When an author of a work of fiction has run out of elements that everyone will like, he or she still has the option to put in high-variance elements that some people will love and some people will hate. Could it be that the objects of fandom are just those that went for these high-variance choices?
This strikes me as the right answer. Things like Star Trek and Tolkien are incredibly powerful for very small subsets of the population because their creators make risky aesthetic and narrative choices. It isn't so much that fans feel they must come to the defense of their preferred works, but that those works speak to them in rare and intense ways that are really distasteful to most people. So fans bask in the uncommon power of their fan-objects and disregard prevailing opinion. People aren't as fanatical about things like Indiana Jones or Animal Farm because their appeal is shallow and broad: everyone seems to agree that Indiana Jones is a sympathetic and entertaining character and Animal Farm is a clever allegory, but they only speak to one thing, and one thing that is widely understood. Star Trek, by comparison, is an immersive universe that goes down peculiar and deep paths that explore culture, power, ethics, and history among other things. It is not so much that all fan-objects possess objective awfulness, but they all do sacrifice wide appeal for a constrictive spiritual completeness.
I find the Animal Farm example funny because it's always seemed to me to be a monumentally dumb and unnecessary work.
More on-topic, I can't speak for others but I really don't think I'm a rabid Tolkien fan because of some cultlike cognitive dissonance over his glaring flaws. I freely acknowledge that his writing is not great literature in any meaningful sense of that phrase. (But this does sound like a really good explanation for Objectivists (okay, and Wagner and Joyce too), so who knows.)
Actually, on reconsideration I think that what Bond calls "monumental badness" is closely related to "lack of accessibility". Joyce/Wagner/Tolkien/various cult movies and TV shows all have the quality of rewarding intense study and background knowledge, and frequently are off-putting to the casual reader/viewer because they assume that knowledge. This can be as simple as having watched all the previous episodes in a series, or as challenging as knowing the slang of 1904 Dublin. Therefore these works generate the feeling of belonging to an exclusive in-group of initiates (with internal hierarchies and everything), and feeling superior to outsiders who "just don't get it" (a.k.a. hipsterism). Whereas a work that is well-crafted, and thus makes everything clear on the first reading, will not generate this fanaticism.
It seems to me that the basic insight is true and worth noting: people don't become hyper fans of things they expect everyone likes. That wouldn't send much of a signal of your group loyalty and your good taste, after all. Extreme fandom says "I know most folks wouldn't like this but I really really like it, and I think they are just wrong wrong wrong."
Oh, GEB has lots of critics.
It's hard to think of any creative work that becomes sufficiently widely known without attracting some harsh criticism; not even The Well-Tempered Clavier. I think Bond has his cause and effect backwards: passionate fans are annoying and create passionate haters, and the haters trot out whatever aspect of awfulness exists to be found. Apple fanboyism is perhaps the most transparent example of this phenomenon.
My guess is that Bond's thesis overestimates how much mileage fandom gets from defending the relevant works against outside criticism - maybe his theory represents an outsider's view?
The only true fandom I've spent a lot of time inside was not at all dedicated to defending its object of focus. The segment of Harry Potter fandom I knew consisted of people (>90% women) writing slash about Harry Potter characters. In meetups people would usually spend more time discussing derivative works (and obsessing over 'pairings') than the original work. To the extent that the original work was discussed it was often to poke fun of its glaring flaws. Most people I knew did not think the Harry Potter books were actually great books. Some thought they were pretty good, some thought they were downright awful - that wasn't the point. The quality of the books wasn't the reason why they were in the fandom.
The only time this fandom would be visible to outsiders was when we did things like dress up as Harry Potter characters and go to a new Harry Potter movie. I'm sure people who saw that thought, "My, these people sure must like the Harry Potter films". In a way, of course, we did - but not in the way the typical cinema-goer liked them. The main object was to mine the new material for suggestions of sexual tension between the male characters.
Maybe this is atypical, I'd be curious to know the inner workings of fandoms that are not sex-based.
Could it be that it's not the flaws that cause the fandom directly, but the tradeoff between emotional volume and flawlessness? Star Wars, for instance, leans really hard on all the emotional buttons it can press. After some point this button-pressing leads authors with a finite reserve of skill, attention, and time, to sacrifice other considerations (realistic characterization, narrative coherence) in order to produce a stronger reaction. On the other hand, works whose creator has taken the time to make them complete and eliminate flaws don't necessarily make the kind of sacrifices necessary to jump out and grab you immediately.
Are there any ready examples that establish the (flaws -> fandom) link in preference to the (emotional volume -> flaws AND fandom) link?
