University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

REMEDIATING REALITY IN REAL PERSON SLASH FAN FICTION

KAYLEY THOMAS

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2010

To the fans

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my chair, Richard Burt, and my reader, Anastasia Ulanowicz, for their interest in my research and their continual support. I would also like to thank my family and friends for their encouragement and for knowing when to let me work and when to drag me away for my own good. I extend my gratitude to the fans whose passion and creativity never ceases to inspire me; my thanks especially go out to those who participated in my research and supported this project.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 6

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 8

2 CELEBRITY AND PARA-SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS ...... 16

3 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE, THE NARRATIVE DATABASE, AND REMEDIATION ...... 25

4 CONCLUSIONS ...... 32

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 34

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 36

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

REMEDIATING REALITY IN REAL PERSON SLASH FAN FICTION

Kayley Thomas

December 2010

Chair: Richard Burt Major: English

Previously taboo in fandom, real person slash fan fiction has seen a surge in popularity in the last few years. This change correlates with the influx of new media and internet information culture that has enabled fans’ para-social relationships with celebrities to increase in depth and intensity. In a proliferation of information access through web sites like YouTube® and LiveJournal®, a feeling (or illusion) of intimacy and immersion in the relationship is achieved through increasing opportunities for participation in and appropriation of media. The online real person slash fan fiction community functions as a community of collective intelligence, creating from a community database of information a folkloristic narrative (fanlore) that works to create at once a hypermediated and immediate experience with the actors as individuals and as characters. The experience of reading a real person slash story promises an erasure of mediation; the fans are now in presence of the thing represented, and more so, the characters are under their control. The fan fiction writers and readers work to build a coherent narrative from the fragments of celebrity media, ascribing a reality and identity to an otherwise fractured object. In order to do so, the fan must continue to contribute to and draw from the fanlore database of knowledge, but the goal of a cogent reality

appears to only be achievable through what is ultimately a text narrative. Real person slash fan fiction becomes, in essence, reverse remediation, a return to text in response to multiple media, though its creation is itself impossible without that very media; the fan fiction must always bear the media’s traces and remain in dialogue with it.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

“Jared, your fangirls. Fangirls, I believe you already know Jared. Better than he knows himself.” So reads the summary description for “Common Knowledge,” a work of fan fiction by Elucreh in which actor Jared Padalecki of the television series

Supernatural comes to realize his love for co-star Jensen Ackles through his discovery of and participation in the show’s fandom. Overhearing fans discussing “J2” at a fan convention, Jared begins to research and unravel the phenomena of real person slash

(RPS) on the internet, finding a vast network of information and stories cataloging and constructing a relationship between the two men through fan videos and recollections of conventions and appearances at other events, interviews and articles, and other sources. He learns that the romantic pairing of Jared and Jensen together is denoted in typical slash fan fiction fashion as Jared/Jensen (or Jensen/Jared) and is commonly referred to by fans as J2 (or J-squared); slash is a subgenre of fan fiction that features a romantic or sexual relationship between two men; and slash about Jared and Jensen are a part of a larger genre known as real person fan fiction (RPF), stories written by fans about actors, musicians, and other public figures.

Elucreh’s highly self-reflective story adeptly models the community in which such

stories are written and read, drawing attention to the desire to know the celebrity, as

well as a focus upon the celebrity’s own self-awareness. Whether Jared and Jensen

appear in fan fiction as the actors we know them as (such as in “Common Knowledge”)

or as alternate universe (AU) versions of themselves – what the writer perceives that

Jared and Jensen might be like if Jared were a struggling artist or Jensen were born in

nineteenth century Japan (AUs are a popular RPS subgenre) – often the core of the

stories center upon conceptions and constructions of identity. “Common Knowledge” highlights in particular the practice of collecting and sharing information as a part of that construction. This lies at the heart of the real person slash community, each member bringing to their reading and their writing a set of “common knowledge” about Jared and

Jensen garnered not only from official interviews or personal experience but from the community’s collective knowledge of a wide array of information and experiences. This intelligence is extrapolated, interpreted, and integrated into works of fan fiction, which then become a part of the community’s collective knowledge as well; when Jared begins to write stories of his own in “Common Knowledge,” they are informed not by firsthand of “official” experiences or data – either of his own personally or from “official” sources – but by fan conversations sharing information and interpretations, as well as from other stories. Fan fiction by fellow members of the community become sources of the celebrity’s identity and interiority that inspire future reconstruction. That Elucreh’s Jared must not only seek out information on the internet to understand the J2 community but must also engage in the community as an active participant in internet technologies through research, discussion, and publishing points to an integral element of RPS study: not a focus upon the sexual politics of slash, as many critics have previously addressed, but an exploration of the technology and processes of narrative and identity construction.

