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wreathedwith · 4 days ago

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Beautiful Possibilities: The Abbey’s ‘Beautiful Possibility’ series through a fandom studies lens

I’ve been reading Faith Current’s Beautiful Possibility series, a new serialised piece of writing – also available in audiobook/podcast format – on accepting the possibility of an explicitly romantic relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and an assertion of the wider ramifications for our culture at large that the acceptance of this could possibility offer.

This series has not yet concluded, and my writing here is offering neither a line-by-line critique nor an examination of the plausibility of the series’ central premise. Rather, what I want to consider at this point in time comes from a perspective different to that of the series’ author: that of a long-time active participator in fandom.

The Beautiful Possibility series’ interplay with mythology intrigued me, especially in part 1:3 (which is the part I will be focusing on here) because of my interest in fandom studies. Unlike most stories that we would consider ‘folklore myths’, two members of The Beatles are currently living real human people (and the other two aren’t exactly denizens of ancient history). For those four men, and for a relatively small inner circle of other people, The Beatles is a deeply personal story. The Beatles is also, of course, a shared story retold endlessly, well-known – at least in its fundamentals – by millions the world over.

What’s also a shared story? Absolutely anything fandom gets its hands on. By the author’s own admission, she “[doesn’t] really fit into either” (Part 1:3) mainstream Beatles studies or the fandom side of things, and so, naturally, Beautiful Possibility is not written from a fandom studies or fandom participant perspective – nor does it claim to be.

There are several aspects Beautiful Possibility that caught my attention from the perspective of a participant in fandom. The first is its anonymising and obscurating citation of fandom, by referring to it as “countercultural Beatles studies”. This is protective of fandom in a way that I personally appreciate (i.e. from those who are in no way familiar, immediately dismissive, and would come by on any clickable link solely to gawp and laugh), yet also serves the purpose of protecting (that is, legitimising) the author’s own work, primarily by reducing any even very hazy link between Beautiful Possibility and works clearly delineated as fiction – even if those same writers are also digging up genuinely new information and factual analysis.

It was also a pretty surprising approach to me: the general concept of ‘fandom’ has massively mainstreamed and, to a degree, commercialised over the past decade or so. Although RPF continues to often receive (and/or require) special or additional protection, perspectives on RPF have continued to shift. (For an up-to-date overview of the history of RPF and the state of things today, read The RPF Question by Sacha Judd (Fansplaining).)

To be clear, the majority of my active fandom participation has been RPF, and I’m personally very much of the ‘lock it all down and keep it solely to its intended audience’ school. And yet I’m also buoyed by the increased accessibility of fandom, and the kind of genuinely exciting and vital research that is being carried out by fans: not only am I thinking here of the Beatles RPF crowd fitting things together that have previously remained unjoined, but also the fandom-to-scholarship pipeline (with academic community engagement!) and getting to experience other fan’s original research that I enjoyed as part of the fandom for AMC’s The Terror and its attached true story.

A second example of something I found distinctly ‘unfandomy’ in Beautiful Possibility 1:3 was this commentary on edited photographs of John and Paul together:

Unlike writing about the lovers possibility, the fake “kissing photos” are without question unethical… The fake photos hurt John and Paul and the ability of serious researchers to prove the credibility of the lovers possibility.

I would say that it is of course helpful for these to be clearly labelled as manips (aka “fake photos”) just as fic is identified in its own context as a fictional work – to help me build my own personal narrative interpretation and understanding, I want to know if a photo is real or not. However, I don’t agree with the sentiment expressed above. I understand that we are far beyond the days of photoshops posted to LiveJournal and well into the horrifying era of GenAI infecting everywhere, but providing that the manip is labelled as such it in no way hurts “the ability of serious researchers” to prove anything, at least any more so than lines from fanfiction breaking containment and being presented as genuine quotations from real people (which sometimes happens). This sentence also results in a strongly implied separation of fans and “serious researchers” into two entirely separate categories, when they can often be one and the same. (For more on The Beatles RPF in a fandom context specifically, both now and then, check out The Beatles Live! by Allegra Rosenberg, also on Fansplaining.)

Sources that are especially potent for fannish interpretation and transformative works also require an absence or some remaining ambiguity, but that absence is not a necessarily a “wound” (as the distorting of John and Paul’s story and the refusal to acknowledge the damage of this distortion is characterised by Beautiful Possibility). That absence is something to be filled in, elevated – marquetry, kintsugi – something that for whatever reason the source material didn’t include but did (probably unintentionally) nevertheless leave space for.

