Could It Be the Fans?
Posted by fourfourteenam on April 21, 2008
I wrote a blog entry earlier in the year about the soap opera stigma and tried to really dissect the problems that people saw in soap operas. I think we’ve addressed just about everything in class: the low budget, the stereotypical good-looking but awful actors, the cheesy writing…
It wasn’t until today until I was talking to my roommate about the upcoming election, a thought came to me. I can’t say I’m a very political person. I took a quiz to see who how my political beliefs lined up with the different candidates, and was given a list concerns… and somehow, I just didn’t find any of the concerns THAT concerning to me. (I know, people tell me that makes me a horrible person, but I can be easily bought or swayed… cash or checks payable to Katharine!) So when I was talking to my roommate, who is a very politically concerned person, about either Obama or Clinton, I was surprised to hear her say that she didn’t really care for the major differences in the healthcare platform or some of the other differences that set the candidates apart. She just identified with Clinton more because, well to put it bluntly, she didn’t like the people who liked Obama.
While this was shocking to hear at first, I gave this more thought and realized, that by being a fan and admitting that you are a fan, you are potentially putting yourself out there to be grouped in a larger group… a larger group that may not be something you may not want to be a part of. So to my roommate, being an Obama supporter meant the overzealous group of supporters that chanted everything he said, and was obsessed with the man instead of what he stood for.
So what if being a soap opera fan meant one of the soap opera fans that had a little shrine in their closet, traveled to Disneyland every year to see their favorite actors, taped every episode of the show to watch it over and over again, and paid top dollar for a half-eaten waffle by their favorite soap opera stud? What if, soap opera fans to the world wasn’t the occasional viewer, wasn’t the teenager that watched an episode everyday after school while eating a snack, wasn’t the group of college students watching soap operas from 7-10:30 every Monday night?
The fanatics are a fairly small portion of the group of actual soap opera watchers and somehow when I ask my friends what they think of soap opera fans, I get the same response… and I have to wonder, how much is the soap opera itself, and how much is it the person who watches the soap opera? So I did a little more digging… What do people think about House Fans? 24 fans? Desperate Housewife Fans? What about Battlestar?
I believe that Laura has compared Sci-fi fandom with Soap Opera fandom and I believe that the two categories are a lot more closely tied than the rest of the fandoms out there. I think both categories have very devoted and involved fan groups and both groups have a stigma associated with both of them because of the over-involvement of the fans. This might be because of the society doesn’t recognize television as a legitimate way to spend time. It might be the fact that America was built on the fire and brimstone beliefs of moderation. There is definitely a stigma attached with overzealous fans… and it is highly possible that soap operas are embarassing to watch, not because of the content, but because of the people watching them with you.
lynn liccardo said
well… i know somewhere in my interactions with this class i’ve mentioned that I’ve always believed that the higher one’s tolerance for ambiguity, the better one can experience the full emotional impact of soap opera. as katharine’s just illustrated, equally as much ambiguity atached to be a soap fan.
i know you’ve limited your examples to television, but i could go to town on sports. i’m mean serious intellectuals write with great insight about baseball, yet who’s “crazier” than die-hard sports fans?
you’re right; you see the crazies and say, “that’s not me” — and it’s not you, or me, or or sam, or your classmates, or the authors you’ve read for class… and i think you had it exactly right in your post below on legitimizing soaps when you said, “I don’t believe I have to legitimize or rationalize my personal preference to you,” which is pretty much what i meant when i replied to you original post on soap stigma, “i reject the premise underlying the question.” (i’ll be commenting on that post soon.)
but at the end of the day, life’s simply too short to allow anyone else’s biases and intolerance to dictate what we should or shouldn’t like.
How to judge characters: action or character « MIT CMS: The American Soap Opera said
[...] want to touch on something Katherine mentioned earlier in a post. In talking about the ongoing political drama that is shaping the coming presidential election, she [...]
samford said
Great questions, Katharine. Hopefully, some of the readings on soap fans have helped you address that, since they deal with the stigma, but my answer would be both. People have stereotypes about the genre and tend to pathologize those who watch them because they often can’t understand why anyone would watch this stuff. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague recently who was skeptical about bringing anyone in who worked with the Ron Paul campaign about how they used the Internet in an innovative way because she/he had met some Ron Paul supporters along the way and didn’t like them and thus thought that everyone on the Ron Paul team must be flawed, as well as all people who supported Paul.
But I see the same thing happening with pro wrestling fans. The stigma against the fans, along with the text, just support one another, so that it becomes doubly hard for a genre like soaps to “legitimize” itself, which ties into your other post about the desire to legitimize soaps, and soap opera fans. Look forward to talking about this more in class.