The Joy Kill Club: On Squid Game (2021), a Roundtable-Monologue by a Korean Female Aca-Fan (Part One)

This week, we take a break from the Global Fandom Jamboree to catch up on Squid Game, which became the top rated streaming program in more than 60 countries around the planet, and has inspired rich discussions where-ever it has been viewed. Do Own Kim, one of my PhD students, shared her mixed feelings about the series and its success with me, and I asked if I might, in turn, share these Korean reflections on the series with my readers.

The Joy Kill Club: On Squid Game (2021), a Roundtable-Monologue by a Korean Female Aca-fan

By Do Own (Donna) Kim

Netflix’s Squid Game (Hwang, 2021) became a global hit. I am a Korean woman, a media fan, and a communication PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California, USA. As an aca-fan, it is both extremely joyous and painful when a media text enthralls my mind. Like a summer crush, I must swoon, ache, and share before the heat passes. So here is my confession, originally confided to Prof. Henry Jenkins via email. Many spoilers.--------------------

I think Squid Game was a rich text and a generous reader in me can write a long eulogy on it as a critical spectacle on the disparities in, and caused by, the paradoxical promise of equity within capitalism. Then, a killjoy reader in me would respond by pointing out that it indeed was a spectacle, and perhaps one at the expense of those who the show claimed to advocate for, and one that nihilistically pointed at our helplessness towards it. At the same time, the generous reader can pounce back at that criticism by arguing that the show reaches its critical potency when we include the fourth screen: by equating the audience as the VIPs in the show. We too were observers of the violence who bet on and rooted for our champion(s), possibly with our own glass of evening drink. This disruptive reflection implies that it is the viewers who ultimately can uproot this game. After all, in a capitalistic society, isn't it all on the demand and supply graph? To this, the killjoy reader would respond with a piece of "real life" that contradicts this critical potential: how the director simply deflected the feminist "controversy" by claiming that he "had no intention of demeaning, hating women" but just wanted to emphasize what humans would do in dire situations and at the apex of indulgence. In the Korean society, feminist readings are still considered as uncomfortable oddities or indeed “killjoys”. Just like the marginalized Squid Game participants, such a reading becomes disqualified by the game maker: the director.

Here is the full conversation. This is a conversation between my two selves: a generous reader and a killjoy reader. This is a methodological exercise, as well as an honest reflection of the busy excitement that overtook my mind.

 Generous Reader: G

Killjoy Reader: K

 G: It was a fun show. It also seemed to have tried their best to represent as many minorities as they can, such as labor union (the main character's backstory about working at Double Dragon Motors is highly reminiscent of the Ssangyong Motors labor strike), women, youth, the elderly, people with disabilities, international folks, non-East Asian people of color, North Korean refugees, etc. At least in comparison to what’s typical in Korean media. It has its faults but has given some, and mostly positive, narratives to these characters. Unlike much Korean media, Squid Games gives them names and voices. And the series suggest not only how the Korean society's capitalistic system has been affecting these people’s lives but also offering no escape from the reproduction of the same patterns.Squid Game offers  only an empty promise of "equality" (not equity) for the disadvantaged.

K: But how did the show use these marginalized groups towards its narrative? As a Korean critic suggested (Text in Korean. Google Translate seems ok), if we were to pick one group that the show championed, ultimately this show was an ode to Korean middle-aged Men, a redemption arc for the "innocent/naive" [soonjin] patriarchs. What the show fails to delve into is how Gi-hun, the soonjin father, was born into the role of the protagonist, both narratively and socially. It overlooks who have been sacrificed either to make Gi-hun’s journey more arduous as a protagonist’s quest should be or to further legitimize the protagonist's status as the hero. Let's first talk about gender. The presence of Sae-byeok (the North Korean refugee character) and ironically Mi-nyeo (“the whore") would improve the results, but a simple Bechdel test would make the narrative build even more evident. What led to Gi-hun’s downfall, i.e., conglomerate greed and labor in Korea, is an issue that direly needs more attention, but what was coupled with it and ultimately excused? The non-demanding, selfless love and sacrifice of old mothers. The seemingly "heartless" ex-wife and her "better" new husband, the "rich dad" (let's not delve into how he showed up to his ex's house and shouted at her, as well as how he reacted to the new “richer” husband’s plea to leave his family at peace). The daughter that repeatedly gets overlooked and deprioritized from the very beginning of the story to the very end, which includes the daughter's own beginning—her birth. Or simply erased, until when the protagonist's well-meaning nature or inner conflicts need to be reminded. The death of the story's strongest female character, who awakened the hero just in time for his noble, bloody “fight" with the hero’s negative parallel, Sang-woo (the smartie). Of course she does so only after she had delegated her purpose to the hero. At the end of Season 1, Gi-hun chooses to re-join the Squid Game to "break the chain" instead of going to LA to visit his daughter: the hero's ultimate sacrifice. But at the expense of whom? Traditionally in Korea, it was socially acceptable to say that "men should do big things (dream big; do important, non-domestic things).” Gi-hun has always chased big things. He is still the hero.

G: Wouldn't that make the protagonist an imperfect hero instead? One that further emphasizes the cruelty of Squid Games that we are all playing. All are suffering, and the fact that you are finding the protagonist's action paradoxical perhaps itself evinces the critical resources the narrative provides for the audience. Behind what may seem like a glamorization, there are such criticisms towards those who may blindly relate to the protagonist, though not without empathy. The only way to stop playing Squid Game is to not participate or to vote together against it. But we are already in it, so perhaps the most agentic choice that we can make is to play it with the goal of dismantling it. This requires sacrifice in which we should think about the collective over the individual. Although it is unfortunate that the domestic life and women’s struggles was chosen as what could be relegated to the “personal,” Gi-hun’s arc can still empower those who may have felt powerless against capitalist oppressors. The oppressors which constantly discourage and threaten people from coming together, indeed at times holding people's private life, domestic peace, and individual purposes as captives.

An example that shows how Gi-hun "earned" his redemption is the contrast between the way the show depicted Gi-hun and Deok-su's (the thug) gambling. Deok-su’s gambling habits were exploitative and purely out of greed. And this exploitative greed continued in how he played Squid Game (e.g., during the marble game). On the other hand, Gi-hun had no other means but to turn towards gambling after his union lost their fight against the big company—whether it be race horses, the claw machine, the flip challenge, or how he gambled by siding with the marginalized during Squid Game out of good faith, etc. He meant well; yes, there was human weakness but also the genuine desire to treat his mother and daughter better. What options do the disadvantaged have? He never returned to the race tracks after winning the game. Gi-hun in episode 3 says "I'm sorry but I'm not in the position to help anyone" when the cop (Jun-ho) asks for Gi-hun’s help in finding his brother. Later he turns into a person who tries to help everyone despite his position. We should also not forget this cop's heroism, although in his case it was partially personally motivated. While to a degree he had to overlook injustices during his undercover at Squid Game, he risked everything to both learn more about his brother's disappearance and to help the world know about Squid Game.

K:  But did those who had to suffer from Gi-hun's gambling also resort to gambling? His mother, for instance, labored on without a shop while being sick. The moms fed their respective sons, Gi-hun and Sang-woo, with honest work.

 While staying on the topic of gender, how was Squid Game? It, perhaps as a self-mockery, continued to police people based on the facade of equality. The game switched off the lights during the glass bridge stage when the glassmaker, after decades of blue-collar work, was able to use his expertise and experience towards winning. The types of games themselves were gender-biased. In episode 3, characters talk about the nostalgia in the game structure, trying to guess what may come next. This nostalgia is one that is based on the middle-aged Korean Men's (or director’s) childhood where their "moms used to cook dinner,” and the "wives [were] very busy preparing boxed lunches every morning.” Gendered domestic labor is romanticized. In fact, Gi-hun earlier also casually says to Il-nam (the old man or Gganbu) that Il-nam should rather be at home being served warm dinner by his son's wife. Il-nam quips back by asking Gi-hun whether he has done that for his parents, which is a conversation that further adds to Gi-hun's narrative incompetence as a Son and a Father. It is a  gibe at Gi-hun’s position which comes at the expense of the hypothetical wife. Gi-hun also explicitly says that Squid Game is reminiscent of the games that they used to play during childhood. Nostalgia is first mentioned without distinguishing genders, then is followed by a clarification that boys used to play the flip game (Squid Game invitation game) and various tag games (I'd like to note that some of these “male" games were indeed played by girls as well). Then he says that girls tended to play some other games, such as rubber rope game [gomujool]. The show later mentions that female characters may be useful for team strategies because of their gendered knowledge about girls’ games, but none of the games that are designated as for girls appear on Squid Game. Ultimately, the games, including the final game—i.e., squid game, tended to be boys’ games that privileged gendered childhood knowledge and physical strength. That is, for instance even if Sae-byeok survived until the end, would she have been able to win? Would she have known the game as a woman, as a North Korean refugee, a younger person? The squid game was depicted as "the most violent game among children's games.” Even if she knew the game, would she have been able to win against the physical strength that the two men so viscerally flaunt during the last game? She was depicted as resourceful and strong, but with the aid of her pocket knife, a tool.

 Speaking of tools, Mi-nyeo ("the whore") brought her leisurely pleasures of small transactional value (cigarettes) and unexpected use (lighter) by hiding them in her "womanly pocket,” the only character shown to use their “bodily pocket(s).” This scene highlighted her unsavory tendencies and short-sighted greed, rather than simply her resourcefulness and cunning. She uses her sexualized body as a tool from this moment on. She shouts "sexual harassment" to one of the masked game staffs to help Sae-byeok’s ceiling adventure, of course not necessarily for pure goodness like Gi-hun. Sex crime is a serious issue in Korea ([a] [b] [c] c.f., Global Gender Gap Report)  and unfortunately, many men still claim that they are at the risk of false accusation and exploitative "flower snakes" (gold diggers) who intentionally use their sex to exploit men. Mi-nyeo constantly emphasizes that she is not old, casually repeating the word Oppa (the word for older brother for woman. Also colloquially used by women to call men who are older than themselves, although at times with misogynistic connotations that are linked with lower positioning of women, subservience, and appeal to cuteness), always trying to side with the strong (eligible men), only screaming for female solidarity when she got cornered. 

 She hastily exchanges sex for her protection, which the director described as a scene to show what people could do in extreme circumstances. But was it the only option? Was she, a woman, the only person who was in an extreme situation? It's difficult to retort if the show claims that this was to show her unique short-sightedness, but as a woman, I couldn’t stop thinking that her action seemed like an extremely endangering option or not even a realistic option, especially in a place where even the dead bodies of a woman can get group-raped (suggested via masked organ harvesters' conversations). The print on the lighter she uses suggests that she might have been a sex worker (“Pretty women rest stop [mi-nyeo hyugesil]”); this additionally adds to the narrative trope. Mi-nyeo, as someone who sells her body, is a degenerate whore, a scoundrel, a villain. Unlike Gi-hun’s arc, her redemption is based on personal revenge, not goodness in favor of the collective. Is this the only possible route for "the whores"? 

 What is more concerning is its resemblance to a Korean historical figure Non-gae, who during the 1500s war killed a Japanese general by seducing him and then commited suicide by jumping from a cliff with her hands clenched to his body. I think it is an unfair stretch to say that this was what the director drew on, and I don’t believe so. It is not the intention nor the potentially defamatory parallel that disturb me. It's with how incapacitating it feels as a (Korean) woman to see yet another narrative where sex and self-sacrifice are depicted as important tools that a woman can, and potentially only a woman can contribute to one's personal gain and/or the greater good.

 Was Mi-nyeo a dynamic character or a generic one that was used as an object to advance the narrative, (as the director claimed) to emphasize the direness of the situation or human nature? I personally believe there were too many unnecessary inserts that used gendered violence and tropes to emphasize the theme of the show. During the marble game, did we need to hear the “witty” wordplay between Deok-su and his follower thug about who knows better about how to shove something into a hole? We already knew their characters at this point. Did we need to know that the masked organ harvesters raped a "dead" female participant(s)? Violence was already well-established. If this was a way to propel the cop arc, was it the only way to tell us that the "zombie" was not the cop’s brother? Did we need constant inserts of the women-animal-furniture during the VIP scene? A generous way to put this would be to say that it was a visually-interested homage to Clockwork Orange (1971), one which oxymoronically co-existed with Squid Game’s noble protagonist. 

What role did Ji-yeong (the domestic sexual abuse survivor or "the other young woman") serve? The potential in the camaraderie between women or more broadly marginalized people, the potential of non-violent options, the potential of learning about people’s lives, where did these “feminine” alternatives ultimately lead to? Both of the women's deaths. These alternatives weren't enough, and someone had to die. Moreover, her sudden introduction to the narrative and the lack of a fully fleshed-out backstory that focuses only on her added to the impression that she was a supplemental character for Sae-byeok’s story or a character to fulfill a representative space for sexual and domestic victimhood (perhaps as a "saint/Madonna/child" because she, unlike Mi-nyeo, turned out to be a pure victim despite her initial negative mannerisms). And perhaps also, or ultimately, the two faces of religions—more specifically Christianity. I'm not religious myself and there definitely are religion-related societal problems in Korea, but I didn't personally love this one-dimensional portrayal of faith; insufficiently contextualized atheistic ridicule can also be discriminative. Another reason I question Ji-young’s narrative purpose regarding religions is because there is a narrative closure to the criticism on Christianity when Gi-hun wakes up to a caricature of a person shouting "Believe in Jesus! Hell to Non-Believers!" after winning the game. 

While watching Squid Game, I thought of some of the survival or society-building genre media that I have read in the past. Many of them, such as Suicide Island, contain sharp social commentaries but often not without relying on some of these “convenient” narrative conventions, particularly regarding women (c.f., in episode 2, people who start pleading for the game to be stopped are mostly women, with one woman saying “I have a child”). I long for the day that I can be immersed in a survival genre pop fiction world without being attacked by violent as-ifs that hides behind the phrase “human nature.”  

Do Own (Donna) Kim is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies fellowship alum. Donna studies digital cultures and mediated social interactions. Her research interests are at the intersections of cultural studies, technology studies, and computer-mediated communication/human-machine communication. She focuses on practices, boundary-crossings, and Others in human-technology assemblages. She enjoys mixed methodological and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, and Mass Communication and Society. She is currently affiliated with the research groups Civic Paths, MASTS (Media as Sociotechnical Systems), and ThatGameGroup.

 Prior to joining Annenberg, Donna received her B.A. degrees in Media & Communication and English Language & Literature from Korea University in 2015. She studied at Nagoya University for a year as an exchange student in 2013-14. Donna has lived in five different countries including South Korea, China, Canada, US, and Japan. Her cross-cultural experiences and her advertisement/PR internship at Cheil Worldwide inspired her to pursue her interest in digital communication.

Website: https://www.doowndonnakim.com/

Twitter: @DoownDonnaKim

Global Fandom Conversations (Round Three, Part Two): Hye Jin Lee and Thi Ngoc Bich (Becky) Pham

BP: Now, back to our conversation. Thank you for your wonderful assessment above on the continuing values that nation-based analyses of cross-border fandoms will bring us even as the world has been and is still being globalized. My above-mentioned case study on Vietnamese revealed how the fans gradually gained more positive recognition from their older critics due to the popularity of K-pop dance covers posted on YouTube. With their own creativity, filmmaking skills, and media competency, their Vietnam-based dance covers subsequently won international K-pop dance contests, which brought in more international attention, socio-cultural capital, economic opportunities, and most importantly, national pride to Vietnam. I would believe that to navigate transcultural tensions and pacify criticism, on top of being tech-savvy and cosmopolitan, non-Korean international K-pop fans these days might also need to be culturally intelligent and quick-witted in self-producing counter-stories against unfavorable narratives about their fannish engagement. Based on your knowledge of non-Korean international K-pop fans so far, to what extent would you agree with this assessment?



YouTube video: The latest K-pop dance cover of aespa’s “Savage” by the dance group B-Wild from Vietnam. The group has won multiple dance cover awards from JYP and LOEN Entertainment 

HJL: I'm not well versed in the Vietnamese K-pop fandom, so I don't think I can offer an accurate assessment. But based on what you're telling me, it seems like the young Vietnamese K-pop fans have gradually changed the older critics' perception of their fandom by demonstrating their fandom's "productive" usage. Fans, especially those who like cultural products that are considered fringe, marginal, or foreign, have a long history of having to defend their fan status to be accepted by the wider society. As part of normalizing their fan status, fans had to prove how their fan activities and practices were "normal" or had acceptable cultural values. Acquiring practical media production skills, enhancing the national image by winning international competitions, and creating financial opportunities are desired social outcomes. So if K-pop fan practices lead to these achievements, then I can see how K-pop fandom can be considered productive and, thus, acceptable (or less problematic). There seems to be a parallel between what you see with the older Vietnamese generation's changed perception about the young Vietnamese K-pop fans and what we witnessed last year with Western media's favorable coverage of the K-pop fans. Only when K-pop fans were "seen" to be using their social media savviness for greater causes (foiling Trump's rally, spamming a police 'snitch' app, or raising $1 million to donate to BLM in a short period) did the mainstream media change their stance on K-pop fans.

Your point about how the Vietnamese K-pop fans were able to gain international fame through their K-pop cover dance contests and how winning these contests led to national pride really struck me. It made me think about what it means for Vietnamese fans to use K-pop and their K-pop fandom to be globally recognized. So I have two questions for you: First, do you think young Vietnamese K-pop fans use K-pop to think about not simply what it means to be Vietnamese but also Asian? I ask this question because of an experience I had this summer. I was invited to give a lecture on K-pop at the Korean Cultural Center in Indonesia and had a chance to talk to Indonesians - whether they are K-pop fans or not, I'm not sure. One of the questions I received during the Q&As was whether Koreans were proud of K-pop's global success. After answering the question, I read the comments on the chat window while waiting for the translator to translate my answers. One person wrote how K-pop's global success should also make Indonesians feel proud since it's an Asian achievement. That comment really stood out to me since K-pop's global success had been discussed mainly as a "national" achievement in Korea or cause for alarm (and basis for anti-Korea/anti-Hallyu) in other Asian countries. 

The second question I have is about the Vietnamese K-pop fandom in the future, especially now with V-pop starting to become popular. Do you expect to see a shift from K-pop fandom to V-pop fandom in the future? Also, is there a desire by the Vietnamese K-pop fans to see a greater Vietnamese members' presence in K-pop groups? Or now that HYBE, SM, CJ ENM, and JYPE are moving in the direction of creating K-pop groups with local members in different countries for the global audience, do you think they would prefer all-Vietnamese groups (maybe it would be similar to V-pop idols but they're trained and managed under the K-pop system)? How have Vietnamese K-pop fans responded to the news about major K-pop companies' new K-pop projects?

BP: Your comment on how K-pop fans were only “seen” after using their social media savviness for greater causes on a large scale is spot on. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, as fans now could leverage readily available digital technologies to make themselves “seen” with “productive” usage. What I am more concerned about is that there might still be media-based participation gap among different fan communities, as different fan groups will appropriate the media differently, and not all fan groups could or wish to strive for the press’s reinforcement of fans using social media on a large scale for political activism as the gold standard. 

Thank you for your two questions on Vietnamese K-pop fans! You are giving me even more ideas to flesh out for my next research goals. With regard to the first question, I am fascinated by your sharing of Indonesian fans feeling proud about K-pop because K-pop has elevated Asian achievements worldwide. I haven’t investigated this particular question among Vietnamese fans, but from what I have been reading online, this theme has not emerged and instead, I have observed that Vietnamese fans of popular music could be very divided between their support for US-UK pop versus K-pop. For example, BTS’s release of the Americanized and English hit “Dynamite” last year was criticized by some Vietnamese (anti-)fans as being “too auto-tuned” (which possibly suggests a copycat move to match the usual US-UK, not Korean, standards) and as being “incomprehensible” due to BTS’s pronunciation of English, which caused online wars between fan communities. 

As for your second question about the interaction between Vietnamese and Korean flavors in music production standards, my country indeed had already tried the recipe of producing a full Vietnamese girl group in South Korea, and then bringing them back to Vietnamese audience with a hope of giving them a competitive edge in the globalized music markets. The girl group was named LIME, created in 2015 and disbanded in 2019, unfortunately, without much domestic success. I remember when I first watched LIME’s debut MV in 2016, it took me half the song to realize they were singing in Vietnamese with some mixture of English because of how Korean their looks, dance, and song melody were. 



YouTube video: The 2016 debut MV of LIME, the Vietnamese girl group who were trained and produced in South Korea 

As for Vietnamese fan’s reaction to major K-pop companies’ new K-pop projects that would have more non-Korean members, they seem to be very excited. In particular, in March this year, Vietnamese fans of the Vietnamese I-LAND contestant, Hanbin Ngô Ngọc Hưng, bought advertisement spaces in 71 digital signages across 7 countries to celebrate his birthday. Hanbin is currently probably considered Vietnamese fans’ biggest national pride in the K-pop industry. 

All of these points bring us back to our comment earlier about how nation-based analyses of fandoms are still relevant as we work towards solving conflicts from cultural and national differences. This also flags to us the ever-changing and multi-dimensional transformation of cultural meanings in relation to K-pop reception across the globe. I am excited to read and learn more about how non-Korean K-pop fandoms will be doing in the future. This conversation with you has also inspired me to look beyond fan practices, and into the K-pop industry and its music production for a more ecological perspective of this fascinating cultural phenomenon. 

