Living Two Lives – A Story of Bilingual Fan-dom

[rodo]

The topic of this post is one that has been on my mind for years, and this certainly isn’t the first attempt to write it all down. This post is about my very subjective experience in fandom, which, I believe, is not quite normal. I suppose all of you who are multifannish know at least to some degree what I am talking about, because essentially, I am talking about being in two fandoms at once. But while most people experience two fandoms as two different things they’re interested in, for me, it is the same thing, in two languages.

So I suppose this is where I should introduce myself: I am a German and German is my first language. I didn’t really start learning English until I was ten (so I am not really bilingual). I started writing fanfiction when I was seven. I discovered fandom when I started reading the AnimaniA when I was fourteen. I doubt more than a few of you ever touched that magazine, but I loved it. Buying the new issue was more fun than Christmas. I discovered online fandom when I was nineteen, googling Harry Potter and finding Animexx. A few months later, somebody posted the translation of this really great Harry Potter fanfic (or so I thought at the time – it was the Draco Trilogy), and I started reading it in English.

That was five years ago, and since then, I spent time in English and in German fandom. Many people would, I think, think it enlightening to be able to participate in discussions in two languages. And to a degree, it is. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to change it, because now that I know what the English fandom is like, I really wouldn’t want to leave. In fact, if I had to choose, I would chose the English and not the German one. But: Being a bilingual fan certainly has its disadvantages. I am living in two places at once, I have to be two different persons at times, and that does not feel nice at all.

The English fandom, for example, has meta. Lots of it. They even have a name for it. But while the topic is certainly not unknown in German fandom (as a look at ff.de’s pages on columns and essays shows, which occasionally includes discussions on slash and writing tips), the name is only used by those who are part of the English fandom as well (see: ff.de’s forum). I love meta. I certainly miss meta when I am in German fandom, especially the sort that people really thought about. And the really intellectual meta. I sometimes feel as if the German fandom is unable to follow me when I start talking in that direction (and I know that is a shitty thing to say, but that’s how I feel).

Another problem with German meta discussions is the different background. I learned to deal with meta-y things via metafandom, which I suppose is true for most of us who haven’t been in fandom long enough to remember a time when there was no metafandom. And following metafandom established a background we use when we talk, a background that is missing in discussion with the German fandom altogether.

I feel the same when it comes to various other fandom related communities, especially fanficrants and fandom_wank, both of which shaped the mind of the English fandom enough to establish phrases like “thoughts on yaoi”. Mocking other fans is considered horrible in most of the German fandom. The only community with that specific purpose was deleted a while ago. It was a sporking community on LJ called loesch_dich and I don’t quite remember why the mods deleted it, but I do remember that I thought it a pity and unnecessary. And I loved the sporking of BlackBolt's “novels”. Big scandals like those around Cassandra Claire and MsScribe couldn’t happen in German fandom. Even the mention of gugi28’s bad behaviour and her accusing unsuspecting new fans of plagiarism when all they did was invent an OC who was slightly similar to hers was deleted (and I forgot to take screencaps), despite being neutral and totally unwanky (at least compared to what ends up on fandom_wank). I know of no place where German fandom can be properly criticized, apart from English fandom, that is. And I think fandom_wank and similar communities are good for a fandom, because on the one hand they serve as an outlet for all the negative feelings, and on the other they establish some sort of rules for community interaction. German fandom needs a place where young fans can learn not to tell others that liking slash/incest stories is OMG SO SICK and that wanky behaviour should be avoided.

German fandom also needs to learn that comments aren’t everything. I know, English fandom has its own fair share of comment whoring and stories that are held hostage. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the fact that in discussions with German authors, I am often told that a good reader writes a comment, because the author has to be paid for a story. The story is seen as a service to the fans that has to be paid for, not as something the author does because s/he likes it or as something the author does as a thank you. There is a hierarchy in fandom, and it places the reader on the bottom. Readers who don’t review are bad readers; I sometimes even get the feeling that they are considered worse than the people who don’t read the story at all. There even is a word for readers like that: “Schwarzleser”. It’s a term that has its origin in the term “Schwarzfahrer” (literally black passenger – meaning someone who takes a train or bus without paying) and “Leser”, the German word for reader. I don’t think the English fandom has developed a term for that yet.

Another thing the German fandom lacks, at least in my opinion, is the presence on journaling platforms. The English fandom on LJ and its clones is enormous. The German part, at least as I remember it, is tiny. I know quite a few people are from Germany, but they don’t participate in anything German. Their journal entries are in English, so that they can communicate with their English speaking friends. After a while, many start writing fanfic in English as well. I am one of those people who really like journaling platforms, because they allow me more freedom than most archives (my main issues with them is generally linked to the fact that I am not free to do as I like), and I generally like reading other peoples’ journals and the flist makes it so much easier to find all the new fic you’re interested in than combing through all the pages of an archive. I like the sense of community as well.

There are, of course, things the German fandom has that the English fandom doesn’t. For one, it allows me to use my dearly beloved first language. Something that I rather like about the German fandom on principle, despite not finding much use for it myself, is the amount of translated fic. Some people aren’t talented when it comes to writing their own stories, some of them lack the ideas, but quite a few of these people can still use their talent to translate stories. I only know of a handful of stories that are translated into English, often by the German authors themselves, but there are a lot of fanfictions in German archives that are translations. Ff.de has threads in which people ask for help translating a certain phrase, threads in which the merits and difficulties of translations are discussed and even those in which potential readers ask other people to translate a fic for them.

And of course there is Animexx, which I don’t like for a lot of reasons (too strict, too focussed on anime and manga), which is an archive maintained by a non-profit organisation that hosts fanfiction, dōjinshi, fanart, cosplay, fic contests and a myriad of other things. It was founded in 2000. Sound familiar? Well, at least that’s what I thought when I first heard of the OTW’s archive. I sincerely hope that the OTW’s archive won’t develop the way Animexx did in terms of focus on visual art and policy, but in terms of functionality, I think Animexx is rather more than English archive users are used to. At least as far as I know. (You can check out the very reduced English version here.) So to me, at least, the idea of the OTW was not a new one. A good one, yes (I’m a volunteer, after all), but not a radically new one.

