Seeing the Star Wars parody of “Somebody That I Used to Know” in class on Tuesday got me thinking about how fans interact with the media they consume. Fans aren’t content to sit idly while they look at a text. Some fans like to analyze on a deeper level and come up with theories and “headcanons” for what the text doesn’t explain. It reminds me of what Barthes wrote about how the pleasure of a text comes from what isn’t there, what it doesn’t explain. This allows fans to create their own interpretations, and through the power of the Internet, they can share their interpretations and discuss with other fans. Fans also like to produce content of their own, and by doing so, find a way to “talk back” to the texts they enjoy. Fans create in their work what they would like to see in the canon of the text, but the text ultimately doesn’t give them. Jenkins describes fan works as a “space for various minority groups to tell their own stories or to question hegemonic representations of their culture.” In a way, fan works provide an outlet for viewers to question what they see in a text, or sometimes, what they see in other aspects of their fandom. To explain this, I’ll use an example from one of my own fandoms, Pokemon. NateWantstoBattle is a musician on Youtube who writes Pokemon parodies of pop songs. His parodies are clever re-workings of the song lyrics to make them Pokemon-related. In two his parodies, he addresses the competitive battling aspect of the Pokemon fanbase and just how intense competitive battling can be. Whether it’s the battling itself (with his "Payphone" parody) or the insane amount of preparation competitive battling requires (with his "Blurred Lines" parody), he found a way to talk back to the fandom and give them something to relate to.
I’ll link both of those parodies here:
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