HJL: This conversation has been productive, and I am glad I had a chance to learn more about the Vietnamese K-pop fandom. I am sure you witnessed how K-pop and K-pop fandom has evolved over the years from your study on the young Vietnamese K-pop fans from 2010 to 2019. K-pop as an industry and an entertainment form and K-pop fandom today is much different from Psy’s “Gangnam Style” day that led to the first serious discussions about K-pop’s potential to break into the mainstream global (primarily coded as the US) market. There is no longer a debate about whether K-pop has a global appeal or not. So now, my current interest is how the K-pop industry understands the meaning of “global” in K-pop’s global popularity and how that understanding shapes their business decisions and directions with their future projects that will change the meaning of K-pop. With BTS’s and other K-pop groups’ releases of English-only songs and collaboration with Western pop stars, there are already fervent discussions within the US K-pop fandom on what K-pop is and how its meaning has changed from its early days. Your examples of Vietnamese K-pop fans’ discussions about BTS’s release all-English songs, “Dynamite” and “Butter” or the K-pop-inspired Vietnamese girl group, LIME, also seem to be part of that conversation.

 Korean K-pop fans (and the public) are now starting to seriously discuss what K-pop means or should look like as the K-pop industry is expanding its global market reach by creating non-Korean K-pop groups or shifting its focus on catering to the demands of the international K-pop fans that might not necessarily align with the needs of the Korean K-pop fans. For instance, in June 2020, JYP partnered with Sony Music and launched an all-Japanese K-pop group, NiziU, through a Japanese audition show (called the Nizi Project). The group became a sensation in Japan, but the Korean K-pop fans and the public were hostile to JYP's success. The Korean K-pop fans accused the company of selling out K-pop's formula of success to Japan just for the company's private interest. A similar criticism arose with SM Entertainment when they launched an all-Chinese K-pop group, WayV, a subunit of the K-pop boy band, NCT. The public outcry over the ambiguous national identity of WayV was particularly loudest when the group performed their all-Chinese song, "Back to You," on a Korean music show.

WayV, the China-based subunit of the South Korean boy band NCT under South Korea-based SM Entertainment and SM’s Chinese sub-label, Label V

We can see that the creation of non-Korean K-pop groups as part of the K-pop industry's global market expansion strategy is being met with antipathy by the Korean K-pop fans who fear this will erase K-pop's Korean identity. The K-pop industry's globalizing projects of discovering, training, and producing local K-pop artists will meet with more resistance from the Korean K-pop fans and the public who have a nationalistic understanding of K-pop. The nation-based analyses of K-pop fandom, then, have become more necessary as K-pop becomes more global.

References

Chin, B., & Morimoto, L. H. (2013). Towards a theory of transcultural fandom. Participations, 10(1), 92-108.

Pham, B. (2022, accepted pending revisions). Public reception of young K-pop fans in Vietnam (2011-2019): At the intersection of nationalistic discourse and transcultural fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures. 

Hye Jin Lee is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Lee has published and delivered invited lectures on K-pop industry's response to Black Lives Matter and is currently working on projects examining the historical evolution of K-pop and the differences in cultural meaning, status, and reception of Korean entertainment when it crosses the national border. 

Thi Ngoc Bich (Becky) Pham is a Doctoral Student at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, USA. She researches how children, youth, and families appropriate communication technologies, and how their media engagement shapes their worldview and lived experience. Her research has been published in the Journal of Children and Media, New Media & Society, Communication Research Reports, and is forthcoming in Transformative Works and Cultures. Her writing on parenting and popular culture has appeared in Psychology Today. She can be reached at thingocb@usc.edu. For more information, visit https://beckypham.com/.

Global Fandom Conversations (Round Three, Part One): Hye Jin Lee and Thi Ngoc Bich (Becky) Pham

Hye Jin Lee (South Korea) and Becky Pham (Vietnam): 

The Relevance of Studying Global K-pop Fandom in Different National Contexts

The Japanese girl group NiziU formed by the South Korea-based JYP Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment Japan

Becky Pham (BP): Hi Dr Lee, I am glad to have been paired with you in this Global Fandom Conversation, as both of our works examine the intensification of K-pop across the globe, and how non-Korean K-pop fans deal with cultural tensions arising from their transcultural fandom (although you’re focusing on the Korean K-pop fans in this conversation, and me focusing on Vietnamese K-pop fans). 

First, let’s talk about how K-pop’s popularity is attracting more attention from the press outside of Korea. I am intrigued by this sentence in your Opening Statement, “Western media did not always get the story of K-pop's global success right”, apart from their more accurate coverage of how tech-savvy and multicultural K-pop fandom has transcended language, culture, and nationality online and offline, toward high-profile events of political activism such as tanking Trump's 2020 rally in Oklahoma and $1 million donation for Black Lives Matter groups in 2020. Could you elaborate on what it is that Western media has not quite captured about K-pop being global or globalized? Why should we care about these under-reported stories as we attempt to de-Westernize fandom studies? 

Hye Jin Lee (HJL): Thank you for starting the conversation, Becky, and I’m also glad to be paired with you for this Global Fandom project. Even though K-pop, as an industry, has existed since the 1990s and K-pop's popularity outside of Korea is not new, the Western media have mostly responded to K-pop's global popularity as an overnight success or a fluke. I've seen many Western media's coverage attributing K-pop's global success to the Korean government's coordinated efforts, which undermines the significant role that global K-pop fans and Korean entertainment companies have played. In addition, the Western media have connected K-pop's global success with what they consider a harsh and inhumane idol training system. So much news coverages that have "the dark side of the K-pop industry" (or something along this line) in the headlines attest to this slanted Western media view about K-pop. The K-pop industry has many issues that need to be addressed and criticized, but this general painting of the K-pop industry as "dark” or “cruel" leads to many different problems. 

First, it perpetuates Western Orientalism, which renders Asian countries, cultures, and people abnormal, foreign/exotic, and deviant. It also stigmatizes K-pop fans as "crazed," "out of control," or "weird" (labels that many female media fans, in general, have to contend with even without taking up the position of being K-pop fans). It also pushes this notion that the K-pop industry is a heartless "factory" or "machine" that "manufactures" stars (again, you will see many news headlines with those keywords associated with K-pop in the Western media). It makes it seem like Western entertainment is NOT a manufactured product and thus more authentic, creative, and artistic. It ignores the fact that all cultural products created in the capitalist system are manufactured commodities generated for profits. Also, the K-pop industry is not the only entertainment industry that is full of problems. How did the entertainment industry in the US enable Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin, Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, and many more to engage in abusive and criminal behaviors for so long? So this is what I meant by the Western media not always getting K-pop's global success story correctly.

The superstar K-pop boy band BTS, whose fandom ARMY raised over $1 million for the Black Lives Matter movement in just one day in 2020

After the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing BLM movements last year, K-pop received a lot of attention from the Western mainstream media again. If the Western mainstream media coverage of K-pop has relied on harmful tropes about K-pop as dark or manufactured before, this was the first time we saw a lot of positive coverage of K-pop. However, this turnaround was due to K-pop fans' use of fan practices for political activism in relation to Trump’s 2020 Oklahoma rally and donation to BLM as you have pointed out, not necessarily because of K-pop artists' or the industry's doing. 

While it was great to see K-pop fans being positively discussed as a powerful political force, the mainstream media still failed to provide a complete picture of K-pop fans. For instance, most of the coverage made it seem like the K-pop fans' "K-pop fan" status led them to support the BLM movement actively. They failed to see the intersection between the racial identity and the K-pop fan identity of many K-pop fans from communities of color. In other words, it wasn't necessarily the "K-pop fan" status that propelled K-pop fans to mobilize support for BLM but because of the importance of racial justice issues, including racism, to the fans. Also, the mainstream media celebrated K-pop fans' act of taking over racist hashtags (such as #WhiteLivesMatter or #AllLivesMatter) to drown out racist social media posts as positive political actions. But for many Black K-pop, seeing racist hashtags trend or seeing K-pop stars' images for racist hashtags was traumatic and nothing to celebrate. So even when the media covers K-pop or K-pop fans more positively, we see significant gaps in the offered stories.

BP: While I am not surprised at your detailed and interesting mini-analysis above about the Western media’s binary portrayal of Western versus K-pop music stars as being self-made/authentic versus being manufactured by entertainment companies/mass produced, you have helped me reflect upon certain unconscious bias and linguistic choices that have been driven by our daily consumption of Western news. It makes sense to me now why mainstream English news and even K-pop fans’ discussion on YouTube, for example, tend to more often call Western pop singers as “singers” and “stars”, but K-pop singers as “idols”. At least, to my personal relief and exhilaration, either Western or K-pop singers could be lovingly referred to by the fans as “kings” and “queens” that they “stan”. 

Your unpacking of how we need to account for a multifaceted understanding of K-pop fans’ racial identity and commitment to social justice in addition to just their fan identity is a sharp assessment that seems to parallel the spirit set forth by Chin and Morimoto’s call (2013) for prioritizing a common fan identity over a national one. Thus, let’s zero in on our common research thread on how non-Korean K-pop fans deal with cultural tensions arising from their transcultural fandom to dig a little deeper into these issues. 

You wrote in your Opening Statement that there is a need to understand the “messy" and “difficult" aspect of K-pop fandom, especially among non-Korean international fans, who have to deal with tensions arising from their transcultural fandom. You then cited an example of how Black K-pop fans struggle with their K-pop fandom when encountering racism and colorism from K-pop artists and the K-pop fandom community. I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment that this “messy" and “difficult" transculturally contested space needs more examination from researchers, as I have quite come to the same conclusion for my paper on young Vietnamese K-pop fans in Vietnam from 2010 to 2019. 

To repeat what I have written in my Opening Statement, I conducted a case study of mainstream online news representations of young Vietnamese K-pop fans and the fans’ online responses to their older, more conservative public critics (Pham, forthcoming). I showed how as recent as 2011 and even until now, the Vietnamese public has stigmatized K-pop fans (both female and male youth) as stubborn as a Vietnamese water buffalo--a result of which they are colloquially labeled as “water buffalo youth”, as “out of control” (see attached image of a K-pop Vietnamese fanboy that notoriously attracted Vietnamese media’s spotlight in 2012; this is not surprising as fandom studies has long addressed the history of fan pathologization, and similar to what you have also pointed out about how the Western media still portray K-pop fans as “crazed” and “out of control”), and as “mixed-race” (which is interesting because I think the word “race” here has less to do in relation to US-based definitions of “racism”, but more to do with a strong rhetorical choice to convey the older generation’s fear that K-pop as a foreign cultural force is overtaking Vietnam’s old-world communitarian and patriotism ideologies, potentially toward a new form of Asia-based--as opposed to Western-based--cultural imperialism). 

From your example of Black K-pop fans and my example of Vietnamese K-pop fans, and in response to Chin and Morimoto’s (2013) call for a working theory of transcultural fan-centric studies over nation-centered analyses, first, would you assess that both of our examples are still nation-based analyses of cross-border fandoms? Second, would you agree that nation-based analyses of cross-border fandoms--especially from under-researched nations (such as Vietnam) or groups (such as Black K-pop fans)--might still be valuable and/or relevant?   

HJL: Before I answer your questions, I would like to ask you about your research on young Vietnamese K-pop fans in Vietnam. Your observation of stigmatizing young K-pop fans (from the media, the government, the wider public, etc.) for liking K-pop, a foreign cultural product (although from an Asian country rather than from the West), has also been reported in other countries such as China and Indonesia. The pushbacks against K-pop's popularity in these countries have been connected to their nationalistic desires to preserve their cultural identity. In other words, the young K-pop fans' embrace of K-pop (which can clash with local cultural and religious values) was seen as a threat to the cultural identity that these countries want to uphold. Can the public criticism against Vietnamese youth's affection for K-pop be discussed similarly, or is this more of a result of generational conflicts (rather than ideas about nationalism or national identity)? Youth culture (esp. girl culture), in general, tends to be dismissed and denigrated everywhere. How are youth and youth culture understood in Vietnam, and how does K-pop fandom fit into that? Also, what does K-pop offer to young Vietnamese fans that they might not necessarily get from their local culture and what does K-pop mean to them?

To answer your first question, I think it really depends on the focus of the study. Your research seems to explore how young Vietnamese K-pop fans use K-pop to form and express their identity that conflicts with the older generation's idea about what youth should be or how young people should act. Whether there's a nationalistic component to the older generation's expectation of youth is something I would like to learn from you (as stated in my questions above). You're investigating K-pop fandom within the Vietnamese national and cultural context, so yes, I would say your research is doing a nation-based analysis of cross-border fandoms. I'm more careful to use this frame to discuss research on Black K-pop fans because a Black identity is not tied to a specific country or a nation. The Black experience is not monolithic. Black K-pop fans are not a monolith. But when I used Black K-pop fans' struggles with their K-pop fandom as an example to talk about the "messy" aspect of K-pop fandom, I had the Black American K-pop fans mostly in mind. But I can see this being applied to Black K-pop fandoms in other countries as anti-Blackness and racism is not an American issue but a global issue.

To answer your second question, I think it is still valuable and relevant to analyze K-pop fandom from different national contexts. Even though we live in a global society where everything is or seems to be interconnected more than ever, national identity continues to play a significant role in the way people think about themselves (I think this was more so during the pandemic when people's national identity/citizenship played a role in restricting or determining their mobilities). Although cultural commodities can flow more freely across borders (I'm writing this answer as I'm reading news about “Squid Game,” a Korean series on Netflix, becoming the platform's most watched show ever), cultural values and sensibilities that are tied with people's national identity do continue to play a role in shaping how they're received and consumed. If the goal is to foster a transcultural fan community where fans of different countries and cultures can celebrate their fandom based on shared interests and pleasures by transcending their national interests and cultural, historical differences, I think nation-based analyses of cross-border fandoms seem to be much needed to work towards solving conflicts from cultural and national differences together as much as possible.

BP: The questions you have specifically raised for me about understanding Vietnamese K-pop fans in relation to Chinese and Indonesian K-pop fans and in relation to intergenerational differences are all appropriate and nuanced ones: Based on my limited knowledge so far, I think it’s fair to say that Vietnam and China share a similar ambiguous history of K-pop reception, as Vietnamese and Chinese policy makers and older generations perceive K-pop as a potentially foreign threat of cultural imperialism against their nationalistic cultures. I also think it’s fair to say that for Vietnamese K-pop fans, the disparity between the young versus old generations’ thinking and values adoption are both due to the aggressive expansion of K-pop as a foreign threat (that is more fast-changing and unpredictable due to modern technologies) and intergenerational differences (that always happens across generations, but not any less unpredictable also due to modern technologies). Your sharp question on what it is that K-pop offers Vietnamese fans that their local artists and cultures might not will be something I keep at the back of my head as I delve into my research in the near future. 

I have not researched Indonesian K-pop fans (who might be very religiously different from Vietnamese and Chinese fans), so I can’t offer more comments on that at this point. When I was writing up my Vietnamese K-pop fandom, I couldn’t find any existing literature reviews of K-pop fans in Asia for comparative analysis. I understand that this could be challenging because Asia is such a huge continent with diverse cultural, religious, and national values. But this might be something that participants across Asia in this wonderful Global Fandom Conversation could think about to make it happen. I would be happy to kickstart it, but my vision might be more focused on mobile media and/or youth and parenting cultures, which might not align with other participants we are having here. Readers, if you are a researcher of Asian K-pop fandom and interested in this idea, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.

Hye Jin Lee is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Lee has published and delivered invited lectures on K-pop industry's response to Black Lives Matter and is currently working on projects examining the historical evolution of K-pop and the differences in cultural meaning, status, and reception of Korean entertainment when it crosses the national border. 

Thi Ngoc Bich (Becky) Pham is a Doctoral Student at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, USA. She researches how children, youth, and families appropriate communication technologies, and how their media engagement shapes their worldview and lived experience. Her research has been published in the Journal of Children and Media, New Media & Society, Communication Research Reports, and is forthcoming in Transformative Works and Cultures. Her writing on parenting and popular culture has appeared in Psychology Today. She can be reached at thingocb@usc.edu. For more information, visit https://beckypham.com/.

Global Fandom: Thi Ngo Bich (Becky) Pham (Vietnam)

Greetings to fellow participants in Professor Henry Jenkins’s Global Fandom Conversation!

 I am thrilled to have been invited as a representative of Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia often culturally associated with the Vietnam War, or vibrant touristy images of beautiful landscape for contemporary Western audience. What fewer people might be aware of is Vietnam’s significant socio-political changes and strong economic growth over the past 30 years hailed by The World Bank as “remarkable” and “resilient” (The World Bank, 2021). 

 Joining this conversation, I hope to tell you the story about the Vietnamese “water buffalo youth” and “out-of-control” fans, to explain why K-pop (or popular music from South Korea) is such a dynamic and transnational force important to the context of Vietnam, and to engage in further discussion with you about the next steps for global fandom studies. 

 I am a female Vietnamese national who was born and grew up in Southern Vietnam, received my higher education and communication research training in Singapore, and is currently living, studying, and working in California, USA. My scholarship is located at the intersection of media studies and cultural studies. Adopting both qualitative and quantitative social science methods, I research the social and cultural implications of communication technologies on children, youth, and families, especially those in Asian communities. 

Under this umbrella research agenda, I have been studying how young K-pop fans in Vietnam in the past decade navigated the tensions between nationalistic discourse versus transcultural fandom. Through a case study of mainstream online news representations of young Vietnamese K-pop fans and the fans’ online responses to their critics, I showed how as recent as 2011 and even until now, the Vietnamese public has stigmatized K-pop fans as “out-of-control” (see attached image of a K-pop Vietnamese fanboy that notoriously attracted Vietnamese media’s spotlight in 2012), “mixed-race”, and stubborn like a Vietnamese water buffalo (hence, “water buffalo youth”). My case study also revealed how the fans gradually gained more positive recognition due to the popularity of their K-pop dance covers on YouTube and their wins in international K-pop dance contests (Pham, 2022). 

 In my next co-authored fandom project, I hope to unpack how K-pop fans across the globe utilized Twitter as an empowering platform during COVID-19 to spread public health awareness through the hashtag #wearamask, while also examining the effects of disparities (such as political alignment and geographical locations) among the fans on their Twitter-based networks toward fandom-based call for social change.

 I am certainly not the first Vietnamese researcher of fandom studies in Vietnam, but Vietnam-based fandom studies is still in its nascent phase, with little attention from scholars of Vietnamese studies (Hoang, 2017). So why this spotlight on K-pop, a foreign phenomenon originating from South Korea, in relation to the context of Vietnam? 

 As a developing country, Vietnam imports more than exports cultural products. Even as V-pop (or popular music from Vietnam) has started to surged across Asia (Souw, 2021), the popularity of K-pop within Vietnam is undeniable (Vietnamnet, 2020). Collectivistic and conservative Vietnam, highly similar to its neighboring China (see Chen, 2018), has had an ambiguous history of cultural policies and public reception pertaining to importing Korean Wave into the domestic market since the late 1990s (Pham, 2022). Policy makers in Vietnam have always had to balance between the economic opportunities and socio-cultural capital brought about by the spread of K-pop, versus the nation’s communitarian ideologies and expectations of patriotism on the younger generations who did not experience wars and societal upheavals like their parents and grandparents did. 

 The very few existing studies on Vietnamese fandom have unanimously focused on K-pop, its influence, and socio-cultural implications (see Duong, 2016; Ha, 2020; Pham, 2022; Phan, 2014). This speaks volume to the ongoing immense power of K-pop as a cross-cultural force within Vietnam (and maybe also within East and Southeast Asia), while also brings into stark contrast the tensions between nationalistic sentiments and the old-world order, versus transnational fannish identities and globalized consumerism. 

 In this regard, studying K-pop fandom should help reveal and complicate various cultural, political, and ideological subjectivities of contemporary Vietnam. Studying K-pop also poses new opportunities and challenges for cross-border dialogues about global circulation and consumption of East Asian popular culture, ultimately toward our increasing attempts to de-Westernize fandom studies.  

 I look forward to our fruitful conversations! 

References

Chen, L. (2018). Chinese fans of Japanese and Korean pop culture: Nationalistic narratives and international fandom. Routledge. 

Duong, N. H. P. (2016). Korean Wave as Cultural Imperialism: A study of K-pop Reception in Vietnam (Unpublished master’s thesis). Leiden University: Leiden, the Netherlands.

Hoang, H. (2017). Abstract of Mediated Intimacy: Fandom as a Way of Life. Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. http://bellschool.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/2017-10/abstracts_vu_for_website_0.pdf

Hoang, H. (2020). K-pop Male Androgyny, Mediated Intimacy, and Vietnamese Fandom. In J. V. Cabañes, & C. S. Uy-Tioco (Eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, pp. 187-203. Springer. 

Pham, B. (2022, accepted pending revisions). Public reception of young K-pop fans in Vietnam (2011-2019): At the intersection of nationalistic discourse and transcultural fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures.

Phan, T. T. (2014). Asianization, Imagination, Fan Culture and Cultural Capital of Vietnamese Youth: A Case Study of K-pop Cover Dance Groups in Hanoi, Vietnam. In A. U. Guevarra (Ed.), Proceedings of the 1st AIKS Conference on Korean Studies: “Hallyu Mosaic in the Philippines: Framing Perceptions and Praxis”, pp. 150-170. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University.