The majority of academic work on fan fiction has been devoted to slash, beginning in the late 1980s with a focus primarily on Star Trek slash; Kirk/Spock is believed to be the first slash pairing. Slash fan fiction are fan stories in which presumably heteronormative characters, most often male, are refigured in a fantasy

space of homoerotic experience and identification. Most often their heterosexuality is initially maintained, with the development of a new sexual identification dependent upon

– and strangely enough, often limited to – their specific attraction to each other. It is the love and/or sexual desire between the chosen two characters than the fan is interested in cultivating; in addition to fulfilling a sexual fantasy, the resulting fan fiction then serves as a means to shed insight into the interior lives of the characters that the source text seemingly cannot offer in its heteronormative characterizations. RPS adopts a similar goal, with much less stable source texts to draw from and a different level of identity construction at stake.

In RPS stories, real people – but most often celebrities, historical figures, or other popular public personalities – are perceived as a text to be read and reconstructed for the fan’s purposes, just as with the appropriation of fictional characters. Whereas slash fan fiction itself can be traced to the 1960s with the popularity of the Kirk/Spock pairing in Star Trek fandom, with slash communities growing ever since, the same has not been the case with RPS. According to Fan History, a few RPS stories did appear during this time with Star Trek actors as their focus, but they were met with suspicion, criticism, and scorn and were quickly hidden away (“ActorFic”). In a variety of fandoms up until the

21st century, most RPS was discouraged or forbidden in fan spaces, perceived as

invasions of privacy. Though there were certainly exceptions, RPS was unable to break

the surface of the larger fan fiction culture until 2001 with The Lord of the Rings fandom

(“ActorFic”). Notably, this was a media property that received a considerable amount of

major media and fan attention, arising alongside an increasingly active and accessible

internet culture.

The RPS taboo still lingers, but with decreasing regularity. Most objections, again, have centered on issues of privacy and consent, a line drawn between the appropriation of real people’s creations and real people’s lives. Certainly the former is no less discursive, particularly in slash fan fiction, where stories range from romantic to pornographic. Yet real person slash has come to rival fictional person slash in numbers and popularity in some fandoms, with more and more communities devoted exclusively to RPS springing up constantly.

Fan culture has come under increasing academic scrutiny in recent years, and it is certainly no coincidence that its popularity has arisen alongside the surge in new

media studies. The proliferation of media in a variety of technological incarnations has

made participatory culture even more participatory than when Henry Jenkins published

his seminal fan studies text Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

eighteen years ago. Since then fan fiction has relocated almost entirely from the pages

of print fanzines to digital dissemination and discussion in internet communities, but

more has changed than just the level of accessibility and the number and diversity of

writers and readers. One of the most noticeable shifts has been in the rise in popularity

of real person fan fiction and real person slash in particular, which have historically been

taboo in the fan fiction community and received little critical attention from media and

fandom scholars. In analyzing the practices of the RPS community, I hope to engage a

new area of fan fiction study that links the process of textual production more closely to

the community’s cultural production.

Drawing from Michel de Certeau, Henry Jenkins has described fan fiction readers

and writers as “textual poachers” (27). In the essay “Reading as Poaching,” De Certeau

addresses the common assumption that the average reader is fundamentally passive, that "[t]o write is to produce the text; to read is to receive it from someone else without putting one's own mark on it, without remaking it" (169). While his primary focus is upon the popular reader and the novel, he acknowledges that this convention can also be seen in the “reading” of television shows, which he suggests are “offered to 'consumers' who cannot trace their own [readings] on the screen where the production of the Other -

of 'culture' - appears" (169). The presumption appears to be that were she to so choose, the novel reader, unlike the television viewer, could physically trace her reading upon the text by “marking” the text, writing in the margins, even if her “readings” are still largely considered passive and without cultural significance or production; traditionally, says de Certeau, she has no “historical role” (167).

Jenkins intervenes here in his conception of the television fan – or, more particularly, the fan fiction community member. Fan fiction functions as more than just a story containing the materials (plots, settings, characters) of another’s work; Sheenagh

Pugh differentiates between fan fictions that desire “more of” versus “more from” their source material (19), such as can be particularly seen in the subgenre of slash, which situates primarily heteronormative characters in a homosexual reconfiguration; this area of fan fiction has perhaps received the most attention from academic critics. While writing fan fiction in general certainly expresses a desire for “more of” the fan’s favorite media, the inclination in slash fan fiction to extend Eve Sedgwick’s homosocial continuum from perceived homoerotic subtext in the source material to realized desire in the fan text indicates a desire for “more from” the homogenous “culture” de Certeau finds so problematic, pre-packaged and intended as it is for immediate and passive

consumption. The slash fan mines the source text for homoerotic subtext in order to create a world that the fan desires to engage with when media itself does not. Jenkins proposes that fans are, in fact, “active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings” (24) in their fan fiction production. They are at once exemplars and extensions of de Certeau’s reader as poacher, who moves beyond the author’s

“intended” meaning of a text, recognizing the text not as a singular object but a fluid space with an “indefinite plurality of meanings" (de Certeau 169) that the popular reader is as capable of extracting as is the academic critic.

