#just because fandom is inherently fundamental to the site’s culture and history

[dryeraseteeth]

Hiya tumblr take my uquiz

[skylerrroses-blog]

Should Adaptation Adhere to the Source Material: An Analysis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its Fandom

This essay intends on exploring the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s relationship to media theory, in particular the ideas of fidelity in adaptation through the lens of Bakhtin’s Heteroglossic Approach (Bakhtin, 1934) and fandom reception and interpretation generated by the films via Jenkins’ ‘Textual Poachers’ theory (Jenkins, 1992) and other such sources to demonstrate how both fidelity and non-fidelity are valid ways in which to consume media, whilst also illustrating the shortcomings of both methods, and how embracing a balance of both is important for fandoms.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a series of films produced by the Disney-owned Marvel Studios, a branch of Marvel Comics dedicated to creating films and TV shows adapted from the popular and long-running connected Marvel comic book universe. These comics have been written and printed since 1939 with the release of their first issue, ‘Marvel Comics no. 1’ dating back to October 1939. Since then, the comic company has developed and held a large and passionate fanbase of readers up until the modern day. Many film and television adaptations of these comic books were created from this original source material, but it wasn’t until 2008, when Marvel Studios released ‘Iron Man’ (Favreau, 2008), that the idea of a Cinematic Universe was truly realised on the silver screen.

Since ‘Iron Man’, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown from one film to twenty-three, and with this growth came an increase in worldwide appeal and profit, becoming the single highest grossing film franchise in the world, according to statistics website ‘The Numbers’. However, the original Marvel Comics fans have still persisted amongst this massive growth of fanbase, and due to the diverging paths the narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (henceforth to be referred to as the MCU) from the Marvel Comics Universe (henceforth to be referred to as ‘Marvel 616’, the name of the universe in the comics), the fandom began to compare and speculate on the MCU through the lens of Marvel 616, expecting and anticipating certain storylines to be adapted to film. However, this created a dialogue within the fandom questioning whether it was important for the films to adhere to the source material, or whether it was just as valid, if not more creative to change elements of the story to better suit the differing tone of the universe. For example, in Cosmonaut Variety Hour’s video “The Marvel Cinematic Universe - All Marvel Movies reviewed and Ranked (pt. 2)” (2018), he criticises ‘Captain America: Civil War’ (Russo’s, 2016) by directly comparing it to the comic story ‘Civil War’ (in Figure 1).

In this clip, he admits that he often attempts to distance the story of the comics from the story of the MCU, but in cases where he perceives the original material to be superior, he cannot separate the adaptation from its original source material.

This brings up an interesting question: is fidelity necessary and important in adaptation, particularly of the comic book medium to film. Fidelity in adaptation is the idea that adaptations should adhere as closely as possible to the source material of that adaptation to satisfy fans and properly honour the original story. An example of this done to an extreme degree is ‘Watchmen’ (Snyder, 2010) which was praised by fans as being a ‘comic book come to life’. This approach is quite safe in terms of fan response; however, it creates a more intense expectation of quality and fidelity in the final product.

The MCU, however, tends to stray from the source material, instead employing the ‘Heteroglossic Method’, a method coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (Bakhtin, 1934). This method, employed by writers adapting material to other mediums, states that an adapted text that is reflected through the metaphorical lens of other creatives and creative visions will be different and reflect different themes and ideas of the story that may not have been explored in its original incarnation. The MCU heavily takes this route, as it veers away from the specific events and story beats of the Marvel 616 story, instead opting to tell their own story while adopting the familiar characters, locations, and broad plot structures of the source material.

This approach has become invariably successful, as while it portrays characters fans will recognise and latch onto, it creates its own story and world for the audience, fashioning its own identity outside that of its source material. In ‘Hunting the Dark Knight” (Brooker, 2012), Will Brooker analyses adaptation in the Batman universe by saying, “Nolan’s Batman movies were released into a complex network of existing, ongoing narratives, which continued during and after their cinematic exhibition. These narratives offered similar but distinct representations of the main character, his world, his history, and his supporting cast.” The idea of a separate distinct world that has similar and familiar elements to others running alongside can be reflected through the viewing of the MCU in relation to Marvel 616, as the latter of the two has continued through the 10+ year run of the MCU, with sales rising due to the films’ popularity. This distinct representation of these characters has resulted in a mixed opinion among fans of Marvel 616.