Souw, R. (2021, March 31). Thai and Vietnamese pop music is surging across Asia – these are the artists to watch. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3127593/thai-and-vietnamese-pop-music-surging-across-asia-these-are

The World Bank. (2021). Vietnam Overview. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview

Vietnamnet. (2020, August 8). K-pop attracts huge number of Vietnamese fans. https://vietnamnews.vn/life-style/749323/k-pop-attracts-huge-number-of-vietnamese-fans.html

Thi Ngoc Bich (Becky) Pham is a Doctoral Student at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, USA. She researches how children, youth, and families appropriate communication technologies, and how their media engagement shapes their worldview and lived experience. Her research has been published in the Journal of Children and Media, New Media & Society, Communication Research Reports, and is forthcoming in Transformative Works and Cultures. She can be reached at thingocb@usc.edu. For more information, visit https://beckypham.com/. 

Global Fandom: Hye Jin Lee (South Korea)

Park Jin Young (founder and producer of JYP) announces the second partnership with Sony Music Entertainment for a new project of creating a Japanese boy band after the successful launch of a Japanese girl group, NiziU, in 2020.  

K-pop, known initially as popular local music from South Korea, has become a global cultural phenomenon by growing into a $5 billion industry. The global sensation of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012 took many by surprise (even Psy himself), but it was primarily understood as an achievement that would be difficult for other K-pop artists to repeat. Since then, with the support and coordinated efforts by its massive fandom, ARMY, BTS has grown into a K-pop behemoth by conquering the Billboard charts while breaking all kinds of world records in the process (and reaching the mainstream popularity in the US that many popular K-pop artists still struggle to achieve). Other K-pop acts such as Blackpink, NCT, Monsta X, Stray Kids, and so on which have signed deals with US major labels over the years, have started to break into the US market (even during the pandemic years when K-pop artists were not able to tour in the US). The expansion of K-pop in the world market has led the Western media scrambling to figure out the “magic” behind K-pop’s continuous global success, producing articles with headlines such as “How K-pop conquered the West” or “How K-pop conquered the universe.”

Although the Western media did not always get the story of K-pop's global success right, they were correct to understand the significant role K-pop fandoms worldwide have played in the global popularity of K-pop. K-pop fans have become the most visible force on social media by actively coordinating their efforts to promote the works of K-pop idols and connect with other K-pop fans, keeping K-pop artists and hashtags related to K-pop to trend continuously. K-pop fans' fervent activities and devotion have merited serious attention in fandom studies, leading to the publication of scholarly works that examine how K-pop fans have come to play a decisive role in "globalizing" K-pop through their fan practices and activities transcending differences in language, culture, and nationality. The focus on the power of K-pop fandom reached a new level in 2020 when news about K-pop fans' active involvement in political activism emerged. K-pop fans who have been broad-brushed as young fangirls were suddenly being discussed as a formidable political force. With their political awareness and social media savviness, K-pop fans were in the media limelight for the role they were playing in political mobilization, particularly during the Black Lives Matter movements in the US. This new recognition of K-pop fans as a force for political activism strengthened K-pop's position as a global cultural phenomenon (an irony considering K-pop tries to stay apolitical).

Now that K-pop is no longer understood to be just for Koreans and the K-pop industry has become more aggressive in its pursuit of global markets, the discussions on what K-pop's growing global popularity means for its increasingly diverse fanbase have primarily centered on international K-pop fans. As a scholar studying K-pop at a US institution, I have paid attention to how the US K-pop fans (who do not speak Korean and are not familiar with Korean history and culture) incorporate K-pop into their everyday lives, how their fannish activities and engagements are "globalizing" K-pop, and how the US pop culture landscape is changing as a result. I tried to understand how what were once unique Korean K-pop fan practices (such as fanchants, fancams, coordinated efforts in streaming to pus K-pop acts to top global charts when they make a "comeback," donations and volunteer works for the image management for a favorite K-pop artist, etc.) have been adopted (and occasionally adapted) by the US K-pop fans and how K-pop fandom has been able to grow globally in the process. I saw how the common interest in K-pop has united K-pop fans in building communities or an affinity space demonstrating the characteristics of transcultural fandom that prioritizes a common fan identity over a national one, as argued by Chin and Morimoto (2013). When K-pop's global rise would create moments of conflicts or fissures with K-pop fandom (an inevitable consequence of globalization), the media and scholarly attention would be on how (non-Korean) international K-pop fans negotiate their national, racial, and cultural identity with their K-pop fan identity to make sense of and deal with tensions that arise from their transcultural fandom (for instance, how K-pop fans of East Asian countries make sense of or defend their K-pop fandom when the anti-Korea/Korean entertainment sentiment is at its height due to the complex geopolitical issues in the region or how Black K-pop fans struggle with their K-pop fandom when encountering racism and colorism within K-pop fandom and/or in K-pop artists' behaviors). This 'messy' and 'difficult' aspect of K-pop fandom needs continued examination to understand the implication of K-pop's global flow.

As a Korean scholar studying K-pop, however, I have also been interested in understanding what K-pop's growing global visibility and popularity means for the Korean domestic fans, especially when the characteristics of K-pop that they are familiar with are continuously shifting due to K-pop's global rise. How do the Korean domestic K-pop fans make sense of K-pop's global popularity and deal with unexpected conflicts that arise with the K-pop industry's decisions that aspire to make K-pop more "global" (such as creating K-pop groups without any Korean members or scheduling more international K-pop concerts and fan meetings than domestic ones)? How do the Korean K-pop fans, who overwhelmingly feel a sense of national pride in K-pop's global popularity, struggle with the gradual erasure of "Korean" traces in K-pop that is becoming global (and no longer just for Koreans)? A growing number of Korean K-pop fans are pushing back against the K-pop industry's "globalizing" projects that dilute or even erase the Korean national identity and cultural values in K-pop. They express discontent with the K-pop industry's aggressive business strategies that focus on the global markets based on their belief that K-pop's national identity is "Korean" (therefore, Korean fans should be a priority). It is the conflict between the K-pop industry and the Korean K-pop fans in the process of K-pop's globalization (although tensions between the domestic and international K-pop fandoms do also arise, I am less interested in examining that here) and the national(istic) response of Korean K-pop fans to the K-pop industry's globalizing strategies that I like to further explore. This case allows us to think about how the "national" identity does continue to matter with the global flow of popular culture (sometimes in unexpected ways).

Korean NCTzens (NCT fandom)’ campaign against SM Entertainment after two of the Chinese members, Chenle and Renjun, of NCT Dream, celebrated the 100th anniversary of China’s Communist Party on social media

References

Chin, B., & Morimoto, L. H. (2013). Towards a theory of transcultural fandom. Participations, 10(1), 92-108.

Hye Jin Lee is a clinical assistant professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Lee’s current research focuses on the K-pop industry and global fandom and the transformation of cultural meaning, status, and content of Korean pop culture when it crosses borders. 

Global Fandom Conversations (Round Two, Part Two): Sebnem Baran and Rafay Mahmood

Sebnem Baran:

Rafay, your observations about K-pop’s reception in Pakistan, the exploitation and co-optation of fan practices by the media industries or political groups, and the effect of transnational flows on genres raise many important questions about the global–local relationship for fandoms! As we reach the final part of our conversation, I would like to address each of them.

Building on your question about how “fan behavior changes or evolves with the kind of genres and tropes being offered,” I want to mention that melodramas were the highest-rated earning shows on Turkish broadcast television during Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun’s first run.[1] It is still possible to say this genre remains very popular in the domestic market while providing a significant portion of the successful transnational content exports. Although melodramas have been part of public (and political) discussions on different occasions[2], none of them has paved the way for fan activism as intense and long-lasting as the cases of Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun.

Nevertheless, Turkish melodramas’ transnational mobility remains matchless. Therefore, it is impossible to compare Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun with melodramas such as Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century) or Diriliş in terms of the global reach. The global appeal of TV melodramas in different forms is well-known. Your discussion of the similarities between Diriliş and musalsala badawi in another article[3] points toward other transnational connections that would help understand the genre’s role—both in global flows of television and global fandoms.

Whereas the global influence in Leyla ile Mecnun becomes visible when the story incorporates global pop culture references such as Reservoir Dogs, Behzat Ç. shares some of the darker elements of the Scandi-noir genre. As a rogue cop, he tries to fight against corruption but ends up failing to protect himself and his family from retribution. Since mainstream news did not explore the crimes the show’s plot did, the fiction, in a way, became a surrogate for journalistic storytelling. In addition, Behzat’s failure becomes a token of realism for the viewers, who are already upset about the political situation. I believe his failures bring him closer to the Scandi-noir detectives than the DC and MCU superheroes, while the show’s quality TV associations also distinguish it from the superhero genre.

Then again, the crime genre doesn’t always generate the same fan engagement that Behzat did. Your description of the popular Pakistani shows “catching the corruption and crime” reminded me of the success of a long-lasting police procedural, Arka Sokaklar (Back Streets), which similarly enjoys high ratings while depicting crime as an anomaly rather than a systemic problem. The show is continuing its sixteenth season. This mainstream success instigated an online fan presence converging around fan accounts on social media. However, without a conflict between the fans and the industry or the political establishment in general, the show’s fans never gained the same level of visibility that Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun fans did.

I also want to mention that there are some other shows that embrace the global superhero wave openly, such as Netflix’s Hakan Muhafız (The Protector), TRT’s kids shows Tozkoparan and Tozkoparan: İskender, and ATV’s Akıncı. All these shows include historical references within fantastical frameworks. Your question about the influence of the DC and MCU universes made me more curious about these Turkish shows’ fandoms.

On a relevant note, in terms of the influence of the language, it is impossible to ignore the effect of Anglo-American media flows and fan practices on local fans’ choices. For example, Turkish fans frequently combine two characters’ names to indicate their shipping while posting comments and questions on social media platforms like many English-speaking fans had been doing.

Like you explained, production companies can also use social media as a marketing ploy. At times, fans use the network’s or production company’s hashtags, which further contribute to the marketing efforts. In addition to fans’ potential exploitation and co-optation, politically sponsored accounts can join the public debates for or against the fandoms. This becomes more apparent when these debates engage with cultural products or images associated with the country’s political divides, like what happened with Turkey’s women’s volleyball team.

Your discussion of the ISPR (Inter-Services Public Relations) offers a more complex example where a power holder is not only trying to dominate the public discussion but also recruiting fans as extensions of its PR mechanism. These synergistic connections are further blurring the lines between the official PR personnel, state- or corporation-sponsored influencers and trolls, and regular fans. Therefore, your call to explore how the fandoms with state support pursue their own activist causes and/or amplify the political messages passed down to them along with the fandoms challenging the dominant forces is very important. With more comparative analyses, power hierarchies can be understood better.

As we wrap up our conversation, I must say that I found your discussion of the K-pop fandom in Pakistan particularly striking. The anxieties about the queer influence are very similar to the Turkish case. At the same time, the Pakistani fans of Jungkook from BTS demonstrated the global spread of the K-pop fandom and its increasing power by sharing a happy birthday message for Jungkook on a big billboard.

Considering how K-pop fans became a political force during the US presidential election in 2020, I think we will be hearing more about them in political debates worldwide. With its fast growth in Pakistan and Turkey, the K-pop fandom offers a unique opportunity to comparatively study the relationship between local, regional, and global politics and fandoms at the corresponding levels. Looking at the cases of Pakistan and Turkey, it is clear that nationalism, religion, and identity politics are likely to be part of these fan studies discussions.

[1] Both Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun were revived by streaming platforms. My discussion focuses on the initial run of the shows.

[2] Medcezir’s homage to Berkin Elvan, Muhteşem Yüzyıl’s on-screen message in defense of the screenwriter Meral Okay, and cancellation of If Only following a row about a gay character are some examples, where melodramas initiated short-lived political debates online.

[3] https://tribune.com.pk/story/2290484/ottoman-obsessions-and-bedouin-fascinations

Rafay Mahmood

 Şebnem, your response about how women's bodies remain an important area of political polarization of not just the TV fandom but Muslim families across the globe was an intriguing framework to understand how the relationship of the TV viewing demographic (the Muslim household) in Pakistan's case has evolved over the years. Your response also raises important questions about how secularism debates in both Turkey and Pakistan hint at specific socio-cultural proximity that result in identity-based fan reactions. It also opens the discussion to Turkey and AKP's mission of reintroducing neo-ottoman values through TV and how in the case of Pakistan, the mission has borne fruit in the South Asian Muslim World.

The relationship between how Pakistani fandom at large views other celebrities and how they view Diriliş' star Esra Bilgiç, as raised in your response is a parallel key to understanding not only how the woman's body is seen in Pakistan but also how the Pakistani fandom, both men and women come to terms with the dichotomy of the local and foreign star, in particular, the non-Indian, Turkish star. And finally your closing question: 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? I will address your questions one by one and try to triangulate ideas in a manner that this exchange about how transnational flows happen through imported or acquired content in countries with state or government-controlled cultural production leaves us with even more questions about how unpredictable and yet formulaic fan behaviour can be.

The 8 pm soap on Pakistani television is a genre-specific slot that the country's private media inherited from the state predecessor Pakistan Television (PTV) in the late 90s. One can easily state that the 8 pm soap and the 9 pm news bulletin has been on our television since Pakistan came up with its TV stations a few years after the independence in 1947. Since then the slot has been associated with some sort of women-centric content, usually, a conflict between a daughter in law and a mother in law, catering mostly to housewives, hence Diriliş: Ertuğrul being aired on the same slot on a Sunday surprised a few given the show's focus on crusades and male warriors. But as soon as the audience caught up with the TV show and realized that the show is essentially a family drama minus the swords and horses, the women-dominated soap audience emerged not only as players in the show's fandom but also the ones fueling morally driven expectations from the real life of Esra Bilgiç, who plays the virtuous and pious wife Halime Sultan.

The reason 'fueling' has been used to describe the process of the housewife is that the average Pakistani Muslim housewife, in most cases, does not display a presence on social media but contributes to the values and ethics, the younger and more tech-savvy members of the family will espouse on social media.  Hence the content that is watched at home with the family is inspired by the value system of the patriarch usually channelled through the leading lady of the house and revolves around the familial notion of endorsing stars who both inspire and adhere to a similar value system because that is how you'd expect any of your family members to be like. This is why Bilgiç's revealing clothes are seen as a sign of hypocrisy as 'fueled' the women in the family because the younger lot is already used to a cosmopolitan ecosystem, if not in the physical spaces of the family and country, than in the digital spaces of the internet and social media platforms.

The same familial association with the soap genre or women playing family-friendly roles on TV is reflected in the Pakistani fandom of the showbiz, particularly TV, movie, music stars and fashion models. Since TV consumption is still very much a family experience in Pakistan, despite a wide and growing digital market, the image of the star is usually taken off as someone you'd like to see because they are beautiful and perfect but someone you're not supposed to hang out with because they are only beautiful and perfect. A profession in acting and the image industry is looked down upon by families of different classes because you only end up in such a professional if you are either illiterate or uneducated to find a regular job, such as that of a doctor or an engineer, or always eager to reveal your body – both being strong value judgments about your character. This applies to men too but like all patriarchal societies, men do get away with it by portraying a healthy personal life in front of fans.

So while the Pakistani fandom is used to policing celebs, especially women, Bilgiç's case was particularly jarring for them because first she played a very pious and faithful wife and secondly that wife was the embodiment of all the neo-ottoman ideals something had never been established so overtly and in such an engaging manner on the Pakistani television before. So a stroll down Bilgiç's Instagram posts in revealing clothes was more disappointing for the fans than surprising and that sense of disappointment was being 'fueled' by the family structure that associates woman's body and personality to the entire family's honour.

While Bilgiç's fans eventually turned into her anti-fans, the shows anti-fans mostly belong to the educated, liberal and secular-minded minority of the country that equalizes Diriliş: Ertuğrul's patronage in the country to the mission of bringing the regressive Islamic ideals back in the garb of owning our Ottoman heritage. These fans, including both men and women, are more active on Twitter than on Instagram and are also generally opposed to Prime minister Imran Khan and his party Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf's right-wing and centre-right politics. Having said that, every time these anti-fans, usually with a very wide and popular following have started an organized critique of the show on Twitter, the pro-fans, belonging to different social classes have appeared to defend the show and the religious values it promotes. The pro-fans not only condemn the anti-fans for disliking a brilliant show but they also accuse them of being anti-Islam for opposing a show that spreads the True message.

This conflict between fans and anti-fans of Diriliş: Ertuğru confirms that religion and the sacred continues to drive discourse in the digital world and the democratic promises of the internet have only emboldened the ideological divide that already exists in society as reflected in the respective fandoms. The exchange with you (Shebnem) and your input combined with my analysis also show how the women and the feminine body continues to be an area of contestation deeply linked with notions such as tradition and honour that are still central to the Muslim family anxieties in both Turkey and Pakistan. If not the Turkish TV show that is either supported or negated by the state (Case in point Behzat C) the family anxieties drive the political system and show up in hasty decisions to ban K-pop or limiting globally famous music movement and must genre to just homosexuality. Another very important overlapping idea that came to me as an afterthought is that Imran Khan's answers to many ills such as sexual violence are the Western and Bollywood media influences on our culture and that is why he offers Turkish content as an alternate. The reason why such a notion is resonant is that Turkey has succeeded in applying Western production value to Eastern stories and offered it to the world like a treat. It's not just that we as consumers appreciate Western production values but this very idea of bringing Muslim, Islamic and Islamicate stories to the forefront in a Western set standard can be linked to the notion of 'Muslim Prestige' which many Muslims feel has been lost. A sense of the reclamation of the grandeur of the Muslim past seems to be the big idea behind state-monitored cultural production in both countries.

Global Fandom Conversations (Round Two, Part One): Sebnem Baran and Rafay Mahmood

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. 

Global Fandom: Rafay Mahmood (Pakistan)

Pakistani fandom, piety and Turkish period dramas 

 Rafay Mahmood

On May 3, 2020, cricketer-turned-politician and now Pakistan’s Prime minister, Imran Khan addressed a public gathering where he spoke about the importance of watching Turkish shows instead of ‘typical Bollywood’. This speech came a year after Pakistan had banned the import or broadcast of Indian content following skirmishes on the border with India. The PM emphasized how the Turkish shows, Dirlis Ertugrul in particular can bring Pakistanis close to their ‘Muslim roots’ and allow us as a nation to get inspired from our lost glory. 

While historians and critics remain divided over the show’s claim to it being an historically ‘accurate’ account, the govt of Pakistan didn’t blink an eye before getting the dialogues translated in Urdu and airing it on the state-run Pakistan Television and its digital assets. With an anti-India sentiment already a part of the public discourse coupled by the absence of Bollywood films in cinemas, the country, that was primarily reliant on Bollywood for a healthy box office was bracing itself for the death of the cinema industry and rise of the new stars and fans, all at the same time.

While Bollywood stars, even with Muslim names such as Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan represented an upper-caste, predominantly Brahmin, North Indian culture, it was the shared language, a similar set of common values, idiom and same physical complexion that made them accessible for the average Pakistani fan. That is obviously apart from the cathartic experience that the Bollywood song & dance formula guarantees. 

 Dirlis Ertugrul on the other hand brought forward an overtly Muslim hero, fighting for the great Islamic cause against anybody and everybody who hinders the message of Allah, displaying the chivalry of a valiant soldier and generosity of a forgiving king; directly inspired from the lives and events of the various venerated figures mentioned in the Islamic holy book of Quran. While the Islamicate tropes being used in an epic period drama were a direct departure from the dominantly ‘Hindu’ popularly registered as ‘Indian’ mise sen scene of Bollywood, the narrative elements remained consistent with that of Bollywood, or any other soap opera in the world. This allowed the fans of the Islamic Republic to enjoy a TV show not only as a binge watch but also as a family entertainer which complied by the Islamic values and Islamicate culture with all the women covering their heads in front of everyone apart from their husbands along with Arabic phrases and idioms commonly used in Muslim countries around the world. 

The treatment of the show successfully enabled the Prime Minister’s propaganda mission to pursue something more than just ‘Indian content’ with the newly launched YouTube channel ‘TRT Ertugrul by PTV’ crossing 8 million subscribers within one month of its launch and amassing 15.9 million in one year. But the state patronage of a TV show, as something a lot more sacred than entertainment, coupled with easy access to the internet and social media created a fan following that wasn’t afraid to express why the stars should be sacred, chaste and pious in their personal lives as well.

In an Instagram post on March 25, 2020, the leading lady of the show Esra Belgic, who plays the role of cool, devoted and loyal wife of the protagonist posted a picture of herself posing on a boat with a revealing upper torso on her verified Instagram account. It started with a few heart emojis to admire her beauty but the comments section soon turned into a slut-shaming space with militant moral policing, mostly by Muslim Pakistani men.



The screenshot of the Turkissh actor being shamed

A user by the name of Hassan Mehmood wrote: well done taaliyan honi chahiye hamaray liye aaj hum ek sacha musalmaan kehlanay ke laik hain ab ek dafa apne dil par hath rkh kr bata do kya tum ne kabhi marna nahi aaj mati ke oopar insaan kal matti ke neechay hoga are saamp khayen ge bichoo khayen ga

“A huge round of applause for we aren’t even close to what a devoted Muslim should be. Take a vow on your heart and tell me that you don’t worry about death, about afterlife, when you will be buried under the sand surrounded by snakes and Scorpios as punishment”

Another user just posted Bilgic’s screen name in Arabic/Urdu along with a question mark. As if bewildered at her shamelessness and disappointed at her not covering her body as she did in the show.

Others followed by a plain and simple ‘Shame on you’ while some questioned if this what Esra learnt from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him). 

