the people behind the characters
Aug. 2nd, 2021 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alreadyreadthatfanficA side-effect of getting into Chinese dramas (a grand total of two so far, The Untamed and Word of Honor) and following tumblrs that reblog the related content is unintentionally getting exposed to how cdrama fandom interacts with the actors and how actors interact with the fandom; including their own fans.
The thing is, my usual approach to the people making content - especially actors - is to studiously ignore them. In my mind, the cast was always put at the same level as the creators of the work - The Powers That Be with which you don't interact and they don't interact with us, and we can comfortably co-exist with plausible deniability. They do their Wholesome Publicity at the General Populace to sell the thing, while we can write our smutty fanfic in peace.
Mind, one of my formative experiences were the ripples of the "someone gave Sherlock cast a smutty fanfic to read in public" drama which, ouch. I can still feel the second-hand embarrassment a decade later.
This attitude is also why I personally never vibed with RPF, almost to the point where I would consider it a squick. It's probably because in my mind, I do not divorce the public persona from the real person in they way people do it when engaging in RPF. It's like using the real name is a magic invocation; it will always have me thinking that whatever the Public Persona is, it is a subset - or a fake decoy - of a Real Person, whom I do not know in any meaningful way, whose opinions and thoughts I cannot begin to speculate on, and subsequently I am supremely uninterested in.
All the discourse about relationship between the creator and the creation in the last few years aside (of the "can you enjoy HP if JKR is a TERF" variety), I had always very strong gut reaction when it comes to how far my comfort zone extended when it comes to creator interaction.
If I saw the author of my favourite book in the shop? I would ignore them.
If I went to library where the author is doing a signing and invites questions about the book? That's fine.
Am I interested in political leanings of the singer performing my favourite song of the week? Absolutely not.
Would I read an interview about what inspired the lyrics to the song - even if it's about their private life? Eh, probably.
The actors are in unique position, because they are a co-creators of the work and the character, they are highly visible and they can generate a lot of profit if they do the public tour right. Which makes me circle back to cdramas and weibo updates.
Seeing weibo updates on my dash was something which, or course, made me automatically hit the J key to skip the post, because it is precisely the type of content I do not want to interact with. This is the fun thing after spending a few years in one fandom and achieving the fine-tuned tumblr dash of people who post and reblog things which are almost entirely to my tastes (hello, Star Wars) and then branching out into a new one. As you are following new people, you get exposed to the type of stuff you didn't know about or avoided in the past, and you begin the fine-tuning anew.
But ah, the weibo updates. After I scrolled past, they made me pause and think about my own reaction.
Again, did I watch even one of these weibo updates? No. Did I read a post about the public reception to a show and the drama surrounding it? Absolutely. (Specifically, it was about how Word of Honor totally subverted expectations, getting really popular after a very "meh" response to casting and leaks and another one expanding on the casting and the surrounding drama).
There is a particular quote about one of the actors in the second post linked above that makes me vigorously chew on this topic:
"(...) he’s had at least two girlfriends before and he’s known for not performing fanservice with his costars."
I am looking carefully out of corner of my eye and I'm wondering why I have much stronger knee-jerk response to those weibo updates than to gifsets of Tom Hiddleston and that other actor discussing their characters in the new "Loki" show (I also scroll past these, just at slightly slower pace). Am I more inured to western actors and their rigmarole? I was in MCU fandom back in 2012, maybe Hiddleston is just old news to me?
There is plenty drama about personal lives of western stars and there is plenty of fanservice on tours (obviously MCU cast, and I vaguely remember people getting excited about the guys playing Magneto and Prof X in the XMFC). However, as I read that short post, the concept of having a personal life and not being enthusiastic about fanservice having a significant impact on the life of the actor is staggering me a bit. It seems to me that actors in cdramas - and probably kdramas too - are expected to promote not only their show, but also themselves (the other thing beside the weibo updates are ads photoshots and vids). It revealed to me that the position of idol (something I associated solely with boybands so far) and the position of actor might get merged into an unholy amalgamation together with being a model and influencer and youtube personality, and - it's too much. They just appear too accessible, and they seem to be obliged to be accessible to a very demanding fanbase which embodies the worst traits of an internet mob, with bonus real life mode.
And to think, this is China. People make light of their censorship, but at the end of the daybehind the Iron Curtain this is not really a joke, this is a very real regime. It's a mystery to me how the culture of actor-idol developed when it is such volatile and precarious position in light of the political climate in the country. I'm not gonna lie, I know very little about the intricacies of life in China. A the same time I am sitting next to several bookshelves full of old books I inherited from my parents; a lot of them are censored by communist government. I've got a great brick of an old Soviet encyclopedia, where there is no entry for "liberal democracy", but there is an entry for "bourgeois democracy", and it takes care to note that "due to class-based system, the rights and freedoms of the citizens in most cases exist only nominally". I might be projecting a bit.
