By Jason McClain (@JTorreyMcClain)
Hi! It’s been a while. How are you? I’m fine. Now. After a month long mourning period that we now have to address even though it borders on the very edges of what borg.com talks about.
It’s sports. In particular, it’s Albert Pujols.
In fact it’s (censored)ing Al(censored)bert Poo(censored)holes (censored) (censored) chorizo-flavored (censored) (censored) pine-scented (censored) (censored) lump of (censored) (censored) stoat (censored).
I know, I know. It’s not like the old studio days for movies or the old times in the land of baseball where the “owners” could get the “workers” to act or play for however little they wanted or ban them entirely. It’s freedom. It’s the free market. It’s getting paid now what you deserved when you first made it big.
Doesn’t mean I’m not going to pout about it for a month. So there.
Since I write for this site it should be obvious that I’m not an owner. I’m a fan. I’m a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, science fiction, comic books, novels, thunderstorms, warm days at the beach, hikes in the mountains, sushi, large pizzas and tall brunettes. With respect to the Cardinals, I’m going to miss Pujols being a part of my team.
There you have the magic phrase. My team. Substitute “team” for any piece of entertainment: “TV show,” “movie,” “book series,” “comic,” etc. Once an artist has created a work, unless they don’t want to be paid, they release it to the public. At that point, each person that consumes the piece of art owns it in some way.
Maybe “owns” is a bit strong. How about “possesses”? Fans possess the work with their own connotations and meanings that are representative of their life up to that point.
What if I did the same for the Star Wars franchise? What if I asked you about the career of Harrison Ford and how would your answer be different if I asked you in 1989 compared to 2012? What if I asked you about the first movie you ever saw with your current significant other? How do you feel about that movie and the actors in it? What about the favorite TV show that you view with that special someone, once a week, when you sit close and enjoy the company of each other and those people on the screen in your living room? I’m sure each question to each person would get a very different response. Heck, some people might say that they wish Harrison Ford had done more movies like Regarding Henry. They’d be wrong, but they might say it.
Around the same time as Albert Pujols shot my heart through with a poison arrow (and you think sports fans aren’t just drama queens waiting to happen), I finished reading A Feast for Crows
How is there no Tyrion? Yes, I know, the next book, I read the epilogue, but still, Tyrion! Tyrion! I want my Tyrion! Waawaaaaaaaaa. You introduce about a thousand new characters to be subjects of chapters and no Tyrion? Waaaaaa. What about Brienne of Tarth! She’s about to get hanged. Are you going to kill everyone we love? (With Mr. George R. R. Martin, it could go either way – so I won’t put it as a definite that she is dead.) Come on! She can’t die. Waaaaaaaa.
I have no creative input into the series except for the consumption of it, if you can call imagining how the characters look, move and act in your mind as you read a creative act. (I do.) I possess the characters with my viewpoints, with my motivations and my love. I want to spend time with them. I don’t want to see them go. I don’t write fan fiction (yet) but it makes sense as a natural outgrowth of the fandom that consumers of art have.
I’m sure that compulsion for fan fiction is even worse when there’s no hope for further adventures after the lack of a conclusion. For the TV show Terriers (available to watch instantly on Netflix) I will never get to see anything further from Hank and Britt. Sure, after a few years, maybe the official people behind the series will get a movie like the folks from Party Down or maybe Netflix will reunite them to do the show again like for Arrested Development. I’m not holding my breath. The only thing I’ll hold my breath for is a return of Community. I still hope there will be three more seasons and a movie. But, I know there is a strong chance that it has already disappeared the same way as Jaye Tyler and Wonderfalls did.
Did you just notice what I did in those few paragraphs? I just jumped the gulf between reality and fiction. Is how I view Albert Pujols and Harrison Ford different than how I view Brienne or Hank Dolworth and Britt Pollack? Is getting weirded out by Tom Cruise after he jumps on a couch different from feeling a pang in your stomach when Peter Parker dies in Ultimate Spider-Man? I know none of those people personally and doubt I’ll ever meet them. Through media coverage of the real ones and the creative talents of writers and artists on the fictional ones, we feel we know them. We possess them with our viewpoint and they can enhance our love or betray it with each successive appearance in the public eye.
Artists may think that the possession is strange, but without it, without those strong connections they created in us, would we consume their art? Probably not. Do we throw a hissy fit when the values we’ve ascribed to their characters fall by the wayside as the artist creates a storyline that diverges in tone but makes them creatively happy? Absolutely. The artist gets to do whatever they want as that is the beauty of freedom. As a fan, I’m free to give my entertainment dollars to other people and leave it at that. Right or wrong, it’s how things work. We trust the good artists though and we will stay with them to see what they have in mind as long as they don’t do something idiotic like sign with the Anaheim Angels or air a show that focuses on tattoos and Bai Ling. Once we leave, we can find new things worthy of possession and maybe it will be the next best thing ever. Until we find that next best thing, we just have to be sure not to move from possession to attempted ownership as I think that would be called kidnapping and is illegal in all 50 states. But, is it ever tempting to try to drag Albert Pujols back to St. Louis.