Perhaps Bilgic hadn’t anticipated that her newly found fandom in Pakistan will not only love her but also hold her accountable for her ‘hypocrisy’ on screen by not espousing to the set of values of her character. For a month or so Bilgic didn’t respond to any of the policing on Instagram and continued tweeting and posting thank you notes to Pakistani fans until a couple of months later when she turned off comments under one of her pictures and eventually gave a befitting reply to a Pakistani fan.

“Elder sister Halime, please don’t wear such dresses,” wrote astounding_ali to which Halime responded by saying, “Let me give you a little advice: Don’t follow me. Thank you.” Her response was lauded as a ‘clap back like a queen’ and ‘Sultan of Sass’ in Pakistan’s more liberal English language press.

However, as the show progressed so did the fan conversation about Bilgic and her policing, so much so that Muslim social media users from around the world and in Pakistan started to eventually argue in favour of her choice.

Kim, a Muslim Hijab-wearing woman from Morocco chimed in by saying that she wears a hijab by choice and since Esra is an actress she should be allowed to wear whatever the task demands of her. She even questioned the disbelief of Pakistani fans by asking, do you also think she is married to Erugrul (Her husband in the show) too?

Royal_g_98, that appeared to be the Instagram handle of a Pakistani user appealed to PM Khan to take Instagram away from Pakistanis: “PM of Pakistan please stop Instagram in Pakistan. They live in 8th or 9thcentury,” the account wrote.

The slow and gradual acceptance of Bilgic as their own, even though with reservations, shows how eager is the Pakistani fandom to express itself pertaining to matters of piety and shame and how religion continues to be a launching point of ideas despite the slow death of the conventional missionary and his mission. This persistent confusion around accepting stars, especially when compared to Pakistan’s loyal and more than half a century-long, love-hate relationship with Bollywood also speaks volumes about the politics of heritage and ‘roots’ in the post-nation-state world. 

“The dichotomy however collapsed with Bilgiç who, at once possessed appearance close in proximity to European femininity, but the heritage and ideology of the brown, Muslim woman. She was almost white and Muslim enough. She was not to be feared, yet possessed all the desirability. And thus began the crisis that led to the barrage of comments on her Instagram posts,” reported the daily paper Dawn. 

The dilemma for Pakistani fans of the Turkish show started with them being challenged to suspend their disbelief and accept the characters and actors as different entities. Which further led them to evolve and inquire which stars to own and how to own them and what part of our heritage to own and how to own it since the Turkish or Central Asian aspect was imported and broadcast as a direct replacement, and in some ways, answer to Bollywood. 

Pakistani government’s plan to acquire rights to Turkish epics not only triggered a fandom that was symptomatic of our existing religious partisanship but also reflective of how religion, piety and shame continue to dictate translational flows of identity and shared heritage, almost in a tribal manner, while partaking in a supposedly ‘worldly’ and cosmopolitan ecology of social media. 

However, more than a space of policing, I see the virtual villages of participatory culture as spaces of possibility where fans may engage in fierce and ruthless attacks on their stars but there are chances, if not equal, of them being maimed and humbled by the comebacks of those who adhere to more progressive values and use the same internet features and lexicon such as slangs and hashtags as proficiently as the ones policing the stars. Despite choosing a gendered experience for the paper, one can loosely take the Pakistani fandom of the Turkish star as a place of major ideological contest about both what it means to be a Muslim and Pakistani and what one wants a Muslim and Pakistani to be like on social media, without turning a blind eye to our ‘Hindu’ neighbour with centuries of shared experience. 

As Arvind Rajagopal shares the framework of understanding the fandom of Dur Darshan’s 1987 production of Mahabharata, “Merely focusing on media itself does little more than confirm our fascination with power. The media neither cause, nor reflect events, they participate in them.” To be able to understand whether the Pakistani fandom of Turkish shows actually snowballs into something truly spectacular that the ruling party can later use as an archetype for voters also requires a closer inspection of how politically and financially is it invested in this mission of cultural production

Rafay Mahmood is a researcher and journalist from Pakistan who is associated with Habib University and The Express Tribune. He also makes Video logs on cultural commentary in Urdu.

Global Fandom: Şebnem Baran (Turkey)

Politics: Where the Global and the Local Meet in Fandoms of Turkey By Şebnem Baran

The summer of 2021 offers an interesting moment to look at the state of fans and fandoms in Turkey. Publicly discussed incidents involving  fans reveal clues about the increasing political and cultural divide while also demonstrating the influence of transnational media flows on the fan experience.  

Media flows originating from South Korea are at the center of the popular debates about transnational influence. This past August, Turkish media platforms became inundated with news articles about three young girls who went missing. The initial coverage alleged that the girls, who were K-Pop fans, had run away from home to go to Korea. After returning to their homes, the girls denied that was the case. However, their statements didn't attract the same level of attention. The debate had already shifted towards the effects of K-drama and K-pop on Turkey's youth—a topic that journalists and academics in Turkey have recurringly explored. Soon after the girls' return, it was reported1 that Turkey's Family and Social Services Ministry was launching an investigation about the Korean content's influence, including the allegations about "the genderless lifestyle" encouraged by K-pop.

Although there is a proliferation of master's theses on Hallyu—perhaps indicating generational trends for the aca-fans—academic literature on K-pop and K-drama fans in Turkey do not always follow the mainstream framework of fan studies. While some scholars focus on audience reception from a media studies perspective, some others are more interested in the cultural impact. The latter group’s sociological interest sometimes extends to the conservative families’ anxieties about Hallyu’s influence on their kids’ religiosity.

This panic is reminiscent of the earlier public discourses on the "corruptive" effects of transnational cultural flows on the youth. These concerns were intricately related to the stereotypical risks associated with unquestioned fan devotion and loyalty. One of the memorable examples among the many reiterations in the past was the murders and suicides attributed to heavy metal music consumption in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The doubts about foreign influence still remain intact—especially among the conservative groups. Nevertheless, there is less stigma about being a fan. Since those days, Turkey has already gone through  the "mainstreaming" of fans, a process well explored by fan studies scholars in the Anglo- American world. Like in many other places, fans' increasing visibility on social media keeps underlining their role in the market as consumers in Turkey. Both content creators and critics do not hesitate to acknowledge fans' importance for the industry.

The success of Turkish drama exports in the 2000s was a turning point for this awareness. Fans had existed as devoted members of the audience along with the regular viewers before this turning point. However, in the 2000s, the devotion that was once attributed to the smaller groups gained a new meaning. First, the "Middle Eastern" fans [2] emerged as the"adoring other" while conjuring up the complex colonial tensions within the region. Then, new groups of fans from different regions, such as Latin America, entered the picture with the increasing volume of Turkish drama exports. Through transnational flows of television, global fans' visibility contributed to the solidification of the TV fandom as a publicly recognized cultural category. Again in the 2000s, the growth of the TV sector in Turkey facilitated more coverage about the domestic fandoms. Many news reports touched upon the devotion of TV fans. For example, Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves), a popular show of its time that later became a long-running franchise, was a frequent topic of these reports. Some fans had followed the real-life rituals of mourning after the death of one of the show's leading characters, which remained a frequently repeated example of Turkish TV fans' loyalty.

With the news coverage about the global fans as well as their Turkish counterparts' devotion, a new understanding of fandom was fully established. As a result, TV fans in Turkey gained more mainstream visibility similar to the celebrity, music and sports fans' statuses in public. This progression is comparable to the accounts discussed in the English language fan studies literature. Since gaining more mainstream visibility and acceptance, fans in Turkey sped 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.

Though the importance of transnational flows and globalization of fan practices via the Internet is undeniable, local circumstances had a big role in shaping the state of fans and fandoms in Turkey. During the ongoing political transformation of the country, fans became more visible through their activism. My own work focuses on two cases where this visibility became intertwined with political tension in the country. The fans of Behzat Ç. and Leyla ileMecnun—two TV shows with small but vocal fan followings—made a name for themselves through their activism to keep the shows on air. For example, Behzat Ç. fans immediately organized to prevent an impending cancellation when the show's slot was changed due to the low ratings. In addition to the fans' posts on online platforms, fans ofGençlerbirliği, the soccer team Behzat supports on the show, protested the show's broadcaster during a game. Leyla ile Mecnun fans similarly made it to the news by causing the show to trend on IMBD's list of highest-rated shows inresponse to a TV critic's article touching upon the low ratings.

As a detective show including storylines about political corruption, Behzat Ç. quickly claimed a more political tone embraced by the young people opposing the mainstream political divides. The politicization of the show paved the way for a lot of fines, which were usually justified by the show's depiction of alcohol use and profanity rather than commenting on the political critique. Despite the constant threat of cancellation, the show was able to survive until the end of its third season in 2013. Leyla ile Mecnun, an absurdist comedy that aired on the public broadcaster, had a more subtle engagement with politics until the cast and crew participated in the Gezi Protests in 2013. Initially starting with a group protesting the upcoming demolition of the Gezi Park in Taksim, these protests later became a movement criticizing the AKP government. Leyla ile Mecnun's cancellation after the cast and crew's participation in the protests caused a fan uproar and culminated in a political discussion in the parliament.

 During the same protests, sports fan groups like Çarşı became visible, creating new possibilities for research {3] on fan politicization. This specific moment of fan visibility during a political crisis reveals how political motives can unite media and sports fans. It is also important to mention the pre-existing overlap between sports and media fandoms. After all, Leyla ile Mecnun's lead character Mecnun is a devout fan of Beşiktaş, the same soccer team supported by the fan group Çarşı. This enables a synergistic connection also seen between Behzat Ç. and Gençlerbirliği fandoms.

 Although sports fandom research and my discussion of the sports fans have focused more on the soccer fans in Turkey so far, I believe Turkey's participation in the women's Olympic volleyball tournament in Tokyo has opened new possibilities for surveying the connection between local politics and fan practices. Despite the mainstream popularity of soccer, other sports like basketball and volleyball—with both men's and women's teams—had occasionally gained popular followings at the time of international tournaments. The recent politicization of the fan support for the women's volleyball team distinguished this case from the earlier examples.

In the summer of 2021, the women's volleyball team reached the quarterfinals during the Olympics. Their popularity continued as they moved to the European Championship Tournament. Two highly publicized incidents followed their initial success in the Olympics. First, a conservative figure, İhsan Şenocak, criticized4 the visibility of the players' bodies and the nickname given to them. According to Şenocak, the team's players did not deserve to be called "Filenin Sultanları" or "the Sultans of the Net," for they were not the rightful owners of the conservative imperial legacy embodied by the "Sultan" title. Şenocak's view about women's place in the public sphere was associated with the conservative agendas, hence causing strong reactions among the anti-conservative critics. As his tweet circulated, many users, including prominent political figures and celebrities, showed support for the volleyball team online.

Then, an Instagram post of Ebrar Karakurt, one of the most successful players, with her rumored girlfriend, instigated a new wave of anti-LGBTQ+ attacks. Like the previous incident, many fans and non-fans supported Ebrar Kararkurt and the team. Once again, the clash coincided with the political and cultural divides about religion's role in the public sphere. The discussions inevitably referred to the pre-existing crises regarding the conservative attacks on the LGBTQ+community. Taylan Antalyalı, a player from the soccer team Galatasaray, was similarly targeted for wearing a Pride T-shirt in June—the same month İstanbul Pride March was dispersed by the police with force. LGBTQ+ rights, like women's rights, were already elements of political polarization. Karakurt's post reignited the clash and earned more support for the team at the same time. Her successful performance following the online attacks further fueled the growing fandom's devotion both for her and for the team.

After the team qualified for the semifinals, another controversy followed. On social media, some users alleged that TRT, the public broadcaster, knowingly cut the team's chanting of İzmir Marşı, an anthem that has been embraced as a symbol of defiance against the conservative government. TRT General Manager Zahid Sobacı immediately responded on Twitter by saying TRT had no say over the live broadcast controlled by the broadcaster in Bulgaria. [5] All these controversies, along with Karakurt's viral social media posts combining humor and determination to win, contributed to the visibility of Turkey's women's national team. With popular support for the team becoming stronger, they ended the European Championship with a bronze medal.

 Like the cases of Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun, the local political specificities affected how fan activism unfolded in Turkey's women's national team. While politicization followed the fan loyalties in these earlier examples, in the case of Turkey's women's national volleyball team, the pre-existing polarization and politicization intensified the fan activism and helped the fandom grow.

 This recipe for an authentic connection depends on a delicate configuration informed by the political context. For example, Behzat Ç., which returned to an online streaming platform with new episodes in 2019, failed to garner the same level of fan devotion it had six years ago. The blunt political criticism in the show was replaced with a more vagueversion avoiding direct targets. This choice cost the show its previous political relevance and the fan devotion it used togenerate. Therefore, the street art-like images of the lead character Behzat Ç. and his nemesis Ercüment, who now has his own spin-off, painted on the walls in İstanbul seem more like a marketing effort than real fan work to me. (Please see Figure-1)

Figure-1 : Behzat Ç. and Ercüment Çözer images. Photo by Şebnem Baran

Leyla ile Mecnun has similarly come back with new episodes in early September. It will be interesting to see if the show would be able to re-establish an authentic connection in a way Behzat Ç. could not in its second life.

While most of the examples I shared focus on fan activism vividly connected to the political divides in the country, it is important to acknowledge there are other fandoms, which are less preoccupied with the same political divides. I also would like to mention that North American and Western European content flows still inspire an important share of the fandoms in Turkey. A frequently Instagrammed proof is a mural in Karaköy, İstanbul depicting Tokyo, one of the main characters from Netflix's Casa de Papel/Money Heist. (Please see Figure-2).

Figure-2: A mural depicting Tokyo from Netflix's Casa de Papel/Money Heist. Photo by Şebnem Baran.

Nevertheless, I believe the global and the local are still going hand in hand in informing most Turkish fans' experiences.An image posted by a fan account on Instagram is a terrific example of this glocalization embedded. (Please see Figure-3). The caption under the image describes it as "Sailor Moon style Sultans of the Net," demonstrating the importance ofglobal images, practices, and vocabulary in shaping the responses to local specificities.

Figure-3: Screenshot of turkmillitakimleri1 account's post. Captured by Şebnem Baran. Although the original post didn't identify the artist, an attribution to Hong Kong-based illustrator Jasmine Tse's Instagram account @tsesaipei was added later.

Şebnem Baran is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Smith College's Film and Media Studies Department. She received her doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California in 2018. Baran's dissertation explores how Anglo-American quality programming standards are claiming more importance in the global television market. Her work on Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun surveys the Turkish interpretation of quality TV and its intersection with fan activism. In addition to fan studies, her research interests include transnational television flows, quality TV, media industries, online streaming, and audience studies.  

[1] https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ministry-to-monitor-effects-of-k-pop-on-young-turks-167460

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCI-AahMapU

[3] For some examples:

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429285288/football-fandom-protest-democracy-dağhan-irak

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1012690217702944

[4] https://twitter.com/ihsansenocak/status/1419296320267997187?s=20

[5] https://twitter.com/zahidsobaci/status/1433040940038565895?s=20

Global Fandom Conversations (Round One): Bertha Chin, Lori Moromoto, Rukmini Pande (Part Two)

3.     To what degree do fandoms still reflect local cultural traditions and practices? 

RP: I think this is a very broad question that could have radically different responses. I’ll take this opportunity to reflect on a trend that I’ve noticed amongst transnational fandom conversations over the last few years. This encompasses parallel processes of othering and simplification that take place when discussing specific cultural issues reflected in non-anglophone media texts and their fandom communities. 

The process of othering is perhaps a familiar one to most scholars. It happens when certain practices specific to those fandoms - pertaining to fanart, fanfiction, etiquette around creator contact, etc - are seen as “problematic” by fans unfamiliar to those milieus. The resulting critique can also impose un-nuanced ideas around identity and representation. This is obviously a troubling phenomenon and is rightfully pushed back against by fans who see it as a misrepresentation of their own specific fan practices as shaped by local histories, cultures, and even pragmatic considerations around access and legal issues. 

However, perhaps inadvertently, this pushback can also result in what I term as simplification, whereby complex political, social and cultural issues informing those same specific fan practices are flattened out in order to be championed uncritically. In such cases, even fans speaking from positions of knowledge and experience within those fandoms are branded as “outsiders.” No media text or fandom is free from issues and hierarchies of power around representations of identity, relationships, and desire. Fans wanting to defend their localized practices against casual dismissal are extremely valid, but I find that this impulse also often undermines location-specific critiques which is an added layer of complexity.

BC: In my opening statement, I alluded to the 'cultural baggage' of conflict and reluctance, and at times, shame, when I looked at the way fandom is discussed in Malaysia. Commercially successful franchises and media such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and most recently, BTS and Squid Game are considered acceptable, often serving as fodder for national conversation. It is one thing to be able to understand the latest superhero references in popular press coverage, or to purchase a Funko Pop figure but fans are still cautioned against being too emotionally attached to a media text. My conversations with students certainly reveal this contradiction, where pop culture knowledge is considered "cool", but fandom is often "waste of time" and something one does as a child (and thus, grow out of). The hierarchy of taste is delineated along commercially successful texts, and acceptable fan practice is sanctioned by the industry through consumption of official merchandise. Any other fan practice that falls into a more transformative pursuit is othered, and often simplified, not only into “fluff”, but “fluff” that is a cause for concern. 

It is difficult, at this juncture not to recall a friend's question, early on in my PhD, as to why I was researching fan cultures and not something "more serious", and that "Asian people don't do fandom". There is always a sense that fandom is a 'foreign practice' within Southeast -- and East -- Asian scholarship, which speaks to Lori's point about the devalued nature of Fan Studies within the academy. Except when one is of Asian descent, this scholarship is devalued twice over, within the academy and among fans themselves. But given Southeast Asia is itself a cosmopolitan hybrid of identities, it is difficult to determine what is local, and as such what would then be considered as ‘authentic’. 

LM: At the risk of continuing in a contradictory vein, “local cultural traditions and practices” is also something that I would problematize insofar as, to paraphrase Rukmini above, it can mean “radically different” things to different people. Historically, hegemonic fan studies has conceptualized ‘local’ fan traditions and practices in opposition to normative fandom practices; that is, as discrete and located outside those practices and traditions that characterize ill-defined (but seemingly universally understood) ‘fandom’ and ‘fan community’. There is little sense in lambasting foundational scholarship that originated and upheld such characterizations, particularly inasmuch as it was a product of its moment in both the history of media fan practices and the evolution of fan studies. But in our current media fandom/fan studies moment, I have a first-row seat to vitriolic English-language debates on social media about the in/validity of fujoshi (lit. “rotten women,” referring to women who consume and create Boy’s Love and yaoi media) that are entirely divorced from - and wilfully uninterested in - their original Japanese contexts. I’ve also gotten my feet wet in that Anglo-American iteration of Chinese drama fandom spawned by the increasing ubiquity of Mainland Chinese dramas on such mainstream streaming platforms like Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime, where we struggle to grasp both the minutiae of Chinese* fan knowledges and practices (kadian, anyone?) and, in particular, the complex social and political circumstances that led to, among other things, English language fanfiction stalwart Archive of Our Own being banned by Mainland Chinese authorities. 

Within this context, what is “local” and against what are we defining it? For example, as I have argued elsewhere (Morimoto, 2019), Archive of Our Own has quite specific cultural traditions and practices that aren’t necessarily generalizable to English-language fanfiction reading and writing practices on FanFiction.net or Wattpad; can we then consider AO3’s norms ‘local’ (in opposition to those fans for whom AO3 embodies fanfiction culture, to the extent that it’s even recognized as a part, rather than the whole, of ‘fandom’)? Or is there perhaps a better way of conceptualizing both the vast array of fan practices and traditions enacted globally, as well as what happens when contact with other practices and traditions alter, challenge, or otherwise inflect them?

*see Bertha below to fully appreciate the complexity of such a superficially self-evident category as “Chinese fans”

4.     What are some of the key issues and challenges facing “global fandom” today?

RP: This conversation has perhaps sketched out some of the key challenges already but perhaps to recap, in my view, the key challenges for scholars of “global fandom” are building theoretical frameworks that can facilitate robust and nuanced examination of complex fan practices. I also think that it is vital to underline that building these frameworks are not abstract practices. They must engage with the increasingly skewed contemporary reality for many scholars - particularly those from the Global South but also those in the Global North with critical accessibility issues - who now face even greater barriers to participation in academic discourse than before. After all, no discipline can claim to be “global” without taking account of the exclusion of so many peers working in those very contexts. 

BC: Rukmini makes a really good point about needing more robust and nuanced theoretical frameworks to look at global fandom. Conversations like these are great starting points, and the fact that Henry is hosting them would mean that people would be aware that these conversations are happening, but as Lori pointed out, it's also dependent on the willingness of scholars to read and engage. And I'd like to take this further by saying that we need to ensure that this doesn't just become a cursory nod to acknowledge diversity and inclusivity, but to also pay attention to the gaps and silences, to who is being silenced, and the question of who is speaking for whom. Even -- and especially when -- it doesn't agree with our viewpoints or our understanding of the world. There is a lot of histories that are still being re-written; there are different approaches to, and understandings of postcoloniality, for instance that doesn't necessarily fit into a neat, little box we can place people into, and this informs and affects fans' understanding of their identities and their cultures. Acknowledging the constraints of where the fan scholar is working from, not just within an academic institution, but also the geopolitical location of the fan scholar would continue to be a key issue.

