Fanfic Forensics

Had two interesting discussions today, one extremely vexing exchange about depictions of women in the media and another far more constructive talk about race (on the ways in which white Japanese Studies researchers may be influenced by their white privilege while studying the Japanese people). Since I'm busy getting a much-needed education about both feminism and racism right now, I ended up revisiting Audre Lorde's "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House" speech. It's still mind-blowing and I still can't believe I managed to spend so many years in so-called 'higher education' without ever being introduced to anything even remotely like it. The part that speaks to me the most today:

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance, and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.

Yes. This. This.

My apologies for the lack of a cut in the last post. It's an automated post from Diigo, and while this is a great service usually, it screwed up that post enough to make it resistant against all attempts at inserting a cut. Won't happen again.

• The classification for 攻め[seme] and 受け[uke] « Japanese words of anime fans, by anime fans, for anime fans

  Tags: boys_love, dojinshi, terminology

• terri_testing: The Keeper of the Keys: Harry Potter meta

  Very interesting analysis of Dumbledore's motives, starting from why he sent Hagrid to introduce Harry to the Wizarding World instead of a more dependable and level-headed faculty member. Unlikely that this is how JKR envisioned it, but the analysis makes so much sense and is so well-supported by canon evidence that it sounds far more likely than JKR's own interpretation of Dumbledore. Gives a whole different meaning to 'creating a monster': the author's idea of the character seems far less reasonable than the readers' here, and it's not pretty.

  Tags: dumbledore, narrative, characters, hagrid, snape, harry_potter

• Bring Forth the Best Robes

  Looks at Snape from a very emphatically religious perspective. Not sure what to think of that, personally, but it may give me some good ideas. To buy.

  Tags: books, snape, characters, religion, to_buy

• Re-read The Sorcerer's Stone Today! An Unauthorized Guide

  Has some fun parts/theories, but fans have gone much farther. Will probably just read parts online.

  Tags: books, narrative, harry_potter, to_read

• Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter

  Looks very interesting. Buy instead of hurt eyes staring at screen.

  Tags: to_buy, harry_potter, snape, morality, religion

• Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan

  by David Leheny, on views of/communication about sexuality in Japan

  Tags: academic, books, enjo_kosai, sexual_content, media, manga, law, children

• mary_j_59 - 19th-century Mores (yay!)

  Tags: harry_potter, snape, race, motherhood, foreigners

  • Snape is the head ot Slytherin house, and that house has a foreign taint; while all the other founders of Hogwarts have good Anglo Saxon names, Salazar Slytherin shares a Christian name with a Portuguese dictator. Naturally, Slytherin must be the “evil” house. Then there are the foreign students who participate in the tournament in GOF.
  • Worse yet, they have no compunction about "cheating" humans, and have, it seems, started several wars. This picture of the goblins combines several of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes.

• Snapedom - If we carry through on the racism/prejudice equivalency...

  Tags: harry_potter, snape, race

  •   Is that part of what James meant when he said it was that Severus existed?  He added "if you know what I mean", which is the nod-nod, wink-wink of a racist, roughly equivalent to the loaded statements characters in Seinfeld used to make about homosexuals

• Snapedom - Still Further Thoughts on Prejudice in the Potterverse and Snape's Worst Memory

  Tags: snape, lily, race, harry_potter

  • 
    Severus was being ABUSED. TORTURED, for crying out loud. Severus broke. And Severus later tried to make amends, only to be kicked while he was down. It is just amazing to me that so many people cannot or will not see that this matters in the moral calculus. And it is a perfect example of why we need to stop viewing this scene solely through the filter of "racism" and all the connotations and baggage that holds for each of us: The prejudice against Severus, based on class, appearance, House affiliation, and so on, exhibited in this scene is just as morally and ethically objectionable as the prejudice against Lily based on her circumstances of birth.
    
    I refuse to blame the young man for breaking under torture.
  • To see Lily alone as right and Severus alone as wrong is to miss the bigger picture of multiple bigotries that interweave and permeate the social and relational dynamics at Hogwarts and in the larger wizarding world--and in our own. Racism, sexism, classism, status-ism, affluence-ism, beauty-ism: It's all connected.