UPDATE:
I think Twelve Virtues is a great example of my hypothesis; some of its turns of phrase have been criticized as unclear or ambiguous, on this site. I suspect the ambiguity comes from the fact that EY was trying to write something with high emotional relevance.
What's going on with your comments in this thread? These are clearly too low-effort, snarky and passive-aggressive for LW. Take this as a mod warning.
This may actually be a feature, not a bug. If something is flawless, there is little danger that someone will turn away from it because of its flaws and miss out on a net gain. If something is worthwhile in spite of its flaws, however, some people will notice the flaws first and will turn away from it and miss out on the value they might otherwise have claimed. The fandom instinct is to tell these people, "no, once you look past the misogyny and the unbelievable characters and the plot woven from overcomplicated schemes and implausible coincidences, it's actually a great piece of literature."
We all seek to aid one another in our searches for delicious fruits, but the lush colorful fruit will look tasty to anyone, they don't need specific advice about it. Rather, spend your time talking about the warty hairy fruit with the thick rind that nevertheless contains a sweet nectar within.
Were this true it would also seem to fit with Robin's theories on art as signalling. If you pick something bad to defend then the signal is stronger.
If you want to signal loyalty, for example, it's not that good picking Shakespeare. Obviously everyone likes Shakespeare. If you pick an obscure anime cartoon then you can really signal your unreasonable devotion in the face of public pressure.
In a complete about turn though, a situation with empirical data might be sports fans. And I'm fairly certain that as performances get worse, generally speaking, the number of fans (at least that attend games) drops. This would seem to imply the opposite.
Bond is being caustic so people will pay attention to him. It's his schtick. He reviews Ender's Game and calls it 'pornography'.
His claim is backwards. People instinctively share their favorite stories for signaling reasons. Read Comeuppance if you don't believe me. The urge is probably strong enough that they'll drive across several states to get to a convention to find a receptive group of people with whom they can signal their approval. Indiana Jones fans don't have conventions because they aren't atypical -- most people like Indiana Jones movies.
He is sort of right, though. Anything that's good enough to attract a rabid fan base but still alienate the general public in spite of its virtues is pretty obviously going to have some even bigger faults.
Proust's following is small, rabid, and (being composed mostly of literary critics) is very far out of touch with reality. Why don't we call them a fandom?
Are Gilbert and Sullivan bad in any dramatic way?
They have serious fandom.
How about Bach himself?
The Grateful Dead?
I'm simply skeptical of the Shakespeare being seriously bad claim too. He had bad plays and no-one cares about them.
What about Chess? Poker? Why does D&D count but they don't?
Anyway, I think that the largest effect at work here is that if anything attracts great enthusiasm it will attack aggressive attack. Everything has its flaws. So what?
Tolkein's fandom is MUCH greater than that of C.S. Lewis or countless other fantasy author...
If this effect is real, I'd expect it to function as color politics. Both sides need to have enough to build their case, that is the work in question must have both good and bad sides. The sides must fail to understand each other, that is, the badness and goodness of the work needs to be sufficiently obscure or hard to figure out or requiring vast background. And there should also be emotional attachment, beyond in-group, to the selected positions for both sides.
For a rationalist community, this dynamic doesn't seem to apply, as the rationalists would need...
Sherlock Holmes has quite a lively fandom, and I haven't heard of any horrendously bad features.
The fact that something has flaws gives you a reason to think about it. A memeplex with no flaws would not stick in your head as long. I'll give some examples.
I can imagine writing Dr Who fanfic, because I know in my head what a good Dr Who story ought to look like, and very few of the actual Dr Who stories measure up. I can't imagine writing Lord of the Rings fanfic, because to me the book is perfect as it is.
Even though I'm not a Christian, I have read a lot of books on Christianity. For a while, I kept expecting, or hoping, to find a book that explaine...
There are a fair number of Revolutionary War reenactments - it's a pretty spirited community, from what I've heard. They also seem to evade some of the corniness criticism Renaissance Fairs seem to garner. Chess and go may not count as "fandom", but they are reasonably popular.
I don't think it's the /badness/ that is required to have a fandom, but a constant stream of discussion. Without badness, it's harder to sustain the discussion. If everyone agreed pirates would beat ninjas or that longswords were better than katana, eventually conversation dries up. Badness spurs arguments that allow adherents to share their beliefs and signal their devotion.