This ended up in a different place from I would expect, but I think I answered my own question. My ideal of the fandom experience is one not infringed upon by creators, and in perfect world the reverse is also true: the creators, both in their work and life, are not imposed on by the fandom. But the work still has to have an audience, and the bigger fan engagement, the more profitable it is. What drives fan engagement? Fanservice. And if an actor has and cultivates an active fanbase for themselves, the more valuable they are as a resource for your show or film. Thus, the draw in not a character an actor plays, but the "real" person, the idol.
Consequently, the weibo update, and me, aggressively avoiding thinking about the implications of the upsetting behind-the-scenes workings of the idol culture.
The thing is, my usual approach to the people making content - especially actors - is to studiously ignore them. In my mind, the cast was always put at the same level as the creators of the work - The Powers That Be with which you don't interact and they don't interact with us, and we can comfortably co-exist with plausible deniability. They do their Wholesome Publicity at the General Populace to sell the thing, while we can write our smutty fanfic in peace.
Mind, one of my formative experiences were the ripples of the "someone gave Sherlock cast a smutty fanfic to read in public" drama which, ouch. I can still feel the second-hand embarrassment a decade later.
This attitude is also why I personally never vibed with RPF, almost to the point where I would consider it a squick. It's probably because in my mind, I do not divorce the public persona from the real person in they way people do it when engaging in RPF. It's like using the real name is a magic invocation; it will always have me thinking that whatever the Public Persona is, it is a subset - or a fake decoy - of a Real Person, whom I do not know in any meaningful way, whose opinions and thoughts I cannot begin to speculate on, and subsequently I am supremely uninterested in.
All the discourse about relationship between the creator and the creation in the last few years aside (of the "can you enjoy HP if JKR is a TERF" variety), I had always very strong gut reaction when it comes to how far my comfort zone extended when it comes to creator interaction.
If I saw the author of my favourite book in the shop? I would ignore them.
If I went to library where the author is doing a signing and invites questions about the book? That's fine.
Am I interested in political leanings of the singer performing my favourite song of the week? Absolutely not.
Would I read an interview about what inspired the lyrics to the song - even if it's about their private life? Eh, probably.
The actors are in unique position, because they are a co-creators of the work and the character, they are highly visible and they can generate a lot of profit if they do the public tour right. Which makes me circle back to cdramas and weibo updates.
Seeing weibo updates on my dash was something which, or course, made me automatically hit the J key to skip the post, because it is precisely the type of content I do not want to interact with. This is the fun thing after spending a few years in one fandom and achieving the fine-tuned tumblr dash of people who post and reblog things which are almost entirely to my tastes (hello, Star Wars) and then branching out into a new one. As you are following new people, you get exposed to the type of stuff you didn't know about or avoided in the past, and you begin the fine-tuning anew.
But ah, the weibo updates. After I scrolled past, they made me pause and think about my own reaction.
Again, did I watch even one of these weibo updates? No. Did I read a post about the public reception to a show and the drama surrounding it? Absolutely. (Specifically, it was about how Word of Honor totally subverted expectations, getting really popular after a very "meh" response to casting and leaks and another one expanding on the casting and the surrounding drama).
There is a particular quote about one of the actors in the second post linked above that makes me vigorously chew on this topic:
"(...) he’s had at least two girlfriends before and he’s known for not performing fanservice with his costars."
I am looking carefully out of corner of my eye and I'm wondering why I have much stronger knee-jerk response to those weibo updates than to gifsets of Tom Hiddleston and that other actor discussing their characters in the new "Loki" show (I also scroll past these, just at slightly slower pace). Am I more inured to western actors and their rigmarole? I was in MCU fandom back in 2012, maybe Hiddleston is just old news to me?
There is plenty drama about personal lives of western stars and there is plenty of fanservice on tours (obviously MCU cast, and I vaguely remember people getting excited about the guys playing Magneto and Prof X in the XMFC). However, as I read that short post, the concept of having a personal life and not being enthusiastic about fanservice having a significant impact on the life of the actor is staggering me a bit. It seems to me that actors in cdramas - and probably kdramas too - are expected to promote not only their show, but also themselves (the other thing beside the weibo updates are ads photoshots and vids). It revealed to me that the position of idol (something I associated solely with boybands so far) and the position of actor might get merged into an unholy amalgamation together with being a model and influencer and youtube personality, and - it's too much. They just appear too accessible, and they seem to be obliged to be accessible to a very demanding fanbase which embodies the worst traits of an internet mob, with bonus real life mode.
And to think, this is China. People make light of their censorship, but at the end of the day
This ended up in a different place from I would expect, but I think I answered my own question. My ideal of the fandom experience is one not infringed upon by creators, and in perfect world the reverse is also true: the creators, both in their work and life, are not imposed on by the fandom. But the work still has to have an audience, and the bigger fan engagement, the more profitable it is. What drives fan engagement? Fanservice. And if an actor has and cultivates an active fanbase for themselves, the more valuable they are as a resource for your show or film. Thus, the draw in not a character an actor plays, but the "real" person, the idol.
Consequently, the weibo update, and me, aggressively avoiding thinking about the implications of the upsetting behind-the-scenes workings of the idol culture.