Where the fan diverges and Jenkins elaborates upon de Certeau, however, is in de Certeau’s statement that “[w]riting accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a place and multiplies its production through expansionism of reproduction” (174), whereas the practice of “[r]eading takes no measures against the erosion of time…it does not keep what it acquires” (174). Despite his argument for the critical capabilities of the popular reader, de Certeau essentially concludes that the reader offers no real cultural production, still lacking a “historical role”; a poached reading is productive for the reader, but otherwise leaves no larger “mark.” Jenkins counters this with his assertion that fan fiction serves as a communal practice that facilitates discussion and cultivation of meaning-production:

Such discussions expand the experience of the text beyond its initial consumption. The produced meanings are thus more fully integrated into the readers’ lives and are of a fundamentally different character from meanings generated through a casual and fleeting encounter with an otherwise unremarkable (and unremarked upon) text. For the fan, these previously ‘poached’ meanings provide a foundation for future encounters with the fiction, shaping how it will be perceived, defining how it will be used. (45)

In the life of the fan fiction community member, the source text is not the text, but the

beginning text from which a multiplicity of texts are created. Each successive work of

fan fiction is in turn read, interpreted, and discussed by the community, contributing to a

critical collaborative reading of a knowledge space teeming with an “indefinite plurality

of meaning” in a network of meaning-making stories. This process becomes particularly

remarkable in real person fan fiction, where the source texts can vary widely in source,

medium, content, and authority; the fan community takes upon itself the task of making

meaning of these texts and does so through a vast and intricate network producing an

ever-expanding and interactive space of knowledge and cultural production. The

presence of their community and the work it produces leave “marks” upon cyberspace

that I argue are indeed evidence of real and meaningful cultural production. Not only do

the poached “meanings” of the celebrity determine future encounters with the celebrity

image or person, but more importantly, the fan texts come to function as the more

prominent meaning-makers, serving effectively as the source texts for further stories.

I attribute this development to a celebrity-fan para-social relationship that has

grown in depth and intensity with the proliferation of information access in an internet

culture, with a feeling (or illusion) of intimacy and immersion in the relationship achieved

through increasing opportunities for participation in and appropriation of media. Drawing

upon the work of Pierre Levy, Lev Manovich, and Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, I

posit the RPS community as a community of collective intelligence, creating from a

dynamic virtual database of information a folkloristic (or fanloristic) narrative that

functions for the fan to create at once a hypermediated and immediate experience with

the actor as person and as character. The RPS community collects data from a variety

of sources and through their fan fiction build a coherent narrative from the fragments of celebrity media, ascribing a reality and identity to an otherwise fractured object. In order to do so, the RPS writer and reader must constantly draw from the ever-evolving fanlore

database of knowledge, working within a complex environment of multimedia and

networked communication. Through this process of collection, dissemination, and

recontextualization, the goal of a cogent reality and a fulfilling celebrity-fan/character-

reader experience can only be achieved through the return to a text narrative, with the

RPS text potentially becoming the stable, authoritative text.

CHAPTER 2 CELEBRITY AND PARA-SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

With the rise of the celebrity image in the film industry, officially sanctioned real

person (non-slash) fiction stories were, in fact, released in the 1940s by Albert Whitman

& Company (Molson 317). The mass-produced, cheaply-bound Big Little Books were marketed as "the Authorized Editions of Hollywood stars” (320), featuring the names and likenesses of popular actors and actresses. Whitman recognized the potential currency that the very name of a celebrity possessed, making a wise business investment in securing a licensing agreement for the use of names like Ann Rutherford,

Ginger Rogers, Roy Rogers, Judy Garland, Gene Autry, Gregory Peck, Shirley Temple, and Betty Grable (Molson 320). The actors did not feature in the stories as their celebrity selves, however. The books often featured photos of the celebrities on the cover and within the text, drawing a clear connection to the celebrity’s image, but the plots themselves bore more resemblance to AU real person fan fiction, appropriating the image and personality of the actor as it was publicly perceived and recontextualizing the actor by placing him in another identity or lifestyle. For example, in the book Ginger

Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak, the Ginger Rogers character is not an actress, but is instead a normal telephone operator who stumbles unexpectedly into a mystery (Molson 321). And yet, she is still Ginger Rogers in the image that her name recalls for the reader. As Francis J. Molson describes, it is the pervading celebrity image that served as the marketing tool, not the story’s plot itself:

Clearly the name of a particular film star, in the publisher's words 'your favorite character,' was intended to lure youngsters to buy or obtain the book featuring that celebrity. Subsequently, the story, an original creation by one of the publisher's stable of writers, supposed would retain readers' interest - surely not a difficult task for the writers inasmuch as young readers presumably were quite willing to identify with motion picture stores

and become involved vicariously in their adventures. (320)

The celebrity image draws the reader into the story, allowing the reader to interact with him in a fantasy space in which the celebrity is “just like me” and thereby accessible –

and for Whitman, quite profitable. Fan fiction writers, on the other hand, do not write

their stories for themselves alone, and they do not publish them on the internet for profit,

indicating that there must be something more behind this dual process of consumption

and production of the celebrity image that RPS takes up.

