“Bandom Ate My Face”: The Collapse of the Fourth Wall in Online Fan Fiction

Abstract

Studies of real-person fan fiction (RPF) often focus on how RPF exploits the flexibility of celebrity identity. Yet social media have introduced an unprecedented level of proximity between fan fiction communities and their subjects. This article focuses on “bandom,” a fan fiction genre focused on American rock bands like My Chemical Romance. Bandom thrived on the constant contact of social media, but some participants became troubled by their subjects' behavior, particularly some musicians' acts of theatrical homoeroticism termed “stage gay.” Such controversies, coupled with the constant online presence of bandom's subjects, threatened to overwhelm the flexibility that RPF often requires.

Notes

^[1] Bandom is also sometimes referred to as “bandfic” or “bandslash.”

^[2] The full survey results are available in Hagen, Fandom.

^[3] It should be noted that popslash had faded in popularity by the time that Lance Bass of ^*NSYNC came out publicly; otherwise that event might have generated more lasting and visible controversy for music slash participants.

^[4] Responders to this blogger's question generally expressed anxiety over writing non-white characters, as the overwhelming majority of bandom authors and readers identify as white. The responses sparked intense debate over why female authors felt empowered to write from the point of view of gay male characters but not characters of a different race. Although this particular blog post has been quiet for years, the issue remains.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ross Hagen

Dr Ross Hagen is a lecturer in musicology at Utah Valley University. He received his PhD and MM degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his BA from Davidson College. Hagen's research interests include music and ritualism, music fan cultures, underground music scenes, and 20th/21st-century avant-garde music. He has contributed to the books Metal Rules the Globe (Duke UP, 2011), Hardcore Punk and Other Junk (Lexington, 2014), and The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures (2014). He has also been published in Horror Studies (2013), the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and the Encyclopedia of American Music and Culture and has presented papers at national meetings of the Popular Culture Association, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is also a composer and bassist specializing in electro-acoustic music, free improvisation, and extreme metal. E-mail: [email protected]