Profile Post

"Becoming Truebie" is a blog studying participatory culture, which uses as its case study the HBO series, True Blood. The author is Erin, a student "studying transmedia storytelling, digital marketing, fandom in participatory culture, and all things True Blood. Under the guise of research, I am becoming a True Blood super fangirl” (Erin).

Clearly this blogger has experience in fandom, and seems to be pretty well-versed in the academia surrounding online participatory culture. She also mentions “transmedia storytelling,” and I had no freaking idea what that was (I know, I’m such a bad COMM student), but helpfully, one of Erin’s introductory posts lets ya read all about it. She provides an overview in which she cites articles by Henry Jenkins and Brooke Thompson. Erin also has another introductory post which explains again in academic terms what online participatory culture is, but I’ll save my commentary on that one as I plan on making such a post myself in the future.

Besides, her later posts are meatier and more interesting—and I imagine it would be even more so if I was a consumer of True Blood. One more recent post entitled “Representations of Women in True Blood: Lorena Krasiki,” talks about exactly that:

“The context in which Lorena made Bill into a vampire reveals a mixture of female stereotypes; ... She has been taught that her value is in her appearance, so her self-esteem depends on validation from men. As a result, she prefers to use her power as a beautiful, manipulative woman than her power as a vampire. ... Lorena is simultaneously portrayed as physically strong but psychologically weak ... Again, Lorena's poor self-esteem is apparent as she determines her self-worth by her physical appeal to men ... Lorena uses her power to fill her need for male companionship, and it is her irrational dependence on Bill that prevents her from forming an independent identity required for her power as a vampire to be respected.” (Erin).

Erin basically uses the post to organize and articulate her knowledge and passion for the narratives of True Blood into an arguably academic post on representations of women in popular culture. The format of this post is similar to most of the entries on this blog. Here, she is providing commentary on the actual official True Blood productions, but it’s a post that only a serious fan would take time and effort to write.

I actually wonder if the academic tone she takes in her blog entries would encourage more readership than would a less articulate, less coherent, personal fan blog about True Blood—say, one that simply gives their opinion on the storyline, adaptation, acting... I mean, I don’t know how to measure the traffic either way, but it looks like Erin doesn’t have a lot of comments on her posts. She used to post pretty frequently, but she hasn’t since the end of last spring. However, she is still active on her ‘Truebie’ twitter account, her last update being two weeks ago, and she has... 651 followers, damn. So clearly she has some kind of active readership.

Anyway, I find Erin and her blog “Becoming Truebie,” to be extremely relevant to mine: first, because like me, her intention is to study and write about fandom through a somewhat academic lens, and second, because despite the clinical framework she uses to talk about the True Blood fandom, she is clearly a hardcore fan herself, and this sort of online publication by fans (and consequently her 651-person Twitter audience) is exactly what drives online fan communities. Her posts linking to academics focusing on the world of online participatory culture will certainly be helpful to me, and her case study of the True Blood fandom might serve as an example and reference for me if I ever decide to do something similar.

Hello, World

Coming up with something to blog about was a source of slight distress to me. There are tons of things I suppose I could blog about, because I’m interested in a ton of things. Mostly TV. But also other things. For example, many cultures and aesthetics that are foreign to me and thus extremely captivating.

I’ve known since I was young that I go through phases with my interests. When I was fifteen I got really into Latin American culture: the food, the music, the art, the fashions, the histories and narratives. I watched movies with Latin themes, listened to Latin artists, and so on, until I rode out the obsession and moved onto my next. The following year it was Indian and Middle Eastern culture, the next, African, and since going to Taiwan for the first time in 2009, it’s been East Asian.

That’s where I got the idea to blog about East Asian culture and its transmission to the rest of the world. I tried to link the topic with my experience as an International Relations major, in order to make my blog somewhat academically-worthy. But then Coach suggested I blog about fandom, since I mentioned in my diagnostic that I used to have a Livejournal and was marginally involved in fandom in high school.

That is a lie. I was extremely involved in fandom in high school. On the biography of my fandom Livejournal, I stated that ‘I use this journal when I’m bored with my life.’ And it was true; I would go through periods of being heavily involved in fandom, then lurk, or disappear completely, depending on how demanding rL (netspeak for ‘real life’) was at the time.

Over the years, I did it all: fan sites, fan art, fan comics, fan videos, fan forums—you name it. And it was super, seriously embarrassing. I was hyper-aware of that fact. It was my huge, terrible secret. At school I led a normal teen life: I worked hard enough to maintain grades that would get me into a good college, while on the weekends still partying and prematurely boozing and sustaining the typical lifestyle of a socially adept, privileged adolescent—a healthily shallow lifestyle that I did not want to compromise by revealing that I went on the internet at night and talked to strangers about nerdy things like… the latest Batman movie and how they shouldn’t have casted that useless Katy Holmes. Weekly discussions and interpretations of each Law & Order episode as it came out. Cartoons aimed at children but that I still enjoyed. Any film starring Christian Bale or Edward Norton. Reviews of the Backstreet Boys’ first album-release after Kevin left. Sailor-freaking-Moon. I mean, how gauche.

Yet as high school came to a close, I realized that I had chosen fandom over many of the shallow relationships I had made over the four years. I even posted about how I wished I could have developed certain friendships more, but ultimately didn’t care, because not doing so had given me more time to geek-out. For me, fandom was always changing, always dynamic—an endless community that could keep up with my ever-changing interests. I could always revert back to fandom when I was bored with my current social playground. Like many, I used fandom for escapist purposes, and my journal was an outlet where I didn’t have to keep up appearances. (Well, I still had to remain remarkable enough for my online ‘friends’ to comment on my entries, but at least I was talking about things that interested me, and not just who did what where and who was getting sent to Wilderness Camp this year.)

My need for fandom decreased after I got to college, where I could truly chose the activities I wanted to participate in and the people I wanted to hang out with—rather than the small group I was lumped together with in high school. Also as participatory media becomes an increasingly important part of our culture and society, people naturally become unwittingly integrated in fandom. Considering my personal relationship with online participatory culture, my major in Communication, and proximity to new media culture expert, Prof. Henry Jenkins, and cyber culture specialist, Prof. Douglas Thomas, I choose for the topic of this blog Fandom and Participatory Media Culture.

Hopefully my present distance from fandom will encourage somewhat objective, intelligent discussion that isn’t littered with too many irrelevant internet culture references and tropes.