META: Totemism in fandom

[auronlu]

While replying rather incoherently to vieralynn about fandom reactions to fic that deconstructs characters, I casually mentioned something that has been central to my understanding of fandom for years, including my own: totemism.

I first brought this up with my therapist while trying to articulate why I'd latch onto particular characters with whom I self-identified, or who inspired me. Our modern culture is fragmented and has no unifying mythology, religion, belief or symbol system, so we're left flailing for symbols that give us psychological satisfaction, a prop for meaning, and a sense of significance, identity, and, yes, love.

People love totems. They love their gods. They love their symbols. They are familiar and provide a sense of belonging, identity, coherence, stability.

So nowadays we have Uhura and Yoda and Nightfall/Redlance and Lady Gaga and [insert favorite character or ship here]. And as Vieralynn put it, fans get upset and lash out when you "chop down their sacred tree."

So a lot of fanfic is celebrating, communing with that sacred tree, whether it's a ship or a particular character. The fic is trying to get at the essence of the totem. Story is secondary; it's the resonance with and reaffirmation of the beloved totem that's paramount, like the Pharaoh having to run through the same heb sed ceremony every year to re-establish and maintain his reign, Egypt, and the universe. (As a child, I was drawn to ancient Egypt, and instinctively understood that culture's emphasis on cycles, repetition, and writing/drawing the same thing over and over to keep reality renewed, as if it might crumble and fall apart if you didn't keep defining it.)

Whereas there is an entirely different approach to fanfic which is deconstruction, gap-filling, grappling with the world and politics and unanswered questions, character flaws and problematic subtexts and things that canon didn't cover or explicate or justify adequately.

Totemic fandom is all about repeating what's loved, what's obvious, what's accepted by fandom consensus. Meta fandom is about exploring what's inchoate, unresolved, uncomfortable, or ambiguous.

I'm oversimplifying here and setting up a false dichotomy. But I wanted to throw the idea of fandom as totemism out there. There's probably a better word than totemism -- I am afraid I'm invoking the specter of bad anthropology by using the term -- but I can't think of a better word to express it.


ETA: I think fanart lends itself particularly well to totemic fandom; people love seeing the characters they love portrayed in a way that romanticizes/epitomizes them, whereas fanart that challenges accepted depictions is rare and usually does not get many favorable responses. Also, my first impression of Tumblr is that there's a high degree of totemic fandom, largely because of the focus on images (icons).

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

Yes, Tumblr does have a huge totemic component. Also, tumblr focuses on reblogs and likes. If you post an image of Lulu that I enjoy, I may like-heart it to up its count (make an offering to your local Lulu shrine?!?!?) or I could reblog it show that I want this totemic thing on my blog (shrine) and increase the chances that it receives more offerings. :D

Related: Some time ago I decided to only write a small set of characters which means that I cannot offer much, writing-wise, on prompts. Solution? I now make fanart! It's so much easier for me because I know how to create nice totemic representations.

Regarding your thoughts on fanart as romantic or otherwise, I agree although I think it is a little more complex.

Since joining tumblr a year ago, I follow fanart closely (mostly to study the art and think if I could make something like it). Some characters in my fandoms have large followings of fans who identify with an intense episode of suffering that the character went through. Those particular characters also receive a lot of art that romanticizes their suffering (the Passion of their Suffering ;)

But, some of these characters are also shipped in hateships and end up featured in art that sexualizes or kinkifies the suffering.

So, the same character may fly by my dash in a fluffy feel-good painting, a Passion of the Christ romanticism of that characters' suffering, and then in a kinky NSFW BSDM scene with in hateship.

people love seeing the characters they love portrayed in a way that romanticizes/epitomizes them, whereas fanart that challenges accepted depictions is rare and usually does not get many favorable responses

I purposefully created my dragon age big bang art to include one Very Romantic image (very well received, totemic) and one provocative image (also well received, but a graphic novel spread, and liked by completely different people--mostly other comicers). The provocative image was something out of the fanfic I illustrated *and* it is completely canon-compatible, but extremely non romantic (police brutality).

[auronlu]

Hm. Maybe "epitomizes" is the more dominant trend, rather than "romanticize." Also, come to think of it, the word "fetish" captures the double meaning of totemism and love, which is not necessarily romantic love.

People can have Kali, Set (Egyptian) or even Cthulhu as a totem. And there is an awful lot of art which fetishizes victimization, rape, violence, hurt, power abuse.

I mean, Apollo trying to rape Daphne, and her father turning her into a sacred tree to escape his lust, is depicted (and enshrined) in western art like this:


-- Wikimedia Commons
(Sephiroth/Cloud, anyone?)

I gather that DA is an intelligent enough game to challenge and deconstruct fantasy and RPG tropes, so there's gotta be at least some fans who appreciate meta.

[sathari]

This, both the original post and this thread in particular, is a really interesting comparison--- it kind of reminds me of the Catholic idea of patron saints. You've got some people of the faith who want to venerate the saints in an almost mythological/archetypal sort of way, you've got others who want to examine their lives and works more critically, and both groups are being faithful in their own right although they can find themselves at cross purposes.