In Figure 2 by Twitter user @moonlillies, they criticise the MCU iteration of superhero Hawkeye by directly comparing him to his Marvel 616 counterpart and criticising the differences in his character. In contrast, below is a tweet from user @ParkerBMovies (Figure 3), who expresses their preference for the MCU iterations of the characters, claiming they “are the best incarnations of the characters, even better than the comics.”

This large variation in opinion between individuals within the fandom is only natural due to the sheer size of fandom groups on the internet on sites and forums such as Twitter or reddit, but the existence of a discourse around this topic paints the idea of fidelity in an interesting light, as it portrays fidelity and heteroglossia as both inherently neutral and up to interpretation of the individual and is therefore subjective to the individual.

However, another element of the fandom is anti-fans. Anti-fans, which are the topic of Jonathon Gray’s article “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans” (Gray, 2003), are a group of non-fans who consume certain media in order to criticise it and express their vitriol towards it. A Twitter user with the display name ‘milo’ in Figure 4 below criticises a sect of Marvel 616 stans (a term for super-fans) who deem themselves better than MCU stans “because they read the comics”, while also stating “not everyone has access to comics. Not anyone has the money to buy them”.

The concept that this Twitter user is criticising overlaps with the academic journal “

Modelling the Marvel Everyfan: Agent Coulson and/as Transmedia Fan Culture” (Scott, 2017), in which the author, Suzanne Scott, analyses the transmedia franchising model that the MCU developed, and how this franchising model is to the benefit of the ‘everyfan’, a concept that implies that the majority of fans are an “avid consumer, collector and completionist”. This concept fundamentally benefits middle-class male-driven methods of fan engagement and ignores other methods that are more commonly employed by women or minority groups. This imbalance in the fandom can create animosity between its members

due to a perceived superiority of Marvel 616 by some sects of fans due to the MCU being an adaptation.  This shows an inherent bias for some who prefer the original material as they can often be influenced by nostalgia and may not be able to see the strengths of adapted material. Due to the subjective nature of the topic, the preference to older material is acceptable, however many view the putting down of other fans due to their own preferences as veering into the ideology of anti-fans, and so heavily discouraged within the fandom.  Another concept within fandom that is important when talking about the MCU is the idea of ‘Textual Poachers’, a term coined by Henry Jenkins in “Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture” (Jenkins, 1992) that describes a certain group of fans who take the existing material of the text, and in this case the films, and builds off of it with their own creative ideas and stories; this can include art, fanfiction and fan films. This fan-created content in an important factor to consider whilst analysing adaptation through the lens of fandom, as fanfiction and fan content is its own form of informal adaptation that is consumed by the fandom itself. Due to its widespread appeal within the fandom thanks to its quicker production, higher quantity, and relatively easy distribution along with its often free cost, fanfiction and fan content is viewed and consumed much more readily by the fandom, and therefore expectations of quality and potential content are formed in the eyes of the fan.

These pieces of fan content can often be inspired by events from Marvel 616, as there is far more potential content to draw from, even when in the context of the MCU, which creates a set of desires for where fans want to see the actual story go. Since expectations are set, they can often not be met by the films in the MCU being underwhelming or simply not playing out how people may have hoped. Therefore the MCU is further compared to Marvel 616 as an inferior adaptation of the original source material. However, this building of expectations can also be very enriching and exciting to many fans, as being validated by the films can be a very positive experience.

This is often the case with pairings known as ‘ships’, where people speculate for romantic relationships between two characters and voice their support in favour of them becoming a couple in the narrative. Often, however, these ships are not validated, and some fans tend to become passionate when their pairings do not come true. For example, in Figure 5 below the user @CROWLEYBEANS criticises the MCU on how their favoured pairing, “Stucky” (a romantic relationship between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes), was not canonical because of its nature as a non-heterosexual couple. In fandom, seeking representation through media is exceedingly common, as observed again in “Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture” (Jenkins, 1992), where Jenkins studies the fanfiction created by fans of ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’ (Roddenberry, 1966-1967) that pair Captain Kirk with his crewmate Spock. In this, he speaks on how fandoms can often create their own representation through the interpretation of media to feel as though they have a voice and an identity that can be seen in the media that they watch and look up to. These fans would argue that adhering to potential source material is not always the best story option, as it deprives the text of representation that could have a positive impact on fans and straying from the original material for adaptation can be advantageous for the overall quality.  

