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

[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.

[sky]

Doujinshi can refer to fanfic if it's in the form of a printed work, but primarily it refers to the printed matter/comic/fanzine itself -- like, on Japanese sites you'll often see a list of printed doujinshi the the site maintainer has put out, and it might be described as, say, "Doujinshi containing fanfic and several pages of manga" or somesuch. In Japanese, fanfic is mostly referred to as 小説 (shousetsu, usually translated as 'novels', although many are the length of what we'd think of in English as a short story). You sometimes also see it called ノベル, SS (whether that's short for shousetsu or the English 'short story' I've never been sure XD;), 短編／長編 (for short stories/long stories respectively), 二次創作 (niji sousaku or 'secondary works' -- this can refer to manga/fanart/etc. as well as fic), and probably a couple other terms I'm forgetting... Occasionally the English 'fanfiction' is also bandied about as ファンフィクション or ファンフィック, though Japanese fandom seems to understand the term as a synonym of 'niji sousaku' rather than referring exclusively to stories/writing. JP fandom also has some categories of fic like ドリーム小説 that don't really have equivalents in English fandom.

Just as an example, here's one fic site I enjoy; she primarily writes CrossKomui, a fairly rare pairing of the D.Gray-man fandom.

Personally, I find German much more unfathomable than Japanese, but then I've spent over a decade of my life studying the latter while barely knowing anything about the former. 8D; I don't think Japanese is nearly as difficult as many people make it out to be, but it does seem like that perceived difficulty contributes to the barrier between English and Japanese fandom. Of course, again it doesn't help that each side has some bad prejudices and misconceptions about the other side either. I think many Japanese fans are happy not to have many non-Japanese participating in their online activities, because art theft by English-speaking fandom is so prevalent and is such an affront to Japanese fandom's idea of proper etiquette -- everybody lives in fear of having their stuff stolen, it seems.

[rodo]

♥

I think the term 二次創作 is really interesting, because the emphasis is not on the "fan" but on them being derived from something else.

And yes, Japanese is nowhere near as difficult as people make it out to be, but I had shitty teachers and then they thought that two years at university would be enough to let us read Mishima! (Seriously, Akutagawa in old fashioned Japanese was easier than Mishima's ramblings about culture.) Plus: I'm still thoroughly unable to write or speak Japanese and I tend to miss the subject of the sentence. Kanji are the easiest part of Japanese (it's when they don't use kanji when it's getting complicated).

I think many Japanese fans are happy not to have many non-Japanese participating in their online activities, because art theft by English-speaking fandom is so prevalent and is such an affront to Japanese fandom's idea of proper etiquette

That always makes me wonder how English fans would react of it would happen to them. I know I was a bit put out when someone copied one of my poems and posted it in a forum (found it while googling my name), and I think most people would prefer being asked before someone uses their stuff.

[sky]

I know what you mean... the hypocrisy of it drives me mad. English-speaking fandom gets up in arms at any accusation of fanfic plagiarism, but 99% of art-theft is handwaved as 'oh, but they only borrowed it because they like it so much, they don't mean anything malicious'. Whether they meant to hurt feelings or not, I think a lot of fans don't realize just how hugely hurtful such an act is under the mores of Japanese fandom. From their point of view it makes foreign fandom look pretty crass -- not only do we borrow images from the original work to decorate our sites and blogs, we don't respect the creator's absolute right to control who sees her work and where it's posted. I think part of it, maybe, is that English-speaking fans aren't aware of just how much emphasis Japanese fandom places on privacy and secrecy. English fans talk about their pairings in public even outside conventions, post their porn fic to public spaces where lots of people can read it, and generally celebrate a culture of openness. Whereas Japanese fans often do their best to hide that they're fans at all, let alone yaoi writers/artists; they post their stories and art to personal sites where they control everything about how it's presented and who can access it; they go to great lengths to keep from being indexed in search engines; and far from posting porn in public, many will make you hunt around for secret hidden links or even make you personally email them for a password before you can look at their more sexual work (which in many cases won't even go beyond some mild nudity and kissing). Not to say that English-speaking fans don't worry about their privacy, because obviously we do, but I think Japanese fandom's obsession with flying under the radar and not letting the 'mainstream' know of its existence is several orders of magnitude beyond what most English fans are prepared to understand.

[rodo]

Hey, a lot of English language artists are rather peculiar about who uses their art for what as well.

Whether they meant to hurt feelings or not, I think a lot of fans don't realize just how hugely hurtful such an act is under the mores of Japanese fandom.

I don't think they even consider that, to be honest. I think most people's thoughts just go "Hey, cool picture ... hmm, person is a Japanese, they won't notice what I did anyway *snatch*". After all, the language barrier is also a kind of protection for the English speaking fans in this case. Who are the Japanese supposed to complain to anyway? And in what language?

