The art of Writing About Something

[yvannairie]

People forget (or at least I feel like they forget) that critique used to be an art form.

It was a style of transformative engagement, with rules and limitations to how it was performed -- the viewpoint and the philosophy that was being applied to look for new meanings in the original text. Structuralist critiques, feminist critiques, Marxist critiques of fiction never really went away, we just stopped calling them "critiques" because that word got associated with... like, reviews and shit, objective, quantitative judgement of a work rather than a subjective interpretation of it. In many ways, what fandom calls "meta" these days is the inheritor of that mantle -- it's own thing, that is using the work as a framework to discuss ideas present in or absent from it. It all depends on what the author is trying to accomplish.

And while a lot of critique is constructive/deconstructive and formalist and self-contained in nature -- and while the meta I write is almost always exploratory rather than "critical" in the common-sense meaning of the word -- there is absolutely no reason a critique can't be done in the style of the work, as a new story, as some other kind of art. That's ultimately why fandom continues to be transformative, because like a lot of good funny-relatable posts on Tumblr say, sometimes fanfic is a love letter and sometimes it's just the equivalent of "fuck you. Strong letter to follow."

When we criticise the tendency for fandom to do certain things that are hinky, "problematic" or regressive, understanding fandom as a critique makes it a lot easier to deal with the fact that sometimes the uncomfortable things are already present in the story and sometimes they're coming from "inside the house", so to speak. The work is one thing, but fan works? Fan works also always include the politics of the fan creating them, to one degree or another.

I think it's very unfortunate that critique gets lumped in with "reviews" and criticisms instead of being understood as a form of writing unto itself. I mean, most of my writing falls in the exploratory auxilliary worldbuilding and textual analysis categories and I regularly talk about how much it frustrates me that I only feel like I'm "proper transformative fandom" when writing fic.... which I don't like doing that much. Hell, that is why I have the "non-narrative writing" tag, to validate my own creative efforts.

Ultimately, I think the conflation of deconstructive criticism, reviewing, textual analysis and non-narrative fic under the same "meta" label is a symptom of fandom becoming more consumptive. There's a push, like, a cultural push for people to treat themselves and their whole existences as content for other people, and to treat the world as a buffet of entertainment -- a topic that is wholly too complicated to get to here -- and the way it manifests in fandom is through people becoming more ignorant to the fact that we make these things for ourselves, because we have thoughts and feelings about The Thing.

I don't think we should forget about this, and treat fandom the same way we treat mainstream media, because the act of talking about a work is where we started, and it is ultimately what we're doing when we're doing fandom.