A difference between the two fandoms, the way I see it, is the fact that a lot of the English fandom culture seems to be based on the traditions of media fandom, while the German fandom seems to be more focussed on anime/manga fandom. That might just be my impression because I started out on Animexx, but I still get that impression when I’m on ff.de now, despite the main fandoms being Harry Potter and Twilight.

Now all this means one thing for me: I am two people. When I am my English fandom person, I can’t talk to anybody about what happened to yaoi.de without having to start with a lengthy explanation on the German laws for the protection of minors. (The end result is this: adult fanfiction on German websites can only be accessed during the night and/or after you sent the maintainers your identification card number so that they verify that you’re an adult. And for God's sake, don't ever call it porn.) I can’t talk about racefail with Germans. I have to separate knowledge and behaviour in my head so that I don’t accidentally think English fandom hates readers. I can’t use the same platforms. I have to watch out for spoilers (both ways – we got the final Pushing Daisies episodes last month). I have to keep track of air dates and publication details. I have to remember that musings on translating fic should be written in German rather than in English. But nobody will read it anyway there since it’s meta and Germans don’t read meta. The latest post on fandom_wank? Nobody’s read it and the fandom isn’t big in German anyway. A “yes, but” would probably not be the best way to react to the enthusiasm for the idea behind the OTW because the people I’m talking to have never even heard of Animexx.

The two fandoms are not entirely separated, though. I do meet quite a few Germans on fanficrants, and many people on my flist are Germans (writing in English, but they will at least heard of some of the things I’m talking about) and there are a number of people in German fandom who are in English fandom as well. But the topics that are discussed are often separate. While the English fandom talked about racefail, ff.de was told to delete the fanfictions for a certain book series by the author’s lawyers. Something that hasn’t happened in German fandom before, at least to my knowledge. While people in the German fandom argued about the new rating system on ff.de, English fandom squeed about Dreamwidth. And I do both, but almost never with the same people or in the same space.

Dreamwidth will make it harder for me to have one place for both of my personas. The Archive of Our Own and the OTW might make it easier, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to have just one fan personality.

Comments

[nikku]

I got here via a link from frogspace, and just wanted to say:

>>I started reading the AnimaniA when I was fourteen. I doubt more than a few of you ever touched that magazine, but I loved it.

I started to read it when I was eighteen, and I loved it, too. It changed my life.^^

[rodo]

Of course the old AnimaniA was superior. *nods* It just wasn't the same after #40.

I think the AnimaniA was at least partly responsible for some manga/anime being published in Germany. Without their article about Weiß Kreuz I would have never become a fan of that series. (other examples: Basara and Angel Sanctuary)

[lian]

Oy, how could I miss this post??? Thanks to frogspace I did still find it, phew. This is super-fascinating, and the thing is -- I'm fascinated by how similar our Sozialisation (see! another beautiful word without a decent translation ;P) is -- I totally would understand you if you talked about yaoi.de/animexx (I got on both around 2001, and every now and then I realize of deeply I am still influenced by that -- e.g. in arguing definitions or naming conventions with English fen!), even though I branched off into English fandom exclusively around...phew, 2004 2005 or so?

And it strikes me, and fascinates me, how there are these seemingly somewhat discrete traditions in German fandom -- apart from individual developments, I mean. Pre-yaoi-crowd maybe? Closer to old-school slash. frogspace, for example, seems to be from that crowd, even though that is of course grossly simplified -- she does write about having submitted a boy x boy story one time, after all. (I commented to her entry here).

[rodo]

(Don't worry, almost nobody on my flist was interested in this entry.)

umm ... "socialisation"?

Yes, 2004/2005 was also the time when I largely left German fandom as a reader (I do still read in German sometimes, but it's really hard to find decent stories without rec-lists). Didn't Animexx used to have a rec function? I could have sword it did, but I can't find it anymore.

The pre-yaoi(oh how I hate that term, it's shounen-ai, goddammit)-crowd also seems to be rooted in a pre-internet culture. Maybe they are old-school media fen while most of the German internet fandom is at least influenced by anime/manga fandom? I know I had to work quite hard on overcoming the naming conventions where the name before the / was the seme, and I still can't read some characters as ukes. (And I use seme/uke quite frequently.)

I also think most of the old school media fen migrated to LJ (unlike the rest of German fandom), but I can't say that I met many of them in archives or forums.

[hl]

Hi! (Here from lian)

I clicked, very interested in reading this, because I'm Argentinian and, like you, am not truly bilingual. I only did a very short stunt on Spanish fandom, (turns out that misspellings in Spanish bother me much much more!) but lately I've friends that are more in it, so I was curious about what did it mean for the fan to be in the two different fandoms.

All I can think of, now, is that 99% of the stuff you say I could take out 'German fandom' and put in 'Jane Austen Fandom' and it would hold true. Seriously, though it's in English, the fannish culture is completely different from the rest of fandom, and the issues are very similar to those you described!

[rodo]

(turns out that misspellings in Spanish bother me much much more!)

Funnily enough, they bothered me more in English because when I started out I never knew if a word was misspelled or simply a totally different word that I didn't know yet.

All I can think of, now, is that 99% of the stuff you say I could take out 'German fandom' and put in 'Jane Austen Fandom' and it would hold true. Seriously, though it's in English, the fannish culture is completely different from the rest of fandom, and the issues are very similar to those you described!

... Now you've got me wondering about the German Jane Austen Fandom (yes, it exists, there even is an archive, as I found out a few weeks ago).

[lenija]

I was at my parents' and missed this post - too bad, I would have loved to enter the discussion.