I think English fans prefer to protect their privacy by using pseuds and favouring non-personal websites that don't have their names attached to them. I don't know how Japanese fans handle it (I just assumed they used pseuds as well).

[ratcreature]

It's the same bizarre etiquette disconnect that causes people to have no trouble to use images they "found" on the internet (whether photos, art, textures whatever) without any attribution, but if something like two sentences are copied and adapted for a punch line when it is text, it counts as "plagiarism". It drives me mad in comic fandom that so many people do icons from comic sources and don't even list the original artist, when there is no way to tell who did the work or to find it in the masses of comics.

I tried to track down artists from things I've seen in icons and the icon users didn't even know. The only one credited was the person who cropped the icon, and going back to them, they told me they "found" the image via google.

I've had people actually assume plenty of time that my icons come from somewhere, rather than being drawn by me, because they are so used to see art just taken, whereas I thought it was obvious they were using my drawings, what with me not crediting anyone else!

[opengoal]

It's the same bizarre etiquette disconnect that causes people to have no trouble to use images they "found" on the internet (whether photos, art, textures whatever) without any attribution, but if something like two sentences are copied and adapted for a punch line when it is text, it counts as "plagiarism".

Maybe it's because (1) texts are much easier to track down on the internet so more authors/original posters make noise about the copying/adapting, which in turn heightens people's sensitivity towards it, (2) there are more text producers than image producers in the English fandom – majority rules, so to speak, and (3) commercial images from the TV or films companies or the media are customarily appropriated without crediting whereas published books/texts are often quoted with proper crediting so it’s not just a fandom disconnect between texts and images really.

[ratcreature]

I don't think it's fandom specific either, that's why I said "people" rather than "fans". I mean, it is extremely rare to see say a LOLcat that says where the cat photo came from, and I bet not all of the pet photos used for LOLcats were released into the public domain. So it's ubiquitous.

It's still seriously annoying me, mostly because it is so hard to track down the original artist when you like something and want to see more of their stuff, but nobody bothered to credit them.

[franzeska]

Agreed! I often wonder where people's icons came from and their icon pages rarely say. (Though I don't usually ask, so maybe more people know than cite, but still.)

I had no idea you'd drawn your icons. They're awesome! I really appreciate it when people have distinctive icons because I can never remember anyone's online handle for more than five seconds, and I find it endlessly confusing when like five people on my flist use different versions of the same screenshot from some show I've never seen. *cough*parasol!KayliefromFirefly*cough*

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I also identify people with icons, and obviously I'm very fond of consistent and recognizable ones myself. I find them especially useful in journal and comment page styles that put poster names in unexpected places or away from the icon.

I had no idea you'd drawn your icons.

Heh, hearing this kind of thing, I always wonder where people who have seen a couple of my icons think I could possible get them from, if I wasn't drawing them myself to match my fandoms and moods.

[franzeska]

I don't think I'd ever thought about it, to tell the truth. A lot of people do have about 400 icons from a single web comic (not drawn by them), so it's not out of the question that they could be from something, but looking at your icon page now, I see what you mean. (I mainly remember the WTF type ones, not the fandom-specific ones, probably because of where I've read your comments.)

[franzeska]

My favorite was this one site that had a teeny weeny sentence at the bottom of the page saying something like "add the romanization of the characters in blah blah part of the page to the end of the URL to see the naughty stuff".

[sky]

Sorry for the double comment, but while I'm at it, here's another site you might find more interesting -- I've never read it so I don't know what's inside exactly, but this author has a Harry Potter section on her site, and she also seems to know some English.

I hesitate to provide a ton of links here because of the aforementioned art-stealing problem -- not that I think anyone here would be so crass, but still, a lot of Japanese fans hate to see their sites linked around on English websites at all.

[rodo]

Thanks.

I understand it if you don't want to hurt your Japanese fandom friends. How to the art thieves find the art anyway? Google?

[sky]

It varies, I think -- probably the majority of Japanese fansites take measures to avoid getting listed on normal search engines, but a few slip through the cracks here and there, and art thieves might find them that way. Also, most fandoms of any decent size have fandom-specific search engines where participants will list their sites so people inside the fandom can find each other. Once you've managed to find one of these for a given fandom, you're pretty much set, so I imagine many people looking for art use them as well.

[opengoal]

"Oh, but Japanese fandom doesn't write fanfic, do they?"

LOL~ And I often hear "westerners can't draw". Honestly I only rec manips to my Chinese friends now.

[franzeska]

But foreign fans are rude, intrusive art thieves! (O ho ho ho ho!)

Kidding! Kidding! But I have seen some really obviously unacceptable behavior from English-speaking fans who would never have taken without permission if they'd been dealing with an English-speaking fanartist. I mean, some fans do think it's ok to take any art from anywhere without permission, and I do understand that, but I find it interesting (and bad) that many English-speaking fans appear to treat English-speaking fanartists one way and professional manga artists and Japanese fanartists another.