The part of Beautiful Possibility 1:3 where I most acutely felt the absence of a fandom perspective is the following:

As I opened myself to the possibility of John and Paul as a romantic couple, I could feel a part of me that had been numb for as long as I could remember come alive with a new sense of hope and creative energy and a deep effervescent joy — not unlike the feeling of falling in love. The possibility of a romantic affair between John and Paul quite simply set my life and my soul on fire, and this feeling has stayed with me for over three years and counting with no sign of fading away.

To me, this glow is what I’d call ‘fandom’ – it is not unique to John and Paul and by now I’ve felt it many times over. I, and many others, have also felt (and made) the comparison between how one feels falling headfirst into a new fandom and falling head over heels in love with someone.

The author does not need to be all things to all people, and of course one person’s unique perspective yields a unique body of work. But it is this section where it feels most relevant to bring in a fandom-familiar perspective, because the near-total uniqueness of John and Paul and The Beatles and their impact on the world is a central pillar to Beautiful Possibility’s thesis. The wonderful feeling the author has written about experiencing is felt by many – about John and Paul, but also about many other narratives and other characters.

Myth and folklore aren’t important because of what percentage of the total characters or story may or may not be real. They’re important because they tell us stories that have stuck around and been reinterpreted many times over. Antimatter was theorised to exist before it was proven because it explained a gap, because nothing else would make as much sense as its existence. There isn’t even that level of a leap of faith here, because the love between John and Paul on at least some level is clearly evidenced, but the attraction of proving the veracity of romantic feelings is often that there is nothing else that is as good or as all-encompassing an explanation. It can’t heal the world, it can’t conquer death, but it can heal those affected, it can make sense.

Even if you believe John and Paul were in romantic love that was in some way consummated, even if this is somehow one day proven beyond reasonable doubt, it is already far too late: they cannot be joined back together. It’s a mystery that can only be solved after the fact, with a modern lens: and therefore it’s not John and Paul that’s helping. Like many mythical protagonists, John and Paul are, and will only become more so, archetypes newly reinterpreted in the light of our own times.

Fanworks can bring John and Paul together, and that is in order to heal our fannish hurt and satiate our desires, but reality is left untroubled. And that’s okay. The noticing in and of itself is to heal more widely in some sense – to convince the sceptics, to satisfy through the resolution of a mystery – but only up to a (lance tip) point.

Beautiful Possibility’s perspective proclaims John and Paul, the ultra-famous white male geniuses, as the “lifeforce love” source – transgressive but subversive – forming the foundation of a myth that, should we recognise its reality, can offer salvation for us all. The fandom studies perspective, and probably the folklore studies perspective too, would say that it is our veneration and continued reinterpretation of the story that gives it its continuous power, whether or not the events within that story ever really happened.

The Beatles without their attendant cultural veneration would have remained in the past as echoing music in an empty room. The ruinous nature of the fruitless quest for the Holy Grail for those who come to believe in its genuine, literal existence is to be found in that definite article: ‘the’. Only one. How could it ever be possible to find one small object in the entire world? What if the belief that there is one best or ultimate source of anything as important as world-healing love is just as limiting?

Modern-day fandom as it stands would barely exist without the modern consumerist culture it centres around and interacts with, and yet (as per good old Henry Jenkins) by its very nature fanfiction also counteracts, is “repairing the damage” of corporations’ control of contemporary myths, thereby intrinsically rejecting the assertion that there is one single correct, centrally-controlled, true narrative. There are many, simultaneously. All of them can feel true. Or none of them. And then you can go and write your own.

Of the thousands of fandoms that there are, every fandom has its source – a novel, a movie, the publicly available personas of a group of real people – but finding one of these sources is not the end of our quests. It’s the start.

#the beatles #mclennon #meta #about fandom #tumblr user wreathedwith will write anything to avoid being brave enough to sit down and finish even one piece of fanfiction #(idk this fandom intimidates me sorry guys)#well reading back this is not not a critique but for the record I am enjoying reading it #wait... there were thousands of grails the whole time?#(yes I am imagining in my head the scene in The Last Crusade)#let me know if you think I should whack this meta on AO3 and/or if you think I've finally lost it #transformative fandom is incredible because it gives YOU the power!#the decoders are the encoders and they're important! remember that!

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