[auronlu]

Excellent and apt analogy. Oddly enough, I come to that side of Catholicism through a superficial study of Santeria, which originally borrowed Catholic iconography so that slaves from Africa could continue to practice their own religion using saints as analogs for orishas.

This would horrify many Catholics, but since I come to it from classical studies, where the ancients were forever saying things like, "Oh, Athena must be Minerva!" and "Oh,Thoth is just Hermes!" this makes perfect sense to me.

[sathari]

Oh, I'm glad it makes sense! (I'm from the other side of the coin: I was raised around that particular tradition in Christianity, and--- I love your phrasing of this--- fear invoking the specter of appropriation when I use other religions'/cultures' terms, but by damn do I have the right to make heretical comparisons about the religion of my upbringing! LOL.)

...and I've kept putting off replying to this because I keep circling this idea about how the same idea (totems/patron saints/polytheism) finds similar-yet-distinct expressions in different cultures and how some of what you're noting in fandom is maybe one more version of that, but I can't quite nail the exact words for the idea, so I'm throwing it out there a few days late and a few dollars short anyway for the sake of possible discussion? Like, this is a thing people do, in subtly different forms across cultural groups?

[auronlu]

Absolutely! And that's a HUGE subject, and my brain is too fuzzy now to give it the thoughtful response it deserves!

But let me throw out a few things from my odd major - -which was mythology with a concentration in "depth psychology," and explaining what the heck that means almost ties into what you're saying. The premise in this particular school of thought is that mythological symbols are symbols that resonate with, epitomize, and provide a common psychological frame of reference for a community or a lot of people who think along similar lines. There's a lot in human psychology that is not rational or logical, but based on instincts, feelings, and -- in a very profound way -- the incomprehensible patterns of life that so many of us face, such as loss, adolescence, childbirth, separation, death, age, etc. These are big and scary and hit us in deep psychological ways.

Stories -- myths, religion, symbols -- are irrational ways of explaining them, which may not be literally true, but ring true for us at a psychological level. The stories and symbols that ring true for lots of people, over a period of time, get preserved as myths or institutionalized in religion.

That's what Joseph Campbell said, building on what Jung said.

Jung's collective unconscious wasn't so much a telepathic hive mind, but rather, the idea that certain repeating patterns in human experience actually tend over time to pattern our psychology in certain ways. (For example, people who don't listen to Mom or don't protect mothers from being killed may not prosper as much as people who listen to Mom and protect Mom, and over time mother-reverence becomes hardwired until Mother Goddess figures are part of cultural symbolism). Different cultures may latch onto or exaggerate different facets of the archetype, but certain archetypes pop up over and over because they help us deal psychologically with things that happen over and over in human lives.

Other psychological symbols, impulses and thoughts may not be universal -- not everybody relates to The Spock -- but it's a common enough experience, or something that "rings true" for a lot of people, that that symbol, too, recurs again and again.

All these symbols and myths help us tell things that can't be put into words, but that we feel. They ring true for lots of people. They crop up over and over. Maybe it's Loki, or Brother Coyote, or Anasazi the Spider, or Brer Rabbit, or Reno, or Zidane, but that tricker just keeps making sense, whatever his particular manifestation!

But the expression -- the manifestation -- is never quite the same, since it's shaped by the particular experiences, symbols, and language of the storyteller, the community, the culture where it's popping up.

Obviously, this is a very agnostic (not quite atheist, but definitely agnostic) way of looking at religion and belief -- as psychological patterns rather than divine truths. But it certainly helps explain the recurrence of certain psychological types, roles, and exaggerated life situations in video games!

[sathari]

Oh, I feel you on fuzzy!brain--- and let me say that your fuzzy!brain response was far more in-depth than my own fuzzy!brain response is likely to be! (Again, see the length of time it's taking me to respond... :/)

First, I could not agree more on the repeating patterns of human existence--- the broad common themes that you find across cultures as contrasted with the flavoring that the different experiences of respective groups of humans give to those common themes. The whole piece of “ways we are all alike as humans/ways we are like some humans but not others/ways each of us is unique”, if you will.

(That last piece, that unique-experience-within-species-and-culture piece, is demanding my attention here; what you said about the repeating themes that call to each of us interests me, because... it’s a thing for me, but it’s not a thing that fits neatly into existing classified archetypes? Your trickster example in particular got my attention, because there are trickster types I love and ones I could not possibly care less about, and yet at the same time I can find common themes in the types-I-love, even though I have yet to see them... um, documented?... as standard archetypes.)

Hah, I’m definitely cool with an agnostic/atheist perspective; even from a spiritually-oriented perspective there’s a lot to be said for attending to those common themes across cultures, those attempts to “get at” the truths of human experience on the one hand and--- okay, I see your agnostic perspective and I raise you a downright critical one!--- if not outright exploit those truths in terms of the way that they can be used to make large groups of people respond to them, then at least work with that, whether it’s the Catholic Church’s historical ability to operate as a world power or Square Enix’s ability to get us to cough up money for their product. (Which come to think of it is not dissimilar to some behaviors of various religious institutions, except SE and their fellow gaming companies are going straight for the profit-from-entertainment motive.)

[samuraiter]

I am remembering, rather partially, a quote about artists having a thing for destroying idols. I wish I remembered the whole thing, as it feels rather pertinent.