The Fangirl

"They were rabid, ridiculous Twihards. And that's just what they said about each other."

I struggle with all these generalizations Jamison is tossing about at the start of this essay. I get where she's trying to go with it, but she's over simplifying way too much in order to back up her convoluted conclusions. The way she jumps from internal criticism in the fandom, to mainstream media’s characterization of the all Twilight fans in general, back to Buffy fans‘ criticism of the books/fandom, is giving me a head ache.

Jamison is attempting to characterize the MANY internal conflicts in the Twilight Fan Fiction Fandom as simply old school fangirls picking on newbie fans for not having geek cred, which is ridiculously untrue.

Not only were there a number of various, extremely common internal conflicts in the fandom. Many resembled conflicts in other fandoms, and were even mentioned earlier in the book. None boiled down to members of the community being “cred-checked” for being new to fandom and fan fiction. 

In fact, the majority of BNAs (Big Named Authors) in the fandom were new to writing fan fiction and fandoms. While the part of the fandom that had experience was relatively small and only a few even came close to BNA status. 

So why would Jamison use this as the primary example of internal criticism in the fandom and try to link it to sexist “fake geek girl” issues in other fandoms? 

My guess is the “lack of experience in fandom/fan fiction culture” is often been used to explain why publishing fan fiction became so prevalent in the Twilight Fan Fiction Fandom, opposed to other fandoms that see the practice as taboo. 

It’s another interesting, arguably manipulative, choice in framing the anti-P2P argument as sexist bullying.