The Quibbler

I favorited a tweet last week about The Vampire Diaries. One of my tweeps observed that Elena—who’s a vampire—was carrying water on her hike, asking, “Why are you carrying water, Elena? Do you drink water?”

I laughed when I read it and was like, hehe, I noticed that too—go us! But then a few days later I read Dalton Ross’s article in this week’s EW: "How We Transformed Into Nitpick Nation.” Ross points out that we don’t just watch TV anymore, we nitpick: our fingers are on constant alert poised over our keyboards, ready to point out the next gaffe or implausible scenario.

He’s not wrong. I mean, I was feeling all smug about noticing that a vampire doesn’t need water, and feeling a sense of community that I wasn’t the only one. Meanwhile both of us clearly watch a show every week that’s about not only teenage vampires but also werewolves and the only reason Elena was hiking in the first place is that all the characters are currently on some ridiculous nature quest LOOKING FOR A MYSTICAL CURE FOR VAMPIRISM.

Why isn’t that the part that bothered me?

I could go all smarty pants and claim that I’ve engaged in what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy the story. And I could claim that the audience has a right to expect that the writers will adhere to self-consistent rules within the confines of the crack-smoking crazy universe they’ve created. That’s great and all, but I’m afraid it still doesn’t change the fact that Ross is right—I’m part of Nitpick Nation.

I think nitpicking probably goes with obsessive fandom like soup with crackers. First, if you watch something more than once, you’re going to notice little stuff. If you make your hobby splicing scenes into gifs, you’re going to notice even more. And then there’s the fact of the online forum. In Olden Times, when we might have discussed our favorite shows in person at school or work the next day, it was perfectly acceptable to rehash major plot points. But by the time you log on to Tumblr, the major stuff will likely already have been covered. We all want to contribute something new to the conversation. So we need to look closer. It becomes important whether or not our characters are carrying logical beverage choices. For example. 

Ross also points out in his article that entertainment used to be viewed as disposable. We were watching a movie on the National Film Registry in my Media Studies class last week. One of the archivists mentioned that one major studio actually threw away all their silent films in the fifties, because there was no thought that anyone would ever want to see them again. Imagine the idiot who made this decision in a room full of modern-day film history buffs. They’d tear the poor dude into pieces. Today, we watch and re-watch. We buy blu-rays, we download. The notion that a given piece of entertainment is only designed to fill one hour of airtime, and then never be viewed again is a thing of the past. This truth makes programs such as Buckwild or Dance Moms more difficult to understand.

But maybe no matter how much we nitpick, some mysteries just can’t be solved. 

The Shipping News

         I’ve always been an obsessive TV watcher. I have DVD sets of my favorite shows, and I re-watch them in rotation, never getting sick of Firefly or Buffy or Roswell or Veronica Mars. I can’t imagine ever getting tired of them. My bff and I were Christmas shopping last weekend, and I suggested she buy someone on her list a copy of her favorite show, but she said no, once this person has watched something, they never want to watch it again. I’ve met quite a few people who feel this way, but I can’t even conceive of how they have the same kind of brain as me. Maybe they don’t. When I love something, I will watch or read it over and over. Probably forever.

So speaking of obsessive viewage, last week I was having a terrible week, and at the top of the short list of stuff I was actually looking forward to was watching the new ep of The Vampire Diaries. Damon and Elena were finally going to hook it up, after years of her pining over Edward Cullen-Lite™.

But then the writers pulled a JK, and explained away their entire relationship with another of their murky supernatural explanations as some kind of magical vampire sire bond. Whatever.

            Right after the episode, I was outraged, and I realized there was a virtual place for me to go, a place where I was guaranteed to find others who felt the same way: the web, and specifically Tumblr. One quick word in the search bar connected me instantly to a community of other people who also had nothing better to do on a Thursday night than watch a TV show and then obsess over the way the storyline was going.

            I’ve been watching and re-watching and getting pissed off at TV writers for what they do to my characters for a long time. In the olden days, though, there was no way to connect to other people who felt the same way, unless you had a friend you could call up right after the credits rolled. The immediacy of that connection is the biggest change—now, right after the show airs you can jump in and discuss the situation with at least everyone else in your time zone who gives a crap.

            Hanging out on Tumblr has introduced me to a whole world of people who are every bit as invested in their shows, books, and movies as I am—and a lot of them are even more invested. I haven’t created fan art or videos or written fan fiction, but if I were a teenager or didn’t have jobs plural I probably would. Fandom is an interesting world, with its own rules, and its own language. I learned last week that if I were a TVD shipper, then my OTP was now canon and that that was both an exciting and paradoxically upsetting thing. Rooting for a couple to be together is probably more fun than actually just sitting back and watching the relationship play out. Shipping itself is an interesting word—it comes from relationship, of course, but think it also resonates a bit with worship. A phrase you see a lot on Tumblr is “I will go down with this ship.” Often the fangirl or boy has chosen to invest a lot of time and feels into a pairing that is never going to happen. And maybe that’s part of the lure. It’s about identifying with the characters and the story—when writers capture a fan’s attention to this degree, the audience feels something. We are connected to the characters.

Source gif: http://gesundheits.tumblr.com/

            But everyone in the fandom is also connected to one another. Each fandom is a community, and it’s always on, just a few clicks away. When I was a kid, I didn’t know anyone who was obsessed with the same shows I was. (They are too embarrassing to name, btw ;) But kids today are luckier in that way. For all the evils of the internet and technology, the web can bring us together. No matter what niche you pick, no matter how remote and small it is, you can probably find somebody else, somewhere, to hang out in it with you. And that’s kind of a beautiful thing. So let’s hear it for the shippers, the fangirls, everyone overcome by feels because they just love their characters. Ship on.