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.
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