I came into fandom a bit later than you, and started to read manga only a few years ago, so I've never been on animexx or yaoi.de. At some point I left fanfiktion.de, too, because I don't agree with some of their policies (some of which might just be German policies, I notice) but didn't feel there was the right atmosphere to discuss any of my concerns. The only place where I'm still in German speaking fandom is livejournal, where many people have finally started to write their fic in English.
But still many experiences you describe sound familiar to me, especially the feeling of being split into several personas. It helps to be able to tie this to the two different communities -- the way you just can't discuss certain questions with one group or the other, because you would need to add pages and pages of links and footnotes, and even of anyone would read what you linked to, they still wouldn't know what it's like to be part of that discourse (racefail09, for example, or Jugendschutz on the other side), even if you're only marginally involved.

For me, there's also still a large language barrier. I don't trust my English skill enough to participate in complex discussions. The problem is, if I can't (or won't) discuss the English speaking fandom's meta problems with English speaking fen, there's no one left I can discuss them with.

There should be more posts like this one. I think it's important that we talk about our different backgrounds in order to... well, help sharpen everyone's perception. Show that diversity is not theoretical.

(Und nun hab ich schon wieder große Furcht, mich schlecht ausgedrückt zu haben, weil mir auf englisch die Genauigkeit fehlt, die ich für meine Definitionen und Fußnoten brauche.)

[lian]

Du bist sooo ein Dussel! Das war doch total perfekt! o_O;

anyway. :) maybe ficathon_de should do a podfic challenge, you know? Or maybe just ask people to go over to amplificathon -- a cooperation?

(see general_jinjur commente here about her not knowing how to 'getting the word out'.)

edited -- Jesus, I fail at closing tags today!!!

[sabeth]

Here from lian! This was so interesting to me – I'm Austrian, but I think I found fandom early enough (X-Files when it was just transitioning from usenet to mailing lists) that there just wasn't much of a German fandom to get involved with online. (Fic-writing fandom, that is; there were fansites.) So it's always been English-speaking fandom for me, and I'm glad for it.

I've tried looking into German fandom a couple of times, but I always end up feeling seriously uncomfortable, happy to return to the modes of communication I'm used to – as you said, many of the meta institutions (fw, metafandom) are missing, and I think that's the reason German fandom has retained a certain ... naïveté that I find frustrating.

Gah, I don't want to be offensive and I'd happily be corrected on this point. But I think because German fandom appears to be so strongly rooted in anime/yaoi fandom, there's a tendency to simplify the characters, stick more closely to the idea of tops and bottoms, bash/ignore the female characters, etc. And that's why I got so fed up with yaoi fandoms in the first place. Not saying there's not a lot of bad slash out there, just that I'm not sure I've ever read a German fic I really loved.

I think in the end German fandom just doesn't offer me anything that interests me. I generally dislike reading/watching anything in translation because meaning always gets lost, so I really don't see the point of doing it in fandom. I like the vastness and diversity and cleverness of international fandom. Conversely, I like being accessible to as many people as possible. The one thing I do regret is that I don't get to hone my writing skills in my own language nearly as much as I do in English, but that's just ... nowhere near enough to draw me away from international fandom.

(Also, wow, "Schwarzleser," seriously?)

[rodo]

many of the meta institutions (fw, metafandom) are missing, and I think that's the reason German fandom has retained a certain ... naïveté that I find frustrating.

Yes, it's rather ... headdesk-inducing. I just can't help it. I love the German language, and I like writing in German, even though I sometimes to try to write in English as well.

I actually had a flatmate once who read only one fic in German because the translation into English wasn't finished yet and the remaining chapters were only available in German. So there do seem to be good fanfics out there, they're just hard to find (no rec-lists).

I think it's interesting that you refer to English fandom as "international". It is international, at least partly, but I wouldn't call it truly international because it is definitely dominated by American media and fen (and British media and fen, to a certain extent). I just don't feel comfortable calling it "international" because of that. Sure, it's on its way of becoming more international (I wholeheartedly support lilithilien's Alles Was Zählt project), but for that we need more translations – of fic and media (and meta and everything else I forgot to mention so far).

(Also, wow, "Schwarzleser," seriously?)

Yes, seriously. It's a big topic on the ff.de forums.

[logovo]

Excellent post! There are similarities between your experiences and what I have felt in Spanish fandom, although it does sound like you have more a foot in both spaces than I do. I started out in English fandom in the 90s and could not find another media based native Spanish speaker for a long time.

[rodo]

I don't think there was much going on in German fanfiction fandom in the 90s either (I could be wrong, that's frogspace's speciality), so a lot of early fen seem to have defaulted to English more easily than the "newbies" of the 2000s.

[general_jinjur]

this is really interesting, and a lot to think about. thank you for posting it.

this is not meant to invalidate your statement at all, since i think the phenomena (from what you say) is on a completely different scale, but i believe english language fandom does hate the reader slightly more than you say - it's just much, much less explicit. but because it's not explicit, it's harder to refute. reading/viewing fanworks is a fanwork itself, separate from leaving feedback, i think. it's largely invisible, which makes it hard to value, and when it is quantified (in pageviews or statistics) that visibility often becomes a negative element, i.e. "hundreds of you jerks read my story and only thirty left comments! you are bad people!" but reading *is* work. it takes time, which has a value. and leaving feedback is a skill that not all of us have (i don't, for one, though i do try, largely out of guilt). i think there's a lot of internalized (and sometimes stated - i know i've stated it) self-loathing in non-commenters that's actually encouraged by english-language media fandom. i think the marginalization of readers who do not create tangible fanworks (even those who do leave feedback) is one of the places that the utopian idea of the fandom stumbles, and does so badly.

anyway. you are making me think! thank you!

[lian]

you just inspired me to make a 'reader -- and proud of it!' icon. Maybe with 'writer' crossed out or something.

I think I'm valuable as a non-fic-producing reader-only fan. Period. And I can't tell you how mad it makes me every time I hear a non-writer fan (say, cathexys!) state that they are still feeling less valuable as a fan because of their different form of engagement. I mean, just. SO.ANGRY.