In the same vein as newerspeak's reference to Proust, how about Joyce fans and their annual bloomsday celebrations?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
Changing genres, I believe all of these references* have both fans and "conventions", and anyone would be hard-pressed to call any of them "bad" or flawed:
Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright
Jazz: Davis, Coltrane, Peterson, Brubeck
Toys: Lego, Barbie, and Play Mobil
Military aircraft: P51 Mustang
Racing: Volvo Ocean Racing, F1, World Rally, MotoGP
Cars: 1955 Gullwing, 1965 Shelby Cobra, Enzo ...
I suspect that it doesn't take much to get the ball rolling on a knock-down drag-out fight between fans and opponents of any Work X: all you need is for enough people to have heard of Work X, and then you wait for polarization. As long as the work is popular enough that most people have heard of it, everyone will take a side and defend it to an extreme degree in a shrill voice. Works that are just good tend to acquire fans more slowly - Shakespeare, George Orwell, and Bach, while widely known, could not really be described as "sweeping the globe&quo...
I wouldn't say it's the goodness or the badness of the work, but the purpose of the work. Any work that changes the criteria for what "winning at life" is, or in any other way indicts the status quo, is going to turn off anyone who likes the current game, and it's going to attract anyone who would benefit under the new game. Being a fan is signaling one's unfitness at the current game. (The average fan of Star Wars has a good reason to dream of a place far away - his life sucks.)
Anything that is either descriptive or reaffirming the current game...
About Jack Vance:
"That's serious fandom. Aimed at work that - like Animal Farm or the Well-Tempered Clavier - is merely excellent, without an aspect of monumental badness to defend."
The history of the Vance Integral Edition is full of flamewars and intensely stupid quarrels, not to mention some off-the-wall exegesis of Vance's work that would make Charles Kinbote blush. I think the most ridiculous aspects of Vance fandom are not well known because it is a much smaller cult, compared to other fandoms. (And yet the VIE project was reasonably succe...
Fandom is social - a big part of it is interacting with other fans. So here's an alternative hypothesis: works that especially appeal to a narrow subset of the population are more likely to develop a fanatic fandom (with things like conventions), because they allow fans to get together with other people like them, form a fanatic community, and radicalize as a group. With broadly popular works, fans won't be all that similar to each other so they'll be less likely to come together to form a fanatic community. Trekkies and Randians seem consistent this hypothesis.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? They have Towel Day, and as far as I know, unless you reject it whole as nonsense, it has no glaring flaws.
Just from reading the quoted segment of Bond's argument, I think there's something missing from it.
'Bad' is too vague. It's not (usually) like people watch a film (or read a book or whatever) and think "man, i found that truly horrible. It was so bad I'm going to start obsessing over it and attending conventions".
Rather, there are specific properties of the work that attract them. These properties (or other ones that go hand in hand with them) also happen to mean the work has bad qualities.
It can't simply be any properties to do with 'ba...
(Responding "does it?" to a comment is not always inappropriate, but it does lean on the reasoning for your skepticism being obvious. If you just want to express disagreement, you can use the disagreement votes or the disagreement reacts)
Those sure are a lot of naked assertions with zero supporting argument. Strange, I don't feel any particular urge to defend Bonds' monumentally bad writing.
Fandom is a subculture that grows up around people who are passionate about a work when the rest of the world isn't.
If the work is part of the dominant culture, nobody has to build a fandom around it. The Well-Tempered Clavier is assigned to every piano student -- nobody has to organize clubs to listen to Bach in secret.
To have a fandom, a work doesn't have to be bad. It can just be overlooked, forgotten, or left behind by the mainstream. Gilbert and Sullivan operas are pretty good, but they have a fandom made up of old-fashioned Anglophiles and intel...
Cultural products that create fandom usually have younger target audiences. Those products tend to be of uneven quality. This seems to explain the correlation noticed by Bond. Products for the young of undeniable quality can be used to test the hypothesis. They do create fandoms: -The catcher in the rye -Jimi Hendrix Older products of uneven quality do not produce fandom... (But since they have been forgotten, I won't give examples!) If older great work didn't create fandom, it's simply that they came before fandom.
Warren Buffett seems to fit all the criteria of the counterexample Eliezer asked for. And if you doubt the fanaticism of his fandom, just look over some videos of his annual shareholders' meeting/convention.
Eliezer, I think you missed something big here: to what kind of audience does the work appeal?
Take GEB: if you want to read and understand it you really have to invest some intellectual effort and I suspect the kind of people who end up appreciating it are not the ones who indulge in emotional fandom.
Star Wars on the other hand has a lot more emotional than intellectual appeal and thus it will select another kind of fans, a subset of them are the kind of people who go to conventions and dress up in appropriate clothing.
