My son taught me about fan fiction, an Internet genre I find fascinating–although the concept is more interesting to me right now than the examples I’ve seen. Doesn’t matter: if the idea is interesting, there’s bound to be some stellar instances.
Tonight I discovered the intriguing world of recaps, where people write long and detailed accounts of television episodes. These are not summaries or synopses. They’re chronicles. I’m only at the entryway, but it seems as if recappers (no doubt they have a cooler confraternal word for themselves) even compete with each other to see who can craft the most engaging and compelling recaps. One I perused included a running editorial/one-liner/aside commentary within the recap itself, sort of like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 without directing all the sarcasm at the episode. (These are fans, after all, not camp aficionados per se.)
Recaps aren’t remixes. So what are they? Short-story-izations? And how would we use literary theory either to analyze or account for them? (That’s a semi-facetious question.)
One set of recaps: House, M.D. at “Television Without Pity.” Note the report cards and pull quotes.
So you actually did get to watch Mystery Science Theater, or did you just use it as a comparison?
Also, as far as Fan Fiction goes there’s a genre of it called MSTings, in which sarcastic jerks (like myself) take an especially bad piece of fan fiction (of which there are many) and roast it. There’s a website that is a fairly large repository of these, but its temporarily down. Though, any search for ‘MSTings’ turns up a large number.
There’s even a subgenre of that called ‘meta MSTings’ in which people MST poor MSTings. I’m sure somewhere out there there’s a meta meta MSTing or some such.
Good to hear from you, Ben. No, I haven’t actually watched MST yet. I’m probably worried I won’t think it very funny, and my Internet license will get yanked as a result. Soon, soon, probably: it only took me three years actually to watch “Better Off Dead,” so there may be hope.
The MST Fan Fiction genre actually sounds more interesting. I’ll do the search and find a juicy example, unless you have one you like and could recommend.
Well the massive database that I spoke of is apparently down for good, and that’s where all of my old favorites were, so I think a few searches will turn up something decent. I have a few that I wrote, but they’re not up anymore.
As far as seeing the show, come the school year I’ll let you borrow a DVD, and I really want to start up a viewer group in which we just commandeer a classroom and play episodes weekly (to say, if you have any idea of how to make this happen, email or comment back to me).
I think you could work this out, either through Frames Per Second or another group. Come by when school starts up and we can plot and plan.