The same is true when Jared and Jensen are cast as a variety of different kinds

of characters – models and artists, samurais and shoguns, and dogsitters and movie

stars, as Elucreh’s portrayal of Jared discovers through reading fan fiction in “Common

Knowledge.” The actors as characters must still be recognizable – they must read

authentically, creating an experience of real intimacy and knowing. Winterlive says that

such stories only succeed when there:

is the long, drawn-out creation of personal canon, the exploration of the psychology of a person based on the little snips that you know about him, and making it as believable as possible. An RPS author wants to make a reader look at her story and go, yes, if Jared were gay, he would totally go for Jensen, in just that way…If Jared were an astronaut, he would bring a container of jello with him so he could see what jello looked like wobbling around at zero Gs. If an author doesn’t have the voice down, the right attitude for her characters, if she fails to capture the character’s personality, toss the story into the recycle bin and try again.

The realization and development of a gay relationship must correspond with the

behaviors, personalities, and friendship that fans have already seen Jared and Jensen

display for them. Jared’s often silly and irreverent persona, along with a repeatedly

expressed love of food and candy in general, is a specific piece of information gathered

and invested into the stories to create a feeling of authenticity.

Notably the 1940s stories are promoted as “featuring your favorite character,”

even while they supposedly feature a real person. Ginger Rogers is not an actress cast

as character “XYZ” as she would be in a film, but she herself becomes a character, a

hybrid of reality and fantasy. In Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star

System in America, Richard De Cordova discusses the development of an actor-

character personality in classic Hollywood, beginning first as “the representation of

character across a number of films” that audiences came to associate with the actor

himself (86). A series of filmic images informs the viewer’s identification not with just the

characters that the actor plays, but with the actor himself. Thus audiences, upon

meeting their favorite celebrities, would expect John Wayne to be a rugged man’s man,

Marilyn Monroe to be a childlike bombshell, James Dean to be effortlessly cool, just as

Jared and Jensen appear as close as the brothers that they play on Supernatural (or

more, as RPS posits). This popular public persona came to be expected and thus

represented off-screen in varying degrees, encouraged by studios and adopted by

actors strategically, giving the actor access to effectively a new level of agency, as

Graeme Turner indicates:

While the development of the star turned the individual into a commodity to be marketed and traded with greater freedom and flexibility by the industry, it also gave the star access to a new kind of power. They could now construct a relationship with their audience that was independent of the vehicles in which they appeared. With this shift, the individual star had a personal and professional interest in promoting themselves – not only the latest product in which they played a role – through the media. Hence we have the constitution of a new source of information for the media and a new means of constructing an identity through the media. (13)

The emphasis upon a “relationship” between the celebrity and the audience becomes particularly important. The audience is charged with the task of making sense of the

celebrity images that they are meant to consume, establishing the celebrity as a text to be read; the audience, in turn, becomes the meaning-makers. Thus the private self, or personality, becomes the focal point of the celebrity, with the private self becoming a public presentation that is always partially a character, or combination of characters, depending on the setting and the audience. The image that the celebrity chooses to present to his fans is necessarily a partial performance of an identity, just as the gossip that the tabloids uncover are mediated fragments of a life; the fan pieces the texts together in order to develop a more cohesive narrative knowledge of the celebrity.

According to Richard de Cordova, “the private lives of the players [are] constituted as a site of knowledge and truth” (98). The RPS writer gathers and employs information about the private lives and public presentations of Jared and Jensen, creating in the stories a synthesis of actor and character that both draws from and constructs a new site of knowledge and truth.

Daniel Malen visited the set of Supernatural and observed Jared and Jensen filming a scene as Sam and Dean Winchester, brothers fighting creatures of urban myth and legend – and often, each other. Malen’s article constructs its own fannish narrative

that seeks out and provides insight into the two actors:

There they sat at an ordinary kitchen table, Sam and Dean (Padalecki and Ackles, respectively) discussing recent events…tempers were flaring. As voices raised, so too did emotions. Dean was, of course, in protective mode, while Sam did what he does best: bristled. And then things took a most unexpected turn. Sam and Dean gazed lovingly - dare I say longingly? - into one another’s eyes. Standing, Dean moved closer to Sam, raising his arm and reaching out as if to touch him softly, when suddenly…

"Cut!” yelled the director. "Okay, boys, now let’s do it seriously this time,” he said, no doubt relegating any footage which might bring to life some of the more lurid fan fiction lurking on the internet to the cutting room floor.

