‘The dark side of Naomily’: Skins, fan texts and contested genres

Abstract

In 2009, Series 3 of the youth-focused British TV drama Skins won widespread praise from fans and critics for its handling of the coming out story of two teenage girls, Emily and Naomi – known in both fan and official discourse alike as ‘Naomily’. However, despite, the Skins' productions team's commitment to dialogue with their youth audience – deemed central to maintaining ‘brand values’ of authenticity and marked by the use of young scriptwriters, by attempts to draw on input from Naomily fans via interactive and collaborative opportunities, and by intertextual plays on the Naomily fan text aesthetic – fan reactions to the recently aired Series 4 have been mixed, leading to heated debate on discussion boards, (‘You've ruined it’) and resistant responses in fan texts. Focusing on genre as a contested site in representations of sexuality and desire in contemporary read/write youth culture and on the generative and dialogical potential of intersections (including collaboration and contestation) between authorized producers and fan creators, as well as the problematic power relations that underpin it, this paper critically applies Derek Johnson's recent concept of ‘fan-tagonism’ to explore the creative tensions between the Skins writing team and Naomily fans.

Notes

1. See the February 23, 2009 entry on ‘Naomily’ in Urban Dictionary, which states that ‘the name originated during thread #1 of the ship on FanForum, courtesy of an overzealously excited fan…' www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Naomily

2. Some indication of this may be found in the fact that popular lesbian themed and targeted magazines such as Britain's Diva, along with entertainment websites, such as After Ellen.com, (which features a weekly episode summary and very active Skins viewer comments threads) only began closely writing about and following Skins with the emergence of Naomily in Series 3.

3. As Willis notes, with critical edge: ‘In what sense is it “resistive” to acknowledge a canonical gay relationship?’ (2006, 168)

4. See Larbalestier's discussion (2002) of fannish character Jonathan in Buffy, which is drawn on by Johnson, 2007b in developing the fan-tagonsim concept.

5. Skins has in fact deployed the stalker motif before, when in Series 2 a female character named Sketch (who's chosen medium, oddly enough, is actually photography, not drawing) becomes obsessed with Gen 1 gay male character Maxxie, a fixation that is played out through manipulative tactics that disrupts the lives of Maxxie and those around him. Any inference of homophobic resonances then in the representation of Sophia as stalker must surely be countered when read intratextually across four series of Skins as a whole. At the same time, however, the repeated use of the implied fan-as-stalker plotline works to support the argument for an underlying fan-xiety in textual production.