That's almost like claiming that women have to produce babies to be uh, valuable *as women*.

(yes, I fail at comparisons, but I feel safe going out on a totally sketchy limb here :DD)

[pulangaraw]

Interesting thoughts!

I only ever spent about 5 seconds poking my head into German fandom and for some reason it makes my skin all itchy. I can't put a finger on it (oh, well, let's be honest, I prefer reading English to German, although I cannot explain why), but it just feels kinda wrong.

I think it's part of me hating contemporary German dubbing of TV shows (*shudders*) and I am mostly in TV fandoms.

That said, I don't mean to say that English fandom is better than German fandom, I don't know enough of the German one to form an educated decision. Maybe at some point I will poke my head in again, if I ever get sick of English.

[rodo]

I think it's part of me hating contemporary German dubbing of TV shows (*shudders*) and I am mostly in TV fandoms.

That might be it. And I suppose you don't watch German TV shows, right? And I do admit, some dubs are horrible. The old Rainer Brandt ones, however ...

That said, I don't mean to say that English fandom is better than German fandom, I don't know enough of the German one to form an educated decision.

I didn't think so. Some people just prefer English fandom or media and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I just love writing in German and I long for German goodfic (which I unfortunately can't find. *sigh*).

[bettina]

Found this entry though frogspace and it's really interesting!

I was never really in the German fandom. At least not the part that exclusively wrote and read fanfiction in German. Mostly, because it seemed very yaoi/manga heavy, which wasn't my thing at all.

On the other hand, I found "international" fandom through many, many German speaking fans. Most of us were into media fandoms and since media fandom back then (mid-90s) was pretty much just available in English that's what we used as well.

Of course there were people, who wrote in German, but most of the stories seemed weird to me. Not because of the German language, but I knew the source in English and then there was a German story about it and it all sounded so wrong. I had the same problem the one time I wrote a Buffy story in German. I just didn't know what vocabulary to use, because I'd never seen Buffy in German.

I still consider it German fandom, though, we are all German speakers, but we just interact with everyone else in English. If that makes sense.

[rodo]

I still consider it German fandom, though, we are all German speakers, but we just interact with everyone else in English. If that makes sense.

It does. frogspace uses the same definition, but my definition of German fandom is the one used in those circles you didn't frequent (and it's not quite as anime/manga heavy anymore, not since Harry Potter came along). And that means people who consume/produce/discuss in German (not exclusively, but that is the definition used in the German fandom circles I am used to), while English fandom is a fandom in which fans consume/produce/discuss in English. Not exclusively either, but ...

I had the same problem the one time I wrote a Buffy story in German. I just didn't know what vocabulary to use, because I'd never seen Buffy in German.

That's a problem, especially in fantasy fandoms. I haven't read the seventh HP book in German yet, but I'm writing a fanfic set afterwards and I want to use the German terms, not the English ones. I rely on research and my betas. Curiously enough, some German HP fans resolutely refuse to use the German translation of any name or specific term.

I think I made up my German translation of "sonic lipstick" for my Sarah Jane Adventures/James Bond crossover ficlet and I know I translated the dialogue for my Heroes ficlet. There was no official translation everyone was used to, which made it easier, if you can believe it.

[sky]

Very interesting post. I can relate to a lot of this, having spent time in both English and Japanese-language fandom. It's really frustrating sometimes trying to bridge the cultural gap, especially when both sides tend to make value judgements about the other (i.e. much of Japanese fandom views foreign fans as rude, intrusive art thieves, whereas it often seems like a large part of English fandom [not my neck of the woods, but slash/Western media fandom, meta-writing fans, acafen, etc] regard Japanese fandom as unsophisticated, juvenile, uncaring about characterization, etc.) which they would realize are patently untrue if they were only able to read each others' languages. I can't count the number of times I've heard "Oh, but Japanese fandom doesn't write fanfic, do they?" from English-speaking fans, gah. It seems like German-language fandom is more off the radar for most English-fandom readers -- or at least it always has been for me, since I sadly don't know any German -- so it's interesting to hear about these sorts of cultural differences.

[rodo]

I actually found Japanese fanfic once (and was too lazy to read through it, I should, would be good for my abysmal Japanese skills). Do you have any links (and no, I'm totally not asking because I once thought I might want to write my thesis about Japanese fanwork culture)?

And the way I understood it, fanfic is just called doujinshi as well, or am I confusing something?

I also think that the language barrier between German and English isn't as high as the one between English/German and Japanese. I know I think Japanese is way more complicated than English, mainly because English is kind of like the dialect spoken where I grew up. But on the other hand, there are very few German source materials that people write English fic for. I linked to the Eskimo Kiss Project in reply to one of sabeth's posts, which is basically the fansubbing of a German soap, and that's a really rare thing to happen in English fandom.

[christycorr]

I know exactly what you mean. For me, the difference is also huge—I know a bazillion people in the Brazilian fandom IRL, and have had to deal with wank aftermath (oh, we have wank! Probably more so, comparatively, than in the international fandom) in person. Which, um, awkward! But yeah. Discussions are never the same, and the only Brazilian fandomers who have any idea of what's going on in the international fandom are those who take part in it.

This gap always shocked me in HP book aftermaths—the things people discussed were so insanely different! There's not much meta-fandom discussion here (that I'm aware of). There are essays on writing, characters and stuff, but I've never seen people discussing the fandom itself, which is something I've grown to adore in the international fandom.

To be honest, I chose to distance myself from the Brazilian fandom and focus on the international one for precisely this reason. I still follow the main events, and several people, but the lack of... oh, I don't know, you can't quite call someone out for using Godwin's, and everyone's either indifferent to wank or takes it way too seriously. Many of us may hate fandom_wank, but the fact is that it's places like that and metafandom that helped shape the HP fandom into what it is today—and without them, it would be a far more difficult place for everyone.

[rodo]

Well, at least calling someone out for using Godwin's definitely isn't a problem in German fandom.