To build on the example that both Lori and Rukmini have already raised, I return to what's happening in China, and the different perspectives that have been offered up as explanations. The English language media in the West posits it as -- to borrow from Lori -- "[X authoritarian regime] cracks down on [Y subculture]", and a 'global event' like this will continue to be a challenge to the ways we conceptualise and understand what global fan cultures is. Even within the different factions of fandoms in China itself, responses and reactions to the crackdowns are varied; just as our reactions, as fan, celebrity and media scholars (and again, dependent on our educational, social and cultural capitals) are different. When I look at what's happening in China, for instance, it's more than just a crackdown on a specific subculture, but rather, it's also a very specific reading of how to perform Chinese-ness on a global scale, as dictated by a powerful country whose people have migrated to other parts of the world for centuries. And yet this performance is rooted in a sense of Confucian morality, and it is a cultural crackdown that can be alarming for other ethnic Chinese, long assimilated into hybrid identities or the culture of their migrated homes, who do not identify with a Confucian understanding of Chinese-ness. In short, it is never as simple or as neat as it seems. 

LM: To pick up where Bertha leaves off, I want to tell a quick story that happened over coffee with Rukmini and her friend Swati Moitra during a conference we were all at several years ago (a story I know Rukmini all too familiar with because I keep going on and on about it!). They had followed the conversation into a discussion about the upcoming Indian release of Disney’s live-action version of The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016), which Rukmini expressed some skepticism about until Swati mentioned a number of the actors involved and, in particular, a song being used in its promotion that updated the Hindi-language theme song of the Japanese anime series, The Jungle Book: Adventures of Mowgli ジャングルブック 少年モーグリ (Kurokawa Fumio, 1989-90). Rukmini ultimately wrote a touching and complex review of the film addressing how this corporate-strategized mashup of Kipling’s notoriously colonialist novel, Indian casting, and use of the widely beloved theme song to its Japanese adaptation effectively enabled a “reclamation” of the text, “expand[ing] into and imaginative space I didn’t quite know existed.” 

What grabbed my attention about this, and what I think is emblematic of the challenges facing fandoms and fan studies going forward, is its semiotic complexity. For Disney, a global corporation whose attempts at media localization include the insertion of painfully transparent scenes set in China in Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013) intended to attract “Chinese” viewers (who, it should be noted, saw right through them), not to mention the Southeast Asian rollout of Disney+ Hotstar that Bertha discusses in her opening statement, this strategy seems uniquely attuned to the arguably counterintuitive popular cultural specificities of transmedia Jungle Book reception in India; something that, for being equally attuned to them, Rukmini’s nuanced analysis is able to discern and discuss. At the same time, her caveat that, “I'm not trying to argue here that the text is somehow free of Disney's globalisation agenda—it could be argued to have accomplished that agenda empathically, given that it made the company about Rs 180 cr (the most for any foreign film release in India by far),” equally demonstrates how, as she notes above, simplistic “ideas of resistance, subversion, or compliance” are often inadequate when it comes to grasping transnational and transcultural media fandoms and fan objects in their often-contradictory complexity.

In this sense, and particularly at a time when we must remind ourselves to think before we hit send on social media, when the number of ‘likes’ on our (often-unsolicited) opinions can engender significant social capital, when we jockey for authority in a world that thrusts us into ever-closer quarters with little understanding of how to navigate and negotiate that space, the need to acknowledge that, as Bertha writes, nothing is ever “as simple or neat as it seems” is at once absolutely imperative and a challenge that both fans and fan scholars face going forward. 

Global Fandom Conversations (Round One): Bertha Chin, Lori Moromoto, Rukmini Pande (Part One)

Rukmini Pande (RP) Intro: Like most other fandom scholars I’ve been invested in popular cultural texts and their fan communities from a pretty early age. As a young girl in India I was heavily engaged in everything from the dubbed version of a Jungle Book anime and the WWF (now WWE), to Bollywood, cricket and football. My exposure to online media fandom started with the delightfully weird anime Weiss Kreuz in the early 2000’s and I’ve been in both anglophone and non-anglophone spaces since then. In terms of my research focus, I’ve been interested in seeing how issues of race and racism interface with certain popular assumptions about fandom and fan studies, particularly ideas of shared pleasure, escapism, and progressive politics. I’m @RukminiPande on twitter. 

Lori Moromoto Intro: The little blurb I have on my personal website pretty much sums me up, so I’m copying it here in lieu of writing another one: I’m an academic, fan, and mom (she/her) who teaches in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and writes on transcultural media fandom. I became a fan of Hollywood movies in Hong Kong as a kid, a fan of Japanese anime in the US as a college student, and a fan of Hong Kong movies in Japan as an adult, and that has pretty much set the tone for my entire body of work. When I’m not teaching or writing, I’m arguing with my spouse about what to watch on TV, reading fanfiction, and trying to work my way through all 50 episodes of The Untamed [NOTE: I finished the series and then fell face-first into CQL/MDZS fandom. Turns out 50 episodes is just not enough]. You can find me on Twitter at @acafanmom

Bertha Chin Intro: My bio would (boringly) say that I’m a senior lecturer teaching Social Media & Communication at Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak. And that the majority of my publications and research look at the intersections of fan and celebrity studies. It doesn’t say I’m a fan, and my first involvement with online fandom was via The X-Files(which was also incidentally where Lori and I met and bonded over our mutual love of Leslie Cheung and HK movies!). It also doesn’t say that in 2015, I moved back to Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo where I was born and raised after spending more than half of my life in Australia and the UK, and a lot of the points -- and struggles -- I raised about hybrid identities and cultures stem from this personal experience. And this struggle with my own cultural identity continues to inform my work, which has also circled back to transcultural fandom (particularly in light of all the recent debates and Hollywood media content that highlighted Asian representation) as I fell head-over-heels into Never Have I Ever fandom [#TeamPaxton always]. I’m @bertha_c on Twitter.  

1.     Response to each other’s opening statements

RP: First of all, thank you both for your perceptive statements. I think there are a few threads that are speaking to common concerns we share, particularly when we discuss fandom in a “global” context with all the possibilities and complexities that that category holds. As Lori also points out, I think we’ve all underlined the need for fan scholars (and fans) to engage with local specificities and push past simplistic narratives that assume or impose a homogeneity on something as differentiated as transnational/transcultural fandom spaces. Bertha’s point about the implications of that cultural homogeneity imposed by a corporate behemoth like Disney+ is well taken. It would be interesting to have further research in how these homogeneities are also linked to the geopolitics of the states themselves and how fans align (or do not) with those interests. 

And also of course, a shared concern with how Fan Studies as a discipline with global interests interfaces with these issues and also builds scholarship that is suitably nuanced. Lori, I find myself returning to your point about the devaluation of Fan Studies as a discipline within the academy. As you rightly point out, its dismissal is certainly rooted in larger institutional biases. I think you also gesture to a possible way forward, which is for the discipline itself to go further in taking “fluff” seriously and crafting more robust critical frameworks. 

LM: Yes, thank you both for your insightful and provocative statements! As Rukmini says, we appear to share an equally impassioned insistence on the need for scholars, industries, and fans to grasp the cultural specificities that inflect not only transnational fandoms, but also transcultural fandoms where fans may have nation in common yet bring different (and differently positioned) cultural orientations to bear on their experiences and expectations. I particularly appreciate both Rukmini’s and Bertha’s attention to American media producers’ continued flattening of difference; something that historically has been reflected in fan studies and still characterizes interactions between normative (white, Global North, English-language) and non-normative fans in online fandom contact zones. To borrow from Bertha’s statement, Hollywood’s eminently questionable “diversity project” is predicated on the same kinds of simplistic identity politics that Rukmini observes in fandoms and fan studies alike, “which paper over the problems of media texts with ethnonationalist or other majoritarian themes with un-nuanced appeals to ‘diversity’ and ‘representation’.” 

Rukmini issues a much-needed call above for creating more robust critical frameworks in fan studies, and it’s here that I locate the critical importance of this series of conversations that Henry has been gracious enough to coordinate and host. Yet their potential impact on fan studies is predicated on scholars’ willingness to read and actively engage with them. This is as much a reminder for me, as both normative fan and fan scholar, as anyone reading; that the global reach of our contemporary media landscape means that, in a very real sense, what might appear through the lens of flattened difference to be irrelevant to a researcher in fact is indispensable to understanding the nuances of an always already transnational fanscape.

BC: Indeed, echoing what both of you have remarked on the common threads running through our opening statements! I find Rukmini’s point about not coming to broad conclusions about the politics of any space, even when the space is one with a majority of those from marginalised identities particularly resonant here. My recent and current work, certainly, have been trying to recognise gaps and silences when we talk about fans, but I think it is always important to remember what, or who is considered marginalised in one cultural context may not necessarily be so in another. To utilise K-pop fandom as an example here, Korean fans of K-pop may be a marginalised identity in the US, but Korean fans of K-pop isn’t necessarily a marginalised cultural and fan identity in Korea. So if we want to understand Korean K-pop fans’ relationship with blackness, we still need to return to the national and cultural context of Korea, and by extension, East Asia’s relationship to blackness. 

In short, it is perhaps useful to constantly question whose lens are we understanding and viewing marginalised identities from. Which may also mean questioning how other, more established -- and accepted disciplines of research -- conceptualise ideas about the “global”, as if global is a homogenous whole rather than disparate, messy concoctions of geopolitical, national, cultural identities. In fact I think the more we move into discourses on global fandom, the more we should recognise the differences, which is why I think Lori’s work on fandom contact zones is so important here.

2.     To what degree is fandom part of a process of globalization? 

RP: I think fandom has always been a part of globalization, both in terms of processes of formal and informal circulation of texts and their popularity and sometimes contested interpretations by fans around the world. There are numerous aspects of this process relevant in a contemporary context, but I am currently most interested in how online media fan communities are interfacing with an ostensibly shared, but also extremely fractured, global mediascape. I am also interested in how these extremely heterogeneous and highly self-reflexive communities are intersecting with local and global geopolitical narratives that are often debated and disseminated within them. To briefly touch on an example that Lori also referenced in her opening statement, the recent regulations around fan culture and media content in China have been broadly reported as the “policing” of fan communities in English language media outlets. At the same time, there have also been numerous fan narratives offering alternate explanations and sometimes justifications of the need of such intervention. Fan communities globally then continue to have complex relationships with issues of identity and politics which cannot be mapped simply onto ideas of resistance, subversion, or compliance. This is true for even those sections of fandom that are seen to have somewhat non-normative interests in particular contexts. 

BC: I remember not really coming across the term ‘fan’ until I moved to Australia in my teens and being introduced to the concept through the discovery of The X-Files. But then thinking back to my childhood in Borneo, and recalling how it was always framed by trying to procure VHS tapes of a Disney animated film or a newly released Hollywood or Hong Kong film, or exchanging written stories with friends which featured a favourite character from a TV show we all loved, or the latest pop band we were all enamoured with made me realised I have been participating in various fan practices even before I understood the concept from a scholarly manner. And given this was all before the Internet, it stands to reason that fandom -- and media consumption in this case -- have always been a part of globalisation. 

What fascinates me, and continues to fascinate me within the context of transcultural fandom, is other fans like me, who accessed different media content but rather embracing the themes, mannerisms and identities that made sense to them, whether it's gender or sexual identity, self-reliance, self-confidence, or even language skills. It wasn't about disregarding a text's national context, but rather, looking beyond the trappings of cultural and national proximity. It's also a fascination with fans who have grown up within a hybrid context, be it via migration or just media consumption, who appropriated these media texts for their own, and who are not entirely visible in the fan studies discourse. Globalisation enabled transnational media flows, and as such, it enabled access to media content from elsewhere, but also access to fan communities online. 

LM: Both Rukmini and Bertha get at something I’m still working through myself; namely, the messiness of fandoms existing within what Rukmini describes as an “extremely fractured global mediascape,” and Bertha identifies as the sometimes “hybrid context[s]” of lived experience. Both characterizations capture our current media fandom moment in ways that don’t map neatly onto the more hierarchical, linear assumptions on which “globalization” rests. As mirrored in online fandom shifts from such platforms as LiveJournal, the affordances of which lent themselves to highly controllable and hierarchical fan spaces, to Tumblr and Twitter, whose far more rhizomatic points of entry afford nonlinear access to fan cultural contact zones characterized by “highly asymmetrical relations” (Pratt, 1991) of not only power, but also access in its myriad forms, “globalization” as a process predicated on ‘West to Rest’ conceptions of media and technology flows increasingly cannot adequately account for a multidirectional mediascape of cross-border access to technologies and media often outside the aegis of corporate and/or government strategizing. 

In this sense, I’d suggest that what we see today is less media fandom as a process of globalization, per se, than media fandom as both reflecting and enacting changing modes, patterns, and sites of transnational and transcultural media circulation and consumption that exceed the narrow parameters of “globalization” as it’s historically been conceptualized in scholarship.

Global Fandom: Rukmini Pande (India)

Bus advertisement for KPop group Red Velvet's Japan mini album

Credit: Photo by Hiu Yan Chelsia Choi on Unsplash

 I begin with an acknowledgement that I, as well as many scholars present (and absent) in this blog conversation series, continue to grapple with the deep inequities exposed and exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The decisions of many conferences in the Global North to move back to “normal” formats with an emphasis on in-person attendance with its attendant networking and professional opportunities are far from value neutral. They signal a willingness (perhaps even an eagerness) to not just return to previous levels of academic inequity and inaccessibility, but further retrench them[1]. 

In this context, I welcome this conversation series being hosted by Henry Jenkins, as it goes some way in addressing those inequities. However, a single endeavour can only do so much. I hope that my colleagues located in other influential Global North institutions and organizations respond to the urgency of the present moment and establish similar forums and avenues of scholarly engagement, support, and publication. No discipline can claim global relevance and reach without working to dismantle mechanisms that alienate so many colleagues and institutions from participation and leadership roles. 

I use these observations to foreground their inextricability with all our current academic lives because they connect directly to many of the key questions faced by fan and audience scholars in a global context marked by precarity and inequity. I pose three as rhetorical jumping off points in the hope that they will connect with other pieces in this series to form a set of provocations for the field. 

1.     What does it mean to engage in fan studies at a time where our mediascape feels more networked, more globalized, and more fractured than ever before, both in terms of texts and the platforms that host and transmit them, as well fans themselves?

2.     To what extent are our current methods and theoretical models equipped to engage with the evolving and fractured dynamics of fan communities as related to broader cultural, political, and economic issues wherein individuals often hold extremely divergent views?

3.     And finally, how do we acknowledge and tackle the fact that all fan communities today are interfacing explicitly with deeply entrenched, globalized and networked social formations amplifying fascist politics (white supremacy, racism, gender-essentialism, xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, enthnonationalism, and neocolonialism amongst many others) without setting up binaries between “progressive” and “reactionary” fandoms? 

The animating focus of my research so far has been to make visible the role of race and racial identity in anglophone online media fandom as well as within the discipline of fan studies itself. I published Squee From The Margins[2] in 2018, and an edited collection, Fandom Now In Color[3] in 2020, as part of this broader project. I have also discussed the effects of institutional whiteness on fan studies methodologies and publication processes[4]. 

One of my primary arguments remains that issues of race/ism, particularly around Black characters, interrupt broadly held assumptions about media fandom spaces as uniformly politically progressive, offering a special refuge to fans from marginalized identities. These arguments remain relevant as we see an increasing polarization in fandom spaces around issues of racist fanwork, micro and macro-aggressions against vocal fans of color (especially Black fans) who identify problems in fandom spaces, and a concerted push to undermine any critiques of the same which seek to identify the workings of systemic racism, rather than individual issues by “bad” actors. This has also been pointed out by acafans such as Stitch in their detailed rundown here[5]. 

My work has also held up the hope for solidarity and coalition building around the category of “fan of color” in fandom spaces, pointing to a longer legacy of similar work lead by critical fans around events such as RaceFail ’09[6]. I continue to believe in the power and vital importance of such coalition building but want to reiterate that identifying and dismantling structural white supremacy is extremely difficult work and requires sustained effort. It does not begin or end with the personal identity of individuals. The power of whiteness operates in many ways including the co-option of marginalized voices and identities. Further, it is vital to understand the increasing role of majoritarian political ideologies (often rooted in ethno-nationalism) in the global mediascape. Fan communities, themselves more transnational and transcultural than ever before, have always been and continue to be profoundly influenced by these dynamics. 

Fandom spaces and communities have been demonstrably proven to be powerful arenas for civic participation ranging from pushing for changes in specific media properties, to broader socio-political mobilization. While initially optimistic about the progressive potential of such activity, recent scholarship has also taken into account the reactionary elements in these spaces. This is an extremely important step. 

Mel Stanfill lists a set of “jarring questions” in the introduction of a special issue on “Reactionary Fandom” which is a good summation of the concerns of this influential branch of scholarship. They ask, “What can we understand about reactionary politics by examining them through the lens of fandom? Should Gamergate be understood as the beginning of the alt-right? Do models of gift economies in fan fiction help us understand the production and circulation of conspiracy theories on YouTube? Can sexism be understood as fanon? Is white supremacy a fandom?”(Stanfill 2020, 2).

These are all extremely interesting provocations and the special issue’s scope includes a case study of fanfiction-based fandom by Anastasia Salter (2020). This also connects to Poe Johnson’s earlier perceptive questioning of fanworks’ troubled relationship with the Black body (Johnson 2019). However, taken together with other work on the same area, there continues to be noticeable skew towards either using the tools of fandom studies to examine explicitly white supremacist organizations like the MAGA movement or QAnon in the USA, or interrogating fandoms with observably reactionary elements in the majority such as Gamergate or sports fandoms (Miller 2020; Lobinger et al. 2020; Johnson 2020; Reinhard, Stanley, and Howell 2021). I am not trying to minimize the importance of this work but rather underline that it’s equally vital for scholars to understand more covert forms of white supremacy and other forms of majoritarianism operating in fandom spaces assumed to be resistant to such ideas. 

I would argue that while the question of white supremacy as a fandom is perhaps debatable, the presence of white supremacist structures in progressive media fandom is now well evidenced. Indeed, I would go further to state that the backlash against anti-racist efforts in these spaces, by branding them as censorship and policing of fannish pleasure, is actually gaining ground because it is couched in the language of social justice. These are admittedly complex issues but the need for scholars to be aware of these dynamics has never been more urgent. 

To expand on an example, many fandom scholars and commentators saw the mobilization of K-Pop fandoms around the 2020 BLM protests in the USA as a potentially politically transformative act. However, a more detailed analysis has shown those fandoms to be as marked by anti-Blackness as any others, as detailed here by Miranda Larsen[7]. To put it in another way, we cannot come to broad conclusions about the politics of any space, even one with a majority of individuals from marginalized identities, without sustained engagement and granular analysis.

This also extends to fandom spaces engaged in the consumption and creation of queer content, which has often functioned as a kind of shorthand for scholars, almost automatically designating those participants as having a larger progressive politics. However, in a world where queerwashing and homonationalism are extremely powerful forces, shaping everything from foreign policy, to media texts, to fan reactions, we need more robust and critical theoretical approach.

To give an example relevant to my current geo-political location, the fandom of USA television series Sense 8 (2015-18) (created and directed by the Wachowski siblings) had all the markers of a queer and racially diverse space which might have been expected to result in a politically progressive community. However, the series itself had some extremely disturbing narrative threads, including one centered on India which reinforced dominant Hindu nationalist beliefs. These same beliefs, now very much the mainstream, have pushed the country further and further into authoritarianism. Today, any effort to critique Hindu nationalism locally or internationally is framed (erroneously) as colonialist and racist. The storyline in the show itself did not generate much debate or protest within the fandom, precisely because it was framed within a queer utopic universalist frame which made locale-specific critique difficult to explain or sustain. Similar dynamics are also visible in many contemporary fandoms which paper over the problems of media texts with ethnonationalist or other majoritarian themes with un-nuanced appeals to “diversity” and “representation.” 

The point I wish to make through these examples is that while media fandom spaces continue function as spaces of connection and enjoyment for fans from marginalized backgrounds, scholars must push beyond single lens understandings of political and social affiliations. Fan studies must move beyond a shallow perception of intersectionality merely as a politics of citation or representation into the conditions it enables and the contexts it functions within; we cannot resist authoritarianism through the mere performative co-option of what sounds like resistance instead of the realities of what we are enabling in the world. 

Rukmini Pande is an Associate Professor in Literary Studies at O.P Jindal Global University,

India. She is currently part of the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and Mallorn:

The Journal of Tolkien Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections including

the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies and The Routledge Handbook of

Popular Culture Tourism. She has also been published in peer reviewed journals such as

Transformative Works and Cultures and The Journal for Feminist Studies. Her monograph,

Squee From The Margins: Race in Fandom, was published in 2018 by the University of Iowa

Press. Her edited collection, Fandom, Now In Color: A Collection of Voices, bringing together

cutting-edge scholarship on race/ism in fandom, was published in December 2020. 

References:

Johnson, Poe. 2019. “Transformative Racism: The Black Body in Fan Works.” Transformative Works and Cultures 29 (March). https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1669.

———. 2020. “Playing with Lynching: Fandom Violence and the Black Athletic Body.” Television & New Media 21 (2): 169–83.

Lobinger, Katharina, Benjamin Krämer, Rebecca Venema, and Eleonora Benecchi. 2020. “Pepe–Just a Funny Frog? A Visual Meme Caught Between Innocent Humor, Far-Right Ideology, and Fandom.” Perspectives on Populism and the Media: Avenues for Research 7: 333.

Miller, Lucy. 2020. “‘Wolfenstein II’and MAGA as Fandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 32.