The fandom that has developed around the MCU encompasses many types of fans due to its sheer size, such as Marvel 616 fans, avid consumers of all content, MCU-exclusive fans, fans on a casual level, and so forth. This means the fandom itself cannot truly come to a unified consensus about fidelity in adaptation from Marvel 616 to the MCU, however a concrete measure of success for the MCU can be seen in the general size of the fandom, along with its popularity in modern pop culture. The unequivocal success of the MCU lends to the idea that regardless of fidelity in adaptation, so long as the adaptation in question is enjoyable and presents interesting characters and a compelling narrative, a fandom will generate around it to support and consume it. As a consumer of the MCU member of its fandom, I am sympathetic to those who seek representation through media as I often find representation from similar social groups to mine in mainstream media to be important for many fans, including myself. In terms of adaptation, I am not insistent on fidelity, as I believe that many of the stories told in the MCU are better than many of the stories within Marvel 616 due to being far more character driven over spectacle. As a consumer, I am happy with the direction the MCU is taking in terms of narrative, however I would appreciate more representation as it is an important aspect of the films for the fandom surrounding it. In conclusion, fidelity in media is a valid way of consuming media due to a connection to the source material, however it is also important to embrace the heteroglossic approach when consuming media such as the MCU, as creatives seek to tell their own stories through adaptation and fans may desire other forms of representation through stories that were not originally present.     

Word Count: 2,208                            

References: 

Bakhtin, M., 1934. Discourse in the Novel. Austin and London: University of Texas Press

Jenkins, H., 1992. Textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. New York: Routledge.

Brooker, W. 2012. Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman. New York: I.B. Tauris

The Numbers, 2020. Movie Franchises [online]. California: Nash Information Services LLC. Available from: https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchises [Accessed 1 June 2020]

Cosmonaut Variety Hour, 2018. The Marvel Cinematic Universe – All Movies Reviewed and Ranked (Pt. 2)[video, online]. Youtube. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUl7y9qNZqQ&t=1843s [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Cox, G. & Steinberg, B., 2017. Comic Book Sales Fly on the Capes of Hit Movies, TV Shows [online]. California: Variety. Available from: https://variety.com/2017/film/news/comic-book-sales-superhero-movies-1202499029/ [Accessed 1 June 2020]

Rosy Maple Moth Stan Account, 2019. Clint having a family in the mcu. Twitter moonlillies [online]. 8 February 2019. Available from: https://twitter.com/moonliIIies/status/1093881781147836418?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Parker B, 2018. Hot Take. Twitter ParkerBMovies [online]. 8 December 2018. Available from: https://twitter.com/ParkerBMovies/status/1071226507123703808?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Gray, J., 2003. New audiences, new textualities: Anti-Fans and non-fans. International journal of Cultural studies [online]. 6(1), 64-81.

Milo, 2019. comic stans that think theyre better than mcu stans. Twitter fuckclub [online]. 17 December 2019. Available from: https://twitter.com/fuckcIub/status/1207086328778756096?s=20 [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Scott, S., 2017. Modelling the Marvel Everyfan: Agent Coulson and/as Transmedia Fan Culture. Palabra Clave [online]. 20(4): 1042-1072

blacklivesmatter, 2018. If Steve or Bucky was a woman. Twitter CROWLEYBEANS [online]. 9 May 2018. Available from: https://twitter.com/CROWLEYBEANS/status/994314360171397122?s=20

[seaalgae]

I posted 3,287 times in 2021

24 posts created (1%)

3263 posts reblogged (99%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 136.0 posts.

I added 36 tags in 2021

#ramblerambleramble - 12 posts

#this is shitposting right - 7 posts

#long post - 3 posts

#finally - 3 posts

#man that's a long post - 2 posts

#finally someone said it - 2 posts

#:) - 2 posts

#you can't fucking do this to me - 2 posts

#kaine appreciation zone - 2 posts

#lirin v1 - 1 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#i'm like 90% sure this is also why every villain(tm) in the last 10 years of western media has had an environmental motivation for their vi

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

ashamed to admit that i’m most likely a limnologist rather than a marine biologist, depending on what field they lump estuaries into

