Thoughts on Precursors
Nothing is wholly new under the sun. There are certainly precursors to the mass culture media-franchise phenomenon. One of the pioneers of this strategy was certainly the Disney organization, which linked comic books and animated films, then extended these to include toys, and eventually the full inter-medium as I am describing it today. The Japanese linkage of manga, which are adult serialized graphical novels in magazine format, and anime, which are animated films with a somewhat younger audience, followed a similar path.
Popular children’s films often inspired comic books, or vice versa. Popular children’s books inspired both films and comic books. Some of these early franchises extended to an adolescent market (e.g. Superman, Spiderman, Batman & Robin). Television extended the power of these youth-oriented franchises, but there were no adult analogues that I can think of (except perhaps in Japan). There were of course no immersive videogames, and there were no online communities with extensive real-time and short-delay interactions. There were of course “fan clubs”, even for imaginary super-heroes, but these were not groups of people who had much direct interaction with one another.
The development of live communities of fans seems to have begun on a large scale with the sponsorship of fan conventions for Trekkies, or fans of the Star Trek television series (later a full franchise in the contemporary sense). Such face-to-face meetings, in the pre-internet age, required that fans be old enough to afford and be able to travel to a regional or national meeting (or able to persuade parents to take them). This was perhaps one of the first visible phenomena of the extended adolescence effect in fan communities: Star Trek fans had been children when they first became involved with the franchise world, but their interest, and the series, continued long enough that, now in their 20s or older, they would still attend a convention. There were somewhat similar phenomena for fans of super-hero comic books, and “comics conventions” were a parallel phenomenon to the Trekkie conventions. Nonetheless, such meetings were relatively rare, if influential, experiences. They developed a parallel economy of trading, buying and selling early issues of the comics, and various “collectible” franchise merchandise. The phenomenon continues today in the form of many face-to-face gatherings of fans of all the various major franchises, particularly the game players, sometimes sponsored by the franchise owners, and sometimes independently (though in almost all cases commercially and for profit).
Online communities however enable a qualitative leap in participation, size, frequency of contact, sharing of information (and virtual objects), and creation and discussion of fan fiction. Certainly on its present scale, fan fiction is a new cultural phenomenon, and strong evidence for the more active stance which “consumers” are taking as creators of discourse within the “cultural” conventions of the commercial franchise worldview (Black, 2004). The economy of collectibles has expanded online to a money economy of trade in virtual as well as material “objects” (and personas) that has a convertible monetary value greater than that of most nation-states today (Castronova, 2001).
We should not, of course, overlook the divergences in ideology and value systems that may occur when fans and players appropriate the resources of a franchise world to express their own view of social reality. A key phenomenon here, I think, is the extent to which large online communities of fans/players develop their own cultural values which may be normative for the community, but at variance with those of the creators of the original franchise world and its commercial extensions. There are some cases of conflict between such communities and the commercial owners/managers of the franchise, particularly in the case of persistent online immersive gaming worlds, where many thousands of players interact both within the gameworld and in their own independent online player communities. (A particularly interesting such phenomenon is “slash” fan fiction, where two male hero figures, say “Aragorn/Legolas” from Lord of the Rings are erotically paired for the amusement of women and gay readers, e.g. http://www.libraryofmoria.com/ . This is an extremely common phenomenon, parallel to a variety of manga/anime mainly for young women in Japan, and certainly at odds with most commercial franchise ideologies.)