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Fan Canon, Memes, and Mr. Darcyâs Wet Shirt
ZOE
Dear Mr Darcy we donât mean to be curt, but we only want to see you in a wet, white shirt.
âSense and Spontaneity, âDear Mr Darcy,â YouTube
Fans want to be involved. They attend cons, do cosplay, write fanfictionâthey seek out more of the story even when there is no more official story out there. So much of fan interaction is the creation of material: from theories (scholarship) to costumes (cosplay) to art (changing medium). When fans come together, they create a new type of community with its own rules and that creates its own content. Sometimes these communities are run by Big Name Fans (BNFs),1 and sometimes these communities have existed for so long that there are really hundreds of small communities that coexist within the larger space. For Austen, the latter is true while encompassing the former; after all, there have been fans of Austen and her work since there were works to be fans of, and after over two hundred years, the introduction of libraries, mass-produced books and printing houses, radio, movies, television, and the internet, there are hundreds of ways to interact with Austenâs texts. But fans want more. They want to be the creator. And so they (well, we) have taken the text into their own hands.
To be a creator, fans must create new material that is analogous to the canon material. By creating fan canon (fanon), communities (or sometimes BNFs) rise to that equivalency; fanon can become so well accepted that some fans donât even know itâs not from the original text, and sometimes creators even work it into later, actual canon material.2 Pilgrimages offer fans the experience of physically becoming a creator by allowing fans to experience firsthand the true materials the creator usedâAustenâs writing desk, Colin Firthâs white shirtâand therefore become closer to the canon material. On top of the physical closeness, fans can prove their level of fannishness by lording it over other fans that only they have been to the true location, or touched the true material, or been in contact with the real creator.3 (The hidden references called âeaster eggsâ often serve much the same purpose, a process of testing other fans that is often called âgatekeeping.â) And, of course, fans can take canon material and twist it. Although fanfiction is a large part of reimagining canon material, the internet has provided a more compact way: memes. By adapting a currently popular meme to fit a particular fandom, fans remix canon material and create miniaturized adaptations,4 allowing new fans to understand the canon via proxy.
Fanon can be a multilayered thing, spanning many fans across generations, or it can be a simple concept that takes a fandom by storm and is never altered. Within media fandom there is a lot of fanon that revolves around the concept of an actor in some way becoming the character they portray. Tony Stark and Robert Downey Jr. being the âsame personâ is a common idea that has leaked from being a joke to becoming a part of fanfiction and Real Person Fic (RPF). Chris Evans, who portrays Captain America, has been called by his fictional superhero name in major media outlets,5 as well as by fans. This crossing of the streams between personhood and fictional portrayal can deeply influence an actorâs career, as fans hold tight to the idea that a certain actor is their fictional portrayal.6 Within Austen canon something very similar has happened, but along with the fanon becoming the conflation of actor and character, a very specific scene was added in one adaptation and has become the epitome of fan canon within the fandom. Weâll explore this moment and track this piece of fanon from its inception to the present day and its immersion into almost canon material, as well as where it leads us as we move through to gatekeeping and remixing.
Fans are smart people. They can figure out the twist in TV shows before they happen (such as purgatory in Lost or most of the twists in Westworld), they run fan-made wikis that creators turn to for reminders, and they create works that can be even more powerful than the original. But creators need to be explicit about what the world is and how it operates for fans to be able to do any of this. With muddied distinctions fans are kept out of the sandbox, unsure of what counts and what doesnât count. They canât create fanon, let alone memes and other fan-made content.
Following the rip-roaring success of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the company Pemberley Digital announced that they would tackle perhaps the most difficult-to-adapt Austen novel, Emma. The adaptation placed Emma Woodhouse as a lifestyle coach, Harriet as her deeply anxious assistant, and Mr. Knightley (Alex instead of George in this adaptation) as her business partner. James Elton became someone running for state senate, and his eventual wife crossed over from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and was Caroline Lee (LBDâs version of Caroline Bingley). Emma ran a fashion blog and answered Q&As about her lifestyle coaching, the characters had social media accounts, and it was presented as the same sort of transmedia experience as LBD, but it immediately felt different. The Austen adaptations surge in the 1990s and 2000s produced more than one Emma adaptation, high-waisted dresses and well-trimmed breeches and all, but Clueless was really the only adaptation to hit the nail on the head in terms of acknowledging the type of person Emma Woodhouse truly is: a busybody who truly believes that she is better than anyone else. Austen uses ironic language (we talk about this later in chapter 7) to indicate that the novel doesnât take Emma too seriously, but the self-seriousness of adaptations outside of Clueless can make for difficult watching without this important aspect. Emma Approved fell into this same trap, but taking Emma Woodhouse too seriously was just the start of the adaptationsâ problems: they didnât create any in- and out-world distinctions.