Pande, Rukmini. 2020. “How (Not) to Talk about Race: A Critique of Methodological Practices in Fan Studies.” Transformative Works and Cultures 33 (June). https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1737.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D., David Stanley, and Linda Howell. 2021. “Fans of Q: The Stakes of QAnon’s Functioning as Political Fandom.” American Behavioral Scientist, September, 00027642211042294. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211042294.

Salter, Anastasia. 2020. “#RelationshipGoals? Suicide Squad and Fandom’s Love of ‘Problematic’ Men.” Television & New Media 21 (2): 135–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879916.

Stanfill, M. 2020. “Special Issue: Reactionary Fandom.” Television & New Media 21 (2): 123–217.

[1] I am referring specifically to the relationship of “global” media and audience studies scholarship whose power centers of publication and privilege continue to be located in the academic structures of the Global North. I do not mean to dismiss the many nuanced locale-specific conversations (such as in India) around higher education where access to the internet and associated digital technologies are a contested terrain.

[2] https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609386184/squee-from-the-margins

[3] https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609387280/fandom-now-in-color

[4] https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1737

[5] https://stitchmediamix.com/2021/09/08/where-are-we-now-ao3-anti-racism/

[6] While “fan of color” is used quite broadly in fandom spaces it can also be linked to the history of the term “women of color.” The latter was initially conceptualized as a category of active organization and coalition building rather than of fixed and static identity by Black feminist activists at the National Conference for Women in 1977 in Washington DC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vl34mi4Iw

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLUWN1l2ZMU

Global Fandom: Lori Morimoto (American/Adult Third Culture Kid)

This Star Wars poster is familiar in the west as a somewhat exoticized image on t-shirts sold at Disney parks, but it also happens to be the actual poster used in the Hong Kong run of Star Wars, with the theater I saw it at circled in red. Something that’s since become somewhat ironically commodified that has a lived past,

I can trace my interest in the ways texts move and transform across borders to coming across, sometime in the sixth grade at the Lutheran Hong Kong International School, illustrations representing Jesus as Chinese. It obviously made enough of an impression that I remember it some 40 years later; in particular, I recall how it gently challenged my theretofore unexamined mental image of “Jesus” as dirty blond, bearded, and unequivocally white (think Ted Neely in Jesus Christ Superstar [1973]).

 It was also in Hong Kong that I became a fan of American movies like Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and this too was inflected by Hong Kong’s transnational milieu. Where fans of such films in the US were buying up special edition magazines and interviews with their stars in publications like People Magazine, I had accidentally discovered in local Japanese department stores movie magazines like Screen and Roadshow that were replete with stills from the films and photos from stars’ Tokyo junkets. I couldn’t read them (although they were very much the genesis of my subsquent study of Japanese language), but I cut the images out and pasted them into embroidered Chinese photo albums, which I pored (and squee’d) over with friends for many enjoyable hours.

Author’s Scrapbook, including Carrie Fischer eating with chopsticks on lower right,

In short, as I’ve written elsewhere (Chin & Morimoto, 2013), I’ve always been a fan of the wrong thing in the wrong place – American movies in Hong Kong, Japanese anime in the US, and Hong Kong films in Japan – and it was these formative experiences that laid the foundations of my research. Indeed, the scholarly significance of those movie magazines I used to ‘read’ in Hong Kong was driven home to me when, many years later, I stumbled across images on Tumblr of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Japan junkets taken from Screen magazine, punctuated by hundreds of reblogs, likes, and the occasional “thank you” to Screen for publishing heretofore unseen images of the star. Seeing them in an entirely different communication context drove home for me both a relative constant of media fandom – the largely borderless pursuit of more and new content now afforded by the Internet – and the critical role played by access in fostering fannish attachments across geographic and cultural divides. 

 Historically, global fan studies has focused on why people become fans of media from outside their own cultural/language/national aegis, focusing on the attractions of their differences to more familiar media texts. Such media, or the places from which they come, historically have been understood as intrinsically exotic, obscure enough to generate cultural capital for its aficionados, and – if lucky – engrossing enough to precipitate further delving into its culture of origin. Certainly all of these are possible, but it’s important to keep in mind that fans of something seldom, if ever, seek out their fannish texts. As they say in English language transformative fan culture, we don’t find fandom, it finds us. While the national aegis of a text can have a strong affective pull, it’s just as (if not more) likely that cross-border fandom begins when we happen to stumble across something in a space we regularly frequent that just catches our attention and keeps it until we’re hooked.

 In this sense, the important question becomes less one of why someone becomes a border-crossing fan – although I absolutely love a good origin story! – than of what happens next. What happens when a white Australian becomes a fan of black American hip-hop? What happens when mainland Chinese women become fans of Sherlock? What happens when American women become fans of Chinese dramas that flirt with (originally Japanese) boy’s love narratives? When black American women participate in global online K-pop fandom? What do we, as fans hailing from our own cultural habitus (fan, but also national, racial, sexual, gender, and so on) bring to bear on not only how we interpret texts from outside that habitus, but also on our interactions with other fans in the spatiotemporally convergent contact zones of online fan culture?

 For me, research on global fandoms begins in the deceptively simple observation that people become fans, ultimately, because we love something, and as we know, love is seldom logical, nor does it always overcome problems of systemic inequality and discrimination. It can move us to do wonderful things – raise funds for people in crisis, support fellow fans in times of need, participate in politically congruent activism – but that same passion that motivates such acts is equally susceptible to motivating more harmful behaviors in the name of what we love. Too, fannish love is itself vulnerable to manipulation by corporate interests in ways that may not actually benefit fans themselves, particularly in an age of algorithms and the (attempted) datafication of affect. Within this context, my research focuses on the critically important question of what happens when we love a thing – when, to borrow from Lawrence Grossberg, it matters to us in ways that exceed everyday mattering – particularly in a global contact zone we have yet to learn to effectively (and safely!) navigate.

 In my entirely volunteer role as inveterate fan studies proselytizer I often foreground the importance of understanding affect and fannish investments in relation to politics. I do this as a way of appealing to those who might otherwise dismiss fan studies as preoccupied with ‘fluff’; while I am personally all about the fluff (particularly insofar as the fluff is critical to understanding the love, which is critical to understanding how fandom intersects with a host of concerns), fan studies can be a hard sell in academic environments that prioritize quantitative over qualitative research and teaching (as well as qualitative fields whose own legitimacy in academia has been hard-won). As I write, arguably the most salient example of what fan studies brings to the understanding of global politics is Chinese government disciplining of womens’ fan circlesin August, 2021 and the subsequent banning of those “effeminate men” on television and in the music industry who have been the focus of intense fan interest in both China and abroad for several years. This action followed on, among other things, a fandom conflagration that resulted in Archive of Our Own being banned in China, and it reflects ongoing concerns over the effects of globally ubiquitous media (in this case, K-pop and Korean dramas) on domestic media industries and markets. While broadly legible at the level of a somewhat pat discourse of “[X authoritarian regime] cracks down on [Y subculture],” any meaningful understanding of the broader history and implications of such actions requires intimate knowledge of not only its Chinese governmental and popular cultural contexts, but also its embeddedness in non-Chinese fan cultures and objects. That is, it requires the kind of transcultural lens that researchers of global fandoms bring to the scholarly table.

 It’s this kind of more meaningful understanding that my own research and teaching advances, taking seriously the ways that fan cultures both reflect and effect both global media fandoms and their cultural milieu in all their messy complexity.  

Lori Morimoto is an Assistant Professor, General Faculty in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She researches transnational/transcultural fandoms and transnational media co-production and distribution. Her work has been published in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Transformative Works and Cultures, Participations, Asian Cinema, and Mechademia: Second Arc. She has also contributed to Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge, 2018), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), and Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics (Iowa, 2021). She also teaches courses in media fandom, East Asian film and media, and videographic criticism.

Global Fandom: Bertha Chin (Malaysia)

Today begins the first week of my Global Fandom Jamboree which will feature early career scholars in fandom studies from more than 40 countries and run through April. This week, I am featuring three distinguished and established scholars — Bertha Chin, Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, and Rukmini Pande. Each has helped to reshape our understanding of transcultural fandom.

Disney+ was launched in Malaysia in May 2021, after much speculation and fanfare. However, instead of the Disney+ premium brand (with same day access to new films released straight to streaming as a result of the pandemic) that many Malaysians have come to expect, the streaming platform was branded as Disney+ Hotstar about 3 months before its Malaysian launch. The inclusion of Hotstar to the branding aligns it with Disney’s other South and Southeast Asian markets of Indonesia, Thailand and India, instead of the premium version launched in neighbouring Singapore (which was more aligned with the rest of the Western world). Disney+ Hotstar would offer more local content and the option of watching top titles from Marvel, Star Warsand Pixar dubbed in the “local language” (in this case, Malay, Malaysia’s official language). However, Malaysia’s 32 million population is multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-lingual. Its urban population is also highly mobile, and prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Malaysians frequently move between Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and the UK for study, work and because of family ties. As such, Disney’s claims of a singular ‘local language’ can be politically controversial, when the concept of ‘local language’ can change from Malay to English, Cantonese, or Tamil depending on the community, the age and class of the audience, and geographical location within the country itself.  

A pop-up store and exhibition for Batman v Superman in a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur

While Malaysia did not have a strong film and TV production industry, it was – and remains – a country with a wealth of access to regional and international media content. Netflix, launched in 2016, remains a popular streaming platform, combining regional and top international titles like Never Have I Ever, Dark, The Untamed, Sex Education, Crash Landing on You, and the like. Malaysia's satellite broadcaster, Astro, offers access to HBO Go (a combination of HBO and HBO Max) and simulcasts top content from South Korea, Hong Kong and China – all in their original language. This is a familiar state of being a media consumer, and by extension, a media fan, in Southeast Asia. Growing up in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo in the 1980s meant access to media content from Hollywood, Hong Kong, Bollywood, Japan and other production powerhouses. With the exception of Japanese anime and Mexican telenovelas, which were usually dubbed into Malay or Cantonese, films and TV shows were available in their original language with subtitles in three languages (Malay, English, and Mandarin). 

Much like a lot of other people in the 1980s, I grew up, not only surrounded by DC and Marvel comic books, Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Disney animated cartoons, but also Hong Kong TV adaptations of classic Chinese folk tales and wuxia literature; essentially building the foundations of a hybrid cultural identity. My work with Lori Morimoto on transcultural fandom was a reflection of growing up under these transnational media consumption patterns. Fandom was an affinity to a character, a fictional universe, a text rather than an affinity to a specific national identity or claims of cultural proximity. 

I start with Disney in this piece because of what Disney represents: a global media conglomerate that now owns mega franchises that is familiar the world over, and where franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe attract huge fan interest in Malaysia. However, there is often a ‘cultural baggage’ of conflict and reluctance – and sometimes, shame – in identifying as a fan in Malaysia. Fandom is acceptable when its practice is structured around material fandom (exhibitions of props and replicas in shopping malls, usually leading up to release dates) and consumption (of the media text, merchandise like a Funko Pop figurine or official T-shirts), and there is a sense that this is a childhood past-time that one grows out of. And if one isn’t a child, then it has to be a practice sanctioned by the media industry (e.g. exhibitions and consumption of merchandise). 

A Funko Pop section in the local departmental store in the children's department in my hometown of Kuching, Sarawak (this is a permanent section)

What this creates is layers of hierarchies of taste. Much like the way Disney have created a hierarchy of content that is available on Disney+ based on their conception of the Asian market, there is a hierarchy of what is acceptable and unacceptable fannish texts. Commercially successful texts like the MCU, Star Wars, Game of Thrones and BTS are acceptable because they are globally renowned, supported by global media conglomerates, while identifying as a fan of anime and cult media are less acceptable. Fannishness over less commercially successful texts are considered as a waste of time, as they are often seen to be more involved in the practice of transformative fandom and thus, more ‘foreign’ and crazier than merely purchasing a Funko Pop figurine or official T-shirt. Consumption, then, is ‘good fandom’, sanctioned by the media industry. Transformative fandom presents a more emotional engagement with the texts, and is considered improper and unbecoming within a Malaysian – and Asian – cultural context. 

A pop-up store and exhibition on Star Wars in a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur

Perhaps this suggests that transformative fandom space is a white space, but this may be too simplistic a reasoning without taking into account internal biases and criticism fans receive from a cultural context. And perhaps Disney+ Hotstar’s promotion of local content and making dubbed versions of its popular titles can be read as a politically correct move towards diversity and inclusion of varied international markets, but I would like to propose a cautionary approach to what I would call Hollywood’s “diversity project”. While the recent inclusion of more diverse characters (especially with regards to Asian representation) in major films and TV shows is a much-needed positive step forward, it may also create assumptions about a particular culture that is foreign. 

Disney+ assumes and imposes a singular culture unto Malaysia upon its launch; that the Malay language unites Malaysia when it has been the subject of fierce debate and division in a region with a complex postcolonial history. Likewise, the global domination of BTS, the Asian representation we currently see on our screens in the MCU’s Shang Chi, Netflix’s Never Have I Ever and The Chair, and the CW’s Kung Fu, among others represent a particular cultural moment in American popular culture which may not necessarily translate internationally. 

Dr Bertha Chin is senior lecturer of Social Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology (Sarawak). She has published extensively on transcultural fandom, fan labour, subcultural celebrity, anti-fandom and fan-producer relationships. She is a board member of the UK-based Fan Studies Network, and co-editor of Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics and Digital Society (2015, Peter Lang) and Eating Fandom (2020, Routledge), on the intersections of food culture and fan studies. 

Coming Soon: Global Fandom Jamboree

This year, I am putting this blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, into the service of an ambitious project. I have sought to map fandom and fandom studies across as many different countries as I can. I spent time this summer tapping my various networks seeking to identify early career scholars — advanced PhD candidates, junior faculty, independent scholars — who were doing work on fandom broadly defined to include cult media, comics, sports, and music — and who were willing to engage in conversations with other scholars doing similar work somewhere else on the planet. To date, the series has participants from almost 40 countries. The terminology here is challenging — global, transnational, transcultural will all crop up in our discussion here. I am thrilled by the scope and diversity of participation but also painfully aware of absences here.

Each week, we will present opening statements from 2-3 scholars doing loosely related work, whether organized around shared objects or themes, followed by several posts worth of back and forth conversations among them about whatever these statements inspired. The series is currently scheduled to run from Mid-October through late April, representing all together 25 pairings of participants. I am still open to further participants, but only if they come from countries which are not currently represented. The included countries so far are:

Argentina

Australia

Brazil

Bulgaria

Cameroon

Canada

Chile

China

Colombia

Cyprus

Czechia

Denmark

Ecuador

Finland

France

Great Britain

Greece

India

Indonesia

Ireland

Israel

Italy

Japan

Korea

Lebanon

Malaysia

Mexico

The Netherlands

Nigeria

Norway

Pakistan

Philippines

Poland

Portugal

Russia

Singapore

South Africa

Spain

Syria

Thailand

Turkey

United States

Vietnam

I am especially interested in filling holes from the Global South . So if you would like to participate and represent those countries, reach out to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and I will do my best to get you paired off.

There’s much to look forward to in this epic conversation series. Based on the materials produced so far, there’s much we can learn about geographies of distribution, about the spaces of fandom in different countries, about issues of translation, about how smaller countries get absorbed into global fan cultures or exist as crossroads for multiple national fandoms, about process of localization, about the particularity of fandom as it operates in the islamic world, in post-socialist and socialist economies, and so much more. We will be talking about soccer, Turkish drama, K-Pop, Bollywood, Anime, games, Game of Throne, Hollywood, Netflix, comics, pop music, and so much more.

Keep an eye on this space. I am going to be taking a little downtime over the next few days but we will be back soon with the debut of the series and it won’t slow down much from there.

Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars (Part Three

You have referenced raising money for charity here but of course, many of the ASMR artists and community leaders also support themselves by performing these services. There’s been a big debate among fans and fan scholars around which aspects of the producer-fan relationship are exploitative and how to reconcile community building and profit-making in this regard. Given what you have said here about the strong affective bonds between performers and followers, I wonder how these issues have been dealt with in regard to ASMR. Are some practices here read as exploitative or as damaging to the kinds of social relationships you describe? We pay therapists, after all, and yet also see them as looking after the emotional needs of their patients/clients. 

It’s delicate. Right? People enjoy content as much as most things in their lives. They’d part with a lot before they gave it up, and yet they often steal it, even when they’d never walk into a store and put something in their backpack. Seemingly, it comes in part from the belief that content creation jobs are a pleasure to do, and people should be paid based on the amount of torment and boredom they endure. As an independent artist myself I generally stand one hundred percent on the side of others like me who are just trying to pay their rent and put food on their table. I don’t particularly want to hear Amazon Studios cry poor when they don’t even pay their taxes, but we’re individuals, working full time, who do pay our fair share. I have, however, felt momentarily taken aback when therapists asked me for money that I couldn’t comfortably afford. You come to them because you’re in pain. They express concern for you, but at the end they remind you that you have a transactional relationship. Sometimes a thought can pass through your mind. “If you actually cared, you wouldn’t leave me in a financially stressful situation.” And then I remind myself that they deserve to be paid. I just deserve functional insurance.

Both of these emotional dynamics can come up in ASMR.  I discovered the genre on YouTube, which is ad-supported. Sometimes a video would begin with the performer delivering a plug for a sponsor like Blue Apron or Casper Mattresses, but I was used to that from podcasts so it didn’t phase me. When I started watching Twitch, which is tip-supported, it took some getting used to because I was reminded incessantly about the money trading hands as announcements popped up on the screen. “Thanks, Aster, for the thousand bitties.” Even without doing any mental math it was hard to miss the fact that some of these artists were making multiple times as much money for a day’s work as I’d ever earned. You mustn’t compare like that. The goal is for all of us to win. Besides, streamers tend to repeat over and over, “You don’t need to give me anything. Please don’t feel like you have to. It’s not necessary. I love all of you equally.”  They rarely offer anything extra for sale, only their thanks and sometimes the opportunity to request a song or something. But people still pelt them with larger and larger amounts of money in a game of one-upmanship to be seen as their #1 fan. 

I once watched someone donate fifteen thousand dollars to a Twitch streamer (not an ASMRtist) over the course of a few weeks. I was like, “Who is this guy, a Saudi prince or something?” Even though the streamer was married, I felt safe in assuming he was in love with her and that no matter what happened it couldn’t end well. Plot twist: It ended very badly, but for a different reason than I expected. He convinced her to start a business with him. She put more than fifteen thousand dollars into it. Then he tried to vanish and actually left her in the red. It came out that he’d done this to other people as well. She hired an attorney and got her money back. Please, no one do that again.  The story I’m describing is the limit case. Even most of the artists who are making videos full time now worked in low-paying service industry jobs until very recently, and it scares them to think about ASMR falling out of vogue, or those artists getting #Cancelled and not having a normal career to fall back on.

YouTube regularly, routinely cheats artists out of their money by ‘demonetizing’ them. The artist allows ads to run at the beginning of their videos in exchange for payment, and then YouTube refuses to pay out by claiming that the videos have violated their standards and practices. Ninety percent of the time there’s absolutely nothing in the videos which would be considered inappropriate outside of, say, China, where YouTube does a lot of their business. YouTube won’t tell you how exactly a given video has violated the agreement, so one is left to conclude that it’s because the artist is large-chested or because the whole idea of whispering to the camera struck someone as sexual.  

Gibi, the most-subscribed-to English language ASMRtist on YouTube, ran into a different sand trap when she attempted to start a subscription service app called Zees. Essentially, artists would repost their YouTube videos on the app and she would ensure they got paid more fairly than they had elsewhere. She stressed over and over that the same videos would still be free on ad-supported YouTube, just as they always had been. We’d simply be giving our favorite artists an added layer of financial protection from the censorship whims and financial double dealings, and we’d be getting our usual content in a nicer format. Despite those promises fans got scared that yes, today her intentions sounded honorable, but if they supported her then soon all of this previously ‘free’ content would in fact end up behind a paywall. ASMR would end up like so many other post-capitalist institutions, out of reach for most people. I genuinely don’t think that’s what was going on, but the business was quietly discontinued.

I am especially interested in the phenomenon of gifting -- the exchange of meaningful, tangible objects between performers and fans, exchanges which might make the virtual online relationships seem more concrete and “real.” What role(s) do such gifts play in the ASMR community? 

Most artists are very selective in what personal information they share online, first and foremost their physical address, so it’s not always easy to send them physical gifts. But some have PO Boxes, either in their own town or near a family member, who will relay them things. Some of them also appear at conventions like TwitchCon and VidCon, where there may be an opportunity to hand them something. 

I have had two experiences with giving gifts and both were really satisfying. A Twitch streamer mentioned that they were spending Christmas alone and had no plans. I came across an ad on Facebook for a company that would send someone a cute stuffed animal and a card. I knew chickens were her favorite animal, so I sent one to her PO Box. It was the only present she got for Christmas last year. When she opened the box on stream and had a big reaction I felt really good. They’ve had that chicken next to them in every stream they’ve done since. Whenever I check in on her channel and she’s still got it close at hand I feel so glad I spent the money.

Another ASMRtist I follow, who is a big Legend of Zelda fan, developed a serious medical problem. For a few months they were in mind-bending pain, almost all day, every day. I ran across a luminescent Zelda health potion on eBay. I wanted it to sit on her shelf like a talisman. She had no way of receiving gifts, but I wanted her to own it, so I arranged to Venmo her the cash and have her buy the item for herself. Her condition has significantly improved. She says that when she was really in trouble it wasn’t the people she knew in real life who were there for her, it was her online community.

