Global Fandom Conversations (Round Two, Part One): Sebnem Baran and Rafay Mahmood
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Figure 1: Promotional poster for Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century)
Sebnem Baran: Diriliş: Ertuğrul (2014–2019) first aired on the public broadcaster TRT in 2014 as Magnificent Century was continuing its last season. The show was quickly associated with the conservative government’s desire to depict the Ottoman Dynasty in a way that was more aligned with the Islamic identity—almost as a reaction against the Magnificent Century’s version. Bir Zamanlar Osmanlı: Kıyam (2012), Filinta (2014–2016), and Çırağan Baskını (2012) are earlier products with the same desire to revisit the Ottoman past from a conservative perspective. All of these shows tried to provide alternative vistas into the Ottoman past in an attempt to rival Magnificent Century and make use of the existing demand for period dramas. Despite varying levels of success, they paved the way for Diriliş, which gained more popularity in both the domestic and global markets.
The AKP government’s neo-Ottoman ideals have been studied in connection with Turkish drama exports in the last two decades.1 As a show exploring the beginnings of the Ottoman Dynasty on the public broadcaster TRT, Diriliş provides an interesting case to discuss within this framework. After all, these neo-Ottoman ideals of increasing Turkey’s diplomatic power in the region overlap with the topic of the show that depicts the life of Ertuğrul Gazi, whose son Osman I founded the Ottoman Dynasty. Thus, the desire to expand is embedded both in the narrative and in the distribution of the show.
Following the political motivations behind the show’s creation, political partisanship had a clear influence on generating its fandom. The supporters of the AKP government celebrated it as a family-friendly show that could inspire the younger generation of viewers with its emphasis on Islamic, heroic, and patriotic messages. Conservative Pakistani fans’ appreciation of the show coincides with a similar framework of viewership and branding. Nevertheless, unlike the fans in Pakistan, Turkish viewers already knew about Esra Bilgiç’s previous on-screen presence. Therefore, the gap between her and Halime Sultan, the character she portrayed, wasn’t a big surprise for the viewers in Turkey.
Women’s bodies remain an important symbol of political polarization as the conservative perspective finds more visibility in broadcast media and social media. The debate around the women’s volleyball team from this past summer is just one among many incidents where an ideal citizenship model—informed by religion—was mapped onto women’s bodies.
Your discussion of the same tension in Diriliş fandom in Pakistan shows how the relationship between politics, religion, and identity can be followed across borders via fandoms around transnational content flows. In this context, I believe it is necessary to say that secularism debates in Pakistan and Turkey create a specific sociocultural proximity, which enables the flow of the show as well as generates identity-based fan reactions to it.
Bilgiç’s interaction with the Pakistani fans criticizing her also raises important questions about fandoms in the age of social media. Although the criticism targeting her came from the Pakistani fans in this case, many other actors and celebrities in Turkey face similar encounters with their fans and anti-fans.
1 Kraidy, Marwan M., and Omar Al-Ghazzi. “Neo-Ottoman cool: Turkish popular culture in the Arab public sphere.” Popular Communication 11.1 (2013): 17-29.
Posting pictures showing themselves eating during Ramadan or drinking alcohol—another emblem of resistance against the conservative ideals—can turn celebrities into targets of conservative social medial users. Similarly, not sharing celebratory posts during some of the national holidays associated with the Republican Revolution can attract the criticism of anti- government users. These pressures sometimes cause actors, musicians, athletes, and other celebrities to conceal certain aspects of their lives to avoid criticism or to keep their jobs. Some other times, they feel compelled to fulfill the sharing expectations and make their stance known. In both cases, the effect of the political conflict is permeating individual celebrity fandoms by passing through fandoms revolving around media texts or sports teams. In other words, local political specificities heavily influence fandom dynamics on multiple levels.
Your observation about Muslim social media users from different countries defending Bilgiç online raises another important question about this political turn in fandoms: How do the global and the local interact in fandoms? Perhaps surveying the local specificities more closely can be the first step for understanding how this interaction unravels.
Therefore, I’m curious about the Pakistani fans’ interaction with Pakistani texts and celebrities. Are there any examples that involved a tension reminiscent of the one in the Diriliş fandom about Esra Bilgiç? How did the conflict progress in these cases?
In the specific context of fandoms in Pakistan, how do the fan reactions differ for texts that are inherently political and ones that become politicized in circulation? Where do the actors’ and other publicly known people’s own political identities fall in this configuration?
Finally, are there any visible anti-fan reactions against the Turkish content—more particularly against Diriliş: Ertuğrul—in Pakistan? If visible, how do these anti-fans express their criticism of the show? Do they have any politically motivated explanations of their dislike? Does the transnational origin of the show come up in these explanations?
Rafay Mahmood
Şebnem, your analysis ‘Politics: Where the Global and the Local Meet in Fandoms of Turkey’ was a very thorough read with several talking points anchored at different places regarding your argument about the politicisisation of TV fandom in Turkey. The choice to pick a crime/ detective show and an absurd comedy offers a fascinating view into not just fan behavior but also how fan behavior changes or evolves with the kind of genres and tropes being offered on the telly.
