Beyond Selidor

This post is brought to you by several recent events, and the memory of similar occurrences of the past five or six years. Consider, for example, the recent kerfuffle in Supernatural fandom which involved enraged fans harassing actors and CW executives over a storyline with which said actors and executives had no control. Consider YA author John Green ill-advisedly wading into discussions fans of Veronica Roth's Divergent series were having about its ending. Consider actor Orlando Jones' thoughts on his show Sleepy Hollow and how its creators interact with the fandom. And finally, consider seanan_mcguire's thoughts on being included in Twitter conversations with fans and reviewers of her books.

I'm having trouble working out where I stand on the creator-reviewer-fan interaction issue, and I think this is because of my own particular experiences. This got long, so bear with me.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I started working as a newspaper book-reviewer when I was seventeen, and that I basically got my first article published because I wrote a snotty, entitled angry letter to the books editor of a major broadsheet accusing her of not having read The Amber Spyglass before reviewing it. (In other words, I behaved just as badly as the Supernatural fans.) Looking back, it was an appalling thing to have done, but it did get me into a line of work that I found extremely satisfying.

Before I got into online fandom (or writing reviews online), I had already been working as a professional reviewer for five years, and I continued reviewing in parallel with my online blogging. Reviewing by its nature involves lots of interaction with authors and publishers - I frequently had to contact them to request review copies of books, and I also interviewed several authors, either over the phone or in person. To date, those authors are: Kevin Crossley-Holland (email interview), Garth Nix (in person), Shaun Tan (over the phone), John Marsden (over the phone), Jeanette Winterson (in person), Gillian Rubinstein/'Lian Hearn' (over the phone), Sophie Masson (in person) and Anna Broinowski, the director of the documentary film Forbidden Lies (over the phone). I have also interviewed sophiamcdougall for my blog; she follows me on Twitter and LJ and we are Facebook friends, so when I reviewed her book for the newspaper, I disclosed this.

I list all this to make the point that before I got into fandom, I was very comfortable interacting professionally with authors and discussing my interpretations of their work (with which, on occasion, they did not agree - I recall John Marsden shooting down a particular idea I had about his YA retelling of Hamlet. I stand by my interpretation and it didn't bother me that he disagreed with it). And since I've been in fandom/a review blogger, I've had extremely positive interactions with authors: it's how I got to know Sophia McDougall, Jo Walton has linked to my reviews of her work, Kate Elliott and Sarah Rees Brennan have done the same and participated in the discussion that such reviews generated, and I have participated in discussions on professional authors' or publishers' blogs without feeling unwelcome. Knowing that the authors were, in a sense, reading over my shoulder hasn't inhibited me in any way - in fact, it helped me to correct mistakes I had made (such as the time I wrote that Sophia McDougall's characters Delir and Lal were Christians, and she corrected me, saying they were Zoroastrians).

I think it helps, however, that the writers with whom I've interacted are neither hugely well-known (i.e. they're not at the J. K. Rowling level), nor are they unpleasant people. They are not going to go all Anne Rice on you all of a sudden if you 'interrogate the text from the wrong perspective'. In my experience, they've linked to my positive reviews and corrected me (as in the example of Sophia McDougall with the Zoroastrianism) when I made errors of fact, and stayed silent when I (to their mind) made errors of interpretation (that is, if I interpreted their writing against their intentions). Nor do they have vast armies of readers who organise themselves into opposing factions and attempt to recruit the authors into their battles of interpretation.

It's precisely because of these experiences (both as a newspaper reviewer and in my online interactions with authors) that I find it baffling, for example, when authors join in fan conversations about their works and are met with hysteria, accusations of 'inserting themselves into fannish spaces' and claims that their status as authors creates a power imbalance. I'm not talking about authors who go after negative Amazon reviewers or people who gave them only four stars on Goodreads. I'm talking more about instances when fans reblog authors' posts on Tumblr and then seem to get outraged that the authors respond. I like having discussions with authors, and if I tweet at them on Twitter, review their books on LJ or Wordpress or reblog them on Tumblr, it means I'm attempting to include them in the conversation if they want to be there.

At the same time, there are so many instances where authors have behaved like entitled brats when interacting with fans. This ranges from Anne Rice linking to negative reviews on her Facebook page and encouraging her fans to go after the reviewers to Ryan Murphy writing mockery of a subset of his fans who didn't like particular narrative choices into Glee. I remember a particularly irritating incident when Karen Miller (who writes Star Wars tie-in novels) went absolutely nuts at fans DARING to write fanfic of them in which 'her' characters were, shock-horror, gay. I'd never read any of her books, and was not in Star Wars fandom, but joined the masses, attempting to get her to see her own hypocrisy. (It didn't work.) Conversely, I have also seen fans act like entitled brats when particular stories didn't go their way (see: Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender shipwars, although the authors involved didn't help matters).

I feel like a good rule of thumb for creators might be to stay offline entirely unless they are comfortable reading criticism of their work. And I feel like a good rule of thumb for fans might be to refrain from posting material visible (or Googlable) to creators unless they're comfortable with the creators reading and potentially responding to their material. (And seriously, Teen Wolf fandom: don't engage the creators about Sterek unless you're prepared to hear any answer. Same goes for Dean/Castiel fans and Supernatural.) The vast majority of creators don't respond, in any case (Kate Elliott, Jo Walton, Sarah Rees Brennan and Sophia McDougall are the rare exceptions among the hundreds of creators whose work I've reviewed and talked about).

The internet is not going anywhere, and over the years I've been online, I've seen the fourth wall slowly dismantled. It's not going back up. Some creators are going to be good at interacting with fans, some are going to be bad, and some are going to be Ryan Murphy. Some fans are going to be good at interacting with creators, some are going to be bad at it, and some are going to Tweet porny fanfic at actors (seriously, please, please don't do that). My conclusion is that I have no absolute conclusion: I personally enjoy interacting with creators as a fan and reviewer, but can understand why some people don't. Ultimately, I think we are going to have to take each set of interactions on a case by case basis: some will be positive, some will be neutral, some will be awful due to the fans' actions and some will be awful due to the creators' actions. Interactions, like the internet itself, are only as good as the people involved in them.

What are your thoughts? I'm particularly keen to hear from those on both sides of the creator-fan divide.