As we wrap this up, I want to return to where you started. Your first sentence was “ASMR is an art movement, an aesthetic, an online culture and even a philosophy.” So speak a bit more about the first part of the sentence. What does it mean to think of it as an art movement? How might you describe that aesthetic? And how does the aesthetic operate in the service of the philosophy and community aspects you have been discussing so systematically here? You’ve already told us a number of things in this regard, but I wanted to give you a chance to sum that up now that we as readers are better informed about what’s going on here.

In terms of formal aesthetics, ASMR films are usually recorded in absolute silence, making each sound deliberate and purposeful. They use soft volumes, which force us to stop moving around and really listen. There may be a single actor or a small few, and the actors get very intimate with the camera. The films are typically made on a low budget, by a relative amateur. The settings are usually domestic or pastoral, and instead of a house where everyone is rushing to get out the door in the morning, you’re likely to see a lot of bedrooms at 3am. The plots are often loosely-structured and more concerned with the journey than the destination. And the visuals often include a lot of close-up shots of props, costumes and other details. ASMR videos are obsessed with aesthetics like clean simplicity, color matching, beautiful tailoring and craftsmanship, and yes, potentially a person’s physical appearance – not just their genes but their clothes, their grooming. It’s all of a piece. Tonally, the films might be comedic, or contemplative, or romantic, but the mood is almost always light. And the function is to relax and uplift you, making you feel better about the world and each other.

However, neither A Quiet Place nor The Lion King is an ASMR movie. A Quiet Place possesses all of the formal aesthetics I just described, but the exact opposite tone and function. It tries to make you nervous. The Lion King possesses the tone and function I described, but virtually none of the aesthetics. ASMR, as a genre, is the meeting of a form and a function.   

Some of the most utilitarian ASMR videos are the simplest, providing white noise, rain sounds, LoFi music and other relaxing aural soundscapes which you can listen to while you write or study. My favorite mixes together rain, soft jazz and the quiet background sounds of a cafe, allowing you to trick your brain into thinking you’re writing in a public restaurant without spending money or defying COVID restrictions. Such minimalist ASMR videos might not set the world on fire with their originality and production values, but they get a lot of repeat views for obvious reasons and serve a useful purpose.  

These are just a few of the forms ASMR can take and the purposes it can serve. I hope people give it a listen.

To read the first parts of this interview, see Part One and Part Two.

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.

Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping Us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars(Part Two)

To read the rest, see part one and part three.

You’ve already said several times here that a majority of the community leaders are women. This has to do with notions of attractiveness and sexiness to be sure, but we’ve also talked about the strong maternal roles these women play in the life of their followers. That they are traditionally attractive gets men to look once. It may even offer some thrill given these women are getting close to the camera, whispering, and otherwise creating a dynamic we associate with more intimate relations, but the maternal nurturing would seem to be what sustains these relationships.  

Since these are complex and personal subjects I just want to say up front: Most of my thoughts on this are based on my close observations and experiences as a viewer. You’re interviewing me as a fan, but an artist might well describe their own work differently.   

 When I was little my mother used to rub my back, ruffle my hair, cuddle me and speak to me in soft voices. Those experiences filled me with a deep sense of well-being. I felt very safe and protected. I did less of that with you, dad – probably because society tries very hard to make men feel self-conscious being affectionate with one another – so I associate those feelings specifically with feminine nurturing. We, as adults, possess “inner children” - versions of ourselves which haven’t really aged that much since our early years, but which we’re usually forced to hide away from the adult world for protection. It can be very healing when we’re able to trust someone enough to let them care for our inner children or play with our inner children. 

 I’ll never forget a video Frivolous Fox made where she sang “You Are My Sunshine”. I started sobbing, because my mother used to sing that song to me when she was about that same age, and I felt like Frivvi had captured that moment in a bottle for me, allowing me to have it back.  

 On her Twitch channel, Cutscene Cutie often hums vintage Disney songs and it always makes my heart soar, because she has such a beautiful voice, and because I watched those animated films when I was little. Scottish Murmurs loves to play the ‘Dot Dot, Line Line’ game with viewers, because it was something her mom always did with her when she was a child. Gibi has a wonderful series where she plays with children’s books and puzzles. Several artists I like have made videos where they play school nurses who check you for lice, grade school teachers who help you make arts and crafts for your parents, or moms who tuck you into bed. The White Rabbit roleplays as an Italian grandmother named Nonna and knits you a scarf. 

 At the same time, different people need other kinds of therapeutic experiences. Some artists offer snuggling videos where they pretend to be your girlfriend and to lie next to you while you go to sleep. Or they pretend to be your wife and they comfort you after you had a bad day at work. I think someone could definitely watch a movie like Blade Runner 2049 or Her which deals with the romance between a man and artificial intelligence and they could view this as a disturbing trend. If you can just get your needs met without confronting the complexities of real human relationships then not only will you be alone, but someone else will be alone who you could have had a relationship with. Switzerland’s Gina Carla has a video where she just repeats, “I love you, I love you, I love you” for several minutes, and by the end of it she’s crying because she’s thinking about the people out there who need to hear that. I just feel that many people have been so damaged by friends and partners who recklessly hurt their feelings that they need to see healthy relationships modeled, and get a sense of what they feel like, before they’ll be prepared to risk looking for them again.

As we look at these women, they often express ideals we might associate with feminism -- from self-empowerment to notions of consent, from queer positivity to a rejection of body and slut shaming. So, tell us more about how the genre facilitates those messages. 

 My favorite ASMR video of all time, because of its potential to transcend entertainment and help people, is Goodnight Moon’s “Can I Touch Your Face?” She demonstrates that asking for consent doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. If you bring a different energy to it, it can be playful, intimate and inviting. Instead of just opening you up for rejection it can be an empowering affirmation of what you want. By making it about something that’s very personal but not sexual she keeps it from coming across as dirty. I wish that sex education students would watch it because if they learned from her they’d probably develop some healthy practices and outlooks. 

I’d hope many of the artists feel empowered by their work. But, one of the most powerful and deeply personal stories I’ve heard comes from FrivolousFox (Lauren). This one is difficult for me to write about, and I can’t imagine how difficult it was for her to tell. It’s the very rare ASMR video that isn’t relaxing, but if anything speaks to the heart of what the art movement is about, it’s this. 

In high school Lauren was a deeply insecure tomboy from a small-town religious upbringing. She fell in love with a girl, which caused her to feel ashamed, and caused her family to stop supporting her. She pursued the relationship in secret for several years, even after the other girl’s mom sent her to a school in another state. In college Lauren got a car so that she could see her girlfriend whenever she wanted. They went on a road trip. They were clowning around and Lauren got into a car wreck. The car somersaulted and landed on the other side of the highway. Her girlfriend was in a coma for 33 days and when she woke up she was mute and had to relearn everything from scratch. She’s still very limited in what she can do. Lauren wasn’t allowed to see her for five years and had to find a way to process the unbearable regret that she felt. She has dealt with severe emotional problems ever since, but ASMR has given her a way to try to comfort other people who are in pain. She’s probably the most outspoken ASMRtist I know about mental health issues and she’s one of several LGBTQ+ artists who have made videos with queer positive themes, such as roleplays around gay crushes, or ones which offer you words of acceptance.  

I think originally ASMR was, overall, a relatively white group, albeit one which had a lot of diversity in life experience. At the same time, YouTube has such a low barrier for entry that you don’t need to be in Hollywood to make it. You don’t need to be recognized by an agent or a producer. All kinds of people from around the world have been able to add their authentic voices to the culture. There have long been a few icons heavily visible within the space, such as MattyTingles, who was born in South Korea, BoHime Chella, who is of Portugese descent, ASMR Glow, who’s of Israeli and Moroccan descent, and Angelica, RaffyTaphy and The ASMR Ryan, who are Latinx. There have also been Caucasians from countries around the world such as Scottish Undertones, Tinglesmith and WhispersRed, who are British, Gentle Whispers and Palagea, who are Russian, Gina Carla, who is Swiss, and MassageASMR, who is Australian. Over the past few years I have become aware of an ever-wider range of Black voices entering the space, including the aforementioned BoHime Chella, Batala, April’s ASMR, Annura’s ASMR and JayYoung. In many cases my awareness is honestly the operative phrase, because they had been around. In other cases, it’s because our circle of friends has grown exponentially.  

 There are also a whole world of artists like Latte, ASMR PPOMO, SAS-ASMR, Devya Gurjar, KittyKlaw and Petit Sucre Blau who largely or exclusively speak languages other than English. PPOMO and SAS have two of the five largest channels in the world. Honestly, I really enjoy the languages and accents. But apart from just representation, each of these people brings elements of their cultures to their videos. If I’ve misdescribed anyone’s identity, please let me know and I’ll be happy to edit it. Since singling any one culture out with a video example goes against the spirit of what I’m saying I’ll use a playlist again. 

Honestly, it’s easy to get comfortable with a group of favorite artists and never become as familiar with others, even though they’re just as good. There are so many creators out there that it can be easy for busy people to just feel overwhelmed. But when you do take the time to sample artists it can be really rewarding. I’d love to read a similar personal essay written by someone who primarily watches an entirely different group of creators.

I think you have now given us enough of a core understanding of this community, its values, and its leadership structure that we can start to make sense of the role ASMR was playing for people during the Pandemic. So, share a bit more about the ways that these videos focused on self-care and community well-being helped people -- especially those struggling with depression and anxiety -- make it through this incredibly difficult time. How did these performers -- of all races and nationalities, as you note -- embrace new responsibilities for their community? And what did this mean for their followers?

To be honest, the first time I saw a COVID mask in an ASMR video I felt uneasy. I liked it even less when one artist called out another for failing to use her platform to promote Black Lives Matter, and the criticized person received a flood of hateful Twitter DMs, including threats to her children’s safety. She was left visibly frightened and crying. “I make relaxation videos to help people sleep,” she said. As 2020 went by some artists had to step away because their own mental health had collapsed. My clinical depression and anxiety had reached an all-time high and I was mainlining hours of relaxation videos every day, trying to stay fucking calm. Seeing the ASMR community become more like the rest of the world was not helping my confidence that everything was going to turn out alright. 

 A number of ASMR Twitch streamers held 24 hour telethons for a variety of charitable causes. I expected their donors to dry up after the first few hours. A lot of ASMR viewers are young, with very little economic opportunity, especially during a pandemic and record layoffs. But I’d wake up at 4am and check back in and the gifts would still be rolling in. Frivolous Fox regularly used her Twitch channel to go on hours-long, life affirming rambles about topics like empathy and forgiveness. She’d probably be embarrassed by this description, but it was almost like watching a 27 year old pastor deliver sermons for secular Millennial audiences. 

Here is a video where “Doctor” Darling tests you for COVID, debunking misinformation in the process, which captures both the insomnia-producing anxieties and the desire to help during this moment,

We got through it. By the Fall of 2020 I had developed curiosity about what COVID masks my favorite artists were wearing and seen a very welcome increase in the amount of content they were putting out each week. By the Spring of 2021 I had lost interest in their masks and I felt glad for those who were able to go on well-deserved vacations or visit with each other in person. The in-fighting had calmed down to a whisper. The videos were largely indistinguishable from those which had come before the pandemic, except that there were more artists. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the ranks thin out, both on the supply and demand sides, as people place a renewed value on face-to-face relationships. My consumption has decreased a little, because I’ve been busy and my mental health has been pretty good.  

 I’ll remember, though, that throughout it all, despite and because of their humanity, most of the steadfast helpers stayed on the ship, seemingly ready to go down with it if necessary. I know their work was sometimes exhausting to them, but it gave them a way to help people from the safety of their homes, without spreading the disease. I love them for who they are. 

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.

Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping Us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars(Part One)

Throughout 2020 my adult son Charlie and I were locked down together in our Los Angeles apartment, so we necessarily got absorbed much more deeply into each other’s lives than we had in a long time. Perhaps what interested me the most was his engagement with the ASMR community. I learned about the social and emotional support work that YouTube creators and Twitch streamers were leading in their communities during the pandemic. These self-care and community support practices were built into the ASMR ethos. The subculture itself is somewhat guarded against press, because the media has portrayed its videos as strange and inexplicable. I’ve tried to get some leading ASMR influencers to appear on my podcast without luck (The invitation still stands if you are reading this). So, I wanted to get my son to share some of his own reflections as a participant-observer. 

Because this community is little known to outsiders, I wanted to have you start with a basic explanation which we can deepen over time. What is ASMR? How might you characterize the ASMR subculture? What kinds of content does it produce and why?

ASMR is an art movement, an aesthetic, a culture and even a philosophy. Streamers and YouTubers produce videos which are often designed to convey a sense of relaxation, kindness, fellowship and a greater appreciation for life's small pleasures. The videos can also be quite whimsical, and often they revel in absolutely trivial subjects. Welcoming people from all walks of life is a foundational principle, but that's usually accompanied by an underlying sense of unity and togetherness. ASMR is, in short, the anti-Twitter. There's so much important, hard work that needs to be done in our society, so many difficult subjects we need to talk about, and service to others is an important part of a balanced life. But if you become so damaged by the toxicity of our world that you develop serious mental health problems, you're not going to be in an effective place to help anyone. You're going to need other people to invest a lot of their energy in helping you. In times like those you look for the helpers, and ASMRtists are there with an endless supply of wholesomeness and love. 

Nothing beats real world, face-to-face companionship, but as the pandemic has shown us that isn’t always an option. When I discovered ASMR I was living in a small Louisiana town where I didn’t know even one person who I could call up to go for a beer. I tried and tried to make “real” friends but felt rejected. I’ve spent long parts of my adulthood without much money to socialize, and without much social status or confidence, partly as a result of clinical depression. I’m not alone in those regards. 

You can consume platforms like YouTube as a series of disjointed clickbait. You can also flip through the TV dial, watching things at random. Alternatively, you can choose a favorite serial drama and watch it for ten seasons. YouTubers and streamers may never become your real life friends, but when you watch them and talk to them regularly they also stop being strangers. They offer steadfast daily companionship to those who are love-poor. You can listen to them ramble about their days and it will make a trip to the laundromat go by faster. Often ASMR videos are the last thing I watch before I fall asleep, because they clear my mind of worries. If porn imperfectly meets your sexual needs, they imperfectly meet your social needs. In an ideal world, all of us would have so much healthy human contact we wouldn’t need to look for it online, but humanity has never been that way. Isolated farmers and social outcasts of previous generations simply sat alone in the dark. I think this is better. I’ve even found that some of the positive social skills modeled in ASMR can be learned. Consuming enough free digital kindness can offer you the courage to look for someone who wants to hear you prattle on about your day.

Many people believe that ASMR videos just involve people blowing on wind chimes or licking microphones. Those popular media images of ASMR reduce the genre to a postage stamp sized simplification, which is not entirely inaccurate, but far from complete. If there's one formal convention shared by all ASMR content it is calming sounds. If there’s a second, it’s how slow videos often are, forcing you to stop rushing around, flitting from one thing to the next, and be calm. It's yoga without the exercise. Words are spoken in soft tones or whispers.  

Often Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting is cited as the inspiration point for ASMR because of the host’s calm, soft-spoken demeaner and eternal optimism. But, I think Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is an equally significant predecessor. Most of the ASMRtists are of an age where they developed as children listening to his messages of love and peace. The way he directly addresses the audience throughout each episode and shares his hobbies and interests with them feels very much like ASMR.

If I could get people to watch one video which captures ASMR’s aesthetic it would be one of Goodnight Moon’s travelogues. When I’ve recorded vacation footage the sound has been choppy and the camera work has been disorienting. She creates these contemplative little wanders full of slow, smooth shots, curated atmospheric sounds and whispered narration. 

(Goodnight Moon is one of my absolute favorites, so I’m going to reference her a lot)

ASMR is a broad category. Any video where the filmmaker speaks softly or makes soothing with the intention of relaxing you is an ASMR video. Generally speaking the highest rated ASMR in America and Western Europe are whisper rambles, where the artist chats with the camera about subjects which interest them. For example, BlueWhispers sometimes flips through the new seed catalogues, telling you about the plants she likes to plant in her garden; Russian-born Gentle Whispering often teaches us professional insights about what fashions and accessories will flatter you; former rapper MattyTingles loves shoes and makes a lot of videos where he and his friends share their favorite pairs.

 The western world also loves roleplay videos, where the artist portrays a fictional role and monologues for the camera. Sometimes that means portraying a particular profession. In one video the Chris Hemsworth-esque FredsVoice, who has a fantastic British accent, portrays a professional photographer and pretends to have you pose for a modeling shoot; in another video, WhispersRed replicates the familiar sounds and small talk of an English barber shop. Other times artists cosplay as their favorite media characters and act out original scenes. Glow is a Star Wars nerd, so she dressed up as Darth Maul and pretended to hold you as her prisoner. A group of European artists collaborated on a richly-ornamented interpretation of A Christmas Carol for the holidays one year. Still other times artists create original characters. Goodnight Moon has an entire Medieval fantasy world called Babblebrook where she plays all of the different people in town and plays out storylines between them. Gibi, currently the most-followed English language ASMRtist, is the queen of all kinds of roleplays. My favorite of her creations is Tatyana, your Eastern European personal assistant, who measures you for wax figures and helps you to buy private islands. If you look at Japanese and Korean ASMR, or ACMP (Russian ASMR), or ASMR porn, those are different worlds. There are different trends in each. 

 Note that in most whisper ramble and roleplay videos the artist directly addresses you, the audience, and pretends as though you’re actually in the room with them, even asking you questions and pausing for you to answer. (You can answer in your head, or not at all, if you feel silly playing along at home.) Their goal is to make you feel like someone is paying attention to you in a friendly way and treating you the way you deserve to be treated. But occasionally artists turn the dynamic on its head, clownishly portraying rude and disruptive characters in order to make you laugh. 

Here is a playlist with all of the aforementioned examples. Once someone figures out what types of videos they most enjoy it’s easy to find variations on a theme. 

ASMR is named after a cool scientific phenomenon which I first noticed in childhood, long before I had any idea what it was called. Every once in a while I'd hear a sound like the howling of wind through the trees or the crunching of autumn leaves that gave me a pleasant little shiver. Sometimes when people would touch the back of my neck I’d shiver even more. Both of those are ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), also referred to as "the tingles." I experience that occasionally while listening to ASMR videos, and it's pleasant, but personally I always find it overstated in media coverage. 

If you want to talk about neuroscience, here's a way of looking at it which speaks much more to my experience. When I hear forks scratching against ceramic dishes in the sink it gives me a shudder of revulsion. If I'm dining with someone who chews with their mouth open it disturbs me so much I need to leave the room. Those are examples of a really common psychological phenomenon called misophonia. I also deal with sensory integration disorder, a related problem. If I'm trying to have a conversation with someone and they're loudly crunching nuts or there's a fussy toddler having a tantrum nearby I can barely string two sentences together. Your brain is supposed to focus on relevant information and fade out irrelevant background noise without your needing to consciously think about it, but mine is bad at that. I suspect many - if not most - people have had experiences like those, it's just a question of how frequently it detracts from your quality of life. I'm not a neuroscience researcher, but those issues seem to be really common among ASMR fans. I would speculate that the more unsettled someone is by painful sound frequencies or disruptive noises, the more soothing they find pleasant other frequencies or harmonious sounds (and thus ASMR videos.) They might also get the tingles, but they might simply feel like their fur or feathers are being smoothed down in the right direction rather than being rubbed against the grain. I'd also say it's an especially good place for people with depression, anxiety and related disorders to heal and maintain good mental health.

I like the way you discuss the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of ASMR practice as well as its neurological roots. And with your suggestion that it is the “anti-twitter” you start to get at the social and political dimensions too.  In what ways does ASMR illustrate a different model of how online communities might operate than the social dynamics many find frustrating and even frightening on Twitter in the Age of Trump? How do the content producers and consumers, if those are even the right words, relate to each other? The word ‘community’ has been so overused in the Web 2.0 era that many of us have become skeptical about it; the promises of “virtual community” seem a quaint reminder of another time and place, like haircuts in high school yearbooks. Yet, when I watch your interactions with ASMR folks, it does seem to have some elements of a gift economy, even if some of the artists find ways to make money off of what they produce. I don’t mean to romanticize this. But I would like to get your sense of what you see yourself as participating in here.

Generally speaking, I believe social media is one of the most corrosive things to ever happen to American politics and society, making it harder to solve every other problem we face. I guess it's a little ironic I feel that way, since you’re the author of Spreadable Media. But overall, for me, ASMR has the healthiest online fan community I've encountered since before the advent of Facebook. 

YouTube comments, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok offer additional places for artists to express themselves and share brief interactions with supporters. But, generally I think of ASMR communities in terms of two platforms, Twitch and Discord. Twitch is essentially a one-way Zoom conversation. The creator sits in front of their webcam and performs live. You can then comment in a chatroom and they can read what you say and reply verbally. Discord provides private message boards. The artist gives you permission to join and they can kick you out. But as long as you act appropriately you can hang out with them and their other core supporters. The one I'm active in has threads about far flung topics like video games, sports, animal pictures, trivia, poetry and self-care. Every week we vote as a group on a movie to watch together, and often stay up until all hours watching sitcoms and cartoons afterward. Sometimes we play networked video games and all converse over voice chat while we compete. The artist is certainly doted on, but all of us are homies. Several of the people in the community have Twitch streams and we drop by to support all of them if we can.