5 notes • Posted 2021-10-18 06:16:26 GMT

#4

as we all know, the most boring thing about cosmic horror is that people will go “hell yeah dude the universe is infinite and uncaring and we are as ants to any creature that could rightfully be called a god” and still find a way to be racist

but!

the second most boring thing is that it’s all been reduced to tentacles and auras of madness and dark secrets when the real horror is knowing exactly where you stand in the context of your life - and for a lot of us, the idea that we are infinitesimally small and alone is just... not particularly scary, it’s just the way things are, and the fact that modern reinterpretations of the genre lean too close to Lovecraft makes them schlocky in their own way because we as a society have generally reached the point where tentacles and interracial marriage aren’t enough to get us to fully reject the entire foundation upon which our perception of the world rests

What we haven’t seen are reimaginings that acknowledge that a lot of people probably find the opposite scarier. The extent to which out lives touch others and even the smallest fragments of our individual impact spread across generations, far beyond our control, far beyond what anyone could reasonably explain? The full extent to which our every breath shapes history, where even the smallest change could radically alter the course of events? To experience the full extent of all the connections in our lives in a way that we are fundamentally not built to process? The notion that maybe, somewhere out there, something immeasurable does care for us on an individual level, and yet cannot bring itself to save us from the weight of all the connections that have bound us since before we were born?

I think there might have a bit more room to work with all of that honestly

37 notes • Posted 2021-09-30 07:33:08 GMT

#3

maybe this is just me being burned out on fanfic culture but like

don’t stake your entire identity on a single website, even if it’s run by a nonprofit?

Nothing has made me more skeptical of how ao3 is run than the way people talk about supporting ao3.

like it’s not normal for your fanfiction website to have a strictly enforced in group/out group dynamic? It’s not normal to treat a single website’s existence as if it’s the only thing protecting fandom as a concept? It’s not normal to treat a website as infallible because they have a modest legal budget they haven’t had to use? It’s not normal for most of the website’s advocates to rely on guilt or manipulation when they talk about how it runs?

Like i understand the value of a website like that - i was involved in fanfic site moderation for god’s sake! - but if people talked about any other website the way they talk about ao3, especially during donation season, you’d probably assume they were talking about a cult

67 notes • Posted 2021-10-17 17:57:12 GMT

#2

what all these posts about twitter vs tumblr are missing is that tumblr is inherently better, just by virtue of the fact that that if i happen across the most batshit take i’ve ever seen in my life here, i can take comfort in the fact that it probably wasn’t posted by a member of English royalty, or by someone that just got a billion dollars to find a way to convert puppies into sentient missiles that feel pain when they don’t hit civilians, or by my boss who will fire me if i don’t retweet it with enough enthusiasm.

71 notes • Posted 2021-05-10 17:51:58 GMT

#1

I’m still thinking about how most Bloodborne players will never realize that its lore is such that in a disease-riddled city about to succumb to madness, the weapon most associated with the elite stratum of the church, who are so close to the truth that they have access to actual magic, is just a common pesticide made with a garden herb

95 notes • Posted 2021-08-28 00:36:57 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[seagull-astrology]

The Tumblr saga

At its apex, Tumblr had more users than both Instagram, now estimated to be worth close to $200 billion to parent Facebook , and Pinterest , which has a market cap of nearly $18 billion. In 2013, Tumblr sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion. On Monday, the parent company of WordPress.com bought it for a pittance.

The precise amount is hard to pin down but insiders have observed that there are modest homes in Silicon Valley that might be comparable in price. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s former chief executive, once described Tumblr as an “incredibly special” property with “105 million different blogs, 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 sign-ups every day.”

“We promise not to screw it up,” she famously added. And now look where we are.

Tumblr was ostensibly a blogging site but it quickly became one of the dominant, if hard-to-navigate, social networks of the early aughts. It attracted users who made and shared memes, art, their random thoughts and, eventually, a sense of community. Its mechanisms were opaque to outsiders: For many years, it didn’t have a function for direct messages or even traditional commenting, forcing users to communicate with each other by, among other things, reblogging each other’s posts.

Since it was difficult or impossible for outsiders to insert themselves into conversations, and because it was and still is a place that allows pseudonymous accounts, the site felt safe for members of marginalized communities, says Alexander Cho, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine, who coedited a forthcoming book on the history of Tumblr.

“Tumblr can be as anonymous as you want it to be, and that allows people to share in a way they might not on Facebook,” says Catherine Holderness, Tumblr’s senior community trends analyst.