Such an instance offers the RPS fan the opportunity to see the personalities of the actors bleed through their characters, alternately highlighting a penchant for playfulness or flirtation and a nod to either the slash pairing of their fictional characters, also popular online – either the Wincest fan (as Sam/Dean readers and writers call the pairing) could interpret this as subtext breaking through to text, or the RPS fan could read it as the love between Jensen and Jared emerging in their everyday lives, so much as to break through their acting, as has been chronicled in fan fiction works. Though Malen suggests that the lack of distribution of this footage would prevent fan fiction, it is his

personal narration – related online – that will instead inform the fan fiction; these are the

pieces fans gather from the floor and, in fact, cut together. The two actors’ habit of

enacting pranks on set and deliberately eroticizing scenes between the two brothers

has been chronicled both in official DVD gag reels and fan reports and videos from

conventions, in which Jared and Jensen share stories of on-the-set shenanigans. Such

data is gathered by fans and appear in fan fiction as personality traits and character

tropes, adapting both an image that the actors present and an experience of shared

intimacy.

With the influx of media we are currently bombarded with, made more proliferate

with the internet and a networked culture, Chris Rojek proposes the idea of the

“ubiquitous celebrity” as it is formed by mass-media technologies, creating a

“mediagenic” culture in which the process of “celebrification” endows the celebrity at

once with a larger-than-life status and an intimate persona. Here Rojek addresses the

traditional discussion of the para-social relationship as an impoverished relationship for

“normal” social interactions, arguing that the increase in contact with mass-mediated

representations of celebrity fills a need for social interaction or emotional satisfaction that is ironically at times found lacking in a fragmented, far-reaching and yet strangely

isolating global network. A para-social relationship consists of interactions which occur

across a significant distance – with people “we don’t know,” such as those we enjoy with

celebrities we watch and admire” (Rojek 52). Rojek still emphasizes the distance

between the fan and the celebrity, however, with a general recognition of the celebrity

persona of intimacy rather than a more significant experience of knowing. Matt Hills

poses the concept of the “subcultural celebrity” as a challenge to the ubiquitous

celebrity, in which it is fans that “confer celebrity status on actors who are not generous

recognized as (ubiquitous) celebrities” (69). Subcultural celebrities are “figures who are

treated as famous only by and for their fan audiences” (Hills 61). Although media may

initiate the consideration of the actor as celebrity, from their television show or official

interviews, there is the possibility for “personal contact” with the celebrity through

conventions, signings, and other public appearances (Hills 60). Such an experience,

“however ritualized and monitored as it may be, allows fans to feel close” to the

celebrity, enabling “the actor’s celebrity personality to be experienced

phenomenonologically in a way that mere reporting of his ‘qualities’ in secondary texts

cannot fully achieve” (Hills and Williams 352). This elevates the fan as a “relevant

beholder” who must recognize the celebrity through a level of personal interaction and

intimacy (Hills 60).

With Jared and Jensen as stars of a cult sci-fi/horror television series, they

function as Hills’ subcultural celebrities. This allows J2 RPS to intercede in Rojek’s

“mediagenic” culture, deriving its information not from highly mediated gossip

magazines and elaborate celebrity appearances but from a communal archive of experience, from fan convention videos uploaded on YouTube® from attendees,

featuring revealing and otherwise highly temporal and ephemeral – thus potentially

unstable and non-authoritative – Q&A sessions between J2 and the audience, to conversations online that interpret particular aspects of an official media representation, informed by these less mediated experiences. This is interestingly highlighted in a

YouTube® video uploaded by TheHuntress69 from the 2008 EyeCon Supernatural

Convention, in which Jared revealed that Jensen had moved in with him. In the video,

Jared quickly proceeds to say that he will “squash any of you all’s [the fans’] fantasies”

by noting that his and Jensen’s bedrooms are on different floors, but then jokes about

“dancing and cooking and cleaning together” (qtd in TheHuntress69). The video

launched many RPS stories about why Jared and Jensen had moved in together – were

they already a couple? Did they fall in love after becoming roommates? – and what their

domestic life would be like. Ironically, before this announcement there had been quite a

few works of fan fiction imagining such a situation; some fans saw this as a confirmation

of the signs they had been interpreting. That Jared would share such information and

supplement it with personal anecdotes contributes to the sense of intimacy not only felt

by the fans but then able to be invested into their stories.

Daniel Boorstin offers a particularly pessimistic but perhaps useful view of the

celebrity, whom he categorizes not as an actor of talent but “a person who is well-known

for their well-knownness” (58). Whereas heroes of old were known for their

accomplishments or “the great simple virtues of their character,” Boorstin maintains that

celebrities are known “mainly by trivia of personality” (65). Particular celebrities only rise

in popularity over others, says Boorstin, “because they are skilled in the marginal differentiation of their personalities” (65). In Jared’s recognition of his fans’ fantasies about him and Jensen, he displays a possible recognition of the currency that playing to this perception could have for his celebrity. With new media has come even more

potential for the dissemination of “trivia” information; a fan has innumerable outlets to

turn to for celebrity gossip, interviews, and images. Celebrity information culture is, in

fact, almost impossible to avoid, and with more and more media images being marketed

toward them, fans must now more than ever work to make meaning and value of these

texts. There is however, as Winterlive stresses, a marked difference in the community

between possessing such trivia knowledge and making use of that knowledge.

