ROBIN BRENNER, Teen Literature and Fan Culture
This article was like a flashback to my middle school days where fan fiction was the trend. Brenner talks about modern fan culture of expanding a story or alternating the universe in which a story occurs, but the ones I usually read were based off Korean band members. Fans would create stories as if maybe the band members were brothers, scenarios where a band member would be dating a fan, or how a scene would go about if two of the band members were dating each other. I remember staying up on a school day reading chapters of fanfics that involved my favorite bands. There were also stories where the plot that the writer had was more interesting than the band they used. Fans would critic the writer on how accurately they portrayed the band members. The band member’s personalities were only based on how they normally act on reality shows, interviews, or behind the scene music video shoots; so the writer had to form the quirks and personality of the members based on what they can observe from a computer screen (unless they flew all the way to Korea to see them).
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN, My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead
Upon reading the title, I knew this article was not going to be a standard read. And looking at the article deeper, Klosterman just shows how “zombified” of a society we have become, and I’m not talking about all the shows. I’m talking about how we mindlessly follow the trend, or even how mindlessly attached to our phones. While I was reading, I remembered the movie “Warm Bodies (2013)”. It seemed like another typical zombie movie, but there was a certain twist to it. The movie portrayed a whole different concept that goes against Klosterman’s description of zombie as “mindless” creatures with no depth. In the movie, it centers on a post-zombie apocalyptic world where everything is basically run down and zombie infested with a small amount of human survivors. The main character, “R”, who is a zombie, falls in love with one of the human survivors, Julie. And throughout the movie, R slowly turns back into human form because of the “feelings” he had that started growing for Julie. It was basically a zombie version of Romeo and Juliet. The only reason I mentioned that movie is because I felt that it humanized zombies instead of victimizing them, which was what all of the examples, that Klosterman gave, did.
It's funny to me that people with write fanfiction on practically anything! It seems like a group of people can create a community or idea with enough writings and art to bolster it. Perhaps it is the instinct of humans to create on already established canvases. A writer's or artist's work is more likely to get more attention if it is related to something that is already popular. However, I have seen people who struggle to create their own original work because they have drawn or wrote about things they have not created for so long. It is a double-edged sword, it seems.
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