• Snapedom - October Challenge: Severus and the Marauders

  Tags: snape, harry_potter, bullying

  • Linguistic violence is never so manifest as in all the corrections, momentary or long-lasting, to which dominated speakers, in a desperate effort towards correction, consciously or unconsciously subject the stigmatized aspects of their pronunciation, their vocabulary (with all the forms of euphemism) and their syntax; or in the confusion which makes them `lose their means', rendering them incapable of `finding their words', as if they had been suddenly dispossessed of their own language.
    (bolding mine)
    
    This is exactly what happens to Snape.
  • According to Bourdieu (from the same source as the quote above):
    
    Quote:
    Symbolic domination really begins when the misrecognition (méconnaissance) implied by recognition (reconnaissance) leads those who are dominated to apply the dominant criteria of evaluation to their own practices
    (bolding mine)
    
    Snape succumbs.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of fanfic forensics group favorite links are here.

• The classification for 攻め[seme] and 受け[uke] « Japanese words of anime fans, by anime fans, for anime fans

  Tags: boys_love, dojinshi, terminology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of fanfic forensics group favorite links are here.

Drawn for rakina and previously posted in Snarry Swap.

Title: One for the birds, two for the wolves
Pairing: Snarry
Rating: PG-13 for a tiny bit of gore
Warning(s): blood, but not Harry's or Snape's
A/N: Illustration for the opening scene of Rakina's "Into the Green". The moment -the very incoherent and drawn-out moment, in this piece- when the flying you-know-what gets its talons into you-know-who, causing lots of flying blood and shocking our heroes. Picture makes no sense whatsoever if you haven't read the story. Go! Read!
( Large image behind the cut )

Couldn't concentrate on work and ended up reading stuff on fandom_wank all day long. Now now, FW is very educational as well as amusing. Maybe I'd spend less time chewing on my own toes if I wondered "How would this look on FW?" every time I was gearing up to say/do something that might be vaguely significant.

I've spent a lot of time following the racefail debate and realizing how totally clueless I am on pretty much every topic it touches upon. I'm going to go do my homework and not mention this again until I know what I'm talking about. Check it out if you haven't heard of it. rydra_wong has tons of relevant links. Combing through ithiliana 's posts throughout the last few weeks may be a good starting point too -her thoughts on the debate are pretty helpful for understanding what's going on.

And I finally got around to changing my icon; the old one contained an image from a dojinshi, and I kept telling myself I was going to try and contact whoever drew it but never actually did. Bad stupid lazy bad. The crappy new icon's barely legible, but at least ethically created. A big thank you to Anne Rice for her inspiring words of wisdom.

My Ph.D research focuses on narrative differences between Japanese fanwork (dojinshi) and English-language fanwork (fanfics). To find out whether there really are significant differences between these two media, content-wise, I did a small-scale test using six fanfics and four dojinshi, all of them James/Snape. I compared only a small number of narrative elements (will be more in the 'real' research) and tried to list them in a nice clean data set. Below I list the narrative elements I looked at, summarize the resulting data, and offer a short first assessment -possible explanations, remarks, and ideas for further inquiry. I'll continue adding to them, and would love to hear any insights or ideas from others. You can view the complete data set in full screen here (please read next paragraph before clicking). If any of this catches your eye, let me know what you think!

Important notes before analyzing fun begins: Please don't link directly to the full-screen version of the data set, as there's no way to include this text there. The summaries of the fanfics and dôjinshi included in the set were written by me for the purpose of contrasting the narratives, and they contain SPOILERS for the stories. The ratings/warnings are the original author's; please pay attention to them before clicking any links, since the stories may contain adult material. If you think I've misrepresented or misinterpreted something, please let me know and I'll correct the information right away. If you're the author of a fanfic/dôjinshi included in the data set and you feel this is cruel and unusual abuse of your work, or you just don't want it mentioned anywhere, drop me a note and I'll remove identifying information from the entry (author name, title, link, summary) or remove the entry altogether.

( No, seriously, JP/SS is a heart-warming tale of true love over there... )

Snarry Swap started posting today, and drachenmina gave me an AU that is an utter joy to read -a developing Snarry relationship that's too heart-warming to properly describe, lots of wonderful details and new wizarding locations, Snape being very creative with a belt, and that great prat James getting his comeuppance. Three cheers!

Of indeterminate viscosity

Good I got this on the first day of posting, I don't deal with anticipation very well ;)

Making potions for the Dark Lord must have been fun sometimes, at the start. Snape at nineteen. There was going to be a Lucius with that goblet of wine, but he didn't fit on the page anymore, poor dear.
( Doodle behind the cut... )

Nicked from amanuensis1's journal.

"These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish."