But inherent in Tumblr’s structure, culture and even code base were, from the beginning, problems for any potential owner. On the business side, it operated under the assumption that it could make money off its users the same way people had since the invention of the banner ad: Build a big enough audience, and “monetization” will take care of itself.

Alas, Tumblr was inherently ill-suited to advertising, says Katrin Tiidenberg, a social-media researcher at Tallinn University in Estonia who has studied Tumblr for years. Its impenetrability was a challenge to advertisers. On top of that, many of its users interspersed their posts on various fandoms, obsessions and memes with sexual content. “A lot of advertising clients, particularly in the U.S., get disproportionately nervous about being seen next to someone’s boobs,” says Dr. Tiidenberg.

Advertisers instead turned increasingly to the ostensibly safer realms of Google and Facebook. Together, the two giants now suck up 57% of all digital ad spend, according to eMarketer. In addition to owning the biggest ad networks, their crown jewels are incredibly sophisticated advertising engines that drive measurable results for advertisers.

As these titans matured, they could attract the best engineering talent, the most advertisers, the most eyeballs and the most partners, riding a flywheel made of cash that spins faster and faster.

Yahoo, which hemorrhaged talent throughout the 2010s at both the engineering and executive level, couldn’t attract and retain the sort of people that could help its revenue-generating engine, that is its ailing ad network, to compete.

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More or less the same thing occurred once Yahoo joined AOL, sorry, Oath—oh wait, I mean Verizon Media—whose parent company essentially wrote down its entire value to zero in late 2018. Eyeballs, which this combined network had plenty of, weren’t enough in a climate in which advertisers had moved beyond the kind of cut-rate programmatic display advertising its sites were running.

The same thing happened in media, of course—such as the “newspaper” you’re reading now—and the response was a massive shift away from display advertising and toward subscription revenue.

But actually charging people to access its services was never really an option for Tumblr, built as it was primarily on the hopes, dreams and countless blog posts of teens all over the world. Kids often don’t have credit cards, and even if they do, they’ve been raised on a steady diet of free games, free video and free services.

It also doesn’t help that Tumblr, never a very polished or particularly reliable service to begin with, had a hard time going mobile. That’s where Google and Facebook ended up moving—quickly, through acquisitions and manic development—to maintain their revenue growth.

“The site was just fundamentally broken; it broke all the time” says Klaudia Amenábar, a senior media producer and comics vlogger who is also a self-described Tumblr power user. Now 24, she found the service at 16 and has been on it ever since, building a career in fandoms and social media from what she learned there. “The mobile app is a lot better now, but before, jokes about the mobile app were rampant on Tumblr,” she adds.

In the past year, Tumblr’s traffic has dropped by more than 40%, from approximately 640 million visits in July 2018 to around 380 million now. Much of that drop happened after the service implemented a ban on adult content.

Before the ban, Tumblr grew large precisely because, like the internet, it was open to the point of occasionally being seedy. The fact that it was riddled with adult material might have been a draw for some audiences and a turnoff to others. Its parent company Verizon launched a mostly automated effort to purge the service of all adult material, a dragnet that also eliminated much of the user-curated and user-generated content on the site. At that point the site collapsed, as its massive communities of fan-fiction writers, outsider artists and moody teens led their own exodus to other platforms.

“It was a long time coming,” says Ms. Amenábar. “A lot of people just stopped using it because they got older, Twitter became more popular, Instagram became bigger.”

Tumblr, still a powerful engine of internet memes and other ephemera, is potentially retro-cool but certainly not as cool as it was during its heyday. It’s like an old car that might become a classic if its owner can hang onto it long enough. That’s why its perch in the same family as WordPress.com is entirely appropriate.

WordPress.com is committed to supporting an activity—blogging—that can seem quaint in an era where if something isn’t shared on social media, it didn’t happen.

It’s entirely possible, as we saw with vinyl, wooden toys and email, that blogging—and, by extension, Tumblr��could make a comeback, or at least hang on as a valuable place for more thoughtful creation and engagement.

The real scandal of Tumblr isn’t that it’s now worth a fraction of its former selling price. The scandal is that Tumblr was ever valued so highly at all. Having a very popular product and only the vaguest idea how to make money on it does not, it turns out, a world-changing business model make.

Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com