Faking and Re-Making (or: I Gonched So Hard I Made a New Blorbo and I Love Them)

Collection Notes:

“Faking and Re-Making (or: I Gonched So Hard I Made a New Blorbo *and I Love Them*)” is a video version of the live presentation “Faking and Re-Making: The Use of Emotional Responses and Creative Resonances in Communal Multimedia Storytelling” given by myself (at the Zoom mic) and my coauthors (in the Gather audience and chatroom to provide live Q&A) at the Fan Studies Network North America 2023 conference. (This video version was created for the Transformative Works and Cultures special issue “Fandom and Platforms”.)

FSNNA23’s theme was reconnecting, reengaging, reinvigorating, and recreating fandom in the wake of the forced separation necessitated by COVID-19 pandemic. Our presentation compared the spontaneously fandom-created imaginary film Goncharov–and its accompanying real fandom–to the imaginary television show Blow the Man Down, an intentionally created work in the style of Goncharov. Where Goncharov developed audience familiarity with mafia film tropes and the hallmarks of Martin Scorsese’s filmography to improvise an alternate-reality film, the anonymous creator of Blow the Man Down used fan familiarity with the real television show Our Flag Means Death, as well as leveraging the same aspects of digital fandom that allowed for Goncharov‘s organic collaborative play, to create a similar (albeit smaller) real investment for fans of OFMD who then crossed over to share engagement in BTMD.

Our argument was that this sort of real engagement by fans in a work they knew to be nonexistent could be explained through author Jo Walton’s “spearpoint theory,” outlined in a 2004 essay to explain why some stories “hit” the audience differently depending on how much emotional investment has been built up over time by an engaged audience. We also suggest that other creators can make their “own” BTMD by applying Walton’s theory and using both Goncharov and Blow the Man Down as roadmaps.

But for those who want to skip the reading, our presentation outlines the specific steps we believe are necessary to create similar fannish investment in other imaginary works. Creators can apply these steps to the creation or supplementing of other media (books, films, alternate reality games, etc.) to “gain engagement; retain audience; and aid in the development of authentic emotional responses from a willing and collaborative audience”–and all of it can be accomplished digitally and at a remove, allowing for creative fannish collaborative creation even when real world necessity requires we do so at a distance.

-Katherine Crighton