META: Totemism in fandom
Feb. 23rd, 2013 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
auronluWhile 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).
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).
no subject
Date: 2013-03-21 02:01 am (UTC)...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?
no subject
Date: 2013-03-21 03:47 am (UTC)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!
no subject
Date: 2013-03-30 06:27 am (UTC)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.)