(oh, we have wank! Probably more so, comparatively, than in the international fandom)

I think the international fandom (even though I don't like the term, because it's still dominated by American and British discourses) is not that wanky precisely because the wanking culture is controlled by metafandom (Where you can't be too wanky and have to back up your indignation with arguments), fandom_wank (where you're mocked for behaving like an idiot) and fanficrants (where you have to follow certain conventions when you blow of some steam).

It's really difficult for me to gauge the reactions of German fen in a discussion because they don't necessarily follow the same rules I do.

Here via Meta Roundup

[opengoal]

(posting this comment at DW so that your comments are in one place)

Finally someone is writing about the experience of a bilingual fan! :) As a bilingual fan myself (English & Chinese), I just want to say I can’t agree with you more on many of your points.

I love the abundance of meta in the English fandoms. Except for Gundam, I haven’t seen much meta on the source books/media in the Chinese fandoms. There are rants on BL/yaoi, cracks about fanfic tropes or being a fangirl but in-depth analyses of the source materials or fic writing genres/trends are hard to find.

And yes, I think the on-line platforms are an important factor for the different landscapes of the English fandom and fandoms of other language communities. Despite its flaws, LJ is really conducive to meta and discussions. Its comment threads make discussions easy to follow and the friending and community features help people of different fandoms mix. The Chinese fandoms I’ve come across are also rather too balkanized to have places for criticism of fandom or fanworks as there isn’t a Chinese version of LJ where people of different fandoms may mix, and personal blogs/site and single-fandom/pairing sites/discussion boards seem to predominate. Of course there are the comic markets which are held several times a year. But if all you do there is buying and selling doujinshi and you only talk to the people you already know, that can’t generate that much meta discussion, can it?

Straddling across the two fandoms, I too felt I had developed a sort of split personality because the two fandoms have norms that require me to behave quite differently, e.g. the strong divide between Sam/Dean and Dean/Sam fans in the Chinese fandom means that I have to walk on eggshells when talking about them and double-check who’s top and who’s bottom in every fic I translate and, as you’ve mentioned, the English fandoms do have a very obvious hierarchy with lurkers seen as freeloaders (whereas doujinshi writers/artists don’t really expect any responses apart from sales).

Besides the difficulty in switching between the norms, simply keeping up with both communities is not an easy task either, especially when fandom migration in manga/anime can be so fast. After Harry Potter and LOTR (which were the two great convergence points of the Chinese fandoms and the English fandoms), it has become increasingly difficult to stay in both worlds as they migrate to different directions. I feel compelled to follow the migration on the Chinese side because of my RL friends but I also enjoy the online English fandoms so much I follow them to the TV shows too. The compartmentalization was driving me crazy. After finally finding some Chinese-language fandoms of US TV shows on-line, I feel a little bit less schizophrenic but as media fandom is such a minority in the Chinese community I feel compelled to participate more actively than in English fandoms where it’s possible to sit back and just listen in. This brought me face to face to the cultural differences between the two communities which I’d only observed as a bystander, because, without artistic talent or the confidence to write TV/Real Person-based fanfics, the only ways I can contribute are to participate in discussions and to translate.

Re: translations, I envy your German fandom for having meta on translation issues. While the Chinese fandoms are phenomenal in fan-translating and fan-subbing (the last Harry Potter books translated within weeks of publication and anime episodes often hard-subbed within one or two hours of airing in Japan), not many fans are willing to comment on the fan translations (as opposed to commercial ones) probably because of no one want to endanger the supply lines.

And I suspect the ratio of English to German fan translation vs the other way round may be quite similar to that of the commercial stuffs like TV shows and novels – after all, how often do you see a German show subbed or dubbed in English, fan or otherwise (Verbotenen Liebe excepting)?

Re: Here via Meta Roundup

[rodo]

after all, how often do you see a German show subbed or dubbed in English, fan or otherwise (Verbotenen Liebe excepting)?

I mentioned Alles Was Zählt (another gay soap opera) above and there seems to be an Australian TV channel that airs subbed German shows. I suspect the ratio is even worse for Chinese media. I only know of a couple of subbed C-Dramas.

Besides the difficulty in switching between the norms, simply keeping up with both communities is not an easy task either, especially when fandom migration in manga/anime can be so fast.

I don't know, I've been pretty resistant when it comes to that. Which is why I actually wrote German fanfic about canons that weren't translated yet, and since most popular American shows are aired here sooner or later, I can actually count on people at least having heard of what I'm talking about.

Warning: rambling.

[solesakuma]

... Being exiled from Spanish fandom, my experience really mirrors yours! The non-LJ based thing, for example. And media fandom in Spanish is new, fandom started with Saint Seiya, not with Star Trek.
Currently, my flist is mostly hispa-fans who are only the anglofandom because... well, Spanish fandom sucks. Many of them actually started in anglofandom, unlike me.
However, ther might be difference because Spanish fandom is probably much more multi-national than German fandom. [ie., Spanish fandom = Spanish speaking fandom]
And I really , really want the Archive of Our Own to take off in non-English fandoms too. I mean, FF.net did, so...

Re: Warning: rambling.

[(Anonymous)]

I think both the Spanish and the German fandom have so much in common because they are both "Western" and fairly large. And the multinationality of German fandom is often disregarded because most people think German = Germany, which is where most of us come from, but there's Austrians, Swiss, Belgian, Italian and Danish people too. Of course, still not as multi-national as Spanish, but not as mono-cultural as would be expected either.

[ratcreature]

The only way I'm in German language fandom is offline comic fandom (conventions and collecting and such) and that seems really quite similar to English mainstream comic fandom (rather than comic fanfic fandom I mean, that is like media fandom). And that is of course an entirely different aspect of fandom, and also mostly guys.

When I joined online fandom in 1997/98 it seemed to be all in English so I went there, and to me it seemed more that it was international fandom that I joined, with English as lingua franca. There were certainly plenty other Germans around, and people from other European countries too. Which was quite useful in the early days for me for tape trading, back when I wanted to get my hands on the original sources before there was high speed internet. It's much easier to get stuff sent from other Germans, or from the Netherlands, Denmark or Finland than from the US. So when I traded tapes it was with other Europeans I met in English language fandom.