Information gathered should “be used to advance plot, to explore character and to add

to the ambiance of the story” and not exist as “an excuse…to show that the author

Knows Thing About Jared.” She provides a bad example and a good example of the

employment of supposed trivia:

BAD: While talking on the phone with Jensen, Jared hears the dogs barking. Jensen takes a minute to ask after Sadie and Harley, Jared’s lovable, friendly, golden-coated mastiffs, and then the conversation continues as normal.

BETTER: While having a very difficult phone conversation with Jared, Jensen hears the dogs barking. Jared mumbles out something about having to go take care of them and hangs up, a clear excuse to end the conversation.

Both examples display a knowledge that Jared has two dogs named Sadie and Harley,

information which has been provided by official interviews and articles as well as

Jared’s loving stories told of them at conventions. The first example conveys knowledge

whereas the second example constructs identities for the characters and realistic

relationships between them through that knowledge. The trivia to the RPS fan may not necessarily function as trivial, when knowing trivia leads to a knowledge space, and when it is the collection, dissemination, interpretation, and incorporation of such information that can create a more coherent celebrity narrative seeking to endow Jared and Jensen with complex identities and a sense of interiority.

CHAPTER 3 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE, THE NARRATIVE DATABASE, AND REMEDIATION

The internet has not only increased television fans’ access to each other but also to information about their shows, from electronic downloads to multiple media tie-in material (interactive games, sanctioned spoilers, web comics, etc). While magazines have always offered celebrity gossip and interviews, and specialized pro fanzines have catered to the genre shows on which much fan fiction is written, the internet has seen an escalation in available extratextual material surrounding shows and their actors: official video interviews on network web sites and online magazines; YouTube® video captures of public appearances; actor MySpace®, Facebook®, and Twitter® accounts; and an array of constantly updated blogs from actors, insiders, and other observers.

More importantly, however, is the manner in which this information is collected, disseminated, and utilized by the fans. The information is out there, but the fans, not the media, build Pierre Levy’s idealized cosmopedia, which he defines as a space of collective knowledge in which “no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity” (20). In the knowledge space all knowledge is accessible:

the members of a thinking community search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore...Not only does the cosmopedia make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment, but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negotiation, and development…Unanswered questions will create tension within cosmopedic space, indicating regions where invention and innovation are required. (Levy 214)

Levy believes that the internet makes these thinking communities possible, and I propose that the RPS community serves as a particularly potent cosmopedia. The network of blogs and communities on web sites like LiveJournal® enable fans to link

other fans to information, creating a fluid database consisting of actual hyperlinks to the aforementioned sources but also blogs chronicling personal encounters, rumors, and

fan conventions; fan uploaded videos from fan conventions where the actors, but

certainly not all fans, are in attendance; and blogs and discussion forums interpreting

any and all of the above. A narrative develops over time – a kind of folklore, or fanlore,

about the actors that becomes common knowledge, or collective intelligence. Not

everyone knows everything, but information is always available within the network,

circulated around the community, and is even collected and organized on fan-created

wikis. Unanswered questions are found in the gaps in narrative fragments – here fans as a community of textual poachers pull their resources/readings together and in their fan fiction create a bricolage of celebrity identity formation and shared fantasy.

Currently one of the most popular sources for fan fiction is the blog website

known as LiveJournal®. LiveJournal® (or LJ) advertises itself as “an online journaling

community, where people from around the world share stories, discuss topics and keep

in touch with friends. It's a free service that you can use for meeting people and

creating bonds through writing and sharing.” While open to anyone of any interest,

many slashers have congregated at the blogging site due to the ease in publication and

communication that it allows. One can keep a personal journal where daily events can

be archived along with fan fiction, and users can join discussion groups to post and

discuss their stories. Dementedjen, one of several LJ users interviewed for this study,

describes the interactive environment as “a common meeting place. It's our library and

our mall that allows us to communicate, share, research, and make friends. The

advantages/positives are the open communication and chances to come together.”1 As

a result, Gretazreta suggests that “many people write so well in fandom because they

are writing for readers and they know who they are. It's kind of like telling stories round

a campfire, and everyone knows the heroes, and has an opinion on what could

happen.”2

Storytelling is not an individual pursuit in the slash community, more closely

resembling an ongoing series of dialogues in which each writer shares her decoding of

a text for the benefit and enjoyment of the other members. LJ user Rivers_bend may just describe the process best:

I write fan fiction because it allows me to belong to a collective creative consciousness in a way that nothing else I can imagine does…Every time I read a great piece of…fanfic, [the characters] mean more to me. And as fanon and canon swirl together into a whole, the boys in my head become a part of that. And when I succeed in writing something that means something to someone else's canon, that resonates, or illuminates, I am becoming part of this elusive but completely vital thing that is fandom. In short, I write fan fiction because it feeds me. Would I still be writing if I didn't have this feedback mechanism of LJ? Probably not. I would have written a few things and moved on to something else. But I don't really think it's the ego boosting. Or not entirely. It's the relationships. And that idea of a collective consciousness.3