Looking at the unrest and eagerness of the Turkish TV fandom to respond, as documented in your paper, makes me wonder if the reaction would have been the same had either one of the shows touched similar themes but in a different style and genre. The protagonist of Behzat Ç is a detective and works more or less like a superhero fighting corruption and Leyla ile Mecnun is an absurdist farce that offers a tendency for political commentary and satire. Behzat Ç’s case study reminds me of the TV show presenters in Pakistan who raid random public offices to ‘catch’ the corruption and crime as-live, and how they continue to be one of the most top-rated shows on the Fixed Point Chart. People love them but they wouldn’t go out on a protest if the state decides to censor one of these show presenters perhaps because the audience expects the news genre to be censored and controlled and is already aware that sooner or later another similar news presenter will be ‘highlighting’ such practices on a different platform.
One question that you can think over is whether similar commentary about state corruption would receive a similar response from the government officials had the release format been different?
Presumably, the TV fandom in Turkey wants a fictional character to save them from socio political vices because someone real, like a journalist they know of in real life wouldn’t have led to a similar movement from the fans because fans don’t trust anyone who is associated with their real-world or the ‘system’?
The good old notion of suspension of disbelief is both relevant to my work and yours too but I do feel the disbelief in the case of Diriliş: Ertuğrul is born out of the fact that actors like Esra are foreign faces but in the case of Behzat Ç it could be the fans’ eagerness to not accept or allow anyone real to fix society? Is that a recent tendency or have Turkish fans displayed similar behaviours before the recent influx of Hollywood superhero films and universes such as DC and MCU? This will also add to the global, local and then glocal conversation you are having towards the end. I do feel your analysis is already rich in ideas but it can be more focused and revealing if we are able to draw a parallel with TV tropes that may or may not have influenced the fandom.
Delving further into the fan practice you elaborate on how fans in “Turkey speeded up the entry of global fan practices and vocabulary into the public discourse by causing their favorite shows to trend on social media, warning ‘regular viewers’ about sharing ‘spoilers’ and publicly ‘shipping’ characters as well as the actors portraying them.” I was just curious about the role of language and if there non-English speaking fans who are using Turkish or any other vernacular or native derivative to talk about the show and in doing so trying to replicate the same global fan expressions in a different language. This point is of particular interest to me because in Pakistan the majority doesn’t speak, read or write English which is why language becomes a very interesting angle to understand whether any movement or a social phenomenon is truly intersectional and driven by ‘public’.
I don’t know how regulated the internet is in Turkey but causing their favorite shows to trend on social media also looks like a marketing ploy that more than one production houses have employed to get a hashtag going. I am sure you are aware of this global practice. The real question then becomes do we know what accounts are paid or supported in some way by the marketing and PR departments of the production houses and how many of them are ‘organic’. Hypothetically speaking, if the hashtags are being pushed by the production houses (no I am not talking about stars of the show tweeting about the show) under some sort of a subtle arrangement with influencers then they are still being picked up by fans. In this case, the argument opens up to how the fans are standing against the system by, in some ways, supporting the system. The first system here is the hyper-capitalist TV production and the second being the state, the government that is censoring or opposing the content. K pop and how the armies operate on social media is a very good lens of comparing how organised these members of the Turkish fandom are and to what extent is their interaction with the issue at play triggered by tribal instinct and to what extent is that instinct planted.
The mention of K pop and heavy metal echoes with the situation in Pakistan and the associated Muslim family anxieties. Last month members of the BTS_Army somehow managed to put a Jungook billboard in the middle of Gujranwala, one of the biggest cities in Pakistan.
The billboard was meant to mark the K-pop star’s 24th Birthday As soon as the billboard was put up both BTS_army, Jungook and Jungkook billboard started trending on Pakistani Twitter. Within hours, provincial assembly candidate Furqan Aziz Butt, who is also a member of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami, had the advertisement removed after he had received “a lot of complaints” from people. He cited the group’s tendency to promote homosexuality and being a negative influence on the youth as one of the reasons for having it taken down.
This also opens the forum to explore the state’s role in agenda-setting by elaborating on whether the fandom of state-supported shows also responds to TV in a similar way. Drawing a parallel between one of the shows that they have tried to censor, such as Behzat Ç and another show that the government has invested in and patronized as the canon of ideal morality and discourse, and how the respective fandoms responded to the two shows will allow us to excavate what precisely unites or divides fans and whether there is any overlapping. In Pakistan, the biggest and the most prolific production house is that of the ISPR (Inter-Services Public Relations) which regularly produces TV shows and films that are advertised aggressively and not subjected to the censor codes that any privately produced show is subjected to. While the two fandoms are usually united by overlapping star cast the fandoms of ISPR-sponsored shows are usually more patriotic and radical in defending their show on social media since their likeness is heavily derived from a sense of nationhood. Having said that, the audience in Pakistan has a softer corner for the army than any government and it got further emboldened after Pakistan took a POW in a recent skirmish with India. The fandoms of the ISPR-funded shows hence act like social media soldiers edging to defend any counter-narrative like that in the war field. This dichotomy, and in some cases the overlapping of fandoms is an area brimming with possibilities and open to manoeuvring in the case of Pakistan and Turkey where the state plays an active role in controlling cultural and creative production.