I jsut never looked for fandom in German, because the English language community worked well enough for me. And doing fandom in two languages at the same time just seems a lot of hassle. I was never too worried about having to use English. Not only did mine become better over time, but also some native speakers' ability to write coherently is so bad that I'd have to try really hard to achieve that level of incomprehensible, second language or not. And it's not like writing in German is any easier. Punctuation hates me (or I punctuation, I guess) no matter the language.

Also, if the community you mean is heavy on the Japanese sources that explains why I never really ran into it. I despise manga style with a burning passion when it comes to comics, so I never go near that part of fandom in any language.

[rodo]

some native speakers' ability to write coherently is so bad that I'd have to try really hard to achieve that level of incomprehensible, second language or not.

Honestly, the stuff that sometimes ends up on fanficrants and that gets blamed on ESL speakers? I don't think most of us could even dream of writing like that.

Also, if the community you mean is heavy on the Japanese sources that explains why I never really ran into it.

Not as much anymore. Harry Potter became quite popular, as did Twilight and there are definitely some popular TV shows now. But the German Harry Potter fandom as I know it was heavily influenced by anime and manga fanfiction and fanart. That doesn't mean that there aren't any people who keep to the media fandom traditions in German, but I think they're a minority.

Here through metafandom.

[dracothelizard]

Wow, you know, I never actually bothered looking up fandom in Dutch, because a) I was quite happy with the English-language fandom and b) I didn't think there'd be many people in it. German has WAY more speakers than Dutch, so while Dutch does get its own place in the drop down menu on fanfiction.net, I don't know and don't expect there's a big Dutch-language fandom presence on the internet. Still, if there is, I can certainly imagine there's a difference between the two fandoms.

Re: Here through metafandom.

[rodo]

I think Dutch people are way better at learning and using foreign languages than Germans are, at least that was my impression when I was there.

I also assume the large number of German native speakers (who don't speak proper English) is a reason why the seperate fandom could develop at all.

reposting with correct HTML

[kaz]

This is really interesting! (Also, hi, are you doro_chan from FFR?) I'm one of the deserters - my native language is German, but I'm pretty much bilingual (learned English when I was five) and have never participated in German-speaking fandom. I occasionally poked my nose in, but, as one of the above comments put it, it made me feel all itchy. D: It actually really upsets me sometimes, re: the not being able to read or write in my own language issue... I think I've developed a sensitivity to my culture and loss thereof via living in the US as a kid and my doing all my internet-going in English really irks me. On the other hand, itchy. :(

*seufz*

Re: reposting with correct HTML

[rodo]

Yes, I changed my username about a year and a half ago when I wasn't active on LJ anymore and didn't want to bother. kazaera, I presume?

It actually really upsets me sometimes, re: the not being able to read or write in my own language issue...

I think that feeling is part of the reason why I still keep trying. Not the only one, but I feel that way because I read almost exclusively in English despite loving well written German so much. It's a bit like losing part of yourself, and I don't want to lose that part.

[yueni]

I'm here via metafandom, and I have to say that I am extremely intrigued that German fandom has people actually going out and translating English fanfiction. It makes me wonder why people don't translate German/French/Spanish/Chinese etc. fanfiction into English, but I think it could largely be because most participants in English fandom are monolingual, while participants in German fandom might be bilingual or at least have a decent grasp of both English and German.

I find it amazing and also intriguing, and should you decide to write on your musings about translating fics, I would be interested because I'm also interested in translation!

[rodo]

I think the simple reason why more fics are translated into German than into English is that the translators are generally German native speakers who don't feel competent enough to translate stories into English. And most English native speakers with good German don't really bother because there's enough goodfic in English anyway.

I don't know all that much about translation, really. I would have to put some serious work into that.

[dhobikikutti]

This is fascinating, thank you for sharing it. And I share some of your frustration, because I have never been able to find a bilingual fannish space to talk in Hindi about Bollywood etc.

Here through metafandom

[(Anonymous)]

I'm German, too, and I'm utterly fascinated because my fandom experience is very different. It might be because I do different fandoms each language - I did HP in German since I felt the German HP fandom was big enough to be fun (and since there was a good translation around! I don't think I'd do HP in German if the translation of HP was too crappy to be read). I do Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse in English since there's no German BSG fandom to speak of.

I wanted to do meta mostly in German because it's the language to do it in. I talk writing meta a lot, and I frankly write better stories in German than in English, and I'd feel very strange if I'd talk writing in English while messing up the occasional proposition. So, I wrote meta in German (all linked in my ff.net profile (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/718986/Trovia)). I didn't even enter the forums on ff.net (they didn't really exist then) and still, it worked out fine. I got a lot of feedback, and I had a lot of good discussions. I still get emails on that, and I still go on discussing, no matter I'm not in that fandom anymore. I also got an invite to a private message board at some point, where I also happily participated in writing and talking fandom meta for years. This board had been established because other people had felt there wasn't enough meta around. (it turned out to be full of homophobes, so I won't link it).

Since there's an English BSG fandom but not a German one, I occasionally translate to bring the squee to Germany (because somebody should!). I've never felt a need to talk translating in German. German is not the language that I feel I have to improve. I have, however, talked translating in English because the fellow translaters on my flist don't care either way, the people on my flist who learn German in school can provide a different POV on it, and it makes the writers of the original fic really happy (here's the LJ tag (http://trovia.livejournal.com/tag/translating+fic), if you'd like to come over). You describe doing it just the other way around.