“Canon” here refers to the actual aired episodes of the show, whereas “fanon” is the

slash community’s canon, a certain amount of fixed truths about the universe in which

they write that the community has come to agree upon over time; when enough similar

speculations about a character’s past, for example, appears in more and more stories

and group discussions, it becomes fanon. In bringing this phenomenon into her

1 Personal interview, March 18, 2009.

2 Personal interview, March 18, 2009.

3 Personal interview, March 18, 2009.

discussion, Rivers_bend highlights the importance of the shared text within the community, both the source text of the show and the community text that the fan stories come together to create.

Adopting Lev Manovich’s work on the database narrative and information culture,

I refer to this phenomenon as the fanlore database. Manovich promotes new media’s ability to immerse users in an “imaginary fictional universe similar to traditional fiction”

(17) while providing a non-hierarchical database of information. That Jared has two dogs named Sadie and Harley may become just as significant to a story as the fact that

Jensen modeled Superman pajamas for a catalog as a child, for example; likewise, a fan might draw from an emotional story told by one of the actors at a convention – often

prompted, and thus shaped and mediated, by the fan, however. Manovich makes the

distinction between interactive media as not exclusively physically interactive but also

psychologically interactive, referring back to print literature’s use of ellipses to engage

the reader in filling in gaps. The fanlore database allows the user to engage in

discovering gaps in the “narrative” of the actor-character as he is seen in the bits and fragments of media, rewriting it in the RPS story while still utilizing that same well of information (no data more important than another, the writer able to pick and choose with freedom). The narrative produced in the RPS story is not static, however, but remains interactive, the story itself enveloped into the fanlore database narrative and accessible for future interpretations and creations. Many fans have noted that certain

supporting characters reappear in RPS stories, as do the tropes they carry with them,

as RPS reader Mindor describes:

The whole J2-verse has a lot of additional characters for pretty much every role you can think of, with determined character traits. I think of that as

"common knowledge" I guess, and I'm not against it, since shorter stories need a background they can build upon. You don't need to explain why Chad's being a douche or Chris's being protective, it's how our ancestors created them!4

According to Manovich, the “computer database becomes a new metaphor that we use

to conceptualize individual and collective memory, a collection of documents or objects,

and other phenomena and experiences” (214). RPS takes this up as more than a

metaphor and closes Manovich’s perceived gap between information and “immersion,”

constructing a narrative that can indeed tie it all together in a productive and creative

fashion. In this collection – from quotes to con videos, from popular fan stories to the

feedback comments they receive – a database is put together, forming an overarching

romance narrative for these actor-characters. It can be tapped into at any time, any

place, by a fan who wishes to interpret the signs and/or take part in the fantasy, to

extract and offer her own experience, as reader, writer, or other contributor.

In order to analyze the effects of new media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have put forth the concept of remediation. Remediation is, in the simplest sense, the representation of one medium in another, with Bolter and Grusin arguing that new media work in a constant dialogue with older media. Bolter and Grusin divide their consideration of how new media function between two subcategories of remediation: immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy, as Bolter and Grusin define it, is “the absence of mediation or representation. It is the notion that a medium could erase itself and leave the viewer in the presence of the objects represented, so that he could know the objects directly” (70). Such immediacy can be traced back to the 1940s pseudo-

4 Personal interview, March 18, 2009.

RPS stories: the celebrity ceases to be an untouchable image, but draws the reader into an inhabitable, relatable world. Hypermediacy is then defined as:

opacity – the fact that knowledge of the world comes to us through media. The viewer acknowledges that she is in the presence of a medium and learns through acts of mediation or indeed learns about mediation itself. The psychological sense of hypermediacy is the experience that she has in and of the presence of media; it is the insistence that the experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real. The appeal to authenticity of experience is what brings the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy together. (Bolter and Grusin 70-71)

The writing and reading of RPS encompasses both immediacy and hypermediacy, with

the fan creating a text that is informed by multiple media but intended to function as a

coherent narrative. Fans differ in their own reflections upon RPS, some insisting that the

characters are independent of the actors, particularly in alternate universe (AU) fan

fiction in which the actor-characters are recontextualized and placed in an entirely fictive

environment. As RPS fan Leah states, “there’s a lot more flexibility in AU, in a lot of

ways. When you have less that’s set in stone—when you strip away context—it means

the focus ends up centering on whatever the author finds most essential about the

relationship. Which can lead to some cool and surprising things.”5 There is a greater

fluidity or multiplicity of narratives, with the celebrity image rewritten through any

number of new identifications and experiences. Other fans propose a relationship

between the text and the actor, the fanlore narrative informing an interpretation of

reality, potentially a result of the para-social relationship that the fan maintains with the actor; the slash story becomes a fantasy wished for the actors instead of for the fan

alone, the perceived relationship between the two actors that is pieced together in the

fanlore database narrative accepted as a verifiable truth.