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was completely in-world; all questions asked were things that the characters could see, all videos that existed on the channel were things that other characters could be watching, and they did. Q&A videos involved real fans playacting and asking questions as a part of the story, and the characters interacted with each other in real time on Twitter and Tumblr. Emma Approved appeared to be the same style of adaptation on the surface: Emma had cameras installed in everyoneâs office and collected footage all the time (apparently for a future video about how amazing she and her company are). Yet the characters didnât seem to know that the videos were being released, even if they knew that they were being filmed at their desks. Rather than bringing the audience in or excluding them completely, Emma Approved chose a middle ground. The videos for the series, which were released on a schedule, were supposedly based on the footage collected by Emma but cut together and released by . . . well, it was never clear. The other characters, it turns out, couldnât see the videos, and they didnât exist âin-world,â only âout-world,â meaning that only the audience could see them. Yet the videos were posted on Emmaâs Twitter and Tumblr. Q&As became increasingly confusing as people submitted questions in the same style that they had in Lizzie Bennet Diaries, asking about the story, playing along, only to have their questions ignored because it turns out that the characters wouldnât have known that those things were in the public eye.
Fans can make a story out of anything, but they need structure. When a story is unclear, fans are going to fade away; with so many different types of media vying for attention, it can be easy to drop even a beloved story if things donât make sense anymore.
It quickly became clear that fans were having this exact problem. The producers attempted to clear up the issue by talking through a few of these fan questions in their FAQ page (as of January 2018 still not updated): âQ: Are Emmaâs Videos âin worldâ? A: . . . But the short answer is no. Every video or reference to a video is out of world.â7 and expanded on the answer on a special page that was needed to make sure that the borders between our world and their world were made clear:
⢠Emma knows she is recording herself.
⢠Emmaâs friends and clients are aware that Emma is recording many things.
⢠They are not aware that their videos are being posted on the internet, because to them they are not for public consumption.
⢠Emmaâs public channel and Pemberley Digitalâs channel are out of world to her and the other characters.
⢠Basically, everything thatâs a video OR that is a piece of social media referencing a video is out of world. Everything else is in world.8
In some ways, this cleared things up for fans, but even Bernie Su, head writer and showrunner, had difficulty creating an understandable breakdown. For instance, in Emma Woodhouseâs world there are no public videos; these have been put together byâour world? But in the FAQ Bernie Su writes that âEmmaâs co-workers and friends (Knightley, Harriet, Annie, Ryan, etc.) do not know that there are public videos of them,â9 but he has already explicitly stated that the videos, any video at all, is out-world, meaning that in the world of Emma Approved there arenât any videos anyway, so there wouldnât be any public videos.
This may seem like making mountains out of molehillsâafter all, at a certain point an audience member who has read the FAQ (although they would have to specifically seek it out rather than giving up on a confusing premise) can say, âI donât get why this works the way it does, but I can roll with it.â But I, for one, never got to that point. Even though TV shows such as The Office and Parks and Rec had popularized the mockumentary (mock documentary) style of filming, this was clearly something different, as the characters didnât know that this was going to be released. Every time a character would acknowledge the camera I was pulled out of the fiction: Why would Emma Woodhouseâs Twitter have a tweet about a new video if they werenât for public consumption? When were these videos being released? Who edited them? Why didnât her employees sue her if she eventually released this footage? Audiences and readers ignore plot holes and suspend disbelief for hundreds of problems in literature, but at a certain point the audience can no longer do so. The producers were clearly aware of this, providing longer answers than the one above (that is, the TL;DR10 version), yet fans still had issues with following and buying the story. LA Weekly interviewed some fans and one fan put it perfectly, âSure, thereâs the main site with the update of the week, but by going through it I feel like it breaks the illusion of reality, which is really my favorite partâ (emphasis mine).11 This break in the reality of the story removes so much of the ironic components.
When fans canât understand how a story fits together they donât create fan content. There is fan content for Emma Approved (93 works on Archive of Our Own, for instance), but compare that to the 1,067 listed under Lizzie Bennet Diaries.12 These arenât quite equivalencies, as Emma Approved never reached the popularity heights that The Lizzie Ben...