I guess I don't regard fandom as something that happens upon me. It's something I make myself. If I miss something, I create it. As a consequence, I don't miss it so much when I really can't talk about something for a lack of background information (say, racefail). So, for me it was fascinating to read about this very different take on it. Thanks. :)

Trovia

Re: Here through metafandom

[rodo]

Hmm, ff.de does have 44 BSG stories, and I do watch the series occasionally. You definitely would have a bigger audience than the one fan who writes fanfic about old Dustin Hoffman films ;-)

I guess I don't regard fandom as something that happens upon me. It's something I make myself. If I miss something, I create it.

That's my approach too (I do write meta in German as well), but one person can only do so much. I'd love to know how you manage not to split yourself in two like I am.

(it turned out to be full of homophobes, so I won't link it)

Urgh. Not fun (but I'm curious anyway). What you describe also seems to be a fandom experience colored by personal websites and private boards, which I guess is hard to get into if you are shy and don't know any of the people involved. That's something I don't know much at all, in both English and German fandom. LJ is quite open (and DW too, it's not that hard to get an invite), and there's a lot of linking going on. Same with open forums like those on Animexx and ff.de. I think I prefer the relative openness and interconnectivity, which is why I never really got active on the more private websites.

Way too much navel gazing and rambling...

[thelana]

Somebody above mentioned AWZ, I'm kinda on the other side of it, I'm predominantly in the Verbotene Liebe fandom. It's actually a very odd situation.

Verbotene Liebe is a soap opera and it currently has both a cute guy gay storyline and a lesbian triangle storyline. Both the gay story and the lesbian story are subtitled on youtube. So it can get pretty fascinating that the German fans (who usually watch the entire 25 minutes show) and the non-German fans (who often know/understand the show only by these slices they get on youtube) often have very different perspectives.

For example, currently the gay storyline is in a bit of a storyline lull and the international fans take it a lot harder because this storyline is really their ony accesspoint while the German fans are often much more positive and zen because if there is no story or scene with the couple in an episode they knew why because they have seen the rest of the show.

The interesting thing to me is that at the moment the gay storyline part of the fandom is much more English than German (and especially was so in the beginning) and so the infrastructure is mostly English at this point. (the current situation is that the main message board is English but has a very active German All-In-One thread). Compared to that the lesbian storyline fandom at the moment is much more German focused (probably because the story is currently slow so there is again a bigger reward for people who watch the entire show while it's harder to follow for people who don't get the whole picture). There are some allowances made for English infrastructure (the board is in German but offers rarely used English subforums which were created recently).

One thing I found interesting is that in lesbian forums, the English side is so underdeveloped that the English speaking fans rather than talking amongst themselves hang out in the Spoiler or Episode Diskussion threads of the Germans and either post their thoughts in broken German or in English and repeatedly ask for clarification if they didn't understand something properly.

It might actualy slowly be happening in the gay couple part of the fandom too because at the moment with less storyline the German thread becomes almost more active than the general English area of the board and I know some people lurk just to see the pictures and try to follow the discussion. Sometimes they too like in the lesbian board post in there in English (especially Dutch fans who can read the German of the rest of the thread but don't feel secure enough to write it themselves).

Languagewise, I know when the storyline first took off a lot of people started learning German just because they liked the storyline/show so much and there were a lot of questions about German grammar. I know of at least some English/American fans who are at least fluent enough that they can grasp roughly what is going on even without subtitles and some do try to watch the entire episodes (and there is often a lot of pleading to subtitle entire episodes, but nobody is that loyal ;)). Ficwise I have gotten a few requests mostly for short phrases or terms of endearments people want to strew into the story.

Fictionwise so far all the lesbian fic has been written in German, none in English except one of the German authors translating some of her stories. Meanwhile most of the gay couple fic is written in English, though there has been more German fic recently. But I have made the experience that the German fans are very reluctant to cross post their stories to the General archive (even though it has a German skin available so at least part of the links are in German) even when asked directly whether they wouldn't like to join.

My experience in the AWZ fandom is not that deep, but from what I can tell the German community is actually larger than the English livejournal based one but the two parts rarely interact with each other and both of their own communities and archives. :/


Another thing the German fandom lacks, at least in my opinion, is the presence on journaling platforms. The English fandom on LJ and its clones is enormous. The German part, at least as I remember it, is tiny. I know quite a few people are from Germany, but they don’t participate in anything German. Their journal entries are in English, so that they can communicate with their English speaking friends. After a while, many start writing fanfic in English as well. I am one of those people who really like journaling platforms, because they allow me more freedom than most archives (my main issues with them is generally linked to the fact that I am not free to do as I like), and I generally like reading other peoples’ journals and the flist makes it so much easier to find all the new fic you’re interested in than combing through all the pages of an archive. I like the sense of community as well.


This is an intensely fascinating point and it would be very interesting to see if there was a German only (or rather German in infrastructure, buttons etc) journalling system.

There even is a word for readers like that: “Schwarzleser”. It’s a term that has its origin in the term “Schwarzfahrer” (literally black passenger – meaning someone who takes a train or bus without paying) and “Leser”, the German word for reader. I don’t think the English fandom has developed a term for that yet.

Well, there is "lurker" but it seems a lot more affectionate term and people seem to have sympathy for lurker behavior in the English/livejournal fandom.

Forgot to add/2nd attempt

[thelana]

I too am somebody who does their journal in English only. Actually, for a long time I used to hide my nationality/real mother tongue because I guess part of me was afraid that my opinions woudn't be taken seriously if people found out that I wasn't watching the episodes in real time with them. That my voice didn't count because I could never contribute to American viewership.

It was actually a huge eyeopener when I realized that a lot of famous authors or metawriters were actually "secret Germans/German-speakers". (I'm Austrian btw) Ok maybe not secret, but so that you didn't know immediately because everbody seems almost flawlessly good in English when they write (at least from my own ESL reader perspective).

I have to say I have never looked for German fandom unless the source material was German and I knew it was unlikely that it would have spread out into English fandom (Verbotene Liebe, Karl May).

I'd like to say that I prefer seeking out the fandom/fanfic in whatever language is the original one but then again, my Hindi movies fandom is mostly English (though I do have a German board there as well) and I assume the same would be if I ever sought out a Japanese/Chinese/Korean fandom.