5 Personal interview, March 18, 2009.

In a recontextualized story, writers can respond directly to mediated portrayals of the actor-characters and, as Henry Jenkins describes fictional character fan fiction, “fill in the gaps in the broadcast material and provide additional explanations for the character’s conduct; these stories focus on off-screen actions and discussions that motivate…on-screen behavior” using the fragmented moments they are given “as points of entry into the character’s larger emotional history” (162-163). Just as is the case with

fictional person fiction, writing slash allows for a unique opportunity to “fill in the gaps,”

making note of and interpreting signs in a communal and productive practice. In reading

Jared and Jensen through slash lenses, fans are able to indulge in the pleasure of

collecting information and creating something whole from it – something new,

something creative, but something that feels real and emotional to those who already

feel a connection to the actor-characters, in turn providing a connection between the

community members.

CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSIONS

RPS writers essentially remediate reality, creating from the media fragments and experiences that they are given a more seamless narrative in which the actor-

character’s identity is fully knowable and inhabitable. I posit RPS as a split between the

dehumanizing and rehumanizing of the actor-character through a complex negotiation of image and text in a new media environment. By both cataloguing and extracting the information from the internet database, the actor as a cultural object is fragmented, but he is arguably always already such in his media presentation. However, by collecting the information into a fan community, a folklore narrative is created more cogently, and individual fan fictions draw from this collective database, rehumanizing the actor as a fully “fleshed-out” character with an identity that, while based upon the database, develops as a completely immersive, immediate reality in which a sexual orientation can be constructed and relationships built in the slash romance. The ultimate goal is not to

“correctly” deduce a homosexual relationship between two real people, to encourage it, or even strictly to fantasize about it. Potentially, RPS is all of these for different people.

But primarily I position the impulse to read and write RPS as the desire for an

immersive, authentic experience in a new media world. As LJ user Fannishliss puts it:

there's a kind of translucence in a really great [fan fiction], where the character begins to shine out of the image of Jared or Jensen in your mind - - like, picturing Jensen, but having that feeling of complete, almost sublime, knowledge of the character --I guess it is like the Joycean epiphany? It's an experience you only get while reading, an art-based experience, not something you could get from interactions in real life----yet the feeling that you in some way know the real life person is pervasive even though you know it is false.1

1 Personal interview, March 18, 2009.

It is about the experience which, however inspired by actors in pixels and high-def, sound bytes and YouTube®, can only be fully achieved in a return to a text narrative.

The fantasy becomes a production – cultural, social, and artistic – with authorial control and the pleasure of reading, writing, interpreting, and experiencing shared by the community in a complex hybridity of folklore and network database in an information culture.

LIST OF REFERENCES

“ActorFic.” Fan History. 13 Jul. 2008. Fan History LLC. 24 Oct. 2010 .

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Atheneum, 1971.

De Certeau, Michel. “Reading as Poaching.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. 165-176.

De Cordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Elucreh. “Common Knowledge.” Fan Fiction by Elucreh. 19 Nov. 2007. LiveJournal®, Inc. 24 Oct. 2010 .

Hills, Matt. “Recognition in the Eyes of the Relevant Beholder: Representing ‘Subcultural Celebrity’ and Cult TV Fan Cultures.” Mediactive 2 (2003): 59-73.

Hills, Matt and Rebecca Williams. “‘It’s All My Interpretation’: Reading Spike through the Subcultural Celebrity of James Marsters.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8.3 (2005): 345-365.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Man’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Trans. Robert Bonomo. Perseus Books, 1999.

LiveJournal®. 2010. LiveJournal®, Inc. 24 Oct. 2010 .

Malen, Daniel. “On the Set with Supernatural Stars Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles.” TheTVaddict.com. 10 Apr. 2007. TheTVaddict. 24 Oct. 2010 .

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.

Molson, Francis J. “Films, Funnies, and Fighting the War: Whitman’s Children’s Books in the 1940s.” The American Experience in World War II: The American Experience in World War II. Ed. Walter L. Hixson. London: Taylor & Francis, 2003.

Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Glasgow: Bell and Bain Ltd, 2005.

Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books, 2001.

TheHuntress69. “Jared on Living with Jensen: Eyecon2.” YouTube®. 3 Oct. 2008. YouTube®, LLC. 24 Oct. 2010 .

Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage Publications, 2004.

Winterlive. “An Inspired Word Will Come Across Your Tongue.” The Race is Not for the Swift. 13 Sept. 2007. LiveJournal®, Inc. 24 Oct. 2010 .

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kayley Thomas was born in Reedsville, Pennsylvania. She received a B.S. in

Secondary Education with a concentration in English from Lock Haven University of

Pennsylvania in 2007 and a M.A. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon

University in 2008. She will receive her M.A. in English in December 2010 from the

University of Florida, where she is also pursuing her PhD in English.