Quite a few of these don't ring a bell, but in my defense, I'm not a native speaker of English. (Edit: Hah. "In my defense". Seems I really do want to look smart and well-rounded.)
( Many pieces of fine literature here... )

Tasks for the day -finish my fest drawing and stop feeling like I need to fit into some box in order to call myself a good vegetarian. People who think vegetarianism is insane want me to justify not eating meat with a bullet-point list of at least five unshakable arguments, and afterwards still think it's insane. When I try to explain that I still eat meat or fish occasionally (leftovers that would otherwise be chucked out anyway, things my grandma loves to make me, fish when I go to Japan because avoiding fish in Japan is like avoiding oxygen), they stare at me like, "Hah! I knew you couldn't do this stupid veggie think properly". People, vegetarianism is just a good habit. Not some fundamentalist religious belief. I don't think anyone, me or you, is morally deficient for eating a steak. I just try to avoid it when possible. Being judgmental is fun, I know, I really do, but please don't harp on people when they're just trying to make the world a better place in their own small unobtrusive way, even if it sounds like a stupid way to you. There are plenty of things far more in need of some vigorous judging.

Abominable in every sense of the word, but I think he looks pretty OK from the right angle :)
( Scary pictures of the abominable Snapeman, as sighted in Belgium )

I'm sure many people are familiar with this leech person's tactics, but another warning couldn't hurt. (If the name Laura Hale doesn't ring a bell, please look at this or this post, among many others.) I'm on a manga/anime research mailing list, a Yahoo group. Laura Hale, who is apparently a member of said group as well, recently contacted me through the address I provided to the group, inviting me to join a service called Grouply which gathers a user's Google and Yahoo groups in one place. She used the address lamiha80@gmail.com , with username Laura Hale on Grouply. On Grouply, she's a member of no less than 448 different Yahoo and Google groups on various fandoms. Presumably, she's been contacting a lot of other people this way to try and add them to her network. Don't listen to her if she does, she will waste your time, try to trick you into making money for her, and possibly try to get at your personal information to sell it.

Enough of my time wasted for today, back to work. Must finish article in just over a month, not enough time, ack.

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Hitting the 'all versions' link often turns up readable versions of papers that are otherwise inaccessible unless you or your institution have a ridiculous amount of cash to pay the publisher, says Lifehacker.

My own gut reaction upon reading that Obama had made it -"Thank god I won't have to look at the other guy anymore"- was another reminder to me about the influence of striking looks on a fictional character's popularity. I got up at an ungodly hour this morning to watch the US presidential election results come in, but pesky CNN managed to call the race exactly five minutes before I got behind the computer, making me miss the big moment. Oh well. I got to watch the concession and acceptance speeches in real time. Listening to Obama and his huge crowd of supporters was actually a pretty damn emotional experience -we may gripe and groan about the US now and then (okay, a lot) here in Belgium, but sometimes I wish we could display the kind of spirit that I saw in Grant Park. While my country is a very good place to live and I feel lucky to have been born here, there are a lot of whiny and very passive people.
( Read more... )

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

No research without a bibliography, of course. I'm addicted to Diigo, a social bookmarking service that offers amazing tools for sharing and annotating web pages. I've been using the service for a year now, and I hesitate to call it god-given and perfect only because it isn't open source and lacks some basic citation info capabilities. (Hint hint, nice Diigo developers.)

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

'Fanfic Forensics' is Nele Noppe's Ph.D project at the Japanese Studies department of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. The aim of the project is to conduct a semiotic comparison of narrative and visual elements occurring in Japanese and English-language fanwork derived from the same original work ('Harry Potter'). I focus on fanwork dealing with Severus Snape, because this character appears to inspire the most diverse and interesting textual and visual fan interpretations.

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

The online Japanese-Dutch dictionary (full name 'Japans-Nederlands woordenboek Waran Jiten') created by the Catholic University of Leuven's Japanese Studies staff and students is, of course, mainly a dictionary. But its wiki format leaves room for getting creative with the dictionary entries (apart from the obvious advantage of anyone being able to add to and correct entries). I've used the Japanese-Dutch dictionary wiki to create a set of steadily morphing Dutch vocabulary lists about media and fandom in Japan, which I plan to make into an appendix of the final Ph.D. Hopefully they'll be useful to any other Dutch speakers who want to study fandom and fan media in Japan. If you see any mistakes or feel I should include a term I haven't mentioned, please let me know (or make yourself an account on the dictionary wiki and edit the pages yourself ;) .

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

From Matt Hills again, page 11: "Couldry (1996: 326) notes that 'Jenkins ... is explicitly both an analyst and a fan (of the type he analyses)."

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Some disorganized thoughts on Fan Cultures (preface and introduction), Matt Hills.

pxi-xii: "In specific institutional context, such as academia, 'fan' status may be devalued and taken as a sign of 'inappropriate' learning and uncritical engagement with the media."

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