point due to time. I think if I were to start i would begin with the wealth of brokeback hobbit fiction or perhaps some naughty smallville-ness (because there isn't a single person on that show I wouldn't want to see nekkid). Obviously there is a market for this stuff and people to read it. Of course some is not to my taste...not really down with the buffy/joyce incest scenarios...but I also read a lot of Anne Rice and generally her characters sleep with at least one family member and inanimate object a chapter in those books...so what's the big diff? And hey, I wanted Luke and Leia to kiss when i watched the first Star Wars movie...and they are twins...so there you have it...My first love, Star Wars, was actually an incestual slash film.

[taraswizard]

OK, not read the Slayage essay and that's a little surprising . However, last November at a local convention, I was discussing the fanfic issue with Christa Dickson (coarthur of Dusted... and Redeemed...), and she and I agreed that fanfic and other fannish activities can deepen and strengthen ones fannish tendencies. As an anecdotal aside, I know that it's very true in my case. So, I need to read the essay.