Make the experiment: go to a group o...
These works with huge fan bases (Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter) have tons of improbable stuff, things clearly added for no reason other than drama, things that are designed to turn your logical brain off. Awful stuff... But they maintain self-consistency. A fan is typically someone who is familiar with the universe's rules, accepts them, and uses them to make predictions about the characters. The author may throw in a surprise or two, but that eventually gets added to the rules. The rules provide the fan with a psychological reward every time they are...
I would like to propose the idea that the fans don't necessarily have to have anything to do with what the original work that started the group going. The original work could just bring together a group of people, that group of people then creates there own reasons for being together and reinterprets the original work to suit there needs. Maybe the strongest fan bases are formed around works that have a "badness" about them, because they are easier to reinterpret to suit the needs of the fans.
I have a theory that the harder people try to convince me of something, the more it means they're really trying to convince themselves. (Example: creationism)
This seems related...
More seriously, I've seen at least one study in which it was noted that the more stringent religious sects have better retention rates, i.e., the more an ideology demands from its adherents, the more committed they are. This sounds like it could be another manifestation of the same effect.
It strikes me that the correlation between "is bad" and "has fanatical fans" is partially due to a common cause - a piece of fiction has to conform to certain popular prejudices entertained by tens of millions of idiots in order to have a really big fan base, and a really big fan base is highly conducive to having a hard core of fanatics - the more people that are interested in something, the more hardcore fanatics you'll get.
I can imagine meeting another Vance aficionado in person: we just nod politely, in silent agreement, or talk in cryptic sentences like vorlons.
H. R. Giger is an excellent painter and sculptor, anyone can see that, but for most people his sculptures are just too... alien. I discoved that I really like Giger and Vance, but I can see that others would have to acquire the taste.
Also somewhat related: the Onion A/V Club has an ongoing Gateways to Geekery series, which gives newcomers introductions to various genres that are the subject of fandom (though not necessarily at the con level), explaining why they can be inaccessible and how best to approach them. There are 18 entries so far; it might be interesting to look for commonalities.
The mechanism makes perfect sense, though that doesn't mean the theory is right. If you have a very good, relatively unobjectionable movie/book/etc, most people will like it, some people will dislike it, but it's unlikely there'll be much conflict. By contrast, if you've got some movie that's got some good parts, and some really awful parts, then you have the potential for some people to really like it, and then actually have to defend it against the bad parts. Since they don't want to part with liking it, they develop all kinds of defense mechanisms, they...
Maybe there are Shakespeare conventions, they're just not an object of public ridicule, because Shakespeare is better than Star Trek.
I'm a poet and hang out with a lot of literature lovers, but I think I still know more people who get excited about Star Wars and Star Trek than Shakespeare. So I'm not sure I accept that Shakespeare lovers are a dime a dozen and Star * lovers aren't.
But badness, especially badness of an obvious, monumental variety, inspires devotion. The quality of the work, in the face of such glaring shortcomings, becomes a matter of faith -- and faith is a much stronger bond than mere appreciation.
IMO this, among other things, can explain why religions still exist.
"And so the fan groups of Tolkien, Star Trek, Spider-man, Japanese kiddie-cartoons etc. develop an almost cult-like character." I like some of all of these examples, and I agree there are horrible, asinine elements to all of them. They all have ludicrous philosophical positions, arbitrary physics, inane plots and villains with motivations that manage to be incoherent and predictable at the same time. Although I've seen every episode of every series of Star Trek before Enterprise, I have to say I spend most of my time watching it making fun of t...
I have noticed some criticisms. Try this, for example:
http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2008/09/eliezer-yudkowskys-friendly-ai-project.html
True fanaticism requires a reservoir of unconsciousness into which contradictions and faults can be swept aside.
Without flaws which fans feel guilty about overlooking or ignoring, fanaticism is unlikely to arise. Nor is it likely to arise among people with well-developed emotional balance who won't or can't harbor monumental blind spots and unconsciousness sinks.
People who defend something vehemently are often compensating within themselves for a negative reaction which they cannot acknowledge. If the matter isn't truly important in a life-or-death sense, and people are getting vehement, it's probably a defensive reaction. Best defense is a good offense and all that.
There are a couple of different aspects to fandom, and it's worth splitting them apart. I'm a HUGE fan of GEB and the Well Tempered Clavier, and have been for over 25 years. Neither of these are the basis of any social group I'm part of (though GEB fandom is rife in a some, it's not the core of any).
