Resisting to Game of Thrones: a fannish agonism.
| Autor | Camargo, Thiago Ianatoni |
Introduction
Fans has been characterized as specialized consumers (de Souza-Leao & Moura, 2018; Lanier Jr, Rader & Fowler III, 2015). When they get together to discuss popular culture products, they express a way of marginal cultural creation, through a voice that responds to texts, producers and the entertainment industry (Hackley & Hackley, 2018; Jenkins, 2015). These discussions often manifest positions of disagreement as to the elements that permeate their fannish (e.g. content presented in the cultural object, interactions in the fandoms and position of the entertainment industry) (Chen, 2021; Hewer, Gannon & Cordina, 2017).
Among the most common positions of disagreement between fans, stands out the search for preserving the original content of the works that serve as the basis for the development of media products, such as books or comic books that give rise to cinematographic and television series or video games. These original contents are assumed to be canonical, and fans often understand that they are produced or distributed by the entertainment industry in inaccurate ways (Goodman, 2015; Myers, 2017).
This situation occurs in a market context, which can be understood as an arena of sociocultural interaction, where different power forces coexist (Bhattacharjee, Berger & Menon, 2014; Denegri-Knott & Tadajewski, 2017). In fan interactions, it is possible to analyze such power relations in the way fans establish their communities (i.e. fandoms), since hierarchies among members are identifiable (Hewer et al., 2017; Kozinets, 2001). Then, it is clear how power relationships can regulate this social experience (Arnould & Thompson, 2015). This is because power relations between fans usually characterize the very existence of fan culture, since these consumers may or may not align their practices and positions with the discourses with both the entertainment industry and other fans (Chen, 2021; De Certeau, 1984).
Among the theoretical perspectives on power that support research in the emerging consumer culture theory (CCT) field, the approach developed by Michel Foucault has stood out (Denegri-Knott & Tadajewski, 2017; Mikkonen & Bajde, 2013). Studies in this theoretical field consider the market as an agent that exercises power over others (Harju & Huovinen, 2015; Parmentier & Fischer, 2015), since it regulates and directs how knowledge, practices and institutions relate and impact, directly or indirectly, the practices of consumers (Bokek-Cohen, 2016; Karababa & Ger, 2011; Zajc, 2015).
According to Foucault (2014a, b), power is not something that can be owned and used by someone over someone else; it is exercised through practices and relationships that affect the individuals, separating, differentiating, organizing and regulating their conduct. From this perspective, power escapes the idea of domination and is defined as a possibility of articulation and negotiation in the way individuals are governed. For this to happen, resistance to power is a sine qua non condition, otherwise it would not refer to power, but to domination.
Resistance and the exercise of power belong to the same field of possibilities, distinguished only by their directions, intensities and the way they are performed. The notion of resistance, therefore, refers to the possibility of modifying the effects of power (Foucault, 2008, 2014b). From this point of view, power and resistance emerge amid a distinct and strategically organized set of discursive (e.g. knowledge, texts) and nondiscursive (e.g. rules, laws, fields of knowledge, institutions) elements, which can be named as dispositifs of power. These dispositifs comprise the necessary conditions in which the practices of power and resistance that sustain or modify social reality emerge (Foucault, 2014a, b).
Thus, it is possible to conceive that opinions and behaviors produced in fandom interactions that are contrary to the directions that the entertainment industry defines for certain media products express an exercise of resistance. Basedon this, we pose the following research question: how do fans of media products resist the changes made by the entertainment industry on their canons? With this referral, we focus on the consumer resistance to new logics of cultural distribution (Bokek-Cohen, 2016; Coskuner-Balli, 2020), putting light on the subculture of fans and its practices, an interdisciplinary theme that has been gaining ground in consumer culture research (Fuschillo, 2016; Zajc, 2015). For this purpose, Michel Foucault's theory provides a fruitful ground to reflect on the conditions that support the tensions and forms of power operation in market contexts (Arnould & Thompson, 2015).