 There are several reasons why, I suspect, ASMR fares somewhat better than most online communities. One is the subject matter. Generally relaxation videos appeal to empaths and sensitive types. The lower the volume of comments a community receives, the easier it is to police. Generally, in ASMR communities trolls are escorted off the premises very quickly. Personal animosities are mediated or split up ASAP. Artists typically designate some of the supporters they know best to moderate their communities and because the moderators are invested in the brand they loyally defend it from malicious assailants.

 With all of that said, there is unfortunately a darker side to everything. Sadly, a lot of the most toxic elements of the community are reserved for the artist as an individual rather than the group as a whole. Many ASMRtists have sensitive personalities. They might be a nurse who wants to ease people’s pain; or a mom who wants to nurture; or a drug store cashier who wants to feel a greater sense of purpose. They encounter people who want to bluntly critique their work. From the outside those comments may seem fair and harmless enough, but if they catch someone at the wrong moment they can really sting. Because it's a visual medium performers constantly have people evaluating their appearance. One moment they might hear, “Your chest looks nice in that dress” and the next they might hear “You look pale and sickly. Are you taking care of yourself?” Performers have shared Twitter DMs they received where people called them slurs or made threats against their family. I suspect virtually all ASMRtists have dealt with amateur sleuths curious about their personal information, and I know of at least one who had a stalker show up at their home. In short, they deal with all of the negative aspects of celebrity culture, but without making millions of dollars. But they deal with some of the negatives that therapists do when they try to help people who are mentally ill or miserable. Someone says, “I’m thinking about killing myself and you’re the only person who’s keeping me from doing it. I need you to pay constant attention to me.” I don't want to overstate all of that. We’re talking about a tiny fraction of the audience. But I'm painting such an otherwise - and deservedly - rosy picture that I do want to acknowledge some of the negatives.

To read the rest, see Part Two and Part Three.

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.

Agents of Influence: An Educational Video Game to Fight Misinformation

Over the past few years, I have been offering advice to Anahita Dalma and a team of USC students (among others) who have been working on a game, Agents of Influence, intended to address current issues around misinformation and disinformation circulation on social networking platforms. The group is launching a Kickstarter campaign as of today to help raise money to push the project to the next level. Having been impressed by their original insights into games-based learning and media literacy, not to mention their professionalism, I want to give them a chance to share some of their work here.

Agents of Influence: An Educational Video Game to Fight Misinformation

Written by: Michael Warker


Over the last year, we all have had to live much of our lives on the internet, whether it be through work, play, or reading the latest updates on these tumultuous times. With the convenience of the internet comes risks, however, as misinformation can easily masquerade as verified fact, and this threat inspired us at Alterea Inc. to think of a way to help. 

The solution we came up with is Agents of Influence: a spy-themed, educational video game that uses active inoculation theory to prepare students to recognize and combat digital misinformation. This theory is much like an inoculation for a virus, as it posits that exposing students to manipulative argumentation strategies makes them more resistant to subsequent manipulation attempts. Through Agents of Influence, we are aiming to equip a generation of “digital natives” in middle school with the tools and knowledge they need to combat digital misinformation.

Agents of Influence was created around the belief that video games have the capacity to be extremely useful learning tools. We constantly abided by teaching best practices to make sure our game was fulfilling the goals we wanted. Video games are a fantastic tool, as demonstrated by the idea of mastery orientations, which states that true knowledge comes from a desire for learning and understanding, not from a letter grade. Through the fun of video games, students actually want to learn. Studies have also shown that feedback is most helpful when it is “specific” and “immediate”, which is easy to accomplish through the video game format. 

As we researched our game and made connections with teachers, librarians, government officials, and more, we realized that misinformation may be one of the greatest threats facing our generation. During the 2016 election, it was found that the top “fake news” stories outperformed the top real ones on Facebook. Even more troubling, an Ipsos poll showed that 75% of Americans who see fake news view it as “somewhat” or “very” accurate. Since the 2016 election, the world has faced many huge issues that require credible information to combat them, including an ongoing global pandemic. We need tools to fight back against the growing threat of misinformation.

The “truth decay” caused by misinformation has taken hold of the world during the digital age, eroding civil discourse, causing political paralysis, and leading to public uncertainty and disengagement. With so much noise, people are taking the easy route of simply reaffirming their own biases with the information that they consume. The most recent and prevalent of these issues lies in COVID-19 vaccine trust, with many people on both sides of the issue finding information that simply reaffirms their own beliefs, as opposed to engaging in civil conversation with each other. 

These are all immense issues, but the solution lies in every individual’s ability and, more importantly, their willingness, to investigate the information that they consume. To encourage our target audience of middle schoolers to become more engaged and critical of what they see online, we knew that we had to make it fun for them. This reason is why we decided to make a video game to teach them about misinformation. 

Before thinking about the fun, however, we had to determine what we were trying to teach our middle schoolers. We spoke to multiple experts on media literacy, and we investigated how other organizations such as MediaWise, News Literacy Project, and more are educating people about misinformation. From all of this research, we derived three core learning objectives that have guided our game. 

Agents of Influence will teach students how to: 

1) Question the trustworthiness of information.

2) Investigate the trustworthiness of information.

3) Use this investigation to inform their decisions and build better information consumption habits.

If students walk away from this game questioning information they consume, and they have the ability and drive to research to verify their information, then we will qualify Agents of Influence as a success. For added benefit, however, we have also included much more educational content. 

We’ve designed our game around many educational standards, including Common Core, CASEL SEL, NAMLE, ISTE, Learning for Justice Digital Literacy Framework, Media Smarts, California Model School Library Standards, and NCSS C3 Framework. A process which is common to many of these standards is the IRAC, or the Inquiry, Research, Analysis, and Conclusion model. The IRAC model was formative to both our story structure and our game structure during the creation of Agents of Influence. Once we finished our initial education prep, we tackled the hard part: making it entertaining for middle schoolers. 

We discovered that the IRAC model forms well into a mystery story structure, so we decided to make our spy-themed game center around an investigation that students will have to lead. Every one of our three core modules will involve a plot from an evil spy group led by the nefarious Harbinger, and the player will have to work together with their spy team, the Agents of Influence, to stop them before it’s too late. These three modules are centered around cyber danger, political disinformation, and pseudoscience, respectively, so even the theming of each story is tied into our core learning objectives.

Creating a compelling narrative was an essential step in the development of this game, as it has been shown that emotional resonance helps students better retain information. We’re creating an experience that will teach students to question information, which is a new skill, not just information to be regurgitated on a test, so having a narrative that helps them remember the significance of their actions both online and in the real world is essential to a successful game In addition to our compelling narrative,we developed four mini-games centered around our other learning objectives. 

Conversation: Disguised in the narrative context of an interrogation, students must use good conversation practices to talk to a suspect. Every turn, students choose between different dialogue options, putting them in control of how they talk and act. If they’re not careful, however, they could trigger a negative “state,” such as making their suspect defensive or suspicious of them. These negative states are triggered when a student says something aggressive, critical, contemptuous, or alienating to their suspect. In addition, this game also teaches students how to recognize logical fallacies that may arise in arguments so they can better combat these fallacies in their daily lives. 

Research: This game takes place in the all too familiar landscape of a social media feed. Setting the game on social media allows for high transferability of skills, as this is where students would most likely encounter misinformation in their own lives. In our research game, students must flag posts as “accurate” or “misleading” by researching the post’s content in a simulated search engine. They’re also taught lateral reading techniques, along with learning about different misinformation types such as satire, false context, imposter content, and fact versus opinion. 

Analysis: Your artificial intelligence friend, A.M.I.E. is malfunctioning, and you have to prove to her that you’re a master of misinformation by answering her questions. Visually, we have a maze representation of A.M.I.E.’s circuitry, which students can navigate if they correctly answer analytical questions about an article they read. Students answer true and false questions about the purpose of the article, the bias of the author, logical and data fallacies the article employs, and many other relevant skills useful to critical reading. 

Finale: This last game is the emotional and intellectual climax of every module of Agents of Influence. Players must save a fellow student who has had their memories corrupted by misinformation. Through research and critical thinking, the player must remind their classmate who they truly are and save them from the clutches of misinformation. 

Of course, we did not know whether our game would be fun for a middle schooler until we sat down over Zoom with a few of them and heard what they had to say. After playing our research game, a small pool of middle schoolers we tested all said that they would research more. This was after only one version of the game in an early paper prototype. Stacking this exposure along with our other games and our narrative could have a huge potential impact on students. Plus, to top it all off, our testers all had fun and were engaged with the material. One of them even asked if we could make the game for his Nintendo DS so that he could take it on the go.

In addition to these small tests with middle schoolers, we brought in teachers and other experts to playtest our games so that we could learn more from industry professionals about how to enhance Agents of Influence. We also sent out multiple surveys to teachers around the world to learn how to make our game seamlessly accomplish their various classroom needs. Through this research, we learned that designing with ample flexibility was essential, which is why we decided to separate the game into smaller, thirty minute sections that are individually playable. This structure allows for teachers to focus on skills that are most applicable to their classrooms. This feedback, along with the copious other guidance from experts we consulted, has been essential in forming the structure and content of our game.

While our initial tests were small, they have allowed us to prepare our framework for feedback, which will be instrumental in our expanded testing period in the near future. Some of our core questions include asking if players have the motivation to look for multiple perspectives when researching after playing our games. We also want to know if they feel better empowered to fight misinformation online after playing Agents of Influence. So far, our takeaways are solid, but expanded testing will be necessary to verify our information. 

To truly see if our game is effective in preparing students for the looming threat of misinformation, we need additional funding. Going forward, we hope to fund our first module, Agents of Influence: Cyber Danger, and we want thousands of students to play it for our in-depth beta period. We have worked hard to ensure this large-scale test will show similarly enthusiastic results as our initial tests. 

Agents of Influence was created wholly to fit the needs of our educational objectives. Story, character, and gamified elements all arose from the core need to teach students how to better combat misinformation, and we are very excited to get Agents of Influence in front of even more students and teachers in the future. This game has a long road ahead of it, and if you would like to follow that journey, try our prototype, or learn more about the game, please visit our kickstarter or our website for more information.

Michael Warker is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California where he studied Theatre and Screenwriting. He is writing on behalf of Alterea, Inc., which is a story-telling company focused on immersive story-living that lets participants grow and change through the stories they experience. This article was written in association with Anahita Dalmia and Jasper McEvoy. Visit our website here: https://www.altereainc.com/ 

Watching Teen TV: An Interview with Stefania Marghitu (Part Three)

To what degree is teen television an aspirational category targeting those on the threshold of adolescence rather than speaking to those actually undergoing such shifts in their age and social status?

There’s no denying any commercial for profit endeavor is exactly that. But I also do find the solution parents often find is censorship, those that are sheltered from media don’t have the literacy to understand it later on in life. I think it’s why I’m so keen to move on to one of my next hopeful projects on the idea of the digital masquerade in social media. The carefully fabricated authenticity behind the ideal beauty standard on platforms like Instagram is leading young people into a dangerous path. Going back to issues of gender and girl making, and added on to complexities of race, colorist, ethnicity, body image, gender identity, Im seeing a lot more organizations outside of the US invest in taking on these issues. Tracing back to the feminine masquerade to the post-feminist masquerade, and to Safiy Noble’s Algorithims of Opression, this is not a new issue, but a newly presented one.

At some point the media literacy and development does kick in with fictional media as fabricated and aspirational. Every single character in a teen show also breaks down some kind of vulnerability at some point, even if it’s solved within a “very special episode” or given more depth through a serialized plot line. I think there’s a reckoning with body images and a wave of amazing resistance geared towards breaking down the ideal beauty standard online right now too, but far too often the potential psychological or physical damage can already be done. And this is why the pain and suffering from childhood and adolescence carries on into adulthood, as it was never resolved or sometimes not even acknowledged.

Again we’re seeing some paradigm shifts, but those most in need of help in this country are also the least likely to receive any form of support. I dedicated the book to a dear childhood friend of mine who struggled with issues of identity, belonging, and self-worth. When we first met we bonded over the music and film and television that we loved. Going back to our town after the vaccine I see a lot of good for teens today, but it makes me realize how much can still be improved and how things have not changed as much as I wish. Finishing the book during the pandemic really reinforced this drive in me to dedicate my pedagogy and research to marginalized communities. 

A recurring critique of teen television is that the actors playing high school students are a decade or so older and often “too old” to convincingly play the part. Why do networks feel the need to cast actors in their 20s in such role and what are the consequences of this choice for the evolution of the genre?

This is a double edged sword. Age appropriate casting like Schulyer’s choice in Degrassi is geared towards public service authenticity and connection. But because it’s so common, audiences are also all the more aware of it. Gabrielle Cartiers just spoke about lying about her age for her part in 90210 because of ageism. Most audiences can look up or roughly know the twenty something playing a teen and be cognizant. Part of the reason behind the casting is industrial, and also  financial. As Holzman described, there are limitations to hiring a child actor. But it also grants authenticity and can also allow for more storylines. But again at this point it’s been satirized and accepted that it almost helps in acknowledge the false standards of what an ideal teen should look like. It’s poked fun of at the beginning of Never Have I Ever.  That kind of self reflexivity helps show behind the curtain and is also helpful for the young viewers. It can also take the pressure of child actors who have historically struggled in their own lives due to the pressures associated with their stardom.

Teen television has proven unusually successful at generating stars -- from Sally Field to John Travolta, from  Clare Danes  to Zendaya. What mechanisms are used to create teen idols? How does this impact the production of the shows? What are some of the challenges of escaping this teen idol status?

There are mechanisms - marketing, promotion, etc. - to try to make stars and there are also sometimes happenstance. Danes’ series was canceled but My So Called Life and her acting allowed her to be a film star. Field’s career shows how quickly one can go from teen to love interest to mother, highlighting ageism in the industry. Both Field and Danes returned to television later in their careers, which shows the opportunities it can give in contrast to film. Travolta and the Saturday Night Fever sensation is a whole phenomenon, and the story behind The Bee Gees soundtrack as told through their recent documentary merits its own academic study. I think it’s telling a lot of the men who started on TV and became film stars - from Tom Hanks to George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio, stayed strong in film. Of course the pipeline of movie stars is already so limited.

Zendaya is definitely a unicorn in the world of former child stars. She tried a bit of film acting, singing, yet still found her way back to television where she thrived.  She choose her projects wisely, has an enviable public image, and is now the youngest lead actress in a drama Emmy award winner. 

As I am writing these questions, I just finished watching the final series of Atypical, which deals with a teen who is on the autism spectrum. It raises questions for me about the notion of “normality” as a key theme in these series? It’s built into the title of  Freaks and Geeks, both groups who feel themselves to be outcasts in their school but for different reasons. My So-Called Life’s Winnie Holzman talks about “people who ‘fit in’ and don’t fit in.”  How has this push to deal with “outcasts” taken different forms across the history of the genre and how might a character like the protagonist of Atypical relate to this dynamic/  Or for that matter, the number of queer characters in recent series?

Atypical was another show I was really delighted to see my students engage with. Historical research has traditionally told us escapist media is where audiences turn to after national and global trauma. Some folks don’t want Covid in their fictional media at all. Some seek that for normalcy and catharsis. I’m really not sure how this might play out in relation to diversity and inclusion given those cyclical histories of shutting out, erasing, or scapegoating marginalized communities. But the positive responses for series like Atypical and Never Have I Ever, as well as docu series and interests in understanding how media history works is also encouraging. 

The recent decision in Tennessee to ban all state outreach with Covid-19 information to adolescents reflects ongoing struggles of adults to exert greater control over teen’s lives, at least among more conservative parts of the culture. Does this make teen television a particularly intense battleground in struggles over cultural politics?

I was actually just talking with a friend who is a teacher in a neighboring state about the upcoming school year right after discussing the new season of Never Have I Ever.  Public school teachers are being told they can’t express their vaccination status or opinions on it. There was a recent episode of Good Fight in which parents sued a private Zoom teacher tutor for “teaching socialism” and that students started critiquing their parents after seeing Parasite through a class lens. It’s all a battleground right now.

The politicization of the vaccine makes “sense” based on the rhetoric, but not on the logics of what vaccines have done for humanity for eradicating diseases. Especially as 12 is the starting age of vaccine eligibility now, but that it depends on their parents’ decisions. Also, of course, as with many of us, teens and pre teens have spent more time at home and potentially with television.  And some folks wanted escapism, but even family dramas like This Is Us showed the difficulties of both being away from family and loved ones, but also the tensions of multi-generational “bubbles” or “pods” and how young people especially were missing out on milestones and social lives.

I know there was a lot of criticism towards young people who “didn’t care” about Covid because it didn’t impact them, but I found that my students were cautious and considerate, though they were also forthcoming of the frustration behind spending a year in college off campus and back home. 

I’m all for criticizing Big Pharma and the inequalities of the health care system, but this is a free vaccine, that is also adding new incentives for folks to get vaccinated in states with low statistics. Meanwhile other countries don’t have the access to the vaccine and citizens which they could have the same protection.

Again I’m seeing both advancements and regressions in these areas. I do think access is key here. Horace Newcomb once said in an interview that he didn’t have access to cinemas growing in the non-urban South, so TV was his entry point into a lot of new worlds. I think about the books and media that was banned and censored while my parents were growing up in Communist Romania. And for teens especially, this is a time when they are gaining independence and forming their own views and perspectives while coming of age. There’s a lot of pressure and to some extent blame being put on educators for pushing agendas and having students turn against their parents. In the new HBO series White Lotus, a great critique of class and privilege, Connie Britton’s character tells her teenage daughter played by Sydney Sweeney that their generation’s legacy is “biting the hand that feeds them, ” not caring about their families who actually know and love them, while caring about oppressed groups who they don’t even know. I think being newly critical and questioning the world around you, including your own privilege, is part of the gears turning towards critical thinking and media literacy.

As college professors, there’s less pressure than teachers in K-12, I am not envious of the constant battles they face in just teaching objective facts in courses like science and history and how that is being challenged, or censorship over the type of literature being taught in English classes. But one interesting aspect of teaching this past year, more students were more in touch with their hometowns as adults, and more self-reflexive about childhood and upbringing. There’s a tendency for some to get out of their hometowns as soon as possible and start anew, which can be liberating of course. And some students stay nearby for various reasons, so this kind of united folks from high school who would have previously not kept in touch. Living in their childhood homes and sleeping in their rooms, being more involved in their local communities, they had a lot of interesting perspectives they previously wouldn’t have.

I had some students in conservative cities or states and they were realizing the changes they can make or impact was greater than in a political bubble or the echo chamber idea. And that’s why we’re seeing folks return to their hometowns or the south to contribute to change. That’s where the good fight is really being fought in those battlegrounds. And I think teen TV has allowed for a lot of relatability and catharsis for college students dealing with their high school past through nee series like Normal People , which also shows the transition to college, Cruel Summer, Never Have I Ever, End of fhe F***ng World, and Sex Education, but also revisiting or exploring past teen TV like Freaks and Geeks, Moesha, Skins, The OC, MSCL and so on. 

From the afterschool specials to East Los High, we can see tensions playing out between the desire to education teens about particular issues or concerns and the entertainment value of these series. What are some of the strategies producers use to negotiate these tensions?

This is where I think the influence of Canadian and British- and of course other non-US- public service television is making both a direct and indirect influence.

Some students don’t realize British shows like Skins and Misfits they loved when younger are on a public service platform- and even if it caused moral panic around the drugs, drinking and sex- and as scholars like Susan Berridge have asserted reassert some of the same stereotypes and narratives of marginalized folks - it was new ground for teen audiences at the time. And when we discuss the failed Skins US remake, it can be traced to adapting the surface level or shock value without a thoughtful or culturally specific eye

As both the folks behind East Los High and Degrassi told me, and for really many teen series that connected to its audiences, talking down is never the answer. Teens are critical when the writing is forced, whether it’s too commercial and like an algorithm of teen speak, or too much of a cautionary tale based on moral panic. Many grow up watching those sometimes terrifying and trite health class videos, or programs like Abstinence Only and D.A.R.E. It’s interesting because a lot of English television scholars have written on how US teen TV influenced the Channel 4 youth series and the American-ness of the teenage experience. And of course we know it’s more common for US to make their own versions of UK shows. But seeing audiences love not only other Anglophone teen series, but from continental Europe and K-dramas, really defies a lot of assumptions about US audience.

And shows like Norway’s Skam, which has been remade in various countries multiple times over, is still revered for its original and the way fans translated for subtitles  and distributed it via Tumblr. And that came from a very savvy Norwegian public service model. I don’t think we’ll see US public service programming beyond childhood series, though Sesame Street and other programs are revered. I see students really want more oversight and checks and balances of the Disney and Nickelodeon programming they grew up on. Children’s programming is not my area of expertise but again I’m seeing more self reflexivity towards that exposure. And the “representation matters” discourse and seeing someone like them on screen matters so much, but again I want to stress to them the cultural and industrial contexts beyond that. And that’s a main goal of the book, and my dissertation, and I think a lot of my work : to trace how socially conscious programming is developed, brought in, distributed and received, and when and why.

Stefania Marghitu holds her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor from The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her book, Teen Television (Routledge Genre Guidebook series), was released in May 2021. You can also find her work published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Spectator, as well as the edited collections White Supremacy and the American Media (Routledge, forthcoming, 2021) and ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). 

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches courses on digital media, film, gender, race, and adaptation. She has previously taught introductory and upper level courses on film, television, and digital media history, aesthetics, industry, and theory at Pitzer College, Chapman University, California State University Northridge, and Columbia College Hollywood.