I have had some interesting discussions with non-German speakers about their insecurities in writing for VL when they don't "hear" the original dialog and only work from the translations. It was actually quite fascinating (though probably because I was never really into any of the Anime or Dorama fandoms, so those kind of problems were actually quite new to me).

[kino]

(Here from metafandom)

As a 'bilingual' fan myself(as in I started learning English at about the same age as you did) I found this really interesting. Lately I've considering getting into Finnish fandom, but my experiences have been pretty similar to yours. On the one hand I want more Finnish fannish friends(it would be really nice to have someone you could meet up with and talk about fandom to in RL every now and then!), but on the other hand Finnish fandom culture frustrates me. (And as I belong to a Swedish-speaking linguistic/cultural minority, I often feel like an outsider in the first place.)

I often get the feeling that Finnish fandom is behind English-speaking fandom in many aspects. Like there's a few years delay before things reach the Finnish forums. And it only gets worse when so many Finns are participating only in the English speaking part of fandom.

I hadn't really considered this before...

And because I forgot to add this before I pressed post

[kino]

I always feel a bit weird communicating exclusively in English with people whose mother tongue is the same as either of mine, ie Finnish or Swedish. It feels...awkward somehow.

[yvi]

Oh yes, agreed with all that you wrote here.

I was a part of the German-speaking X-Files fandom for a few years (reading, writing and translating), I think from 2002-2005 and while it was in parts lovely and I met many nice people it was really very different from the way I now participate in fandom. There was, for example, a divide between those that read fanfics in English and those that didn't. Fandom was way smaller and thus you didn't have any real disagreements - you would constantly run into those people afterwards.

And yes, the fanfic quality was also worse. The fanfic themes were much less diverse and since many of the older German fans dabbled in the English-speaking fandom the quality just couldn't be as high as in the Emglish-speaking fandoms, where you meet people from all age-ranges, some with more than dozen years of writing/discussion experience.

[rodo]

I wouldn't say that German fanfic generally has a lower quality. For one, I think it depends on the fandom (don't know much about XF). And on the age of the writers and how prevalent beta-reading is. I also often only find interesting English fanfic via reclists nowadays, which is a problem because I don't know of any German reclists that would help me find good German fic.

And I think I'm even more picky when it comes to German fic. Not so much when it comes to the story, it's the style I'm really concious about, and many writers just hate it when a beta tells them that their style could be better.

Re: Here through metafandom.

[dracothelizard]

I think it's because we pretty much have to as we're a small country surrounded by bigger countries like France, Germany and the UK.

And of course German tv is all about dubbing foreign shows rather than subtitling them like the Dutch, which I think also helps a lot in learning a language. While the Dutch do dub some things, it's usually cartoons like Pokemon, where kids watch who can't quite read well/quickly enough to follow it.

[magic_at_mungos]

Here from metafandom. I'm English, so I came into the English speaking fandom first. And some of the my friends who don't have English as a first language have commented when seeing the canon (TV show or books) translated that the translation can be completely rubbish at times.

SO I don't know whether that has an effect on fandomers who don't speak English as a first language or whether it just emphasises it.

Plus if I thought my written German was up to it, I'd try to participate but my grammar fails! :)

[rodo]

Yes, sometimes the translations are completely rubbish. And sometimes they're not, but watching/reading the original is always so much better (believe me, there are some Germans who will tell you that every translation sucks and that you should only read/watch the original version). I've even seen people tell others to read the English version despite the fact that these people would have only been able to read the book with a dictionary and much time on their hands. Which most people won't do just for fun.

Not to mention the fact that spoilerphobes could never be part of English fandom unless they watched/read the English source because it often takes years until something is aired/published in Germany as well (if it is at all).

I know it's a problem for some people as well to watch something in one language and to write a fanfic in the other. I don't usually have much of a problem with that as long as I can research the German terms for canon specific words like "Extendable Ears" or if there's no translation my readers are familiar with and I can be creative.

(It's nice to hear native English speakers here as well, I think you're the second who commented.)

[tez]

(Here via metafandom)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts - I can relate, to a certain extent, as I have been involved in online fandom since '99/2000, but while I started off in Italian communities (mailing lists, message boards, monofandon fic archives), I later gradually migrated into English speaking fandom (mainly the lj-based one) and almost totally abandoned the Italian one.

So in all honesty, I can't tell whether things have changed since, but Italian fandom as I knew it was much more fic-centered, with less emphasis on the meta, and I can't think of any panfandom community à la Livejournal. Sure there are multifandom fic archives, but they are more akin to the ff.net model (and get sporked consequently, although sporking/snarking is less tolerated than in the English fandom from what I see).

In a nutshell, I've preferred to stick with the English speaking fandom because it offered a more varied experience. At the same time, though, it still isn't my whole experience; in the English fandom I'm better known as a fanartist, while in the Italian one most of my feedback comes from fanfic. Which I don't write in English as a general rule because, while I can cut myself some slack so long as journaling goes, I just don't feel that I master the language enough to write ~prose~ in it.

All in all, I guess there will always be a bit of "split personality" issues going on when you're active in bilingual fandoms - not to mention bicultural: there are likely to be references and jokes that are either lost on you or on the English speaking majority because of your different cultural backgrounds. Minor things, yeah, but that still set non English speakers apart at least a little bit.

[rodo]

lenija already mentioned the bicultural aspect that comes to play in discussions on race, for example, because the German discourse on racism is very different from the American one. I generally try my best to learn everything I can about the American/British aspects, but it gets really tricky when I try to explain the discourse I'm used to because I either can't explain them very well or the person I'm talking to isn't recognising that I'm talking about a different discourse/culture at all.

I also think it's really interesting that I've had tons of comments (it's a bit overwhelming, really) from people all over the world here, and that all our experiences are somehow similar (funnily enough, it's other Germans who disagree the most). I'm kind of curious how English native speaker view this discussion, but so far, only two spoke up.