Some dicks are more moby than others. #theoryofdick

[azurelunatic]

http://waldorph.tumblr.com/post/111844405768/whatre-we-calling-this-theoryofficgate-i-like

So some student-led class at one of my charming local universities has decided to teach fanfiction. This has come to the attention of my circles courtesy of a torrent of really obnoxiously critical comments left on a few select fics.

As an author, one does take on certain risks when posting anything in public online. However, solicitation of people to go and post shitty things in someone else's space is a dick move. I also think that we can agree that college students who have not mastered constructive criticism are highly likely to say shitty things in the attempt to engage critically. Furthermore, some (not all, but quite a few) fannish spaces have a convention of saying the nice things in the author's space in public, and either sending critical things in private, putting them in your own space, or just not saying them at all (at least in connection to the author) unless the author has asked for it.

If you're trying to interact helpfully with fandom and you send a torrent of kids who have been instructed to be "critical" and are likely to poke their thumb in someone's eye by accident while doing so into a fannish space, you, honorable sentient, are being a dick.

1) Don't require your students to leave a comment. If you need to prove they've interacted with the fic, require them to leave kudos.

2) Instruct them to be good citizens when leaving comments, if they leave comments at all. As academics, you are guests in fandom. As the fandom guide of people who have not internalized fandom mores, you have the responsibility to tell the students about things like this, and what sorts of things are unacceptable in this culture. Don't be a shitbrick.

3) By all means, have them interact critically with the text. Require them to either make their own space -- livejournal, dreamwidth, tumblr, blogspot, facebook -- and post the criticism there, post it to an online space reserved for the class, or send it directly to the instructor. Having your students leave it as a comment is like taking all the critical freshman essays on Moby-Dick/Finnegans Wake/The Fountainhead and packing them up into a tidy bundle and sending them to Herman Melville/James Joyce/Ayn Rand, marked "IMPORTANT FEEDBACK - PLEASE READ". Except those authors are actually dead.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Crossposted: http://azurelunatic.tumblr.com/post/111850692957/so-your-fic-is-required-reading-hahahanope

[torrilin]

Yeah, about the most negative I'm willing to be is "it's an old fic, I'm sure the author can do better now". That's if I absolutely can't find anything where I can articulate why I think it's good. It's really easy to pick nits, and the author can usually do it better than I can. Pointing out the good bits is hard.

[silverflight8]

Eh, attitudes to constructive criticism vary widely across platforms, fandoms, genres of fic, individual authors. I know that while I was posting on FFN around 2008-10 in my tiny little fandoms it was not unusual to give and receive crit casually--sandwiched in with hey, your fic's really good! Just be careful, the canon fact is actually X and you could have worked on this a bit more, but I really enjoyed it! It's not necessarily a teacher-student kind of relationship, but just part of the normal interaction between people in a fandom.

As someone who came into fandom through that background, the assumption that no author wants crit bothers me; obviously people take crit too far, try to crit people who really do not want it, etc. But it bugs me that the unspoken rule on AO3 seems to be "anything not 100% positive makes you a jerk". Especially since it seems to give ammunition to people who tend to blow up if comments don't meet their standard of appreciativeness.

[elf]

There were several comments that treated the fics as if they were rough drafts, rather than published works. (Which is what beginner-level literary critique often sounds like--"the middle section was too wordy and the conclusion felt rushed; it would've had more impact if Character X had shut up"--but normally, you write it up in an essay and submit it to a teacher; you don't send it to the author)

Many of the fannish comments mentioned the big problem with this approach to fanfic: Are you teaching literature, or ficfandom as a community? If literature, DON'T INTERACT; if community, YOU NEED A DIFFERENT APPROACH and also, approval by your university's ethics board.

There's also the whacktitude of assigning drastic AUs in megafandoms as starting points for fanfic studies. Gah. To teach fanfic--rather than "media studies focused on alternate possibilities"--you start with character studies or missing scenes of iconic characters, possibly in Yuletide fandoms of childhood favorites, instead of currently trendy megafandoms.

Instead, the students got thrown at fics where you need to know canon really well to follow the stories, where the focus is on "how would everything be different if..." (Also, they were assigned several epic-length WIPs, of which they're only required to read a little bit. The fuck?)

I saw a few of the comments. If my kids had received any of those, it'd put them off public fanfic for life. If I'd received one... depending on my mood, I might have tried putting the commenter off internet contact for life. Shredding the ego of the average college student is not difficult, and fandom has dealt with quite enough invasion from careless people who can't be bothered to figure out community norms before jumping into a conversation.

[silveradept]

I think that's why we tend to require the instructors be graduate students or more - they've learned enough to avoid common pitfalls.

[siderea]

Whoa, thanks for posting about this.

[silverflight8]

Yeah, this hit ffa yesterday night (?) and promptly BLEW UP. Like, I haven't looked but I think there is a 600 comment thread which is ginormous. Things meme gets really het up about include: gender, feminism, hygiene, countrywank, and anything relating to fandom crossing the streams with real life.

ANYWAY. I'm still stuck on the fact that the student instructors decided to make feedback part of the assignment and completely fail to tell students how to behave. Or even give them basic guidance. Like not even "what are the unspoken comment etiquette guidelines" but like "Read a fic about Suits--but here's a primer about Suits so you don't go into the comments like a chump saying 'I DON'T KNOW THIS SHOW BUT HERE ARE MY THOUGHTS ABOUT HOW THIS FIC IS BAD'". I honestly don't get how they could have missed the fact that fandom is based on FANworks and therefore the context--the canon--is actually really important. In so many ways. Serious lack of thinking it through. And yeah, reflective essays are good and sometimes essential but you don't flipping mail them to the author. You have students submit them to you and mark them. Seriously, what.

[azurelunatic]

Sunny mentioned it sometime Sunday, yeah.

Just. What.

[silverflight8]

Cluelessness to the nth degree, I guess. I mean, incompetence before malice, and just...incompetence. ARGH