To carry out this research, we investigate Westeros.org, a forum of A Song of Ice and Fire (ASoIaF) fans. It is a book series written by George R. R. Martin (GRRM), a former Hollywood screenwriter, and the inspiration to Game of Thrones (GoT), a TV series that became a popular culture phenomenon broadcasted between 2011 and 2019 on the Home Box Office (HBO) channel network (MacNeill, 2017; Rappas, 2019). Throughout the 2010s, the show had unprecedented achievements regarding production investment, audience records, awards and the sale of licensed products, indicating its economic relevance for the entertainment industry (Clark, 2019; Maas, 2019; Spano, 2016).
Some of its numbers are impressive: the countries that invested to host the series' locations (i.e. Croatia, Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom), received up to ten times more in visits from tourists (McElroy & Noonan, 2019; Ramsey, Baker & Porter, 2019). In the United States, the world's largest television consumer market, it had an increasing average audience over the seasons: from 9.3 million in 2011, it jumped to 32.8 million in 2019. The series also became a huge critic recognition, receiving 738 nominations and winning 269,59 of them Primetime Emmy Award, the most important television award (Mathews, 2018; Feldman, 2019).
Culturally, HBO's production reached the status of the most pirated series in the world (MacNeill, 2017; Steiner, 2015), in addition to encouraging its audience to watch the show simultaneously with the release to avoid knowing the content through interactions on the web (i.e. spoilers) (Sarikakis, Krug & Rodriguez-Amat, 2017): of the 207 countries in which it was broadcast, 194 of them presented the option to their consumers to watch the content following the American launch time (Feldman, 2019). Still, the series is considered a media phenomenon that promoted discussions on identity and political agendas (e.g. gender, race) (Clapton & Shepherd, 2016; Perks & McElrath-Hart, 2016). However, as relationships between fans are not always peaceful (Hewer et al., 2017), Westeros.org does not escape this. The interactions between fans evidence power relationships on the individual volume of content production and expertise about the fictional universe. However, it happens specially among fans who stand for or against the direction taken by the plot of the television show compared do the book series (Sarikakis et al., 2017), what became even more striking along the final seasons and mainly after the ending of the show (Ellis, 2019). This fans movement is due to how, from the fifth season, GoT started to present a different narrative of ASoIaF, since the final books of the saga have not yet been published (George, 2018; Spano, 2016). Narrative differences have become one of the main topics discussed among fans, leading even part of the fandom to organize a movement against the lack of canonical fidelity of the TV adaptation (Ellis, 2019).
As practical implications, our study aligns with those seeking to exploit with consumer resistance not limited to the marketplace (see Denegri-Knott & Tadajewski, 2017; Lee, Roux, Cherrier & Cova, 2011), but focusing on the relationships and hierarchies that they are commonly established among fans (see Hewer etal, 2017; Fuschillo, 2020). It also seeks to reflect on how decisions made by producers in the entertainment industry tend to produce fan movements that expose the resonance of the cultural objects they consume - whether they are aligned with their interests or not (see Chen, 2021; Parmentier & Fischer, 2015).
The participative productivity of fans
The entertainment industry counts with a singular, specialized type of consumers: the fans. They used to act in a participatory way to influence the perception of others about their consumption (Booth, 2018; De Certeau, 1984). This can be seen in the way they commonly seek to establish fan practices and social relationships with other fans and with the cultural object in order to legitimize the level of their involvement with what they do (Fuschillo, 2020; Jenkins, 2015). Fan practices lead them to assume appropriate popular culture (e.g. comics, movies, TV shows, games, music, books) narratives, signs and values, re-signifying what they consume (Myers, 2017; Sarikakis et al., 2017). Fannish is characterized by the way in which fans relate to each other and to different products of popular culture (Kozinets, 2001; Lanier Jr, Rader & Fowler III, 2015). It is common for fans to gather in communities to create content, interact and report their consumption experiences (Hackley & Hackley, 2018; Mittel, 2015). Fan communities, as known as fandom, consist of spaces for socialization, production of culture and affirmation of lifestyles (Fuschillo, 2016; Lanier Jr, Rader & Fowler III, 2015). They are collective spaces for the perpetuation and propagation of activities, which aim to represent and expand the meaning that the consumption of popular culture products has in the lives of fans (Booth, 2018; Guschwan, 2012). Thus, fan's practices are more than collective; they are participatory (Guschwan, 2012; Fuschillo, 2016).
According to Jenkins (2015), they are emblematic to represent how individuals appropriate the available...
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