The aspects of fandom you're looking at - the clique or socially-separate group, would seem to come not from bad elements of the work, but from a desire to form tribes and share hardship, normally by repelling out-group attack (or perceived attack). Note t...
Your PS for the newly imported post is out of date- the colored text doesn't seem to have come with it.
Renaissance time paintings? The Taj Mahal?
Or are these works of art gone too much into the past and thats why they are not criticised?
Stephen Bond, "Objects of Fandom":
...my theory is that for something to attract fans, it must have an aspect of truly monumental badness about it.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a robust potboiler, tongue-in-cheek, very competently done. I think it's enjoyable, but even among those who don't, it's hard to see the film attracting actual derision. Boredom or irritation, probably, but nothing more. Star Wars, on the other hand.... From one perspective, it's an entertaining space opera, but from a slightly different perspective, an imperceptible twist of the glass, it's laughably awful. Utterly ridiculously bad. And it's this very badness that makes so many people take up arms in its defence.
...It's impossible to imagine a fan of Animal Farm, the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the theory of gravity. Such works can defend themselves. But badness, especially badness of an obvious, monumental variety, inspires devotion. The quality of the work, in the face of such glaring shortcomings, becomes a matter of faith -- and faith is a much stronger bond than mere appreciation. It drives fans together, gives them strength against those who sneer... And so the fan groups of Tolkien, Star Trek, Spider-man, Japanese kiddie-cartoons etc. develop an almost cult-like character.
"Uh oh," I said to myself on first reading this, "Is this why my fans are more intense than Robin Hanson's fans? And if I write a rationality book, should I actually give in to temptation and self-indulgence and write in Twelve Virtues style, just so that it has something attackable for fans to defend?"
But the second time I turned my thoughts toward this question, I performed that oft-neglected operation, asking: "I read it on the Internet, but is it actually true?" Just because it's unpleasant doesn't mean it's true. And just because it provides a bit of cynicism that would give me rationality-credit to acknowledge, doesn't mean it becomes true just so I can earn the rationality-credit.
The first counterexample that came to mind was Jack Vance. Jack Vance is a science-fiction writer who, to the best of my knowledge, I've never heard accused of any great sin (or any lesser sin, actually). He is - was - the supremely competent craftsman of SF: his words flow, his plots race, and his human cultures are odder than other authors' aliens, to say nothing of his aliens. Vance didn't have his characters give controversial political speeches like Heinlein. Vance just wrote consistently excellent science fiction.
And some of Vance's fans got together and produced the Vance Integral Edition, a complete collection of Vance in leather-bound hardcover books with high-quality long-lasting paper. They contracted to get the books printed, and when the books arrived, enough Vance fans showed up to ship them all. (They referred to themselves as "packing scum".)
That's serious fandom. Aimed at work that - like Animal Farm or the Well-Tempered Clavier - is merely excellent, without an aspect of monumental badness to defend.
Godel, Escher, Bach - maybe I'm prejudiced here, and I've heard a word or two said against it, but really, I don't think the fandom that it has stems from it being frequently attacked. On the other hand, there aren't annual conventions for fans of self-referential sentences, so maybe it's not as much of a data point as I might like.
Star Wars really did have something going for it that Raiders of the Lost Ark didn't, namely, it introduced a lot of impressionable minds to science fiction. Or space opera, if you like. The point is that the romance of space is not the romance of archeology.
On due reflection, I'm not sure that utter ridiculous monumental badness is all it's cracked up to be.
But there are annual Star Trek conventions. And there are not annual Jack Vance conventions. Douglas Hofstadter might be far more widely beloved - but Ayn Rand has more fanatic fans.
If Jack Vance had been so clever as to keep all the poetic phrasing and alien societies, but now and then have his characters make crazy political speeches - if he had deliberately introduced an aspect of monumental badness - would he now be worshiped, instead of just loved?
Can anyone think of a true, pure counterexample of a reasonably fanatic fandom (to the level of annual conventions, though not necessarily suicide bombers) of something that is just sheer good professional craftwork, and not commonly criticized? And of course the acid test is not whether you think it is just sheer good craftsmanship, but whether this is widely believed within the broad context of the relevant social community - can you have fanatic fans when their object of worship really is that good and the mainstream believes it too?
I do think that Stephen Bond's Objects of Fandom is pointing to a real effect, if not the only effect. So in the same vein that we should try to be attracted to basic science textbooks and not just poorly written press releases about "breaking news", let us try to be fans of those merely excellent works that lack an aspect of monumental awfulness to defend.