Friday Tchotchke #13: Fatal specificity
I posted my BlueSky username on Twitter last night (I’m at @tchotchke!) and immediately got texts from both of my parents asking what it was and how could they follow me. I appreciate this loyalty but even if I had invite codes to give out (I DON’T SORRY) I doubt Rachel and Stuart would find much of interest on the platform as it stands currently, especially with regards to my own profile.
I have long struggled with being a “true poster”—outside the bounds of my fandom practices, that is. My fangirl content is hot shit, I daresay, but when it comes to posting under my own name I get the digital equivalent to stage fright and end up just tweeting screenshots of paragraphs from my grad school readings. Oy.
If I could be funny and interesting without a grounding referential status to a pop culture object, I’d be leading a very different life, I think. But I am simply incapable of posting hashtag relatable content. Expression isn’t the issue—I can string a sentence together just fine. But good comedy requires empathy, an understanding of the human condition which is not one of my strengths. To have a consistently excellent Twitter presence like the user known as trash jones you need a keen mental eye for the sense of humor of those around you; the ability to think not in terms of “what do I think is funny” but “what do I think is funny that a lot of other people would also” and then translate that into content form.
The thousands of notes on Tumblr I got as a teenager on my Doctor Who Impact font memes made me believe that one fine day, my clear talent would bloom into untethered independence, and I’d be able to effortlessly create popular content of a desired level of genericity.
But alas: my prowess lies in severe, almost fatal specificity. During an open-mic set in Brooklyn I earnestly thought I’d get a laugh from the crowd with a joke about my suburban hometown, which is halfway across the country and which I should have known nobody in the room would have possibly heard of. It is time for me to accept that I will never be a poster.
This week in fandom
Today in the New York Times (h/t Rec Center), critic Tomi Obaro examines a recent duo of TV shows that encounter and comment on stan culture. Full disclosure, I have not watched either show, but I enjoyed this analysis of the ambivalence of both series in their treatment of the relationships between celebrities and their most intense fans.
As Obaro notes, the creators of these shows are both famous, so naturally feature an examination of the “dangerous stan” trope from the perspective of the person being stanned, even when (in the case of Donald Glover’s show) the stan is ostensibly the protagonist. The most offensive of stan behaviors are depicted, in service to a narrative—a valid one, at that—but it means that a feedback loop of representation is created which just furthers popular conceptions of the reprehensibly deranged fan.
Because of the tautology that in order to be in a position to create representations on film and TV, you are likely to be famous yourself, representation in media of the stan from the stan’s POV is more common in books than in movies and TV. A swelling fleet of romance and YA novels from authors like Rainbow Rowell and Olivia Dade, to say nothing of the immensity of popular Wattpad self-insert fangirl stories and their adaptations, let readers into a more sympathetic perspective of the obsessive.
But I would love to see Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get From You turned into a fictional TV show, for example, or an American adaptation of the popular Kdrama Her Private Life, about an art curator with a secret double life as a fangirl who ends up in a fake-dating situation with her idol. I just think that for every show about violent, crazy fans we should get a heartwarming story about the way fandom can change peoples’ lives for the better, right?
This week in polar exploration
I do not have any big groundbreaking updates for this section this week so instead I will offer a book recommendation. I’d been meaning to start investigating the story of Scott’s Northern Party for a while, and The Longest Winter by Meredith Hooper (Tom Hooper’s mother, apparently?) was a fantastic place to start—a compellingly readable treatment of their legendary but undersung ordeal, with a special emphasis on the relationships amongst the “lower deck” members of the party and those between them and the officers. G. Murray Levick, the party’s doctor (pictured above), had as much of a majestic protagonist’s arc as Atkinson of the main shore party—a man who at the start of the expedition was not entirely taken seriously emerging through trials and tribulations as a judicious, caring leader who saw a group of men through an incredibly difficult and uncertain time.